CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
_ Cornell University Library 
 
 BL 2001.J69 1873 
 
 Oriental religions and their relation to 
 
 3 1924 023 004 710 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023004710 
 
ORIENTAL RELIGIONS. 
 
■' Out from the heart of Nature rolled 
 The burdens of the Bible old j 
 The litanies of nations came, 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flam^ 
 Up from the burning core below. 
 The canticles of love and woe." 
 
 R. W. Emerson* 
 
Oriental Religions 
 
 AND THEIR 
 
 ,RELATION TO UNIVERSAL 
 RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 INDIA 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY 
 
 1873 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 
 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 BBOOITD m>TI10S, 
 
 CAMBRIDGBI 
 PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 INTRODUCTORY i 
 
 INDIA. 
 
 1. 
 
 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 I. The Primitive Aryas 39 
 
 II. The Hindu Mind j 57 
 
 III. The Hymns 87 
 
 IV. Tradition 153 
 
 V. The Laws 169 
 
 VI. Woman 203 
 
 VII. Social Forms and Forces 237 
 
 II. 
 
 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 -- I. Vedanta 305 
 
 II. Sankhya -^T^ 
 
 III. The Bhagavadgita 411 
 
 IV. Piety and Morality of Pantheism 441 
 
 V. Incarnation 483 
 
 VI. Transmigration 513 
 
 VII. Religious Universality 'ii^ 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 III. 
 
 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Page 
 
 I. Speculative Principles 579 
 
 11. Nirvana 6ig 
 
 III. Ethics and Humanities 639 
 
 IV. The Hour and the Man 683 
 
 V. After-Life in India 711 
 
 VI. Buddhist Civilization 735 
 
 VII. Ecclesiasticism 769 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 'T^HE pages now offered as a contribution to the 
 Natural History of Religion are the The stand- 
 outgrowth of studies pursued with constant p°'"'- 
 interest for more than twenty years. These studies 
 have served substantially to confirm the views pre- 
 sented in a series of Lectures, delivered about that 
 number of years since, on the Universality of Relig- 
 ious Ideas, as illustrated by the Ancient Faiths of 
 the East. So imperfect were the sources of positive 
 knowledge then accessible, that I chose to defer publi- 
 cation ; and such increase of light has been constantly 
 flowing in upon this great field of research ever since, 
 that I have continued to defer my report thereon, in 
 view of the existing state of scholarship, until the 
 present moment, when such reasons are comparatively 
 without force. Engaged for many years in the public 
 presentation of themes and principles of the nature 
 here illustrated, I cannot but note that a trustworthy 
 statement of what the non-Christian world has to 
 offer to the eye of thoroughly free inquiry, in mat- 
 ters of belief, is more and more earnestly demanded ; 
 that in the present stage of religious questions it 'is 
 indispensable ; and that the sense of inadequacy felt 
 by all who have thoughtfully approached the subject, 
 in a degree which none but themselves can compre- 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 hend, should no longer prevent us from performing 
 our several parts in this work. I need hardly add 
 that the response to this demand is already admirable 
 on the part of liberal thinkers in Europe and America. 
 To them the present contribution is dedicated, in cor- 
 dial appreciation of their spirit and their aim. It has 
 been a labor not of duty only, but of love. I have 
 been prompted by a desire of combining the testimony 
 rendered by man's spiritual faculties in different epochs 
 and races, concerning questions on which these facul- 
 ties are of necessity his court of final appeal. I have^ 
 written, not as an advocate of Christianity or of any 
 other distinctive religion, but as attracted on the one 
 hand by the identity of the religious sentiment under 
 all its great historic forms, and on the other by the 
 movement indicated in their diversities and contrasts 
 towards a higher plane of unity, on which their ex- 
 clusive claims shall disappear. 
 
 It is only from this standpoint of the Universal in 
 Religion that they can be treated with an appreciation 
 worthy of our freedom, science, and humanity. The 
 corner-stones of worship, as of work, are no longer to 
 be laid in what is special, local, exclusive, or anoma- 
 lous; but in that which is essentially human, and 
 therefore unmistakably divine. The revelation of 
 God, in other words, can be given in nothing else 
 than the natural constitution and culture of man. To 
 be thoroughly convinced of this will of itself forbid 
 our imposing religious partialism on the facts pre- 
 sented by the history of the soul. 
 
 Yet it should perhaps be stated that the following 
 outline of what I mean by the idea of Universal Relig- 
 ion, although prefatory, represents no purely a friori 
 assumption, but the results to which my studies have 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 led me, as well as the spirit in which they have been 
 pursued. 
 
 Man's instinctive sense of a divine origin, interpreted 
 as historical derivation, explains his infantile TheWstor- 
 dreams of a primitive "golden age." In this 'c^ p^cess. 
 crude form he begins to recognize his inherent rela- 
 tion to the Infinite and Pei-fect. But while, as his 
 happy mythology, these dreams have an enduring 
 symbolic value, they no longer stand as data of iposi- 
 tive history or permanent religious belief. And the 
 same fate befalls the claims of special religions to have 
 been opened by men in some sense perfect from their 
 birth, and to possess revelations complete and final at 
 their announcement. All these ideas of genesis are 
 transient, because they contradict the natural processes 
 of growth. We come to note, as they depart, a pro- 
 gressive education of man, through his own essential 
 relations with the Infinite, commencing at the lowest 
 stage, and at each step pointing onward to fresh ascen- 
 sion ; an advance not less sure, upon the whole, for 
 the fact that in special directions an earlier may often 
 surpass a later attainment, proving competent, so far, 
 to instruct it.^ 
 
 And this progress is as natural as it is divine. It 
 proceeds by laws inherent and immanent in humanity ; 
 laws whose absoluteness affirms Infinite Mind as impli- 
 cated in this finite advance uf to mind, and then by 
 means of mind; laws whose continuous onward move- 
 ment is inspiration. 
 
 If this be true, the distinction hitherto made between 
 
 1 I insist on the indispensableness of the infinite element to every step of evolution, 
 because 1 find this nowise explicable as creation of the higher hy the lower. The very 
 idea of growth involves more than mere historical derivation. Genesis is a constant mys- 
 tery of origination. And an ascendirg series is to be accounted for by what is greater, 
 not less, than its highest term. 
 
A INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 " sacred " and " profane " history, interpret it as we 
 will, vanishes utterly and for ever. "Profane his- 
 tory" is a misnomer. The line popularly drawn 
 between Heathenism and Christianity as stages respec- 
 tively of blindness and insight, of guess-work and 
 authority, of " nature " and " grace," is equally unjust 
 in both directions, because unjust to man himself. In 
 all religions there are imperfections; in all, the claim 
 to infallible or exclusive revelation is alike untenable ; 
 yet, in all, experience must somehow have reached 
 down to authority and up to certitude. In all, the 
 intuitive faculty must have pressed beyond experience 
 into the realm of impalpable, indemonstrable, inde- 
 finable realities. In all, millions of souls, beset by 
 the same problems of life and death, must have seen 
 man's positive relations with the order of the universe 
 face to face. In all, the one spiritual nature, that 
 makes possible the intercourse of ideas and times 
 and tribes, must have found utterance in some eter- 
 nally valid form of tliought and conduct. 
 
 The difference between ancient and modern civiliza- 
 Ancientand tiou is not to bc explained by referring to 
 "pM™f Christianity, whether as a new religious ideal 
 civilization, or life grafted into the process of history, or as 
 the natural consummation of this process. The Chris- 
 tian ideal is but a single force among others, all equally 
 in the line of movement. Civilization is now definitely 
 traceable to a great variety of influences, among 
 which that of Race is probably the most prominent ; 
 its present breadth and fulness being the result of a 
 fusion of the more energetic and expansive races ; while 
 the freedom and science, which are its motive power, 
 have found in the manifold ideals of the Christian 
 Church on the whole quite as much hindrance as help. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. c 
 
 But, apart from the causes of difference between 
 ancient and modern conceptions of life, the fact itself 
 may be described as simply the natural difference be- 
 tween the child and the man. This transition is not 
 marked in either case by sudden changes in the nature 
 of growth, nor by the engrafting of new faculties, nor 
 by special interferences of the kind called "supernat- 
 ural," whatever that may mean, but is gradual and 
 normal. Reflection supplants instinct, and, with the 
 self-consciousness which brings higher powers and 
 bolder claims, enters the criminality of which the child 
 was less capable. In the child there was more than 
 childishness ; for his whole manhood was there in germ. 
 The leaf needs no special miracle to become a flower ; 
 nor does the child, to become a man. T^e whole 
 ■process of growth is the miracle, — product of a divine 
 force that transcends while pervading it. 
 
 The history of Religion follows the same law. There 
 is no point where Deity enters ; for there is no , . 
 point where Deity is absent. There is no need of thenam- 
 of divine interference, where the very law by ' p™"^- 
 which all proceeds is itself divine. It is as tenderly 
 faithful to minutest needs at the beginning as at any 
 later stage of growth. Whatever forms may arise, 
 they require neither fresh legitimation nor explanation, 
 since their germs lay in the earlier forms, their finest 
 fruit encloses the primal seeds, and history, when 
 read backward, is discerned to have been natural 
 prophecy. 
 
 Thus there are differences of higher and lower in 
 the forms of revelation ; but there is no such thing as 
 a revealed religion in distinction from natural religion. 
 So, too, spiritual and physical differ ; but natural can 
 be opposed to spiritual only in a very restricted and 
 
6 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 questionable sense. Any distinction thus indicated 
 must lie within the limits of each and every religion 
 taken by itself. It cannot mark off one positive relig- 
 ion from another, still less one from the rest; since, 
 whatever meanings be given to these terms, every 
 such religion will be found to have its own spiritual 
 and natural sides, if any one has them. 
 
 Christianity is nevertheless constantly opposed, as 
 False pre- a "spiritual" religion, to the earlier faiths, as 
 u"rr"chrL- merely natural ones ; as if there were some 
 tianity. essential contradiction to truth and good in 
 our human nature, which was abolished by the advent 
 of Jesus. The history of religion, so far from teach- 
 ing such a schism between the human and the divine, 
 — or this bridging over at a certain epoch of a gulf 
 which, by its very definition, was impassable, — de- 
 monstrates the exact contrary, — a substantial unity 
 of God and Man beneath all outward alienations. It 
 points to perfection in the laws of human nature, under 
 all the varying phases of human character ; to con- 
 stitutional health unshaken by the diseases incident to 
 growth ; to moral and spiritual recuperation, as human 
 as the vices that required it ; to divine immanence, 
 under finite conditions, from the beginning onwards. 
 
 Universal Religion, then, cannot be any one, ex- 
 whereisthe ^lusively , of the great positive religions of 
 Universal the world. Yet it is really what is best in 
 
 Religion ? ,^ . ,_,^ 
 
 each and every one of them ; punfiied from 
 baser inter-mixture and developed in freedom and 
 power. Being the purport of nature, it has been ger- 
 minating in every vital energy of man ; so that its 
 elements exist, at some stage of evolution, in every 
 great religion of mankind. 
 
 If any belief fails to abide this test, the worse for its 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 7 
 
 claims on our religious nature. " If that were true 
 which is commonly taken for granted," wrote Cud- 
 worth/ "that the generality of the Pagan nations 
 acknowledged no sovereign numen, but scattered their 
 devotions amongst a multitude of independent deities, 
 this would much have stumbled the naturality of the 
 divine idea ; " an effect equivalent, in his large and 
 clear mind, to disproval of the divineness itself. 
 
 As distinctive Christianity was in fact but a single 
 step in a for ever unfolding process, so those Rightsof the 
 earlier beliefs are disparaged when they are °''*" Faiths. 
 made to point to it as their final cause. They stand, as 
 it has stood, in their own right ; justified, as it has been, 
 by meeting, each in its own day and on its own soil, 
 the demands of human nature. They point forward, 
 but not to a single and final revelation entering history 
 from without their line, and reversing at once their 
 whole process in its new dealing with their attained 
 results. They point forward ; but it is with the proph- 
 ecy of an endless progress, which no distinctive name, 
 symbol, authority, or even ideal, can foreclose. They 
 are misrepresented, when they are held to be mere 
 " forerunners '' or " types " in the interest of a later 
 faith, which has in fact entered into the fruit of their 
 labors, and in due season transmits its own best to 
 the fresh forces that are opening up a larger unity, 
 and already demanding a new name and a broader 
 communion. They are misrepresented, when, to con- 
 trast them with what is simply a successor, they are 
 called " preparations for the truth of God." The exi- 
 gencies of Christian dogma have required that they 
 should even be described as mere " fallacies of human 
 reason," tending inevitably to despair; a charge re- 
 
 > Preface to Intellecti(al System of the Universe. 
 
8 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 futed alike by the laws of science and the facts ol 
 history, since man never did, and never can, despair. 
 Prejudices of this nature, inherent, it would seem, in 
 the make-up of a distinctive religion, which forbid its 
 disciples to render justice to other forms of faith, are 
 rapidly yielding to the larger scope and freer method 
 of inquiry peculiar to our times. 
 
 Every historical religion embodies the sacred person- 
 Misrepre- ality of man ; announcing his infinite relations 
 sentationo ^^ ^.^^^ duty, destiny. Yet it has been an al- 
 most invariable instinct of the Christian world to ignore 
 this presence of the soul in her own phases of belief, 
 and to hold " heathenism " to be her natural foe. How- 
 ever non-Christian morality and sentiment may have 
 harmonized with what is best in the New Testament, 
 it has seldom been accorded the name of revelation. 
 Although there is always a comparatively intelligent 
 orthodoxy, which assents to the idea of a divine im- 
 manence in all ages, yet the divinity thus recognized 
 being, after all, "/,4e Christ," — and moreover the Christ 
 of especial tradition, — and, further still, this Christ in 
 a merely preliminary and provisional form, — there can 
 be but little freedom in such appreciation of the faith 
 or virtue extant in non-Christian ages. A mode of pre- 
 senting these, not unlike that of the early apologists of 
 the Church, is common even with writers of the so- 
 called liberal sects ; while, with the more exclusive 
 ones, to praise the heathen being regarded as despoil- 
 ing Christianity, it is an easy step to the inference that 
 Christianity is exalted by referring heathenism to the 
 category of delusions and snares. And it is not too 
 much to say, upon the whole, that the most affirmative 
 treatment of the older rehgions would hardly suffice to 
 adjust the balance fairly, and to place them on their 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 9 
 
 real merits before the conscience of a civilization which 
 has, until very recently, expended almost all its hospi- 
 tality on the claims of Christianity alone. ^ 
 
 Many erf those who write in the interest of denomi- 
 national efforts have trained themselves to shrink from 
 no assumptions in the line of their purpose ; while others 
 are blinded by its logic to the most patent facts of his- 
 tory. It has been common to deny boldly that moral 
 and religious truth had any positive existence for the 
 human mind before the Christian epoch ; to assume 
 that the Sermon on the Mount actually introduced into 
 human nature that very love and trust to whose pre- 
 existing power in the hearts of its hearers it could 
 itself have been but an appeal. As if ideal principles 
 could have been imported into man by a special 
 teacher, or be traced back to some moment of arrival, 
 like commercial samples or inventions in machinery ! 
 So powerful is a traditional religious belief to efface the 
 perception that every moral truth man can apprehend 
 must be the outgrowth of his own nature, and has al- 
 
 "■ We may mention, as in striking contrast to this general record of Christendom, such 
 works as Dupuis' Origines de Tons les Cuiies, Constant's De la Religion, Creuzer's 
 Symholik^ Duncker's Geschichte des Alterthums^ Cousin's Lectures and Frag7}tents on 
 ike History 0/ Philosophy^ Denis' Theories et Id&es Morales dans VAntiquiie^ Quinet's 
 Genie des Religions, Michelet's Bible de VHumanite^ Menard's Morale avant les 
 Philosophes, Mrs. Child's Progress 0/ Religious Ideas, and R. W. Mackay's Prog- 
 ress of the Intellect- To these, in the special field of Oriental Literature, we must 
 add the Shemitic studies of Renan and Michel Nicolas; and those of Abel Remu- 
 sat, Riickert, Lassen, Roth, and Miiller, on the remoter Eastern races. All of these 
 are distinguished from the mass of writers on this theme by a spirit of universality, 
 which proves how far the scholarship of this age has advanced beyond the theological 
 narrowness of Bossuet, the critical superficiality of Voltaire, and the hard negation of 
 the so-called rationalistic schools of Lobeck and Voss. But it is to be observed that these 
 scholars are still reputed heretical, and stand in disfavor with distinctive Christianity in 
 exact proportion to their historical impartiality. Of unequalled significance are Lessing's 
 Treatise on the Education 0/ the Human Race, and Herder's Ideas of a Philosophy 
 of Man; works of marvellous breadth, freedom, and insight, to which, more than to any 
 other historical and literary influences, we must assign the parentage of modern thought 
 in this direction. Heine finely says of Herder, that, "instead of inquisitorially judging 
 nations according to the degree of their faith, he regarded humanity as a harp in the hands 
 of a great master, and each people a special string, helping to the harmony of the whole," 
 
lO INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 ways been seeking to reach expression, with greater 
 or less success. 
 
 Until very recently it was the most confident com- 
 monplace of New England preaching that all positive 
 belief in immortality came into the world with Jesus. 
 And it is still repeated, as a fact beyond all question, 
 that no other religion besides Christianity ever taught 
 men to bear each other's burdens, or preached a gospel 
 to the poor. 
 
 Nor has there been wanting a somewhat discredit- 
 able form of special pleading, for the purpose of 
 reducing the claims of heathenism to the smallest pos- 
 sible amount; a grudging literalism, a strict construc- 
 tion, or a base rendering, of ancient beliefs ; which 
 would prove every apparent spiritual perception a 
 phantom of fancy or blind hope, or else a mirage 
 reflected from the idealism of the present on the back- 
 ground of the past. Resolving the fair imaginations 
 and delicate divinations of the childlike races into 
 mockery betrays, however, far more scepticism in 
 the critic than in the race he wrongs. The same 
 disposition has often arisen from philosophical prej- 
 udice. Thus the desire of Locke to disprove the 
 notion of innate ideas led him to a degree of unbelief 
 in this direction, which has had noticeable effect on 
 subsequent thought. 
 
 But we have yet to mention one of the worst effects 
 of traditional religion on the treatment of history. It 
 is still held consistent with Christian scholarship to 
 deny moral earnestness and practical conviction to the 
 noblest thinkers of antiquity, in what they have af- 
 firmed of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood 
 of man . They were " theorists , not believers ; " " talked 
 finely about virtues, but failed to apply them ; " " gave 
 
INTRODUCTORY. II 
 
 no such meanings to their great words as we give to 
 them ; " were " aristocrats in thought, whispering one 
 doctrine to their disciples, and preaching another to 
 the people ; " and so on. All of which is not only ex- 
 aggerated or false in details, but in its principle and 
 method utterly destructive of historical knowledge. 
 Substantially, too, it amounts to rejecting all founda- 
 tion for morality in the nature of man, and the constant 
 laws of life. Critics of this temper have not now the 
 doctrinal excuse of Calvin, who ascribed the apparent 
 virtuesof the heathen to hypocrisy ; and Dugald Stewart 
 was hardly more wanting than they must be in the true 
 spirit of scholarship, when he met the first modern 
 revelations of Oriental wisdom with the charge that 
 the Sanskrit language was a mere recent invention of 
 the Brahmans, and Sanskrit literature an imposture. 
 
 The large historical relations of the Roman Catholic 
 Church have permitted its scholars to gather up the 
 spiritual wisdom of the heathen, though in the interest 
 of its own authority. ■■ But even this appreciation, such 
 as it was, the Reformation included in its sweeping 
 malediction upon a " Church of mere human tradi- 
 tions." And Protestantism, with few exceptions, has 
 continued to show, in its treatment of non-Christian 
 piety and morality, the narrow sympathies incident to 
 a self-centred and exclusive movement of reaction, and 
 to an attitude inherently sectarian. 
 
 When other grounds of depreciation failed, there 
 remained the presumption that all such outlying truth 
 must have been carried over into Pagan records by 
 Christian or Hebrew hands. In its origin, doubtless, 
 this idea was the natural outgrowth of Christian en- 
 thusiasm, and the sign of a geniality and breadth in the 
 
 1 See especially Lamennais, Essai sur Vlndiffcrejice en MatUre de Religion. 
 
12 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 religious consciousness which was reaching out every- 
 where to find its own. But there was also a dogmatic 
 interest in the development of these claims ; and this 
 foreclosed the paths of fair inquiry. Just as the Alexan- 
 drian Jews referred Greek philosophy to Moses (some of 
 them even resorted to pious frauds to prove it) , so un- 
 der the exigency of their creeds of depravity and natural 
 incapacity, of atonement, incarnation, and mediation, 
 Christians have been impelled to trace all ancient 
 piety to their own records ; to imagine late interpola- 
 tions or communications with Jewish doctors or Chris- 
 tian apostles, in explanation of what are really but 
 natural correspondences of the religious sentiment in 
 different races. And when for such imputed influence 
 there could not be found even the shadow of a historical 
 proof, well-reputed writers in all times have not been 
 wanting, who dared to affirm it without hesitation upon 
 purely a -priori grounds.^ 
 
 A common method of dealing with the relative claims 
 of positive religions is illustrated in a recent writer,- 
 whose extensive reading is almost nullified for the 
 purposes of comparative theology and ethics by the 
 absolutism of his authoritative creed. He begins with 
 affirming that "Christianity will tolerate no rival ; that 
 they who wish to raise a tabernacle for some other 
 master must be warned that Christ, and Christ alone, 
 
 ^ Tbus Hyde (a.d. 1700) supposes that the Persians must have been converted from 
 idolatry by Abraham, and that their fire-altars have been imitations of that of Jerusalem : 
 and a writer in the Bibliotheca Sacra (1859) attributes the Avesta to the prophet Daniel, 
 and declares that the Persians must have borrowed their notion of a Messiah from the 
 " revealed religion of the Hebrews." Another instance of the same Icind is the attemptt 
 uot very scrupulously conducted, to derive the moral philosophy and spiritual faith of 
 Seneca from St. Paul, so thoroughly defeated by Hilgenfeld {^Zeiischr. d. Wiss. Theol. 
 i8s8). 
 
 * Hardwick, Christ and other Masters^ i. pp. 39, 43. Examples of the extreme inca- 
 pacity of this learned writer to render justice to pre-Christian beliefs may be found on 
 pages 333 and 336 of the first volume. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 
 
 is to be worshipped ; " and proceeds to state the limits 
 of his recognition of character in the theory that " the 
 most eifectual way of defending Christianity is not to 
 condemn all the virtues of distinguished heathens, but 
 rather to make them testify in its favor," — not at all, 
 be it observed, in their own. All of which reminds 
 us of St. Augustine's saying, that whatever of truth the 
 Gentiles taught should be " claimed by Christians from 
 its heathen promulgators, as unlawful possessors of it, 
 just as the Hebrews spoiled the Egyptians;" a process 
 of historical justice still extensively practised by the 
 Church. 
 
 It is not surprising that appreciative Orientalists 
 should be moved to enter their protest with some 
 warmth against audacities like those here mentioned. 
 " The reaction from extravagant theories goes too far," 
 exclaims Max Mtiller, " if every thought which touches 
 on the problems of philosophy is to be marked indis- 
 criminately as a modern forgery ; if every conception 
 which reminds us of Moses, Plato, or the Apostles, is 
 to be put down as necessarily borrowed from Jewish, 
 Greek, or Christian sources, and foisted thence into the 
 ancient poetry of the Hindus." Friedrich von Schle- 
 gel at the outset of Oriental studies, as well as Miiller 
 at a later stage, found it necessary to reprove this dis- 
 position among Christian scholars. Yet he himself 
 does not hesitate to use Oriental errors to point an 
 appeal to Christianity as " affording the only clew to 
 principles too lofty to have been elicited by human 
 reason." ^ 
 
 It is time the older religions were studied in the 
 light of their own intrinsic values. They are at Their inde- 
 once spontaneities of desire and faith, and ele- P^'!"^™"' 
 
 ' Indian Literature, B. in. ch. iv. 
 
14 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 ments in an indivisible unity of growth, which in- 
 cludes at each stage natural guarantees of all that 
 has since been or shall yet be attained. We should 
 go back to them now, in the maturity of science, with 
 something of the tenderness we feel for our own 
 earliest intuitions and emotions ; with a reverent use, 
 too, of those faculties of imagination and contempla- 
 tion which are our real way of access to essential rela- 
 tions and eternal truths. For the race as for the 
 individual, — 
 
 " The child 's the father of the man ; 
 And we could wish our days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety." 
 
 The first universal principle of religion is that all 
 Ideal ek- great beliefs have their ideal elements ; just as 
 ments. jj^ ^j^g natural world the bud is not a bud 
 merely, but the guarantee of a flower. And it is these 
 with which we are mainly concerned, as pointing to 
 fulfilments beyond themselves, in a future that will 
 not be mortgaged to any names, nor to any claims. 
 They are that promise in the first belief, which the last 
 cannot fulfil alone ; the dream which only their mutual 
 recognition can interpret. And it becomes us to find 
 in our own experience the secret which explains how 
 they have met the problems of ages and answered the 
 prayers of generations. 
 
 Illustrations of these ideal elements, high-water 
 marks of ancient faith, readily suggest themselves. 
 
 The religious toleration prevailing in China from 
 very early times is not fairly estimated when it is 
 shown to have lacked that deep moral earnestness and 
 spiritual dignity which distinguish the highest forms 
 of modern religious liberty in Europe or America. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. I5 
 
 The question for our religious philosophy is, whether 
 it is not of essentially the same nature ; a germ out of 
 which that highest freedom might come by pure force 
 of the familiar laws of social and scientific growth, by 
 the intercourse of races and the intimacies of diverse 
 beliefs ; whether it has not, even on its own ground, 
 reached a point of development, in certain instances or 
 certain respects, which makes these our greater out- 
 ward opportunities look less than we thought them ; 
 and whether it may not hold elements of moral value 
 whereof our culture needs the infusion. Similarly 
 with the self-abnegation of the Buddhist. It is not that 
 perfect devotion of the human powers to social good 
 which would involve the best culture and the largest 
 practical efficiency. Neither is this, we may add, the 
 quality and extent of the- same virtue, even as illus- 
 trated and taught in the Christian records. But to 
 suppose that there would be need either of miraculous 
 re-enforcement or essential change, to unfold Buddhis- 
 tic self-denial into the best morality and piety known to 
 our time, would be to ignore the fact that it has shown 
 itself fully equal to these in the sfirit of practical 
 benevolence, and in ardent zeal for an ideal standard 
 of purity and truth. In the same way, an implicit germ 
 of Monotheism, even in the "element-worship" of the 
 early Aryans, fully guarantees progress into the pure 
 and definite Theism of the best Indo-European minds ; 
 and shows the assumption of a divine deposit, of this 
 central truth with the Shemitic Hebrews alone, for dis- 
 tribution to the rest of mankind, to be entirely ground- 
 less and gratuitous. Thus the cardinal virtues and 
 beliefs belong not to one religion, but to all rehgions ; 
 and the diversities of form into which each of these 
 ideals is broken by differences of race and culture do 
 
1 6 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 not affect its essential identity in them all. We every- 
 where find ourselves at home in the world's great faiths, 
 through their common appeal to what is nearest and 
 most familiar to us in solving the great central facts 
 and relations with which the soul is for ever called to 
 deal. Everywhere we greet essential meanings of the 
 unity of God with man, of fate and freedom, of sacri- 
 fice, inspiration, progress, immortality, practical du- 
 ties and humanities, just as we everywhere find the 
 mysteries of birth and death, the bliss of loving and 
 sharing, the self-respect of moral loyalty, the stress 
 of ideal desire. 
 
 It will be found, in following the course of these 
 studies, that all those forms of moral and spiritual per- 
 ception which are wont to be regarded as peculiar gifts 
 of Christianity are visible through the crude social 
 conditions of the old Asiatic communities ; in such 
 brave struggle, too, for growth as demonstrates not only 
 their vitality under those conditions, but also the fact 
 that they fulfil functions inherent and constant in the 
 nature of man. Such are the recognition of ultimate 
 good through transient evil ; of spiritual gain through 
 suffering and hindrance ; of freedom through accept- 
 ance of divinely natural conditions ; of love, beyond a 
 thought of constraining law ; of the rightful authority 
 of the soul over the senses ; of the sacredness of con- 
 science, and of somewhat immutable in its decrees ; 
 of the inevitableness of moral penalty, and the beauty 
 of disinterested motive ; of invincible remedial energies 
 in the spiritual universe; of Divine Fatherhood and 
 Human Brotherhood, and Immortal Life. 
 
 Our advantage over older civilizations will thus be 
 wiierein sccn to cousist not, as is generally imasrined. 
 
 lies our ad- . . . ^ °- . •' ° ' 
 
 vantage. "1 somc new force, mfused miraculously, or 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 1*] 
 
 otherwise, by the Christian religion ; but in some- 
 thing of a quite different nature. It is found, in fact, 
 in the immense special development of the under- 
 standing ; of the faculties of observation and the forces 
 of analysis; in the advancement of science, and the 
 fusion and friction of races ; and, finally, in the wealth 
 of practical material opened to all. So impressive is 
 this growth of the understanding, and the sciences 
 thereon dependent, that writers like Buckle go to the 
 extent of inferring that morality and religion, on the 
 other hand, as being the comparatively "unchanging 
 factors" in history, have had "no influence on prog- 
 ress." But this is to reduce history to a sum in 
 arithmetic. History is a living process. Its factors 
 are dynamic, and are not to be pulled apart like dead 
 bones or a heap of sticks. These ethical forces are 
 "unchanging," only in the sense of being constant and 
 unfailing; and the mental growth, which clears their 
 vision and develops their practical capacities, in fact 
 enables them to exert an ever-increasing influence, a 
 completer fulfilment of their own ideal. 
 
 And so, in holding the vantage of modern civiliza- 
 tion to lie specially in the sphere of the understanding, 
 I do not overlook the force with which the manifold 
 ideals of Christian belief have wrought, like other and 
 older ones, at its vast looms of productive power. But 
 I note also how perfectly these variations in the reHg- 
 ious ideal of Christianity correspond with and depend on 
 the steps of intellectual progress ; how analogous they 
 are to those of other religions ; and finally, a point of 
 no light import, how little what is broadest and best in 
 our civilization has to do with what is distinctive in 
 Christian faith, — namely, its exclusive concentration on 
 Jesus, of Nazareth as the Christ. It is, moreover, pre- 
 
l8 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 cisely in its moral and religious aspects that the Chris- 
 tenilom of eighteen centuries can claim least practical 
 superiority to the older civilizations. 
 
 I have sought to bring into view a law of progress, 
 Spiritual in which the most important transitions in 
 Reaction, religious history find their true explanation. 
 I refer to Spiritual Reaction. It is mainly from 
 habitual disregard of this familiar law in its broader 
 aspects that such transitions have been referred to 
 special divine interference with the natural processes 
 of history. 
 
 It is commonly supposed that natural growth in 
 things moral and spiritual can proceed only in a direct 
 line. When a divine life appears in a degenerating 
 age, this theory requires the inference that, natural 
 human forces having become effete and exhausted, a 
 miraculous interference, Hke the " creation of new 
 species " in the old theory of biology, had become 
 necessary. What else should stop the downward ten- 
 dency of " unaided nature "? Such is the usual method 
 of accounting for Jesus of Nazareth and his religion ; 
 such the principle of historical construction which is 
 assumed throughout the growth of Christian dogma : — 
 the Christ and his gospel were a new spiritual species. 
 So far as Jesus is concerned, this theory in fact rests 
 on a very superficial survey of the condition of man- 
 kind at his birth ; since his ethical and spiritual faith 
 had their tap-roots within his native soil, and followed 
 a line of strong democratic and spiritual tendencies in 
 that age. Yet it is also true both of the Roman Empire 
 as a whole, and of the old faiths that were perishing in 
 its bosom, that social and religious life had, on the 
 whole, become fearfully degenerate. Grant this to 
 the fullest extent possible, yet "miraculous inter- 
 
INTRODUCTORY. I9 
 
 ference " need not be assumed in explanation of the 
 revival. 
 
 For there is a law of self-recovery by reaction, in 
 mind as well as in matter ; different indeed from that, 
 as developing not an equivalent, but a new and greater 
 force. It has been described as " forbidding that vicious 
 ideas or institutions shall go so far as their principle 
 logically demands." ^ It strikes back individuals and 
 nations from degeneracy. It restrains excess in the 
 passions with timely warnings. And it shows us each 
 historic period hastening to an extreme in some special 
 direction, only that the next may be forced into doing 
 justice to a different and balancing class of energies, 
 and so in good time all faculty be liberated into free 
 play. This natural law of reaction is quite as essen- 
 tial and constant as the law of steady linear growth ; 
 though perhaps, when clearly apprehended, it will be 
 found to be but a more interior and less obvious form 
 thereof. It is not only essential to the explanation of 
 primitive Christianity in its relation to the degeneracies 
 of the epoch, but thoroughly competent to that end. 
 It is adequate to prove the phenomenon a sign not that 
 the spiritual forces of human nature had become ex- 
 hausted, but that they were exhaustless, since even 
 suppression only nerved them to unprecedented vigor. 
 Of course this natural solution of religious progress 
 does not exclude personal or social inspiration, 
 
 ' Inspiration. 
 
 in any rational sense of the word. It leaves to 
 religious genius, as to intellectual, its own unfathomed 
 mystery, its immediate insight, its spontaneity, its en- 
 thusiasm, its fateful mastery of life and of men. It 
 leaves unquestioned the fact that there is an element 
 in the present instant which the past cannot explain. 
 
 1 Guizot, History 0/ Civilizaiion. 
 
20 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Nay : it affirms the constancy of this transcendence 
 and of this primacy in the instantaneous fact of spirit- 
 ual perception. It recognizes the special energy of 
 intuition in the saint and the seer. 
 
 But it implies that religious genius also has its con- 
 ditions, and inspiration its laws ; and .it demands that 
 in this respect they be placed in the same line with 
 intellectual and poetic genius, even if in advance of 
 them. They are not less purely human than these, 
 either in their original source, or in the law of their 
 appearance. 
 
 The energy of all these forces in the early Oriental 
 world has seemed to me a very noble illustration of 
 their universality. And I may add that we need not 
 be surprised to find, amidst the weaknesses of spiritual 
 childhood, certain superiorities also, incident to that 
 stage, in the quahties of imagination, intuition, and 
 faith, over maturer civilizations. 
 
 In point of moral earnestness and fidelity also, it 
 Religions admits of serious question whether what we 
 judged by Call the highest form of civilization is an ad- 
 e.r ruits. ^^^^^ ^jp^^^ ^j^^ phascs of faith it has been 
 accustomed to contemn. Admitting the clearer light 
 in which science has revealed the laws of social prog- 
 ress, it would be difficult to prove that races in this 
 > espect far behind us are in any degree our inferiors 
 '11 those qualities of the heart and the conscience which 
 lead to the faithful service of what one worships, and 
 the honest practice of what he believes. I venture 
 the prediction that we shall yet learn of the Oriental 
 nations many lessons in moral simplicity and integrity. 
 Nothing could be more unfortunate for those who wish 
 to exalt Christianity by comparison with Heathenism 
 than to rest their argument on what they call "judging 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 21 
 
 religions by their fruits." A distinguished orator has 
 said, "My answer to Buddha is India, past and pres- 
 ent." It would be as reasonable for a Buddhist to say, 
 "My answer to Christ is Judaism, past and present;" 
 for India rejected Buddha, as Judaism did Christ. 
 What India is and has been, the Western world will 
 probably be better able to state half a century hence 
 than it is now. But if the power of a specific religion 
 is shown in its ability to mould a civilization into the 
 image of its own moral and spiritual ideal, what shall 
 be said of one whose results after eighteen centuries 
 of preaching and instituting our orator must charac- 
 terize by saying that no one would know its Founder if 
 he came among us to-day ; that there is no Christian 
 community at all ; and that Christianity goes round 
 and stamps every institution as a sin? We need not 
 give too literal a construction to expressions whose 
 substantial meaning is justified by the facts. What we 
 would note is that these admissions concerning the 
 practical fruits of Christianity are made by its noblest 
 disciples ; and that they virtually confess its inadequacy 
 to meet the actual demands of social progress. 
 
 Nevertheless, its religious ideal is still confidently 
 presented as all productive, and final. Here is evi- 
 dently some misunderstanding of the origin of these 
 nobler demands. 
 
 It is in fact not the Christ-ideal at all, as is here 
 imagined, but an advancing moral standard, due to 
 many new causes, that now criticises the institutions in 
 question. Such institutions were in fact unmolested 
 by definite Christian precepts or prohibitions for many 
 ages. Our reformer's inspiration is indeed as old as 
 Christianity, — nay, more than that, as old as heroism 
 and love ; but its practical present resources lie in 
 
?2 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 science and liberty, and even represent the triumph of 
 secular interests over distinctively religious opposition. 
 And every fresh task of the reformer is made con- 
 ceivable only through the accomplishment of the last. 
 How then can it have been evolved solely out of the 
 faith and virtue of eighteen centuries ago? It is not 
 the fruit of Christianity alone, but generated by living 
 experience, in the breadth and freedom of modern 
 civilization. 
 
 On this whole subject of judging religions by their 
 fruits, we are yet to collect the data for a just decision ; 
 since it involves the study of civilizations whose inner 
 movements have hitherto been in great measure sealed 
 from the view of our Western world. 
 
 Man^Man is the broad formula of historical science, 
 „ . as well as of practical brotherhood. But it 
 
 Meaning ^ 
 
 of natural must uot bc Superficially interpreted. It does 
 '^^ ^^' not mean the falsehood and egotism of com- 
 munistic theories, which disintegrate personality and 
 society alike in the name of an unconditioned "equality" 
 which natural ethics nowhere allows. It means that in 
 every age and race, under the varying surface-currents 
 of organization and intellectual condition, you shall 
 find a deep-sea calm, — the same essential instincts 
 and insights, aspirations, tendencies, demands. The 
 first vital problem of historical research is to find 
 the constant factor, the guarantee of immutable and 
 eternal laws, by means of the variables. Its first 
 duty is never to pause at mere negation, nor in- 
 dulge in arrogant disparagement, but to draw from 
 every form of earnest faith or work its witness of im- 
 mutable law and endless good. Not till this is done, 
 can we wisely apply analysis, and interpret the diver- 
 sities of human belief. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 23 
 
 The inspiration of modern physical studies is in the 
 universaHty of their idea and aims. This fine 
 
 . . Universality 
 
 idealism in the exploration of nature, by lens inpiiysicai 
 and prism and calculus, which casts theologies ^'"''"^• 
 into the background of human interest, is preparing 
 the way for a religion of religions, whose Bible shall 
 be the full word of Human Nature. How opulent the 
 time with encyclopedic survey and comparative sci- 
 ence ! Humboldt's " Cosmos '' was representative of 
 the drift of the century ; a search for that all-inspher- 
 ing harmony, of which the worlds and ages and races 
 are chords. Humboldt, pursuing the idea of unity 
 through immeasurable deeps of law, with a reverence 
 that is too full of the spirit of worship to need the cur- 
 rent phraseology of religion ; Pritchard, tracing the 
 physiological, and Miiller the linguistic, affinities of 
 the human tribes ; Ritter, unfolding the function of 
 every continent and sea, every mountain range and 
 river basin, in the development of humanity as a whole ; 
 Kirchhoff and Bunsen, with their successors, applying 
 spectrum analysis to the rays of every star, till the 
 determination of the "sun's place in the universe" is 
 but a single element in the immeasurable significance 
 of light now opening before this marvellous instru- 
 ment of research ; Tyndall, making the subtlest phases 
 of force a revelation of poetry and philosophy, and a 
 delight for the general mind, — these, with others not 
 less earnestly pursuing the unities of law, whether 
 wisely or imperfectly interpreting its evolution and 
 defining its higher facts and relations, represent the 
 physical science of our time. 
 
 How should the spiritual nature fail to be explored 
 by the same instinct ? It is a deepening sense of the 
 unity of human experience, and so of its reliability as 
 
24 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 well as dignity, that banishes supernaturalism, affirms 
 universal laws in place of miracle, and bids us rest in 
 them with entire trust ; " loving," as the Stoic Aurelius 
 said, " whatever happens to us from nature, because 
 that only can happen by nature which is suitable, and 
 it is enough to remember that law rules all." The 
 growing belief that the stability of law is the guar- 
 antee of universal good, or, to translate it into the 
 language of the spirit, that Law means Love, is the 
 sign that Love, in its practical and universal sense, is 
 itself becoming the all-solving calculus and all-analyz- 
 ing prism of our spiritual astronomy, — the pursuer, 
 diviner, interpreter of Law. 
 
 And therefore they who disapprove our inevitable 
 exodus from distinctive religions, upon the 
 to Humm- grouud that organizing good works would be 
 "^' better than reconstructing theology, have very 
 
 slight comprehension of that which they distrust. It is 
 the very spirit of humanity that is moving in this relig- 
 ious emancipation ; clearing its own vision, reaching out 
 to consistency and self-respect, and finding its sphere 
 to be, as Herder has said, "not merely universal as 
 human nature, but properly no less than human 
 nature itself." ^ 
 
 ' "The object of all religions," sings the Persian 
 Hafiz, " is alike. All men seek their belqved. And 
 is not all the world love's dwelling? Why talk of a 
 mosque or a church?" Hindu teachers have said: 
 "The creed of the lover differs from other creeds. 
 God is the ci-eed of those who love Him ; and to do 
 good is best, with the followers of every faith." " He 
 alone is a true Hindu whose heart is just, and he only 
 a good Mussulman whose life is pure." "Remember 
 
 ^ Philosophy of Man-, £. viii. ch. v. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 25 
 
 Him who has seen numberless Mahomets, Vishnus, 
 Sivas, come and go, and who is not found by one 
 who forgets or turns away from the poor." " The 
 common standpoint of the three rehgions," say the 
 Chinese, "is that they insist on the banishment of evil 
 desire." 
 
 The Chinese Buddhist priest prays at morning that 
 the music of the bell which wakens him to his matins 
 " may sound through the whole world, and that every 
 living soul may gain release, and find eternal peace in 
 God."^ The Buddhist Saviour^ vows "to manifest 
 himself to every creature in the universe, and never 
 to arrive at Buddhahood till all are delivered from sin 
 into the divine rest, receiving answer to their prayers." 
 What else, or wherein better, is the claim of the 
 Christian or the Jew? 
 
 It is so far from being true that the effort to lift 
 religions to a common level is antagonistic to the 
 humanities of the age, that these humanities could 
 not possibly dispense with such an effort. It is their 
 natural expression. It is the demand not so much 
 of comparative science even, as of instant social duty. 
 Is it not quite time that the excuses which religious 
 caste has constantly furnished for treating the heathen 
 as lawful prey of the Christian in all quarters of the 
 globe were finally refuted, by bringing to view the 
 unities of the religious sentiment, and the ethical 
 brotherhood of mankind? Is it not time that claims 
 of exclusive revelation ceased, which can only flatter 
 this spirit of caste ? 
 
 Fourier tried to circumnavigate the globe of human 
 "passions," that he might show how it could be regu- 
 lated for the utmost good of all : surely a magnificent 
 
 1 Caiejia of Buddhist Scriptures. ' Avalokitiswara. 
 
26 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 aim, however beyond any man's accomplishment, and 
 whatever his mistakes of method. A similar ideaHsm 
 testifies to the same inspiration in all leading move- 
 ments of modern thought. It is the humanitarian 
 instinct that guarantees them : it is this instinct that 
 forbids their falling away from the very principles 
 that make them colossal in stature and infinite in 
 reach. Hence the new sciences of mind, theories of 
 progress, analyses of social function, brave and broad 
 claims of equal opportunity for the races and the 
 sexes. Let us be assured that Liberty, Democracy, 
 Labor Reform, Popular Progress, are to reach beyond 
 the assertion of exclusive rights or selfish claims into 
 full recognition of universal duties ; that liberty is not 
 to stop in license, nor democracy in greed and aggres- 
 sion, nor progress to be earned through bloody retri- 
 butions alone. 
 
 And this humanitarian instinct, which impels each 
 private current towards the universal life, is not only 
 recreating literature arid art, but changing the heart 
 of scholarship also. It demands an ideal culture, that 
 shall give breadth and freedom to our philosophy of 
 life. It culls the choicest thought of all time. It 
 would nurse every child at the breast of that oldest 
 wisdom of love which Jesus confessedly but repeated 
 as the substance of the Hebrew Law and Prophets, 
 and which in them was but the echo of all noble 
 human experience from the beginning of time. It 
 transmutes that one mother's blood which flows 
 through the veins of all ages to practical nerve and 
 manly sinew of present service. It will discern the 
 fine gold in all creeds and rites, which gave them en- 
 during currency. It will read in sphynx and pyramid, 
 in prehistoric bone heap and sculptured wall, in Druid 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 2*] 
 
 Circles and Greek Mysteries, and Shemitic Prophe- 
 cies and the antique Bibles and Codes, the varied 
 hieroglyph of man's assurance of Deity, duty, and 
 immortality. It will trace through all transforma- 
 tions of faith the eternal right of man's ideal to re- 
 interpret life and nature, and to change old gods for 
 new. 
 
 Even so decided an opponent of naturalistic religion 
 as Guizot bears witness to the constructive spirit of 
 this aspiration to a larger synthesis of faith. " What 
 gives the modern movement against Christianity its 
 most formidable character," he says, " is a sentiment 
 which has found heroes and martyrs, the love of truth 
 at all risks, and despite of consequences, for the sake 
 of truth and for its sake alone." If such a spirit as 
 this is " formidable " to Christianity, could there be 
 stronger proof that the time for that free culture 
 which it demands is fully come? 
 
 The scholar must identify himself with the social 
 reformer, and demonstrate brotherhood out of Dutyofthe 
 the old Bibles and the stammering speech of Scholar. 
 primitive men. It is his duty to show that the human 
 arteries beat everywhere with the same royal blood. 
 It is his duty to help break down the strongholds of 
 theological and social contempt, and refute the pre- 
 tences by which strong races have ever justified their 
 oppression of the weak. He may avail himself of 
 Comparative Philology, or Comparative Physiology, 
 or of any other branch of ethnological science. The 
 materials are at last abundant, the laborers in these 
 harvests equal to his utmost need. But if all these 
 resources should prove inadequate ; if the language, 
 physical organization, and social condition of any 
 race, should all appear to invite the contempt of 
 
28 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Christian nations, there is still left the testimony of 
 the religious sentiment. The essential unity of man 
 does not rest on physiological, but on psychological 
 grounds. 
 
 A true philosophy of History will know how to 
 reconcile this identity in the substance with phases of 
 progressive development. But no theory will serve, 
 which fails to recognize it as real in every one of 
 these phases. Formulas are as dangerous as they are 
 fascinating. Thus Hegel, compelled by his formal 
 logic, regards the Oriental religions as merely repre- 
 senting man in the undeveloped state of non-distinc- 
 tion from nature; in other^ words, in pure bondage to 
 the senses. And so, as elsewhere, his philosophical 
 generalization plays into the hands of theological prej- 
 udice. It tells but half the truth. It ignores the fact 
 that man himself was the soul of these earlier faiths. 
 There were incessantly noble reactions which pro- 
 tested against such bondage as he describes, and 
 justified human nature, as genius and intuition and 
 free self-consciousness, even in the crude experience 
 of its earlier children ; although men had not yet 
 learned to analyze the mysteries of subject and object, 
 Being and Thought. Let us be admonished by the 
 hint of the old Buddhist poet : — 
 
 " The depths of antiquity are full of light. Scarce- 
 ly have a few rays been transmitted to us. We are 
 like infants born at midnight. When we see the sun 
 rise, we think that yesterday never was." 
 
 The opening of China to the Western nations, and 
 Religious of the West to Chinese emigration and labor, 
 app°oach- ^^^ events as momentous in their religious as 
 ing- in their commercial and political bearings. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 29 
 
 Taken in connection with revolutions in Japan indi- 
 cating the growth of a liberal policy, and with the rapid 
 disclosure of the field of Hindu literature and life 
 during the past half century, they announce a new 
 phase in the education of Christendom. It is as cer- 
 tain that the complacent faith of the Christian Church 
 in itself as the sole depositary of religious truth is to 
 be startled and confounded by the new experience, 
 as that the fixed ideas of that huge population which 
 swarms along the great river-arteries of China, and 
 heaps flowers in the temples of spirit-ancestors, and 
 bows at shrines of Confucius and Fo, are to be as- 
 tounded at the immense resources of the "outside bar- 
 barians," and their peculiar worship of Mammon and 
 Christ. The time has arrived, in the providence of 
 modern social and industrial progress, for a mutual 
 interchange of experience between the East and the 
 West, for which neither was prepared, but which is 
 quite indispensable to the advancement of both forms 
 of civilization. 
 
 In their natural impatience to count these unknown 
 millions as converts to Christian theology, the ,, 
 
 °.' I Not an ec- 
 
 Churches but feebly comprehend the serious- ciesiasticai 
 ness of the situation. Dreams of denomina- °pp°"™"y 
 tional trophies won in these realms of Pagan night, 
 where the tidings of salvation by the power or the 
 blood of Christ are to come as a long-desired dawn 
 of day, will probably prove illusory. Missionary zeal 
 has been but a poor spell to conjure with. All its 
 auguries and exorcisms have failed. The real oppor- 
 tunity and promise is of another kind. The world of 
 religion is wider than Christendom has apprehended, 
 and it is undoubtedly destined to widen in the sight of 
 man as much as the world of population and trade. 
 
30 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Christianity, as well as Heathendom, is on the eve of 
 judgment. It is to discover that it has much to learn 
 as well as to teach. I firmly believe th^t in making 
 the worship of Jesus as " the Christ " — which, more 
 than any essential difference in moral precept or 
 religious intuition, forms its actual distinction from 
 other religions — a prescriptive basis of faith, it will 
 strike against a mass of outside human experience so 
 overwhelming as to put beyond doubt the futility of 
 pressing either this or any other exclusive claim as 
 authoritative for mankind. I have written in no spirit 
 of negation towards aught that deserves respect in its 
 faith or its purpose ; in no disparagement of what is 
 eternally noble and dear to man in the life of Jesus ; 
 but with the sincere desire to help in bridging the 
 gulf of an inevitable transition in religious belief, and 
 in pointing out the better foundations already arising 
 amidst these tides that will not spare the ancient foot- 
 holds and contented finalities of faith. And in this 
 spirit it is, that, after such serious study of the Re- 
 ligions of the East, their bibles and traditions, as has 
 been possible, without direct acquaintance with the 
 Oriental languages, — through the labors of scholars 
 like Lassen, Schlegel, Weber, Rosen, Kuhn, Wilson, 
 Burnouf, Bunsen, Spiegel, Riickert, Muller, Legge, 
 Bastian, our own Whitney, and of many others, render- 
 ing such direct acquaintance comparatively needless, 
 — I have reached the conviction that these oldest relig- 
 ions have an exceedingly important function to fulfil in 
 that present transformation of the latest into a purer 
 Theism, which is still irreverently denounced as infi- 
 delity. The mission of Christianity to the heathen is 
 not only for the overthrow of many of their religious 
 peculiarities, but quite as truly for the essential mod- 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 3 1 
 
 ification of its own. The change from distinctive 
 Christianity to Universal Religion is a revolution, com- 
 pared with wh,ich the passage from Judaism to Chris- 
 tianity itself was trivial. 
 
 Here is the practical situation. Christendom is 
 henceforth to face those older civilizations out x^e sima- 
 of which its own life has in large measure ''°''- 
 proceeded, and on which its reactions have hitherto 
 made scarcely any impression. Brought into intimate 
 relations with races whose beliefs are more obstinate 
 than its own, and even more firmly rooted in " super- 
 natural " claims, it will be obliged to drop all exclu- 
 siveness and absolutism, defer to the common light 
 of natural religion, and do justice to instincts and con- 
 victions that have sustained other civilizations through 
 longer periods than its own. The movement is not 
 retrograde, but in the direct line of our own American 
 growth ; a promise of science and a consequence of 
 liberty. It can be regarded as a return to bygone 
 systems only by those whose own feet cling too closely 
 to special traditions to venture on testing what lies 
 beyond them. As well think it makes no difference 
 whether one goes to China with Agassiz in a Pacific 
 steamer, or as a Middle Age monk across the sands 
 of Gobi. The new wisdom makes and finds all the 
 old life new. A richer and deeper synthesis beckons 
 us, of which telegraph and treaty are but symbols. 
 There are divine recognitions in that grasp of broth- 
 erly hands which will soon complete the circuit of the 
 physical globe. 
 
 Scholars have not been wanting who bring us hints 
 of this large communion from the Scriptures of the 
 East. Here and there a thoughtful traveller or a 
 liberal missionary has noted the brighter facts, that 
 
32 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 tell for human nature, and explain the social perma- 
 nence and enduring faith of these strange civilizations. 
 Even from the Catholic Church, as we have already 
 said, have come many willing tributes, however per- 
 verted to the support of its own claims, to the idea 
 that revelation has in no wise been confined to one 
 person, race, or religion. But the strongest evidence 
 has failed of its due effect thus far, because the prac- 
 tical interests of society had not compelled attention 
 to these distant fields. At last their immensity, as 
 well as actuality, becomes a fact of common experi- 
 ence ; and the ethics of Confucius and the piety of the 
 Vedas are to stand as real and positive before the mind 
 of Christendom as the mercantile and political inter- 
 ests that give dignity to this opening of the great gates 
 of the Morning Land. 
 
 " Ex Oriente Lux I " Light from the East once 
 The Prom- more 1 As it came to Greece in the " Sacred 
 ise. Mysteries " with the Dorians and the Pytha- 
 
 goreans and the Chaldaic Oracles ; to Alexandria 
 in Philo and Plotinus ; to Europe in Judaism and 
 Christianity ; to the Middle Ages by the Crusades, in 
 floods of legend and fable, the imaginative lore that 
 was itself an education of the ideal faculty, and pre- 
 pared the way for modern liberty and assthetic cul- 
 ture, — so now again it comes to modern civilization 
 through literature and commerce and religious sym- 
 pathy ; and, as ever before, with a mission to help 
 clear the sight and enlarge the field of belief. Chris- 
 tendom will not become Buddhist, nor bow to Confu- 
 cius, nor worship Brahma ; but it will render justice 
 to the one spiritual nature which spoke in ways as 
 yet unrecognized, in these differing faiths. It will 
 learn that Religion itself is more than any positive 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 33 
 
 form under which it has appeared, and rests on broader 
 and deeper authority than can ever be confined in a 
 prescribed ideal. The religious sentiment demands 
 freedom from its own exclusive venerations, that it 
 maj^ recognize principles in their own validity, and 
 instead of revolving in endless beat around some 
 pivotal personality, some fixed historic name or sym- 
 bol, front directly the spiritual laws and facts which 
 man has ever sought to recognize and express, and 
 find them ample guaranties of growth, and ministers 
 of good. 
 
 These bearings of the present work on questions 
 now uppermost in the religious conscious- 
 
 '^ '^ _ =" Limits and 
 
 ness are summed up in the outset, not in Purpose of 
 order to forestall the reader's judgment on the *'^'"'""^i'- 
 field of inquiry before him, but in justice to that inde- 
 pendent attitude towards distinctive religions, which is 
 demanded alike by science, philosophy, and human- 
 ity, enforced by the results of historical study, and 
 recognized by religion itself as a new birth of in- 
 tellectual freedom and spiritual power. While our 
 criticism must point out deficiency of this universal 
 element, and hostility to it, wherever they appear, yet 
 the substantial spirit and motive of these studies is not 
 polemical nor even theological. As far as they go 
 in regions of research whose immensity the largest 
 scholarship does but open (and of these I would be 
 understood as but aspiring to sketch the general out- 
 line) , they would record the ethical and spiritual im- 
 port of those older civilizations, whose seats were in 
 India, China, and Persia previous to the Christian 
 epoch ; with such light from their later forms and 
 results as may be required for their appreciation. I 
 would emphasize in them whatever may encourage 
 
 3 
 
34 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 respect for human nature, while hiding none of their 
 darker features ; which indeed do but illustrate the 
 common inadequacy of all past forms of faith in view 
 of our new and still advancing ideals, and so must 
 the more commend religion to the forward step and 
 aim. Ill-understood beliefs and institutions, whereof 
 we ourselves are not without representative forms, I 
 would trace to their roots in the spontaneities of spirit- 
 ual being, and make as clear as I may the essential 
 identity of human aspirations, under conditions of ex- 
 perience and in stages of progress the most diverse. 
 
 Finally, within these limits of inquiry, I would note 
 directions in which the differing civilizations may help 
 to supply each other's defects; and, in sum, endeavor 
 to bring the old antipodal races now practically at our 
 doors under that light of free and fair inquiry which 
 justice to them and to the common good requires. 
 
INDIA. 
 
RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 oMXo 
 
 I. 
 
 THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
 npHAT elevated region in Central Asia extending 
 -*- from the Hindu Kuh to the A.rmenian The Aryan 
 mountains, which is now known as the pla- Homesteai 
 teau of Iran, is entitled to be called in an important 
 sense the homestead of the human family. It was at 
 least the ancestral abode of those races which have 
 hitherto led the movement of civilization. Its position 
 and structure are wonderfully appropriate to such a 
 function ; for this main focus of ethnic radiation is 
 also the geographical centre of the Eastern hemi- 
 sphere. " There, at the intersection of the continental 
 axes, stands the real, apex of the earth." ^ And its 
 borders rise on every side into commanding mountain 
 knots and ranges, that look eastward over the steppes 
 of Thibet and the plains of India, westward down the 
 Assyrian lowlands towards the Mediterranean, north- 
 ward over the wide sands of Central Asia, and south- 
 ward across Arabia and the Tropic Seas. " Where 
 else," demands Herder, with natural enthusiasm, 
 if not with scientific knowledge, " should man, the 
 summit of creation, come into being?" Whatever 
 answer be given to this still open question, the sym- 
 bolism of the majestic plateau points, we may suggest, 
 
 1 Reclus, The Earth. 
 
40 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 to higher human meaning than that of the mere his- 
 torical beginning of the race. 
 
 The languages and mythologies of nearly all the 
 great historic races, in their widest dispersion, point 
 back to these mountain outlooks of Iran. Hindu, 
 Persian, Hebrew, Mongol, kneel towards these vener- 
 able heights, as their common fatherland ; a primeval 
 Eden, peopled by their earliest legends with gods and 
 genii, and long-lived, happy men. The homes of 
 ancient civilization rose around their bases, as under 
 the shadow of a patriarchal tent; and there they 
 were gathered to the dust. The drift of forty centu- 
 ries of human history lies amidst their recesses, and 
 strewn over the spaces which they enclose ; attesting 
 what storms and tides of life have preceded our own ; 
 vestiges of aspiration and achievement hid in pre- 
 historic times ; relics of old religions ; inscriptions in 
 mysterious tongues ; local names, whose vague ety- 
 mological affinities suggest startling relations between 
 widely separated ages and races. The highways of 
 the oldest commerce strike across this plateau, and 
 out from it on either side ; and caravan tracks of im- 
 memorial age hint the lines of those primitive migra- 
 tions that issued from its colossal gates. We seem to 
 be contemplating a marvellous symbol of the unity of 
 the human race and of its movement in history ; born 
 out of the mystic intimacy of Nature with its inmost 
 meaning. 
 
 Of the primeval life of races on this grander Ararat 
 we know but little. Why indeed should we call it 
 primeval? It is but a step or two that history or sci- 
 ence can penetrate towards any form of human life 
 that would really deserve that name. Should we gain 
 much by knowing the crudest human conditions, after 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 4I 
 
 all? It is said that there are tribes in Thibet that 
 glory in believing themselves descended from apes.^ 
 Darwinians would probably be content to glory in 
 merely getting sight of the process, if that could be 
 found. But even if we should come upon traces of 
 it, whether in Thibet or elsewhere, would it show the 
 origin of man, as mind; that is, as Man ? This is 
 a mystery involved in every step of mental evolution ; 
 in the fact of thinking, now ; and we cannot account 
 for this evolution by any -previous steps. We shall 
 hardly find the source of our personality by tracking 
 it backward and downward into nought. 
 
 I do not even enter here into the question, whether 
 the eastern or the western edge of the great plateau 
 was first peopled ; or whether Armenia or Bactria 
 was the earliest centre of ethnic radiation. The 
 oldest Bibles "belong to the modern history of the 
 race." What are patriarchal legends, what is Balkh, 
 " mother of cities," what is Ararat or Belur-Tagh, 
 what are Aryas or Shemites, what is Adam or Manu, 
 — to him who explores the pathless, voiceless ages 
 of prehistoric man? There is no respect of persons 
 or places in that silence of unnumbered centuries that 
 shrouds the infancy of the soul. 
 
 It suffices to say that in 'the dawn of history we 
 find the Hindus descending from these heiglits of 
 Central Asia to the South,^ the Iranians to the West, 
 and the' Chinese to the East. 
 
 Let us turn to that focus of movement, of which we 
 know the most, — to the Bactrian Highlands, at the 
 north-eastern extremity of Iran, nestling under the 
 multitudinous heights of the Belur-Tagh and Hindu 
 
 * Klaproth, Asia PolygUUa. 
 
 * See proofs and authorities in Muir's Sanskrit Texts, ii. 366-322. 
 
^2 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Kuh. They who have penetrated farthest into these 
 mountain ranges report that the silent abysses of the 
 midnight sky with its intensely burning stars, and 
 the colossal peaks lifting their white masses beyond 
 storms, impress the imagination with such a sense of 
 fathomless mystery and eternal repose as no other 
 region on earth can suggest. The mean altitude of 
 these summits of Himalaya, the Home of Snow, is lof- 
 tier than that of any other mountain system in the world ; 
 and their mighty faces, unapproachable by man, over- 
 look vast belts of forest which he has liot ventured to 
 explore. From one point Hooker saw twenty snow 
 peaks, each over twenty thousand feet in height, whose 
 white ridge of frosted silver stretched over the whole 
 horizon for one hundred and sixty degrees. Here 
 are splendors and glooms, unutterable powers, im- 
 penetrable reserves, correspondent to that spiritual 
 nature in whose earlier education they bore an es- 
 sential part. 
 
 Here is the mythological Mount Meru of the Hin- 
 dus, — "centre of the seven worlds, and seed-vessel 
 of the Universe." Here are Borj and Arvand, the 
 celestial mountain and river of the Persians. Here 
 perhaps is the Eden of the Semites. " Kashmir," 
 says the Mahabharata, " is all holy, inhabited by 
 saints." Here is the plateau of Pamer, regarded 
 throughout Asia as the " dome of the world." " Men 
 go to the North," say the Brahmanas, "to learn speech." 
 Here Manu, the Hindu Noah, led by a fish through 
 the deluge waters, comes to shore on a mountain-top, 
 and when they subside descends to people the South- 
 ern land.' Here the Greeks saw an ideal climate, 
 allowing every variety of product, wondrously fecund 
 
 ^ Satapatha Br^hmana. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
 43 
 
 in plants, animals, and men ; and guarded from intru- 
 sion by mysterious tribes and half-human creatures, 
 with marvellous powers over the hidden treasures of 
 the earth. 1 It was the great unwritten Bible of Asia, 
 the free field of imagination and faith. Here was 
 Balkh, in Oriental tradition the " Mother of Cities," 
 the starting-point of culture, the birthplace of the 
 Zoroastrian fire. Here are sacred lakes and mystic 
 fountains, the immemorial resort of pilgrims from 
 every quarter of the East. The Chinese Buddhists 
 say that a lake on the summit of the Himalaya is the 
 origin of all the rivers of the world. And in fact, from 
 the mountain system of which this region is the centre, 
 the great rivers of Asia descend on every side, — the 
 Oxus, the Yaxartes, the Yang-tze-kiang, the Brahma- 
 pootra, the Indus, and the Ganges. Again we cannot 
 but recognize an impressive symbol of the wealth and 
 scope of human nature ; and not less of its love of 
 broad divergence into special forms, made kindred by 
 far-reaching supplies of one inspiration, ever flowing 
 from central springs. 
 
 It is in a spot so rich in spiritual suggestion that we 
 are to seek our earliest data for the Natural Thewit- 
 History of Religion. What were the resources ""^• 
 of human nature at that remote epoch when the ances- 
 tors of the principal modern races dwelt on these high- 
 lands of Central Asia ? It is only of the Indo-European 
 family — comprising the historical Hindus, the Per- 
 sians, and the various races of Europe, excepting 
 Jews, Turks, Basques, Finns, and Magyars — that we 
 can render a positive answer. And even of this pre- 
 eminent family of nations we cannot speak from data 
 afforded by the ordinary forms of testimony. For we 
 
 * Curtius, StrabOf Ptolemy. 
 
44 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 have here to do with a period far antecedent, not only 
 to the oldest Bibles of mankind, but even to the very 
 notion of such a thing as the transmission of knowl- 
 edge. But in these prehistoric deeps, where even the 
 half-blind guides of mythology and tradition fail, we' 
 greet a fresh source of scientific certainty. It seems 
 as if the infancy of man became but a starless night, 
 in respect of all those dubious guides by whose aid we 
 penetrate the past, in order that the pure testimony of 
 language, alone illuminating it, might make his divine 
 origin unmistakable. For language is, as the oldest 
 faith and the latest science unite to declare it, an inspira- 
 tion. It is no arbitrary invention, like the steam engine 
 or the cotton gin ; no mere imitation of natural sounds ; 
 but the natural result of a perfect correspondence be- 
 tween the outward organ and the inward processes, 
 which must have material expression. Its testimony pro- 
 ceeds from no interested witnesses, from no treacherous 
 prejudices, from no play of imagination, but from the 
 certainties of organic law. Men do not invent names 
 for things of which they have no idea. A people 
 puts its character and its history into its language, 
 without hypocrisy and without reserve. It is a spon- 
 taneous creation. The "Word "has always been re- 
 cognized as the fittest symbol of truth, as the purest 
 manifestation of deity. 
 
 This unimpeachable witness it is, that testifies of man 
 in an antiquity where no other is possible. And tlie 
 most primitive fact we know of his nature is thus a 
 certain unconscious honesty, that discloses his inner 
 life without disguise. 
 
 It is by the testimony of Language that the nations 
 called Aryan or, more properly, Indo-European, are 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
 45 
 
 brought into a single class and referred to a common 
 origin. 1 And the next step has been, to recover out 
 of the mass of words or roots common to the lan- 
 guages of these nations as much as possible of the 
 primitive language spoken by the parent race in its 
 prehistoric antiquity previous to dispersion into many 
 branches.^ The best pliilological scholarship of the 
 age has been employed upon this reconstruction. It 
 may fairly be said that we are able already to look 
 directly in upon the character and condition of these 
 hitherto unknown ancestors of the Hindu and the Per- 
 sian, of the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the 
 Teuton. No achievement of modern science is more 
 brilliant or more marvellous. It is the result of a 
 comparative Philology as subtile as the calculations of 
 Astronomy. It has evoked from human data hitherto 
 unintelligible the substance of a lost language and a 
 forgotten race, as astronomers have applied the strange 
 perturbations of the solar system to effect the discovery 
 of hidden planets. It is not over-confident to claim 
 positive certainty for the general result here stated. 
 Enough is already achieved in this field to justify its 
 most skilful explorers in claiming for it the name of 
 Linguistic Paleeontology.^ 
 
 i See especially the researches of Burnouf and Eopp. 
 
 2 We do not mean that Pictet, Eichhoff, Schleicher, Kuhn, Fick, and other scholars, 
 have succeeded in reconstructing the language actually spoken by the original Indo- 
 Europeans, out of the radicals afforded by this comparison of tongues. But their re- 
 searches prove at least competent to show the objects which that language was used to 
 designate, and the mind of the people who used it. 
 
 8 Pictet, Origines Indo-EurvpeeTtes, or Les Aryas Primiiifs. See also Spiegel's 
 Avesta, II., Einleit. cxi.-cxv. ; A. Kuhn in Weber's Indische Studien, I. 321-363 ; Las- 
 sen's Indische A Uerthutnskunde^ I. 527 ; MuUer, Science of Languages, 234-236 ; 
 Duncker, Ges£h. d. AlterthuTtts, III. g; Sc)\o&hA, Rickerckes sur la Religion Prem. de 
 la Race Indo-Europ. (Paris, 1868); Whitney, Study of Language (Lect. V.); Muir, 
 Sanskrit Texts, II. ; Fick, IVdrterlmch, d. Indog. Sfrache. 
 
46 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 The common name by which the Indian and Iranian 
 The Testi- (or Persian) branches of this great family des- 
 mony. ignated themselves was Aryas (in Zend, Air- 
 yas) ; a title of honor/ which now, after thousands of 
 years, returns, in scientific nomenclature, to justify 
 their self-respect by the magnificent record of Euro- 
 pean civilization. The first fixed datum for our prime- 
 val people is therefore their name. 
 
 It further appears from these researches that the 
 Aryas lived in fixed habitations, kept herds, and tilled 
 the soil. They occupied a diversified region, richly 
 watered and wooded, and highly metalliferous ; its 
 climate, flora, and fauna corresponding with the de- 
 scriptions of Bactriana which have come down to us 
 from the Greek geographers, and which are confirmed 
 by modern travellers.^ It was cold enough to stir the 
 blood and to make them number their years by win- 
 ters. Their houses were roofed, and had windows and 
 doors. Barley, the grain of cool climates, was their 
 commonest cereal. Their wealth was in their cattle. 
 Names for race, tribe, family relations, property and 
 trade, for the inn, the guest, the master, the king, 
 were all taken from words which designated the herd.' 
 They called dawn the " mustering time of the cows ; " 
 evening, the " hour of bringing them home." They 
 had domesticated the cow, the sheep, the goat, the 
 horse, and the dog. The cow was the " slow walker ; " 
 the ox, " the vigorous one ; " the dog was " speed ; " the 
 wolf, "the destroyer." They used yokes and axles 
 and probably ploughs; wrought in various metals; 
 spun and wove ; had vessels made of wood, leather, 
 terracotta, and metal; and musical instruments of 
 
 1 Compare Greek dpET^, valor, and German ehre, honor. 
 » Pictet, I. 35-42. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
 47 
 
 shells and reeds. They counted beyond a hundred. 
 They navigated rivers in oared boats ; fought with 
 bows, clubs, bucklers, lances, and swords, in battle 
 chariots and to the sound of trumpets and conchs. 
 They besieged each other in towns ; employed spies, 
 and reduced their enemies to some kind of servitude, 
 of which we know not the extent. 
 
 Domestic relations rested on sentiments of affection 
 and respect. There are no signs of polygamy. Patri- 
 archal absolutism was tempered by natural instincts. 
 Father meant " the protector ; " mother, " the former 
 and disposer ; " brother, " the supporter ; " and sister, 
 "the careful," or "the consoling, pleasing one." The 
 primitive names of these forms of relationship have 
 been transmitted with slight change through most 
 branches of the Indo-European race even to the pres- 
 ent day. And thus the closest domestic ties not only 
 became, as common speech, the symbols of an ethnic 
 ' brotherhood, which time and space are bound to guard 
 and expand, but were sealed also to irtimortal mean- 
 ings for the moral nature by the oldest testimony of 
 mankind. And the affirmations of conscience, the 
 words of the Spirit, were not less clearly pronounced, 
 in other directions.^ 
 
 The Aryas had clear conceptions of the rights of 
 property and definite guarantees for their protection. 
 These guarantees were based on ownership of the 
 soil where the family altar stood, concentrating the 
 sentiment of piety. We see at how early a period 
 men recognized the natural dependence of those 
 necessary conditions of social order, the famil}' and 
 
 1 Kuhn, in Weber's Ind. Siudien, I. 321-363 : Lassen, I. 813 : Miiller, Oxford 
 Essays /oriis^ '• Weber, Lecture on IndiaiBerim^ 1854) ; Muller, Science of Langitage^ 
 236; Pictet, II. 746. 
 
48 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 the home, on fixed and permanent ownership of 
 land. Communistic schemes have never yet suc- 
 ceeded, among the Indo-Europeans, in overcoming 
 this instinctive wisdom, which loyally maintains the 
 Family, the Home, and private Property in Land 
 as mutually dependent factors of civilization. And 
 we may infer from the sacredness attached by the 
 Hindus, Greeks, and Romans to bounds, whether by 
 stones, or by ploughed trenches, or by vacant spaces, 
 — each famil}' thus marking off its real estate from 
 its neighbors, — that this reverence for property limits 
 was also a trait of the older race of which they were 
 the branches.' 
 
 The Aryas had formalities for transactions of ex- 
 change and sale, for payment of wages, and for the 
 administration of oaths. All the essential elements of 
 social order were evidently present in this primitive 
 civilization, the cradle of historic races. Law was 
 designated by a word which meant right. The notion 
 of justice was associated with the straight line, sug- 
 gestive of directness and impartiality. Transgression 
 meant falling off, and oath constraint.'^ 
 
 Their psychological insight surprises us. They 
 seem to have distinguished clearly the principle of 
 spiritual existence. Soul was not merely vital breath, 
 but thinking being. Thought was recognized as 
 the essential characteristic of man, the same word 
 designating both. For four thousand years man has 
 been called "the thinker." For consciousness, will, 
 memory, the Aryas had words that are not traceable 
 to material symbols. They even made a distinction, 
 it is believed, between concrete existence and abstract 
 
 » See De Coulanges, La Citi Antique, B. i. ch. v. 
 » Pictet, Les Aryas Primiii/s, II. 237, 427, 435, 456. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 
 
 49 
 
 being ; i a germ of that intellectual vigor which has 
 made the Aryan race the fathers of philosophy. Their 
 language abounded in signs of imaginative and intui- 
 tive processes. They believed in spirits, good and 
 evil ; ^ and their medical science consisted in exor- 
 cising the latter kind by means of herbs and magical 
 formulas. 
 
 There are no signs of an established priesthood, 
 nor of edifices consecrated to deities. But terms 
 relating to faith, sacrifice, and adoration, are so 
 abundant as to prove a sincere and fervent religious 
 sentiment. The similarity of meaning in numerous 
 words descriptive of divine forces has seemed to " point 
 to a primitive monotheism, more or less vaguely de- 
 fined."^ Yet the Aryas had probably developed a 
 rich mythology before their separation into different 
 branches.* They had also firm belief in immortality 
 and in a happy heaven for those who should deserve 
 it,^ beholding the soul pass forth at death as a shape 
 of air, under watchful guardians, to its upper home. 
 Some of these inferences of linguistic paleontology 
 may require further evidence to give them scientific 
 certainty. But there are other features in the picture 
 of Aryan religious life which admit of no dispute. 
 The word Div, designating at once the clear light 
 of the sky, and whatsoever spiritual meanings these 
 simple instincts intimately associated therewith, has 
 endured as the root-word oj ■worship for the whole 
 Aryan race : in all its branches the appellatives of 
 Deity are waves of this primal sound, flowing through. 
 
 > Pictet, II. 539-546, 749- 
 
 2 Developed afterwards in the YStus and RJkshasas of the Veda, and in correspondent, 
 evil spirits of the Avesta. Pictet, I. 633. 
 
 3 Ibid., 720, 690. « Ibid., 689. " Ibid., 748. 
 
50 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 all its manifold and changing religions with the serene 
 transcendence of an eternal law. 
 
 Again, it has been shown ^ that the whole substance 
 of Greek mythology is but the development, with ex- 
 quisite poetic feeling, of a primitive Aryan stock of 
 names and legends, recognizable through comparison 
 with the Hymns of the Hindu Rig Veda, where they 
 are found, in simpler and ruder forms. In these earlj 
 yet secondary stages of their development, they rep- 
 resent the daily mystery of solar movement, the swift 
 passage of dawn and twilight, the conflict of day with 
 night, of sunshine with cloud, of drought with fertiliz- 
 ing rain, the stealthy path of the breeze, the rising of 
 the storm wind, the wonder-working of the elements, 
 the loss of all visible forms at night only to return 
 with fresh splendors in the morning. This old Aryan 
 religion of intimacy with the powers of air and sky 
 has in fact been aptly called a meteorolatry. And 
 recent scholarship has applied much ingenuity as well 
 as insight, in bringing all Vedic names and legends 
 under the one title of "solar myths," using the word 
 in the wide descriptive sense just indicated. And 
 there can be no doubt that they all are more or less 
 intimately related to natural phenomena, though pro- 
 ceeding primarily, it is none the less true, from moral 
 and spiritual experiences in their makers, as all 
 mythology must do. But what we have now to 
 observe is that the amount of this mythologic lore, 
 inherited by both the Asiatic and European branches 
 of the Aryan race, warrants our ascribing very great 
 productive capacity, both aesthetic and religious, 
 
 1 Especially by the recent researches of Miiller. See Cox's Manual of Mythology for 
 a popular summary of these. Also the valuable articles of Mr. John Fiske, in the AU 
 lantic Monthly for 1871. 
 
TUE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 5 1 
 
 to their common ancestors, the mountain tribes of 
 Central Asia. 
 
 And, again, names and traditions, found alike in the 
 Indian Veda and the Iranian Avesta, indicate that 
 these unknown fathers of our art, science, and faith, 
 must have venerated a mountain-plant, and used its 
 sap as a symbol of life renewed through sacrifice ; ^ 
 that they believed in a human deliverer, who, after 
 saving men from destruction, had reorganized their 
 reviving forces for social, growth ;^ in a human-divine 
 guardian of the world beyond this life ; ^ and in a true 
 Aryan hero who slew the serpent of physical and 
 moral evil.* And so we learn how early and how 
 cordial was man's prophetic sense of his proper unity 
 with the Order of the Universe, the ideal which it is 
 the main business of all our religion and science to 
 make good. 
 
 I add another fact of equal significance. The 
 thought that those patient domestic animals, which 
 gave milk, and bore burdens, and were in other ways 
 indispensable to man, deserved a better lot than they 
 were apt to receive, and that the kind treatment of 
 them was a religious duty, is common to both the 
 Aryan races, and redounds not to their own honor 
 only, but to that of their common progenitors, from 
 whom it must have descended.^ 
 
 Finally, we may infer from the testimony of the 
 
 ^ The Soma (Zend, haoma), ex Asclepias acida. The haoma was perhaps a different 
 plant, yet must have nearly resembled it. 
 
 2 Vi'tKiz {Iran.) Had Jl^nu ilud.). They have common functions as mythical beings, 
 and descend alike from Viz'osiiiai (Zend, Vivan^kvat). See Lassen, I. 517- 
 
 8 Vatna (Ind.) and Vohumano (Iran.). Schoebel points out the curious transference of 
 functions between the four personages just mentioned, in consequence of the separation 
 of the Iranian and Ir>dian branches of the family. 
 
 * Trita. (Ind.) and Tkraetona (Iran.). ' 
 
 I! Roth, in Zeitschr. d. De-uisch. Morg. Gesellsck., XXV. 7. 
 
52 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 two related bibles that the oldest Aryas found God 
 in all the forms and functions of Fire ; that they had 
 great faith in prayer, as intercourse with Deity in 
 purity and simplicity of trust; and that they were 
 endowed with qualities that help to explain a certain 
 emphasis on sincerity and abhorrence of falsehood, 
 equally characteristic of the precepts of these old 
 ethnic scriptures, and of the reputation of the early 
 Persians and Hindus among the Western races of 
 antiquity. 
 
 The sacred Fire, kept kindled on the domestic altar, 
 as the centre of religious sentiment and rite, and as 
 consecrating all social, civil, and political relations, is 
 found to be a common heritage of all Aryan races. 
 Its flame ascended from every household hearth, 
 watched by the fitris, or fathers, alive and dead, of 
 this primitive civilization. Modern scholars have 
 traced its profound influence, as type and sacrament 
 of the Family, in shaping the whole religious and 
 municipal life of ancient Greece and Italy.' 
 
 Not only are the words we now use to designate 
 domestic relations and religious beliefs explained by 
 the radicals of this primitive Aryan tongue, but even 
 our terms for dwellings, rivers, mountains, and na- 
 tions,^ are in Hke manner associated with these patri- 
 archal tribes. So much are we at home among the 
 prehistoric men. The largest part of our knowledge 
 of the ancient Aryas has been reached through Lan- 
 guage alone. The fleeting words of a people have 
 become its most enduring record I 
 
 And here is the tribute the philologist ends by ac- 
 
 ' See a recent remarkable work by Fustel de Coulanges, La Cit6 Antique (Paris, 1870), 
 in which this special subject is presented for the first time, so far as I am aware, in all its 
 bearings, and with great clearness and force. 
 
 ' See Eichhoff, Grammaire Indo-E-xroptene, p. 248, 252. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 53 
 
 cording them : " What distinguishes the Aryan race 
 is the harmonious balance of the faculties. It was 
 revealed in the formation of their language, and pre- 
 sided at the opening of their social organization. A 
 happy disposition, in which energy was tempered with 
 mildness ; a lively imagination, and strong reasoning 
 faculty ; a spirit open to impressions of beauty ; a true 
 sense of right ; a sound morality and elevated religious 
 instincts, — united to give them, with the consciousness 
 of personal value, the love of liberty and the constant 
 desire of progress." ^ 
 
 I add the impressive words of Renan : " When the 
 Aryan race shall have become master of the planet, 
 its first duty will be to explore the mysterious depths 
 of Bokhara and Little Thibet, where so much that is 
 of immense value to science probably lies concealed. 
 How . much light must be thrown on the origin of 
 language when we shall find ourselves in presence of 
 the localities where those sounds were first uttered 
 which we still employ, and where those intellectual 
 categories were first formed which guide the move- 
 ment of our faculties ! Let us never forget that no 
 amount of progress can enable us to dispense with the 
 verbal and grammatical forms spontaneously chosen 
 by the primeval patriarchs of the Imaus, who laid 
 the foundations of what we are and of what we 
 shall be." 2 
 
 1 Pictet, II. 7SS. 
 
 2 De tOrigine du Langage, p. 232. 
 
II. 
 
 THE HINDU MIND. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 
 
 A GREAT civilization is a collective personality. 
 ■^^ Like great men, whom the past does not ^ 
 account for, it is a mystery of genius and dawn of 
 spiritual gravitation. '^""'' 
 
 We can report the conditions of its development. 
 We can trace climatic and historical influences that 
 have educated it. Behind these we note determinative 
 qualities of race, which, while constantly modified by 
 such external forces, are yet inexplicable by them. 
 The word " race," moreover, is used quite indefinitely, 
 and, like "species," serves but to prove the limitations 
 of our science. It is applied to kinds of relation 
 widely differing not in breadth only, but in origin and 
 substantial meaning. Thus the term "Aryan" or 
 " Semitic " marks a class of unities wholly distinct 
 from that designated by such terms as " Teutonic " and 
 " Hebrew ; " and these again differ to an equal 
 extent from that kind of unity which would constitute 
 races as American, African, or Polynesian. 
 
 But, in whatever sense conceived, races are frag- 
 mentary ; and the growth of civilization is dependent 
 on their fusion. However we may decide the question 
 of their origin, it is certain that, when we mark their 
 first appearance in history, it is their incompleteness 
 
58 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 that most impresses us. This embryological phase, 
 it is true, combines the just apparent germs of those 
 forces which subsequent stages of growth must differ- 
 entiate and develop. Yet, while each race is thus en- 
 dowed with all properly human elements, it manifests 
 some one of them out of all proportion to the rest. 
 The very exaggeration, however, is both present vigor 
 and prospect of reaction. The law of progress must 
 at last bring out all the diverse energies of races, and 
 blend them in due proportion, in the nobler humanity 
 that is yet to come. 
 
 The Oriental races in antiquity, though by no means 
 The Special without mutual intercourse, did not attain real 
 Types. fusion. Owiug to peculiar circumstances, cli- 
 matic and other, they have not yet attained it. They 
 are still isolated columns, awaiting their place in that 
 universal temple of religion, politics, and culture, which 
 our widest experience is as yet inadequate to design. 
 
 I venture to borrow from the physical world an 
 illustration, which may serve to indicate the general 
 result of their ethnological qualities. It is, I need 
 hardly say, symbolical merely, and not to be taken 
 either in a materiahstic sense, or as defining impassa- 
 ble limits of race capacity. 
 
 ^he Hindu mind is subtle , introversive, contempla- 
 j^ive. It spins its ideals out of its brain ^ubsta n ce , anS 
 may properly be called cerebral. The Chinese — busy 
 with plodding, uninspired labor, dealing with pure 
 ideas to but little result, yet wonderfully efficient in 
 the world of concrete facts and uses — may be defined 
 as muscular. And the Persian, made for mediating 
 between thought and work, apt alike at turning specu- 
 lation into practice, and raising practice to fresh 
 speculation, so leading out of the ancient form of civil- 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 
 
 59 
 
 ization into the modern, no less plainly indicates a 
 nervous type. 
 
 We observe therefore that in the dawn of history, 
 and more or less through its later periods in the East, 
 the brain was dreaming here, while hands were drudg- 
 ing there ; and yet again, elsewhere, the swift nerve, 
 made to ply between brain and hand, was unduly pre- 
 ponderant over both. Here are great disadvantages 
 for the growth of ethical and spiritual capacity, the 
 natural bloom of due proportion and right under- 
 standing between the faculties. So that it would be 
 not a little encouraging to us as students of universal 
 religion, and lovers of its progress and its promise, • 
 if these imperfect societies should reveal even germs, 
 w^hich familiar appliances might seem competent to 
 expand into noble forms of thought and desire. 
 Better still, if these forms themselves are found to 
 have spontaneously arisen in such races, in despite of 
 the adverse conditions. 
 
 Our first study is of the Hindu. I have called the 
 mind of this race, or more properly of the The Hindu 
 Aryan portion of the population of India, the **"^- 
 Brain of the East, isolated from muscle and nerve. 
 By this I do not mean that either of the latter elements 
 was absent. On the contrarj;-, many of the tribes into 
 which these Aryan Hindus were divided, — and the 
 semi-Kxjzxi, mountain tribes generally, — have shown 
 very decided military tendencies ; while the race, as a 
 whole, is agricultural, and nowise wanting in industry 
 or perseverance, as their development of the physical 
 resources of the country and the wonders of their 
 architecture amply prove.^ 
 
 Nevertheless, the contemplative faculty seems com- 
 
 1 See illustrations in Craufurd's Ancient ajid Modem India^ ch. x. 
 
6o RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 petent to the control of these and all other tendencies, 
 shaping them in the long run to speculative rather than 
 material or practical results. The most impressive 
 works of Hindu genius are^odes of celebrating. the. 
 _£ower of meditation^ The Rig Veda sinj^s of the 
 " deep sea ormindr" And it has been finely said that 
 the name, "Father of gods and men," which the Greeks 
 loved to give to the ocean, would well apply to India, 
 that immeasurable sea of dogmas and beliefs.^ 
 
 The latest philosophical and religious systems lay 
 Productiv- prefigured in the depths of this Hindu Brain, 
 ''y- It exhausted most forms of devotional mysti- 
 
 cism and subtle speculation. In these spheres " it left 
 its pupils little to learn from Zeno or Aristotle, or the 
 controversies of later theology." It created one of 
 the most artistic languages, and one of the richest 
 literatures, in the world. It compiled elaborate Law 
 Codes in great numbers, and, besides its voluminous 
 Bibles, gathered immense treasures of sacred lore, 
 ritual, philosophical, devotional. Its poetic produc- 
 tivity was prodigious. Its great epics, the Ram&yana 
 and Mahabharata, containing the one 50,000, the 
 other 200,000 lines, glow with a luxuriance of imag- 
 ery which contrasts with the Iliad or ^neid as the 
 stupendous vegetation of India differs from that of 
 Italy or Greece. All that this colossal people have 
 dreamed or done, in philosophy, mythology, ethics, 
 in imaginative or didactic thought, is here transmuted 
 into song. The Hindu alone has made his whole life 
 and experience an epic. These two great accretions 
 of rhythmic lore represent a constant necessity for 
 such expression in all ages of Hindu history. In 
 
 ^ Ballanche^ quoted in Laprade's Sentiment de la Nature avant le Christianisme, 
 p. 115. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 6l 
 
 their main substance they go back as far as the fourth 
 or fifth century befdre our era. Many of their legends 
 may be referred to a much earlier period. And, while 
 their relations to each other are not very clearly settled, 
 this at least is certain, — that in both have been worked 
 over very ancient Vedic myths from age to age, in the 
 interest of fresh experiences, all taken up, as they 
 came, into this epical transfiguration. Such the cre- 
 ative imagination of the race.^ 
 
 Yet it could never organize itself into one united 
 nation. From the beginning this vast penin- 
 sula, one-third as large as" Europe, has been 
 divided among a multitude of distinct tribes. The little 
 kingdoms warred with each other ; and now and then 
 some greater chief would master his neighbors on every 
 side, and build up some brilliant dynasty, like the 
 Maurya or the Gupta, or in later times the Mahratta, 
 and perhaps organize a wide movement for Hindu in- 
 dependence : all of which would last a little while, and 
 then disappear, like cirrus streamers in the blue deeps 
 of the Indian sky, or fleeting thoughts in the heaven of 
 Hindu dreams. It was the mutual jealousy and strife 
 of the Hindu kings, not the lack of military spirit 
 nor of military resources, that made this great people 
 a prey to the invading Moslem from the eleventh to 
 the fourteenth centuries of our era. A glut of food 
 in one English province of India has often occurred 
 at the same time with a famine in an adjoining one ; 
 yet the intercourse between them has been insufficient 
 to make the abundance of the one supply the lack of 
 
 ■■ The R&mAyana has been translated into Italian by Gorresio, and into French by 
 Fauche. Monier Williams has given a careful abstract of it, as also of the MahJbharata, 
 in his admirable little volume on Indian Epic Poetry, and a new English rhymed version 
 by Griffith is in course of publication. Many of the finest episodes in both-poems will be 
 found translated in Jolowicz's Orienialiscke Poesie^ 
 
62 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 the other.i There are at this very day, it is estimated,^ 
 twenty-one distinct nations in india^^ach of which 
 possesses a language in many respects peculiar to 
 itself. "Villages lie side by side for a thouj iai;id ye^^s. 
 without^any considerable intermixture of these distinct 
 _Jongues." Hindustani in the north of India and Ta- 
 mil in the south, represent, generally, the difference 
 between the two great classes of languages derived 
 respectively from the Aryan and the indigenous, per- 
 haps Negrito, perhaps Turanic, tribes. But, how- 
 ever widely diffused, these two types but feebly express 
 the diversities of speech which render the writings of 
 Hindustani schools in Bombay unintelligible to races 
 in the north-west of India, and make it more easy for 
 an educated native of that city to hold intercourse with 
 one from Bengal or Madras in English than in any 
 other tongue.^ 
 
 The earlier Hindus had well-organized governments, 
 „ ,. . , much lauded by the Greek writers, to whom 
 
 Political '' ^ ' 
 
 organiza- we owc our earliest reliable notices of India, 
 for the wise and thoughtful manner in which 
 the interests of trade and agriculture were protected, 
 the wants of strangers, as of the sick and needy, 
 supplied, and the defence of the state secured.* The 
 law-books contain minute regulations for freights and 
 markets, and just rules for partnerships and organiza- 
 tions in trade, for testing weights, measures, and 
 money, and punishing dishonest dealing.^ And the 
 organization of the village communities throughout 
 
 * Westminster Review, July, 1859. 
 
 2 Mackay's Reports on Western India, p. 29. 
 
 « Perry on the Distribution of the Languages of India, youmeUqf Roy. Asiatic Soe» 
 (Bombay branch), for January, 1853. 
 
 * See especially Megasthenes, in Strabo, De Situ Orbis^ B. xv. 
 6 See Lassen, in Ztschr. d. D. M. G. (1862). 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 63 
 
 Northern India, from very early times, was an elaborate 
 system of local self-government, that showed how 
 large an amount of personal and social freedom could 
 be maintained, even under the depressing shadow of 
 caste. But these steps in political science never led 
 onwards to unity and nationality, nor to any form 
 of constructive policy on a large scale, or for a com- 
 mon end. 
 
 India has at all times been famous for its domes- 
 tic and foreign trade. In the early days of Foreign 
 the Roman Empire, it was a great commer- Relations. 
 cial tentre for the merchants of Italy and Egypt, as it 
 was at a mucli earlier period for all Asiatic races, 
 from Phoenicia in the West to China in the East. The 
 oldest codes record a very advanced system of com- 
 mercial exchanges among the Hindu tribes, regulated 
 by wise and just provisions ; and a high respect for 
 trade is shown by the permission granted the Brah- 
 mans, in violation of caste, to earn their support by 
 assuming the functions of the Vaisya, or mercantile 
 class. ^ In more than one epoch, the resources of 
 India, natural and industrial as well as intellectual, 
 have made the wealth of great empires.^ Its delicate 
 tissues, its marvellous colors and dyes, its porcelains, 
 its work in metals and precious stones, its. dainty 
 essences and perfumes, have not only been the wonder 
 and delight of Europe, but in no slight degree helped 
 in the revival of art. But, after all, the Hindus have^ 
 shown little practical enterprise, and there was a certaid 
 passive quality in their best performance ; even in that 
 fine manipulation that wove gossamer fabrics, and 
 wrought the precious metals with such eminent suc- 
 
 1 ManUi X. 83 ; YB-jnavalkya^ III, ; Lassen, Ind. Alt.^ II. 572-576. 
 
 2 See Craufurd, Ancient a-nd Modern India, ch. xiii. 
 
64 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 cess. It has been believed that they could have taken 
 little pains to export these products, since the sailor 
 was held in slight respect by their laws ; that most of 
 their trade was carried in foreign bottoms ; and that 
 the Mohammedans first introduced coinage among 
 them, their only previous currency being shells.' We 
 read indeed of wealthy merchants in their dramatic 
 works, and traces of their mercantile establishments 
 are found far to the east and west of India. Yet, on 
 the whole, it is probable that other nations had to 
 come to them. They have always been mainly an 
 agricultural people, the whole population averaging 
 only about one hundred to the square mile. Their 
 scholars di d not travel. Only a great religious and 
 moral inspiration, like Buddhism, could rouse Hindu 
 thought to seek geographical expansion. Only here 
 and there we find traces of embassies ; and these, 
 maiilly for political objects, to the courts of China, 
 Rome, and Egypt. Yet the intellectual life of India 
 was profoundly felt throughout the ancient world. 
 Greece, Persia, Egypt even, went to sit at the feet of 
 these serene dreamers on the Indus and under the 
 banyan shades, from the time of Alexander down- 
 wards; and there -they marvelled at the power of phi- 
 losophy to achieve ideal virtue. And what treasures 
 of European fable, legend, and mythic drama further 
 testify to the extent of our indebtedness to India in 
 the sphere of imagination and fancy, dowji to the 
 magic mirror, the golden egg, the purse of Fortuna- 
 tus, the cap of invisibility ! 
 
 The Hindus reasoned of war itself as if it were a 
 Sciences, flash out of the brain, a piece of metaphysics.'' 
 
 > ymrtialXay. As. Sac. of Bengal (Philolog., i86j). 
 ' See the Bhagavadgita. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 65 
 
 They loved to press beyond material successions or con- 
 ditions to general forms and essential processes ; pur- 
 suing with special success those studies that afford the 
 largest field for abstraction and contemplation, — the 
 orderly movement of the stars, the laws of numbers, 
 the structure of language, the processes of thought. 
 They made much progress in analytic arithmetic, and 
 not only applied algebra to astronomy and geometry, 
 but geometry to the demonstration of algebraic rules. ^ 
 They seem to have invented numerical signs and 
 the decimal system ; the zero itself being of Sanskrit 
 descent, and the old Hindu figures being still clearly 
 traceable in those of the later Arabic digits. The 
 introduction of these numerical signs in place of 
 the alphabetic characters before used by all other 
 nations of antiquity — a change ascribed by old writers 
 to the Pythagoreans, those Orientalists of the Greek 
 world, but probably an importation from India through 
 the Arabians of Bagdad — was the finest ideal im- 
 pulse ever given to arithmetical studies. The decimal 
 system was developed in India as a speculative cal- 
 culus so earnestly, that special names were given to 
 every power in an ascending scale of enormous reach. 
 The fifty-third power of ten was taken as a unit, and 
 on this new base another scale of numbers rose till a 
 figure was reached consisting of unity followed by 
 four hundred and twenty-one zeros. And these ele- 
 ments were applied to the solution of ideal problems, 
 such as " the number of atoms containable in the 
 limits of the world taken as a fixed dimension ; " 
 representing mathematical reality none the less for 
 being so utterly past conception.''' The Arabians. 
 
 1 Colebrooke, Hindu Algehray Introd., pp. xiv., xv. 
 
 3 Woepcke., iW^WK. surUs Chiffres Indiens^ in yournal Asiaiigiie (1863). 
 
 s 
 
66 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 called the Indian arithmetic the " sandgrain calcu- 
 lus." Eighteen centuries ago at least, the Hindus had 
 elaborate systems of arithmetical mnemonics, based 
 on numerical values attached to letters of the alpha- 
 bet.i " They reached a stage of algebraic science," says 
 Weber, " which was not arrived at in Europe till the 
 close of the last century ; and, if their writings had been 
 known a century earlier, they would, certainly have 
 created a new epoch." ^ Aryabhatta, their greatest 
 astronomer and mathematician, in the fourth century 
 determined very closely the relation of the diameter 
 of a circle to the circumference, and applied it to the 
 measurement of the earth.^ They invented methods 
 also for solving equations of a high degree. 
 
 In the time of Alexander they had geographical 
 charts ; and their physicians were skilful enough to 
 win the admiration of the Greeks. Their investiga- 
 tions in medicine have been of respectable amount 
 and value, lending much aid to the Arabians, the fa- 
 thers of European medical science, especially in the 
 study of the qualities of minerals and plants.* In 
 much of their astronomy they anticipated the Arabi- 
 ans ; their old Siddhantas, or systematic treatises on the 
 subject, indicating a long period of previous familiar- 
 ity with scientific problems. And in such honor did 
 they hold this science that they ascribed its origin to 
 Brahma. They made Sarasvati, their goddess of num- 
 bers, the parent of nearly a hundred children, who 
 were at once musical modes and celestial cycles.^ 
 They gave names to the great constellations, and 
 noted the motions of heavenly bodies three thousand 
 
 1 Lassen, II. 1140. * Weber, VorUsungen, p. 238. 
 
 2 Lecture on India. ' Creuzer, Relig: de VA ntiq., p. 261. 
 * Lassen, II. 1138-1146, 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 67 
 
 years ago. The Greeks appear to have derived much 
 aid from their observations of edipses, as well as to 
 have been in some astronomical matters their teach- 
 ers. Lassen mentions the names of thirteen astron- 
 omers distinguished in their annals. A Siddhanta 
 declares that the earth is round, and stands unsupported 
 in space. The myth of successive foundations, such 
 as the elephant under the tortoise, is rejected for good 
 and sufficient reasons in one of these works, as in- 
 volving the absurdity of an endless series. " If the 
 last term of the series is supposed to remain firm by 
 its inherent power, why may not the same power be 
 supposed to reside in the first, that is in the earth 
 itself ? " 1 
 
 Aryabhatta appears to have reached by independ- 
 ent observations the knowledge of the earth's move- 
 ment on its axis ; ^ and to have availed himself of the 
 science of his time in calculating the precession of 
 the equinoxes and the length of the orbital times of 
 planets.^ 
 
 Especially attractive to Hindu genius were Grammar 
 and Philosophy. They alone among nations 
 
 '^ ■' •' . ° , , ,. Grammar. 
 
 have paid honors to grammarians, holding 
 them for divine souls, and crowning them with mythical 
 glories. Panini in the fourth century B.C. actually com- 
 posed four thousand sutras, or sections, in eight books, 
 of grammatical science, in which an adequate termi- 
 nology may be found for all the phenomena of speech.* 
 
 1 Siddh^nici Siromani, quoted by Muir, IV. 97. 
 
 2 Colebrooke (Essay II.) quotes his words: " The starry firmament is fixed : it is the 
 earth which, continually revolving, produces the rising and setting of the constellations." 
 
 s See Lassen, II. 1143-1146. Also, Craufurd, Ancient and Modern India, ch. viii. 
 The views of Lassen and Weber as to the origin and age of Hindu astronomy are criticised 
 by Whitney, whose opinions are entitled to very high respect. These criticisms, however, 
 do not affect the substance of what is here stated. 
 
 * Lassen, II- 479. 
 
68 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 His works have been the centre of an immense litera- 
 ture of commentation, surpassed in this respect by 
 the Vedas alone. No people of antiquity investigated 
 so fully the laws of euphony, of the composition and 
 derivation of words. "It is only in our own century, 
 and incited by them," says Weber, " that our Bopp, 
 Humboldt, and Grimm have advanced far beyond 
 them."i The Hindu Grammar is the oldest in the 
 world. The Nirukta of Yaska belongs probably to 
 the seventh century B.C., and quotes older writings 
 on the same subject.^ In whatsoever concerns the 
 study of words and forms of thought, the Hindus have 
 always been at home ; anticipating the Greeks, and 
 accomplishing more at the outset of their career than 
 the Semitic race did in two thousand years. 
 
 Yet not more than the Semites are they inclined to 
 pure history. There are, it should seem, no 
 reliable Hindu annalists. The only sources of 
 important historical information are the records of royal 
 endowments and public works preserved in the temples, 
 and the inscriptions on monuments and on coins, fortu- 
 nately discovered in large numbers, and covering many 
 periods otherwise wholly unknown. The scattered 
 Brahmanical Chronicles of several kingdoms are but 
 dynastic lists and meagre allusions. The Buddhists, 
 on the other hand, have made a really serious study 
 of history, though even they have not had enough of 
 the critical faculty to distinguish fact from legend. It 
 is only by careful study, and comparison with Greek, 
 Chinese, and other testimony, that their voluminous 
 records can be made to yield the very great wealth of 
 historical truth they really contain. There are in fact 
 
 1 Lecture on India (Berlin, 1854), p. 28. 
 ^ Renan, Langues SimitigueSi 365. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 
 
 69 
 
 only two general histories of India from native sources ; 
 one quite recent, and the other dating from the four- 
 teenth century. A most valuable Indian chronicle is, 
 however, the Buddhist Mahavansa, which gives a 
 more complete and trustworthy account of Ceylon, 
 rfeaching from the earliest times down to the last 
 century, than we possess of any other Oriental State 
 except China. ^ For determining chronology, there 
 are as yet few landmarks ; both Brahmans and Budd- 
 hists making free use of sacred and mystic numbers, 
 with whose multiples they strive to express a haunting 
 sense of interminable space and time. But though 
 the mythology of the latter deals in extravagances 
 beyond all parallel, they far surpass the Brahmans in 
 serious historical purpose, in observation of human 
 affairs, and in the taste for recording actual events.^ 
 Their earliest Sutras are of great value in the inves- 
 tigation of an epoch of which we have scarcely 
 any other record. This superiority as chroniclers 
 is due in part to their freedom from caste ; a system 
 whose theoretic immobility and practical lack of motive, 
 either for the backward or the forward look, forbid the 
 growth of a historic sense. They differ from the Brah- 
 mans also in a deeper interest in the human for its own 
 sake. A philosophy which wholly absorbs man in Deity 
 cannot allow that independent value to the details of 
 life, the recognition of which is an indispensable condi- 
 tion of historical study. How to escape the flow of 
 transient events, and know only the Eternal One, was 
 the Brahmanical problem ; and it would seem quite 
 incompatible with even observing the details of posi- 
 
 1 Lassen, II. 13, 16. 
 
 » Of the services of Buddhist literature to the geographical and historical study of 
 India, see a just recognition in St. Martin's Giographie du Veda (Introd.), Paris, 1S60. 
 
70 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 tive fact, not to speak of tracing the chain of finite 
 causes and effects. It is only remarkable that the 
 Brahmans should have shown anj^ capacity whatever 
 in this direction. Especial notice is therefore due to 
 the opinion of a thoroughly competent scholar that 
 they have not indulged in conscious invention, and 
 the falsification of facts, to such extent as would 
 justify European writers in casting stones at them on 
 this account.^ 
 
 The historic sense is indeed by no means wanting, 
 at least in certain directions. We are told that, in 
 every village of the Panjab, the bard, who fills in 
 India the place which in Europe is taken by the 
 " Herald's Office," can give the name of every pro- 
 prietor who has held land therein since its foundation, 
 many hundreds of years ago, and that the correctness 
 of these records is capable of demonstration.^ It 
 would, in fact, be far from becoming, in the present 
 state of Sanskrit studies, to deny that the Hindus have 
 ever written genuine history. The destructive effect 
 of the climate of India on written documents is of 
 itself a discouragement to literary pursuits, and to the 
 preservation of records. 
 
 Yet we cannot overlook their natural propensity to 
 Force of the '^^^"'^^ ^^ limitation by positive facts, and to the 
 contempia- objcctive authority of details. This was not 
 tiveeiement. Q^jj^g^ ^g jjj ^ g^g^j degree with the Semites, 
 to intensity of passion and the worship of auto- 
 cratic caprice, but to a strpng^^ :^^^ attraction towards 
 
 fure thou g ht. Whatever they may have accomplished 
 in astronomy and medicine, an ideal generalization 
 was always easier to them than observation. The 
 
 » Lassen, II. 7. ' Griffin's Rajahs of the Panj&b, p. 494. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 7 1 
 
 Hindu has, after all, effected little in the purely prac- 
 tical sciences ; almost as little as the Hebrew did in 
 incient times, and in his distinctively Semitic capac- 
 ity. But while the Hebrew failed here by reason of 
 tiis defective appreciation of natural laws, and his 
 appetite for miracle and sign, the Hindu, belonging 
 :o a family in which the scientific faculty is supreme, 
 failed for a different reason ; namely, his excessive 
 iove of abstraction and contemplation. This enfee- 
 Dled the sense of real limits. His imagination spurned 
 :he paths of relation and use. It dissolved life into 
 intellectual nebula, and then tried to create the worlds 
 anew, weaving ideal shapes and movements in phan- 
 :asmal flow, out of this star-dust of thought. 
 
 Its boundless desire to bring the universe under one 
 ;onception, and make it flow for ever from Mind as the 
 Derfect unity and sole reality, by contemplative disci- 
 ■plines alone, — though one-sided and ill-balanced, was 
 yet a magnificent aspiration in days when practical 
 ind social wisdom was in its infancy. Limit, the true 
 jalance of ideal and actual, fate and freedom, divine 
 ind human, — limit, which is not limitation, but har- 
 nony and order and justice of the parts to the whole, 
 — this, the inspiration of Greek genius, the Hindu 
 lid not know. Compare his art with the Egyptian and 
 :he Greek. Egyptian sculpture is a plain prose record 
 )f actual life ; or else it binds the idea within fixed 
 ypes, which are conventional, and, though often 
 j-randly serene, everywhere mechanically repeated 
 md allegorically defined. Greek sculpture demon- 
 strates the capacity of the Human Form for every 
 esthetic purpose, embodying divine ideas therein 
 vith pure content and noble freedom. Here CEdipus 
 las solved the riddle, and pronounced the answer, — 
 
72 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Man. But in Hindu Art you see mythological fancy 
 overpowering real life ; and, instead of the actual 
 human form, a boundless exaggeration and reduplica- 
 tion of its parts, a deluge of symbolic figures, gathered 
 from every quarter and heaped in endless and stupen- 
 dous combinations, the negation of limit and of law.^ 
 Every thing here is colossal. This aspiration to 
 enfold the Whole cannot find images vast enough to 
 satisfy its purpose. It excavates mountains, piling 
 chambers upon chambers through their depths, for 
 mile after mile of space. ^ It carves them into mon- 
 strous monolithic statues of animals and gods. It 
 brings the elephant to uphold its columns, and stretches 
 their shafts along the heavy vaults of EUora and Karli, 
 like the interminable spread of the banyan trunks in 
 its tropical forests. Its temples represent the universe 
 itself; gathering all elements and forms around cen- 
 tral deity, yet seldom pausing to bring out of these 
 forms the artistic beaut}'^ of which they are individ- 
 ually capable. Intellectual abstraction — as of mind 
 fascinated by the vague sense of cosmic wholeness, 
 and not yet definitely constructive — excluded Art, 
 except in the one grand, all-enfolding form of Archi- 
 tecture. And here sculpture is involved ; yet not as 
 with the Greek, in separate freedom, but adherent to 
 the whole edifice, and absorbed in it, save in the 
 instances of a few special forms of statuary. 
 
 The contemplative element did not fail at last to 
 itssignifi- engulf outward forms, and even human per- 
 "■'"■ sonality, to an extent elsewhere unparalleled. 
 
 » See Kugler's Kunstgeschichie, p. lai ; Renan in Nott's iTtdigenous Races, p. loj; 
 RamSe, Hist. tU V Architecture, vol. i. 
 
 ' There are forty series of caves in Western India; and at Elbra the architecture 
 extends more than tv/o miles. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 173 
 
 But we should say that these facts had not yet reached 
 their real values for the mind, rather than that the 
 values themselves were denied. At the least we are 
 allured by the sense of an immeasurable scope in 
 these mystical aspirations to unity with God, which 
 bears witness of genuine intuition. Here abides an 
 illimitable Whole, instead of the manifold symbols of 
 special faith, that have come to stand out, for our 
 sharper Western understanding, in mutually exclusive 
 and even hostile attitudes, plainly enough needing to 
 recognize some higher unity, even though it were by 
 suggestion of the Hindu dream. 
 
 To appreciate the results of these contemplative 
 tendencies, we must recall the old Aryan worship of 
 the clear Light of Day. It seems to have given 
 place, in the development of Hindu thought, to its 
 exact opposite, of which the gloom of the Forest and 
 the Cave would be a truer symbol. But it is in fact 
 not lost. It is transformed into an inward representa- 
 tive and analogue, becoming a worship of the serener 
 Light of Meditation.. It is this divinity, which with 
 full confidence in its power to pass through and dis- 
 solve all possible barriers, is here invoked to illumine 
 mystic depths, whether of matter or mind, which the 
 outward sunlight cannot pierce. This aspect of Hin- 
 duism must not be forgotten, vs^hen, in order to see 
 its true embodiment, we endeavor to picture to our- 
 selves those sunless caves of Ellora and Elephanta ; 
 where columns and symbolic statues loom dim and 
 colossal through a silent abyss, and only the mystical 
 imagination finds play, losing itself in its own hover- 
 ing phantoms ; those deeps where all shape is spell- 
 bound, and all action dream ; where puny, awe-struck 
 men light up some litde patch of lifeless wall with 
 
74 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 feeble torches, or wake some little space around them 
 with half-whispered words, — a wizard gleam, a 
 stealthy sound, — and all is dark again and still. To 
 make these profound sepulchral recesses of nature 
 and art endurable, light must have shone through 
 them from an Invisible Sun. 
 
 The Hindu thinker found Deity most near to him, 
 TheLan- not as Pcrson nor as visible Shape, but as 
 guage. Word, the symbol of pure thought, in his own 
 marvellous Sanskrit. It was in language, the most 
 purely intellectual, most nearly spiritual, of all human 
 products, — and we might almost say it was in language 
 only, — that he showed absolute mastery in constructive 
 work. With pious zeal he perfected and transmitted 
 this, the express image of his ideal life. He wrought 
 it out in love and faith and patience, in the depths of 
 mind, far back in antiquity, without aid from abroad ; 
 and then slowly developed or decomposed this divine 
 "Word" into many popular dialects, — still holding 
 its purest form sacred and inviolable.^ "Speech, 
 melodious Vach," says the Rig Veda, "was queen of 
 the Gods ; generated by them, and divided into many 
 portions."^ So grew up this typical language, if not 
 the norm of Indo-European speech, yet the centre 
 and hearth of this brotherhood of tongues ; reveal- 
 ing their several resources through the wealth of its 
 radical forms and structural aptitudes. Its rich 
 grammatical elements are combined with unequalled 
 simplicity of law. It is pre-eminent among languages 
 
 1 The Sanskrit was the vernacular tongue of Northern India in early times. It began 
 to die out in the ninth century B.C. In the sixth it was no longer spoken. In the third 
 it became a sacred language : and by the fifth of the Christian era was established as such 
 throughout India. {See Benfey, in Muir's 5'o»s.4>-i< Texts, 11. m.) Muir has carefully 
 traced it back to Vedic times, and shown that the oldest hymns were composed in the 
 every-day speech of their authors. 
 
 « R. v., Vm. 89, 10 i X. 125. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 
 
 75 
 
 in creative faculty, in flexional and verbal develop- 
 ment; full of terms descriptive of intellectual and 
 spiritual processes; deficient only in those which re- 
 late to practical details. The profound thirst of the 
 Hindu mind for unity is indicated in its wonderful 
 synthetic power of fusing radical words into com- 
 posites; so great, that a Sanskrit verse of thirty 
 syllables may be made to contain but a single word. 
 Its makers gave it a name which means ferfected, 
 and not perfected only, but adorned-; for to them 
 Beauty was in the Word of the Mind, not the Work 
 of the Hand. This was their Kosmos. They created 
 it by pure force of native genius, and as in sport; 
 when, and in how long a time, we know not. We 
 know only that it was too near and too dear to their 
 hearts to need letters for its transmission. It is a ma- 
 ture product when we first find it in the oldest Vedas, 
 which were preserved without an alphabet for ages, 
 in the memory alone. At last came writing. Then 
 as sound had been " God's music," so letters became 
 the chords thereof.^ The Sanskrit letters are not 
 transformed picture-signs, but something more ab- 
 stract and intellectual. They are phonetic, symbols 
 of articulate sounds. Infinite was the toil the Hindu 
 grammarians for thousands of years expended in de- 
 veloping the laws of euphonic structure ; drawing 
 from this fine and facile tongue of theirs as from a 
 perfect instrument, with what has been called a "pro- 
 found musical feeling," harmonious assonances more 
 regular and delicate than the Greek. They referred 
 its primal sounds to the organs by which they were 
 severally shaped. And, with a presentiment of sci- 
 entific truth, they sought to divine an essential relation, 
 
 ^ Karma Mimdnsi. 
 
76 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 existing in the nature of things, between the sounds 
 of words and the objects they represented.^ They 
 went so far as to trace back the whole language to 
 about fifteen hundred root-words, to all of which they 
 ascribed distinct meanings. EichhofF enumerates 
 nearly five hundred of these in his Indo-European 
 Grammar, fully illustrating the clear light they throw 
 upon the comparative etymology of this whole family 
 of languages.^ 
 
 But it was not till the Buddhist reaction that the 
 uses of writing were recognized. The Brahmanical 
 laws indicate contempt of this instrument for the 
 diffusion of truth. Was their opposition based partly 
 on the fact of its democratic tendencies, as was that 
 of the Christian Church afterwards to the invention 
 of printing? 
 
 Recent writers have described the Hindus as igno- 
 Practicai ^^^^ ^^^ wasteful, careless to better their con- 
 andphysi- ditlou, lacking in comprehension of the uses 
 mteress. ^^ money. They have pointed to the primi- 
 tive and almost worthless structure of their ploughs 
 and other agricultural implements ; to the comparative 
 absence of variety and ingenuity in their earlier at- 
 tempts at construction in the useful arts ; to the imper- 
 fection of their materials for dye-work, glass-blowing, 
 and all chemical operations, and especially their dis- 
 abilities in art from the want of substantial stone- 
 wares and fire-bricks for furnaces ; and to the lack of 
 all provision in their laws for the protection of me- 
 chanical, artistic, or literary genius in the fruit of their 
 labors. Much of this is the result of depressing 
 causes in the history of the last few centuries. It is 
 certainly in many respects in striking contrast with 
 
 1 Karma Mimiiisa. > Eichhoff, pp. 21, 29, 162. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. ^^^] 
 
 the State of the fine as well as of the useful arts, as 
 described in the old national epics and dramas, as in 
 the account of India, with special reference to Budd- 
 hist art, given by Fahian, the "Chinese Pilgrim," in the 
 fifth century. British officials describe many of the 
 tax-free lands as showing marks of agricultural skill 
 quite equal to those of Western Europe.^ Nor must 
 we do injustice to the genius that may show itself in 
 the very use of crude conditions. The Hindu woman, 
 working up raw cotton into thread for the incompar- 
 able muslins they call " running waters " or " webs of 
 woven air," with no other instrument than a fish-bone, 
 a hand roller, and a little spindle turning in a bit of 
 shell, is at all events an artist, endowed with the 
 rare gift of making the most of simplest and nearest 
 materials. The above unfavorable report is certainly 
 exaggerated. But enough of truth remains in it to 
 indicate that there are drawbacks in the qualities of 
 this race to steady progress in practical directions, 
 without impulse from abroad. 
 
 The Hindu mastered many physical uses. Yet he 
 was, on the whole, disinclined, to the labor of devel- 
 oping them. His passive temperament was unsuited 
 for material progress, having little curiosity and little 
 zeal for conflict with reluctant nature. The caste- 
 system was an exponent of his dislike of movement. 
 His favorite games are dice and chess ; the latter his 
 own invention, his typical gift to all civilized races ; 
 and both answering to the combination of a passive 
 body with a speculative mind. The pivot of most 
 Hindu philosophy has been the pure unr"eaTrty~of 
 -pheiioimena. If'war'as'"7rTEiF'biis3fTram7"'3eBar 
 Irom social construction, teeming with thoughts it 
 
 ' speeches te/ore the British India Society (1839-40). 
 
78 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 could not liberate into the world of action, had de- 
 clined to accept all external tests of validity whatever. 
 And the history of its metaphysical speculation proves 
 in many ways that man cannot live by Thought alone. 
 
 It is not implied that these tendencies shape the 
 whole current of Hindu thought. We do not forget 
 how the people of India have gloried in their great 
 epochs of wide literary culture. We do not forget 
 that twice at least, in their history, all the rays of 
 Oriental learning, science, and song were gathered 
 into a focus of free energy, — at the brilliant courts of 
 Vikramlditya, the companion of poets, and Akbar, 
 the " Guardian of Mankind." We do not forget the 
 opportunity constantly open, on this great mustering 
 ground of nations, for the friction of races and the 
 sympathy of religions. Nor can we overlook that 
 passionate love of the Hindus for dramatic personation, 
 — the sign of a wide scope of the imaginative and 
 sympathetic faculties, — which has shown such pro- 
 ductivity in their literature, and makes the social 
 delight of every village in the land. 
 
 The results of excessive abstraction and contempla- 
 tion, even in India, are equally far from encouraging 
 the widely held belief that these mental 'habits are de- 
 void of noble uses. The reactions to realism that 
 were involved in their natural processes of development 
 will claim our admiration. And we are especially to 
 study the splendid capacity, philosophical and relig- 
 ious, — or both, since the two in Oriental life are 
 substantially one, — which was brought out in the 
 endeavor to live by Thought alone. 
 
 It should seem that personal energy belongs of right 
 Force of to the Hindu, as a member of that Indo-Euro- 
 
 Pnysical ^ _ 
 
 Nature. peau family of nations, in whom a vigorous 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 
 
 79 
 
 practical genius, whether as Persian, Greek, Ro- 
 man, or Teutonic, appears to be inherent and irre- 
 pressible. How is it that, in his case, the old Aryan 
 manliness and vigor have yielded to enervation, and 
 the instincts of liberty and progress comparatively 
 failed? Though the extent of this failure has been 
 greatly overstated, there is truth enough in the pre- 
 vailing estimate to mark an exceptional fact, which 
 requires explanation. It is doubtless an extreme illus- 
 tration of the power of climatic conditions. In every 
 other instance Aryan migration has been westward or 
 north-westward : in this alone it has been southward. 
 The dreamy and passive element obtained mastery 
 only after the tribes had penetrated the whole breadth 
 of Northern India from the Indus eastwards, and 
 settled in the sultry valley of the Ganges; where 
 to this day it is scarcely possible to rear children 
 of English blood, without annual migrations to the 
 cooler hills. 1 Montesquieu has suggested,^ as one 
 cause of the general absence of practical energy and 
 free progress in the Asiatic races, the fact that Asia 
 has not, like Europe, — and we may add America, — 
 a temperate zone open in all directions, where races 
 of equal force can enter into free mutual relations, 
 whether of collision or of combination. Her tribes 
 are brought together only by sharp transitions of 
 climate ; and easy conquests by superior physical^ 
 vigor are followed by rapid enervation of the con- 
 querors, whose movement, from obvious causes, has 
 usually been from the mountains to the plains. The 
 descent of the Aryans into a tropic wilderness, where 
 the invigorating alternations of summer and winter 
 
 1 See Jefirey's British A rmy in India, Appendix. 
 
 2 Esprit des Lois, XVII. 3- 
 
8o RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 were wanting, and every day renewed the same be- 
 wildering luxuriance of leafage, blossom, and fruit 
 throughout the year, was subject to these transforming 
 conditions. We should naturally expect that these 
 hardy mountaineers, sweeping down from their cool 
 eyries in the Hindu Kuh and Kashmir, into a land 
 wherein 
 
 " the languid air did swoon, 
 Breathing like one that had a heavy dream, 
 A land where all things always seemed the same," — 
 
 would lose intellectual muscle and nerve. The colos- 
 sal unity and simplicity of movement in the natural 
 world would be reflected in their mental processes ; 
 and an atmosphere heavy with perfumes would lull 
 them to rest in mystical reverie. 
 
 We may easily exaggerate these forces, as well 
 as the enervation we adduce them to explain. Por- 
 tions of India have a cool and bracing atmosphere ; 
 and the tribes that occupy the higher levels are vigor- 
 ous, active, and enterprising. But the climate of the 
 lowlands, where Hindu culture has had its centre, 
 although modified by the wind and rain of the wet 
 .season, is in all essential respects determined by the 
 tropical heats. A colossal vegetation covers this rich 
 alluvion, through which enormous rivers flow from 
 the Himalaya to the sea, enclosed between vast moun- 
 tain ranges on the north and lofty plateaus on the 
 south. An almost vertical Sun, whose beams have 
 ever held the Hindu's love and awe, — all the more 
 strongly because relied on to smite the sensitive head of 
 the invading Englishman, while they have been slowly 
 transforming the texture of his own dark skin till it 
 ceased to suffer from their shafts, — has proved master 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 8l 
 
 of the very movement of his thought, and disposed it 
 to the languor of contemplation and the melting pas- 
 sivity of dreams. 
 
 Yet that Aryan vitality, which in the North turned to 
 Teutonic sinew and in the West to Persian and intellectual 
 Hellenic nerve, even here wrought its special "^^^'""^ 
 wonders. Its brain, self-centred, enclosed in suits. 
 tropical forests and under all-mastering heats, and 
 without the fine stimulation from climate and the inter- 
 mingling of vigorous races which the Greek enjoyed, 
 nevertheless became an immensely productive force. 
 And the fact tends to show that, while climatic or other 
 physical conditions modify original spiritual forces, 
 they are not adequate to explain civilizations, nor to 
 supply the inspiration which sustains and directs them. 
 The elements which characterize the later develop- 
 ment of Hindu mind were, as we shall see, present in 
 its infancy. The solitude and heat of the Indian wil- 
 derness gave ifno new forces, but subserved a certain 
 original ethnic personality, its special essence ; some 
 of whose qualities indeed they forced into excessive 
 action, thereby provoking the others to bring out their 
 latent strength in energetic reactions. Such historical 
 results as these have an important bearing on the phi- 
 losophy of development, by which modern science 
 seeks to interpret the growth of man. They illustrate 
 the truth which all evolutionists affirm, that no histor- 
 ical changes require to be explained by creative inter- 
 ference with the natural order. But they also tell 
 against the tendency which prevails, in many scien- 
 tists of this class, to mistake the physical conditions of 
 phenomena for their productive cause, and to ignore 
 forces, inexplicable by such conditions, which work 
 in every step of the process, involving the precedence 
 
82 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 and creativity of mind, and constituting spiritual sub- 
 stance; more or less enduring forms of which appeal" 
 in race, in personality, and in the constancy and wis- 
 dom of natural law. 
 
 As it is not incapacity, so it is by no means pure 
 enervation that we note in the passive quality of Hindu 
 temperament. It is rather, as one has well defined it, 
 an " inclination towards repose ; " a constant reference 
 to coming rest, alike in things material and spiritual, 
 as the consummation of endeavor and the end of strife ; 
 explicable in part by the recurrence of a sultry, relaxing 
 season, as the predestined end of the climatic year, and 
 the most salient fact of its monotonous round. This is 
 of course compatible with a degree of active energy. 
 The religion of Brahman and Buddhist alike was 
 aspiration to repose ; yet its disciplines were pursued 
 with incomparable energy and zeal. 
 
 "If the Hindus are not enterprising," says Lassen, 
 "they are industrious, wherever they have real labors 
 to perform. They show much power of endurance, 
 and bear heavy burdens with patience. And they 
 avoid toils and dangers more from a dislike to have 
 their quiet disturbed, than from want of courage ; a 
 quality in which they are well known to be in no 
 way deficient." ^ 
 
 The freedom and force of self-conscious manhood 
 could hardly be expected of a people who were mi- 
 grating further and further into tropical lowlands and 
 wildernesses. The keen goads of the mountain air 
 were forgotten. Lassitude crept over the will and re- 
 laxed the practical understanding, till they seemed to 
 lie buried in the helplessness of dreams, confounded 
 with this overwhelming life of physical nature ; and 
 
 ^ Lassen, I. pp. 411, 412. 
 
THE HINDU MIND. 83 
 
 their place came to be defined by the philosopher as 
 that stage in human development where man as yet 
 knows not that he is other than the world in which he 
 dwells. But, if we look more closely, we shall find 
 that the facts are not wholly as they have seemed, 
 and that the severity of the Hegelian formula is far 
 from fairly representing them ; since man is not here as 
 an embryo in the womb of nature, but as living force 
 that reacts upon it, though with little help from the 
 practical understanding. And, if we listen atten- 
 tively, we become assured that even the somnambulism 
 of the soul may be inspired; hearing from these 
 dreamers, also, who at least have faith in their dream, 
 not a few of those accents 
 
 " of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world hath never lost." 
 
III. 
 
 THE RIG VEDA. 
 
** I have proclaimed, O Agni, these thy ancient hymns ; and new hymns for thee who 
 art of old. These great libations have been made to Him who showers benefits upon 
 us. The Sacred Fire has been kept from generation to ceneration." — Hymn of ytsvti- 
 mitra. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 TT is not yet determined at what period the Aryas 
 ■^ descended into the plains of India ; whether Antiquity of 
 moved by one impulse or in successive waves "'^ Hymns. 
 of immigration ; whether impelled by disaster or 
 desire.^ While their religious traditions indicate a 
 march of conquest, those of agriculture, on the other 
 hand, as embodied in the extensive organization of 
 the village communes, have been supposed to point 
 with greater probability to a peaceful colonization. ^ 
 Their earliest footprints at the base of the Himalayas 
 are effaced. It is even doubtful whether their name 
 means " men of noble race " or tillers of the earth. ^ 
 The etymology which derives it from roots (or, or rt) 
 that signify movement,^ is at least finely sugges- 
 tive of the destiny of their race. It is pleasant too 
 to trace, however dimly, a primitive association of 
 labor with dignity and success, and to note that the 
 name assumed by this vigorous people for themselves 
 served also for their gods.^ In later times it was 
 applicable to the Vaisyas, or third caste, who consti- 
 
 1 Lassen, Indische A Uerthumskunde, I. 5 IS ; Miiller, in Bumen's Philas. of History, 
 I. 129 ; Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. ii. ; Ludlow's Brit. India, L 37. 
 
 2 Maine, Village Cowmunities in the East and West, p. 176. 
 
 s Mullet's Science of Language, I. 238; Lassen, I. s ; Pictet, I. 28; Weber, Indischt 
 Siudien, I. 352. Schoebel considers it the title of the family chiefs, or patriarchs. 
 * Pictet, I. 29. See the Lexicons of Roth and Bumouf. 
 ' Rig Veda, V. 2, 6; II. 11, 19. 
 
88 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 tuted the mass of the community.^ Dates are uncer- 
 tain in this remote antiquity. There are signs that, 
 as early as twelve centuries before our era, the Aryas 
 were not only a powerful people spread along the 
 banks of the Indus, making obstinate resistance with 
 trained elephants to the Assyrian invaders, but had 
 even reached the mouths of the Ganges on the extreme 
 east of India. ^ The whole intermediate country lies 
 before us in the half-light of a heroic age, the scene 
 of epic and doubtless historic wars, of tribe with tribe 
 and dynasty with dynasty. 
 
 But we have a record more precious than many 
 precise facts and dates. We have the sacred song 
 (Veda, or -wisdom^) of these otherwise silent genera- 
 tions. The Rig Veda, oldest of the four Hindu Bibles, 
 — the other three are mainly its liturgical develop- 
 ment,* — is a collection of about a thousand Hymns 
 ("Mantras," born of mind) composed by different 
 Rishis, or seers — not one of which can have orig- 
 inated later than twenty-si;s hundred, and few of 
 them later than three thousand years ago. These 
 initial syllables of Hindu faith are probably the devo- 
 tions of still earlier times. ^ They appear to have been 
 composed in that part of north-western India now 
 called the Panjab, whose wide slopes descend sea- 
 ward between the upper Indus and the Jumna; a 
 land always famous for the spirit and grace of its free 
 
 1 St. Martin, Giographii du Veda, p. 84 : Miiller, ul supra. 
 
 2 Ktesias: Duncker, Gesck. d. Alterth., II. 18. 
 
 8 From the root j/i/, to know; Greek, Ma; Lat., video; Germ., wissen; Eng., wit, 
 wisdom. 
 
 * "The Rig Veda," says Manu, " is sacred to the gods: the Yajur relates to man ; 
 the Sama, to the manes of ancestors." Tlie Atharva consists, mainly, of formulas for use 
 in expiations, incantations, and other rites. 
 
 E MuIIer's Sansk. Literai., 481, 572 ; Whitney, in Chr. Exam., i86i, p. 256 ; Wilson's 
 Introd. to Rig Veda ; Duncker, II. 18 ; Koeppen, Reiig. d. Buddha, I. 12 ; Colebrooke's 
 Essays, I. 129 ; Lassen, I. 749. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 89 
 
 tribes, having its outlook on soaring mountains and 
 limitless snow-reaches; a land of picturesque hill 
 ranges and of redundant streams, whose rushing 
 waters these children of Nature loved to celebrate 
 in their sacred songs. 
 
 We possess this Rig Veda in precisely the state, 
 down to the number of verses and syllables, in which 
 it existed centuries before^the Christian era.^ It prob- 
 ably represents the earliest distinctly expressed phase 
 of religious sentiment known to history.^ There is 
 not the slightest sign of a knowledge of writing in the 
 whole collection.^ In all ancient literature, there is 
 no parallel to this inviolable transmission of " sacre^ 
 text," and the veneration with which men are wont td* 
 regard such protection from the vicissitudes of time 
 may be more justly claimed for this the oldest of 
 Bibles, than for any other in the world. 
 
 And the respect deepens when we reflect that these 
 Hymns are outcomes of a yet remoter Past ; pre-vedic 
 that they point us beyond themselves to mar- Religion. 
 vellous creative faculty in the imagination and faith 
 of what is otherwise wholly inaccessible, the childhood 
 of Man. They present a language already perfected 
 without the aid of a written alphabet ; * a literature 
 alreadj' preserved for ages in the religious memory 
 alone ! They sing of older hymns which the fathers 
 sang, — of " ancient sages and elder gods." They 
 
 1 Miiller and Whitney, ui supra; Colebrooke, in Asiatic Researches, VIII. 481: 
 Craufurd's Ancient and Modem India, ch. viii. 
 
 ^ MiiUer, 357. 
 
 8 Miiller (497, 528) finds no sign of writing in ancient Hindu history. Whitney (Ckr. 
 Exam., 1861) thinks it may have been employed, though not for higher literary purposes. 
 
 * The language of the Rig Veda differs in many respects from the later Sanskrit, the 
 learned language of its commentators. " Its fireedom is untrammelled by other rules than 
 those of common usage." Muir's Sanskrit Texts, II. 223 ; Whitney, in ymmal of 
 Arner. Oriental Society, III. 296. 
 
90 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 were themselves old at the earliest epoch to which we 
 can trace them. Their religion, like their language, 
 was already mature when they were born. Do not 
 seek in them the beginning of the religious sentiment, 
 the dawning of the Idea of the Divine. Their deities 
 are all familiar and ancestral. It is already an inti- 
 mate household faith, which centuries have endeared. 
 " This is our prayer, the old, the prayer of our fa- 
 thers."' "Our fathers resorted to Indra of old : they 
 discovered the hidden light and caused the dawn to 
 rise ; they who showed us the road, the earliest 
 guides." "Now, as of old, make forward paths for 
 the new hymn, springing from our heart." " Hear a 
 hymn from me, a modern bard."^ As far back as 
 we can trace the life of man, we find the river of 
 prayer and praise flowing as naturally as it is flowing 
 now. We cannot find its beginning because we can- 
 not find the beginning of the soul. 
 
 The earliest religion is one with the maturest in this 
 The vedic rcspcct : that it records itself in the details of 
 People. ];fg_ ^jj(j these primitive Hymns have been 
 called the "historical" Veda, so real is the picture 
 they give of the Aryas after their descent into India. 
 They are described as a pastoral and to some extent 
 agricultural race, divided into clans, and often en- 
 gaged in wars of ambition or self-defence.^ Their ene- 
 mies, designated as Dasyus, or foes,* and Rakshasas, 
 or giants,* are unquestionably the aborigines of North- 
 ern India, and are described as of beastly appearance, 
 
 ' J!, f., III. 39,2; 1.48,14- 
 
 2 Muir's Sanscrit Texts^ III. 220-230. 
 
 ' It has been suggested that the hymtvs contain traces of an opposition between a peace- 
 ful and a warlike element within the old Aryan community, ancestors perhaps of the 
 priestly and soldier castes, respectively. Wheeler, Hist, of India^ II. 439. 
 
 * Muir- See also Bunsen's Fkilos. of History, I. 343. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 91 
 
 every way abominable, and even mad. They are 
 sometimes represented as magicians, who withhold 
 the rain in the mountain fastnesses; and identified 
 mythologically with darkness and drought. They 
 are declared to be living without prayers or rites, or 
 any religious faith ; charges which go further to prove 
 the devotion of the invaders to their own belief, than 
 the atheism of the tribes they despised. The extreme 
 religious sensitiveness of the Aryas is attested by the 
 frequency with which these charges of godlessness are 
 repeated, in the strongest terms of indignation as well as 
 contempt ; feelings which point perhaps to barbarous 
 practices abhorrent to their own purer faith. Their 
 social ideas indicate primitive relations and pursuits. 
 Their political institutions very closely resembled those 
 of the Homeric Greeks. Their names for king meant 
 father of the house and herdsman of the tribe. Their 
 public assemblies they called "cowpens," and war was 
 "desire of cattle." They prayed for larger herds, for 
 fleet horses, broader pastures, and abundant rain ; for 
 nourishing food ; for valor and strength ; for long life 
 and many children ; for protection against enemies 
 and the beasts of the wild. 
 
 This infantile human nature nevertheless adored 
 the Light. The dawn and the decline of ■ The wor- 
 Day, and the starlit Night that hinted in its Light" 
 splendors an unseen sun returning on a path behind 
 the veil, were dear to its imagination and its faith ; 
 and Fire, in all its mysterious forms, from the spark 
 that lighted the simple oblation, and the flame that 
 rose from the domestic hearth, to that central orb, in 
 which the prescience of their active instinct saw, so 
 long ago, an all-productive cosmic energy,^ was every- 
 
 1 See Hymns quoted by Bumouf, Essai sur le Veda, ch. xv. 
 
92 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 where one and the same, alike mysterious, alike divine. 
 And this vital fire of the universe was ever within 
 call, stooping to human conditions, respondent to theii 
 need and will ; at once a father and a child ; born when 
 the seeker would, out of dark wombs in herb and tree ; 
 waiting there to kindle at the touch of his hand, when 
 he rubbed the two bits of wood, or turned the wheel of 
 his fire-churn, — as if his busy fingers reached through 
 the bright deeps on high, and brought life at their 
 tips, kindred life, fresh from the central flame. ^ In 
 the imagery of the hymn, they are "the ten brothers, 
 whose work, one with the prayer, brings forth the 
 god." The worshipper, plying them with power, 
 "plants the eye of Surya in the sky, and disperses 
 the delusions of darkness." ^ 
 
 Thus early in the history of religion the act of 
 Its creative worship is blended with a sense of creative 
 and pro- faculty. Man is here dimly aware of the 
 
 phetic -' -^ 
 
 meaning, truth that he makes and remakes his own con- 
 ception of the divine ; that the revealing of deity 
 must come in the natural activity of his human 
 powers. 
 
 This prophetic instinct thrilled within him, at each 
 spark he drew from the splinter's cleft to kindle his 
 altar-fire, so long before science had secularized his 
 mastery of nature in lightning-conductor and electric jar. 
 There was more in this delight than the mere satis- 
 faction of physical necessities. With every upward 
 dart of flame from the dark wood, the god was new 
 born ; a mystery of answered prayer and expanded 
 oblation. So the omnipotence of the child's dream 
 
 1 So the Nortli- American tribes. Brinton (Myths of ike New IVarld, p. 144) quotes 
 a Shawnee prophet as saying: "Know that the life ia your body and the fire on your 
 hearth are one, and both from the same source." 
 
 2 i?. K., V. 40; X. 63. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 93 
 
 was the first regenerator of the heavens and the earth. 
 The out-goings of the morning shone with the cour- 
 age and strength of his inward day.^ 
 
 Such was the religious rite of the old Vedic fami- 
 lies. Each had its altar and its sacred Fire. The 
 family hearth was the first " holy of holies ; " and the 
 flame kept burning in every household was the sign 
 of perpetuity for all powers that bound men in social 
 relations. And not for the Vedic families alone. The 
 Romans and the Greeks also made the hearth the 
 centre of religious faith and rite ; and so the word 
 Hestia, or Vesta (the altar), originally signifying the 
 Jixed -place for the family hearth-flame, came to rep- 
 resent the divine mother, to whom all deities bent the 
 knee with the old filial reverence for that flame, at the 
 hearth of the world. Vesta, or womanly purity, was 
 worshipped in the "ever-living fire," which meant the 
 inviolability of the family, and the sacred meaning 
 that invests its transmission of human life.^ 
 
 In the later age of the Hindu epics, the rites of a 
 whole people in honor of their king are still performed 
 with the primitive instruments of these joyful oblations : 
 not only mortar and pestle for crushing the Soma 
 plant, but the two pieces of wood for kindling the 
 altar fire.^ 
 
 This original delight in producing the element 
 
 1 Pillon {^Les Religions de PInde, in L^ Annie Philosophique for 1868) traces the 
 tyranny of the priesthood in later times to this Vedic taith in the power of prayer and 
 sacrifice to bring forth and sustain the god. "It is not man, but the priest, that thus 
 creates the divine, in those early sacrifices ; and this naturally developed itself into the 
 divinity of the Brahman." But the writer seems to forget that the priesthood, as a distinct 
 class, was not then conceived of as masters of this simple rite. And the feeling of creative 
 power involved in it belonged to the self-confidence of the religious sentiment, was its 
 natural faith, its wonder at the work of its own hands. That its prestige came to be con- 
 centrated in the worship of the priest as such was due to other causes, tending to narrow 
 and ritualize the religious life of the Hindus : to such, among others, as ecclesiastical 
 organization, cKmate, and, later, passivity of temperament. 
 
 * Cicero, Pro Domo, § 41. * R^m^yana, II. ch. Ixxxiii. 
 
94 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 which animates the world, and in preserving its pure 
 and helpful forces, is retained in all religions of the 
 Indo-European race. It is consecrated in myth and 
 rite, and fable and spell. Its vestiges are in the legend 
 of Prometheus, civilizer of men through this secret of 
 power ; in the Roman Vestal Fire ; in the lighting 
 of the sacred lamps in Christian churches ; and in the 
 "need-fires " to remove evil and cure disease, familiar 
 to the Germanic tribes.^ The races of the New 
 World also guarded the sacred element with the same 
 loyalty, and renewed it by the same primitive method 
 of friction which the Aryas of the Veda employed.^ 
 Man could not forget that pregnant dawn of revela- 
 tion, the discovery of his own power to rekindle the 
 life of the universe., 
 
 From first to last, what significance he has read in 
 Primitive Light ; as element of nature, as vision of the 
 Symbolism, g^^i [ ^he symbol is for ever dear. And 
 it was as symbol, not as mere material element, 
 that it had religious homage in the early ages. It is 
 true that developed symbolism requires the separation 
 of the thing from what it represents, and the choice of 
 it as representative ; and this can hardly belong to 
 Vedic experience. But we must remember that there 
 must be an early stage of unconscious symbolism, — a 
 sense of help, beauty, power in the elements, already 
 obscurely suggesting the intimate unity of nature with 
 man ; the condition and the germ of all later develop- 
 ment in this direction. And this is what we find in 
 the Veda. 
 
 From the first stages of its growth onwards, the 
 
 ^ Kelly's Indo-European Folk-Lore^ ch. ii. 
 
 » Compare Brinton, p. 143 ; Prescott's Peru, I. 107 ; and Domenech's Destrts ef 
 America, II. 418. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 95 
 
 spirit thus weaves its own environment : nature is 
 for ever the reflex of its life. And what but an un- 
 quenchable aspiration to truth could have made it 
 choose Light as its first and dearest symbol, reach- 
 ing out a child's hand to touch and clasp it, with the 
 joyous cry, " This is mine, mine to create, mine to 
 adore ! " 
 
 That instinctive cry predicts not only the whole 
 light-loving mythology of the Indo-European races, 
 and its free play through the heavens and the earth, 
 but the concentration of the ripest intelligence on 
 Light in all forms and in all senses, physical, moral 
 and spiritual. That primitive pursuit of a cosmic 
 fire centred in the sun was indeed natural divination : 
 it struck the path which science was ever afterward to 
 trace through the subtle forms and processes of force, 
 paying an ever nobler homage to solar light and heat. 
 It is interpreted across thirty centuries by Tyndall's 
 song of science to this centre and source of living 
 powers. 1 That wonder and joy over the first kindling 
 of the flame is an earnest of the rapture which has 
 ever celebrated Light as type of spiritual resurrection. 
 That infantile thrill at generating the " eye of Surya " 
 is a germ of man's mature consciousness that knowl- 
 edge is power. And that fearless clasp on the ele- 
 mental fires predicts the full trust in Nature, which 
 at last affirms her, against all implications of dogmatic 
 theology, to be not the spirit's darkness, but its day. 
 
 Such prophecy was in that primal attraction to the 
 Light. Well might its priest and poet sing at morn- 
 ing, his face to the rising sun : "Arise ! the breath of 
 our life has come I The darkness has fled. Light 
 
 1 Heat as Mode of Motion, pp. 4SS-4'i9- 
 
g6 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 advances, pathway of the Sun ! It is Dawn that brings 
 consciousness to men : she arouses the living, each to 
 his own work : she quickens the dead. Bright leader 
 of pure voices, she opens all doors ; makes manifest 
 the treasures ; receives the praises of men. Night 
 and Day follow each other and efface each other, as 
 they traverse the heavens : kindred to one another 
 for ever. The path of the sisters is unending, com- 
 manded by the gods. Of one purpose, they strive 
 not, they rest not; of one will, though unlike. They 
 who first beheld the Dawn have passed away. Now 
 it is we who behold her ; and they who shall behold 
 her in after-times are coming also. Mother of the 
 gods. Eye of the Earth, Light of the Sacrifice, for 
 us also shine ! " ^ 
 
 The old Vedic deities all centre in this purest of the 
 Iranian and clemcnts. lu this, as in manj- other respects, 
 Indian. their affinity with the Avesta-deities of the Ira- 
 nians is so striking as to prove beyond reasonable 
 doubt that the two races were originally one. Of this 
 primitive unity we have already spoken.^ A sharp 
 discordance seems to have struck into it ; and the two 
 sections of the Aryan family, moving in different direc- 
 tions, are found using the same mythological names in 
 opposite and hostile meanings. The gods of the one 
 are the evil spirits of the other. But the antagonism 
 touches the names only. The worship of the Light 
 stands unchanged for both. 
 
 Unchanged in essence. Yet there was a difference 
 in the application of this common symbol to express 
 the inward experience. While the Iranians converted 
 
 auir. 
 
 * Hi'^ Veda, I. 113 ; Mu 
 2 Lassen. I. 527, 529; Bunsen, P&iios. Hisi., I. 130; Schoebel, Rickerches sur la 
 Religion Premiere de la Race Indo-Europkene^ Paris, 1868. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 97 
 
 the phenomena of nature into signs of moral conflict, 
 the Indians, on the other hand, made them the divine 
 reflex of simple social instincts and practical pursuits. 
 We see here a happy confidence in these nearest ele- 
 ments of experience, rising to the form of religious 
 trust. It is coextensive with the tasks and the de- 
 sires ; and there was, moreover, sufficient self-respect 
 in this primitive sense of natural order to claim freely 
 for human interests the sanction of an intimate relation 
 to all vast, unfathomable forces in the Universe. So 
 early was man, the purport of nature, at home in its 
 mysteries. Titanic Powers have tenderly waited on 
 the processes of his growth, and taken the signifi- 
 cance his childish purpose craved. This lord of the 
 manor rules it from his birth. 
 
 The Horse and the Cow, the nomad's earliest help- 
 ers and sustainers, are the earliest symbols of xhePaEto- 
 his poetic faith. The clouds are the " herds "■"' ^y'"'^"'"- 
 of the sky;" "the many-horned, moving cattle, in the- 
 lofty place, where the wide-stepping Preserver shines." 
 "When the dawns bring rosy beams, then these ruddy 
 cows advance in the sky." 
 
 Vritra (the enveloper), or Ahi (the serpent), en- 
 camped on the mountains, withholds their bounty. 
 Indra, as the lightning, pierces this foe with his 
 gleaming spear, and milks the nourishers of man. 
 Down go the drops to the sea "like kine." Ahi lies 
 felled by the bolt, under his mother, " like a dead cow 
 and her calf, and the floods go joyfully over him." 
 The streams are the "herds of the earth." The sum- 
 mer drought is Ahi's work, who has driven them to- 
 the mountain caves, or castles, and holds them bound.- 
 Indra follows, and sets them free. His thunder is 
 " like a cow lowing for her calf." Swift as thought, 
 
 7 
 
98 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 the winds (Maruts), "born among kine, strengthened 
 with milk," attend him. " With their roaring they 
 make the rocks tremble, they rend the kings of the 
 woods ; and men hear their talk to each other, as 
 they rush on, with awe." The clouds are their "spot- 
 ted deer, the lightnings their bright lances : " they are 
 "heroes, ever young, that bring help to man." Indra 
 smites down Vritra as " an axe fells the woods ; breaks 
 down the castles (of cloud) ; hollows out the rivers ; 
 splits the mountain in pieces like a shard." And 
 therefore the singers "bring their praises to heroic 
 Indra, as cows come home to the milker." 
 
 Ushas,^ the morning light, is now a " maiden, like 
 the dun heifer;" now twin youths, Asvins,^ on fleet 
 steeds ; now a " stately spouse, who steps forth, awak- 
 ening all creatures, stirring the birds to flight, and 
 man to his toil." Sarama, the dawn, creeps up the 
 sky, seeking right and left for the bright herds, whom 
 the night has stolen, and hidden in its caves. "As 
 mares bring up their new-born foals, so the gods bring 
 up the rising sun." Savitri^ is the risen sun. "Bright- 
 haired, white-footed steeds draw him along his ancient 
 upward and downward paths, the paths without dust, 
 and built secure ; the wise, the golded-handed, bounte- 
 ous Sun." He is himself "a steed, whom the other 
 gods follow with vigorous steps." 
 
 Agni,* Fire, is the "herdsman's friend, bright in the 
 
 sacrifice, and slays his foes." He is the child 
 
 ^'' of the two pieces of wood rubbed together, 
 
 hidden in the cleft between them ; brought to birth by 
 
 1 From uSy to bum ; Or., ^Wf ; Lat , itro; Germ., est; Eng., east. 
 
 2 From <7J, to penetrjite ; tha swifi ones ; Gr., w«Vf; Lat., e^wKj. 
 
 * From su, to produce. 
 
 * From a£^, to move ; Lat., i^zs. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 99 
 
 trees and shrubs, by the clouds and the waters. He 
 is god of the hearth, "born in the house, gracious 
 as a dwelling, bringing joy." He is the " son of 
 power, neighing like a horse when he steps out of his 
 strong prison, spreading over the earth in a moment 
 when he has grasped food with his jaws, devouring 
 the wood, surrounding his path with darkness, and 
 sweeping his tail in the wind, as, in the smoke column, 
 he ascends to heaven." When the lightning illumines 
 the storm, he is the "bull, born in the bed of waters, 
 who impregnates the herds of heaven." He is 
 "wealth," and whatsoever means wealth to the herds- 
 man; "like a good son, like a milch cow, like women 
 in a dwelling ; " "the light of the sun ; " " the soul of 
 what moves or rests ; " a deity pervading the world, 
 who is at once bearing gifts to the gods from man, 
 and coming on the earth to bless him.^ 
 
 ^ Rig Veda, passim. All versions of the Rig Veda. Hymns now accessible to students 
 have been carefully consulted. They are : i. Prof. H. H. Wilson's English translation, 
 made under the auspices of the East India Company, and extended since his death, so 
 that it now covers more than half the original collection ; and this, faithful as it is, has the 
 twofold disadvantage of not discriminating the original text from the later commentary of 
 Sayana, and of being deficient in poetic appreciation and simplicity of style. -=. The 
 French version of Langlois, which evidently errs in the opposite direction of too great 
 liberality and poetic freedom. 3. Dr. Rosen's admirable Latin version, of the highest au- 
 thority with all scholars, but unfortunately brought to a close by liis early death, and cover- 
 ing only the greater part of the First Book. 4. Translatiorfs of a large number of Hymns, — 
 into German, by accurate Oriental scholars like Benfey, Aufrecht, and Roth, in the Ger- 
 man Oriental Journals; and into English by Max Miiller {Sanskrit Literature) and by 
 Dr. Muir, in his invaluable Sanskrit Texts. 5. Miiller' s long-desired English version, of 
 wliich only the first volume has appeared. The quotations in the present work have been 
 made with preference of Benfey and Rosen to Wilson, where the three cover the same 
 ground, and give different renderings of the text. A less scrupulous regard to accuracy 
 would have greatly enlarged, and in the view, perhaps, of many readers, greatly improved, 
 this account of the Rig Veda, by a fulness of quotation, which, however tempting, the 
 present state of scholarship on the subject does not, in my judgment, warrant. I have, in 
 general, often with no little sacrifice of taste and inclination, avoided quoting texts for 
 which there is but one authority; except such as are furnished by Miiller and Muh, whose 
 versions have, in general, been adduced without hesitation. Quotations from the Vedas, 
 in popular works upon ancient religions, must be received with great caution, being often 
 drawn, without investigation, from very imperfect versions. No one, at all acquainted 
 with the materials now on our hands, would quote the best version of a Rig Veda Hymn 
 with the same assurance of minute accuracy with which he adduces translations from the 
 
lOO RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 These and other deities are, with simple confidence, 
 invited to descend and recline on the sacred 
 Kusa grass, and quaff the juice of a moun- 
 tain plant, 1 expressed in a mortar or between stones, 
 strained through a goat's hair sieve into clarified but- 
 ter, and spi-inkled on the grass. Exhilarated by this 
 draught of vital juices, they are nerved to supreme 
 labors in behalf of their worshippers. Perhaps the 
 mingling of these elements symbolized the propaga- 
 tion of life in man and beast, to these primitive tribes 
 doubtless the holiest mystery and the dearest hope. 
 And this beverage, though a mild acid of no great 
 potency, was thought helpful to the lyrical powers of 
 the psalmists themselves. " Soma, like the sea, has 
 poured forth thoughts and hymns and songs."® 
 
 But the language of the Hymns to Soma shows that 
 its virtue was associated with the idea of new and purer 
 life, given through voluntary sacrifice. The sap of 
 the mountain plant, slain and brayed in the mortar, 
 became the "all-purifier, all-generator ; father of the 
 gods;" ''its ocean transcends the worlds," and its 
 filter is their "support."^ Both Soma (Hindu) and 
 Haoma (Persian) are " healers, deliverers from pain." 
 The Sama Veda says of this god, that he " submits to 
 mortal birth, and is bruised and afflicted that others 
 may be saved."* This is the rudest type of mediation 
 through sacrifice, of strength through weakness, of 
 Hfe through death. A later hymn has been thought to 
 represent the Supreme Spirit as sacrificing himself, to 
 create the world. ^ 
 
 Greek or Latin classics. Yet the path through this difficult literature is already so well 
 cleared that we need not misconceive its beatings on any important question of Comparative 
 Religion. 
 
 • ThB Aschpias acida. ' S, v., IX. g6. 
 
 ' See texts in Muir, vol. iv. Soma means "extract,^' — from su, to express or beget 
 
 • Stevenson's TransL Pt. IJ., x. 2, 6 ; vi, 4. ' R, y.,X. 81. But see Muir, vol. iv. 
 
THE HYMNS. lOI 
 
 Here surely is what religion and philosophy have 
 been wont to call " man in bonds of nature ; " 
 man rudimentary, instinctive, absorbed in ^p'"'"^'^- 
 material objects, ," unaided by revelation," dependent 
 on what comes in the " mere " structure and necessity 
 of his faculties. This is that "natural incapacity," 
 which is believed to require " supernatural grafting " 
 in order to the generation of spiritual truth. And yet 
 what do we find here? The religious sentiment in- 
 tensely active, indeed an all-pervading consciousness. 
 These Hymns are full of implicit trust, of childlike 
 awe. They are addressed to deities, not arbitrarily 
 fashioned in human shape, nor out of any material 
 of human device, nor yet enclosed in temples made by 
 hands ; but felt directly by the religious instinct, face 
 to face with nature. It was not a sense so much of 
 diverse deities, as of dependence and divine guardian- 
 ship, and even of a closer relation. Prayers were 
 espousals with deity, and the very car itself by which 
 the blessing descended. They even " uphold the 
 sky." He who asked devoutly, received. No god 
 could resist constancy in one's prayer. Whatsoever 
 he needed, prayer would bring, — food, healing, 
 riches, victory, knowledge, daily protection. Strong 
 in the force and promise of nature, the instinct knows 
 no distrust of itself or its object.^ "My prayers fly 
 to Him who is seen of many, as herds to their past- 
 ure;" "fly upwards, to win highest good, as birds to 
 their nest."^ "Indra, preserver, refuge, leave us not 
 subject to the evil disposed ; let not the secret guilt of 
 men harm us ; be with us when afar, be with us when 
 nigh ; so supported, we shall not fear. We have no 
 other friend but thee, no other happiness, no other 
 
 > R. v., V. 44i 8. ' Ibid, I. 2Si i6> 4- 
 
102 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 father. There is none like thee, in heaven or earth, 
 O mighty One. Give us understanding, as a father 
 his sons : let not the wicked tread us down. Thine 
 we are, we who go on our way upheld by thee." 
 "Thou whose ears hear all things, keep near thee 
 this my hymn." 1 "Free from harm, we praise boun- 
 teous Vishnu who harmeth none. Listen, O self- 
 moved Deep, to our early hymn."^ 
 
 " Agni, guardian of the dwelling, observer of truth, 
 remover of diseases, ever-watchful, and provident for 
 us, life-giver." ^ " As everlasting beams dwell in the 
 Sun, so all treasures are in thee, their king." " Men 
 find thee who sing the words made in their hearts."* 
 " Day after day we approach thee with reverence : 
 take us into thy protection, as a father his son : be 
 ever present for our good." " Break not the covenant 
 with our fathers. Decay threatens the body like a 
 cloud. From this ill be my guardian." " Thou art 
 like a trough of water m the desert to the man who 
 longs for thee."^ " O Agni, in thy friendship I am at 
 home."^ 
 
 The wise Pushan (food-giver) is invoked to continue 
 the protecting care he bestowed on the men of old. — 
 The divine Rivers,'^ that refresh the herds with their 
 healing streams, are invoked to grant length of life. — 
 The Asvins are invoked in the last watches of night, 
 as doers of all noble and generous deeds, to break 
 forth in the dawn with their wonder-works of restora- 
 
 -yV" ' if. f'., I. II, 3 ; II. 32> 2 ; VII. 32 J I. lo, 9. s Ibid., VIII. 25. 
 
 ' I'^i'l-' I- "• " Ibid., I. 59, 3 ; I. 60, 3. 
 
 » Ibid., I. I, 7, 9; I. 71, 10; X. 4, I. itid., V. 44, 14 (MuUer). 
 
 ' Of the richly watered Panjab they might well have been the gods. In' the Veda 
 their flowing speeds onward the hymn and rite. More than thirty streams are mentioned 
 in a single hymn. " O Sindh, the rivers bring their tributes to thee, as cows their milk to 
 the milker ; thou movest, like a king extending his wings for batUe, at the head of thy tem- 
 pestuous waves." 
 
THE HYMNS. IO3 
 
 tion on the sick, the lame, the blind. — Parjanya, 
 rain-giver, is invoiced to "cry aloud, to thunder, to 
 flood the earth and impregnate it, that all that is therein 
 may rejoice and be glad." — The love of Vishnu, "the 
 
 ♦ Preserver," i " embraces all mankind," an " unpreoccu- 
 pied love."^ 
 
 " May the opening dawns, the swelhng streams, the 
 firm-set hills, the ancestors present at this invocation, 
 preserve us ! May we at all seasons be of sound 
 mind ; may we ever behold the rising sun." " Shine 
 for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, lengthener 
 of life, giver of food.and wealth. Drive far away the 
 unfriendly; make our pastures wide, give us safety. 
 All ye divine Ones, protect us always."^ 
 
 Th e se are not . the prayers of slave s^,^ no r even p£^ 
 mere suppliants. They incessantly break forth into 
 praises._^"0 Indra, gladden me! Sharpen my 
 
 "Tbought like a knife's edge ; whatever I, longing 
 for thee, now utter, do thou accept."^ A poetic enthu- 
 siasm glows in these earliest matins and nocturns. 
 They exalt the splendors of the Dawn and the orderly 
 paths of the Night. They dwell with joyful wonder 
 on the changes which pass over the sky and the earth, 
 tracing step by step the marvellous beneficence that 
 follows the paths of the Light. All this is not ,mere 
 " meteorolatry." Man is not prostrate here before the 
 material universe, but erect, greeting the sublimity 
 and magnificence of nature as tokens of a divine 
 good-will. The sense of physical dependence is con- 
 stantly more or less absorbed in the delight of this 
 recognition. It would be doing great injustice to 
 primitive Aryan piety to overlook this fine freedom of 
 
 ^ From vU, to hold, or maintain. 
 
 2 R. v., I. 42, 5 ; 23, 18 ; 112 ; v. 83 ; VII. 100 ; VI. 52, 4, 5 i VII. 77- 
 
 » Ibid., VI. 47, iQ. 
 
I04 RELIGION AND. LIFE. 
 
 the imagination, this exultation in the beauty as well 
 as the bounty of the visible world, and the proof it 
 affords that we have here something quite other than 
 adoration of visible things. It is the happy sense of 
 harmony with the universe, a healthful confidence' 
 that the world and man are made for each other, that 
 life and nature mean his good. " Surya has produced 
 the heavens and earth, beneficent to all : from the 
 desire to benefit men, he has measured out the worlds, 
 with their undecaying supports. To Him we render 
 praises." ^ 
 
 The rishis were " associates of the gods ; found out 
 Spontaneity the hidden light, and brought forth the dawn 
 of Song, -witli sincere hymns." ^ The singers "seek 
 out the thousand-branched mystery, through the vis- 
 ion of their hearts-."^ Their hymns are "of kin to 
 the god, and attract his heart;"* for "Agni is him- 
 self a poet. " ^ The " thoughtful gods produce these 
 hymns." ^ The rishis "prepare the hymn with the 
 heart, the mind, and the understanding." ^ They 
 " fashion it as a skilful workman a car ; " " adorn it 
 as a beautiful garment, as a bride for her husband."* 
 They " generate it from the soul as rain is born from 
 a cloud ; " " send it forth from the soul, as wind drives 
 the cloud; " " launch it with praises, as a ship on the 
 sea." 9 
 
 These rude bards have not analyzed their conscious- 
 Delight in ness: the material and the spiritual are still 
 the World, blended together in their conceptions. This 
 is not the anthropomorphism which we find in the 
 maturer faith of the Greek, a clear full disengagement 
 
 > R. v., I. i6o. 2 Ibid., VII. 76, 4. s Ibid., VII. 33, 9. 
 
 » Ibid., VIII. 12, 31 J 13, 36. I! Ibid., VI. 14, 2. e Ibid., X. 61, 7. 
 
 ' Ibid., I. 61, 2. 8 Ibid., I. 130, 6 ; V. 29, 15 ; X. 39,14. 
 
 ' Ibid., VII. 94; I. 116; X. 116. See Muir, III. 220-240. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 105 
 
 of the personal deity from the physical element or 
 form in which he is felt to be present. For wonder 
 and awe are not analyzers nor definers of thought : 
 the lines between infinite and finite, man and nature, 
 spirit and matter, are not of their drawing. But 
 neither is this Vedic worship the mere " personification 
 of the elements," the mere calling the thing fire, or 
 cloud, or moon-plant, a god. What we do in fact note 
 here, in the not yet differentiated instinct, is a pre- 
 dominance of the spiritual element ; and this not only 
 in its constant recognition of intelligence as every- 
 where the substance of nature, and in its admira- 
 tion of conscious energies and volitions, — mantra, 
 the prayer, itself meaning thought, — but even more 
 decisively in that open sense of beauty and hospi- 
 tality, of invitation even, in life and the world to 
 which I have just referred ; a prelude, we may call it, 
 to the aesthetic grace and geniality of the Greek. 1 
 It is indeed what Quinet finely declares to be the 
 meaning of the whole Vedic religion, — " Revelation 
 by Light." 
 
 It is not the mere worship of the elements. Bond- 
 age to the senses will not explain this spontaneity and 
 joy ; these cordial relations with the universe ; this 
 home-feeling so assured and fearless as to permit 
 undistracted contemplation and living praise ; this cre- 
 ative force of imagination ; this feeling of beauty and 
 
 ^ Very close affinities, not only etymological, but profoundly psychological and moral 
 also, have been traced between the three principal divinities of the Greeks, — Zeus, Diony- 
 sus, and Heracles, — on the one hand, and the three Vedic gods, — Indra, Agni, and 
 Savitri, — on the other. The relations between the gods of the Veda and those of Greece 
 and Rome, and the close atfinities of name and function, pointing to a common origin, are 
 matters of literary inquiry which lie outside the direct line of our purpose. They will be 
 found fully treated in the writings of Miiller: in Lassen's Indische Alierthumskunde^ 
 I. 756 ; and in Mr. Cox's new volumes on A ryan Mythology (1870). Also by N^ve, 
 Mythe des Ribhavas ; and Pococke, India in Greece, 
 
I06 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 benignity, in full play, neither repressed by fear, nor 
 enslaved by animal instincts. It is very refreshing to 
 see the religious sentiment recognizing the aesthetic 
 faculty, the guarantee of all liberties, and pronounc- 
 ing it good, in th# morning of time. It was a great 
 step in the evolution of intellectual life. We cannot 
 be inattentive to such an assertion of inherent capaci- 
 ties and rights of the soul. 
 
 It shows us in the infancy of Indo-European de- 
 velopment that innate disposition to accord liberty 
 to every faculty, welcoming all to their own several 
 uses and delights, and accepting the world as their 
 natural furtherance and plastic material, which has 
 given this ethnic family the leadership of intellectual 
 progress and religious freedom. The Vedic Hymn 
 is the primal guarantee, the infantile presage of these 
 future powers. The oldest Greek sages, like the 
 Vedic, wrote their wisdom under poetic inspiration and 
 in verse. Solon, Thales, and the rest, were called 
 Sofhoi, or knowers ; a word having nearly the same 
 meaning with the word "rishis." Their cosmogonies, 
 which trace all things to fire, or water, or their inter- 
 mixture, are, like the Vedic faith, no mere element- 
 worship, and clearly indicate the recognition of life 
 and mind as the essence of these outward forms. 
 This is the characteristic of all early Aryan thought. 
 
 It is the mind of a child that we are exploring. AH 
 AU ReKg- is yet indeterminate, vague, instinctive. But 
 
 ions in ^ . 
 
 germ. lor that very reason we can the better recog- 
 nize the capacities of human nature, observing the 
 primitive impulses from which its laws of growth have 
 evolved such diverse forms of revelation as the history 
 of religion presents. The Veda cannot be claimed 
 exclusively by any one of the great theological 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 107 
 
 systems, —by monotheism, polytheism, or pantheism ; 
 bu t it contains th e common principle of the m all, the 
 germ^of whfc h the hig^t is but ,a_natnra1 HevPlnp- 
 m ent, — the consciousness of deitv.-^ 
 
 This nebulous universality of the Rig Veda, this 
 potentiality of all religions, this prophetic star-dust of 
 historic systems, may well enough be called panthe- 
 ism. Yet in no exclusive sense. It is not philosophi- 
 cal abstraction, but intense realization : it is man wide 
 awake and intent, in eye and ear, and to the very 
 finger-tips. It is the rounding continent of his rehg- 
 ious instincts, and holds a wealth of imagination that 
 supplies prototypes for the mythologies of India, 
 Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; and a geniality in 
 its love of personification, that endowed with living 
 sympathies each and every phase of the elements, 
 every metamorphosis of fire, and the very sacrifices 
 and prayers of the worshippers themselves. ^ 
 
 Its polytheism, like its pantheism, is in the free, 
 plastic stage, and clearly discloses its depend- i„tuition of 
 ence on a theistic instinct, deeper than itself, "'= o°=- 
 in the constitution of man. 
 
 I do not intend to convey the idea of what Miiller 
 calls a " monotheism which precedes th¥ polytheism 
 of the Veda ; a remembrance of One God, breaking 
 through the mists of idolatrous phraseology." ^ Such 
 antecedent revelation does not appear to me to be 
 
 1 There is, also, a hint of dualism in the feet that twin deities are often invoked, yet 
 not as antagonistic. Mtiller, Science of Langttage, II. 585. There is even a tendency to 
 triple forms of deity, pointing to later conceptions of a trinity. 
 
 2 For an excellent ri&utni of Vedic worship, as regards the illustration of its vigor and 
 wealth of imagination, and its affinities with other religions, see Alfred Maury's Croyances 
 et Ligendes de VAntiquUi. On the personification oi Sotna, the sacrifice, see Muir's 
 Sanskrit Texts, vol. iv., and Stevenson's Samn Veda, Mr. Fiske's articles on My- 
 thology, in the Atlantic Monthly, trace many of these relations. 
 
 " Sanskrit Literature., p. SS9- 
 
I08 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 proved. But that a profound theistic instinct, the 
 intuition of a divine and living whole, is involved in , 
 the primitive mental processes we are here studying, 
 I hold to be beyond all question. 
 
 For these Hymns are in reality not so much the 
 worship of many_ deities, as the recognition of deity 
 everywhere; the upward look of reverence, wonder, 
 gratitude, and trust, from hearts to which all aspects 
 and powers of nature spoke in essentially the same lan- 
 guage. There is manifold revelation ; but there is also 
 unity of impression. The response to these divine invi- 
 tations takes outwardly different directions, is addressed 
 to different objects ; but intrinsically it is seeking the 
 same spirit in all. In no other way can we explain 
 the fact that these Vedic deities are in no essential 
 respect distinguishable from each other. It is not 
 merely that they are mostly forms of light or fire : 
 this recognition of unity in the symbol points back to 
 the intuition of a deeper spiritual and moral oneness.^ 
 They are all described in the same way. All are truth- 
 ful, beneficent, generous, omniscient, omnipotent. All 
 are bestowers of life, inspirers of knowledge. They 
 are alike the refuge of men, ahke immortal; creators 
 and measurers of the world, for the benefit of man ; 
 radiant with all-searching light, transcending and 
 pervading all worlds. "Among you, O gods, there is 
 none that is small, none that is young : you are all 
 great indeed." They have all equal praise. All are 
 invoked for the same blessings. They are even mu- 
 tually interchangeable. "Thou, Agni, art Indra, art 
 
 1 Even where an opposition of interests is for a moment conceived, as where Indra is 
 supposed to contend with the Maruls about their respective rights, this is but in order to 
 reassert the unity of divine interests more positively. " The Marnts, O Indra, are thy 
 breihren." R. V., I. 170, z. See Roth's translation of I. i5s, in Zciischr. d. D. M. G 
 XXIV. p. 302. 
 
THE HYMNS. IO9 
 
 Vishnu, art Brahmanaspati." " Thou, Agni, art born 
 Varuna ; becomest Mitra when kindled : in thee, son 
 of strength, are all the gods." And all alike are 
 supreme. Soma, the sacrificial plant, itself " generates 
 all the gods, and upholds the worlds." ^ The fact now 
 before us has been admirably stated by Miiller. " Each 
 god is to the mind of the suppliant as good as all the 
 gods. He is felt at the time as supreme and absolute, 
 in spite of the necessary limitations which to our 
 minds a plurality of gods must entail on every single 
 god." ^ And the reason of this can only be that, in 
 all these diverse directions, the act of worshif was 
 essentially one and the same, and gave its own bound- 
 less meaning to all its instruments, forms, and objects. 
 A like assignment of equal and supreme authority to 
 many different deities is found also in Egyptian poly- 
 theism ; and the trait has in this case been admitted to 
 indicate an approximation to belief in the Unity of 
 God, even by those who can find no other evidence 
 of the theistic bearings of that primeval faith. ^ The 
 same fact has been noted in respect to the names 
 applied to their deities by the North American tribes, 
 such as, " Maker of all," " Father and Mother of Life," 
 "One perfect God," "endless," "omnipotent," "invisi- 
 ble," and the like ; all of which, according to the 
 latest and best researches on the myths of the New, 
 World, were familiar terms of hornage for what was 
 felt to be higher than man, and clearly indicate a 
 "monotheism which is ever present, not in con- 
 
 ' R. v., VII. 30, I ; II. I, 3 ; V. 3, i ; IX. 86, 89, 109. 
 
 > Ancient Sanskrit Literature^ p. 532. MuUer's fine spiritual instinct and profound 
 acquaintance witli the origbal text of the Vedas combine to make him, on the whole, our 
 best authority for their verbal meaning. 
 
 • Kenrick's Ancient Egypt, I. 367. 
 
no RELIGION AND LIP'E. 
 
 trast to polytheism, but in living intuition, in the 
 religious sentiments."^ 
 
 It is impossible not to discern in the Vedic passages 
 which have been quoted, and indeed in Vedic forms 
 of vv^orship generally, the presentiment of that pro- 
 found unity into which the wisest pupils of ancient 
 polytheism resolved the gods of their fathers, and 
 which Maximus Tyrius expresses in terms that strik- 
 ingly recall our Vedic texts. " Men make distinctions 
 between the gods. They are not aware that all the gods 
 have one law, one life, the same ways, not diverse nor 
 mutually hostile ; all rule ; all are of the same age ; 
 all pursue our good ; all have the same dignity and 
 authority; all are immortal; one their nature, under 
 many names." ^ And as the Greek philosopher, so 
 also the Vedic seer was conscious of a still deeper 
 unity than this. 
 
 In these vague embodiments of religious wonder 
 „ . , and awe, there could be none of that dlstinct- 
 
 Mystical 
 
 sense of ucss of individuality which later and more re- 
 "'"'^" flective polytheism gave to its separate .deities. 
 Doubtless many Vedic terms translated as proper 
 names were really meant as affellattves only, or else 
 record natural facts which were not intended to be 
 personified at all, so that our ignorance of their mean- 
 ing may have greatly multiplied the distinct figures 
 of this older Olynipus, as well as exaggerated their 
 distinctness. Miiller has called attention to a 
 striking difference between the Semitic and Aryan 
 languages, in the tendency to invite polytheistic dis- 
 tinctions. In the former, the original root-name 
 always remains unaltered in the body of any word 
 
 1 Brinton, p. 58. 2 Diss., XXXIX. 5. 
 
THE HYMNS. Ill 
 
 that may be formed from it ; while in the latter it is 
 merged and lost in each fresh combination, so that 
 every new appellative tends to independent meaning, 
 and starts a special personality. That these linguistic 
 peculiarities explain the intenser monotheism of the 
 one race, and the freer polytheism of the other, seems, 
 however, to be less conceivable than that both the 
 linguistic and the religious differences arise from a 
 common cause in the constitutional unlikeness of 
 the two races. Yet the influence of the transform- 
 ing process alluded to must have been very great. 
 And we can infer, even from the Veda, how this 
 multiplication of individual deities must have gone on 
 in the Aryan religions, by the change of mere appel- 
 latives into personal forms of deity. Thus a great 
 many names to which prayers are addressed are 
 simply expressions of qualities that were, undoubtedly, 
 first attributed to the Sun, and became distinctive 
 through the linguistic obscuration described above ; 
 until Macrobius could find ready to hand quite ample 
 materials for proving his great thesis, so often repro- 
 duced, that all ancient worship was resolvable into 
 heliolatry alone. 
 
 But at so early a stage in the observation of nature 
 as that of the Vedas, even this process could hardly 
 have had time to produce very clearly marked dis- 
 tinctions of personality in the objects of worship. 
 
 Those mysterious forms and processes of Light, 
 to wlijch diverse names were attached, really flowed 
 into one another ; sometimes by imperceptible grada- 
 tions, sometimes by instantaneous shift, as of feeling 
 or mood. Whether the face of the universe changed 
 before the eyes of the worshipper, or showed behind 
 the change an ever-abiding heaven and earth, it was 
 
112 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Still the same face of the. universe, and power could 
 not be definitely held apart from power. The senti- 
 ment of worship, too, was ever the same, whithersoever 
 it turned for the moment, to every name going forth 
 in the same yearning and faith. It was natural that 
 in every moment of deeper thought thg poet should 
 pronounce these names interchangeably. It was not 
 their individuality that impressed him, but the common 
 fact of their power. He would instinctively feel that 
 unity which these experiences suggested. It was the 
 perpetual need to find for every act of prayer and praise 
 the highest -possible object of prayer and praise, which 
 caused him perpetually to regard that deity as su- 
 preme to whom he was for the moment addressing his 
 thought. . This is the very germinal principle of 
 Theism ; for it is the instinct of undivided homage. 
 And if this claim to hold communion in every act 
 of worship with the highest sovereignty nevertheless 
 allows many different powers successively to appear 
 as highest, if it does not yet draw the logical inference 
 that the object of such aspiration can only be unity, it 
 is simply because the mind is not yet introversive 
 enough to recognize what is really involved in this 
 spiritual process. It can require no aid from " super- 
 natural intervention," whatever that may mean, to ad- 
 vance to the perception that supreme sovereignty cannot 
 be divided among many. Given the impulse to rise in 
 every act of worship to the highest known conception 
 of the Divine, there can be need only of a jjeeper 
 absorption in some one tribal deity, as with the Hebrew 
 prophet, or a finer speculative habit, as with the Greek 
 philosopher, to develop it into a clear and positive 
 form of Theism. 
 
 It was not requisite that some special race should 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 "3 
 
 be " supernaturally " gifted with the vision, and " in- 
 trusted with the charge" of this indefeasible truth, 
 that Deity is One. It was requisite only that the 
 religious consciousness of man should become in- 
 tently concentrated upon its own deeps. Greek, 
 Roman, and Oriental literature, as well as Hebrew, 
 show that this was the experience of all thoughtful 
 minds long before the Christian era. 
 
 The whole Veda hovers on the verge of this higher 
 experience. Its free devotion, guided like the wild 
 fowl's flight by the mysterious instinct of natural 
 desire, steeps unwearied wings from time to time in 
 this purer light. There are hints of a Father of all 
 the gods, in Dyaushpitar ; ^ of a Lord of Creation, 
 Prajapati ; of a generator and lord of all Prayer, 
 Brahmanaspati.^ Vis'vakarman is "wise and pervad- 
 ing, creator, disposer, father, highest object of vision."'' 
 Varuna is "King of all, both gods and men."* Surya 
 is the concentration of all powers in one ; " the wonder- 
 ful host of rays," the "eye of Mitra, Varuna, Agni ; " 
 "soul of all that moves or rests. "^ "Indra contains 
 all the gods, as the felloe of a wheel surrounds the 
 spokes."^ 
 
 Even so is this whole religion contained in the ado- 
 ration of Light ; in the sense of a vital fire in the Uni- 
 verse, one with the life that stirred within the soul ; in 
 the search for this through all disguises, and the recog- 
 nition of it in all visible powers. The Gdyatri, or 
 holiest verse of the Veda, reads: "We meditate On 
 that desirable light of the divine Savitri, the Sun who 
 governs our holy rites."'' It was this verse which the 
 
 i ZeOf TTOT^p, Jupiter. a R. r., I. 40, s ; II. 23, i ; 24, 5 ; ^S, 5- 
 
 s Ibid., X. 82, I. 4 Ibid., II. 27, 10. » Ibid., 1. 115. i. 
 
 « Ibid., I. 31, 15. ' Ibid., III. 62, 10. 
 
114 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 later worship affirmed to have been milked out by 
 Brahma as. the substance of the Veda, and "to con- 
 tain all the gods," being interpreted with the largest 
 freedom of spiritual meaning. 
 
 The Veda goes beyond these vague intimations. It 
 distinctly announces the unity of the religious senti- 
 ment, and anticipates philosophy in referring mono- 
 theism and polytheism to a common root. "That 
 which is One the wise call many ways. They call 
 it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, the winged heavenly 
 iGarutmat." ' 
 
 In the light of this mystical instinct, which to a 
 greater or less extent pervades every Vedic Hymn, 
 we must interpret the fact that all these, so-called, 
 nature - gods are freely declared creators of the 
 world. It even concentrates the whole -of this tran- 
 scendence within each in turn with such intensity and 
 fulness as makes the personality of the Vedic God as 
 vivid and absolute as that of the Hebrew. There are 
 abundant passages descriptive of the all-creative and 
 all-mastering energy of Indra, in which it seems as if 
 we were listening to the praise of Jehovah from a 
 Hebrew Psalmist. Nor is the spirituality of deity 
 much more obscured by outward and sensuous ima- 
 gery in the one case than in the other. 
 
 "To Indra the heavens and earth bow down. With 
 his thunderbolt he looses the waters. At his might 
 the mountains are afraid. He established the quiver- 
 ing earth ; he propped up the sky for the good of all 
 creatures, upholding the sky with its golden lights in 
 void space ; he spread also the green earth. Let us 
 
 1 S. F., 1. 164,46. Therearesimilarhymns to Osiris, in which he is identified with other 
 Egyptian deities. —Rev Archialogique^ 1857. The Book of the Dead gives him a hun- 
 dred appellations. So the Greek Zeus absorbed almost every name dear to popular faith. 
 See Rawlinson's Herodotus^ I. 555. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 "S 
 
 worship him with reverence, the exalted, the undecay- 
 ing, the ever young. The worlds have not measured 
 his greatness. Many his excellent works : not all the 
 gods can frustrate the counsels of Him who established 
 the heavens and the earth, and produced the sun and 
 the dawn. He transcends the whole universe; archi- 
 tect of all things and lord of all."i 
 
 Yet even of this Supreme Aryan Jehovah it is said 
 elsewhere that " a divine and eracious mother 
 
 ° Birth and 
 
 bore him, when like the dawn he filled the parentage of 
 worlds." ^ And he is not only undecaying, and "^"*^' 
 adored of old, but "for ever young." 
 
 And when the poets turn to Savitri, or to Soma, or 
 to Agni, there is not only the same vividness in the 
 description of sovereign power, but the same recur- 
 rence to this limiting fact of birth and beginning. 
 How shall this be explained? 
 
 It is to be remembered that, after all, the Vedic 
 Hymns belong to different epochs, and must represent 
 many. changes in the special ideal associated with each 
 of the gods ; and that every fresh form would natu- 
 rally be held the offspring of the last. Doubtless, too, 
 these images of birth and youth in part refer to natural 
 transitions or phases of the heavenly bodies, the visi- 
 ble symbols of deity; and report the ever-fresh pro- 
 ductive vigor of their outgoings and renewals. They 
 are indeed the natural play of the poetic faculty, which 
 recognizes the life of the universe as for ever new, and 
 creation as an instant fact, — -long _^q f; ^;;;^_^£i£nce learns 
 to find the same signi^canceinnaturalja^ 
 
 ^ut the root of the idea that the gods are subject to 
 birth and parentage probably lies deeper. While the 
 
 1 Other examples may be found in Maury, Ligendes ei Croyances^ from Langloia. 
 See texts in Muir, vol. iv. 
 
 2 Ve. K, X. 134, I. .S'^»»<i,Pt.II. vii. 16. 
 
Il6 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 religious imagination was busied with bringing out the 
 sense of deity in ever-changing forms, there was natu- 
 rally as constant a sense of the limitations in which 
 these definite deities were involved. None of them 
 Could satisfy the thirst to reach the origin of power. 
 These creators are but outbirths of what went before. 
 They are " young ; " and the ancient deep is behind 
 them. The eye still pierces, the soul presses, beyond 
 them, and finds no end to the series. "A divine 
 mother bore them." What is this but to say, " God is, 
 after all, beyond all our gods " ? 
 
 Is science any wiser than song? In protoplasm, or 
 elsewhere, has it ever found us a beginning? What 
 else does the Vedic faith in birth and parentage of 
 deity, but foreshadow this endless inadequacy, and in 
 the tenderest way ? It finds rest by resolving its series 
 of divine powers into syllables of a word whose mean- 
 ing for the heart was not to be fathomed, a life which 
 only the sacred name of motherhood could express. 
 
 This unfathomed background of life, out of which 
 The depth each and every god was born, must have 
 of Deity, .haunted the religious consciousness as a con- 
 stant suggestion of unity beyond all these changing 
 forms. But it was a unity, which so far from insist- 
 ing on being represented in one way only, inspired 
 men with the intensest desire to multiply forms and 
 symbols of it. And this diversity, bearing witness 
 of its productive resources, must have prompted it, 
 in turn, to seek ever more and more stars in this 
 all-enfolding depth of spiritual space, which shut 
 no doors of dogma, and spread no mythic firma- 
 ment to stay the wings of thought. The religious 
 imagination was not only left free, but invited to in- 
 cessant creation of mythical names and forms, ever 
 
THE HYMNS. II7 
 
 promising to embody more and more fully the un- 
 mortgaged ideal that welcomed them all. Here was 
 an open path for progress, so far as progress depends 
 on religious forces. This made the old Aryan my- 
 thologies so rich and full. It was in this way that 
 polytheism, free from the exclusiveness that besets 
 strictly monotheistic conceptions, became the real 
 parent of aesthetic and scientific liberty. 
 
 It is to be observed that all these definite conceptions 
 of deity are interfused with a sense of man's 
 
 Recogni- 
 
 harmonioiis relation to what lies beyond all tionofthe 
 conceftion.^ And of the spiritual content and '°^'"'^- 
 confidence hereby made possible, we may cite in illus- 
 tration, first, a hymn to Hiranyagarbha, or the Light 
 as embryo, born in the waters. 
 
 I. " In the beginning there arose the source of golden light. He 
 ■^as the only born Lord of all that is. He established the earth and 
 the sky. Who is the God ^ to whom we shall offer our sacrifice ? 
 
 2 " He who gives life ; he who gives strength ; whose blessing 
 all the bright gods desire ; whose shadow is immortality, whose 
 shadow is death. Who is the God, &c. ? 
 
 3. " He wliD through his power is the only King'of this breathing 
 and awakening world ; he who governs man and beast. Who, &c. ? 
 
 4. " He through whom the sky is bright and the earth firm ; who 
 measured out the light in the air. Who is, &c. ? 
 
 5. " He to whom heaven and earth, standing firm by his will, look 
 up, trembling inwardly. He over whom the rising sun shines forth. 
 Who is, &c. ? 
 
 6. " Wherever the mighty water-clouds went, where they placed 
 the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He who is the only life of 
 the bright gods. Who is, &c. .? 
 
 7. " He who by his might looked even over the water-clouds, the 
 clouds which gave strength and lit the sacrifice. He who is God 
 above all gods. Who is, &c. ? 
 
 1 I do not here employ the tenn " unknowable,'' which, as used in scientiiic parlance, 
 does not convey my meaning. 
 
 9 Langlois translates it, " To what other god." 
 
Il8 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 8. "May he not destroy' us. He the Creator of the earth, the 
 righteous, who created the heavens. He who also created the 
 bright and mighty waters. Who is the God to whom we shall offer 
 our sacrifice ? " ' 
 
 Who is this that is "born in the waters," an "embryo 
 of light " ? Even He of whom the waters and the 
 light are but the garment, " the only life of all these 
 bright gods ; " their /«/%, not apart from them only, but 
 t'n them.' 
 
 And here is a farther venture into those abysses of 
 the consciousness, where finite so blends with infinite, 
 that its very darkness deepens into light; where 
 deity, felt as mystery beyond all names or forms of 
 conception, yet is also highest personality and instant 
 life of all. 
 
 1. "There was then neither nonentity nor entity; neither atmos- 
 phere nor sky beyond. What covered all ? 
 
 2. " Death was not, nor therefore immortality ; nor day nor night. 
 That One breathed, breathless, by Itself [in essence] : there was [or 
 has been] nothing different from It, nor beyond It. 
 
 3. " The covered germ burst forth by mental heat. 
 
 4. " Then first came Love upon it, the spring of rnind. This the 
 poets in their hearts discerned, the bond between being and nought. 
 
 5. " The ray which shot across these, was it above or below ? 
 There were mighty productive powers, nature beneath and energy 
 above. 
 
 6. " Who can declare whence this creation ? The gods came later. 
 
 7. "Who then knows what its source, or whether created or not? 
 He who rules it in highest heaven knows, or He knows not."* 
 
 And in the following passages we mark the pro- 
 
 ' " Injure," according to Muir. 
 
 '^ R. v., X. 121. Miiller's transl. is in Sansk, LU-^ p. 569. Muir's, in Saitsk. Texts^ 
 vol. iv., is essentially the same. *" 
 
 8 of the monotheism of the Hindus, recurring at every stage of their history, and its 
 independence of foreign influences, see Lassen, II. 1105. 
 
 ^ R.V., X. 129, translated by Miiller and Muir. Colebrooke translates the last clause, 
 "none other can know." 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 119 
 
 found yearning to transcend that imperfect solution of 
 the mystery of existence which ascribes it to Beyond cre- 
 a special creative fiat : — ^''^= p°""- 
 
 " That which is beyond the earth and sky, beyond gods and spirits ; 
 what earliest embryo did the waters hold, in which all the gods 
 were assembled ? Ye know not Him who produced these things. 
 Something else is within you. The chanters of hymns go about 
 enveloped in mist, and unsatisfied with idle talk.' 
 
 " Who has seen the First Born ? Where was the life, the blood, 
 the soul of the world ? Who went to ask it of any that knew it." 
 
 " What the tree from which they shaped heaven and earth ? Wise 
 men, ask indeed, in your minds, on what He stood when He held 
 the worlds." ' 
 
 It is the inadequacy of all conceptions of Original 
 Cause as a definite form of existence that one of these 
 poets would express when he says, "The existent 
 sprang from that which exists not."* 
 
 There is but one solution of these mysteries, and 
 that is for all time : the unity of human and divine 
 through the moral being. 
 
 Every one of these Vedic deities is a moral guar- 
 dian and saviour. "This day, ye gods, with The moral 
 the rising sun, deliver us from sin." " What- f^'^^Hl 
 ever sin we may have committed, O Indra, let ship. 
 us obtain the safe light of day : let not the long dark- 
 ness come upon us." "Preserve us, O Agni, by 
 knowledge, from sin; and lift us up, for our work and 
 for our life." "Thou leadest the man who has followed 
 wrong paths to acts of wisdom." "Deliver us from 
 evil " is the constantly recurring prayer.^ 
 
 " The gods are not to be trifled with." " They are 
 with the righteous: they know man in their hearts." 
 
 » S. v., X. 82. 2 Ibid., I. 164, 4. s Ibid., X. Si, 4. < Ibid., X. 72, a. 
 
 « Ibid., I. iJSi 6; II- 27, 14; I- 36, 14; I- 35- 
 
I20 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 "They behold all thhigs, and hear no prayers of the 
 wicked." "May I, free from sin, propitiate Rudra, 
 so as to attain his feUcity, as one distressed by heat 
 finds relief in the shade ! " "I have committed many 
 faults, which do ye, O gods, correct, as a father his 
 ill-behaving son. , Far from me be bonds, far be sins." 
 "May our sins be removed," or "repent-ed of" is the 
 burden of a whole hymn.^ What rude tribes, unused 
 to self-examination, may have meant by the terms here 
 translated " sinning " and " repenting," may not be 
 easy fully to determine. We may readily overesti- 
 mate their moral aspirations. But we shall err even 
 more seriously if we recognize in their hymns nothing 
 better than the desire to buy material advantages from 
 their deities, or the fear of losing these advantages, or 
 of suffering outward penalties at their hands. ^ It is 
 very clearly a sense of wrong-doing from which the 
 worshipper is seeking relief. It is conscience that 
 pricks him, the rebuke of his moral ideal. Because 
 the evil he thinks or does offends himself, therefore 
 he holds it an offence to the All-discerning. Its penal- 
 ties, whether inward distress or outward failure and 
 loss, — and both kinds, as will hereafter be noticed, 
 are confessed, — he construes as signs of its opposi- 
 tion to a rectitude to which he aspires. It is purity 
 of heart, it is peace with the conscience, that these 
 prayers pursue. Their simple confessions of weak- 
 ness and ignorance are laden with earnest feeling. 
 " I do not recognize if I am like this : I go on per- 
 plexed in mind." '^ " O Agni, thou art like a trough in 
 the desert, to one who longs for thee."* 
 
 1 R. v., VII. 3j, 9; vni. 13, is: II. 33, 6; II. 24, s : I. 97. 
 
 2 For this kind of criticism, see Hardwick, Christ and other Masters-, 1. 182, and even 
 Wilson's Lectures at Oxford (1840), p. 9, 10. 
 
 « R. v., I. 164, 37. 4 Ibid., X. 4, I. 
 
THE HYMNS. 121 
 
 The moral law is eminently embodied in Varuna. 
 His name, kindred with the Greek (9Mra«05vamna;the 
 and the Zend Varena — from var, to veil or ""^ ^''"''• 
 surround — remands us to the outermost confines of 
 the universe.^ He is essentially the Limit, which en- 
 folds the thought of these simple natures, and protects 
 it from being bewildered and oppressed by the myste- 
 ries of immensity. He is the measurer of depths, 
 whose wise ordinances round them in. His world is 
 farthest space. His calm unswerving legislation is 
 the safety of all beings and forms. '^ His worship ex- 
 presses man's instinctive sense of natural law, of the 
 bands that cannot be loosed. He is adored as framer 
 and sustainer of the everlasting order of the world ; 
 who appointed the broad paths of the sun, prepared 
 from of old, free from dust, well-placed in the firma- 
 ment ; who holds the stars from wandering, and keeps 
 the streams from overfilling the sea. " The constella- 
 tions, visible by night, which go elsewhere by day, 
 are his inviolable works." " Wise and mighty are his 
 deeds who has stemmed asunder the wide firmaments. 
 He lifted on high the bright heavens : He stretched 
 apart the starry sky and the earth, an^ made great 
 channels for the days."^ He is calm and immovable, 
 the Aryan Fate : inevitable things are " his bonds." * 
 Night, with its mysterious deeps and steadfast orderly 
 watches, is his special realm ; and he it is who brings 
 back the sun to his place, to reappear after passing 
 invisibly through the heavens. Thus the world was 
 instinctively felt to be stanch with orderly cycles, long 
 before the conception of law could be fully formed. 
 
 , I. 7S8. 
 
 2 if. K., VIII. 42. s Ibid., V. 8s ; VII. 86, 87 : I. 24, 10. 
 
 • Roth, Die Kochsten Getter d. Arischen Vdlker (Zeitschri/i d. Deutsch. Morgenl. 
 Geselisch., VI. 72). 
 
122 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 But in this physical order was reflected also the 
 divine law which shone in the conscience, and pro- 
 claimed eternal decree against moral disobedience. 
 " By day, by night, there is said one thing. The 
 same is spoken to me by my own conscious heart." ^ 
 This unseen Eye of the Night " beholds all that has 
 been and all that will be done."^ To Varuna the 
 darkness shineth as the light. It is he who is of- 
 fended at the evil-doer, who is satisfied only when the 
 sin is put away. " Desirous of beholding thee, I 
 ask what is my offence." ^ A later hymn from the 
 Atharva Veda says of him, " If one stand or walk, 
 or hide, the great Lord sees as if near; he knows 
 what two whisper together; he is there the third. 
 He who should flee beyond the sky would not escape 
 Varuna. He hath counted the twinklings of the eyes 
 of men."^ 
 
 He is " merciful to the evil-doer, and takes away 
 Deliverer siu, cxtricating man from its bonds." ^ This 
 from eva. morality is plainly not the bondage of an in- 
 exorable physical necessity, nor the blind fear of a 
 wrathful judge. It has sight of a divine compassion, 
 that spares and restores. 
 
 1. " Let me not yet, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay. 
 Have mercy. Almighty, have mercy ! 
 
 2. " If I go along, trembling, like a cloud driven by wind, have 
 mercy. Almighty, have mercy ! 
 
 3. "Through want of strength, thou Strong One, have I gone to 
 the wrong shore. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy ! 
 
 4. " Thirst came on the worshipper, in the midst of the waters. 
 Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy ! 
 
 5. " Wherever we men, O Varuna, commit an offence before the 
 
 » R. v., I. 24, 12. = Ibid., I. zs. II. = Ibid., VII. 86. 
 
 • Mnir, V. p. 53 ; Mailer, Ch^s, I. p. 41. » s. y.^ yil. 87 j I. 25, 21. 
 
THE HYMNS. 1 23 
 
 heavenly host ; wherever we break thy law through thoughtlessness, 
 have mercy, Almighty, have mercy ! " ' 
 
 Similar trust in forgiving love inspires the prayers 
 to all the Vedic gods. They are all called by the 
 names Saviour and Father. 
 
 It has been said that " we look in vain in the Vedas 
 for penitential psalms, or hymns commemorat- 
 
 "^ Aryan sense 
 
 ing the descent of spiritual benefits."^ This of moral 
 is true only if we take these expressions in ^"^ 
 their Semitic meaning. In most Hebrew piety, the 
 sentiment of moral obligation, yielding much fruit of 
 sublimity and tenderness, is yet more or less an over 
 bearing despotism. Its austere and jealous God tends 
 to paralyze the worshipper's freedom with dread of 
 having done, or of being about to do, something that 
 trenches upon exclusive and sovereign claims. Hence 
 an intensity of contrition, and a disposition to dwell 
 on what is called the "malignity" of sin, amount- 
 ing, in the ultimate phases to which Christian the- 
 ology has developed it, to a demand for self-contempt 
 and even self-abhorrence as the first condition of 
 piet}'' ! Now it is certain that iiothing like_this_will_be, 
 found in the^3&difi«"or,„any .^thgr^ jeligion^^^\Aryaja 
 'orTgTnr^"°But it is not to be inferred that such religions 
 do not rest on moral and spiritual foundations. If they 
 know nothing of these moral agonies, so liable to 
 narrow and enslave the mind, they are not for this 
 reason incapable of recognizing the inevitable penalty, 
 and the need of divine renewal, involved in evil think- 
 ing and ignoble living. 
 
 On the other hand, the gods are not jealous of the 
 liberties of their worshipper. They cordially beckon 
 him on every side, and make the world a genial 
 
 1 X. v., VII. Ss. ' Hardwick, I. 181. 
 
124 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ' climate for all his energies. If there is danger lest' 
 this entire spontaneity should relax the authority of 
 conscience, there is at least implied in it a guarantee 
 of freedom and progress indispensable to conscience 
 itself. It does not dwell mournfully and hopelessly 
 on the past, nor on the enormity of offence ; but passes 
 readily on to greet fresh opportunity, accepting the 
 future as still its friend. This moral elasticity and 
 ready recovery of self-estimation, this good under- 
 standing between the conscience and a happy devel- 
 opment of all human powers, is the needful corrective 
 of a despotic moralism in religion and culture, which 
 Semitic earnestness has mingled with its better gifts 
 to the inward life of man. 
 
 The Hymns to Varuna, which have suggested these 
 TheAdi- remarks concerning a common criticism upon 
 'y^- religions of non-Semitic origin, are not the 
 
 only illustrations of the Vedic conscience. Varuna 
 is one of Seven Adityas, or Everlasting Ones.^ These 
 are the " Children of Aditi," who is " The Unlimited, 
 Immortal Light Beyond." Sleepless, beholding all 
 things, far and near, evil and good, the innermost 
 thoughts of men, — irreproachable protectors of the 
 universe, haters of falsehood, punishers of sin, yet 
 forgivers too, and abandoning none, they "bridge the 
 paths to immortality, and uphold the heavens for the 
 sake of the upright." ^ And to them the herdsman 
 prayed that he might escape the vices that were " like 
 pitfalls in his path;" calling on them to spread their 
 protection over him, " as birds spread their wings over 
 t heir young ;^."^ Of 'tI5l^"the~nearest to Varuna is 
 -Mitra, " the Friend." 
 
 > Roth, ut supra, Zeiischr. d. D.M. G., VI. 69 ; Mailer's Rig Veda., I. Noia, p. J37. 
 2 R. v., II. 27- = Ibid., VIII. 47, 2. See Muir, V. 57. * 
 
THE HYMNS. 1 25 
 
 " Neither is the right nor the left hand known to us, 
 neither what is before nor what is behind. O givers of 
 our homes, may I, weak and afraid, be guided by you 
 to the light that is free from fear. Far or nigh, there 
 can come no harm to him who is in your leading." i 
 
 Though called " children of the light," these Im- 
 mortals are not to be confounded with the 
 1 1 1 T , 1 Their spirit- 
 
 heavenly bodies: they are not mere phases ofuaimean- 
 
 the Sun, as the later Puranas have been sup- "'^' 
 posed to represent them. They were conceived as 
 the unseen support and background of his radiance. 
 Their light was of the spirit. Their very names have 
 moral and religious import, born of the conscience and 
 the heart. They mean Friend, Protector, Beholder, 
 Sympathizer, Benefactor, Giver without Prayer.^ They 
 preserve from the evil spirits, or druhs, that follow 
 the sins of men." The oldest Aryan faith centres in 
 these Shining Ones. The Adityas are, in fact, radiant 
 witnesses that the visible heavens have always been 
 recognized as the symbol of a Higher Light, through 
 which the soul lies for ever open to infinite wisdom, 
 justice, and care. 
 
 In all ancient religion there is -no name more in- 
 teresting than that of Adili, the " mother " The mother 
 of the Aryan gods. To maternity all deities "^ '•>= s°'^- 
 pay reverence ; and to the bosom of its infinite, ten- 
 derness man must refer his whole conception of the 
 divine. " Aditi," says Max Miiller, " is the earliest 
 name invented to express the Infinite, — the visible in- 
 finite. A-diti is the unbound, unbounded, one might 
 almost say, the Absolute. It is a name for the dis- 
 tant East, the Dawn, — but more, Beyond the Dawn; 
 and in one place the Dawn is called the 'Face of 
 
 1 R. v., II. 27, II, 13. ' Roth, itt mfra. 
 
126 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Aditi.' In her cosmic order she is The Beyond, the 
 unbounded realm beyond earth and sky." Beyond 
 Aditi, however, was Daksha, literally " the powerful." 
 "She, O Daksha, who is thy daughter; after her, 
 the gods."i Yet Daksha is also said to be born of 
 Aditi. 2 And here it must be noted that this phrase- 
 ology of descent does not indicate chronological suc- 
 cession, but ideal relation ; just as we may say, with 
 equal truth, that light is the child of power, and 
 that power is the offspring of light. Yet there 
 can be no doubt that this reaching forth to an all- 
 embracing Life beyond and behind special forms of 
 deity, — an ultimate in which the two conceptions of 
 love and power, under the symbols of male and female, 
 are combined in the interchangeableness of Daksha 
 and Aditi at the fountain of being, — is but a typical 
 expression of the whole religious experience of the 
 Vedic poets. For we find the same unlimited capac- 
 ity invoked, in each and every deity, to reach out 
 beyond itself, with a care and a power that should 
 absorb all the rest. 
 
 The study of the Rig Veda has revealed the 
 The earliest f^ct that the earliest apotheosis of which we 
 apothebsis. havc rccord was a form of homage to virtue. 
 Some of the hymns are addressed to deified men, 
 who had attained their divinity through beneficent 
 work.3 They are the "dexterous, humble-minded 
 artisans of the gods."* The miracles ascribed to 
 them indicate what was then thought godlike in con- 
 duct. They had restored their parents to youth ; an 
 act typical, to the Oriental mind, of all social virtues. 
 
 1 Mailer's Rig Veda, I. p. 230, 237 ; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, IV. 10-13. 
 ' R. v., X. 72, 4, 5. 
 
 " N^ve, MytAe des Ribhavas ; Roth, Brahma und die Brahmanen, in Zeiisch. d. Morg. 
 Ges., I. 76. 
 
 • R.r.V. 42, 12 (Wilson) 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 127 
 
 They had made a chariot for the dawn, that daily 
 blessings might be brought to all men. They had 
 multiplied sacred vessels for the service of the gods. 
 They had created, or brought back to life, catde for 
 the poor.^ Their name, Ribhavas, formed from that 
 most fruitful of Aryan roots, which indicates upward 
 movement, points to aspiration and growth. It is 
 closely related to the Greek Orpheus, both names sym- 
 bolizing the arts of orderly and rhythmic construction ; 
 and to the German Elfen, denoting the busy, service- 
 able elves.2 To these divine helpers, who seem to 
 have been in some respects identical with the.;pitris, 
 or ancestral fathers of families, especially in their 
 beneficence, prayers were addressed for the same 
 blessings which the older deities bestowed. Thus 
 the good man ascends to heaven, and stands among 
 the gods. The stars of the generous shine in the 
 firmament : they partake of immortality.^ They are 
 like the Asvins, those divine physicians, who enabled 
 the lame to walk, the blind to see ; who restored the 
 aged to youth, were guardians of "the slow and 
 weak," relieved burns with snow, cured cattle, sowed 
 fields, and delivered sailors from storms.* 
 
 This instinctive recognition of the divine in the hu- 
 man gave shape to the Vedic idea of a Future xhe Future 
 Life. The first man who had passed through ^"^^ 
 
 ^ X. K., IV. 33, 35, 36; v. 31, 3- 
 
 * See KelJy's Indth-European Folk-Lore, p. 19. 
 
 8 R, v., X. 88, 15. (See Maury, Croyances, 8zc., 147.) Even if, as N^ve supposes, the 
 multiplication of the goblets for worship, as well As the other services to the gods ascribed 
 to the Ribhavas, signify that they " extended the pomp and importance of the religious 
 ritual," and represented the tendency to priestly organization in those early times, it will be 
 none the less true that they were exalted to divinity for acts held in grateful remembrance 
 as serviceable to men. That they were »ierely priests, or beloved for merely vicarious and 
 ofScial acts, the whole account of them in the Rig Veda disproves. 
 
 * See Muir, V. 242, and R. V.-, I. 116-120. For remarks on the relations of the Ribhus 
 and Pitris to the bright spirits or elves of the Teutonic mythology, see Kelly's Indtj-Europ. 
 Folk-Lare, p. 19. 
 
128 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 death waited, enthroned in immortal light, to welcome 
 the good into his kingdom of joy.^ This " Assembler 
 and King of Men " in another life had himself been hu- 
 man, and knew all human needs. Death was thus 
 Yama's kindly messenger, " to bring them to the homes 
 he had gone before to prepare for them, and which 
 could not be taken from them." ^ It was far in Varu- 
 na's world of perfect and undying light, in the " third 
 heaven," in the very " sanctuary of the sky, and of 
 the great waters," and in the bosom of the Highest 
 Gods. Thither the fathers had gone, and " the earth, 
 the air, and the sky were underneath them ; " and 
 thither the children were following, each on his own 
 appointed path.^ That which men desire is the 
 attainment of good in the world where they may 
 behold their parents and abide, free from infirmities, 
 " where the One Being dwells beyond the stars." * The 
 morning and evening twilight, the gloaming in which 
 darkness mingles with light, were the " outstretched 
 arms of death," the two watchful dogs of Yama, 
 guiding men to their rest.^ The poet sang the in- 
 evitable longing, and the assurance that has for ever 
 come with it. " There make me immortal, where 
 action is free, and all desires are fulfilled."^ And 
 age after age the simple tribes repeated the Hymn. 
 And while the mourners for the dead, in their rude 
 symbolism of mingled faith and fear, set a stone 
 between themselves and the grave, and placed the 
 clog upon the feet that were to move no more, and 
 
 > Roth, in Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., IV. 426 ; R. V., X. i, 14. 
 2 R. v., IX. 113, 7. 
 ' Hymns in R. V., X. 
 
 * R. v., X. 82, 2. 
 
 " Miiller's Science of Langttage, II. 496. 
 
 • Rig Veda. Burial Hymns, translated by Muir, Sansk. Texts, II. 468, and by Whit- 
 ney, Bib. Sac., 1859 ; Roth, D. M. G., II. 225 ; IV. 428. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 129 
 
 took the bow from the nerveless hands, placing in 
 them — in token of Nature's bounty and protecting 
 care — portions of the body of the goat or cow, their 
 trustful ritual made appeal to the Earth to " receive 
 him kindly, and cover him with her garment as a 
 mother her child ; " to the Fire-gods, to " warm by 
 their heat his immortal part;" and to the Guide of 
 Souls, " to bear him by his sure paths to the world 
 of the just." To the body it said, " Go to thy Mother, 
 the wide-spread, bounteous, tender Earth. I lay the 
 covering on thee : may it press lightly ; thou feelest 
 it not. Pass, at thy will, to the earth or sky." And 
 to the spirit, " Go thou home to the fathers, on their 
 ancient paths : lay aside what is evil in thee : guarded 
 by Yama from his sharp-eyed sentinels, by right 
 ways ascend to the farthest heaven, if thou hast de- 
 served it, and dwell, in a shining body, with the 
 gods. May the fathers watch thy grave, and Yama 
 give thee a home." ^ "Let him depart," it is some- 
 times added, " to the mighty in battle ; to the heroes 
 who have laid down their lives for others, to those 
 who have bestowed their goods on the poor."'' 
 "Wash the feet of him who is stained with sin," 
 says the Atharva ; " let him go upward with pure 
 feet." 
 
 And so, amidst prayers, libations of water, and 
 purifying fires, the loved were sped on their unseen 
 way ; and death was conquered, in these rude children 
 of Nature, by an unquestioning trust in the eternal 
 validity of virtue, in the fidelity of the departed, in. 
 
 1 MuUer's Tmml. of Burial Hymns, in Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., IX. \.Aptendix\ and 
 Whitney, ut sitfra. The tender invocation, " mayit press lightly," was a part of the burial, 
 rite of the Greeks and Romans also. Eurip., Alcest., 463 ; Juvenal, VII. 207. 
 
 2 R. v., X. 154. 
 
 9 
 
130 • RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 the care of a Providence as wide as their thought of 
 being, or their need. 
 
 The honor paid by such childlike instincts of grati- 
 tude and trust to the souls of parents at their graves 
 was the natural bond of these simple tribes with an 
 unseen world and future life. The Sraddha, or offer- 
 ing of rice-cakes to his father's spirit, is the first duty 
 of the Hindu son ; and it has descended from remotest 
 antiquity. This oldest religion of filial piety appears 
 in all branches of the Aiyan race. 
 
 " So great," says Cicero, " is the sanctity of the tomb. 
 Our ancestors have desired that those who departed 
 this life should be held as deities." ^ Plato says : " Let 
 men fear in the first place the gods above ; next, the 
 souls of the dead, to whom in the course of nature it 
 belongs to have a care of their offspring." ^ The 
 Latin " Dii Manes " and the Greek " Theoi Chthonioi " 
 correspond perfectly to the Vedic Pitris, blessed div- 
 inities who watch over their descendants, and expect 
 their tribute of holy rites. The Pitris were in fact 
 fathers of families, and represent' the religion of 
 those patriarchal times when the family, isolated and 
 self-sustained, was the centre of social life and the 
 foundation of all law and rite. 
 
 Whether the body was buried or burned, the garment 
 The spirit- of the spirit was to be fire, " the bright armor 
 uaibody. of Agni." ^ Of coursc it caunot here receivc the 
 symbolic meaning which it holds in the mature relig- 
 ious imagination, in the poetry of the later mystics. But 
 it would be equally wrong to take it in a merely gross 
 and material sense. In fact, we detect in it the natural 
 
 » De Leg., II. 22. So Eurip., Alcest. " Slant manibus arx : " Virgil (III. 64). 
 
 s Laws, XI. 8. 
 
 ' X. v., X. 14, 8 ; 16, 4. So, in the later epic belief, the perfect men, the great sages, 
 cast off their old bodies and ascend in new ones of a splendor like the sun, and in chariots 
 of fir;. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 131 
 
 germ of all ideas, Christian or other, of a s-piritual 
 body; a blending of sense and soul; a clinging of 
 the imagination and the affections to the familiar 
 organs through which life has been manifested, as 
 if still existing or destined to resume existence, even 
 after they have turned to dust. Vedic Hymns not 
 only exhort the fire " not to burn nor tear the body," 
 but even invoke the fathers to " rejoice in heaven vsrith 
 all their limbs." Even the gods themselves have 
 material enjoyments. Here it is the deep natural in- 
 stinct of respect for life, that attributes permanence 
 and power over death even to its corporeal exponents. 
 But the maturer doctrines of a glorified spiritual body 
 and a corporeal resurrection spring originally from 
 the same instinct. They betray the same confused 
 perception of the relations of the physical with the 
 moral. And if this is not gross materialism in the 
 Christian dogma, neither is it so in the Vedic hymn. 
 
 Of the same nature, and equally common among 
 early races of the Aryan stock, is the apparent inconsis- 
 tency of treating the departed spirit as if shut up under 
 ground, and dependent on food provided at the grave 
 by living relatives, while it is at the same time invoked 
 as moving in a freer sphere, and addressed as con- 
 scious of their veneration and love.^ 
 
 The moral aspect of Vedic immortality points to the 
 same respect for life and its uses. The spirit jnimortai 
 in his armor of fire was not to live for self: he ^'f^- 
 was to protect the good, to attend the gods, and to be 
 like them.^ Such is the immortal function of the 
 ^itris, as intimated in the hymns, which represent 
 
 ' Juvenal, VII. 207 ; Eurip., Aicest., 463,993-1003 ; Helene^ 962 ; Virgil, ^n-t III. 67 ; 
 Cic. Tusc. Ques; I. 16 ; Ovid's Metam. [Orph. and Eur-yd.\ X. i 85. 
 2 Roth in D. M. G., I. 76 ; IV. 428 ; R. F., X. 15. 
 
132 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 them as altogether happy therein. "They have 
 adorned the sky with stars, placed darkness in the 
 night and light in the day." Even when drinking up 
 the libations of their worshippers, as if to satisfy phys- 
 ical thirst, they are busy in offices of guardianship. 
 Their immortal life is none other than the actual life 
 of the best men. 
 
 "On the path of the fathers, there are eight and eighty thousand 
 patriarchal men, who turn back to the earthly life to sow righteous- 
 ness and to succor it." ' 
 
 " He who gives alms goes to the highest heaven, goes to the 
 gods." " 
 
 " To be kind to the poor is to be greater than the great there." ^ 
 
 We find the same belief among the Greeks. "The 
 souls of the dead," says Plato, reproducing the oldest 
 faith of his race, "incline, like the gods, to the care 
 of the orphans and the destitute : they are kind to 
 those who act justly, but angry with those who act 
 otherwise."* 
 
 Vedic futurity has its heaven, but no very distinct 
 No infemo traccs of a hell.^ Not that sins are without their 
 penalties. 1 his would be impossible in Varuna s 
 world. " The Druhs, ' powers of evil,' follow the sins 
 of men, binding as with cords." ^ But these simple 
 hymns are natural outpouring of the trust, rather than 
 of the fears or hates, of the poet. Their divinity is mer- 
 ciful, and loves to efface the marks of transgression. 
 And the yearnings of the heart to brighten and warm 
 the shadows of futurity leave no room for that sternness 
 
 1 R. v., X. IS ; Y&jnaii(dkya, III. i86. 
 ■' R. K, I. us, s, 6. 
 » See MuUer, Chips, I. 46. 
 • Laws, XI. 8. 
 
 8 The same is true of the oldest Chinese Scriptutes, or " Kings.'' The Veda has two 
 or three intimations of an abyss of darkness. Muir V. 313. 
 8 R. v., VII. 61, 5 ; 59, 8. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 133 
 
 of judgment which would blacken them with its own 
 spirit of avenging wrath. ^ The theological hell of 
 civilized races has been worked up with a refined vin- 
 dictiveness, and a morbid exaggeration of moral evil 
 under the name of organic " sin," that does not shrink 
 from staining the eternity of God with blind inexora- 
 ble hate. But this systematized ferocity in judicial 
 logic comes from the perversion of developed mind and 
 conscience. The childish familiarities of rude races 
 with their gods are not so audacious and irreverent as 
 this ; and if they lack the constraints of its infernal 
 terrors, they escape also their fearfully demoralizing 
 power. 
 
 Here is a period of pure spontaneity in man's ex- 
 perience, before he had begun to brood over spoma. 
 the hideous fantasy of everlasting woe ; and °"'y- 
 we are glad to note how far the good impulses of 
 Nature have sped him without the goads of that dismal 
 lore. 
 
 We hail the simplicity of these moral and spiritual 
 instincts, so frank and direct, like the opening. eyes of 
 a child, or the movement of his limbs at play. This 
 entire confidence in immortality was based on an intui- 
 tive trust in the continuity of life, and in destiny pro- 
 portioned to the best desires. It associated itself with 
 filial and parental love, a firm belief in the continued 
 interest of ancestors, who had entered Varuna's world 
 beyond death. 
 
 " Give me, O Agni, to the great Aditi, that I may again behold 
 my father and my mother." 2 
 
 1 In the early teaching of Buddhism, there seems to have been a similar effect, arising 
 from the intensity of sympathy and pity. Among certain savage races, as the Kamska- 
 dales and the North American Indians, there is no definite idea of a hell. 
 
 2 R. v., I. 24, 2. 
 
134 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Such reliance on the demands of the affections is 
 prophetic of immortality in its highest meaning. It 
 comports, too, with the genial sense of present realities 
 which predominates in these Hymns. Yet this very 
 quality has perhaps led to an impression that they indi- 
 cate but faint belief in 2. future existence. The constant 
 tributes to the pitris, for example, have been repre- 
 sented as ^'^ merely an expression of grateful remem- 
 brance."^ Such estimates fail of justice to that instinct 
 of continued existence which would naturally be de- 
 veloped by a healthful confidence in life itself. It is 
 earnest and deep in the Vedic poets, for the very rea- 
 son that it is so closely associated with the affections. 
 Every god and every good act, it would seem, was the 
 promise of " immortality.'' 
 
 The sense of living, the feeling of real import in 
 actual, present experience, must have been very in- 
 tense in such a race as the Vedic Aryans. And this 
 is ever the germ and the guarantee of all genuine 
 sight in the direction of a future life. In the Rig Veda 
 it is perfectly pure and simple : it has not a trace of the 
 later schemes of transmigration, with their elaborate 
 ingenuity of fear ; nor of ascetic disciplines bartering 
 comfort in this Hfe for bliss in another. This relig- 
 ' ion is just the inborn impulse to believe, to aspire ; 
 the natural search that finds the hand it feels after, be- 
 cause it is this very hand that moves it to feel. " The 
 belief in the immortality of the soul," says Burnouf, 
 " not naked and inactive, but living and clothed with a 
 glorious body, was never interrupted for a moment : it 
 is now in India what it was in those ancient times, and 
 even rests on a similar metaphysical basis." ^ 
 
 1 Wheeler's History of Intiia, II. 436. 
 
 2 Le Veda, p. 186. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 135 
 
 Here is as yet ng jdolatrY nor organized priesthood, 
 no ecclesi astical nor mediatorial authority. The 7" 
 
 ' — — ^— r- ' " ' ■ ■_'■' ^^^•^•'~- --^^- _.^.: „ ^.,r,^ K-^. . , . 1 . Simplicity 
 
 Aryans had risen beyond the fetichism which of life and 
 is found in the lowest races to be without these '""'^^p- 
 elements/ to a stage which dispensed with them 
 through higher insight. The parent, as transmitting 
 the mysterious life principle, was the centre of religion. 
 Each householder was as Arya, capable of immedi- 
 ate relation with the family deities ; was priest and 
 psalmist in one : and rites were still domestic.^ There 
 is no trace of^ the burnings of widows, no prohibi- 
 tion of their marryingjtgsip- The filial instincts' 
 were the basis of a social order as yetjnnocentof 
 c astes.^ The marriage relation had its sacramental 
 rites; and polygamy, though not absent, was excep- 
 tional.* We are still farther from the barbarous custom 
 of polyandry, which appears more distinctly in the 
 epics, and of which a trace is discovered in but one 
 Vedic hymn.^ 
 
 A delicate sense of the significance of family ties is 
 indicated in the words chosen to represent them, -phe sexes 
 — words which remain in all Aryan tongues to ^''uai- 
 testify of this fine instinct in the childhood of the race.^ 
 The sexes are on thesame Jevdj and the Vedic idea 
 of their mutual relations strongly reminds us of that 
 which prevailed in the old Germanic tribes.'^ The 
 marriage rite by joining hands and walking round the 
 
 ^ See instances in Lubbock's Origin of Civilization. 
 
 2 Wilson's Inirod. to Rig Vedn; Burnouf, p. 226. 
 
 3 Haug, Brahma und die Brakvtanen., a£&rms, contrary to the opinion of most schol- 
 ars, that the castes existed in an orga)iized form in the oldest Vedic times. At most, how- 
 ever, his illustrations seem to prove only that germs of these distinct orders of society 
 were visible in the early rituals. His principal authority, R. V,, X. go, is generally regarded 
 as of late origin. See Muir's effective reply to this theory of Haug and Kem, in Sanskrit 
 TeMs, II. 457. Wilson, R. V., II. id. 
 
 * Muir, V. 457- ^ Wheeler's Hist, of India., II. 502. 
 
 8 Burnouf, Le Veda., ch. vii. 
 
 ' Weber's /«ar. Stud., V. 177; Pictet, Orig. Indo-Europ., II. 338. 
 
136 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 hearth does not seem to imply either a "natural " or 
 " ordained " supremacy of the male over the female.^ 
 Husband and wife were equal in the household, and 
 at the altar of sacrifice.* Woman cares for the sa- 
 cked vessels, prepares the oblation, often composes the 
 hymn. There are referencesj perhaps symbolical, to 
 the mother of the altar fire, who gathers the Soma, 
 and holds it in her bosom as a babe ; ^ to the sacred 
 mothers, who adorn this child of the sky.* There 
 are hymns descriptive of domestic affection, and 
 breathing the sentiment of love. The union of hus- 
 band and wife is likened to the " embrace of Indra by 
 the hymn." The sun follows the dawn as a man a 
 woman ; and the dawn is like " a radiant bride." 
 
 "As a loving wife shows herself to her husband, so does she, 
 smihng, reveal her form ; moving forth to arouse all creatures to 
 their labors." " All life, all breath, is in thee, O Dawn, as thou 
 ascendest. Rise, daughter of heaven, with blessings ! " ^ 
 
 The religion of labor is honored in harvest hymns. 
 The husbandman prays that "the ploughshare may 
 cut the earth with good fortune." The physician 
 blesses his heaHng herbs, and hints, with a touch of 
 humor, that it is not a bad thing to cure the sick, and 
 make money, at one stroke. ^ A democratic instinct 
 has play in this Vedic community of functions, in which 
 " the purohita could till the earth or pasture flocks, as 
 well as crush the Soma or kindle the sacred fire." '' 
 
 Some hymns have serious moral purport, and record 
 
 Ethics. the effects of vicious habits on personal and 
 
 domestic happiness, in descriptions which have 
 
 1 Pictet, Ori^-. Jndo-Etirof., II. 338. 
 
 ' Weber, Vorlemngen, pp. 37, 38 ; MMIer, Sansk. Lit., p. z8. R. V., IX. 96. 
 
 » R. v., V. 2, I, 2. 4 Ibid., II. 33, 5. 
 
 ' Rig Veda, II. 39, 2 ; I. j, 23 ; X. 43, i ; I. 48, 92. 
 
 ' R.V.,X. 97. Roth ,mD.M. G-, XXV. ' Burnouf, Essai mr le Veda, p. 227 . 
 
THE HYMNS. 1 37 
 
 lost none of their truth for human nature by the lapse 
 of three thousand years. The gambler "finds no 
 comfort in his need : his dice give transient gifts, and 
 ruin the winner : he is vexed to see his own wife, and 
 the wives and happy homes of other men." Rudra is 
 entreated not to " take advantage, like a trader, of his 
 worshippers." " Men anoint Savitri with milk, when 
 he makes man and wife of one mind." 
 Here too are philanthropic sayings : — 
 
 " I regard as king of men him who first presented a gift." 
 
 " The wise man makes the giving of largess his breastplate." 
 
 "The bountiful suffer neither want nor pain." 
 
 " The car of bounty rolls on easy wheels." 
 
 " He who, provided with food, hardens his heart against the 
 poor, meets with none to cheer him. Let every one depart from 
 such an one : his house is no home." 
 
 " Let the powerful be generous to the suppliant : let him look 
 to the long path." 
 
 " For riches revolve like wheels : they come now to one, and 
 now to another.'' >: 
 
 " He who keeps his food to himself has his sin to himself also." ' 
 
 And here finally is a quaint benediction from the 
 later Atharva Veda, which sounds like an echo of 
 this simpler domestic age : — 
 
 " I perform an incantation in your house. I impart to you con- 
 cord, with delight in each other, as of a cow at the birth of her calf. 
 Let not brother hate brother, nor sister sister." ^ 
 
 Of the Vedic sacrifices, we cannot speak so posi- 
 tively. Yet, so far as we can see, there was Meaning of 
 the same frankness and simplicity in these sacrifice. 
 as in other matters. Sacrifice is always from the 
 highest to the lowest, from the earliest to the latest 
 form, in some sense the consecration of one's best 
 and dearest possession to his ideal. Even in the 
 
 1 R v., X. 107, 117 (Muir). 2 Ath. Ved., III. 30. 
 
138 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 lowest tribes this cannot be the mere reluctant service 
 of fear, or atonement of sin : gratitude, trust, and love, 
 must mingle in these primal relations with the invisible. 
 And the very sincerity of the instinct involves search- 
 ing for the mysterious and even the noble qualities 
 of things, beyond their mere barter price ; an effort 
 to discover their representative values ; in other 
 words, an ideal aim. 
 
 And so the Aryan offered these three gifts : the 
 vedicsacri- f^dnt, whosc juices promised new life to all 
 fices. inactive powers ; clarified butter, as choicest 
 
 gift of his herds and his simple art, just as the He- 
 brew offered his corn and wine ; and, above all, fire, 
 as the purest of elements, the light and life of nature 
 and of man. These his best he brought with awe,^ 
 not only as his own choice, but as themselves par- 
 taking of the divinity, to whom he yielded them as to 
 their natural source and home. He had chosen them 
 because he saw divineness in them ; for nothing less 
 than a god could meet his desire. In the sacrificial 
 act he stood their ministrant ; to further, not to destroy, 
 their life. It was meant not only to effectuate their 
 saving power towards himself, but also to second their 
 own inmost purpose, and inspire the divinity with the 
 joy of finding his own ; speeding the inherent good- 
 will that nestled within them to its fulfilment in the 
 bright track of the altar flame. The offering, this 
 bright Agni, was thus a radiant messenger, swift to 
 bring the earthly blessing and the divine society, and 
 winged with freedom and delight. Do we not note 
 here in its early form that intuition, which makes the 
 saint or martyr see his own powers transfigured, by 
 the ideal to which they have been dedicated, as his 
 
 1 Rig Veda, I. 91; VI. 47; VI. 16, 42. 
 
THE HYMNS. 139 
 
 best gift? Such meaning was hinted in Soma, symbol 
 of life given for the good of men, to quicken them to 
 "immortality." It is the vital fire of the universe 
 poured out through the mystery of death in the plant, 
 to resurrection in the flame. " It generates the great 
 light of day, common to all mankind."^ 
 
 This covering up of destruction by consecration, 
 this absorption of the death involved in sacri- Human 
 fice by the life it is to effect, this belief in the sax:rifices. 
 exaltation of the victims above all loss, through satis- 
 faction of the divine affinities within them, — is for- 
 ever the significant fact in the sacrificial impulse, under 
 whatever name it appears. Even its darkest forms 
 are interwoven with this redeeming instinct. This is 
 our key to the painful fact that at some time or in 
 some form human sacrifice has been the custom of 
 almost every race of men.^ It has everywhere been 
 regarded, to a greater or less extent, as an exaltation 
 of the victim, a fulfilment of his best desire ; as his 
 sublime opportunity of representing the affections of 
 the worshippers, the atonement of their sins, or the 
 assurance of their hopes. Thus the Nicaraguans 
 believed that only such as offered themselves on the 
 funeral piles of the chiefs would become immortal.^ 
 The Aztec victim was held to be the favorite of the 
 god ; and every gift and honor was lavished on him in 
 preparation for his exalted destiny. We are told of a 
 Mexican king who devoted himself with many of his 
 lords to sacrificial death, to efface the dishonor of an 
 insult ! * The Khonds regard their chosen human 
 victims as divine, rear them with utmost tenderness, 
 
 ' Rig Veda., IX. 6i. 
 
 * The sad record is summed up in Baring Gould's work on the Origin of Religiout 
 Beluf-i ch. xviii. See also Mackay's Progress of the Intellect, vol. ii. 
 
 s Brinton's Myths, &c., p. 145. * Prescott's Mexico, I. 84. 
 
140 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 and teach them that a noble destiny awaits them.' 
 The choice of such victims as were free from blemish, 
 as well as most precious and honored, whether of 
 beast or man, in the rites of Baal, Moloch, or Zeus, is 
 sufficient evidence that the fate was believed to be 
 essentially a blessing. In the Ramayana, the -hermit 
 Sarabhanga, believing himself desired by Brahma for 
 his heaven, only defers self-immolation till Rama's 
 coming. Having seen this incarnation, he is content, 
 and " hastens to cast oif his body as a serpent his 
 slough." He prepares a funeral pile, enters the fire, 
 and being burned, arises as a youth from the ashes, 
 bright as flame. ^ 
 
 The burning of widows with their husbands, prac- 
 tised under Brahmanical rules, and not yet quite 
 extinct, was not only commended by the hope of re- 
 joining the lost, but even desired as a crown of glory 
 in the eyes of the assembled people. It was also a 
 deliverance from the doom to solitary asceticism, or to 
 new repulsive relations for securing male descend- 
 ants to the deceased. Mutual attachment alone would 
 have made sati quite natural under these circum- 
 stances.^ It has been estimated that five-sixths of the 
 women who undergo it are moved by devotion to their 
 affections.^ The actual spirit of this rite lifts it high 
 among those forms of martyrdom which have grown 
 out of ignorant notions of duty, whether Pagan or 
 Christian. Women have been seen seated in the 
 flames, Hfting their joined hands as calmly as if at 
 ordinary prayer.^ Ibn Batuta reports, in the four- 
 teenth century, that the woman was usually surrounded 
 
 ' Mrs. Spier's India, p. 21. 2 RamSyana, B. III. 
 
 > See Wheeler's Hist, cf India, 11. 116, and Arnold's Life of Dalhausie, II. 316. 
 
 « Arnold, II. 314. Life of Elfhimtone, I. 360. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 141 
 
 by friends who gave her commissions to spirits de- 
 parted, while she laughed, played, or danced, down 
 to the moment of being burnt. And the Dabistan 
 tells us it is " not considered right to force a woman 
 into the fire." 
 
 In the Mahabharata, two widows of a raja dispute 
 for the privilege, one pleading that she was the favor- 
 ite wife, the other that she was the first and chief. 
 Herodotus mentions the custom of the Thracians to 
 select the best beloved wife for this honor, to the grief 
 of the rest.i And the Norse Sagas refer to widows 
 who, like Nanna, the wife of Baldur, insisted on 
 following their dead husbands and sharing their 
 destiny.^ 
 
 If, then, human sacrifice existed among the Vedic 
 Aryans, it must have been regarded as an 
 
 , , ^ - , . . In the Veda, 
 
 exaltation of the victim ; and to a greater ex- 
 tent than we can now realize accepted by him as such. 
 Even in the later Puranas, this barbarous rite, which 
 had become a part of the established worship of Siva, 
 is found still penetrated by such beliefs ; and without 
 them would surely have been a far more cruel super- 
 stition than it was. Siva declares the victim to be 
 " even as himself." Brahma and all the deities 
 " assemble in him, and be he ever so great a sinner 
 he is made pure, and gains the love of the universe." ^ 
 That such sacrifices were ever offered by the Vedic 
 Aryans is by no means clear ; and the supposed notices 
 of this, as well as of the " Horse Sacrifice," in the 
 Hymns and the Brahmanas, are very uncertain histor- 
 ical data ; * while sacrifices destructive of life in any 
 
 1 Herod., v. 5. 
 
 2 Keyser, Private Life of ike Northmen^ p. '42. 
 8 KaHk& Purina, As. Res.^ vol. v. 
 
 « See, on one hand, Colebrooke (I. 61, 62); Wilson, in As. your., XVII.; Roth, in 
 
142 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 form seldom appear in the Rig Veda."^ There is 
 nowhere any mention of human sacrifices, in dis- 
 tinct terms, in the whole Rig Veda; and the only- 
 evidence for even an allusion to them rests on an 
 inference from the later form of one old Vedic legend. 
 Sunahsepa, afterwards the centre of this sacrificial 
 tale, is in the Vedic Hymn itself simply a prisoner, 
 bound and in deadly peril, who is delivered through 
 his prayer toVaruna, as Master of life and death. 
 And so the poet sings, "May He, the far-ruling One, 
 hear us without wrath, taking not away our life. This 
 they say to me day and night ; this my own heart 
 teaches me. He whom the fettered Sunahsepa sought 
 in prayer, Varuna our King, shall us also free."^ 
 There is no necessary allusion here to a sacrificial 
 rite; and the pnly ground for supposing such refer- 
 ence is in the mythic story found in the later Aitareya 
 Brahmana ; ^ in which Sunahsepa is the son of a 
 starving Brahman, and bought for a price, to be 
 offered to Varuna, as substitute for a certain prince, 
 who, having been devoted from his birth, is taking 
 this method to ransom himself from the doom. Here 
 also Varuna acts the part not of a destroying, but of a 
 preserving God, which is his natural function in old 
 Hindu faith. For again and again he defers exacting 
 his claim to the prince's life, and when Sunahsepa is 
 
 Weber's Ind, Si-ud., II. 112. On the other, Miiller's strongly expressed suspicions, 
 Sausk. Lit., 419, and Weber's additional illustrations to confirm them, in Zeitschr. d. 
 D. M. G; XVIII. 262. Of the two Vedic Hymns concerning the Horse Sacrifice, " one at 
 least," says Burnouf, " is certainly symbolical ; " and Weber himself has shown (ui sujira, 
 p. 276) that the long list ai persons of every class, enumerated as victims in the V&yasaneyi 
 SanhitS, must certainly be, in part if not altogether, of a similar character. 
 
 1 Wilson's Introd., xxiv. 
 
 2 R. v., I. 7, 1, 12; V. 1,2, 7. 
 
 > See Miiller's Sansk. Lit., p. 408 ; 'Weha'slnd. Stud., II. 112. The myth of a sacri- 
 fice of Purusha, the Spirit, by the gods (R. V., X. 90), beheved by Haug to prove the 
 existence of human sacrifice in the oldest time, is regarded by Muir as of late origin. 
 
THE HYMNS. I43 
 
 bound in his stead, at the altar, answers his prayer, as 
 in the older legend, with deliverance, bidding him 
 "praise the gods and so be free." 
 
 Here, however, it is plainly implied that men were 
 sometimes offered up in these ^osi-Vedic ages 
 
 ; , m Records of 
 
 of the Brahmanas. The same ages record a hmnansam- 
 substitution of the horse for man as a sacrificial^'^' 
 victim ; then of the ox for the horse ; then succes- 
 sively of the sheep, the goat, and lastly of the earth 
 and its products.' These mythic intimations of what 
 was perhaps historic fact derive strength from anal- 
 ogous legends recorded of other races ; as that of the 
 ram substituted for Isaac in the Hebrew story, and of 
 the hind received for Iphigenia, by Diana, in the 
 Greek. Manetho relates that Amasis, King of Egypt, 
 abolished the sacrifices of Typhonic men at the tomb 
 of Osiris, and substituted wax figures; and Ovid, that 
 images made of bulrushes were thrown into the Tiber 
 in place of the old sacrifices of living beings. Many 
 Greek heroes are credited with abolishing this barbar- 
 ity, as Cecrops, Hercules, Theseus. And to Krishna 
 in the Mahabharata myth, who punishes it as a crime 
 to have offered victims to Siva, corresponds the histor- 
 ical Mexican monarch, who delivered Anahuac from 
 similar rites. 
 
 These analogies, however, do not prove that the 
 custom in India went back, as Haug has in- 
 
 ° Results. 
 
 sisted, to Vedic times. Such testimonies, if 
 mythologic, may but prove a consciousness of the in- 
 herent cruelty of such forms of worship, and the desire 
 to find far back in antiquity an authority for discon- 
 tinuing them. They would thus testify to a germ of 
 progress, even in stages of social decay. That human 
 
 1 A itareya Br&hmana-^ as quoted by Miiller. 
 
144 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 sacrifices were oifered in later periods of Hindu his- 
 tory is certain ; but there may well have been an 
 earlier age when they had not yet an existence, as 
 there was for that noble Toltec civilization on the West- 
 ern continent, whose pure and simple religion was all 
 engulfed in the sanguinary institutions of the Aztecs. 
 And there is much in the character of Vedic civiliza- 
 tion to make us hesitate, in the present state of the evi- 
 dence, to believe that it could have mingled immolation 
 of men with its simple offerings of the product of the 
 dairy and the plant of the field. 
 
 The Vedic gods were indeed believed to approve the 
 Different destruction of the evil-doer who offended their 
 fonnsofhu- gQ ig End rcsistcd their claims; and to slay 
 
 man sacn- ^ -^ ./ 
 
 fice. " godless Dasyus " was an acceptable service. 
 
 But this desire to find a religious sanction for inflict- 
 ing extreme penalties on real or imagined crime is 
 manifestly to be distinguished from the desire to please 
 the deity by bestowing on him a human victim purely 
 as an oblation. The national gods of the Hebrew, 
 the Greek, and the Norseman, were appealed to in 
 the same way, as fully disposed to destroy their ene- 
 mies, and to accept for service such revenges as the 
 worshipper chose to inflict in their name, on his own. 
 Substantially the same spirit is ascribed to the Chris- 
 tian God in the doctrine of eternal punishment, which 
 is simply a refinement of the belief that deity would 
 fain deal inexorably with its foes, though carried over 
 into the other life and from physical to eternal woe. 
 It appears frequently in the New Testament,^ and ap- 
 parently comes from the lips of Jesus,® as well as from 
 the intolerant disciple he rebukes. But incomparably 
 
 » Matt. XXV. 41, 46; Romans ix. 17-23; i Tim. 1. 20; Apoalypse, passim. 
 ' Matt. X. 33; xii. 32; xxiii. 33; xviii. 17, 18, 35; xxv. 41. 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 145 
 
 the worst form of the inference that God is pleased by 
 the severest punishment of crime is to be found in 
 those bloody inquisitions upon the persons of heretics 
 and witches, in which Christian ages have certainly 
 surpassed all others in human history. Many in- 
 stances in Hebrew annals, mistaken for human sacri- 
 fices,^ were of this character. They were in fact 
 barbarous penalties inflicted on actual or supposed 
 criminals; such as " hewing" hostile kings in pieces, 
 and " hanging up " law-breakers or tyrannical fami- 
 lies " before the Lord," and " consecrating " one's self 
 to Him, by putting to the sword those who had 
 relapsed into idolatry. They were simply the earlier 
 analogues of modern Christian rejoicings over barbar- 
 ous massacres of the heathen in India and Algeria, and 
 of Christian arguments for the death penalty as based 
 on a commandment of God. In all these cruel atone- 
 ments, the victim is held to he. faying the fenalty for 
 his sins; and they differ very decidedly from human 
 sacrifices in the proper sense, such as Jephthah's offer- 
 ing of his virgin daughter, or the abominations of Baal 
 worship,® or the dreadful Cherem, devoting to death men 
 "not to be redeemed;"^ or, we may add, the Chris- 
 tian " atonement," which is of essentially similar nature, 
 — a death of the best to satisfy divine justice for the 
 sin of the worst. 
 
 In the former or simply primitive class of sacrifices, 
 the Vedic age of course abounded ; though there is no 
 evidence of special cruelty in their warfare, or special 
 barbarism either in dealing with offenders, or in grati- 
 fying personal revenge. Of distinctive human sacri- 
 fice there seems on the whole to be no positive proof. 
 
 * Numbers, xxv. 4, 13 ; xxi. 2 ; i Sam. xv. 33 ; 2 Sam. xxi. 9 ; Exod. xxxii. 27, 29. 
 See Mackay, Progress of ike Intellect, II. 456. 
 
 * Fsalm cvi. 38; Ezek. xx. 31. ^ Levit. xxvii. 28. 
 
 10 
 
146 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 It is said in a Hymn in praise of Vishnu that " men 
 Free bear- worship him, offering him their libation face 
 ing towards to face."^ And Agni is ever a " companion " 
 the gods. ^^^ ^^ confidant." We note with especial inter- 
 est this cordial freedom in the bearing of the early- 
 Aryans towards their gods. Deity was the " gracious, 
 well-beloved guest" of the householder's altar and 
 hearth, invited to find home there, to give and receive ; 
 praised among the people as their " food and dwell- 
 ing," reverenced as a " kinsman " and " friend." ^ So 
 the Greeks addressed the gods standing, and some- 
 times prayed sitting. The Homeric heroes converse 
 freely with the Olympians, whose human interests are 
 as profound and absorbing as their divine ; are in fact 
 one and the same thing with these. And this was not 
 due to irreverence, or to a low ideal of the divine. It 
 was partly a form of childlike confidence, and partly a 
 manly self-respect, to which slavishness was unknown 
 and impossible. While the religious sentiment is yet 
 untaught by science, this freedom is a strong defence ; 
 and wherever in such epochs it does not exist, there 
 must be grovelling fear before the phantoms of the 
 religious fancy ; and thence that blind intolerance and 
 savage cruelty which befit the spiritual slave. 
 
 It is one of the grand compensations for all er- 
 ourdebtto Tors iuvolved in polytheism, that it consulted 
 Polytheism, individual liberty far more than the stern 
 exclusiveness and absolute will of monotheism. Its 
 principle has been finely stated to be the " independ- 
 ence of forces." ^ The soul protects its own right to 
 grow in every direction, by creating a divine balance 
 of powers; the basis of which is in its instinct of 
 
 • j?. r., X. I, 3- Mbid., IV. I, 20; VI. 16, 42; VI. J. 7, 8; 1.31,10. 
 
 * Menard, La Morale avant les Fhilosopkes, p. 94. 
 
THE HYMNS. l^ij 
 
 equal justice to all. And thus while the religion of 
 the monotheistic Semites, wherever it has followed its 
 native instincts, has proved ungenial to many forms of 
 growth, that of the polytheistic Aryans has been a 
 hearty tolerance, inviting the full expansion of human 
 nature. But for Greek liberty and culture, Hebrew 
 concentration on the Unity of God, descending through 
 its Christian modifications, would, with all the purity 
 of its spiritual ideals, have been to the modern world a 
 legacy of moral bondage and intellectual death. The 
 early error had its truth, which saved us from that 
 one-sided and narrow view of another truth, which 
 would make it error. Faith in many gods was in 
 fact a recognition of that manifoldness of expression 
 by which the divine really becomes human ; and there- 
 fore, in the beautiful and orderly path of human evolu- 
 tion, it has not been wanting ; so that we know how 
 to worship The One in fulness of free opportunity 
 and integrity of culture. The keys of progress were 
 not committed to any single race or religion. Greek 
 and Jew alike were inspired ; alike heard eternal 
 truths, and bore divine messages to the generations 
 whose day was to be more liberal for the mingled 
 light of this twofold dawn. The Semite has sought 
 to preserve the principle of authority in the divine; 
 the Aryan, that of development in the human. Only 
 the maturer reason of man could learn the true mean- 
 ing of both these principles and their unity in Uni- 
 versal Religion. 
 
 The Hebrew, or Christian, and the Aryan Bibles 
 are very unlike each other. The resemblance of the 
 praises of Indra or Varuna to the praises of Jehovah 
 goes, after all, but a little way. Even the Gospel of 
 John, with all its Alexandrian inspiration, is touched 
 
148 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 only at certain points with the creative religious im- 
 agination of the Aryan mind. Semitic ardor has 
 warmed and illumined many of the dark passages 
 of nature and life. But the Rishis also, lovers and 
 searchers of the Light, " saw " what they sang. The 
 debt we owe to the prophets and psalmists of Jehovah, 
 and to the Christian ideal, we are not likely to over- 
 look or to undervalue. But we do need to be reminded 
 of other historical obligations and affinities. The 
 monotheist, whether of Athens, Rome, or Palestine, 
 was not the sole parent of our. modern faith. The 
 plastic susceptibility which secures it from permanent 
 intolerance, opening broad paths of experience in 
 every direction, comes, so far as it depends on the past, 
 of our polytheistic affinities and descent. Our liberty 
 and our science, the sense of free communion with God 
 and Nature through principles, ideas, laws, — are in 
 the fine of the Veda rather than of the Thora or the 
 Gospels. These Aryan children feel no separation 
 from God through their thirst to know. To them 
 deity is not apart from man, but in him, revealed in 
 the free play of his own energies. They look straight 
 at the facts with their own eyes, not as aliens, and under 
 ban ; no sense of a " fall " comes in between to dis- 
 able the natural sight, nor is miracle made to dispar- 
 age the famifiar facts of life ; no exclusive incarnation 
 limits the divine meaning of Nature as a whole ; no 
 external authority judges or supplants free thought, 
 aspiration, pursuit of truth. The modern spirit recog- 
 nizes its own features here in their infancy.. This is 
 plainly the inextinguishable spark that has flamed at 
 last into our free arts and sciences and beliefs, and 
 shines with steady radiance in the civilization that 
 issues in such diverse types of universality as Goethe 
 
THE HYMNS. 
 
 149 
 
 and Humboldt and Emerson. And for the germs of 
 this our larger opportunity, which guarantees wisdom 
 and gladness to man's present and future thought ; of 
 his genial outlook upon life as a home, and his fearless 
 hospitality to its forces and laws ; of the home-born 
 courage to use all faculties and open all paths ; of 
 the assurance that we are not slaves of prescription, 
 whether to person, creed, or distinctive religion, but 
 natural heirs to universal truth ; of the self-respect 
 whose religion is rational, and the liberty whose ideal 
 is endless progress, — we must go back to the frank 
 Aryan herdsman, inviting his gods to sit as guests 
 beside him on his heap of Kusa-grass. 
 
IV. 
 
 TRADITION. 
 
TRADITION. 
 
 " A ND Brahma said to Manu, ' Divide the Veda, O 
 ■^^ Sage! The age is changed; the strength, the 
 fire is gone down; every thing is on the path of 
 decay.' " This passage from the Vayu Purana shows 
 us that the later Hindus were not without perception 
 of the causes which brought three ritualistic Script- 
 ures out of the simple Rig Veda Hymns. 
 
 The spontaneity of a germinant faith greets us only 
 to disappear. We are to pass from primitive Limits of 
 Aryan piety along a track, such as every re- '3=g™eracy. 
 ligion has seemed fated to tread ; wherein we should 
 find bitter discouragement, as being led ever further 
 from the promise of the morning, were not every 
 lapse the guarantee of a coming self-recovery of 
 human nature, the nobler for the depth of the apparent 
 fall. We shall see this social equality exchanged for 
 the complex hierarchy of caste ; this liberty of private 
 worship for the despotism of an official priesthood; 
 this inspiration for the pedantic echoes of past reve- 
 lations, themselves regarded as but mediators of a 
 yet older gospel, — those same manly Hymns which 
 we have just now admired as made to rebuke, not 
 ta compel, a servile fear. We shall see this genial 
 practical vigor yield to expiatory sacrifices and the 
 
154 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 terrors of transmigration ; this freedom of the moun- 
 taineer to the enervation of dreamers among tropical 
 banyans and palms. In a word, we shall note a two- 
 fold degeneracy, caused by the forces of Ecclesiastical 
 Organization and Physical Nature. 
 
 But this is by no means a full account of the process ; 
 and that we may deal fair measure in our interpreta- 
 tion of it, we must be able to enter into the spirit of 
 these remote civilizations, as we would enter into the 
 inner life of a new personality, to do it justice for its 
 own sake. 
 
 At the outset then, let us appreciate that Worship 
 '. , of Tradition, which lies at the root of Ori- 
 
 Onental -^ ' 
 
 Worship of ental faith. It is not to be judged by the 
 t epast. patent vices of modern traditionablsw?, whose 
 preference of outworn, lifeless finalities to an ever-open 
 spirit of inquiry is not a foundation of faith, but a form 
 of unbelief This is a trailing shadow, flowing away 
 from the living substance of worship. But, whatever 
 else was wanting to it. Oriental veneration for the Past 
 ■Was at least a fervent and supreme faith. That pro- 
 found absorption in religious sentiment which we saw 
 iti the Veda is typical of the whole mind of these 
 Eastern races. Their tradition-worship was a rude 
 form of reverence for the Eternal : it was awe before 
 everlastingness. They built their temples and hewed 
 out their caves and their focfc statues on a scale that 
 should symbolize this awe. It was because the religious 
 books, ritesi legends, hymns, seemed as old as the 
 stars and streams and patriarchal trees, and memory 
 \ivent not back to their beginnings, that they were held 
 sacred. Their permanfence belittled the fleeting lives, 
 the vanishing dreams iand deeds of men : it did not 
 minister to their vailityj but t© their humility. Man 
 
TRADITION. 
 
 iSS 
 
 could have had things so ancient and so stable, only 
 of God. If the hoary head was believed the patri- 
 archal chrism, the visible sign of divine appointment 
 to the oldest priesthood, much more should God be 
 present in words white with the love and awe of un- 
 told generations ; words which could no more come to 
 death than they could be traced back to any mortal 
 birth. The earliest sense of immortality came, as we 
 have seen, in the feeling of a continuous existence 
 traceable through ihe ^ttris or progenitors, and in the 
 aspiration to become one with them in their inviolable 
 home; for the serene silence of the past in which 
 they dwelt was a fit shrine to hold the moral and 
 spiritual idealism of their descendants. "The pitris," 
 according to this faith, "are free from wrath, intent 
 on purity, without sensual passion ; primeval divini- 
 ties, who have laid strife aside. "^ It was a worship 
 founded in gratitude, the apotheosis of the tenderest 
 sentiments. "A parent's care in producing and rear- 
 ing children," says the law, " cannot be compensated 
 in a hundred years." ^ This authority of ideal love 
 and duty penetrated all worlds. Even the gods could 
 not turn recreant to the past, and forsake their duties 
 to progenitors, without penalty : they were even in- 
 voked by the priests, in sacrifice, by the names of their 
 special ancestry.* 
 
 Under such conditions, Bibliolatry deserves a cer- 
 tain respect. As these old Vedic Hymns, i,^^„^„^^ 
 in process of time, came to be collected, ar- fonhe 
 ranged, and enlarged into Samaveda and Yajur- 
 veda for purposes of ritual service, we note indeed 
 the failure of inspiration, and the growth of ecclesias- 
 
 » M>iM>. (II. I9J. * Ibid., II. 227- 
 
 8 Mil'-.* , Sanskrit Literature^ p. 386. 
 
IS6 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ticism ; yet there is something tender as well as noble in 
 the faithfulness with which the Hindu cherished them 
 as " reminiscences of a former state ; " ^ as " words 
 heard from above," ^ committed to him by a long line 
 of ancestors, who still sought him with yearning care, 
 and who were cherished with the whole strength of 
 his affections ; their primitive Sanskrit the very lan- 
 guage of God ; their syllables so full of virtue that they 
 needed not to be uttered or even understood, only silently 
 whispered in the heart ; yet every one of them laden 
 with ineiFable meanings, which endless commentaries 
 sought in vain to exhaust; laden with Brahmanas, 
 Upanishads, Sutras, Puranas ; literally a thousand 
 schools of biblical science founded on their mooted 
 texts ; wells of theology, literature, science, legisla- 
 tion, for ever brimming, let never so much be drawn 
 off from age to age.^ It is but a childish thought of 
 everlastingness ; but this child is Humanity ! Then 
 how colossal that outgrowth of the intuition, how utter 
 that faith, how prodigal that toil in its service ! And 
 if age be indeed venerable, surely there was better 
 ground for such Bibliolatry than for any other that 
 has ever existed. What records, what institutions, can 
 be called time-hallowed by the side of these ? When 
 Solon boasted of the antiquity of Greek wisdom, the 
 old priest of Sais led him through the sepulchral 
 chambers, showed him the tombs of a hundred dynas- 
 
 » Tht VedaKta. » Mann. 
 
 » Manu (XII. 94-102) declares the Vedas " an eye giving constant light, not made by 
 man, nor to be measured by his powers. All that has been, is, or shall be, is revealed 
 by them : all creatures are sustained, all authority is imparted, all prosperity given, by the 
 knowledge of these, which bums out the taint of sin, and makes one approach the divine 
 nature though he sojourns in this low world." — " Brahma has milked out of them three 
 holy letters, — A. U. M. ; three mystic words, — Earth, Sky, Heaven ; three sacred meas- 
 ures of verse, — the G^yatri: and these immutable things, the essence of this wisdom that 
 was from the beginning, shall be sanctity and salvation to him who ceaselessly utters them 
 with faith." II. 74-84. 
 
TRADITION. 157 
 
 ties, recounted to him the annals of nine thousand 
 years, and admonished him that he was but a child, 
 that there lived no aged Greek. "You have no re- 
 mote tradition, O Solon, nor any discipline that is 
 hoary with age." What must the pandits of Benares 
 think of the Christian missionary, who would supplant 
 their veneration for the Sanskrit Vedas by claiming that 
 divine guardianship has transmitted his Greek or even 
 his Hebrew Scriptures? Wherein is his advantage? 
 Is not every Bible a cup that holds what the drinker 
 wills? "Every one who pleases," says the Dabistan, 
 ''may derive from the Vedas arguments in favor of 
 his particular creed, to such a^ degree that they can 
 support by clear proofs the philosophical, mystical, 
 unitarian, and atheistical systems ; Hinduism, Judaism, 
 Christianity, Fire-worship, the tenets of the Sonites or 
 Shiites ; in short, these volumes consist of such ingen- 
 ious parables and sublime meanings, that all who 
 seek may find their wishes fulfilled." ^ 
 
 A mature, self-conscious generation cannot compete 
 with races of instinctive faith, upon their own ground, 
 without making itself more childish than they. Its 
 own liberty to inquire and grow is what represents, in 
 a nobler way, that very authority of age which tradi- 
 tion-worship but dimly divined. Nature is older than 
 ritual or Bible, and the personality of Man more ven- 
 erable, even with years, than all his " special revela- 
 tions." We cannot forsake the insight nor the tasks 
 of the man for the unquestioning credence of the child. 
 But in the child we none the less admire a tender 
 respect for age. We recognize the "trailing cloud of 
 glory ; " a filial instinct towards eternity ; an inborn- 
 sense of our affinity with imperishable life. 
 
 ' Dadist&n, ch. II. 2. 
 
158 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 To the unfolding consciousness of the race as of the 
 individual, the first great mystery is memory. 
 
 Memory: ^ . 
 
 its divine All dear and honored things pass into one 
 *™'"°°- silent but living fold, and there await the call 
 that evokes them from their sleep. There death is 
 incessantly overcome, and swallowed up in resur- 
 rection. In this light of endless preservation and 
 renovation the fact of immortality is first revealed. 
 Megasthenes tells us that no monuments were erected 
 in India to the dead, because the people believed that 
 their virtues would make them immortal in the memory 
 of -posterity . We are far away now from those days 
 when man bent in natural wonder before this experi- 
 ence of renewal. The memory is, for us, one of many 
 faculties, into which our science has analyzed the 
 mind, and with which we have grown but too familiar 
 as human instruments to venerate them as mysteries of 
 power. But to the awakening soul it was the wonder 
 of wonders, the power of powers. It might well be, 
 as it was, the earliest purely spiritual deity of the hu- 
 man race. It was the only preserver of man's " winged 
 words," the only conductor between his past and his 
 future ; and its stupendous achievements were at once 
 result and warrant of the reverent culture it received. 
 For many centuries the treasures of human experi- 
 ence, of hymn, meditation, and ritual, accumulating 
 from remotest time, were in its keeping alone ; and 
 the immense deposit was transmitted more faithfully 
 than by the later devices of writing and printing. 
 The prophet was "the rememberer," the "bearer on" 
 of an ancient message. Never to forget was the most 
 sacred and tender duty. The Greeks preserved Homer 
 in their memory alone for four hundred years. Down 
 to the time of Buddha there is no positive evidence of 
 
TRADITION. 159 
 
 a written Sanskrit. Veda does not mean Scriptures, 
 does not mean Bible, or Book at all, but, more spiritu- 
 ally, Wisdom. The Hindus know no dearer name 
 for it than " Words remembered from the beginning." 
 Through indefinite ages this whole literature was 
 transmitted in this invisible way, by means of inces- 
 sant mnemonic practice,-' and guarded from the dese- 
 crating hand of the penman, even after the introduction 
 of writing, by stern prohibitions as well as by traditional 
 contempt. And it has been finely suggested that the 
 ample satisfaction afforded to every need of intellectual 
 and religious communication, by their splendid culture 
 of the memory, may have prevented the early Hindus 
 from inventing a written alphabet; an achievement 
 which other races, such as the Chinese, Egyptians, 
 and Hebrews, owed to their inability to mature this 
 more intellectual instrument. ^ In Plato's Egyptian 
 myth in the Phzedrus, the god who invents letters as a 
 medicine for memory is told that he is doing detri- 
 ment to the mind, by teaching men to remember out- 
 wardly by means of foreign marks, instead of inwardly, 
 by their own faculties. We can at least admire the 
 fine economy of Nature, in opening the resources of 
 this faculty in men, while as yet science had not se- 
 cured other means of preserving and transmitting 
 thought. How should we ever, in this age of discon- 
 tinuous reading and ephemeral journalism, — chopped 
 feed for ruining these powers, — come to realize, as 
 Mailer has well suggested, how vast they are? 
 
 Thus even Oriental worship of tradition has its own 
 proper root in human nature, and its noble germs also 
 
 J See MUlIer's account of such exercises in Hindu schools, Sansk. LU.j p. 504. 
 2 Pictet, II. S58. 
 
l60 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 of future dignities ; nor had those children of memory- 
 turned their faces, hke our religious traditionalists, 
 coldly and unbelievingly to a dead Past. 
 
 And so, when we see the Hindu slowly elaborating 
 his minute ritualism ^ in that still life along the 
 
 Onental rit- ° 
 
 uaiisman Gaugcs, tweuty-five hundred years ago, until 
 "^'^" he had transferred, out of his brooding thought 
 of the Everlasting, its inviolable permanence into all 
 works and ways, we cannot permit any superstition 
 or puerility involved in it to hide the fact that it brings 
 also its incentives to respect for human nature. That 
 hypocrisy and sanctimony were quite as possible in 
 this as in any other religious form, is palpable ; but 
 the essence of Oriental ritualism was certainly reality. 
 The absorbed ascetic, girt with sacrificial cord, gesticu- 
 lating before animals and plants, bowing to his platter, 
 walking round it, wetting his eyes, shutting his nos- 
 trils and mouth by turns, muttering spells as in a 
 dream, performing his three suppressions of the breath, 
 whispering the three sacred letters, pronouncing at 
 intervals the three holy words and measures,^ is to 
 nature, reason, and common sense, in many ways, an 
 unedifying spectacle ; yet, as compared with much 
 modern formalism of a less detailed and visible sort, 
 he will compel a serious moral esteem. "These 
 Hindu gesticulations," says Professor Wilson,^ " are 
 not subjects of ridicule, because reverentially prac- 
 tised by men of sense and learning." That quaint 
 writer, James Howell, the contemporary of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, whom he in many ways resembled, tells us 
 frankly : " I knock thrice every day at heaven's gate, 
 
 1 See the microscopic regulation of times, rites, food, and auguries detailed in the first 
 book of yajnavalliya's Law Code, and the fifth of Manu. 
 
 ' Manu, II. 74. • Essays on Hindu Religion, II. 57. 
 
TRADITION. l6l 
 
 besides prayers at meals, and other occasional ejacu- 
 lations, as upon the putting on of a clean shirt, wash- 
 ing my hands, .and lighting the candles. And as I 
 pray thrice a day, so I fast thrice a week," &c. These 
 quaint devotions, somewhat in the Oriental spirit, 
 may help us to distinguish the idea which its round 
 of observances sought to embody, from the formal- 
 ism of mercantile piety that pays off a business-like 
 God at a fixed rate, in days, words, and rites ; set- 
 ting apart for this exalted Personage, a Church, a 
 Bible, an abstract morality, that it may keep its houses, 
 trades, politics, and practical prudence for quite othfer 
 dedications. Oriental ceremonial was at least essen- 
 tially an effort to cover the whole of life with divine 
 relation. It was recognized that the primacy of relig- 
 ion did not cease at some given point, where men 
 may have chosen to draw the line. That is not relig- 
 ion whose outward law and set plan fastens on us 
 like a thumb-screw, is endured as penance, and gladly 
 thrown off to escape the pain and awkwardness of its 
 constraints. Relations which are affirmed in theory 
 to be unnatural, and shown in practice to be so by 
 systematic evasion, have certainly little to do with 
 either faith or freedom. 
 
 Behind the dreary ceremonialism of the old relig- 
 ions, there is the aspiration of an ideal. The despot- 
 ism of priestcraft does not explain such phenomena 
 as the requirements of Burmese law, that a priest 
 when eating shall inwardly say, " I eat not to please 
 my palate, but to support life ; " when dressing, " I put 
 on these robes, not to be vain of them, but to conceal 
 my nakedness ; " and in taking medicine, " I desire 
 recovery, only that I may be the more diligent in 
 
1 62 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 devotion." ^ That minute regulation of the form, 
 whether inward or outward, in which we should find 
 the death not of spontaneity only, but of sincerity, 
 must be taken in connection with the permanent habit 
 of the Oriental mind, which in each individual was 
 itself, more or less, a constant reproduction of the 
 original meaning of the precept. The instinctive 
 demand for enduring things required that the whole 
 of life should reflect divine unchangeableness, from 
 the largest relations to the least. There must be 
 nothing hurried, erratic, impulsive : all must be fixed 
 and serene, an image of brooding deity. Human 
 action had surer determination than the impulses of 
 the moment. Fate was the dearest of divinities to these 
 contemplative minds, because it expressed this idea of 
 an unalterable path, and satisfied this instinctive yearn- 
 ing for absolute devotion to the religious ideal. Where 
 reason has not yet come to its sure revolt against im- 
 plicit faith, men move in the chains of habit, which they 
 themselves have forged, with slight sense of bondage, 
 and without the moral degradation which always 
 enters with enforced conformity. There is freedom 
 in spontaneity, even of Religious Form. 
 
 It is generally allowed that the Oriental races wear 
 their robes of ceremony, whether in worship 
 
 Its freedom. . . , , , -^ 
 
 or m manners, with real ease, and even a 
 strange grace, in spite of endless petty elaboration. 
 " There is more civility and grace among all classes 
 in India," we are told, " than in corresponding classes 
 in Europe and America."^ This is because their 
 etiquette is spontaneous, without doubleness and self- 
 rebuke in the person, a wholeness, a genuine faith. 
 
 > Malcom, Travels in Burmah. » Allen's India, p. 483. 
 
TRADITION. 163 
 
 Manners are here a part of religion, and common 
 actions grow punctilious from an instinctive sense 
 of accord with the ideal form. There is, I doubt 
 not, a kind of freshness and even freedom in the 
 Hebrew boy, as he binds the thongs of his tephillin 
 seven times round his wrist, and thrice round his 
 finger, and repeats the formularies over every bit of 
 food, and at sight of every change that passes 
 over the face of Nature, and on the "enjoyment of 
 any new thing, "i For the Hebrew still retains in some 
 measure the infantile faith in forms as the natural 
 body of piety, and in piety which clothes the whole 
 of life in a time-hallowed ritual. It is not Form as 
 such that is ungracious, constrained, or undevout, but 
 forms that do not express the life in its unity and 
 integrity. In the instinctive ease and freedom of 
 Oriental routine there is even an image, not so faint 
 as to be insignificant, of that perfect liberty of the 
 wise and just person, whose every act is unconditional, 
 inevitable, precise as the planet's sweep. 
 
 " Slight those who say, amidst their sickly healths, 
 Thou livest by rule. What doth not so, but man ? 
 Houses are built by rule, and commonwealths. 
 Entice the hasty sun, if but you can, 
 From his ecliptic Hne : beckon the sky ! 
 Who lives by rule then, keeps good company." 
 
 There is a self-idolatry of passions and cupidi- 
 ties, a failure of respect for great social and moral 
 traditions of civilization, on which order and culture, 
 as well as purity and decency stand, that would remand 
 us to infinitely worse barbarism than all the tradition- 
 worship of the older races combined. 
 
 ' See Instructions in the Mosaic Religion, from the German of Johlson (Philadelphia, 
 
 1830), p. 112. 
 
I04 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 The ritualism of Eastern devotees is of course not 
 the intelligent freedom of living 'according to universal 
 laws of culture and use. But at least the ease, preci- 
 sion, and minute perfection of both, flow alike from 
 free surrender of the whole life to the ideal faith ; 
 though this faith be ever so different in the two cases, 
 and though in the one case the principle itself be but 
 germinant, in the other mature. 
 
 When we recognize therefore that in all the history 
 The protest of religious forms there is nothing like Hindu 
 of thought, ritualism for complexity, thoroughness, and 
 rigor, we really concede to this people a certain pre- 
 eminent integrity in its religious conviction. We 
 have here in fact a great, all-surrounding abstract 
 idea, admitting no exception, no evasion, no com- 
 promise, no practical limit. It is the first product of 
 that pure brain-work which makes the inward life 
 of the Aryans of the Ganges. In their clime of beat- 
 ing suns and towering forests, one element of the old 
 Iranian energy made vigorous protest against the 
 forces of physical nature, — the intellectual element. 
 It would create after its own vast aspiration, even 
 though it were in idea only. Of the manifold beauty 
 and wealth of which this dream-life was capable, the 
 whole history of Hindu poetry, from the Vedas to the 
 Puranas, is the impressive record. In philosophy and 
 rehgion, the contemplative faculty produced yet more 
 marvellous results. Its grasp on pure ideas was ex- 
 traordinary, and its faith in living by them absolute. 
 It was bound to take the whole of Hfe into its mighty 
 impulse to create and rule. It was bound to construct 
 all forms of action in the image of its own eternity ; a 
 world whose very freedom should be in the absolute- 
 ness of its sure and perfect ways. So that in the 
 
TRADITION. 165 
 
 absence of that struggle with practical conditions and 
 for visible uses which educates us to independence 
 and progress, ritualism, all-pervading and all-ordain- 
 ing, became the natural language of its ideal ; the 
 more so in proportion as it sought to organize itself in 
 a Brahmanical or other ecclesiastical communion. 
 
 For how insignificant and impotent would the indi- 
 vidual come to appear, seen through this absorbing 
 vision of everlastingness. Heart-deadening asceticism 
 was but a natural result. But let us remember that 
 all real self-abnegation, though it may fail of due bal- 
 ance from the practical and social energies, none the 
 less truly involves the substance of practical virtue. 
 And its upward aim surely deserves our thoughtful 
 study, as an element of universal religion, however 
 the mist of dreams rolled in between it and the goal 
 it sought. 
 
V. 
 
 THE LAWS. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 
 
 "XT 7"HEN Vedic inspiration ceased, there came ages 
 
 * ' of organized traditional religion. To Growth of 
 the Mantras, or Hymns of seers, succeeded the ""^'^^'^f- 
 
 •* cal institu- 
 
 Brthmanas, or theological homilies about the tions. 
 hymns ; explanations of the sacrifices and rituals, 
 definitions of faith, directions for efficacious use 
 of formulas in prayer. They are the work of a 
 priestly class, gradually formed by the development 
 of the old patriarchal or family religion into close 
 clans or fraternities, with distinct functions in the ritual ; 
 and dealing for the most part, naturally enough, in 
 quite spiritless pedantry and verbiage, ringing changes 
 on " revealed texts " with superstitious and pompous 
 verbal commentary, after the manner of biblical func- 
 tionaries everywhere. Miiller has traced this tradi- 
 tionalism even in the latter part of the Vedic period, 
 busily at work arranging and combining the hymns 
 for ceremonial purposes.^ Gradually priestly author- 
 ity became elaborated in the caste-system, and ex- 
 pressed itself in ideals of legislation. These were 
 based in part on natural wants of the social organiza- 
 tion, and in part on the logic of the religious idea, as 
 
 * Sansk, Lif.^ p. 456. There were more than twenty of these old clans, out of which 
 sacerdotal families were developed. 
 
lyo RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 traditionally received, and developed by its represen- 
 tative class. Doubtless there were many such codes, 
 emanating from different priestly schools and fellow- 
 ships ; 1 but their ecclesiastical compilers could hardly 
 have possessed the means of imposing them upon the 
 population of India. It is probable therefore that they 
 were carried into practice only in so far as they really 
 embodied popular customs and beliefs. Their devel- 
 opment, too, must have been very slow ; and many 
 ages must have elapsed before so vast an edifice of 
 rules and relations could have been constructed, even 
 in theory, as we find presented, with a serene and 
 simple absolutism, as if by universal consent of gods 
 and men, in the Dharmasastra of the M^navas, com- 
 monly called the Laws of Manu. 
 
 This serene self-assurance, in fact, rested upon pub- 
 lic recognition. Law itself, we must remember, was 
 originally but the mandate of religious sentiment, and 
 the oldest legislation 'was everywhere honestly as- 
 cribed to the gods ; for these ruder ages heard secret 
 whispers of an eternal truth, on the acceptance and 
 right following of which depends the life of the latest 
 and freest states. 
 
 It is still undetermined at what period the theolog- 
 Ageofthe ^'^^^' '"oral, political, and social ideal of the 
 Code of Brahmanical schools became embodied in this 
 code. It has been usual, ever since its trans- 
 lation by Sir William Jones, in 1794,^ to place it next 
 in antiquity to the three oldest Vedas, as one of the 
 few great landmarks of Hindu literature; and most 
 Orientalists have dated it somewhere between the 
 eighth and thirteenth centuries before the Christian 
 
 ^ Farishads and Charanas. See MiUIer, Sanak. Lit, 
 2 The version here used. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 
 
 171 
 
 era.' Yet other recent scholars find the evidences of 
 this great antiquity inadequate, and hold its date to be 
 altogether unknown, the most eminent of these being 
 Max Miiller. 
 
 It is certain that Greek authors, from the time of 
 Alexander, agree that Hindu courts appealed to no 
 written codes ; though Lassen may be correct in his 
 suggestion that their references are to special occa- 
 sions only, and do not prove that such written laws 
 were not in existence. It must be allowed, too, that 
 legislative codes depend on the current use of writing ; 
 and this cannot be traced back in India beyond the 
 age ascribed to Buddha. True, a wonderful develop- 
 ment of the memory supplied the place of books ; and 
 as the Vedic hymns were preserved by oral tradition 
 alone for centuries, so, doubtless, were definite social 
 customs and rules. But a code so elaborate as this, 
 embodying the whole Brahmanical system in its de- 
 veloped form and full application to all branches of 
 human conduct, would imply a common understand- 
 ing of relations and duties for which written docu- 
 
 ^ This is the view of such eminent authorities as Lassen and Burnouf, as well as of 
 Koeppen in his very thorough investigations into the history of Buddhism ; and Weber's 
 exhaustive researdies into tiie literature of India result in the judgment that it is the oldest 
 of the numerous Hindu Codes. The grounds of this general agreement are given by 
 Duncker, Geschickie d. AUerthUTns, II. pp. 96, 97. The followmg is a summary; The 
 oldest Buddhist Sutras describe a more developed stage of Brahmanism in many respects 
 than this code, and must therefore have a later origin : yet they are traceable far back 
 beyond the Christian era- It is probably cited in the Buddhist legends and in the MahSb- 
 h&rata. It is cognizant of only three Vedas, while the Buddhist Sutras are acquainted 
 with the latest Veda also. It contains no allusion to Buddhism by name, and makes only 
 general reference to rationalists who denied the Veda, as was in fact done by many schools 
 previous to Buddha. It knows nothing of the worship of Siva, familiar to Buddhist 
 Sutras ; nothing of that of Vishnu-Krishna, — its only allusion to Vishnu being in a pas- 
 sage of doubtfiil antiquity, and this after a purely Vedic manner, — nothing finally of the 
 epic heroes, while it freely mentions kings famous in the Vedic age. Finally, its geo- 
 graphical knowledge extends no farther than the Vindhya Mountains, though the Aryans 
 had conquered much of Southern India long before our era. See Lassen, I. 800 : Bur- 
 nouf, Intrad. a rHht. du Bouddhisme, p. 133 ; Koeppen, I. 38 ; Weber, Varlemngen, 
 p. 242-244. Wilson, Introd, to Rig Veda, places it as early as the fifth century B,c. 
 
172 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ments appear absolutely necessary. And the use of 
 such documentary form for systems or ideals of jurispru- 
 dence was not likely to have been undertaken in India, 
 until a comparatively late period ; both because of the 
 general dislike for written teachings and because all 
 authoritative priesthoods are disinclined to limit them- 
 selves to defined and recorded rules. Such self-limi- 
 tation came, doubtless, only when it could no longer 
 be resisted, and may have been compelled by the ad- 
 vance of Buddhism. Yet even these considerations 
 would not greatly diminish the supposable antiquity 
 of the Code, at least in its main elements. That in its 
 present form it represents a gradual growth of the 
 Brahmanical ideas, and contains additions belonging 
 to very different periods, is more than probable, es- 
 pecially from the confused and contradictory elements 
 in its legislation. At all events, it alludes to earlier 
 codes, whose elements are doubtless incorporated into 
 this, the fullest and most perfect in form of all that are 
 yet known to us.^ Of these Indian codes, early and 
 late, there would seem to be no end. Stenzler enu- 
 merates forty-seven law-books by different authors, 
 besides twenty-two special revisions; the codes of 
 Manu and Yajnavalkya only being now practically 
 accessible to us.^ Most of these books, however, are 
 metrical versions, based on older texts. 
 
 Both these codes define the extent of their territorial 
 validity by calling themselves the "law of the land 
 (Aryavarta) where dwells the black gazelle." It was 
 thus admitted that a portion of the peninsula lay out- 
 side their jurisdiction. Whatever antiquity may be 
 ascribed to Mauu, or however late the origin of its 
 
 • Stenjler, in Weber's Indische Studien, I. ajS, 237. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 73 
 
 present form, it is difficult to find the age when it can 
 have had practical recognition by any large portion of 
 the people of India. It is in fact but the Law Code 
 of the Manavas, one of the old Brahmanical fellow- 
 ships founded on common guardianship of sacred texts, 
 and is valuable mainly as embodying what was un- 
 doubtedly Orthodox Brahmanism in its most vigorous 
 age, as well as a vast number of the recognized usages 
 and institutions of ancient Hindu life. And there is 
 reason for believing, in accordance with what is stated 
 by Mr. Maine to be the opinion of the best scholars, 
 that " it does not as a whole represent a set of rules 
 ever actually administered in Hindustan, but is an 
 ideal picture of what, in the view of the Brahmans, 
 opght to be the Law."^ 
 
 As further evidence of a later origin than the Brah- 
 manas, we may observe that the Manava-Dharma- 
 sastra belongs to the class of writings defined by the 
 orthodox Hindus as Smriti, or tradition, in distinction 
 from Sruti, or revelation. It is difficult to explain this 
 fact, except upon the supposition that a more recent date 
 was ascribed to it than to the Brahmanas, which, as we 
 know, by reason of their antiquity were held to be 
 verbally inspired. For it represents Manu as receiv- 
 ing the eternal rules of justice from Brahma himself, 
 and as delivering them to the ten great rishis, who 
 reverently address him as master of all divine 
 truth. 2 
 
 Notwithstanding this inferior position, the Brahman- 
 
 ^ Ancient LaWt p. r6. See Sykes, Polit. Condition of Anc. India^ JourTtal R. As^ 
 Soc, 1851, VI.: Annals of Rural Bengal^ p. 104. The Code of Manu is nominally, 
 the law of the Burmese empire. But we are told that every monarch alters it to suit 
 himself, and that it is null for all practical purposes, being never produced or pleaded, 
 from in courts. Malcom, Travels in Burtnaht Notes, IV. 
 
 2 J7ttrodm:tion to Manu. 
 
174 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ical commentators have not failed to recognize its 
 immense value as authority in whatever relates to their 
 traditional faith. And they, labor earnestly to prove, 
 not quite true to their bibliolatry here, that Manu's 
 knowledge of the Vedas gave him equal claims 
 with their authors ; yet they bring the testimony 
 of Vedic text itself, that "whatever Manu said is 
 medicine."^ 
 
 Of all Institutes of Government, this, to the Brah- 
 manical tribes, was the consummate and sacred 
 '^''°^™'- flower. Manu signifies Thought. The word 
 is kindred with the Latin mens, as also with man, and 
 indicates the honor paid by the Aryan race to the in- 
 tellectual nature.- The name thus expressive of 
 divine intelligence revealed in the human, was ap- 
 plied by the Hindus to the mythical first man and 
 first king, as to many other imaginary rishis in prime- 
 val legend.^ The Institutes called by his name are 
 in twelve books of metrical sentences, covering all 
 branches of speculation and ethics, of public and pri- 
 vate life. The first reveals a Cosmogony ; the second 
 and third regulate Education and Marriage as duties of 
 the first and second stages of Hindu culture ; the fourth 
 treats of Economics and Morals ; the fifth, of Diet and 
 Purification, also of Women ; the sixth, of Devotion, or 
 the duties of the third and fourth stages ; the seventh, 
 of Government and the Military Class ; the eighth, of 
 Private and Criminal Law ; the ninth, .of the Com- 
 mercial and Servile Classes ; the tenth, of Mixed 
 Classes and Regulations for Times of Distress ; the 
 
 1 See quotations in Miiller, p. 89, 103. 
 
 « Minos of Greeks, Menes of Egyptian, Mannns of Germans, Menw of Welsh. See 
 Pictet, II. 621-627. 
 
 s See Ztschr. d. D. M. G., IV. 430; MiiUer, p. 532. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 175 
 
 eleventh, of Penance and Expiation ; the twelfth, of 
 Transmigration and Final Beatitude.^ 
 
 As the basis of Brahmanical speculation is that self 
 is nothing, and that of their ethics that self- 3^;^^^^^^ 
 ishness is hell, so the substance of their juris- ^''"^s^''""- 
 prudence is a discipline of entire self-renunciation. 
 The theoretic aim of the Manavasastra is the utter 
 suppression of selfish desire. It is absolute despotism ; 
 but a despotism by the conscience rather than over it; 
 enslavement not of subjects by rulers, but of souls by 
 their religious idea. Manu begins, and Yajnavalkya 
 ends, with reverent ascription of the Law to the Self- 
 existent. Highest and lowest castes alike confess its 
 terrible sanctions, present and future. Its minuteness of 
 legislation is unequalled. If we should judge Oriental 
 prescription by the principles we must apply among 
 ourselves, we should say that its regulations, purifica- 
 tions, penances — an endless reach of absurdity — had 
 not left the slightest loop-hole for the self-assertion of 
 private reason or will. They are doubtless framed with 
 special regard to the prerogative of the priesthood, as 
 divinely appointed, and as conscious of being the in- 
 telligent and controlling class ; but the legislation was 
 \2c^ for the priesthood, as well as by it, and demanded 
 of this class as complete self-abnegation as it exacted 
 from the Pariah. The Brahman was fully invested 
 with the duty of concealing its inner meaning from all 
 but such as are worthy to receive it from his sacred 
 lips ; and an appalling secrecy repelled curiosity and 
 
 * The Law Code of Yajnavalkya, probably next in the order of time to Manu, and 
 referred by Stenzler to the period between the second and fifth centuries of our era, covers 
 substantially the same ground with its predecessor, but with much less of detail, and in a 
 style and diction in many respects peculiar to itself. Its speculative contents are different 
 from those of Manu, comprising a curious treatise on the physical birth and structure of 
 man, and a philosophy that strangely combines astrological fancies with mystical, Buddhis- 
 tic, and positive tendencies. It consists of three books only, which have been translated 
 by Stenzler (Berlin, 1849), from whose German version our extracts are taken. 
 
176 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 repressed ambition in the lay classes. This is their 
 sacrifice. He has also his : to surrender himself, 
 body, mind, and soul, to its ascetic observances ; and 
 faithfully to fulfil its minutest precepts, on penalty of 
 dreadful transmigrations for ages. Thus a master 
 instinct of sacrifice sweeps the whole compass of life 
 and thought. It is because this instinct, however 
 blind, has yet essentially noble elements, that we find 
 even a spiritual and social thraldom like caste, though 
 bristling with insensate ceremonies and penalties, alive 
 with the endeavor to subdue selfish desires. We see 
 this alike in the implacable severity with which sensual 
 and brutal appetites are punished, and in the benevo- 
 lence which runs in fine veins and broad arteries 
 through the gloomy organism, forbidding wrath and 
 revenge, binding the heart to the least of sentient 
 creatures,^ and in its way anticipating the tenderness 
 of the modern poet : — 
 
 " He prayeth best who loveth best 
 All things both great and small; 
 For the dear God who loveth us, 
 He made and loveth all." ' 
 
 We see the same endeavor in the stern disciplines 
 laid upon servants, priests, and kings, a deeper 
 democracy of renunciation beneath the tyrannies of 
 caste ; and in the final aim of the whole to make 
 saints whose motive shall lie in virtue, not in its re- 
 wards ; whose ultimate freedom shall be to lose them- 
 
 1 Mami, IV. 238, 246; VI. 40, 68. 
 
 2 A striking instance of tliis mixture of superstition with tenderness to the brute world, 
 as a discipline of self-denial, is in the penance prescribed in Manu for having chanced to 
 kill a cow ; a creature inviolably sacred for the Hindu, from his sense of her benefits to his 
 fathers in the early nomad days. The offender " must wait for months all day on the herd, 
 and quaff the dust raised by their hoofs ; must stand when they stand, move when they 
 move, and lie down by them when they lie down. Should a cow fall into any trouble or 
 fear, he must relieve her ; and, in whatever heat, rain, or cold, must not seek his own 
 shelter, without having cared for the cows." Manu^ XI, 109-116. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 177 
 
 selves in Deity, whose method to " shun all worldl}^ 
 honor as poison, and seek disrespect as nectar," i 
 " reposing in perfect content on God alone." ^ And we 
 see it in the creed which inspires all this asceticism, 
 and proves it to have been a living faith, not an en- 
 forced bondage : — " The resignation of all pleasures 
 is better than the enjoyment of them."^ 
 
 The product of Brahmanical self-renunciation was 
 the Yogi, a creature of penances, purifications, 
 and ascetic feats ; the conventional type of ^ °^' 
 heathen degradation ; whom the law book itself paints 
 as crouching at the foot of a gloomy banyan, his 
 hairs growing over him, and his nails growing in, 
 gazing listlessly on the tip of his nose, or moping 
 along with his eyes fixed on the ground, lest he should 
 unawares destroy some ant or worm ; " waiting release 
 from his body as a servant his wages," yet wishing 
 neither life nor death, and receiving his food from 
 others without asking it, as the due of his austerities 
 for the public good.* Unpromising enough ; yet the 
 desert monks of Christendom in the fourth century 
 were, as a class, less gentle and thoughtful, and cer- 
 tainly far less cleanly, than these Eastern devotees ; 
 while they drew from Christian dogma the same 
 unnatural theory of self-abnegation which the others 
 drew from Hindu caste. And, repulsive as he may 
 be, the Yogi is a specimen, such as these crude social 
 conditions could furnish, of devotion to a purely 
 contemplative ideal. Under all the circumstances 
 even squalid asceticism appears as a positive moral 
 protest. For sensuality must have all the more 
 fiercely beset the temperament of the Hindu, under 
 
 1 Manu, II. 162. * Ibid., VI. 43i 34- 
 
 s Ibid., II. 95. * Ibid., VI. 42, 45, 58, 68 ; Y&jnamlkya, III. 4s, 62. 
 
178 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 hot suns, amidst a voluptuous physical nature, the 
 more he was devoted to seclusion and meditation; 
 and these relentless disciplines were in fact a vigor- 
 ous reaction against titanic attractions in the senses. 
 Their very name, ta;pas, signifying heat, hints of a 
 torrid climate, in which the moral sense was finding 
 itself severely tried. This virtue is of the passive 
 Hindu quality, lacking self-consciousness and free- 
 dom, a divine instinct struggling against hard con- 
 ditions ; but how complete its command ! Man shall 
 know nothing, and be nothing, apart from the God of 
 his ideal thought ; and in finding Him all things else 
 shall be found. Such is its law and its promise. To 
 escape the finite dream, and the petty limit of self, 
 and to enter into the real and eternal, as a blessed life 
 worthy of all price, is the mystic desire into which all 
 great rehgions have flowered, each in its own hour 
 and way. 
 
 The Brahmanical poets certainly knew how to 
 picture their wilderness-life in very attractive colors, 
 even for the civilized mind.^ The hermitages are 
 described in the Ramayana, as well as by Kalidasa, 
 as surrounded by spacious lawns, well planned and 
 scrupulously neat; frequented by antelopes, deer, and 
 birds, creatures "taught to trust in man; " shaded by 
 fruit-bearing trees; laved by canals, strewed with 
 wild-flowers, and set with clear pools, where white 
 lilies, symbols of holy living, spread their floating 
 petals, never wet by their ^contact with the element 
 beneath, to the clear sky.i And here the peaceable 
 saints, husbands and wives, purified bodily by con- 
 tinual ablutions, and spiritually by happy meditation 
 on sacred themes, lived amidst supernatural delights 
 
 1 Ragkmania, B. I. ; Sakmttam, Act I. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 79 
 
 in the society of celestial guests, and received the 
 visits of their admirers writh hospitality in their leafy 
 huts ; performing stupendous feats of asceticism with- 
 out physical injury ; multiplying their simple roots and 
 herbs into splendid bouquets, large enough for armies, 
 with resources beside which those of Hebrew and 
 Christian miracle must, to this Oriental imagination, 
 be hopelessly tame. Through the mythological dress, 
 we detect an ideal which could not have failed in 
 some degree to reconcile ascetic life with natural occu- 
 pation and social good. 
 
 And we, in fact, find that the active virtues are 
 not- forgotten. "All honor to the house- The active 
 holder," says the law, " and let him faithfully ™"'==- 
 fulfil his duties." " He who gives to strangers, with a 
 view to fame, while he suffers his family to live in 
 distress, having power to support them, touches his 
 lips with honey, but swallows poison. Such virtue is 
 counterfeit."^ And the purely contemplative life was 
 not allowable till three stages of practical activity had 
 been passed through : the student life ; domestic mar- 
 ried life, or social service of some sort ; and anchoret 
 life, a kind of missionary function, to feed the forest 
 creatures, and preach to disciples, — doubtless, like 
 St. Francis, to the fishes and the fowls also. "Low 
 shall he fall who applies his mind to final beatitude, 
 before having paid the three debts, to the gods, the 
 fathers, and the sages ; read the Vedas according to 
 law ; begotten a son ; and sacrificed, to the best of 
 his power. "2 Then only "shall the twice-born man, 
 fcrceiving his muscles relaxing and his hair turning 
 gray, leave his wife to his sons, or else, accompanied 
 
 1 Manu, XI. 9. '^ Ibid-. ^I- 35- 
 
l8o RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 by her, seek refuge in a forest, with firm faith and 
 subdued organs of sense." There he is to live, patient 
 of extremities, a perpetual giver, benevolent towards 
 all beings, content with roots and fruit, studying what 
 the Vedas teach of the being and attributes of God ; 
 proving his mastery over outward things ; in the hot 
 season b}^ adding four fires to the sun's heat; un- 
 covered in the cold : putting on wet garments in rain ; 
 and, if incurably diseased, living on air and water till 
 his frame decays and his soul is united with the Su- 
 preme.^ Thus he advances to the final disciplines of 
 a Sannyasi, whose sole employment is "to meditate 
 on the transmigrations caused by sin and the im- 
 perishable rewards of virtue, on the subtle essence 
 of the Supreme Spirit and its complete ex'istence in 
 all beings." So "his offences are burned away;" 
 " all that is repugnant .to the divine nature is extin- 
 guished ; " " higher worlds are illuminated with his 
 glory," and he is "absorbed in the divine essence."^ 
 Here the balance of the active ahd passive elements 
 is indeed lost, since the ideal of life is contemplation 
 alone ; but both elements are at all events recognized, 
 and the system in this respect compares very credita- 
 bly with Christian asceticism, by insisting, as that has 
 seldom or never done, on the fulfilment of practical 
 duties as passport to contemplative repose. 
 
 Far back in the ages, without doubt long before 
 Spirituality, the Christian era, Hindu formalism was met 
 bjr these trenchant rebukes : — 
 
 " By falsehood sacrifices become vain ; by pride, devotions. By 
 proclaiming a gift, its fruit perishes." ' 
 
 " For whatever purpose a man shall bestow any gift, according to 
 that purpose shall be his reward." * 
 
 1 Matm, VI. I-3I. s ibid., yi. 62, 72, 81. 
 
 8 Ibid., IV. 237. « Ibid., 234. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. l8l 
 
 " One who voluntarily confesses his sin shall, so far, cast it off: 
 when his heart shall loathe it, the taint then only shall pass away." ' 
 
 " Let no man, having comraittea sins, perform penance, under pre- 
 text of devotion, disguising his crime under fictitious religion; 
 such impostors, though Brahmans, are despised." ^ 
 
 "A man who performs rites only, not discharging his moral 
 duties, falls low : let him discharge these duties, even though he be 
 not constant in those rites." ' 
 
 " He who governs his passions, though he know only the Gdyatri, 
 or holiest text, is more to be honored than one who governs them 
 not, though he may know the three Vedas." * 
 
 Though with Eastern extravagance it is said else- 
 where that "sixteen suppressions of the breath, with 
 the constant repetition of the holy syllables for a 
 month, will absolve even the slayer of a Brahman for 
 his hidden faults,"^ passages like the foregoing cer- 
 tainly imply also that only a repentant spirit could give 
 such efBcacy to the form. So this frank confession of 
 bibliolatry — " as a clod sinks into a great lake, so is 
 every sinful act submerged in the triple Veda" — should 
 be taken in connection with such precepts as the fol- 
 lowing : — 
 
 " The wise are purified by forgiveness of injuries ; the negligent 
 of duty, by liberality ; they who have secret faults, by devout medi- 
 tation." « 
 
 " Of all pure things, purity in acquiring wealth is pronounced 
 most excellent ; since he who gains this with clean hands is truly 
 pure, not he who is purified with earth and water."' 
 
 " Penance brings purification for the Veda student ; patience for 
 the wise ; water for the body ; silent prayer for the secret sin ; truth 
 for the mind : for the soul the highest is the knowledge of God." ' 
 
 " Let the wise consider as having the quality of darkness every act 
 which one is ashamed of his having done, or doing, or being about to 
 do ; to that of passion, every act by which he seeks celebrity in the 
 world ; to that of goodness, every act, by which he hopes to acquire 
 
 » Minu, XI. 229-232. « Ibid., IV. 198. » Ibid., IV. 204. 
 
 « Ibid., II. 118. ' Ibid., XI. 249. " Ibid., V. 107. 
 
 ' Ibid., V. 106. ' Y&jn., III. 33, 34- 
 
l82 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 divine knowledge, which he is never ashamed of doing, or which 
 brings placid joy to his conscience. The prime object of the foul 
 quahty is pleasure ; of the passionate, worldly prosperity ; of the 
 good, virtue." ' 
 
 "To be a hermit is not to bring forth virtue," adds 
 Yajnavalkya : " this comes only when it is practised. 
 Therefore, what one would not have done to him, let 
 him not do to others."^ 
 
 "God is Spirit," says the Christian Gospel, "and 
 
 Thes irit ^^^y ^^° worship Him must worship Him in 
 
 spirit and in truth." Hear the Hindu Law : — 
 
 " O friend to virtue, that Supreme Spirit, which thou believest 
 one with thyself, resides in tliy bosom perpetually, and is an all- 
 knowing inspector of thy virtue or thy crime.'' 
 
 " If thou art not at variance with that great divinity within thee, go 
 not on pilgrimage to Gunga, nor to the plain of Curu." ^ 
 
 " The soul is its own witness, its own refuge. Offend not thy 
 conscious soul, the supreme internal witness of men." 
 
 " The wicked have said in their hearts, ' None sees us.' Yes, 
 the gods see them, and the spirit within their own breasts.'- * 
 
 "The wages of sin," says the Christian Bible, "is 
 Retribution, ^cath." Quite as distinctly says the Hindu 
 Law : — 
 
 " The fruit of sin is not immediate, but comes like the harvest, 
 in due season. Little by little, it eradicates the man. Its fruit, if 
 not in himself, is in his sons or in his sons' sons."° 
 
 "Even here below, the unjust is not happy, nor he whose wealth 
 comes from false witness, nor he who dehghts in mischief"* 
 
 " One grows rich for a while through unrighteousness, and van- 
 quishes his foes ; but he perishes at length from his root up." ' 
 
 "Justice, being destroyed, will destroy ; preserved, will preserve. 
 It must therefore never be violated." * 
 
 " In whatever extremity, never turn to sin." * 
 
 ' Mam, XII. 35-38. • rd/».. III. 65. ■> Mamt, VIII 91, 92. 
 
 * Ibid., VIII. 84, 85. 5 Ibid., IV. 172, 173. 6 Ibid,, IV. 170. 
 
 ' Ibid., IV. 174. » Ibid., VIII. 15. » Ibid., IV. 171. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 83 
 
 " Let one walk in the path of good men, the path in which his 
 fathers walked." ' 
 
 "Vice is more dreadful by reason of its penalties than death."" 
 
 "Whosoever," says the New Testament, "shall 
 break one of these commandments, is guilty of all." 
 The Dharmasastra of Manu affirms the same natural 
 law. of integrity. " If one sins with one member, the 
 sin destroys his virtue, as a single hole will let out all 
 the water in a flask." * 
 
 " Let one collect virtue by degrees, as the ant builds its nest, 
 that he may acquire a companion to the next world. The Future 
 For, in his passage thither, his virtue only will adhere Life- 
 to him. 
 
 " Single is each man born ; alone he dies, alone receives the reward 
 of his doings. When he leaves his body on the ground, his kindred 
 retire with averted faces, but his virtue accompanies his soul. 
 
 " Let him gather this, therefore, to secure an inseparable com- 
 panion through the gloom, how hard to be traversed ! " * 
 
 " The only firm friend who follows man after death is justice." * 
 
 In order to discover what is the substance of this 
 Brahmanic ideal, let us note first some of the Humanities, 
 humanities of the Code. 
 
 " The care and pain of parents in behalf of their children can- 
 not be repaid in a hundred years." * 
 
 " Reverence for age is to the young, life, knowledge, and fame." ' 
 
 " The old, the blind, the maimed, the sick, the poor, the heavy 
 laden, are to be treated with marked respect, even by the king." ^ 
 
 "Knowledge, virtue, age, even in a Sudra, should have re- 
 spect." » 
 
 The diseased and deformed were avoided in sacri- 
 ficial acts,^° which concerned only what was physi- 
 
 > Manu, IV. 178. ^ Ibid., VII. 53. » Ibid., II. 99- 
 
 4 Ibid., IV. 239-242. " Ibid., VIII. 17. » Ibid., II. 227. 
 
 ' Ibid., II. 121. « Ibid., II. 138 ; VIII. 39S J I'4?»-. I- "7- 
 
 « Y&jn., I. 116. " Manu, III. 161. 
 
184 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 cally as well as spiritually unblemished. Yet they 
 were "in no wise to be insulted." ^ As Homer 
 pictures the gods going about disguised as beggars 
 and outcasts, to try men's hearts, so, according 
 to Manu, children, poor dependants, and the sick 
 are to be regarded as "rulers of the ether." ^ The 
 blind, crippled, old, and helpless are not to be taxed ; ^ 
 the deaf and dumb, the idiotic and insane, the maimed, 
 and those who have lost the use of a limb, are indeed 
 excluded from inheriting, but must be supported by 
 the heir, without stint, to the best of his power.* On 
 the father's death, the oldest son must support the 
 family, and the brothers must endow their sisters.® 
 The authority of the householder over his family is 
 almost absolute ; yet he must " regard his wife and 
 son as his own body, his dependants as his shadow, 
 his daughter with the utmost tenderness."^ His pi-e- 
 scribed prayer is, " that generous givers may abound 
 in his house, that faith and study may never depart 
 from it, and that he may have much to bestow on the 
 needy." ' 
 
 " A guest must not be sent away at evening : he is sent by the 
 retiring sun ; and, whether he have come in season or out of sea- 
 son, he must not sojourn in the house without entertainment." * 
 
 The sense of solidarity in social ethics is well worth 
 noticing, as shown in passages like the following : — 
 
 " The soldier who flees and is slain shall take on himself all the 
 sins of his commander ; and the commander receive all the fruit of 
 good conduct stored up by the other for the future hfe." 
 
 " A sixth of the reward for virtuous actions, due the whole peo- 
 ple, belongs to the king who protects them : if he protects them 
 not, a sixth of their iniquity falls on him." ' 
 
 > Manu, IV. 141. 2 Ibid., IV. 184. s jbid., VIII. 394. 
 
 • Ibid., IX. 202. 5 Ibid., IX. 104-H8. « Ibid., IV. 183. 
 
 ' Ibid., III. 2S9- « Ibid., III. 105. » Ibid., VII. 94; VIII. 304. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 85 
 
 The Brahman's decalogue not only commands con- 
 tent, veracity, purification, coercion of the 
 senses, resistance to appetites, knowledge of ^'^'^' 
 scripture and of the Supreme Spirit, but abstinence 
 from illicit gain, avoidance of wrath, and the return 
 of good for evil.^ Forced contracts are declared 
 void.^ Transfer of property must be made in writ- 
 ing.^ Royal gifts are to be recorded on permanent 
 tablets.* There are laws against slander, peculation, 
 intemperance, and dealing in ardent spirits ; laws pun- 
 ishing iniquitous judgments, false witness, and unjust 
 imprisonment ; laws providing for the annulment and 
 revision of unrighteous decrees ; enforcing the sacred- 
 ness of pledges and the fulfilment of trusts ; justly 
 dividing the responsibilities of partners ; dealing se- 
 verely with conspiracies to raise prices to the injury 
 of laborers ; laws which either forbid gambling alto- 
 gether, or discourage it by regulative drawbacks ; laws 
 declaring persons reduced to slavery by violence free, 
 as well as the slave who has saved his master's life, or 
 who purchases his own freedom.^ Penalty becomes 
 merciless in dealing with crimes which involve the 
 greatest mischief, such as arson, counterfeiting coin, 
 and selling poisonous meat.® 
 
 The king shall " never transgress justice." " It is 
 the essence of majesty, protector of all created things, 
 and eradicates his whole race," if he swerves from 
 duty.' " He shall forgive those who abuse him in their 
 pain : if through pride he will not excuse them, he 
 shall go to his torment."^ 
 
 > Manu, VI. 91. =■ Ibid., VIII. 168 ; ydjn., II. 89. 
 
 s Vdjti., II. 84. * Ibid., I. 317. 318. 
 
 B Ibid., III. 285; II. 270; Mimi, IX. 221; YAJn.,!!. 4,82,243; S'lSOS! 58.164, 
 249, 259 ; .^^K", VIII. 21 1, 230-233 ; ySjK., 11. 199, 182. 
 
 • VS/ri; II. 282, 297. ' Manu, VII. 13, 14, 28. ' Ibid., VIII. 3i3. 
 
l86 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 " A king," says Yajnavalkya, " should be very patient, experi- 
 enced, generous, mindful of services rendered, respectful to the old, 
 modest, firm, truthful, acquainted with the laws, not censorious, nor 
 of loose habits, nor low inclination, able to hide his weak points, 
 wise in reasoning and in criminal law, in the art of procuring a 
 livelihood, and in the three Vedas." 
 
 " Higher than all gifts is the protection of his subjects." 
 
 " The fire that ascends from the people's suiferings is not extin- 
 guished till it has consumed their king, his fortune, family, life." ' 
 
 " What he has not, let a king seek to attain honestly ; what he 
 has, to guard with care ; what he guards, to increase ; and what is 
 increase let him give to those who deserve it." ' 
 
 He shall be " a father of his people." ^ He should 
 make war only for the protection of his dominions ; 
 must respect the religion, laws, and even the fears, of 
 the conquered.^ Punishment by military force must 
 be his last resort.* 
 
 The warrior, " remembering what is due to honor," 
 shall not shoot with poisoned arrows, nor strike the 
 weary, the suppliant, the non-combatant, the sleeping, 
 the severely wounded, the fugitive, the disarmed, nor 
 one already engaged with an opponent, nor one who 
 yields himself captive.^ Civilization has added noth- 
 ing to these humanities of military chivalry. To sum 
 all, " let not injustice be done in deed or in thought, 
 nor a word be uttered that shall cause a fellow-creature 
 pain : it will bar one's progress to final bliss." ^ " He 
 who has caused no fear to the smallest creature shall 
 have no cause for fear when he dies."'' 
 
 It may not be easy to comprehend the idea of justice 
 Moral which mingled with such precepts as these 
 sanctions, the cruelties of caste legislation. Yet do not 
 such incompatibilities proceed side by side in the 
 
 ' Y&jn., I. 308-310, 334, 340, 316 ! Manu, VII. 80 ; Ytljn., I. 333. 
 
 » Mami, VII. 168, 170, 2ot, 203. « Ibid., VII. io8; Y&jti., I. 345. 
 
 » Mami, VII 90-93; Y&jn., I. 325. Matm, II. 161 ' Manu, VI. 40. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 87 
 
 laws, theologies, and bibles of all races? For the 
 State as such, the reconcihation of law with love, 
 of government with noble instinct, as yet lies in the 
 future. — We notice that self-interest is suggested as 
 motive for benevolence. This sanction is constantly- 
 appealed to in the New Testament also, and even in 
 the Beatitudes of Jesus. But it would be irrational 
 to make this a ground for ascribing such delicacy 
 of affection as appears in both Hindu and Hebrew 
 ethics to any other primary cause than noble and hu- 
 mane feeling. Laws may suggest interested motives, 
 and they must appeal to sanctions. But Law itself 
 springs from the natural instincts of love and care, 
 as well as from social dangers. And so the eternal 
 piety of the heart had its large share in the oldest 
 legislation. 
 
 With what decision a natural self-respect breaks 
 forth through the slavery of abnegation , the 
 despotism of custom and law, in such pre- 
 cepts of an older stoicism as these : — 
 
 " One must not despise himself for previous failures : let him 
 pursue fortune till death, nor ever think it hard to be attained." ' 
 
 " Success depends on d^tiny and on conduct : the wise expect 
 it from the union of these ; as a car goes not on a single wheel, so 
 without one's own action the fated is not brought to pass." ^ 
 
 "AH that depends on one's self gives pleasure.: all that depends 
 on another, pain." ' 
 
 " The habit of taking gifts causes the divine light to fade." *■ 
 
 "A behever may receive pure knowledge evenfromasudra; and 
 a lesson in the highest virtue even from a chandala ; and, a woman 
 bright as a gem even from the basest family. Even from poison 
 may nectar be taken ; from a child, gentleness of speech ; even from 
 a foe, prudent counsel ; even from an impure substance, gold." ' 
 
 » Mami, IV. 137. ' Y&jn., I. 348-350. 
 
 • Manu, IV. 160. • Ibid., IV. 186. » Ibid., II. 238, 239- 
 
l88 RELIGION AND LIFE., 
 
 It may be asked how much of all this preaching was 
 Natuie of reduced to practice ? It is doubtless true, as 
 Oriental wc havc Said, that Oriental Codes express 
 right inter- rather the aspirations and convictions of the 
 pretation. classes from which they spring, than actual 
 rules of civil and political conduct. They are vast 
 repositories of national life, of individual ideals, 
 philosophical systems, customs and traditions more 
 or less sacred, laws more or less recognized and 
 carried out. They have also an imaginative form, 
 deal in the superlative and boundless, and must not be 
 too literally interpreted. These considerations apply 
 alike to their good and evil ; and we must guard alike 
 against over-censure and over-praise. But this much 
 may be said. The Greeks who travelled in India 
 centuries before the Christian era were enthusiastic 
 in their admiration of Hindu morals. They told of 
 kings spending the whole day in the administration 
 of justice, of the honesty of traders, and the general 
 dislike of litigation ; of the infrequency of theft, 
 though houses were left open without bolts or bars ; 
 and of the custom of loaning money without seals or 
 witnesses. They praised the truthfulness of the men 
 and the chastity of the women. ^ Whatever deduc- 
 tion must be made from these testimonies for exagger- 
 ation and mistakes, they are not without their value. 
 
 But for us the main import of such precepts is that 
 The sub- ^^^ human soul recognized the nobility of truth, 
 stajjceofthe justicc, and love through its own resources, 
 testimony. ^^^ ^^^^ witncss to the universality of its own 
 inspiration. There they stand written in their old 
 Sanskrit, or " beautiful speech " as the Hindu called 
 it, pointing back to how much older times than such 
 
 > Arrian, Strabo. See also Duncker, II. 283-287. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 189 
 
 writing we cannot tell. And to affirm, in the exclusive 
 interest of the Christian, or any other " dispensation," 
 that they were not deeply felt and bravely lived by 
 men and women even then, were indeed 
 
 " To sound God's sea with earthly plummet, 
 To find a bottom still of worthless clay." 
 
 The barbarities of this legislation — and they are 
 
 many and dark — do not disprove our conclu- ^^^ ^^^^ 
 
 sions. In all times and civilizations, verities ^''^=- 
 
 stand side by side with falsities ; and barbarous laws 
 
 and customs contradict the best theoretic claims of 
 
 states. The better moments of a people's life record 
 
 their natural capacities for good ; and of these their 
 
 unjust or cruel traditions of law must not be taken as 
 
 the measure. Would it be fair in some future historian 
 
 to assert that the American conscience had no better 
 
 ideal of freedom down to the year 1865 than a slavery 
 
 basis of representation and a Fugitive Slave Law? It 
 
 would certainly be more just to say that American 
 
 history had been throughout, the struggle of the two 
 
 opposing ideas. Liberty and Slavery, each existing 
 
 potentially in the consciousness of the age and people, 
 
 and more or less apprehended by individuals ; and tha,t 
 
 the laws, so far from showing the stage at which this 
 
 personal light or darkness had arrived, as a definite 
 
 point, gave merely the general resultants of the strife 
 
 with long established and instituted wrong. If then 
 
 the barbarities of the Hindu Codes were even crimes 
 
 like those of mature civilization, instead of being, as 
 
 they to a great extent are, results of childish fears and 
 
 superstitions, they would still prove nothing against 
 
 other evidences that a high sense of ethical truth stood 
 
 side by side with them in the Hindu mind. 
 
190 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 In fairness we must note that the beginnings, even 
 „ . of customs which the advance of practical 
 
 How inter- ^ 
 
 pretedand intclHgence stamps as enormities, are to be 
 expamt found in half-conscious instincts, by no means 
 discreditable to human nature. And the legislation 
 we condemn was perhaps the effort actually to modify 
 and control their mis-growth. Whoever the earlier 
 legislators may have been, they were obliged to make 
 the best of existing institutions. What to us are de- 
 fects in their codes may have been timely reforms and 
 remedial restraints. Solon's laws gave political func- 
 tions according to wealth ; thus continuing, to a degree, 
 the old exclusion of the people as a whole from office. 
 But he was thereby enabled to lift them from a yet 
 more abject position, and to procure them, in compen- 
 sation for such defects, their archons and general 
 assembly, — powerful checks on the aristocratic party. 
 Another arbitrary decree of this great Athenian can- 
 celled just debts, and debased the currency. Yet 
 it delivered the poor from burdens which they could 
 no longer bear, freed them from personal seizure for 
 debt, and produced an abiding respect for the force of 
 contracts.^ "I made the land and the people free,"' 
 he said ; and Aristotle reaffirms this claim on his 
 behalf. Portions of the Mosaic legislation concerning 
 the Canaanite races, that seem to the last degree cruel 
 and barbarian, were really a limitation to the treat- 
 ment of certain most dangerous enemies alone, of 
 usages previously applied to enemies as such.^ Traces 
 of similar effijrts at mitigation are observable in many 
 severities of the Hindu Code. 
 
 The better impulses in which many persistent forms 
 of law, now seen to be inhuman, originated in rude 
 
 1 Grote, III. loj. a Deut. xx. 10-18. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 
 
 191 
 
 ages, have seldom been recognized by historical 
 inquirers, and scarcely enter into the estimate of 
 heathenism by the Christian world in general. 
 
 The elder races, for example, were fully and in- 
 tensely convinced of the nature of moral evil ^, „ , , 
 
 The Ordeal. 
 
 and the certamty of moral retributions. They 
 were, on the other hand, ignorant of the invariableness 
 of natural laws. These two conditions led inevitably 
 to the use of the Ordeal, as a means of testing guilt by 
 an appeal to divine interposition. It was simply an 
 effort to find decisions of justice in the ill-understood 
 operations of physical nature ; to prove that the ele- 
 ments were under moral sovereignty. The Sanskrit 
 words for ordeal signify " faith " and " divine test." 
 "The fire singed not a hair of the sage Vatsa, by 
 reason of his perfect veracity."^ Nature is pledged, 
 in other words, to deal justly, when appealed to. 
 Can Christians tell us why a miracle should not be 
 wrought to save a truthful Vatsa, as well as to punish 
 a lying Ananias ; or why fire and water should not 
 discriminate between the saint and the sinner in the 
 old Hindu courts as well as in the cases of modern 
 * reprobates recorded in the " manuals " as drowned or 
 struck by lightning for violating the Christian Sab- 
 bath? But there is in fact a great difference. For 
 while it may have indicated not a little faith and cour- 
 age, in races ignorant of physical laws, to believe that 
 Nature was subordinate to justice, and to trust its cause 
 to her defence, it sefems to imply something very unlike 
 either of these qualities to renounce the light of a 
 scientific age in the name of religion, and persistently 
 to cling to the superstitions of an ignorant one. 
 
 Manu knows only ordeals by fire and water, or by 
 
 1 Mam, VIII. 116. 
 
192 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 touching the heads of one's wife and children with 
 invocations thereon. Other codes add tests by poison 
 and by various processes, — for example, by being 
 weighed twice in scales, drinking consecrated water, 
 touching hot iron with the tongue. In the trial by 
 carrying a red-hot bar for seven paces, however, leaves 
 were to be wrapped round the hand ; in that by re- 
 maining a certain time under water, the legs of another 
 could be clasped. The seasons of the year for em- 
 ploying the different forms of ordeal were determined 
 with a certain regard to the interests of those who 
 were to undergo them. Women, children, the old, 
 the sick, and the weak were not to be subjected to 
 ordeals by fire, water, or poison, but by the scales 
 only.^ Yajnavalkya implies that they were not to 
 be used except in cases of great moment. ^ 
 
 The ordeal cannot be called the special barbarism 
 of any one race or religion, though it appears never 
 to have existed in China. The Arab, the Japanese, 
 the wild African, alike defer to its authority.^ The 
 Hebrew husband had his " bitter water of jealousy." 
 And the historian of the Christian Church tells us 
 that she "took the ordeal under her especial sanction," ' 
 sprinkled its red-hot iron with her holy water, and 
 enacted its cruelties with solemn rituals within her 
 temples.* Down to the twelfth century, it " afforded 
 the means of awing the laity, by rendering the 
 priest a special instrument of Divine justice, into 
 whose hands every man felt that he was liable at any 
 moment to fall."^ And its final abolition was due 
 
 > For a summary of these laws, see Stenzler, in Zeitsch. d. D. M. G., IX. 661-682; 
 Siatm, Will. 115 ; Asiat. Res., I. 389. 
 
 * y&j'fi., II, 95. See Stenzler*s Intraductiojt, p. vii. 
 
 » See Pirtet, II. 457, 458. » Milman, Lot. Ckrisiianitji, III. v. 
 
 ^ Lea*s Superstition and Force^ p. 271. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 
 
 ^93 
 
 quite as much to the revival of the old Roman law 
 and the rise of the free communes as to the repent- 
 ance of the Church. 
 
 Personal deformities and diseases are regarded in 
 Manu as the consequences of sin in the present 
 
 . . '^ Treatment 
 
 or m a previous life. And the law classifies of physical 
 them according to the sins from which they '^^^"''■ 
 proceed. In one passage it declares that the victims 
 are to be despised ; ^ excluding some of them too from 
 the Sraddha, or feast in honor of the dead.^ And this 
 superstition is as wide-spread as the ordeal; it has, 
 like that, infected the Jew and the Christian, and had 
 a similar origin in the effort to comprehend the mystery 
 of physical evil under a moral law. — The instinctive 
 presumption that it becomes the material world to 
 show allegiance to the moral, is of course, while 
 growing up among ignorant races, the source of a 
 superstitious expectation of miracles. But we must not 
 forget that it is this very instinct to whose develop- 
 ment by science we owe the abolition of every ground 
 for believing or demanding miracles ; its ultimate form 
 being the conviction that natural laws are themselves 
 the desired expressions of universal good. 
 
 The contempt which Hindu law prescribes towards 
 the physically deformed and diseased is limited 
 within strictly defined lines of conduct; and towards de- 
 this legislation is evidently an endeavor to ^°™^>v™^ 
 
 o -/ disease. 
 
 modify and restrain, as well as to respect, the 
 crude instinct that physical evil is a punishment for 
 sin. The unfortunate were not to be despised as 
 such. They were to be treated kindly and even with 
 respect.^ They were exempted from public burdens ; 
 and although avoided in the act of sacrifice as being, 
 
 1 Marat, XI. 48, 53. ' Ibid., III. 150. « VA/"-, H. 204. 
 
 13 
 
194 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 blemished, and in the choice of partners for life, prob- 
 ably for physiological reasons, yet they were not to 
 be expelled from society ; and, after prescribed rites, 
 could freely associate with other people. 
 
 There are also sanguinary punishments on the prin- 
 ciple of "eye for eye and tooth for tooth." And 
 ye or eye. ^j^^^^ ^^^ made most repulsivc by their connec- 
 tion with the enormous inequalities of caste. This 
 principle, cruel as it seems, forms the basis of all first 
 essays at abstract and ideal justice in the requital of 
 crime. Some of the severest penalties are left to the 
 criminal's own execution, as if falling back on a sup- 
 posed spontaneous recognition of their rightfulness in 
 his own mind.^ And their barbarity cannot be ex- 
 plained on any theory that leaves out of view the fact 
 that their makers had at least an intense abhorrence 
 of the crimes they punished. Adulterers must burn 
 on a bed of red-hot iron. Thieves were to lose the 
 limbs with which they effected the theft.^ " Where- 
 withal a man hath sinned, with the same let him be 
 punished," recommended itself to these unflinching 
 judges as the maxim of natural right. It was but 
 following out the stern hint of nature in its retribu- 
 tions of sensual excesses. 
 
 But the law knew how to provide compensations for 
 Sympathies ^^ enduraucc of its barbarities. As if dissat- 
 of the law. isfied with them, and looking upwards for a 
 way out of these bonds of judgment, it says : " Men 
 who have committed offences, and received from 
 kings the punishment due them, go pure to heaven, 
 and become as clear as those who have done well."* 
 A similar reaction against the severity of statutes was 
 
 • Maxu, XI. loo, 104. Suicide is one of the commonest forms of penalty in the East. 
 ' Ibid., VIII. 372, 334. » Ibid., Vni; 318. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 95 
 
 naturally to be expected in the case of false witness, 
 in view of the tremendous penalties which were at- 
 tached to this crime, both for the present and the 
 future life. And this presumption may help explain 
 the exceptional fact that falsehood is expressly al- 
 lowed, wherever the death of a person of any caste, 
 who has sinned inadvertently, would be caused by 
 giving true evidence in the courts. ^ It would seem as 
 if the affections sought to assert their precedence, in 
 such extreme cases of the conflict of duties, to the 
 demands of literal fact. In the same way we may 
 account for the singular scale of fines and forfeits in 
 commutation of penalties, based, by a crude sense of 
 natural justice, on the principle of eye for eye and 
 life for life. They are not a mere money measure 
 of crime, but the modification of a harsh lex ialionis 
 under the influence of the humane sentiments. 
 
 This relenting indicates the natural character of the 
 Hindus better than the barbarism of the legislation in 
 detail. It is not to be believed that the punishments 
 by branding and mutilation, the expiations by self- 
 torture and suicide, even for minor crimes, were car- 
 ried out with any thing like the precision of our western 
 conformity to written law.^ There is so much contra- 
 diction between different texts, both in spirit and in 
 letter, so much manifest exaggeration, such frequent 
 confusion of law with ethics, and such difficulty of dis- 
 tinguishing between dogmatic statement and positive 
 command, that this natural inference from the general 
 
 1 Manu, VIII. 104; Yijn..., II. 83. 
 
 2 The very great disregard of legal prohibition concerning the use of animal food and 
 the destruction of animal life, by the Brahmans, is described in Heber's Journaly vol. ii. 
 
196 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 character of the race is not set aside by the text of 
 the Law Book itself. ^ 
 
 Even the history of infanticide and of sati bears 
 Infanticide witncss to this natural gentleness of Hindu 
 and Suttee, character. No traces of these customs are 
 found in the Rig Veda, in Manu, or in Yajnavalkya. 
 They are a later growth, partly of tropical enerva- 
 tion, partly of social misery. But nobler elements^ 
 also were involved in the widow's desire to follow 
 her lost husband ; and female infanticide was due to 
 the marriage custom of giving a costly dowry with 
 the bride.* Both these barbarities were abandoned 
 at the earliest opportunity afforded by European in- 
 fluence.'* Their rapid extinction in British India was 
 mainly the work of the native chiefs themselves, under 
 the persuasion of men like Ludlow, Macpherson, and 
 Campbell.* Even before British interference, many 
 of these chiefs had endeavored to control them by 
 their own unaided efforts. The natives now gener- 
 ally regard the river sacrifices of children as disgrace- 
 ful ; and. sati, since its abolition, is seldom spoken of 
 but with condemnation.^ 
 
 Later pandits have not hesitated to rule out such 
 Free treat- regulations from the old laws as did not seem 
 kws'inlaur Suitable to their times, upon the ground that 
 times. they were established for a less advanced age 
 of the world. In the progress of the Hindus came 
 
 • It has been acutely observed (ia; Citi A ntigm, chap, xi.) that " the principle of the 
 divine origin of laws in the older codes made it impossible for their subjects definitely to 
 abrogate them." And so the old statutes remained side by side with later ones of a dif- 
 ferent and often humaner tenor. In this way we may partially explain the contradictions 
 with which these codes abound ; though, as we shall see, the rule was not without its 
 exceptions, even in the remote East. 
 
 = See chapter on Rig Veda, p. T40. s Elliott's N. W. India, I. 250. 
 
 * Ludlow's British India, II. 138, 149, 151. 
 
 ^ Ludlow, II. J49; Buyers's Recoil, of N. India, 132, 23s; Allen, p. 418. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 97 
 
 denunciation cf many ancient customs. "Among 
 these," says Mr. Wheeler, " may be mentioned the 
 sacrifice of a bull, a horse, or a man; the appoint- 
 ment of a man to become the father of a son by the 
 widow of a deceased brother or kinsman ; the slaugh- 
 ter of cattle at the entertainment of a guest ; and 
 the use of flesh meat at the celebrated feasts of the 
 dead, still performed under the name of sraddhas." 
 
 It is not so much a spirit of cruelty that darkens the 
 pages of this Code as an insatiate self-abnega- supersti- 
 tion, which in many respects is a kind of ''°"'' =='f- 
 
 . . 1 « -/ r ^ abnegation. 
 
 suicide. And, for full answer to all justifica- its lesson. 
 tion of human nature under these aspects, it may seem 
 sufficient to point to their consequences. " Here," it 
 may be said, "is the end of Hindu virtue; here, in 
 Jagannath and his car of human slaughter, in Kali 
 with her sword of human sacrifice, in Mahadeva with 
 his collar of sculls." These deities have been greatly 
 belied. 1 The Hindus certainly became sensualized, 
 — from causes easy to trace. If, however, we should 
 accept the facts as condemnatory of human nature, we 
 must admit that Christianity does not reinstate it, since 
 this religion fell into similar degeneracy, and since its 
 theology still retains this dreadful destructiveness in 
 an ideal form. The records of Christian superstition 
 are more dismal than those of Brahmanical. .The 
 fanaticism of the Donatist and the human sacrifice of the 
 Hindu are of kindred nature. It has been well said, 
 that " England and France have pages in their religious 
 history that ought to cause them to be silent, or else to 
 
 1 " Instances of victims throwing themselves under the wheels of Jagannath have always 
 been rare, and are now unknown. Nothing could be more opposed to the spirit of Vishnu- 
 worship than self-immolation." (Hunter's Orissa, p. 134.) The great mortality among 
 the pilgrims to this shrine is in fact due to neglect of sanitary conditions. The symbols 
 of destruction in figures of the other deities referred to have more relation to spirits of 
 evil, or to death as such, than to human sacrifice, which has always been infrequent. 
 
198 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 bring their charges of cruelty against Hindu rites with 
 some humility." It has been computed that several 
 millions of persons have been burnt as heretics, sorcer- 
 ers, and witches, in Europe, duriiig the period of Chris- 
 tianity. In Cadiz and Seville alone the Inquisitors 
 burned two thousand Jews in a single year (1481).^ 
 It is not desirable to dwell much on this aspect of the 
 subject. But why should all these dark pictures 
 combined make us sceptical concerning the spiritual 
 faculties of rrian? The self-tortures and the dismal- 
 fanaticisms that reach through the long history of his 
 beliefs are not there to prove his moral incapacity : they 
 even teach the very opposite. They are birth-throes, 
 blind and bitter indeed, but none the less genuine, of 
 his divinity. Let us face the worst. There is the Yogi, 
 crawling in agonizing postures from one end of India 
 to the other, or sitting whole days between scorching 
 fires and gazing at the sun with seared eyeballs and 
 bursting brain. There is the Shaman cutting himself 
 with knives, the Moloch worshipper passing his chil- 
 dren through flames, the Aztec piercing himself with 
 aloe thorns and tearing out the hearts of his kinsmen 
 on the reeking teocalli. There are Stylites on their 
 columns, Flagellants beating themselves through the 
 streets of Christian Europe, and all the mad penances 
 and savage suicides of the Desert Monks. And there 
 is Jesuit Loyola with girdle of briers and merciless 
 iron whip; his followers giving themselves "as a 
 corpse" into the hands of "Grand Masters," to be 
 used at their absolute will ; — dismal and dreadful in- 
 centives to a contempt of human nature, that almost 
 start the doubt whether its origin be not from some 
 demoniacal Power, doomed to self-annihilation. But 
 
 ' Jost, Gesch. d. Judenihums, III. no. 
 
THE LAWS OF MANU. 
 
 t99 
 
 other scenes are at command, and to these you hasten 
 that you may recover your respect for hfe. You turn 
 to Christian saints dying serenely on the rack and at 
 the stake ; to the great martyrs of the world's later 
 day, witnesses for truth, liberty, and love ; and stand 
 at last reverently on Calvary before the consummate 
 sacrifice to which you ascribe all this majesty of the 
 soul. You seem to have passed from death to life. 
 " There," you say, " man was on the brute's level : 
 here he becomes a God. A new nature has surely 
 descended on him." But that is impossible, and as 
 needless as it is impossible. You have done injustice 
 to the soul. Can we not read between these dark 
 lines, and discern that the endurance for errors, how- 
 ever dismal and demoniacal, and the endurance for 
 truths, however benignant and divine, have one point 
 ^n common, and that of utmost significance? Do they 
 not at least assure us that man will suffer all things 
 for what he believes true and sacred? It is not mere 
 superstitious terror that makes martyrs even to super- 
 stitions. Fear does not explain these extremities of 
 self-sacrifice, these mournful self-crucifixions, — but 
 something that masters fear. They hint of aspiration, 
 they cry for light, they assure progress. They are 
 impossible without a sentiment of awe before duty, 
 and a vision of triumph beyond pain. They are 
 signs, even they, that man has in his very substance, 
 assurance of those spiritual dignities which he has 
 been believed to owe to some supernatural change, or 
 some all-creative element, introduced by Christian 
 and Jewish revelation alone. 
 
VI. 
 
 WOMAN. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 " I ^HE Dharmasastras are unquestionably no wiser 
 
 on the nature of woman than the Law 
 of Moses, or the mythologists of Adam's Fall. Hbdukgis- 
 Manu is as positive as the Christian Apostle '^''°°- 
 was, and as the Christian world in general has been 
 hitherto, that man is her appointed head, and that her 
 prerogative is to obey. This theory of the sexes, in 
 spite of age and Scripture, is rapidly vanishing, with 
 all analogous pretensions that "might makes right." 
 And it is of less import now to discuss its evils in this 
 or that form of society than it is to note the remedial 
 forces in human nature which mitigated those evils, 
 even in times when the relative " might " of man was 
 in most respects much greater than it is now. 
 
 The general status of woman in the East is given 
 in the declarations of the Law books, that she is 
 " unfit by nature for independence," and " must never 
 seek it ; " that " she is never to do any thing for her 
 own pleasure alone; " that " a wife assumes the very 
 qualities of her husband, as a river is lost in the sea."^ 
 This is our precious modern principle of "feme 
 covert " in its purest essence ! — The widow must give 
 herself up to austerities and remain unmarried, 
 
 • Manu, V. 147, 148 ; IX. 3, 22 ; Y&jn., I. 85. The old Roman Law was similar. See 
 Thierry, Tableau de VEtn^ire Romaitij p. 279. 
 
204 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 preparing for reunion in the next life ; ^ while the 
 husband could, and should, marry again.^ As the 
 Hebrew law allowed husbands to put away their 
 wives on the plea of mere "uncleanness," so the Hindu 
 made mere " unkindness," as well as barrenness or 
 disease, sufficient ground for supersedure; while it 
 exhorted the woman on her part, on pain of bestial 
 transmigrations, to revere even the basest husband as 
 a god.^ The Brahman in later times, like the Hebrew- 
 patriarch, might by law have several wives, though 
 of different castes, having claims to preference ac- 
 cording to the order of their classes ; and neither his 
 wife, child, nor slave, could hold any thing as abso- 
 lute property. He could take every thing from either 
 of them or from all.* This was an incident, affecting 
 them all alike, of the old system of patriarchal au- 
 thority. The custom of polyandry, or possession of 
 one wife by several husbands, was also prevalent 
 during the Middle Ages of Hindu history ; originating 
 partly in the necessity of male offspring, as ground of 
 religious hopes as well as source of physical support.^ 
 This was the theory, — easily matched, we may 
 remark, in Western ideas and institutions, even of 
 recent time. But let us observe the counteractions 
 provided by human nature to its worst effects. 
 
 1 ManUf V. 157-162. * Ibid., V. 167-169; Yajn.^ I. 89. 
 
 * Deitt. xxiv. I ; Mamf, IX. 81 ; V. 154 ; y&j?i.j I. 77. 
 
 * Ma-mt, IX. 85 ; VIII. 416. "A woman's property taken by her husband in distress, 
 or for performance of a duty, he need not restore her." (K4/«., II. 147.) Yet this does 
 not involve the right to violate other laws, which are very stringent in protection of the 
 property rights of woman. (Manu, III. 52. Macnaghten, p. 43.) The language in the 
 text is perhaps too strong. Wilson tells us {Essays on Sanskrit Literature, III. 17, 28) 
 that a widow in India was, by the older laws, free to do as she would with her property ; but 
 in later times efforts were made to deprive her of this right. " At present, in Bengal," he 
 adds, "a woman is acknowledged by all to be mistress of her own wealth." 
 
 " The same necessity explains the custom universal among savage tribes, and even 
 practised by more advanced ones, like the Hebrew tribe of Benjamin, of capturing wdves, 
 and dividing them among the captors ; a custom which tended of course to ensure other 
 qualities of bondage, in the permanent status of woman imder ancient laws. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 205 
 
 Woman was secured against total enslavement in 
 rude times by the operation of two causes. 
 
 r^T . , ._ Natural de- 
 
 She was mvoluntarily recognized by man as fences of 
 
 bringing his spiritual deliverance, and as ap- '"°"^- 
 pealing to his physical power for protection. 
 
 Of these recognitions, the former was due to her 
 procreative function. In early times a man Religious 
 depended for safety, for help, and for honor, f^-^herance. 
 on the number of his children. The patriarch's sons 
 were his strength. " The estimation of an Egyptian," 
 says Herodotus, " was, next to valor in the .field, in 
 proportion to the number of his offspring." ^ To this 
 day, the prayer of the laborer in the Nile Valley is 
 for many children, to aid him in his toil. They 
 were men's hold on the life beyond death. " Chil- 
 dren," says the Greek poet, 
 
 " Are for the dead the saviors of fame ; 
 Even as corks buoy up the net on the sea, 
 Upholding its twisted cord from the abyss beneath." * 
 
 The mysterious principle of life, as transmitted by 
 the seed of man, is the earliest object of veneration 
 by tribes that have risen above the condition of Fet- 
 ichism. As essence of the family bond, it is the centre 
 of patriarchal religion, and embodied in that demand 
 for male offspring, which determined the early institu- 
 tions of the principal races of Europe and Asia. Greek 
 and Roman law watched for ages over the preserva- 
 tion of the family lines through male offspring, as the 
 ground-work of religious rite and tradition. It is 
 easy to explain the fact that interests of this nature 
 were so excessively developed among the Hindus. In 
 the first male child centred the religious relations with 
 
 » Herod., I. 136. * .ffischyl., Ckoe^hori, 497. 
 
206 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 past and future. A male child has always been the 
 primal necessity for the Oriental man. Through a 
 son he pays his progenitors the debt for the gift of his 
 own life,' which is held the most sacred of all dues, 
 and assures himself of the like payment from pos- 
 terity. ^ The happiness of his ancestors was believed 
 by the Hindu to depend on the performance of me- 
 morial rites in their honor by an uninterrupted line of 
 male descendants. For was it not through a son that 
 his own existence became a part of that continuous 
 line of generations, which was probably the first and 
 simplest sign to man of his own immortality ? The 
 laws declare that '■ by a son one obtains victory, by a 
 son's son immortality, by a great-grandson reaches the 
 solar heaven."^ "By a son he overcomes the great 
 darkness (of death) : this the ship to bear him across. 
 There is no life to him who has no son." ^ Kalidasa 
 pictures the joy of a king in the birth of a male child, 
 as resembling that which is felt by the Supreme, at 
 the thought that Vishnu, as manifesting His own sub- 
 tance, is a guarantee of the stability of His Universe.* 
 The Upanishads record the tender forms by which a 
 father at the point of death transfers his whole being 
 to his son.® The very word for son {jiutra) means 
 deliverer from the hell called fU. In the Mah^b- 
 harata, a saint has a vision, in which he sees his an- 
 cestors descending into this limbo, heads downwards, 
 in consequence of the extinction of their male line 
 of descendants in him. The laws of the Greeks and 
 Romans prescribed adoption to the father who had no 
 son, as his sacred duty to his own line.^ 
 
 1 ManUf IX. io6, 107. 2 Manu^ IX. 137, 
 
 3 Aiiereya Br&hmana. Roth, in Weber's Ind. Stud,, I. 458. 
 
 • Raghuviima, III. 5 Kaushitaki Upan. (Weber, I. 409). 
 
 " See references in La CiU A ntique, I. ch. iv. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 207 
 
 Here then was man exalting his stronger sex to 
 heaven, finding therein, as Christianity did after- 
 wards, in the " well-beloved Son," the ground of his 
 salvation. But even to this end the wife and mother 
 was by nature, after all, the sole and sacred path. 
 The gods said to man concerning woman : " In her 
 you shall be born again." "The husband," as Manu 
 expresses it, "becomes himself an embryo, and is 
 born a second time.''^ And so marriage became of 
 necessity a sacrament, invested with the sanctions of 
 conscience and piety. Nature enforced, in behalf 
 of woman, the respect that seemed likely to be re- 
 fused. " Since immortality and heaven come through 
 descendants," says Yajnavalkya, " therefore preserve 
 and honor woman." ^ 
 
 So Manu : — 
 
 " A man is perfect when he consists of three, his wife, himself, 
 and his son." ' 
 
 " A wife secures bliss to the manes of his ancestors and to 
 himself." 
 
 " She is as the goddess of abundance, and irradiates his 
 dwelling." * 
 
 Hence the great simplicity and purity of marriage 
 in the Vedic times, — a more equal and just relation by 
 far than in those of Manu ; though nothing in the 
 recorded marriage rites of later times indicates other 
 than mutual respect and unity of interests.^ Through 
 this religious motive, it must have been that polyandry 
 was got rid of; ^' and even the polygamy of still more 
 
 ' Mamt, IX. 8; YAjn., I. 56. ' y&jn.,.l. 78. 
 
 » Manu, IX. 45. / 4 Ibid., IX. 28, 26. 
 
 ^ See full accounts of the marriage rites of- the Hindus according to the later Vedas, in 
 Weber's IndiscJie Studien, vol. v. 
 
 8 This custom still exists in some parts of India, as among the Nairs, and is ascribed 
 by Mr. Justice Campbell to the modification of that widely spread custom among the 
 Hindtis, of a wife passing on the death of her husband to his brother: "This successive 
 
2o8 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 recent ages was much modified by it, being made 
 rather a last resort where the religious end of mar- 
 riage could not otherwise be attained, than a means 
 of gratifying loose and lawless desires. Polygamy 
 came in fact to be prohibited except for such causes 
 as are expressly declared just grounds for dissolving 
 the marriage contract, among which long continued 
 barrenness naturally was the chief.^ Again, as with 
 the Hebrews, the necessity of securing male offspring 
 led to the transference of the wife by her husband to 
 a near relative, or safinda, for the purpose; but the 
 religious motive of the act led also to the most solemn 
 precautions lest this infringement should be abused 
 for sensual purposes.^ 
 
 These are a few of the legal defences that inured 
 to woman as the recognized way of immortality to 
 him whose mere brute strength, uncontrolled by such 
 motives, would have made her his slave. But they 
 give only a faint idea of that fine compensation which 
 nature must have lent her weakness, through her 
 hold upon man's dearest hopes. 
 
 And as her procreative function enlisted on her be- 
 physicai de- ^alf his rcHgious aspirations, so her physical 
 pendence. inferiority appealed in rude times to his gen- 
 erosity and tenderness. The laws of Manu had 
 the grace to put that lifelong dependence to which 
 they consigned her on the ground of protection.^ 
 
 holding being Iiere transformed into a jotjtt cotUemporanemts holding," where the great 
 object, that of obtaining children, could not otherwise be secured. — Ethnology of India, 
 p. 135. As .to the influence of this belief on marriage relations, see Ditandy, Polsie 
 Indienite, p. 137. 
 
 » Macnaghten, 60. = Manu, IX. 59, 60; YAJn., I. 67, 68. 
 
 ' Manu, I., IX. 3. In rude and ill-governed states of society, even polygamy was plainly 
 in many respects a safeguard, assigning female captives, for example, to a recognized status, 
 under the care of a husband, and in the partial management of a household. Manu's 
 sedulous instructions to the husband, in the art of protecting his wife by employing her "in 
 the collection and expenditure of wealth, in purifications and female duty, in the prepara- 
 
WOMAN. 209 
 
 And a regard to her helplessness runs through the 
 special provisions on those matters in which she was 
 liable to be oppressed. On certain grounds, even 
 "for bearing only female children," 1 a wife might be 
 superseded; but "not a beloved and virtuous wife," 
 who must never be set aside without her consent.^ 
 A superseded wife is entitled to a sufficient mainte- 
 nance in all cases whatever. " It is a crime to leave 
 her without support." 3 Unmarried daughters inherit 
 their mother's estate equally with sons.* So in 
 general, though the Wiie's fecuHum, or special prop- 
 erty, made up of six different kinds of gifts, and pro- 
 nounced positively hers, could nevertheless be used 
 by the husband in case of distress ; ^ yet a special 
 provision consigns to torment male relations who take 
 unjust possession of a woman's property.^ A wife 
 could not be held liable for the debts of a husband 
 or a son.''' A good wife is to be faithfully supported 
 by her husband, though married against^ his inclina- 
 tion, from religious duty.^ A father is forbidden to 
 tacitly sell his daughter by taking a gratuity for giving 
 her in marriage ; ^ and the son is charged to protect 
 his mother after the death of her husband.^" Insanity 
 in a husband, impotence, and extreme vice, are held 
 
 tion of daily food and the superintendence of household utensils" (ix. ii), are evidently 
 dictated by the fear of trusting her to her own dispositions, which are regarded as her most 
 dangerous enemies. This diligent protection and preservation of the wife from vice, which 
 is made so essential a part of his own salvation, savors of a complacency which might have 
 been rebuked, had woman had the making of the laws. Yet, as things were, it must have 
 proceeded from his judgment as to her special needs, and doubtless expressed a real sense 
 of her physical weakness and exposure to rude assaults. For instance, the law commands 
 him, " if he have business abroad, to assure a fit maintenance to his wife while away ; for 
 even if a wife be virtuous, she may be tempted to act amiss, if distressed for want of sub- 
 sistence" (ix. 74). 
 
 ' YAjn., I. 73. 2 Mami, IX. 8i, Sz. ' Y&jn., I. 74- 
 
 * Macnaghten, 6i ; Y&jn., II. 117 ; Mami, IX. 192. « Macnaghten, 44. 
 
 • Manu, III. 52. ' Y&jn., II. 46. « Manu, IX. 95. 
 9 Ibid., IX. 100. " Ibid., IX. 4. 
 
 14 
 
2IO RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 sufficient excuse for aversion on the part of the wife ; 
 which must not be punished by desertion nor depriva- 
 tion of her property.^ 
 
 And this regard for the weakness of woman could 
 not fail to lead to a certain appreciation of her true 
 strength. Thus, as we have just noted, it is upon her 
 need of protection that Manu bases not only a per- 
 petual wardship, but a most vigilant system of restric- 
 tions and occupations, to preserve her from the perils 
 to which her " natural frailty " was presumed to ex- 
 pose her. But the injunctions to these end in what 
 for this presumption is decidedly a fatal admission ; 
 namely, that those women only are truly secure 
 "who are protected by their own good inclinations." ^ 
 So Rama says, "No enclosing walls can screen a 
 woman. Only her virtue protects her." ' 
 
 In fact, a far greater amount of domestic tyranny 
 Domestic ^^^ bccn prcsumcd, by those who regard only 
 oppression the letter of the law, than the facts will war- 
 overstate ^^jj^._ -pj^g scclusion of fcmalcs which prevails 
 in India, for example, has been regarded as forming 
 part of a despotic system. But it is probably due to 
 other causes, in the main, than marital jealousy and 
 distrust. The Brahmans maintain that it is of Mo- 
 hammedan origin, and was adopted by the Hindus 
 merely in self-defence against foreign brutality.* 
 With both Moslem and Hindu, it may have had its 
 origin in modest reserve ; in that instinctive reverence 
 which penetrates the whole life of Eastern races, and 
 passing in the course of ages, like every thing Orien- 
 tal, into a rigid etiquette.^ The use of the veil by 
 
 > Manu, IX. 79. ' Ibid., IX. 12. » R&m&ydna. 
 
 * Wilson, Theatre of the Hindus, Introd., xliii. ; Bnyeis, Recollect, of India, p. 401. 
 
 • De Vere, Pictur. Sketches of Greece and Turkey, p. 270. 
 
WOMAN. 211 
 
 Persian females seems to have been derived from 
 times when it was regarded as a sign of dignity and 
 social elevation. 1 A Buddhist legend illustrates the re- 
 lation of this religion to democratic reform on the 
 subject. The wife of Buddha, it is said, rejected the 
 veil, against the wishes of the court, immediately after 
 her marriage, saying : " Good women need veiling no 
 more than the sun and moon. The gods know my 
 thoughts, my manners, my qualities, my modesty. 
 Why then should I veil my face ? " ^ It would appear, 
 too, that, in spite of their seclusion, the women of the 
 upper classes exercise as much influence in family 
 affairs as among Europeans.^ In the Hindu epics, 
 women are described as entirely independent in their 
 intercourse and movement, travelling where they will, 
 and showing themselves freely in public, and un- 
 veiled.* Married women, especially, were perfectly 
 free in India in their social intercourse with the other 
 sex ; ^ and Sakuntcila, in the drama, pleads her own 
 cause at the court of King Dushyanta, and even boldly 
 rebukes him. 
 
 But these hints of the compensative forces of nature 
 in behalf of woman lead us still farther. Here Recognition 
 were circumstances scarcely suited to demon- "f™™™- 
 strate her finer spiritual gifts. Yet Hindu law and 
 literature abound in proofs that woman did then, as 
 she now does, compel recognition of these gifts ; al- 
 though it may have been shown then, as it has since 
 been, more by the service of the lips than by the con- 
 duct of life. 
 
 The ages we are now studying are not those of the 
 
 1 Gobineau, Relig. et Phil. d. I' Asia CentraU, p. 348. 
 
 2 St. Hiladre. ' Prichard, Admin, of India, II. 89. 
 • See Williams, Indian Epic Poetry t p. 57" 
 
 Wilson, lit supra. 
 
212 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 simple Aryan household, where husband and wife, 
 equals in age, in rights, in serviceable industries, 
 hand in hand ministered to the holy fires on their 
 altars and hearths. i They are ages of southern 
 polygamy and caste; when woman, betrothed in 
 childhood, was in law for ever a child, superseded at 
 her husband's pleasure, forbidden to read the Vedas 
 or to take part in religious rites. In these times, too, 
 the epics reveal the semi-barbarous custom of poly- 
 andry, although this possession of one wife by several 
 husbands must certainly, even in the stormy social 
 conditions which the Mahabharata describes, have been 
 exceptional.^ 
 
 The Ramayana, indeed, somewhat later, shows pro- 
 found respect for the marriage relation. But even 
 this poem, abounding in manly sentiments towards 
 women, frequently falls into the tone of contempt 
 which their perpetual minority suggested ; as where 
 Rama admonishes Bharata of tlie duty of a ruler 
 always to treat them with courtesy, while he should 
 disregard their counsel, and withhold from them all 
 important secrets. 
 
 Yet, under such circumstances as these, observe 
 what the law itself confessed. Not only did it declare 
 " mutual fidelity till death the supreme duty between 
 husband and wife,^ and "virtue, riches, love, the 
 three objects of human desire," to be " the reward of 
 their mutual friendship,"* and pronounce the woman 
 the highest beatitude of the man." ^ It admonished 
 
 > See Manu, IX. 96. 
 
 > In Manu indeed it is not mentioned, and Brahmanism had little toleration for it. The 
 Himalaya mountaineers explain the custom as necessary for the protection of women 
 during the long absence of their husbands on distant expeditions for trading purposes. 
 Lloyd's Himalayas^ 1. 255. 
 
 « Mam, IX. loi. « Y&jn., 1. 74. t Ma„u, IX. 28. 
 
WOMAN. 213 
 
 him that " where females are honored the deities are 
 pleased, and where they are dishonored, or made 
 miserable, all rehgious rites are vain;" while "their 
 imprecation brings utter destruction on the house." ^ 
 The inference that women must therefore be con- 
 stantly supplied with ornaments and gay attire shows 
 that Eastern and Western logic on these matters stands 
 in common need of reconstruction at the hands of 
 woman herself. But the law went deeper than man- 
 ners. In an outburst of Oriental reverence it proclaims 
 a mother to be greater than a thousand fathers.^ In a 
 calmer, didactic mood, it defines the sum of all duty to 
 consist in assiduous service of one's father, mother, 
 and spiritual teacher, as long as they live, holding 
 them " equal to the three worlds and the three Vedas ; " 
 and even commands that the wife of the teacher, if of 
 the same class, shall be treated with the respect shown 
 to himself.^ In the Sraddha, or memorial rite in honor 
 of the pitris, or ancestors, those on the female side 
 must not be forgotten.* The Swayamvara form of 
 marriage, after free choice of a husband by the 
 maiden, is celebrated by the later poets as well as 
 in the Vedas. ^ And Burnouf has gone so far as to 
 affirm that marriage in India was never a state of 
 servitude for woman.^ It is certain that, of the four 
 forms of marriage recognized as valid by Manu, 
 neither necessarily involved such subjection ; while, in 
 the Prajapatya form, bride and bridegroom are dis- 
 tinctly enjoined "to perform together their civil and 
 religious duties."'' 
 
 We have here, it is true, no such testimonies as 
 
 1 Manu, III. 55-62. = Ibid, II. i4S- ' Md., II. 210. 
 
 « Y&jn., I. 242 ; IIi: 4. ^ R- V; I. "6; Raghuvania, VI. 
 
 « Essay on the Veda, p. 213. ' Manu, III. 27-30. 
 
214 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 those of Herodotus and Diodorus concerning Egypt, 
 who inform us that in that country it was customary 
 for the husband to obey the wife, and for women to 
 manage business affairs while the men plied the loom 
 at home.' Yet Yajnavalkya specifies certain classes 
 of women whose debts their husbands were bound to 
 pay, because dependent on their labor for support.^ 
 And Wilson tells us that all the contempt shown by 
 the Hindus for women was learned by them of their 
 Mohammedan masters.^ The Ramayana shows us 
 King Dasaratha prostrate at the feet of his wicked 
 wife, entreating her to release him from his prornise 
 to grant her any boon she might ask. In fact, Hindu 
 literature abounds in amusing illustrations of submis- 
 siveness in husbands to wives as well as in wives to 
 husbands.* 
 
 The gentleness of Hindu character was favorable 
 to the sway of these subtler forces. This has 
 
 Influence on 
 
 public af- been shown on a great scale in political, 
 ^^ mercantile, and domestic life. Women have 
 ruled empires in India, as in Egypt and Assyria, and 
 had their full share in bringing about the frequent 
 wars and revolutions of the petty Hindu States. The 
 Indian epic, like the Greek and the Teutonic, cele- 
 brates feminine control over the military destinies of 
 states, and Kalidasa describes the admirable govern- 
 ment of Ayodhya by a mythic queen." 
 
 Among the native rulers who have heroically re- 
 sisted foreign invaders, none have shown stronger 
 quahties than Lakshmi Baee, the Rani, or queen, of 
 Jhansi ; whose wonderful generalship held the British 
 
 1 Died., I. 27 i fferod., II. 35. s K4,k., II. 48. 
 
 5 Essays m Sanskrit Literature, III. 17. • See Wheeler's India, II. 569-573. 
 
 o Raghuva-nia, XIX. 
 
WOMAN. 215 
 
 army in check ; and who headed her troops in person, 
 dressed as a cavalry officer, and was killed on the 
 field. Sir Hugh Rose declared that the best man on 
 the enemy's side was the Rani of Jhansi.i Another 
 Rani, Aus Kour, being elevated by the British to the 
 disputed throne of Pattiala in the Panjab, an utterly 
 disorganized and revolted state, "as the only person 
 competent to govern it," is recorded by the historian 
 to have changed its whole condition in less than a 
 year, reducing rebellious villages, bringing up the 
 revenues, and establishing order and security eveiy- 
 where.® 
 
 Malika Kischwar, queen dowager of Oude, educated 
 her son, who was dispossessed in 1866, to a knowledge 
 of ancient and modern literature, resulting in his be- 
 coming an author of high repute, and surrounding her 
 and himself with persons of literary distinction. 
 
 Aliah Bae, the Mahratta queen of Malwa, for 
 twenty years preserved peace in her dominions, devot- 
 ing herself to the rights, happiness, and culture of her 
 people. It was said of her that it would have been 
 regarded as the height of wickedness to become her 
 enemy, or, if need were, not to die in her defence. 
 Hindus and Mohammedans united in prayers that her 
 life might be lengthened. And of so rare a modesty 
 was this great queen, that she ordered a book, which 
 sounded her praises, to be destroyed, and took no notice 
 of the author. 
 
 Notwithstanding certain precepts, the law has practi- 
 cally allowed women a larger share in the manage-^ 
 ment of property than the statutes of most Christian 
 nations ; and they have shown abundant shrewdness 
 
 > Arnold's Dalhmsie, II. 153. ' GrifSn's R^'ahs 0/ the PanjSi, p. 138. 
 
2l6 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 and tact in trade. " In family affairs, secular or relig- 
 ious, their influence is very great, and almost supreme. 
 Seldom can a man complete any important business 
 transaction, without having settled the matter with his 
 privy council, in the female apartments."^ "As the 
 law in Ceylon," says Tennent, "recognizes the abso- 
 lute control of the lady over the property conveyed to 
 her use, the custom of, large marriage portions to 
 woman has thrown an extraordinary extent of the 
 landed property of the country into the hands of the 
 females, and invested them with corresponding propor- 
 tion of authority in its management." ^ A recent very 
 careful work on India tells us that " in the family circle, 
 and daily rounds of domestic duties, interests, and 
 enjoyments, the Hindu woman has a field for her 
 sympathies which puts her quite on a level with her 
 sisters of the West."^ 
 
 Nor have the intellectual capacities of women failed 
 inteuectuai of respcct. There are hymns in the Rig Veda 
 recognition, jjy female rishis.* Malabar boasts seven ancient 
 sages, and four of them were women. The moral 
 sentences of Avyar are taught in the schools, as golden 
 rules of life ; and they certainly deserve the name. 
 Here are a few specimens : — 
 
 "Honor thy father and mother. Forget not the favors thou 
 hast received. Learn while thou art young. Seek the society of 
 the good. Live in harmony with others. Remain in thy own 
 place. Speak ill of none. Ridicule not bodily infirmities. Pursue 
 not a vanquished foe. Deceive not even thy enemy. Forgiveness 
 is sweeter than revenge. The sweetest bread is that earned by 
 labor. Knowledge is riches. What one learns in his youth is as 
 lasting as if engraven on stone. The wise is he who knows him- 
 self. Speak kindly to the poor. Discord and gambling lead to 
 
 • Buyers, p. 399. » Chfistianity in Ceylon, p. 157. 
 
 ' Prichard, Administr. of India, II. 89. « Weber, VorUsuneai, 37, 38. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 217 
 
 misery. He misconceives his interest who violates his promise. 
 There is no tranquil sleep without a good conscience, nor any virtue 
 without religion. To honor thy mother is the most acceptable 
 worship. Of woman the fairest ornament is modesty. " ' 
 
 A little Hindu work on " Deccan Poets," by a pandit, 
 Rameswamie (Calcutta, 1829), tells us that Avyar, 
 supposed by some to have been a foundling, was ven- 
 erated as the daughter of Brahma and Sarasvati. 
 She was the child of a Brahman by a low-caste 
 woman, like Vyasa and other great Hindu person- 
 ages, and, though brought up by a singer of the servile 
 class, excelled all her brothers and sisters in learning, 
 and wrote, besides poetry, on astronomy, medicine, 
 chemistry, and geography. The same work mentions 
 many other female poets, among them the daughter 
 of a potter. 
 
 Though the law prohibited women from teaching 
 the Vedas, we know that priestesses were teachers of 
 princes. We know that there were Brahmanical 
 schools, not unlike the famous Saracen Colleges of 
 the Middle Ages, at which kings, priests, and women 
 united in the enthusiastic study of metaphysical and 
 moral science ; and of the women it is reported that 
 some astonished the masters by the depth and sub- 
 limity of their thought, and that others delivered 
 responses from a state of trance.® 
 
 In the Dramas, women always speak in the Prakrit 
 or common dialects, while men use the Sanskrit or 
 "holy" speech. These softer popular dialects derived 
 by decomposition from the Sanskrit are believed by 
 Renan to be special consequences of the female organ- 
 ization, and to prove its independent activity in the 
 
 1 From Schoberl's Hindustan in Miniature. 
 
 s Megastheoes, Nearchus in Strabo^ XV, ; Weber, 21. 
 
2l8 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Structure of the language. ^ More significant is the 
 fact that the Prakrit, thus proper to woman, and by 
 her means introduced into literature, has gradually- 
 supplanted the Sanskrit, and forms the basis of the 
 present spoken languages of India. So that the stamp 
 of female influence is in fact conspicuous in the his^ 
 torical development of Hindu speech, as an informing 
 and determining force. 
 
 It would require a separate volume to render justice 
 to the fine appreciation of womanly qualities 
 
 Literary ap- '^ '^ . . 
 
 preciationof in what wc already know of Hindu literature, 
 woman. j^. ^^^ bccu noticed that, in recognizing these, 
 the poets abandon exaggeration and draw from na- 
 ture.^ Nothing could be more tender and noble than 
 these ideal pictures, covering, too, so wide a range of 
 destiny and desire : the chaste love of Rama and Sita, 
 — her»courage, fortitude, and womanly dignity under 
 his unjust suspicions, her mastery of all forms of evil 
 by moral purity and spiritual insight ; the fidelity of 
 Damayanti to her unhappy Nala, tempted by an evil 
 spirit first to play away his crown, and then to flee 
 from her for shame at his beggary, but followed and 
 redeemed at last by that loyalty of love, which thought 
 only of the misery he must endure in offending against 
 his nobler nature ; the piety of Savitri, controlling fate, 
 charming, the god of death himself, by her wisdom 
 and love, into giving back life to her dead husband, 
 and sight to his blind father, with his lost crown, and 
 the glory of his fallen race.^ Equally intuitive is the 
 sense of woman's power to inspire a noble manhood 
 with absolute devotion. The Mahabha,rata describes 
 
 * De VOriffine du Lan^age, Pref. p. 28. 
 
 * Monier Williams, Indian Epic Poetry^ p. 54. 
 
 ' Savitri and Satyavan, Episode of the MahctbhSrata. 
 
WOMAN. 219 
 
 the passionate love of Rurus, imploring the gods to 
 restore his Pramadvara, and offering to yield" up his 
 own lifetime to be added to hers. 
 
 " I give thee half my future days, beloved, 
 Light to renew thy life be drawn from mine." ' 
 
 And Kalidasa gives us the tale, wrought out in East- 
 ern traits, of the wasting grief of good prince Adja 
 for his young wife, whom the fall of celestial flowers 
 on her bosom has called away from earth ; pursuing 
 his Indumati through all sweet perfumes and sounds 
 and forms, refusing to turn away his mind or to be 
 comforted, the mighty grief slowly dividing his soul, 
 as a bough will rend the wall into which it grows, 
 until after " wearing through eight years of pain, 
 patiently and faithfully for his young son's sake, living 
 on pictures and images of his beloved, and on fleeting 
 transports of reunion, in his dreams," he freely lays 
 aside the r^ined body for an immortal life, with the 
 lost one, and among the gods.^ In Hindu poetic jus- 
 tice the fickleness, unfaithfulness, or harsh suspicion 
 towards true womanly love, which so often recurs in 
 Eastern story, is always visited by remorse, distraction, 
 or despair ; and even where changes of heart are as- 
 cribed to the malevolence of evil powers or the male- 
 dictions of offended saints, they are in no wise freed 
 from these penalties, which teach humility and truth, 
 while they honor outraged virtue by proving it be- 
 friended by the eternal laws.' What European poet 
 knows better than Kalidasa how gracious a soul is 
 born in nature at the touch of woman? Sakuntala, 
 cherishing her plants like a sister, 
 
 ' Makaih., I. '' Raghuvansa, VIII. 
 
 ^ See especially SakuntalA. and the R&m&yana' 
 
220 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 " Never moistening in the stream 
 Her own parched lips, till she had fondly poured 
 Its purest water on their thirsty roots, 
 And oft, when she would fain have decked her hair 
 With their thick clustering blossoms, in her love 
 Robbing them not e'en of a single flower," ' 
 
 infuses into them her own affections : the woods, the 
 flowers, the forest creatures, feel her coming and going 
 like the breath of life and the blast of death. 
 
 " In sorrow for her loss the herd of deer 
 Forget to browse ; the peacock on the lawn 
 Ceases its dance ; the very trees around 
 Shed their pale leaves like tears, — while they dismiss 
 Their dear Sakuntala with loving wishes." ^ 
 
 " He who would wish her to endure the hardships of 
 penance would attempt to sever the hard wood with 
 the blue leaf of the lotus." She is "the mellowed 
 fruit of virtuous actions in some former birth." — Wild 
 beasts respect the holiness of Damayanti, wandering 
 in the deserts ; the noisy caravan halts, and the rough 
 men beseech for her benediction. ^ The poet of the 
 Mahabh&rata sings the praise of woman like an earlier 
 Schiller. The wife is " man's other half, his inmost 
 friend, source of his bliss, root of his salvation ; friend 
 of the solitary one, consoling him with sweet words, 
 in his duties like a father, in his sorrows like a 
 mother." She reproves his neglect of manly duties, 
 and admonishes him of the forgotten God within him, 
 the witness and judge of human deeds. Deserted by 
 her husband, who refuses to recognize her, the Sa- 
 kuntala of the epic says with dignity: "Thou, who 
 knowest what is true and what is false", O King ! 
 
 1 Williams's translation. s ibij. 
 
 ^ Nala and Damayanti, Episode of the Mah&bh&rata. 
 
WOMAN. 221 
 
 scorning this child of our love, bringest shame on 
 thyself. Thinking, ' I am alone,' thou hast forgotten 
 that beholder from of old, who is in the heart. Doing 
 wickedly, thou imaginest, ' No one knows it is I.' 
 But the gods know, and the witness within thee : sun 
 and moon, day and night, their own hearts, and the 
 justice of God, behold the deeds of men. The spirit 
 that dwells within us judges us hereafter." 
 
 Sita, the ideal wife in the Ramayana, is Rama's 
 "primeval love," not less tenderly human for being 
 divine. She compels him, by her devotion, to take her 
 with him into his exile in the wilderness, overpowering 
 his reason and will alike by the higher wisdom of 
 love. She rebukes him for his anger against even 
 the Rakshasas, demon foes of gods and men, as un- 
 becoming one who had assumed the consecration of 
 a religious life ; and warns him to subdue the first 
 risings of evil desire, since even a great mind may 
 contract guilt through neglecting almost imperceptible 
 moral distinctions : with which frankness Rama is 
 delighted, and replies, " O Sita, one who is not ad- 
 monished is not beloved. You have spoken becom- 
 ingly, and you are my companion in virtue, and 
 dearer to me than life."^ Fully to appreciate this 
 recognition of womanhood, we must remember that 
 Rama is nothing less than incarnated deity. 
 
 Even the wife of the demon Ravana, the Satan of 
 the epic, warns him against gratifying his sensual 
 passions on the person of his beautiful captive; "for 
 he who forces the inclination of a woman shall die an 
 early death, or become the prey of endless disease." 
 The Ramayana likens " the wind that drives away the 
 white lotus from the too thirsty bees " to " the modesty 
 
 * Rdm&yana, B. ii. 
 
222 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 that drives the coy bride from her husband." Sitk, on 
 her part, can forgive her crudest enemies. Saved 
 from their hands, she says, "Why should I revenge 
 myself on the servants of Ravana, whom harsh com- 
 mands drove to injure me? What I have suffered 
 'pays the penalty for a former life. I would not punish 
 others who are also enforced to evil." What exquisite 
 sense of the fine divination of womanly love is in the 
 picture of Damayanti, surrounded by the gods, who, 
 to deceive her, have all taken the form of her chosen 
 Nala, and mingle in the crowd of suitors, in her 
 father's hall! 
 
 "And Damay'anti trembled with fear, and folded her hands in 
 reverence before the gods, praying them to resume their immortal 
 shapes, and reveal Nala, that she might choose him for her lord in 
 presence of all. Then the gods wondered at her truth and love, 
 and revealed straightway the tokens of their godhead. And 
 Damayanti saw the four bright gods, and knew they were not 
 mortal heroes ; for there was no sweat on their brows, nor dust on 
 their garments, and their garlands were fresh as if the flowers were 
 just gathered, and their feet touched not the earth. And she saw 
 also the true Nala ; for he stood before her with shadow falling to 
 the ground, and twinkling eyes and drooping garland, and moisture 
 was on his brow, and dust on his raiment. And she went and tooR 
 the hem of his garment, and threw a wreath of radiant flowers 
 around his neck, and thus chose him for her lord. And a sound of 
 wild sorrow burst from all the Rajahs ; but the gods and sages 
 cried aloud, ' Well done ! ' And Nala said, ' Since, O maiden I you 
 lave chosen me for your husband, in presence of the gods, know 
 that I will be your faithful consort, ever delighting in your words, 
 and so long as my soul shall inhabit this body I solemnly vow to 
 be thine, and thine alone.' " ' 
 
 The lamentation of Tara, the wife of Bali, over the 
 dead body of her husband, is as touching and noble 
 as any thing in poetry. 
 
 1 Wheeler's History of India-t I. 484. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 223 
 
 "Why lookest thou so dull on thy child, thou, to whom thy 
 children were so dear ? 
 
 " Thy face seems to smile on me in the bosom of death, as if 
 thou wert alive. 
 
 " I see thy glory still like sunset on a mountain's head." ' 
 
 As the moral interest of the Iliad centres in the 
 nemesis that follows crime against the sancti- 
 
 e 1T11-,- , ^ -V^A. Woman the 
 
 ties ot wedded life, so that of the Ramayana inspiiation 
 centres in the public and private calamities "^ *^ "^^"'^ 
 naturally incident to polygamy. It is the attempt of 
 one of the king's wives to set aside the rights of the 
 son of another, in the interest of her own offspring, 
 that brings about the exile of Rama, the misery of the 
 people, the death of the unwise, uxorious king him- 
 self, the capture of Sita, and the war for her recovery ; 
 and this last portion of the epic is but a Hindu counter- 
 part of the Trojan war in punishment of the rape of 
 Helen. But while the Greek heroine shares the crim- 
 inality of her captor, the Hindu Sita is the ideal of 
 the faithful wife. 
 
 The crime which leads on the woes depicted in that 
 other great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, is a gam- 
 bling match, in which a monarch, made desperate by 
 continual losses, finally plays away his own wife, — an 
 atrocity which is rebuked on the spot by a Brahman, 
 who represents the eternal ethical law ; protesting that 
 Judhishthira "lost himself heiore he staked his wife, 
 and having first become a slave could no longer have 
 the power to stake Draupadi." 
 
 Without entering into definite criticism of all these 
 ideals, I cannot forbear quoting the excellent remarks 
 of Monier Williams in his sketch of Indian Epic Poetry. 
 
 • Rim&yana. B. iv. 
 
224 
 
 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 "Sita, Draupadi, and Damayanti," he says, "engage 
 our affections and interest far more than Helen or even 
 Penelope. It cannot be doubted that in these delight- 
 ful portraits we have true representations of the purity 
 and simplicity of Hindu domestic manners in early 
 times. Children are dutiful to their parents and sub- 
 missive to their superiors ; younger brothers are re- 
 spectful to their elder brothers ; parents are fondly 
 attached to their children, and ready to sacrifice them- 
 • selves for their welfare ; wives are loyal, devoted, 
 obedient to husbands, yet show much independence 
 of character, and do not hesitate to express their own 
 opinions ; husbands are tenderly affectionate towards 
 their wives, and treat them with respect and courtesy ; 
 daughters and women generally are virtuous and 
 modest, yet spirited, and when occasion requires 
 courageous : love and harmony reign throughout 'the 
 family circle. It is in depicting scenes of domestic 
 affection, and expressing these feelings that belong to 
 human nature in all times and places, that Sanskrit 
 epic poetry is unrivalled." 
 
 Reverence for motherhood is here carried beyond 
 all other forms of respect for natural ties. The divine 
 sons of Dasar^tha, all gods, all bow at the feet of 
 their human mothers. Rtma, obliged to go into exile 
 that his father may not break his vow, is indeed un- 
 moved by his mother's unmeasured distress, and can- 
 not concede the claims she founds on the Sastras 
 themselves, to greater respect and obedience than is 
 due even to a father; yet from his exile he sends 
 messages of profound affection to her, and even to 
 that other wife of his father whose criminal ambition 
 was the cause of his own disinheritance, and bids his 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 225 
 
 brother Bharata pay every form of pious attention to 
 both. 
 
 The inspiration of these two great epics is indeed 
 nothing else than the Worth of Woman. Thev 
 
 * -^ •' And of my- 
 
 celebrate her not only as imparting a divine thoiogy in 
 dignity to every sacrifice for her sake, but as ^™^'^' 
 conquering all moral evil through her constancy and 
 faith. In this whole cycle of mythology, it is always 
 woman who destroys the dreaded powers, and revives 
 the energy of good. In the natural symbolism of the 
 Rig Veda, "the divine Night arrives, an immortal 
 goddess, shining with innumerable eyes, scattering 
 darkness with their splendors ; and men come to her 
 as birds to their nests. She drives away the wolf and 
 the thief, and bears them safely through the gloom." ^ 
 And the Dawn arrives, "a daughter of the sky, shin- 
 ing on them like a young wife, arousing every living 
 being to his work, bringing light and striking down 
 darkness ; leader of the days ; lengthener of life ; for- 
 tunate, the love of all, who brings the eye of the 
 god."^ Woman prepares the holy fire. "The great 
 sacred mothers of the sacrifice have uttered praise, 
 and decorate the child of the sky." ^ 
 
 It is remarkable, in view of the reverence of Hindu 
 life for male offspring, that the later theogonies com- 
 bine male and female elements, and treat both sexes 
 as equally necessary to the conception o_f deity. Crea- 
 tion, in Manu as well as in the Upanishads, proceeds 
 from the divine Love or Desire, becoming twain, male 
 and female.* This co-essentiality of the two, for all 
 manifestation of the absolute, is common to the Hindu, 
 
 > R. v., X. 127. 2 R. K, VII. 77. 
 
 ' R. V,, IX. 33, 5. Perhaps symbolical expressions, yet not the less significant. 
 
 * Manu, I. 32 ; Brihad Up. I. 43 ; Wilson's Essays on Hindu Religion, I. 241, 245.- 
 
 15 
 
226 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Egyptian, and Phoenician religions. The deities are 
 androgynous, whether Brahma-Maya, Osiris-Isis, or 
 Baal-Baut; or they flow in series of twofold ema- 
 nations through all pantheistic cosmogonies. Oriental, 
 Gnostic, Neo-Platonic, under names not so familiar 
 as even these, — names which it is needless to enumer- 
 ate. In most cases the divine equality of sex is still 
 further represented by the fact that these wives of the 
 deities are also their sisters, and thus co-eternal. It 
 is a striking illustration of that greater breadth of sym- 
 pathy we have already noted in polytheistic and pan- 
 theistic forms of religion, as compared with intensely 
 monarchical, that this cosmogonic recognition of the 
 equality in the sexes was confined to the former class. 
 Thus it is quite unknown to the old monotheistic 
 severit}' of the Hebrew faith, as well as to the distinc- 
 tively Christian, in its original form, which prefers the 
 masculine alike in its name of God and its choice of 
 Saviour. Only with latest heresy does God, as God, 
 come to stand as " Our Mother." ^ Honor to deity as 
 mother was indeed, both in Hindu and Egyptian wor- 
 ship, carried to a point beyond what was rendered to 
 any male function or authority. To Isis, greatest of 
 Egyptian divinities, whose myriad names were woven 
 into this one, the most tender of all, answers the Vedic 
 Aditi, " Mother of all the gods." 2 
 
 And not less significant is the fact that in all the 
 The Word olderEastcm religions "the Word" is feminine. 
 feminine. Thought, in its purest symbol, is thus awarded 
 
 ' So it is only in tile later Kabbalistic theology of the Hebrews, subsequent to Greek 
 and Oriental influences on their faith, that we find the first emanation of Deity conceived 
 as "the great Mother." (Sohar. See Berthold's Christologia, § 23.) And the Book of 
 the "Wisdom of Solomon," under similar influences, praises its female "ffo^fa," as the 
 mirror of the power of God. 
 
 2 Herodotus^ II. 40 ; Apuleius, Metajnorphoses. 
 
WOMAN. 227 
 
 to the physically weaker sex. In India, as Sarasvati, 
 woman is the genius of art, literature, eloquence, — is, 
 in short, " the Word ; " ever the holiest symbol to the 
 Hindu mind. She is thus properly the wife of Brahm^. 
 At her festivals, as goddess of learning, all books, 
 pens, and other implements of study, are gathered in 
 the school-houses in India, and strewn with white 
 flowers and barley-blades ; and in the prayer her 
 name is coupled with the Vedas and all the sacred 
 writings, and her love invoked, as one with that of 
 Brahma, "the gi'eat Father of all."i "Sarasvati," 
 says the Rig Veda, "enlightens all intellects." "The 
 gods made Ila the instructress of men." V^ch, or 
 Speech, is "the melodious Queen of the gods," who 
 says : — 
 
 " I myself declare this, which is desired by gods and men." 
 " Every man whom I love, I make him terrible. I make him a 
 priest, a seer." 
 
 " I make him wise." ^ 
 
 Here is Indra's praise of Lakshmi : — 
 
 " Thou art mystic and spiritual knowledge. Thou art the phi- 
 losophy of reasoning, — the three Vedas. 
 
 " Thou art the arts and sciences, thou moral and political 
 wisdom. 
 
 " The worlds have been preserved and reanimated by thee." ^ 
 
 " Every book of knowledge," says the Hitopadesa, 
 " which is known to Usanas or Vrihaspati, is by na- 
 ture implanted in the understanding of women." As 
 Durga, it is woman who slays the Satan of the later 
 popular belief, and delivers mankind from the fear of 
 evil ; for which service this goddess is adored by all 
 
 1 Wilson's Essays, II. 190. 
 
 ■' Rig Veda, I. 3, 12 ; I. 31, 11 ; VIII. 89, 10; X. 125, 5. 
 
 ' Vishnu PurSna, I. ch. ix. 
 
228 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 deities and saints.^ In the myth of the Kena Upanis- 
 had, it is a woman', Uma, who represents divine knowl- 
 edge. She is a shining mediator between Brahma 
 and the gods : none but she is able to reveal to Indra 
 "who it was that had appeared to them, enforcing their 
 adoration, and vanished when they sought to approach 
 too near." The epics also describe Uma as one of the 
 three divine daughters of the great mountain king, 
 Himavat, all of them renowned in the three worlds 
 for force of contemplation, for chastity, and for power 
 in expounding divine wisdom.^ And as in the Rig 
 Veda, at the beginning of Hindu religious develop- 
 ment, we have Aditi, " mother of the gods," so in the 
 mystical Purstnas, at the end, we have Durga, or 
 Mahamay^, defined as " the eternal substance of the 
 world, soul of all forms, whom none has power to 
 praise ; by whom the. universe is created, upheld, pre- 
 served, into whom it is absorbed at last."* 
 
 After eighteen centuries of Christianity, the task of 
 christianit en^^ncipating woman from legal incapacities 
 andHea, yet remains to be accomplished. Such prog- 
 emsm. ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ actually been made in this direction 
 cannot be laid to the sole account of any distinctive re- 
 ligion. Physical and social science, intellectual culture, 
 and practical necessity have had more to do with it than 
 either Christian belief or that spirit of brotherhood 
 which Christianity has held to be its own peculiar 
 grace. The history of its churches as a whole affords 
 no ground for according them superiority, in this form 
 of justice, to the heathen world. The Hindu law for- 
 bade woman to read the Vedas, or to officiate at holy 
 rites. * Christian councils and Popes, echoing the 
 
 * Pwr&nas, quoted in Muir, Sanskrii Texts, IV. 371. 
 
 ' See texts in Muir, IV. 367. » Ibid., 371 ; Wilson's Essays, I. 247. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 229 
 
 great Apostle to the Gentiles, have interdicted her 
 not only from assumption of the priesthood, but from 
 speaking in religious assemblies, or administering the 
 rite of baptism.' Christian legislation has been in 
 many points even more unjust to her than Manu. A 
 law of Justinian concerning deaconesses makes death 
 the penalty for their marrying. What is there in the 
 Hindu code harsher towards females than their exclu- 
 sion by English common law from " benefit of clergy," 
 so that they were put to death for crimes which a 
 clergyman could commit with impunity, and for which 
 a man was simply branded?^ Have Hindu laws pre- 
 scribed the self-burning of widows ? For eighteen 
 hundred years Christian statutes burned women at 
 the stake, and for heresy mainly. Is the absolute 
 authority of husband and father the oldest despot- 
 ism? It survives still in the law of England, which 
 "vests parental rights in the father alone, to the 
 entire exclusion of the mother ; " giving him power 
 not only to remove the children from her during his 
 life, but to appoint a guardian with similar power over 
 them after his death .^ What could be worse than the 
 European principle of " feme covert," the absorption of 
 her legal existence during marriage into that of her 
 husband, still described in the very language of the 
 Hindu Law ? Or what shall we say of the facts that 
 the Ecclesiastical or Canon Law has been the source 
 of woman's severest disabilities ; and that it is only in 
 so far as the secular principle has prevailed over the 
 ecclesiastical that any progress has been made in re- 
 
 » Laodicea; Carthage; Autun (670 A.c); Aix-la-Chapelle (816); Paris (824). The 
 Synod of Orange (441) forbids the ordination of deaconesses. See Ludlow, WomatCs 
 Work in the Church, p. 65. 
 
 > Wendell's Blacksione, I. 44s, n. 
 
 • Westminster Review for Jan. 1872, p. 30. 
 
230 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 moving them ? ^ The persecution of witches in modern 
 Europe has no parallel in Hindu or any other barbar- 
 ism. Many of the legal disqualifications of woman, 
 which have descended from feudalism, make her per- 
 petual wardship among the heathen appear almost 
 respectable in comparison. 
 
 And on the other hand, as we have seen, an instinc- 
 Treatment tive rcspect for the sex was not wanting to the 
 bylff"ant prc-Christian world. It was the command- 
 reiigions. ment of nature. Its roots were in religion, 
 in moral appreciation, in generosity and in love. 
 Judaism and Christianity helped it onward, by their 
 stern protest against polygamy and sensuality, and by 
 sublime ideals of purity and beneficence. But the 
 Church, it must be remembered, was anticipated by 
 a noble movement of Roman law, which steadily 
 transformed the status of woman from almost total 
 bondage into freedom and equality in respect of con- 
 jugal, marital, and proprietary rights. It has been 
 said with truth that Roman jurisprudence gave her 
 " a place far more elevated than that since assigned to 
 her by Christian governments." ^ The culmination 
 of liberal tendencies under Christian emperors, as 
 especially shown in the laws of Constantine in her 
 favor, was the issue of a secular movement, which 
 had been penetrating for centuries through the whole 
 mass of Roman legislation. Under Christianity itself, 
 the progress was slow : later emperors undid the work 
 of earlier ones ; and it is admitted even by Troplong 
 that this religion " did not take full possession of civil 
 society till after the older races had been rejuvenated 
 
 ' See Blackstow, I. 445 ; also Maine's Anoient Law, p. 153. 
 " Westm. Rev. for Oct. 1856. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 231 
 
 by fresh life infused from new sources.^ Without dis- 
 paraging the services of the Church, we must render 
 justice to that far greater help towards the emancipa- 
 tion of woman which came from a different quarter. 
 I mean those Teutonic tribes, to whom a queen was 
 as good as a king, and who gave Rome an empress.^ 
 I mean those free "barbarians," who brought with 
 them a pei-fect equality of sex in all the domestic and 
 social relations ; with whom the wife was accustomed 
 not to yield up a dowry, but to receive one from the 
 husband, while each formally endowed the other with 
 spear, and steed, and sword, in token of common 
 public duties and claims ; whose women were '' fenced 
 with chastity," and "guardians of their own children ; " 
 who held that " somewhat of sanctity and prescience 
 was inherent in the female sex;"^ who entered neither 
 on peace nor on war without consulting the priestess 
 as an oracle ; whose mythology conceived destiny in 
 female forms, whether as Valkyriur or Nornir, at the 
 tree of life or on the field of death ; and whose oldest 
 poem, the Voluspa, was ascribed to a woman, repre- 
 sented as a divinity who unveils the past and future to 
 gods and men. 
 
 But behind Roman, Christian, and Teutonic helpers, 
 rise the grand Greek ideals of Wisdom and Greece and 
 Maternity, Athena and Demeter, with their ^gypt. 
 consecration not of thought only, but of earth and air. 
 The inviolability of the family was enthroned in Hera. 
 The awe of all deities beheld Hestia, the earth, as 
 their common mother, and the witness of their most 
 sacred vows. And even behind these stands Egyp- 
 
 * Troplong, Influence du Chrisiianisme^ p. 218. 
 
 > Victoria, " Mother of Camps." See Thierry, Tableau de V Entire Romam, p. 1S9. 
 
 • See Tacitus, De Mor. Germ., c. 18, 19, 8 ; Hist., IV. 61. 
 
232 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 tian Isis, Goddess Mother, crowned with her thrones, 
 shielding Osiris with her outspread wings, co-equal 
 ruler of the land during his calamity, and its saviour 
 through her own distress ; tender seeker of the lost 
 divinity of love and truth ; his deliverer from bonds, 
 and his avenger on the powers of evil ; commending 
 even the brute creatures to human gratitude for their 
 sympathy and help in her beneficent work. How 
 beautiful the myth ! ^ Diodorus gives us an inscrip- 
 tion in which she says" what she well might say, 
 " What I have decreed, none can annul." And 
 Apuleius calls her "Nature, beginning of ages, 
 parent of all."^ 
 
 These natural instincts spoke clearly in the Far 
 j^^j^ East also. There was faith in maternity as the 
 root of redemption, long before men bowed 
 at the shrine of a CathoUc "Mother of God." When 
 Dante and Dominic beheld the mysteries of hell and 
 heaven through faith in the sanctity of Womanhood, 
 they but made fresh confession of a spiritual need, 
 which in other forms is as surely represented in the 
 old Hindu Epic, Drama, and Sacred Hymn. And 
 when free opportunity and becoming culture shall 
 have been at last achieved for women, and the old 
 contempt for their intellectual capacities shall have 
 everywhere gone to its place, it will be better under- 
 stood that the recognition has been but clearer vision 
 of what could not anywhere have been wholly hid. 
 Recent movements in India for the better education of 
 women, and the recent mission (1870) of the leader 
 of Hindu Theism to England, in the interest of their 
 deliverance from the marital, social, and ecclesiastical 
 
 1 See Plutarch's /jm and Osiris. 
 
 > Diod., I. 27 J Apuleius, Metamorpk. 
 
WOMAN. 
 
 233 
 
 oppressions of ages, are but the springing of these 
 ancient waters afresh with renewed power. Native 
 Hindu women are being educated for the medical 
 profession, without distinction of caste. Some have 
 already entered on regular practice.^ " In north- 
 western India," we are told, "the pandits are always 
 ready to do their very best to promote the cause of 
 female education." ^ Miss Carpenter, in her recent 
 noble mission for this purpose, found the intelligent 
 Hindus so earnest and so wise in their interest in it, 
 that she was fain, as she tells us, to follow their lead- 
 ing, convinced that the best way for them was to 
 emancipate themselves.' 
 
 And our hopes are strengthened, when we remem- 
 ber that this contemplative race would naturally be 
 disposed to rega.rd intelligence, by whomsoever mani- 
 fested, as worthy of respect; and that even the des- 
 potism of caste could not wholly exclude the special 
 gifts of woman from hospitality and honor, with a 
 people whom it is but just to call the Brain of the 
 East.* 
 
 ^ At the school of Dr. Corbyn in BareiUy, where twenty-eight native girls are now 
 studying. See Victoria Masazine^ April, 1871. 
 
 2 Prichard, Administr. of India^ II. 73. 
 
 8 Six Months in Ittdia, I. 78, 80. 
 
 * The position of Woman in Buddhism will be noticed in the sections relating to that 
 religion. 
 
VII. 
 SOCIAL FORMS AND FORCES. 
 
SOCIAL FORMS AND FORCES. 
 
 TT has been usual to ascribe the social system of the 
 ■'- Hindus to the deliberate artifices of a onginof 
 priesthood. But the germs of caste are in the '^'^• 
 instinctive, not in the self-conscious age of man. Nor 
 can we now accept Niebuhr's sweeping statement that 
 "castes are in all cases the consequence of foreign 
 conquests." Neither theory meets the all-important 
 question : Of what social needs and aspirations is a 
 system so general in the early history of nations the 
 natural expression? 
 
 The religious instincts are as old as the social. The 
 savage makes a fetich of the wooden sticks out xhepnestiy 
 of which he churns his fire ; and the medicine- '=^'=- 
 man listens with awe to the din of his own rattle or 
 drum. The sorcerer makes an image of a diseased 
 person out of earth or grass, and, confounding his own 
 processes with the life of the individual represented, 
 ascribes to this work of his own hands a magical 
 power over the disease. This is the rude beginning 
 of religious mysticism ; and it is but a more refined 
 form of the same "superstition," when the crucifix is 
 believed to possess a divine efficacy in removing the 
 crosses of life and the anguish of death from the 
 human being in whose likeness it is made. But in 
 
238 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 neither case does the word " superstition " express the 
 whole truth. To the primitive tribes nature is not 
 merely hunting-ground and pasture, but mysterious 
 living Presence of invisible powers. Endless motion 
 and endless rest, brooding stillness, inexplicable sounds, 
 ' stir strange yearning and awe in these children of the 
 open eye and ear. Who shall solve these mysteries, 
 and draw the secret runes of life and death out of the 
 night aiid the day ? He whose organization is most sen- 
 sitive to the contact of these subtle forces shall be holy 
 and dear to men. The natural seer is the first recog- 
 nized ruler. The grateful people will live to honor, die 
 to appease him. They will stand afar off, while he 
 talks with gods and spirits for their sake. Moses shall 
 go in among the clouds and lightnings for us. Vasish-- 
 tha shall pray for us to Indra, the storm-ruler, to an- 
 nihilate our foes. This interpreter of Nature fulfils all 
 ideal functions, except that of military chief or king. 
 He is magician, astrologer, physician, philosopher, 
 poet, moral leader. And he is eminently sincere. 
 It is his faith and feeling that make him what he is, 
 and give him his power over the people. He is meet- 
 ing their deepest needs as well as his own ; being 
 more plainly impressible than others by those powers 
 which all confess. As yet there is no priestcraft here. 
 And as nature is felt but as a chaos of undistinguished 
 powers, so society has reached nothing like a hier- 
 archy of classes. A division of labor is in fact just 
 beginning in this instinctive respect for the inspired, 
 or possessed person. 
 
 Such is the Aryan furohita ; such the Hebrew ndbi 
 or ro'ehy Both are properly natural seers. The name 
 purohita, meaning one who has charge,^ shows how 
 
 1 I Sam. ix. g ; Judges xvii. a Lassen, I. 795. 
 
THE CASTES. 
 
 239 
 
 closely the sentiment we have described allied itself 
 with the performance of religious rites. As social 
 relations are developed, this class become not only 
 psalmists and singers, but teachers and counsellors of 
 the king.^ They direct his policy, simply because 
 they are his wisest men. " That king withstands his 
 enemies," says the Rig Veda, " who honors a purohita ; 
 and the people bow before him of their own accord." ^ 
 The seer teaches his wisdom to his children, who 
 follow in his honored paths. They come to have 
 esoteric mysteries ; but it is simply because their re- 
 ligious disciplines as well as natural susceptibilities 
 have put them in possession of physical or psycholog- 
 ical knowledge which the multitude can receive only 
 in parables. 
 
 By and by the seers become an organization. These 
 hereditary disciplines draw them into closer TheSrah- 
 combination for such purposes as grow naturally '"^°^- 
 out of their public functions ; and we have Levites, 
 Magi, Brahmans. The Hindu purohitas, thus trans- 
 formed, are bound into charanas and farishads, schools 
 and associations for definite objects, such as the guar- 
 dianship of formulas and rites, or the study of Vedic 
 hymns. They are divided into forty-nine gotras, or 
 families, who trace their descent from the " seven holy 
 rishis," and the mythical or other saints who figure in 
 their traditions ; and these gotras are governed by strict 
 religious and social regulations. Gradually the text 
 becomes more precious than the soul which created it ; 
 and at last its guardian is holier even than itself. 
 The freedom and ardor of the Veda hymn are sup- 
 planted by formulas of doctrine, the oracles of Nature 
 
 * 2 Sam. xxiv. n. 
 
 = R. v., IV. 5, 7, 10. See Roth, ia Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., I. 80. 
 
240 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 by ritual law. A corporate authority grows up, by 
 force of intellectual supremacy and in the name of 
 religion, which favorable circumstances develop into 
 the Brahman caste. 
 
 The heroic life of the Greek cantons in the older 
 Aryan spirit forbade this distinct separation of a relig- 
 ious class from the rest of the community. ^ But the 
 contemplative Hindus, passive, fatalistic, yearning 
 in the lassitude of tropical life for self-surrender to 
 ideal powers, gave full sweep to the caste tendency, 
 and became its typical representatives. 
 
 Such, substantially, is the history of priesthood in 
 The priest- ^1^ times. It begins in the natural gravitation 
 hood. of power to the wisest and friendliest men. 
 In- the Middle Ages, a Martin, an Ambrose, or a 
 Gregory, standing for the weak and oppressed in the 
 name of God, made iron knees and fierce unshorn 
 heads bow down, and do penance for every act of 
 injustice. But where the prophet stood in the morn- 
 ing of a religion, by and by stands the priest, its 
 functionary, inheriting his honors, but not his spirit. 
 It is the destiny of every organized religion. In the 
 Eastern races the degeneration was not arrested by 
 science or political liberty. But, on the other hand, 
 it escaped that sort of ecclesiastical Jesuitism which 
 follows the deliberate refusal to recognize what these 
 teachers bring. For the impulses of nature wrought 
 through the religion, not against it : a real faith, both 
 in priests and people, made devotees and martyrs after 
 its own kind. 
 
 The other castes likewise begin in certain rude 
 
 1 The priest and king were there one and the same person ; and, both in Hellenic and 
 Roman civilization, the political element gradually absorbed the religious into its own cur- 
 rent) shaping it to practical and general uses. 
 
THE CASTES. 24I 
 
 forms of social need. A portion of the tribe be- 
 comes agricultural. It must be defended from ^he other 
 sudden incursions, in its quiet settlement along "^^^^ 
 the Ganges or Nile. The Soldier, as more inde- 
 pendent, and as holding more firmly to the traditions 
 of the free roving life, will stand higher in the social 
 scale than the Husbandman. His function is an in- 
 dispensable one : he assumes, with this social pre-emi- 
 nence, the special burden of public defence. He rules 
 not by the might of the strongest, so much as by 
 the need of the strongest. Contempt of labor in the 
 ancient communities was covtparative, not absolute. 
 In all of them there are recognitions of its worth, 
 such as Hesiod's "Works and Days," or the lives of 
 early Romans, like Cincinnatus and Cato. But the 
 labors of the priest and soldier are more prized than 
 those of artisans or tillers of the earth. The pursuits 
 of settled life begin to exist, on mere sufferance by the 
 armed nomad ; and they endure only so far as pro- 
 tected by the military class. Again, the handicrafts, 
 as they arise, are subservient to the wants of the 
 agriculturist ; and so we have the natural order of the 
 castes. Veneration for parental disciplines and ex- 
 ample, and the need of an exact transmission of 
 methods, render all employments hereditary. Force 
 of fellowship, tradition, custom, accomplish the rest. 
 Thus society becomes organized by the laws of pre- 
 cedence in public service. In its origin the baleful, 
 caste system, which is not confined to Egypt and India,, 
 but in some form has appeared in most races at a 
 certain stage of development, was simply an instinc- 
 tive effort for the Organization of Labor. i 
 
 1 Quinet {.Genie des Religions) has traced a striking parallel between Hindu castes- 
 and the European classes in the Middle Ages, another epoch of social reconstruction. 
 
 16 
 
242 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Plato himself, in his ideal Republic, supposes classes 
 to have originated in a natural division of labor, and 
 justice to be that adherence of each to its own function 
 which the general good requires. I cannot doubt that 
 Plato's " justice " is the philosophical statement of a 
 natural ideal, which had much to do with constructing 
 the earlier forms of society. 
 
 An old Hindu myth gives the following solution of 
 our question. Brahma created a son, and, 
 
 Hindu ideas ^ , - ^ , , . 
 
 of the on- calling him Brahman, bade him study and 
 ginofcastes. ^^^^^ the Vcda. But, fearing the attacks of 
 wild beasts, he prayed for help ; and a second son 
 was created, named Kshatriya, or warrior, to protect 
 him. But, employed as he was in defence, he could 
 not provide the necessaries of life ; and so a third 
 son, Vaisya, was sent to till the soil ; and as, once 
 more, he could not make the tools, and do the other 
 needful service, a youth called. Sudra succeeded, and 
 all dwelt together, serving Brahma.^ The Brihad 
 Upanishad says that "Brahma is in all the castes, in 
 the form of each." The law books and the older 
 mythologists deprecate the idea of a violent origin of 
 the system, and affirm that all the castes descend from 
 One God ; the priest proceeding from Brahma's head, 
 the soldier from his arm, the husbandman from his 
 leg, the sudra from his foot. Buddhist accounts, 
 which describe castes as the consequence of social 
 degeneracy, none the less represent them as having 
 been spontaneous and elective. A discourse attributed 
 to Buddha himself contains a legend of the following 
 purport : — 
 
 * Creuzer, Relig^. de V Antiguiti^ I. 227. 
 
 2 Manu, I. 31 ; V&Jnavulkyii, III. 126. A passage to similar effect in the Rig Veda 
 (X. 90, 6, 7) is helieved to be of later origin than the rest Miiller's Chi^s^ II. 30S. 
 
THE CASTES. 
 
 243 
 
 When outrages on society began, a ruler was elected to pre- 
 serve order, who received for such service a portion of the produce. 
 He was called Khattiyo, or Kshatrya, as owner of lands, and after- 
 wards Raja, as rendering mankind happy. But his race was origi- 
 nally of the same stock with the people, and of perfect equality with 
 them. Then, by reason of the increase of crimes, the people ap- 
 pointed from among themselves Bahmanas, or suppressors of vice 
 and awarders of punishment, — a class which afterwards became fond 
 of living in huts in the wilderness ; and these were the ancestors 
 of the Brahmans, who also were therefore originally of the com- 
 mon stock. Other persons, who distinguished themselves as ar- 
 tificers, were called wessa, or Vaisya, while others, addicted to 
 hunting (ludda), became sttdras ; but all these classes were at first 
 equal with the rest of mankind. Finally, from out of all these 
 classes came persons who despised their own castes, left their habi- 
 tations, "and led wandering lives, saying, " I will become samana, 
 ascetic, or priest." Thus the sacerdotal class, being formed from 
 all the rest, does not properly constitute a caste.' 
 
 Finally, the Bhagavadgita, giving the philosophy of 
 Brahmanism on the subject, refers these subordinations 
 to differences of natural disposition (^gimd) among 
 men ; in other words, to moral gravitation.^ This 
 resembles the defences of slavery offered by the later 
 Greeks and modern Americans ; and serves, like 
 these, to demonstrate that the worst institutions are 
 compelled to do homage to a natural sense of right, 
 and must defend themselves by the pretence of justice. 
 But the common idea which all these Hindu authori- 
 ties suggest — the intimation of mythologist, lawgiver, 
 and theorist alike — is that castes were, in their origin, 
 spontaneities of social growth, pursuing, both by di- 
 vine order and human consent, the common good of 
 society. Nor did the common sense and humanity 
 of the people fail to recognize that the separation of 
 
 1 This legend, as translated by Tumour, is given in full in Colonel Sykes's Notes 
 on Ancient iTidia {Journal of Roy. As. Soc^ vol. vi.). 
 
 2 So the Vishnu and Vayu PurSnas. 
 
244 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 the classes by absolute difference of origin was it- 
 self a delusion, and refuse it place in their ideal of 
 history.'' 
 
 As far as regards the three upper castes in India, 
 The lowest the explanation now given seems adequate. 
 castes. g^jt it ig to be noted that the lowest caste was 
 black ; that its name Sudra is not Sanskrit, but desig- 
 nated an indigenous tribe ; and that its caste degrada- 
 tion would thus appear to be the result of conquest by 
 the invading Aryans.^ 
 
 There are many outcast classes, even lower than the 
 Sudra. These are the product of " mixed marriages," 
 from which, as confusion of the castes, according to 
 the law, all possible evils proceed.^ Doubtless Miche- 
 let's opinion, that the whole relation of the caste system 
 to the aborigines was but an indispensable policy of 
 self-protection on the part of the Aryan tribes against 
 absorption into degraded I'aces, is entitled to some 
 regard in explaining this intense hatred of mixed 
 marriages, which we find throughout the Brahmanical 
 legislation.* Yet there are also ignoble sources of low- 
 caste miseries, and it is plain that priestcraft has had 
 its share in elaborating a system which began in sim- 
 ple instincts of mutual help. 
 
 1 Muir has fully established the truth of his statement {Satisk. Texts, I. 160) that " the 
 separate origination of the four castes is far from being an article of belief universally 
 received by Indian antiquity." Abundant passages in the RiraSyana describe the earliest 
 or Krita age of man, 4n which " righteousness was supreme, ' when " the soul of all beings 
 was white ; " when " men were alike in trust, knowledge, and observance i " when " the 
 castes were devoted to one deity, used one formula, rule, and rite, and practised one duty." 
 And the Bh^gavata Purina says (IX. 14, 18) there was formerly but one Veda, essence of 
 speech, one God, and one caste, the triple Veda entering in the Treta, or later and degen- 
 erate age. 
 
 2 Unless the Aryan occupation was, as Maine believes, a colonization rather than a 
 conquest. The Rig Veda calls the black skin the " hated of Indra " (IX. 73, 5). Varna-, 
 or caste, may mean color; and the MahabhSrata carries out the idea, representing 
 Brahma as having created the Brahman white, the Kshatriya red, the Vais'ya yellow, and 
 the ^udra black. Weber, Vorlesungen, p. 18 ; Duncker, II. 12, 55 ; Lassen, I. 799. 
 
 s Manu, VIII. 353 ; X. 45. « Bible de P Humamti, p. 40. 
 
THE CASTES. 245 
 
 The Brahmans must have owed their supremacy 
 to other sources than physical force. In mod- origin of 
 ern Kashmir and the Mahratta country they '^'f"^'- 
 
 -J ./ cal author- 
 
 still rule by the brain and the pen.^ The ity. 
 
 Hindu has always believed that his chief power 
 lay in blessing and cursing. According to Manu, 
 " Speech is the weapon by which they destroy their 
 foes."^ The Ramayana makes the priest Vasishtha 
 overcome the Kshatriya Vis'vamitra by the miraculous 
 power of his staff. In the Rig Veda, both these 
 saints, who became for later times representatives of 
 rival castes, are alike furohitas ; and the whole third 
 book is ascribed to Visvamitra. No contest of classes 
 had then arisen, and the poet's inspiration was honored 
 without regard to the question whether he was soldier 
 or priest.^ Even were it probable that any such inter- 
 necine conflict between the two orders as that described 
 by the poets in the myth of Paras'urama, which ends 
 in the " extermination " of the Kshatriyas, ever really 
 occurred, it is plain that nothing of the kind was possi- 
 ble until the caste system had become fully organized. 
 In no case could it have been the primary source of 
 priestly supremacy. 
 
 Parasurama himself, in the legend, is a Kshatriya; 
 and destroys his own caste, not merely in the inter- 
 est of Brahmanical revenge for the murdered priestly 
 tribe of Brighu, but also from motives of a personal 
 character, the Kshatriyas having slain his father. It 
 would seem from this that the reference is to a civil 
 war inside the soldier caste.* 
 
 Lassen and Roth, upon the whole, regard the con- 
 
 * Campbell on Indian Ethnology, youmal Bengal Society, 1866. 
 
 * Manu, XI. 33. ^ Bumouf, Essaisur le Veda. 
 
 * Wultke, Qesch. d. Heidenih., U. 321 ; Muir, Sansk. Texts, I. ch. iii. ; Mah&bh., III. 
 
246 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 flict of Vasishtha and Visyamitra as a symbolic ex- 
 pression for the victory of Brahmanical organization 
 over the simpler life of* Vedic times. Visvamitra, as 
 his name indicates, has always represented the demo- 
 cratic or popular element in Indian faith. And the 
 outcast races have generally been associated with his 
 family. 1 
 
 When this organization of castes was effected, or 
 how far its development ever proceeded, is not easy to 
 determine. A rationalistic and democratic element, 
 of which distinctive Buddhism was but a single ex- 
 pression, seems to have existed in every epoch of 
 Hindu thought; and this must have constantly hin- 
 dered the growth of Brahmanical authority. The 
 progress of the system must therefore have been slow. 
 A civil war of so barbarous and destructive a charac- 
 ter as the tale of Paras'urama implies becomes ex- 
 tremely improbable. 
 
 If, as has been conjectured, the conflict occurred in 
 later Buddhist times, ^ it must still have been of a very 
 different character from that described in the legend ; 
 for the history of Buddhism gives no record of such a 
 conflict in any form. Nor, as matter of fact, were the 
 Kshatriyas "exterminated;" either "three times," as 
 the poet puts it, or even once. Their descendants 
 abound in Rajputana and the Panjab, amidst the old- 
 est seats of Hindu civilization. In the epics there are 
 still signs of superiority in the soldier class : the chief- 
 tains often treat Brahmans with contempt, as merce- 
 nary sacrificers. At the marriage of Draupadi,^ the 
 
 1 The word •aU means probably to occupy or hold (Greek, okof ; Latin, virus; Eng- 
 lish, wick)^ and indicates the settled householding class ; hence Vaisyas, the agricultural 
 caste, and probably Vislinu, the preserving One. 
 
 * Wheeler's History of India.^ 11. 64 ; Campbell, at supra. 
 
 » MahUh; I. 
 
THE CASTES. 
 
 247 
 
 Rajahs are indignant at being humbled by a Brahman, 
 whom the maiden chooses for. her husband in prefer- 
 ence to all her Kshatriya suitors. * 
 
 Manu, indeed, believed to have been himself a 
 Kshatriya, records the names of kings, who perished 
 by reason of not submitting to Brahmanical divine 
 right. But this means only that the spiritual arm 
 claimed and secured mastery over the temporal, in 
 the maturity of both, as it afterwards did in Chris- 
 tendom. 
 
 Like every thing Hindu, this worship of a priesthood 
 was hewn out of an abstract conception. With Hindu 
 whatever base elements mingled, to whatever p™^"'°°^ 
 
 o ' ship an 
 
 ends exploited, the theory was that justice ideal. 
 could be administered only by just men, and that pun- 
 ishment belonged only to the pure.^ As the Egyptian 
 priesthood represented the national idea of absolute 
 duty, and exhorted the king on solemn occasions to 
 the use of his power for the public good,® so the Brah- 
 man was held to be an " incarnation of Dharma, or 
 Sovereign Kight ; born to promote justice and guard 
 the treasure of duties."^ The king must appoint a 
 Brahman as chief of his ministers.* The Brihad 
 declares justice created to rule force (Kshatriya). 
 "Through it the weak shall overcome the strong." 
 Therefore the Brahman was inviolable, world-maker, 
 world-preserver, venerable even to the gods. Hor- 
 rible transmigrations are the penalty for assaulting 
 him, even with a blade of grass, and barbarous pun- 
 ishments for slaying or mutilating him. The grains 
 of dust wet by his blood ai-e counted as years in the 
 atonement of the murderer.^ Down at his feet, and 
 
 ^ Manu, VII. 30; Y&Jn., I. 354. ^ Diod. Sicul. 
 
 3 Manu., I. 98, 99. 4 Ibid., VII. 58, S9- 
 
 '' Ibid., IX. 314, 316; XI. 84; IV. 166, 168; YAjn., II. 215. 
 
248 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ask forgiveness, if you have confuted him in logic. 
 Let him suffer, and the nation perishes. The sea 
 fails, the fire goes out, the moon dwindles, if his 
 prayers and offerings for the people cease. He is the 
 producer, the healer, the deliverer : the world is but 
 the outcome of the virtue of which he is the visible 
 sign. He may violate every rule of caste without sin, 
 to relieve himself from extremity of distress : though 
 the king die of hunger, the Brahman shall not be 
 taxed, his contribution being already infinite. He is 
 venerable from his birth ; though a Brahman be but 
 ten years old, and a Kshatriya a hundred, the former 
 is the father, and all things are his.^ 
 
 To invest individuals or classes with an exclusive 
 Its mean- divinity belongs to ail forms of organized 
 "s- religion hitherto prevalent in the world. And 
 
 it is easy to show, in this worship of the Brahman 
 which is i*s typical form, of what folly, superstition, 
 and despotism it is capable. But such criticism, how- 
 ever just, does hot explain the facts of history. We 
 would recognize that sentiment, in itself eternally 
 valid, which found crude and bhnd expression in this 
 old absolutism, so as to give it currency with human 
 nature. What it aspired to, in its imperfect way, is 
 in fact achieved only through the mutual stimulation 
 of free, vigorous, practical races. The question which 
 Brahman worship properly suggests is whether he, 
 whom the progress of civiHzation has shown to be 
 the real goal of that imperfect groping and striving, 
 whether the true preserver of states and sustainer of 
 worlds, he whose conscience outraged, whose service 
 stayed or suppressed, is indeed the people's shame 
 
 > Mami, XI. 206; IX. 316; X. 103; II. 133; I. jcxj. 
 
THE CASTES. 
 
 249 
 
 and loss, — whether the just citizen, the laborer for 
 universal ideas and uses, has at last adequate recogni- 
 tion and respect. Meantime it is well to note how 
 strong an impulse to this natural veneration underlies 
 the most unpromising features of Hindu life. 
 
 Brahmanical absolutism could not have been the 
 mere device of a body of priests, imposed from with- 
 out on the religious sentiment. Priest and people 
 were alike swayed by a sense of the indispensableness 
 of spiritual help. They comprehend that to bring 
 this is to sustain the world ; that social order, custom, 
 inspiration, are derived from this; that the first of 
 duties is to recognize hiili who has this to give ; and 
 that to stay this product is to deal destruction to the 
 people. Here, in the crude ore, is the fine gold of an 
 eternal idea, which these latest ages are still engaged 
 in working out. Here is at least a sincere effort to 
 divinize spiritual help ; and the Brahman himself was 
 substantially a believing servant of the impulse, even 
 while he more or less selfishly directed it to eff"ect his 
 own supremacy. 
 
 He wrought out the laws, under a sense of inspira- 
 tion. He bowed his own neck under the yoke „ 
 
 .^ Responsibil- 
 
 which he laid on the lower castes. This isityofthe 
 certainly true, whatever the alloy of priest- " °™' 
 craft in his legislation. The theory being that primi- 
 tive power belonged only to the just, its organ must 
 first master himself.^ As far as the wretched Chandala 
 lay beneath this incarnate god, so far the god himself 
 was beneath the law. Let him violate its precepts or 
 disciplines, he shall be turned into a demon whose 
 food is filth, and whose mouth a firebrand.^ To 
 
 ' Manu, VII. 30; Y&jn., I. 3S4- ' Manu, XII. 71. 
 
250 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 neglect them is to make way for his own destruction. 
 Dante's Christian Inferno is prefigured in these penal- 
 ties of Brahmanical sin. "If, as judge, the Brahman 
 shall overturn justice, it shall overturn him : if he 
 extracts not the dart of iniquity from its wounds, he 
 shall himself be wounded thereby." ^ If he begs gifts 
 for a sacrifice, and uses them otherwise than for sacri- 
 fice, he shall become a kite or a crow ; ^ if he begs 
 from a low-caste man, he shall become an outcast in 
 the next existence ; and if he marries a low-caste 
 woman, he degrades his family to her caste, and loses 
 his own.-* For his marrying a Sudra woman, the law 
 declares there is no expiation.* Crimes are specified 
 which will change his nature into that of a Sudra in 
 three days.^ The law forbids the king to slay him, 
 even though convicted of all possible crimes.^ Yet it 
 also prescribes his banishment for capital offences, 
 and even declares it permissible to kill him, if he 
 attempts to kill.'' If he steals, his fine is eight times 
 that of a Sudra ; and, if he accepts stolen property, he 
 is punished as the thief.^ Care is taken indeed that 
 he shall be able to compound for the severest penalties, 
 by milder penance ; but the recognition of a higher 
 law than his own will is none the less real, nor are his 
 expiations an easy burden. The Brahmanical bed 
 was not made of roses. The demands of asceticism 
 rose in proportion to one's elevation in caste life, and 
 the ^udra is a freeman by comparison, in the matter 
 of ceremonial bonds. ^ Whatever rights the Brahman 
 possessed over the lives and property of others, the 
 
 1 Manu, VIII. IS, 12. 2 Ibid., XI. 24, 25. B lyi, m. 16, 17. 
 
 * Ibid., III. 19. « Ibid., X. 92. Ibid., VIII. 380. 
 
 ' Ibid., VIII. 350. » Ibid., VIII. 337, 340. 
 
 For some curious effects of this fact on the relations of the castes, see Ludlow'a 
 British Induh !■ 57- 
 
THE CASTES. 
 
 251 
 
 law insisted with energy that he should subdue his 
 passions, be just and merciful, and return good for 
 evil, on penalty of losing all the prerogatives of his 
 birth. He must not gamble, nor sell spirituous liquors, 
 nor indulge any sensual desires. Nor must we esti- 
 mate lightly the practical power of these saving pro- 
 visions, and of the religious beliefs from which they 
 sprung. Alexander and his followers found the Indian 
 Gymnosophists " blameless, patient, wise, and just.''^ 
 And the Egyptian priesthood; under analogous disci- 
 plines to the Hindu, seem to have won a like reputa- 
 tion in the ancient world. A very interesting little 
 tract was sent to Hodgson, and communicated by him 
 to the Royal Asiatic Society, in which the Buddhist 
 author confutes the doctrine of the castes out of the 
 mouth of Brahtnans themselves ; proving, by a great 
 number of examples drawn fx"om their sacred writings, 
 that Brahmanism cannot be a matter of birth nor race, 
 nor wisdom, nor observance of rites. He shows that 
 many leading Brahmanical authorities were from 
 low-caste mothers, that many Sudras have become 
 Brahmans by their austerities ; quotes Manu to the 
 effect that "bad actions will change a Brahman into 
 a Sudra, that virtue is better than lineage, and that 
 royalty without goodness is contemptible and worth- 
 less ; " also the Mahabharata, as saying that the signs 
 of a true Brahman are the possession of truth, mercy, 
 self-command, universal benevolence ; and that origi- 
 
 1 Megasthenes, for example {ZJ^ ^zVm (9r3w, ch. xv.), describes the Brahmans as frugal 
 in living ; avoiding animal food or sensual pleasure ; intent on serious conversation with 
 such as are willing to hear. And Scholasticus, in the fifth century, says of them : " They 
 worship God : never question Providence ; always in prayer turning towards the light, 
 wherever it may he : live on what the earth spontaneously brings forth ; delight in the sky 
 and woods, and sweet song of the birds ; sing hymns to God, and desire a future life." 
 These philosophers were in fact the highest ideals of the Greeks in morality and religion. 
 See Marco Polo, and the Arabian writers on India ; also Wuttke, 463, 464. 
 
252 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 nally there was but one caste, the four arising from 
 diversity of rites and vocatioHS. " All men born of 
 woman have the same organs, and are subject to the 
 same wants." * 
 
 These considerations may show the injustice we 
 Condition of should do the Hindu caste-system in placing 
 theSudra. j(. q^ ^ moral levcl with modern slavery. 
 The ^udras were indeed at the mercy of a fearful 
 system of oppression. Legal penalties for enslaved 
 races were neither more nor less barbarous in the 
 Code of Manu than in the written and unwritten 
 codes of the old Slave States of America. Slitting 
 of tongues, pouring hot oil into mouths and ears, 
 cutting off lips and branding foreheads, are neces- 
 sary adjuncts of any system which undertakes to make 
 any form of slavery its corner-stone, in old time or 
 new. The thraldom of the Sudra was very distinctly 
 stated. "Though emancipated, he does not become 
 free, since none can divest him of a state which is 
 natural to him."^ He can possess no property as 
 against a Brahman ; ^ and must not accumulate wealth, 
 lest he give trouble to the superior race ! * And a kind 
 of colorphobia, too, certainly underlay the old bondage 
 as it did the later. Whether the Sanskrit word for caste 
 (varna) really points to the color of the skin or not, at 
 present a doubtful question,^ it is certain that the lowest 
 caste was black, or nearly so." The indigenous races 
 of India, according to good authority, are negrito.^ 
 As the Dasyas in the Veda are called " black skins," 
 so the Aryas are the "white friends of Indra." It is 
 
 1 Transac. of Roy* As. Soo., III. p. 160. 
 
 a Mann, VIII. 414. " Ibid., VIII. 417. 4 Ibid., X. 129. 
 
 » Muir, II. 374-413 ; Lassen, I. 407-409 ; Duncker, II. 55. In the Xig- Veda, varna 
 has the sense of race, tribe, says Schoebel {Researches, p. 11). 
 fl Campbell on Indian Ethnology, in your. BeTig. Soc, 1866. 
 
MITIGATION OF CASTE. 
 
 253 
 
 an old, sin, this preying of the fair skin On the dark; 
 and, in the overbearing' oligarchy of British rule in 
 India, its penalties, are falling on the native posterity 
 of those Aryan oppressors. 
 
 But there is this difference. The Brahman recog- 
 nized a higher law than his own gain. The Dig-^rence 
 modern slaveholder made his power his law. °f Eastern 
 Caste, in its general outlines, was an outgrowth westem 
 of the social and religious faith of the East : ^i^^'y- 
 slaveholding denied and affronted the conscience of 
 the West. Caste rested on a belief in reciprocal 
 duties that held every member of the system under 
 rigid responsibilities and restraints : slaveholding rested 
 on mere force and fraud, and the belief in a reciprocity 
 of duties was exceptional and incidental. Man escapes 
 from both systems not by -miraculous intervention of 
 Christianity, but by the deeper forces of his own moral 
 and spiritual nature. As these have driven American 
 slavery to self-destruction, so they have in past times 
 counteracted, and continue to counteract, the worst 
 tendencies of Hindu caste. 
 
 The military and mercantile classes intervened be- 
 tween the Brahman and the Sudra ; and a ch^^^j ^^ 
 series of mutual checks pervaded the system, oppression 
 
 . . ^ . . ^ in the casta 
 
 which graduated its tyrannies, and mitigated system. 
 their force. "The king is formed," says Manu, Roy^^'y- 
 "out of the essence of the eight guardian deities, 
 and exercises their functions. He is ordained protector 
 of all classes in the discharge of their several duties."-' 
 In the Ramayana, the king of that model Brahmanical 
 city, Ayodhya, "takes tribute of his subjects, not for 
 his own use, but to return it to them with greater 
 
 1 Mimt, V. 96 ; VII. 80, 33. 
 
254 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 beneficence ;' as the Sun drinks up the ocean, to return 
 it to the earth in vivifying rai'n." ^ " O Bharata," says 
 Rama to his brother, " the tears which fall from those 
 who are unjustly condemned will destroy the children 
 and the herds of him who governs with partiality."^ 
 'By the law of Manu, the king is under a responsi- 
 bility equivalent to his power. The burden of inno- 
 cent blood shed by the courts falls in large measure 
 on him.^ He is commanded to proceed mildly in 
 dealing with offences : first by gentle admonition, 
 then by severe reproof, then by fines, then by inflic- 
 tion of corporeal pain ; and to use severest methods 
 only as a last resort.* 
 
 All persons are obliged ^ to adjust their controversies 
 according to the particular laws of their own order, 
 and by reference to those who are familiar with the 
 interests under question : kindred, fellow-artisans, co- 
 habitants of villages, may decide lawsuits, and meet- 
 ings for the purpose are entitled judicatories. There 
 are judges appointed by the king also in these courts ; 
 and an appeal lies from these to higher ones, and 
 finally to the king himself. 
 
 He is exhorted to mild and conciliatory discourse 
 towards litigants. The law codes abound in injunc- 
 tions upon him to adhere to justice by conscientious 
 investigation of, the cases brought before his tribunal. 
 He is to appoint a counsellor from the priesthood, who 
 shall check him if he act "unjustly, partially, or per- 
 versely." And the judicial assemblies are subject to 
 the same rules. We are reminded of the official oath 
 of the Egyptian judges not to obey the king if he 
 
 1 R&m&yana, B. I. » Ibid., B. II. 
 
 8 Manu, VIII. i8. « Ibid., VII. 104; VIII. 129. 
 
 ■ These rules for the administration of justice are taken from Colebrooke's elaborate 
 Digest of Hindu Law. See Trans, qf Roy. As. Soc, vol. ii. pp. 174-194. 
 
MITIGATION OF CASTE. 255 
 
 should command them to act unjustly. By Hindu 
 law, the judge who sits silent and does not deliver his 
 real opinion is deemed guilty of deliberate falsehood. 
 The unjust judge is to be fined twice the penalty in- 
 volved in the suit, and shall make good the loss to the 
 injured party. The king shall appoint for the trial 
 of causes only persons who are " gentle and tender 
 rather than austere, and who are wise, cheerful, and 
 disinterested." 
 
 The foetic ideal of Hindu royalty is found in Kali- 
 dasa's King Atithi, who, " even when young on the 
 throne, was invincible through the love of his people ; 
 who spoke no vain words, nor recalled what he had 
 given, inconsistent only in this, that, having overturned 
 enemies, he lifted them again from the earth ; seeking 
 only what was practicable, as fire attacks not water, 
 though the wind is its servant to consume the forest ; 
 amassing riches, only because gold gives power to 
 help the unhappy ; loving honest ways even in war ; 
 making travellers as safe as in their own homes ; 
 sending the poorest from his presence enabled to be 
 generous to others, as the clouds come back from their 
 voyages over the sea ; making enemies feel the infec- 
 tion of his virtue."! 
 
 The severest caste-laws must have been inoperative, 
 as the numberless contradictions and absurdi- Looseness 
 ties of the code amply manifest. It is certain oftteiaws. 
 that the cruelties made legal in Manu could never 
 have been inflicted by any physical power which the 
 priesthood could have possessed ; and, as we have seen, 
 it is matter of serious doubt whether this legislation ever 
 had very extended recognition in India. To learn the 
 actual condition of things, we must resort to other wit- 
 
 » Raghuvatda, XVII. 
 
256 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 nesses. I have already alluded to the testimony of 
 Greeks who visited India before the Christian era, to 
 the excellence of royal and judicial administration. 
 They report further that the courts judged vsrithout 
 reference to any written code whatever ; and such is 
 to a great extent the case at the present time, local 
 usages taking the place of positive written statutes.^ 
 
 Practically, the lines of caste were always -ill- 
 - . , defined, shifting like waves of sand blown by 
 
 Interchange- ' o J 
 
 abieness of the winds of the desert ; a constant satire on its 
 pretensions to immobility. Inter-marriage has 
 always been permitted, and some of the mixed classes 
 have been treated with respect. Colebrooke, in a 
 valuable paper on the subject, has described the 
 disintegration of fixed orders in Hindu society, and 
 the breaking down of its " impassable walls " of caste 
 by this subdivision into mixed classes. They, were 
 " multiplied to endless variety " at a very early epoch ; 
 so that it seems hardly possible that the division into 
 four distinct classes could have really prevailed in 
 India for any great length of time. 
 
 The higher castes could, in case of necessity, 
 assume the occupations of the lower ; and the Sudra 
 could not only engage in trades belonging to the class 
 above him, but even "gain exaltation in this world 
 and the next, by performing certain lawful acts of the 
 twice born men." ^ " In fact almost every occupation, 
 though regularly the profession of a particular class, 
 is open to most other classes. The only limitation is 
 in the exclusive right of the Brahmans to teach the 
 Vedas, and perform religious ceremonies." ' 
 
 1 Maine, Village ComimmUies, p. 52. 
 
 s Matm, X. 81, 96-^9, 128 ; YAjn., III. scj. 
 
 8 Colebrooke, in Asiatic ResearchsSt vol. v. 
 
MITIGATION OF CASTE. 257 
 
 One may often, we are told,^ see carpenters of five 
 or six different low castes employed on the same build- 
 ing ; and the same diversity may be observed among 
 the craftsmen in dockyards, and on all other great 
 works. Manu's caste laws are perpetually violated, 
 even those to which the severest penalties are attached. 
 It is well known that the Bengal army has been com- 
 posed of high-caste Hindus, mostly Brahmans, as the 
 Madras army is composed of low-caste men, and a 
 Brahman may even be a private under a low-caste 
 officer ; an assertion of natural democracy as little 
 likely to be relished in India as the authority of a 
 negro general by scions of first families in America, 
 yet equally inevitable in both cases. Men of low 
 castes have been princes and had Brahmans in their 
 service. 2 "The President of the Dharmasabha at 
 Calcutta is a Sudra, while the secretary is a Brahman. 
 Three-quarters the Brahmans in Bengal are servants." ^ 
 High-caste cooks are said to be in great demand in 
 the army, and in native families. The rules of 
 Brahmanical purity make it far easier for the high- 
 caste man to become servant to the low, than the 
 reverse.* And this intermixture of caste functions 
 has gone on from very early times, leading to an 
 elaborate chapter of regulations in Manu. 
 
 Every thing in climate and ethnic constitution tended 
 to favor this system in India ; yet even there the force 
 of justice in human nature has been too strong for it, 
 and shown a transforming energy that is marvellous. 
 Such testimonies suggest that the resort to super- 
 naturalism, either to explain man's past or guarantee 
 his future progress out of the barbarism of caste in 
 
 1 Rickards, India^ I. 32. * Allen's India, p. 472. 
 
 « Muller's Chips, II. 350. * Ludlow, I. 57. 
 
 17 
 
258 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 any form, is wholly gratuitous. They have thus a 
 bearing on the adequacy of Natural Religion to the 
 explanation of history, which makes them of great 
 interest in the present state of inquiry on that subject. 
 Strong centrifugal and disintegrative tendencies 
 Democratic have rcvcalcd themselves in the very structure 
 reactions. Qf tjjg system, afTording ample proof that the 
 free impulses of nature in which its first foundations 
 were laid refused to yield either to priestcraft or social 
 pride. " Manu's classification never passed in its in- 
 tegrity," says Mr. Hunter, "beyond" the middle land 
 of India. On the east where Lower Bengal begins, 
 caste, as a fourfold classification, ceases. It never 
 crossed the Indus on the west. Beyond this the 
 tribes held all men equal." ^ In Northern India, at 
 the present day, all castes mix socially together, even 
 where separated by religious distinctions, or diversity 
 of functions. ** In the South, Sudras rank next to 
 Brahmans ; and their name has never had the degrad- 
 ing sense which is given it in Manu's Laws.^ In 
 truth the old doctrine of four distinct castes has no 
 longer a semblance of validity anywhere. The 
 ancient Sudras and Vaisyas are absorbed into the infi- 
 nite diversity of mixed castes, now no longer treated 
 with contempt.* So are the old Dasyus of the Veda. 
 Brahman cultivators are numerous in Western India, 
 and in Oude outnumber all others ; and the chief 
 traders, civil officers, and writers in the Panjab* are 
 descendants of the Kshatriya, or soldier class. "The 
 Vai^ya caste," says Ludlow, "has almost wholly dis- 
 appeared. The Kshatriya (as soldier) exists perhaps 
 
 ' Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 102, 104. a Campbell, p. 136. 
 
 * See Monier Williams's Lecture'on the Study of Sanskrit. 
 
 * Campbell on Indian Ethnology, 
 
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 
 
 259 
 
 only among the Rajputs of the north-western frontier ; 
 the Sudra, scarcely anywhere but among the Y^ts and 
 Mahrattas. Only the Brahman holds his ground ; and 
 beneath him a chain of castes, varying almost infinitely 
 in number according to locality, seldom less than 
 seventy, and averaging a hundred. In Malabar are 
 enumerated three hundred."^ And of the Brahmans 
 Wilson tells us that " they have universally deviated 
 from their original duties and habits ; " that " as a hier- 
 archy they are null ; as a literary body, few, and meet 
 with slender countenance from their countrymen ; " 
 that " they have ceased to be the advisers of the peo- 
 ple ; " and that " various sects have arisen which 
 denounce them as impostors."^ The gosains and 
 fakeers have succeeded to the old Brahmanical sway, 
 and generally contemn these subordinations of the 
 ancient system, which one reformer after another has 
 assailed, from Gotama Buddha to the present day. 
 The most national religious festival in India, that of 
 Jagannath in Orissa, has always rejected caste. "No 
 one in India," says Max Muller, "is ashamed of his 
 caste; and the lowest Pariah. is as proud and anxious 
 to preserve his own as the highest Brahman. Sudras 
 throw away their cooking vessels as defiled, if a Brah- 
 man enters the house." ^ Sir H. Elliott, in his valuable 
 work upon the races of North-Western India, sup- 
 plies conclusive evidence on the failure of caste to 
 maintain its principle of immobility in that region, 
 " The attempt of early lawgivers to divide society into 
 classes, which should hold no communion with each 
 other, was one which broke down at an early period. 
 Even in India 'love will be lord of all.' The plan of 
 
 « 
 
 1 British India, I. 48 ; Elliott, Races of N. W. India, I. p. 166. 
 
 = Religious Sects 0/ the Hindtts, 1862. ' Chip, II. 347- 
 
26o RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 degrading the issue of mixed castes has been highly 
 beneficial. It is like the disintegration of granite till 
 it forms fertile soil. In practice, a man who had a 
 Brahman or Rajput for father was not likely to be 
 ashamed of it, or to be looked down on by his fellow- 
 men ; and the barriers of caste once overstepped, 
 that mixture and fusion of the people began which 
 has gone on to our day, and promises to continue till 
 there shall be no remnant of caste left. A laconic 
 modern proverb in North Behar says, ' Caste is rice ; ' 
 i.e., matter of eating or not eating with others, only. 
 It is a hopeful sign, presaging, like the Brahmo Somaj, 
 a new and better order of things in India." ^ One or 
 two more witnesses will suffice. 
 
 Says the author of " Rural Annals of Bengal : " 
 " That the time foretold in the Sanskrit Book of the 
 Future, when the Indian people shall be of one caste 
 and form one nation, is not far off, no one who is ac- 
 quainted with the Bengalis of the present day can 
 doubt. They have about them the capabilities of a 
 noble nation." Finally, Maine does not hesitate to 
 say that caste is now " merely a name for trade or 
 occupation ; " ^ and Monier Williams asserts that 
 "however theoretically strict, it practically resolves 
 itself into a question of rupees." '^ Caste, in Ceylon 
 as well as in India, is now in fact a purely social dis- 
 tinction, and disconnected from any sanction derived 
 from religious belief.* 
 
 The Drama has given expression to the democratic 
 
 1 Elliott, I. p. 167. ! Village CommunUUs, p. 57. 
 
 » Lecture on the Study 0/ Samkrii (1861). He mentions the fact tliat, a fewyeara 
 before, it was decided at a meeting of Old and New Scliool Hindus in Calcutta that certain 
 young Brahmans, who had lost caste, should be readmitted on paying a large fine and 
 performing puriiication. 
 
 ^ Tennent, Christianity in India, p. 91. 
 
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 261 
 
 spirit in India, — as it did to the opening of modern 
 liberties in Europe, — by protest against the shownin 
 pride of caste, which is in fact but the feudal- litera'^i^e- 
 is7n 0/ the East. The Mrichchikati,^ for instance, 
 describes the social contempt that befalls poverty, in 
 indignant language, as suitable to the Western as to 
 the Eastern world : — 
 
 " This is the curse of slavery, to be disbelieved when you speak 
 the truth. 
 
 " The poor man's truth is scorned : the wealthy guests look at 
 him with disdain ; he sneaks into a corner. 
 
 " Believe me, he who incurs the crime of poverty adds a sixth 
 sin to those we term most hideous. 
 
 " Disgrace is in misconduct : a worthless rich man is con- 
 temptible." 
 
 The same play brings out a Brahman thief who 
 uses his sacred thread, "that useful appendage to a 
 Brahman," to measure the walls he would scale, and 
 to open the doors he would force. It ridicules a 
 Brahman pandit, "stuffed with curds and rice, chant- 
 ing a Veda-Hymn ; a pampered parrot." A king is, 
 in another passage, represented as commanding the 
 impalement of a priest. Again, the brother of a slain 
 king, dragged about by a mob, is set free by the for- 
 giveness of the subject he would have put to death 
 unjustly. A slave is shown as a model of integrity, 
 and made to say, " Kill me, if you will : I cannot do 
 what ought not to be done." A chandala, the lowest 
 of all outcasts, when ordered to execute a supposed 
 criminal, replies : — 
 
 " My father, when about to depart to heaven, said to me : 
 ' Son, whenever you have a culprit to execute, proceed slowly ; for 
 perhaps some good man may buythe criminal's liberation ; perhaps 
 
 ' Translated by Wilson. 
 
262 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 a son may be born to the king, and a general pardon be proclaimed ; 
 perhaps an elephant may break loose, and the prisoner escape in 
 the confusion ; or perhaps a change of rulers may take place, and 
 every one in bondage may be set free.' " ' 
 
 The lower castes have established claims to respect 
 in other ways. In Ceylon they have been the only 
 astronomers, and amidst their astrological fancies 
 attained a certain amount of scientific knowledge, 
 calculating eclipses and noting the periods of the 
 stars. ^ 
 
 It is probable that the intercourse of the Aryans with 
 native tribes has helped to weaken and disin- 
 
 Iniluence of 
 
 the native tegratc the caste system. Ihe very ancient 
 '"'^^^' popular rites in honor of serpents, doubtless of 
 agricultural origin, and celebrated throughout India, 
 in which all classes unite, amidst holiday pleasures, 
 prove that a democratic influence has proceeded from 
 the aboriginal races. Most of these tribes have 
 always been free from caste ; many have bravely 
 resisted the invader among their rocky fastnesses, 
 maintaining a heroic -independence. And, with all 
 their barbarism, many of .them have shown primitive 
 virtues which ignore conventional distinctions among 
 men. The Bheels are described as "more honest 
 than the Aryan Hindus," and their women as having 
 a higher position than those of the latter race, and 
 taking part actively in all reforms in behalf of order 
 and industry .3 The Khonds believe that to break an 
 oath, or repudiate a debt, or refuse hospitahty, is to 
 invite the wrath of the gods.* Another writer speaks 
 of " the kindly spirit of the Kols towards each other." 
 " The Kol girl is never abusive : her vocabulary is as 
 
 1 Wilson's Hindu Theatre, vol. i. 
 
 ' See Upham's Sacred Boohs 0/ Ceylon, Introd. xiv. 
 
 » Mrs. Spier's India. « Lassen, I. 377, 378. 
 
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 263 
 
 free from bad language of this kind as a Bengali's 
 is full of it."^ "The whole Santhal village," says 
 Hunter, " has joys and sorrows in common. It works 
 together, hunts together, worships together, eats to- 
 gether. No man is allowed to make money out of 
 a stranger." ® In the interesting work here quoted, 
 the democratic "village-system," which extends over 
 a large portion of India, is traced back to the aborigi- 
 nal tribes. They must, at all events, have shared it 
 from the earliest period with the Aryan immigrants. 
 Ludlow ^ depicts them in general terms as " savages, 
 with scarcely a rag to cover them, yet honest and 
 truthful, as all free races are." " A tithe of the care 
 and benevolence expended on the Hindus," says a 
 still more recent writer,* " would make the hill races a 
 noble and enlightened people." However strong some 
 of these. expressions may seem, the unanimity of the 
 best observers points at least to a strong democratic 
 force as working from this direction on the Hindu 
 social system. 
 
 Such the force of democratic reaction within this 
 oldest system of social wrongs, — a system which has 
 generally been taken as type of their unchangeable- 
 ness under heathen influences. Such the protest 
 that began with its beginning, and steadily smote 
 against its iron joints till it broke them in pieces ; 
 not indeed introducing liberty, but preparing the way 
 for it by dividing the bondage to an indefinite extent, 
 atomizing the elements as it were for better affinities. 
 And this old Brahmanical code, wrecked and stranded 
 by the sacred, instinct of freedom, bears witness that 
 
 1 Bengal Journal^ 1866. ^ Annals of Rural Bengal^ pp. 202, 208, 216. 
 
 * British India, I. ig. • 
 
 * LewinSf Races of S.M. India^ 349; also yournal Bengal Society (1866), II. 151. 
 
264 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 man was always greater than his own theocracies, 
 oligarchies, or despotisms, of whatever kind, and will 
 never abide in them as in his home. 
 
 But further, so far as was possible amidst a series 
 
 . of changes like these, each caste has always 
 
 rights of really stood by itself in political matters, 
 
 lower castes. ..,,«.,., ^y" i 
 
 managmg its anairs by its own sunrage ; and 
 even the lowest have always had, notwithstanding the 
 theory of the law, certain well-understood and well- 
 defined civil rights, such as that of acquiring and 
 bestowing property, learning to read, and performing 
 certain sacrifices.^ Caste usages have even been 
 found to resemble in some respects the ancient popular 
 institutions of the European Teutonic tribes. Slavery 
 itself, in many parts of India, has helped to equalize 
 caste, since men of all castes could become slaves, 
 and a Brahman might serve a Sudra ; while, jn Mala- 
 bar, slaves, in their turn, have had higher social con- 
 sideration than some of the free castes.^ 
 
 Slavery in India must be distinguished from caste. 
 It stands on a wholly different basis and oriei- 
 
 Slavery. . ^ •' ° 
 
 nates in causes of a more superficial nature. 
 According to the Mohammedan law, there is but one 
 justifiable ground of enslavement ; namely, punishment 
 of infidels fighting against the true faith. According 
 to the Hindus, fifteen causes are enumerated, among 
 which voluntary or involuntary self-sale is the sub- 
 stance of several, and punishment that of others.^ 
 The strong language of the law concerning a slave's 
 natural destitution of rights received in fact many im- 
 portant qualifications. He could be manumitted ; if 
 he saved his master's hfe, he could demand his free- 
 
 ' Buyers's Northern India, 314, 457 ; Allen, Indin., 471. 
 
 2 AdamJ Slavery in India^ 131-133. 
 
 » Adam; Macnaghten's Hindu and Mohammedan Law. 
 
SLAVERY. 265 
 
 dom and the portion of a son ; if the only son of his 
 master, both his slave mother and himself became free 
 by virtue of that condition alone ; when enslaved for 
 special causes, voluntarily or otherwise, his bondage 
 ceased with the cessation of its grounds. 1 Contracts 
 made by slaves in the name of an absent master, for 
 the behoof of the family, could hot be rescinded by 
 him ; nor was there any bar to the institution of judi- 
 cial proceedings by a slave against his master ; nor, in 
 practice, to the reception of his ' testimony thereon.^ 
 We must observe, too, that slavery in India has not 
 been as in the West an incident of race, but attached 
 alike to all races, and even to all classes in society. 
 It was therefore impossible that the relation as such 
 should be held, as in Christian countries, to be some- 
 thing organic and essential in its victim. 
 
 Notwithstanding Hindu laws speak of slaves as 
 mere cattle, though they could be transferred Distinction 
 with the soil, or sold from hand to hand, and f^om^est- 
 though their condition, especially in Southern em slavery. 
 India, has been past description miserable and de- 
 graded,^ yet it may fairly be said that slavery, in the 
 sense in which we have been used to understand the 
 word, has not existed in India.* It does not claim in 
 that country to rest on religious foundations.^ Chief 
 Justice Harrington distinctly declared that " the law 
 and usage of slavery had no immediate connection 
 with religion," and that its abolition woiild not shock 
 the religious prejudices of the people. Manumission 
 
 * Colebrooke, in Macnaghten, p. 130. 
 3 Manu, VIII. 167; Adam, p. 17. 
 
 8 See the accounts given by Adam ; and in a valuable pamphlet on Slavery in India 
 (printed in London by Thomas Ward & Co., 1841), full of statistics drawn from official 
 documents, originally prepared for the Morning Chronicle. 
 
 • Buyers, 314, 315. , ^ Macnaghten, p. 128. 
 
266 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 itself, on the other hand, is regarded as an act of piety 
 expiative of offences ; and by the Mohammedan law 
 it is expressly commended as a religious merit. The 
 form in which slavery appeared in ancient India was 
 so mild that the Greeks refused it the name ; Megas- 
 thenes declaring definitely that " there are no slaves in 
 India," and Arrian that " all Hindus are free." And 
 even in later times and in regions of which these 
 writers had no knowledge, it is not easy to find 
 among the Hindus the abstract idea of chattelhood, as 
 Western ingenuity has wrought it out. Everywhere, 
 for example, are traces of the right of the slave to in- 
 heritance ; while the. "Law of Nature," as the Romans 
 called those ancient ethnic customs which had a uni- 
 versal scope, was always favorable to his claims.^ I 
 venture to affirm that nothing of the exact nature of 
 Western slavery as an idea existed in the older East, 
 either among the Hebrews, the Persians, the Chinese, 
 or the Hindus. The systematic reduction of men to 
 things could hardly have been conceived by these 
 instinctive races. It belongs to socially self-conscious 
 generations, who know enough of ideal freedom to 
 comprehend what the negation of it implies. It is a 
 Satanic fall made possible only by a mature sense of 
 personal rights. The earliest approach to it, so far as 
 I know, was by polished ethical philosophers of 
 Greece.^ 
 
 But there is a family likeness in the forms of slavery 
 Appeal of ^"^ ^ races and times. And that theoretic 
 caste to basis which could not quite reach the absolut- 
 ontoiogy. jgj^ of Western bondage was, within the limits 
 of caste, developed with extreme precision. The idea 
 
 » Maine's Ancient Law, 158-160. > Aristotle's Politics, B. 1. ch. 4-6. 
 
SLAVERY. 267 
 
 of caste everywhere rests upon an abstract postulate 
 of organic differences among men.^ Thus, in Manu, 
 it is the " nature " of a Brahman to read Vedas, to 
 pray, to be adored. It is the " nature " of a Kscha- 
 triya to fight, of a Vaisya to labor, of a Sudra to 
 serve. This belief grew up insensibly, as the system 
 became fixed, and its distinctions hereditary. Then 
 the Brahmanical priesthood went further, by a neces- 
 sary law of development. With those subtle brains 
 of theirs, they spun out an ontology of caste. The 
 laboring class represented the physical world of ac- 
 tion, in their philosophy an unreality, a kingdom of 
 obscurity and delusion. The soldier caste represented 
 the will, which struggles up out of this lower region, 
 and maintains itself in contradistinction therefrom. 
 The Brahmans themselves represented the purely 
 spiritual realm, the only real life, absorbed in deity. 
 As for the lowest caste, it lay outside the world of 
 ideas, an opposite pole of negation ; though even here 
 it would seem that no absolute evil was affirmed, since 
 from the lowest caste one might rise into the highest 
 through transmigration. Thus it was attempted to 
 justify a colossal servitude by the structure of the soul 
 and the constitution of the universe. To us the chief 
 value of this attempt is in its illustration of the neces- 
 sity which compels every form of injustice to render 
 account to the natural sense of justice in mankind. 
 Mere power never sufficed to vindicate any despotic 
 system in the sight of man. And in this fact lay 
 guaranteed from the first an ultimate real perception 
 and appreciation of social ethics. The ceaseless en- 
 
 ' See Grdte, on Plato's "guardians," or "golden and silver men," and on the way in 
 which they would necessarily regard the " brass and iron " natures, ordained to lower 
 fimctions and destinies. Crete's Plaio, III. 214. 
 
268 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 forcement of all institutions to plead their cause at the 
 ideal bar of conscience leads at last, without need of 
 miracle, to a true commonwealth. 
 
 It was inevitable that caste should be driven in India, 
 as slavery has been in America, to justify its falsity 
 upon abstract grounds of nature and right. To this 
 theoretic test it has to come, whether a thousand years 
 before Christ or two thousand years after him. And 
 the appeal to ontological defences was its refutation, 
 just as we have since seen it to be the suicide of 
 American slavery. 
 
 For a deeper dialectic came to rebut them. And 
 Brahmanism was driven, on its own logical ground, 
 to the utter denial of its own social principle. This 
 result came to pass in the Buddhist reaction. For 
 Buddhism was the abolition ufon recognized meta- 
 physical as well as moral principles, of all distinc- 
 tions founded on caste, and the consequent affirmation 
 of universal brotherhood. And from this Brahmani- 
 cal caste has never fully recovered. So close lay 
 truth to honest error, so inevitable was the appeal to 
 pure reason three thousand years ago. The history 
 of this reaction will claim our attention at a subsequent 
 stage of these studies. 
 
 But we may go behind the spirit of caste, to far 
 Democratic uobler tendencies in the Hindu mind. The 
 inftrHin- ^^^ Vedic Hymns do not recognize it at all. 
 dumind. The names afterwards given the three upper 
 castes are found in these hymns, but not as indicative 
 of social distinctions. Brahmana is appellative of 
 prayer; Kshatriya, of force ; and Vis, whence Vais'ya, 
 of the people in a general sense. Indeed the old 
 pastoral Aryans, as we have seen, were a very demo- 
 cratic community. They seem to have known no dis- 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 269 
 
 tinctions resembling those defined in Manu. The 
 householder had his chosen seer, like the Hebrew, 
 or might himself offer sacrifices as the head of his 
 family.^ The epics speak not only of Brahmans who 
 descended from soldiers, and of Vais'yas taking part 
 in government, but of times when the whole popula- 
 tion assembled to ratify the nomination of a King.* 
 In the Mahabharata,^ King Judhishthira is inaugu- 
 rated by the united action of all the castes. So the 
 Ramayana tells us that Das'aratha called a great coun- 
 cil of all his ministers and chieftains to discuss the 
 appointment of a son to share the government ; and 
 that all the people were gathered together in like 
 manner to express their preference, and give their 
 advice. The divine Rama is the ideal of a democratic 
 prince. His sanctity in the epic is itself a transfer- 
 ence of the ideal of religion from the Brahman to the 
 Kshatriya ; an affirmation of liberty on this soil of 
 caste. The chiefs praise him for continually "inquir- 
 ing after the welfare of the citizens, as if they were 
 his own children, afflicted at their distresses and re- 
 joicing in their joy, upholding the law by protecting 
 the innocent and punishing the guilty ; so that all 
 the people, whether they be servants or bearers of 
 burdens, citizens or ryots, young or old, petition the 
 monarch to install Rama as coadjutor in the admin- 
 istration of the Raj."* Rama's brother Bharata, 
 seeking to move him from his determination to yield 
 the crown, in obedience to his father's vow, as a last 
 resort appeals to the people. "Why, O people! do 
 you not lay your injunction on Rama ? " And the 
 
 • Weber, VorUmngen, p. 37; Lassen, I. 795. ' Lassen, I. 811. 
 
 » Mahabhtota, B. 11. • RSmayana, B. 11. 
 
270 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 people reply that they find reason on both sides, and 
 cannot judge the matter in haste. 
 
 The people were from the first divided into little 
 clans under independent chiefs. Down to this day 
 the tribes of the Panjab, that oldest homestead of the 
 Hindu Aryans, remain free from consolidated mon- 
 archy and caste. ^ 
 
 A quarter of the population of India, about fifty 
 millions, are governed by about two hundred native 
 chiefs. Such is the force of the centrifugal principle 
 of local independence.^ Small, self-governed com- 
 munities, adhering to local customs and traditions, 
 and organized in guilds and corporations, exist all 
 over India, even under the shadow of royalty and 
 caste, persistent protests in many ways against the 
 authority of these institutions.^ The type of this free 
 spirit is the Sikh, whose Bible says : — 
 
 " They tell us there are four races ; but all are of the seed of 
 Brahm. 
 
 " The four races shall be one, and all shall call on the Teacher. 
 
 " Think not of caste, but abase thyself, and attend to thy own 
 soul." 
 
 Originally the full tide of the laborer to the soil was 
 Title to the rcHgiously conceded. " The old sages declare 
 land. that cultivated land is the property of him who 
 
 first cut away the wood or cleared and tilled it, just 
 as an antelope belongs to the first hunter by whom it 
 is mortally wounded.* Even the feudalism of the 
 Rajput princes still acknowledges the ryot's ownership 
 in the land.^ This natural hold upon the soil and the 
 right of self-government consequent thereon have been 
 
 > See Weber, p. 3. s IVestm. Rev., July, 1859. 
 
 8 Duncker, II. 105 ; Muller, Sansk. Lit., p. 52. » Manu, IX. 44. 
 
 <* Asiatic Journal, New Series, V. 41. 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 2*]! 
 
 embodied by the Hindus from remote times in what 
 are called the "Village Communities." ^ 
 
 By this system the land is held by the village com- 
 mune as an organized whole, having complete vaiagecom- 
 arrangements for distributing the produce ™>™'i=s. 
 among the laborers, after the payment of a certain 
 small fraction, differing at different times, to the king 
 and the local chiefs. The village has its arable land 
 cultivated by all, and its waste land used by all as 
 pasture. It has its judge or head-man, appointed by 
 the raja in the old time, but now a hereditary officer. 
 He is the agent of the village in all transactions with 
 the government, the assessor of taxes according tO' 
 property, and the manager of the common lands. 
 Yet all matters of moment are determined by " free 
 consultation with the villagers, and disputes decided 
 with the assistance of arbitrators."^ 
 
 The organization of the little commonwealth is com- 
 plete ; having its judge, its collector, its superintend- 
 ent of boundaries, its notary public, its weigher and 
 ganger ; its guide for travellers, its priest, schoolmaster, 
 astrologer ; its watch and police ; its barber, carpen- 
 ter, smith, potter, tailor, spice-seller ; its letter-carrier, 
 irrigator, and burner of the dead ; all functions being 
 hereditary in most villages, and all work paid for out 
 of the common fund.^ Within the limits of Oriental 
 instincts this little community is an independent unit ; 
 a " petty republic ; " containing within itself all the 
 elements of stability and mutual satisfaction ; organ- 
 
 1 " The right of the sovereign extended only to the tax. Theoretically, he was owner 
 of every thing acquired by his subjects : but practically they had their rights, as fully 
 secured as his own." Ritchie, British World in the East^ I. 179. 
 
 2 See Wheeler, History 0/ British India, II. 597. Hunter's Orissa, (1872) vol. ii. 
 
 ' Mill, British Ittdia, I. 217; VLe^ien, Asiatic Natiom, 11. -^ii); Westm. Revitvi !at 
 July, 1859 ; Ludlow, Brit. India, I. 61. 
 
272 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ized for the security and profit of each family in the 
 position hereditarily or otherwise assigned it, and 
 according to the recognized measure of its contribu- 
 tion to the public service. And these villages, it may 
 be added, have from very ancient times been, not in- 
 frequently, bound together into larger organizations, 
 containing generally eighty-four members.' They 
 are an admirable illustration of the principle of Mutual 
 Helf, and of its controlling influence over mankind in 
 the early organization of social life. The members of 
 such primeval republics, of which India itself has 
 been styled " one vast congeries," have no other tradi- 
 tions of political duty than what this form of govern- 
 ment has transmitted from immemorial antiquity. 
 "They trouble themselves very little about the dis- 
 memberment of empires ; and, provided the township 
 remain intact, it is matter of perfect indifference to 
 them who becomes sovereign of the country, the in- 
 ternal administration continuing the same."® The 
 system in fact rests on principles that may not only be 
 called congenital with actual Hindu tribes, but go back 
 to more primitive social relations. The tie which 
 unites the members of these village communities in- 
 volves, as Maine has shown in his remarkable work 
 on Ancient Law, the assumption of a common family 
 descent, suggesting unmistakably their origin in 
 Patriarchalism, the earliest constructive principle of 
 social life. The same profound student, in a more 
 recent volume of equal interest, has added to his 
 previous parallel between the Indian communities and 
 the Russian and Slavonian village-brotherhoods, a 
 
 » Elliott, N. W. India, II. p. 4. 
 
 ' Wilkes's Historical Sketches of the South of India. See Heeren, A sialic Nations. 
 II. 260. 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 273 
 
 description of the very close resemblance of the first- 
 named organizations to the old Teutonic townships, — 
 a resemblance " much too strong to be accidental," 
 — and especially in their presenting " the same double 
 aspect of a group of families united by common kin- 
 ship, and a company of persons exercising joint 
 ownership of land."^ These Indo-European "affinities 
 will of course suggest to the reader a common origin 
 in the primeval life of the race previous to its disper- 
 sion into different nationalities. 
 
 Mr. Maine infers from the character of village com- 
 munities, as well as from other data, that the xheiriiber- 
 oldest discoverable forms of property in land *'^=- 
 are collective rather than individual ownerships ; ^ 
 though he finds a periodical redistribution of the land 
 among families to have been universal among Aryan 
 races. ^ The Hindu villager's idea of freedom is cer- 
 tainly' associated with the rights of the corporate 
 body of which he is a member,, rather than with 
 personal independence, and the notion of his own in- 
 dividuality as a limitation of these traditional corporate 
 rights is substantially new to him. The idea is doubt- 
 less profoundly alterative of this Whole system, now 
 subjected to the influence of European ideas and in- 
 stitutions. Yet the defect of personal freedom is by 
 no means so great as might be inferred ; since these 
 corporate rights constitute the natural body of political 
 consciousness, assuming the form of organic guaran- 
 ties and sacred trusts. The Family, moreover, has its 
 sphere, within which the commune does not penetrate, 
 protected in part by patriarchal traditions of very 
 great sanctity. Personal property is by no means- 
 
 1 Village Communities in the East and the IVest, pp. 12, 107, 127. 
 ' Ibid., p. 76. ' Ibid., p. 82. 
 
 18 
 
274 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 excluded from the system ; and even the arable land, 
 though owned by all, is marked off to different culti- 
 vators, by more or less pernianent arrangements. 
 
 It is to be observed, too, that the absorption of pro- 
 prietary rights in land by the commune is by no 
 means universal in the Hindu villages. Whole races, 
 like the jats, spread over Northern and Central India, 
 are described ^ as thoroughly democratic ; as having 
 an " excessive craving for fixed ownership in the land," 
 of which every one has his separate share, while the 
 government is not patriarchal, but to a very great 
 degree representative. On the Western coast, and in 
 the broken hilly regions especially, the land is largely 
 held by private ownership. ^ And the isolated home- 
 stead so natural to the Teutonic races is in fact very 
 common in India, notwithstanding the strong ten- 
 dency of an agricultural population like the Hindu, 
 to seek the advantages of a communal system of 
 cultivation.^ Seventy years ago. Sir TKomas Munro 
 found the lands in Kanar'a owned by individuals sub- 
 ject to government assessments, who inherited their 
 estates ; and " who understood property rights as well 
 as Englishmen."* 
 
 Ramaswami Naidu, a native official, of reputation 
 in the British service, prepared a careful memoir of 
 the tenures of those ancient States which came to be 
 included in the Madras Presidency.^ It contains full 
 evidence that, under the native sovereigns of India, a 
 portion of the cultivators possessed full proprietary 
 rights in the soil, while another portion merely paid a 
 tribute to the kings in return for protection, according 
 
 1 See CampbelPs elaborate account oi Irtdiati Ethnology, in the yournaZofthe Bengal 
 Society for 1866. 
 
 2 Campbell, p. 83, 134. 8 Maine, Village Communities, p. 114. 
 « See Westm. Rev., Jan. 1868. » journal R. A. S., Tol. i. 292-306. 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 271; 
 
 to a fixed proportion of their products. It gives us 
 also a full description of the constitution of a village 
 community, and of the eighteen salaried officers hered- 
 itarily attached to it; of their appointment by the 
 king in newly conquered territories, and of the distri- 
 bution of free proprietorships among the clearers of 
 the land. "This ownership," says the author, " the 
 cultivators enjoy to this day, because hereditary right 
 to the soil is vested in them."^ 
 
 Absolute equality is no part of the ideal of a Hindu 
 commune. There are " parallel social strata ; " and in 
 many parts of India outcast classes are attached to the 
 villages, probably belonging to indigenous conquered 
 races. Yet even these outsiders are held authori- 
 tative on the subject of boundaries ; and the letter- 
 carrier and burner of the dead, who usually belongs 
 to the lowest class, is, like the other functionaries, a 
 free proprietor, with ofiicial fees.^ The people freely 
 discuss laws and customs ; nor can the constant inter- 
 mixture of races of more or less democratic tendency, 
 which has been going on for ages all over India, have 
 failed to supply elements of individuality to Hindu 
 life. It has already been observed, that the village 
 ■ system is by no means an exclusively Aryan institu- 
 tion in India, but indigenous also ;^ and, even where it 
 is predominantly Aryan, the native tribes have been 
 quite freely incorporated into its membership, and 
 shared its elements of political equality. This hospi- 
 tality is so characteristic, that the natural working of 
 the system is probably preferable in such respects to 
 the changes introduced by foreign interference, which, 
 
 ^ Wilson {Hist. India^ 1. 418) declares distinctly that "the proprietary right of the 
 sovereign derives no warrant from the ancient laws or institutions of the Hindus." 
 " Rdmasw. Naidu. * Htmter's Orissa, vol. L 
 
276 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 in Maine's view, has induced a more jealous corporate 
 exclusiveness, clinging to vested rights, than had pre- 
 viously existed. 1 Looking at the history of the insti- 
 tution as a whole, we may discern hmts and openings, 
 which promise to throw much light on the subject of 
 individual freedom, as an element of Hindu civili- 
 zation. The breaking up of the old caste-system 
 on the one hand, and the persistence of these local 
 liberties and unities of the agricultural communes on 
 the other, are facts of great historical significance, in 
 estimating the degree in which the idea of personal 
 rights and duties is probably already developed among 
 the races of India. The extent to which the com- 
 munes have absorbed Brahmans and Kshatriyas into 
 the class of cultivators opens the further question, 
 how much this permanent devotion to agricultural 
 industry may have done towards counteracting the 
 exclusiveness of caste. 
 
 The village community is now affirmed to have been 
 the primitive pohtical unit in all Aryan tribes. These 
 little Indian republics have been truly characterized as 
 " the indestructible atoms out of which empires were 
 formed." Many of the largest cities of India were 
 originally collections of these villages. Every succes- 
 sive master of the soil has been compelled to respect 
 them, as the real " proprietary units " with which his 
 authority must deal. Wherever the English have 
 abolished them, the people have returned to them at 
 the earliest opportunity. Their extension, not only 
 over all India, Aryan and riative, but even beyond 
 Java,2 makes them the ground fact of Oriental history, 
 and especially interpretative of Hindu character.- And, 
 
 ^ Village Comtnunities^ p. 167. 
 
 * Raffles, quoted by Heeren, II. 260. 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 277 
 
 after trying all their own bungling and barbarous 
 forms of political surgery, the latest experimenters in 
 governing India find the main features of this ancient 
 polity best suited to the genius of the race, and most 
 consistent with social order. It has been an admirable 
 preparation for that system of full personal proprietor- 
 ship, which should long ere now have been accorded 
 to the Hindu people.^ 
 
 The school-master is an essential member of this 
 system ; and by virtue of his function enjoys j.^^,^,;^ 
 a lot of tax-free land by gift of the commune. 
 
 " In every Hindu village which has retained its old 
 form, I am assured," says Ludlow, " that the children 
 generally are able to read, v^rrite, and cipher ; but 
 where we have swept away the village system, as 
 in Bengal, there the village school also has disap- 
 peared."^ 
 
 Trial by jury (^panchdyet) , alike for the determina- 
 tion of law and fact, is generally a parfof this , . 
 
 => . . Junes. 
 
 system of self-government ; as is also a special 
 service for the discovery of criminals, and the escort- 
 ing of travellers. Mr. Reynolds, who was employed 
 for many years in suppressing Thuggery, testified in 
 the highest praise to the vigilance of the village police, 
 and to the aid afforded him in tracking offenders 
 sometimes for hundreds of miles. He went so far 
 as to call the village system of India " the best in the 
 world." 3 
 
 1 For a full account of the village land-tenures, see Mackay's Reports on Western 
 India' 
 
 2 British iTidia^ I. 62. In Bengal alone there were once no less than eighty thousand 
 native schools ; though, doubtless, for the most part, of a poor quality. According to a 
 government Report in 1835, there was a village school for every four hundred persons. 
 MissioTtary Intelligencer ^ IX. 133, 193. 
 
 » Ludlow, I. 66 ; II. 344* 
 
278 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 The fanchdyet juries vary in their composition, 
 and in the number of their members. Originally 
 each party named two, and the judge one. It is a 
 common saying in India, " In the fanchdyet is God." 
 And, though not always incorrupt, its administration 
 is, according to good authority, on the whole " singu- 
 larly just." The influence of the elders of the village 
 often induces contending parties to yield points of 
 difi'erence, or even to forgive the injury. ^ 
 
 In Nepal, both civil and criminal cases are referred 
 to the panchayets, at the discretion of the court, or 
 the wish' of the parties ; the members being always 
 appointed by the judge, each party having the right 
 of challenge in case of every man nominated. The 
 parties, in other cases, name each five members, and 
 the court adds five to their ten. The verdict must be 
 unanimous, to effect a decision of the case. These 
 jurors are never paid any compensation for travel- 
 ling expenses • or loss of time. The prisoner can 
 always confront his accuser, and cross-examine the 
 witnesses against him. The witness is commonly 
 •sworn on the Harivansa, which is placed on his head 
 with a solemn reminder of the sanctity of truth. If 
 a Buddhist, he is sworn on th'e Pancharaksha ; if a 
 Moslem, on the Koran. If parties are dissatisfied 
 with the judgment of the courts at law, they can 
 appeal to the ministers assembled in the palace at 
 Kathmandu; applying first to the premier, and, if, 
 failing to obtain satisfaction from him,' proceeding to 
 the palace gate and calling out, "Justice ! Justice ! " 
 Upon which fourteen officers are assembled to hear 
 the case, and give final judgment.^ 
 
 • Elliott, N. W. India, I. 282. 2 Hodgson, in yournal R. As. Soc, vol. i. 
 
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 279 
 
 The Hindu mind, then, retained the natural bias 
 towards republicanism which was so distinctly Republican 
 shown in the Aryans of Vedic times, and t™<i™cies. 
 which reached such energetic growth in the Teu- 
 tonic races of the same stem. Neither the hot sky 
 of Central India, nor the caste system, which it stimu- 
 lated to such rankness, could eradicate this germ. 
 Its fires constantly broke forth in organized efforts to 
 expel the Mussulman invader from the soil. The 
 formidable Mahratta confederacy, which came near 
 overthrowing first the Mogul, and then the British 
 empires in India, was a military republic of independ- 
 ent chiefs, loosely related to a central authority. 
 The Sikhs, or disciples, at first peaceful religious 
 puritans, became, when roused by Moslem persecu- 
 tion, ardent apostles of political liberty. Even after 
 the long and bloody struggle which ended in the 
 subjugation of the peninsula by England, there still 
 remained the energy to combine in one immense 
 revolt against a foreign despotism that had been peel- 
 ing the land and demoralizing the race for more than 
 a century ; and to compel the government to deprive 
 the colossal East India Company of autocratic power. 
 A brief notice of some of the most important features 
 of British rule in India, which, it must be remembered, 
 have been succeeded by much better methods, will be 
 here introduced, not in a censorious spirit towards the 
 people of England, for whom I cherish a most cordial 
 respect, but because such a review will enable the 
 reader to do something like justice to the natural 
 qualities of the Hindus, and to judge whether their 
 degeneracy, so much harped on, is, as we are con- 
 stantly told, owing to viciousness specially inherent 
 in the heathen heart. 
 
28o RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 The English systems of land tenure and taxation 
 have been more prejudicial to the rights of 
 government; thc village communes than the Mahommedan 
 land system, ^^ich they Superseded. Under the latter, the 
 zemindars, or farmers of revenue, took from a fourth 
 to a half the produce of the ryot, in the government's 
 name, paying themselves out of the revenue thus ex- 
 acted. The English transformed the zemindars into 
 positive owners, who paid quit-rent to the Company, 
 and were armed with powers of summary distraint 
 on the tenants ; a system involving the utter extinction 
 of nativie rights, which had still lingered, favored by 
 the general irregularity of the Mussulman administra- 
 tion. ^ The presidencies of Bengal and Madras becom- 
 ing impoverished by this policy, the Ryotwaree system 
 was tried, in which the zemindars were supplanted by 
 the government tax-gatherers, levying directly on the 
 villagers ; and this proved as fruitful of corruption, 
 extortion, and outrage as the other. ^ The bribe which 
 would often deliver the ryot from the clutch of the 
 Mussulman collector would not assuage the rapacity 
 of his Christian successor. The one was generally 
 content with payment in kind, but the other insisted 
 on having money ; thus not only throwing the peasant 
 into the grasp of usurers, so that he was at last 
 obliged to alienate his land, but also draining the 
 country of precious metals, to enrich a foreign com- 
 pany.3 The older taxation took a portion of the 
 actual crop ; but the English " fixed an assumed capa- 
 city of each field for produce, and an assumed price 
 for this, and then from 35 to 40 per cent of this fixed 
 
 ^ See Westtn, Rev-, Jan. 1858. 
 
 » Ludlow, Lect. IX. 
 
 ' Ibid ; McCuUoch's East Indies. 
 
MISGOVERNMENT. 281 
 
 sum as its share for ever." ^ The effect was to absorb 
 the larger part of the ryot's actual income, and in 
 general to sweep away the whole. From the time 
 of Clive,^ the material exhaustion and social misery 
 went on steadily increasing, until, as in the Puttee- 
 daree plan, which was adopted in the Panjab, isolated 
 efforts were made towards a partial return to the 
 native village polity. 
 
 In 1838, by the exertions of many leading reform- 
 ers, conspicuous among whom were George 
 Thompson and Daniel O'Connell, the "Brit- India so- 
 ish India Society" was organized, — a natural '^'^^' 
 offshoot from the great movement against Western 
 slavery, — for the purpose of emancipating the masses 
 in Hindustan, and at the same time, through the devel- 
 opment of the culture of cotton in that country by free 
 labor, to abolish slavery in America by destroying 
 the English market for the slave-grown article. The 
 apostles of this movement made the land ring with 
 eloquent denunciation and appeal. They brought a 
 flood of light to bear on the wretched condition of the 
 Hindu laborer. Their speeches assailed the pretence 
 that the Government was owner of the soil of India, 
 " with the right to take what suited it from every man's 
 field." They proved that its extortion of rent made 
 private property in land impossible, and that cultiva- 
 tion had decreased in consequence in the ratio of two- 
 thirds, while the tax assessed continued nearly the 
 same. They denounced it for laying high taxes on 
 the cultivation of waste lands, for the express purpose 
 of preventing the impoverished ryots from resorting to 
 these. They pointed to a long series of appalling 
 
 1 Gen. Briggs's Speech at Glass;o'Wy Aug. 1, 1839. 
 
 2 Macaulay's Essay on Clive. 
 
282 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 famines ; in one of which five hundred thousand per- 
 sons perished in a single year, while grain enough was 
 being exported from Bengal to feed the whole number 
 with a pound of rice a day ; and another of which 
 swept off three millions in Bengal alone. They de- 
 scribed the ruin of" Hindu manufacturing industry, 
 and the fall of British imports down to sixpence a head 
 on the population. They warned the rulers of the 
 detestation in which they were held throughout India, 
 of the elements of desperate revolt that were gather- 
 ing. The horrors of Hindu slavery were spread out 
 before the eyes of the British people, who were just 
 then striking off the chains from their West India 
 bondsmen.^ Yet twenty years of corporative des- 
 potism were yet to elapse, finding their natural result 
 in the terrible scenes of 1857-58, before the worst 
 features of the old land system in India began to yield 
 to the civilization of the age.^ 
 
 The police of the East India Company was as mis- 
 chievous as its revenue system. It was de- 
 
 Police. .^ 
 
 scribed as " not only powerless to repress crime, 
 but a great engine of oppression and corruption." 
 The venality and arbitrariness of the courts became 
 intolerable, and were among the leading causes of the 
 rebellion.'' 
 
 The monopoly of opium and its compulsory culture 
 Opium were sources of enormous evil. At one time 
 trade. a fifth of the revenues of the Company were 
 
 1 Of pre-eminent value were the labors of George Thompson, both in advocating the 
 abolition of slavery and in defending oppressed and defrauded native rulers, with a thor- 
 oughness and eloquence which entitle him to be called the apostle of East Indian emanci- 
 pation, as he was one of the bravest helpers of the American slave. 
 
 » See the speeches of Thompson, O'Connell, and Briggs, before the British India 
 Societies during 1839 and 1840, for abundant and startling statistics on these points. 
 
 ' Ludlow, ch. xix. ; Macaulay's £ssay on H^arren Hastings. 
 
MISGOVERNMENT. 283 
 
 derived from this pernicious interest. The loss of 
 productive industry effected was as nothing compared 
 with the moral ruin it entailed.-' It was the decisive 
 testimony of Hastings that the Hindus were a remark- 
 ably temperate people before evil communication with 
 the Europeans had corrupted them.^ The use of in- 
 toxicating drugs is prohibited to the Brahmans by the 
 native law, and is still disreputable among the higher 
 classes. In the rural districts intemperance is still 
 rare ; but wherever English rule is established, and 
 foreign influence active, it has greatly increased. It 
 is admitted on all hands that in these localities the 
 character of the people has changed, and that both 
 Mohammedans and Hindus are rapidly degenerating, 
 under the effects of alcohol and opium. ^ 
 
 The Mohammedan government is nowise respon- 
 sible for the terrible results of the opium trade. It 
 repressed the cultivation of the poppy as long as it 
 was able. Ninety years ago no regular trade in 
 opium existed. The East India Company's officers 
 began it by smuggling a thousand chests into China. 
 Thenceforward the " fostering care " of the Company 
 developed it till it "enticed all India, native and for- 
 eign, Christian and Buddhist." In 1840 the Chinese 
 government destroyed twenty thousand chests of 
 opium, being not more than half the importation for a 
 single year. In 1858 the production in India, of 
 which England held the monopoly, for exportation 
 into China, amounted to seventy thousand chests. 
 
 1 Westm.Rev.^ Julyj i859' "Half the crime in the opium districts," said Mr. Sym 
 (Ludlow, II. 300), "is due to opium. One cultivator will demoralize a whole village." 
 Dr. Allen [India-, p. 304) declares that he knew nothing in modem commerce, except the 
 slave-trade, more reprehensible than the manner in which this business was carried on. 
 
 2 Ludlow, II. 302. 
 
 3 Allen, pp. 47S, 479, 497. See testimonies collected in Thompson's Address- ai 
 Friends'' , Yearly Meeting in London-, 1839. 
 
284 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 Government, down to the rebellion of 1857, not only 
 never made the slightest effort to repress, but steadily 
 encouraged it, urging the legalization of it upon the 
 Chinese rulers, who as strenuously strove to resiSt a 
 scourge that was desolating their dominions. Eng- 
 land, in fact, " found India and China comparatively 
 free from intemperance through the positive restraints 
 of Buddhism and Mohammedanism. She has estab- 
 lished in these countries the most extensive and deeply 
 rooted debauchery the world has known." ^ 
 
 " The intemperance of the British soldiery in India," 
 wrote Dr. Jeffreys in 1858, " appears to be bounded 
 only by the opportunities they can command. It is 
 to a lamentable extent associated with Christianity in 
 the minds of the natives. Once, on my making in- 
 quiries into the creeds of certain black descendants of 
 Europeans in the Upper Provinces, a well-informed 
 Mussulman informed me they were Christians, that he 
 knew it (speaking not disrespectfully, but in all sim- 
 plicity) from their being nearly all of them drunkards. 
 The example of Christians, and the efforts of govern- 
 ment to multiply spirit-shops for the sake of revenue, 
 are changing the habits of the natives. Drunkenness 
 is becoming prevalent, whereas formerly there were 
 few who touched alcohol in any form."^ 
 
 The salt monopoly afforded another fifth of the rev- 
 sait mo- enue of the Company. The peasants were for- 
 nopoiy. bidden the very salt-mud of the river mouths, 
 their main reliance for agricultural purposes. " Not a 
 grain of the sun-evaporated salt left by nature at his 
 own door could be placed by a native on his tongue, or 
 
 I These last facts and affirmations are taken from a work by Dr. Jeffreys on The British 
 Ar-my i» India (London, 1858). See, also, Ludlow, II. 302. 
 * Jeffreys, p. 19. 
 
MISGOVERNMENT. 285 
 
 removed into his hut ; " and the trade in salted fish was 
 destroyed. At one time the price of this necessary 
 article was raised to thirteen hundred per cent above 
 the cost of production.^ 
 
 The supersedure of native manufactures by English 
 machinery created an amount of suffering . 
 among numerous classes in India scarcely to manufact- 
 be paralleled in the history of labor.^ The '"^'' 
 slave-grown cotton of America, manufactured in Eng- 
 land, was forced on a people who once had woven 
 for their own use the finest fabrics in the world. The 
 native looms that not long be/ore produced annually 
 eight millions of pieces of cotton goods were stopped 
 altogether. Once flourishing cities and villages, the 
 seats of a busy and thriving population, were ruined. 
 Dacca, for instance, once a city of three hundred 
 thousand inhabitants, has been reduced to sixty thou- 
 sand ; and its transparent muslin, a " woven wind," a 
 whole dress of which will pass through a finger-ring, 
 is " almost a thing of the past." ^• 
 
 The older governments were careful to build roads 
 and secure communication across the country. + 
 
 ^ Internal 
 
 In 1857, the "Friend of India" confessed thatcommuni- 
 " for one good road we have made we have 
 suffered twenty to disappear." * Four or five thousand 
 miles of railroad have since been projected and in 
 great part constructed, as well as several thousand 
 miles of canal ; but the native industry can hardly 
 have begun to recover from the terrible discourage- 
 ment created by the long-continued neglect of internal 
 communication, on the part of the invaders, and the 
 
 ^ Ludlow, Thompson, &c. ^ Allen, 449. 
 
 2 Ludlow, I. 10. * See, also, Allen, p. 327. 
 
286 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 incessant shocks of conquest and civil strife which 
 they helped to introduce. 
 
 The Skanda Purana- describes the descent of 
 . . , Ganea, the sacred stream, through the tressfs 
 of Vishnu, which broke her fall and scattered 
 her waves, bearing fertility to the land. She followed 
 the steps of Bhagiratha, to whom she was granted, 
 — a drop of the waters of heaven, as reward of his 
 all-conquering devotion. Such the consecration in 
 mythic lore of the popular enthusiasm and love for 
 fertilizing streams. Nothing in the Ramayana is 
 more eloquent with genuine national feeling than the 
 episode in which the descent of the waters is identified 
 with the beneficence of all the gods. It represents 
 them as sent to revive the ashes of the seventy thou- 
 sand sons of Sagara, reduced to dust by Vishnu, 
 " spouse of the all-nourishing earth, in his avatara of 
 Fire," because they reproached him with carrying 
 away the sacred horse of their father's sacrifice, which 
 they had sought in vain through the worlds. These 
 are the symbols of an agricultural people ; and the 
 whole is manifestly like the Greek myth of Ceres and 
 Proserpine, significant of the death and re-birth of 
 vegetation. 
 
 Serpents, in the popular mythology of India, seem 
 to represent this oldest interest of the community. 
 The festivals in honor of these first owners and occu- 
 pants of the ground are celebrated by young and 
 old,' rich and poor, throughout Western India. The 
 children have holiday, and the serpent figures are 
 crowned with flowers. In the Sutras, Puranas, and 
 Epics, these animals are always mentioned with respect, 
 and incarnations in serpent form abound. The popu- 
 lar faith ascribes this veneration to gratitude for the 
 
MISGOVERNMENT. 287 
 
 forgiveness shown by the queen of serpents to the 
 husbandman who killed her little ones by the stroke 
 of his plough. 
 
 The prodigious monuments of this agricultural 
 ardor, so intimately related to the old Hindu religious 
 faith, have been treated by later invaders very much 
 as similar achievements by the ancient Peruvians were 
 treated by the Spanish conquerors of South America. 
 Of the innumerable canals, reservoirs and tanks for 
 irrigation, built by native and Mussulman govern- 
 ments, great numbers were suffered to decay, and the 
 contributions paid in by the people for their repair, in 
 accordance with ancient custom, were appropriated to 
 other purposes.^ Wherever the opportunity has been 
 afforded, as especially in the Panjab of late years, 
 the natives have entered with vigor on the improve- 
 ment of these long-neglected works, and their exten- 
 sion upon a suitable scale. 
 
 To such demoralizing forces the Hindus have been 
 subject for centuries. When we read therefore ^ , 
 
 J Inferences. 
 
 of the filthy condition of villages, the destitute 
 and despondent state of the agricultural population, 
 we shall not need to resort for explanation either to 
 caste or to religion. We shall appreciate McCul- 
 loch's abundant proofs that this poverty and misery 
 are largely owing to that misgovernment of which we 
 have here given but the merest outline.^ We shall 
 appreciate the force of such testimony as that of the 
 "Bombay Times," in 1849, that the boundaries of the 
 dominions of the East India Company could be dis- 
 covered by the superior condition of the country 
 people who had not become subject to their sway ; 
 
 ^ Ludlow, II. 317 J Arnold's Dalhousie^ 11. 282. 
 ^ Commerc. Dici., article on East Indies. 
 
288 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 or as Campbell's, who affirms, in his work on India, 
 that "the longer we possess a province, the more 
 common and grave does perjury become ; " or as Sir 
 Thomas Munro's, half a century since, that the in- 
 habitants of the British Provinces were " the most 
 abject race in all India." We shall appreciate the 
 energy with which Burke declared in the House 
 of Commons that, "if the English had been driven 
 from India, they would have left no better traces of 
 their dominion than hyenas and tigers." 
 
 Systematic contempt and outrage by British officials 
 lu-treat- was SO much a matter of course, that for 
 ment. J^JJ Englishman to treat natives with common 
 civility was looked upon as a prodigy ; and the gov- 
 ernment servants had a general impression that it 
 would bring one into bad odor with the Company. ^ 
 Impressment, plundering of houses, and burning of 
 villages, the kick, the buffet, the curse, mal-treatment 
 in every form, such as made men like Metcalfe, 
 Napier, and Shore " wonder that we hold India for a 
 year," brought the ryots to the conviction at last, as 
 the missionaries confessed in their conference of 1855, 
 that "the Christian religion consisted in having no 
 caste, eating beef, drinking freely, and trampling on 
 the rights of niggers."^ The gross immoralities of 
 Europeans in the early period of British rule in India 
 in fact led to the use of the term Christian as a by- 
 word, having nearly the sense of "bastard ; " and, "had 
 the name been altogether laid aside, it would have 
 been a great blessing for those parts of India most 
 frequented by Europeans." ^ It can therefore hardly 
 
 > Hon F. J. Shore. See, also, Speeches at Friends' Meeting in London^ 1839 
 2 Ludlow, II. 365. 
 
 » Buyers's If orthern India, p. 107; Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 423; IVestm. 
 Rev. for July, 1868. 
 
4 
 
 MISGOVERNMENT. 289 
 
 be held suggestive of special hardness in the natural 
 heathen heart, when we find, after more than a century 
 of British sway, that there are less than a hundred 
 thousand Christian converts in India out of a popula- 
 tion of nearly two hundred millions ; and less than 
 twenty thousand out of the forty-five millions of 
 Bengal. 
 
 It remains to add one more item to this sad detail 
 of Christian influence in India. Not only did „ 
 
 ■' Slavery. 
 
 the Company gratuitously sanction existent 
 Hindu and Mohammedan slavery by interpreting law 
 in its interest, needlessly placing it under the shield of 
 " respect for the religious institutions of the natives ; " 
 not only did it everywhere permit and justify the sale 
 of this kind of property among them ; not only en- 
 courage an external slave-trade, for a long period 
 carried on for the supply of India by Arab traders 
 with the coast of Africa and the Red Sea ; not only 
 sell slaves itself, to secure arrears of revenue. It 
 steadily resisted numerous endeavors to obtain the 
 abolition of Hindu slavery on the part of such men 
 as Harrington and Baber, from 1798 to 1833.1 Not 
 till 181 1, was legislation directed against the slave- 
 trade ; and the law then, made prohibited the sale of 
 such persons only as should be brought from abroad 
 for this express furfose, — a limitation which rendered 
 it of no effect. Every extension of British territory 
 increased the traffic, opening the whole domain to 
 importation of fresh victims.^ In 1833, a bill intro- 
 duced by Earl Grey, for abolishing slavery in five 
 years, was so emasculated in its passage through 
 Parliament by the opposition of the Duke of Welling- 
 
 * See the case fully stated in Adam's Slavery in India, 
 
 2 Judge Leycester; in Parliamentary Documents for 1839, No, 138, p. 315. 
 
 19 
 
290 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 ton and others, as to come out finally but a timid recom- 
 mendation to the Company to mitigate the evil as far 
 as should be found convenient ; serving only to en- 
 courage and confirm it. The earnest agitation of the 
 subject by the British India Society in 1838 aroused 
 fresh interest; but the East Indies and Ceylon were 
 excepted from the great Colonial Emancipation of that 
 year. Nor can I learn that any complete Act of Aboli- 
 tion has been passed, down to the present hour. What 
 we are here especially to oljserve is the fact that this 
 continuance of so barbarous a system has not had the 
 excuse of a necessary regard for the prejudices and 
 interests of the people. Judge Vibart, after an inves- 
 tigation made by desire of government in 1825, re- 
 ported that the respectable classes of the Hindus were 
 strongly in favor of abolition, and that the Moham- 
 medans had no very great objection. Macaulay, as 
 Secretary of. the Board, was assured by the ablest of 
 the Company's civil servants that there would be 
 no danger in the attempt. In 1833, four thousand 
 Hindus, Parsees, and Mohammedans memorialized 
 Parliament, thanking it for its exertions to abolish the 
 slave-trade.^ It was the opinion of able lawyers that 
 the Mohammedan law itself, if rightly executed, 
 would free almost all the slaves in India ; nor has 
 that of the Hindus any immediate connection with 
 their religion or their system of caste. 
 
 But we hasten from this criticism to an estimate 
 
 Traits of which could not be fairly presented without 
 
 Hindu such reference to an oft-told history, otherwise 
 
 needing no fresh recital. Charges of gross 
 
 depravity are constantly brought against the Hindus 
 
 1 Pamphlet on Slavery in India., compiled largely from offidal docaments"; printed by 
 Ward & Co., London, 1841. 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 
 
 291 
 
 as a people. Such writers as Mill and Ward seem to 
 be incapable of finding any good in them. Of these 
 sweeping accusations, falsehood, vindictiveness, and 
 sensuality have been the most frequent. The best 
 authorities agree in refuting them.i Dr. Jeffreys 
 allows himself the extravagant statements that "every 
 child is educated carefully to avoid speaking the truth, 
 except as a matter of interest or necessity," and "that 
 they will compass each other's ruin or death for the 
 smallest object." Colonel Sleeman, on the contrary, tells 
 us he has had hundreds of cases before him in which 
 a man's property, liberty, or life depended on his telling 
 a lie ; and he has refused to tell it, to save either. Mr. 
 Elphinstone, whose opportunities were those of thirty 
 years in the highest positions in Indian service, de- 
 scribes the Rajputs as remarkable "for courage and 
 self-devotion, combined with gentleness of manners 
 and softnes^of heart, a boyish playfulness and an 
 almost infantme simplicity." " No set of people among 
 the Hindus," he continues, " are so depraved as the 
 dregs of our own great towns. The villagers are 
 everywhere amiable, affectionate to their families, kind 
 to their neighbors, and towards all but the government 
 honest and sincere. The townspeople are different, 
 but quiet and orderly. Including the Thugs and 
 Decoits, the mass of crime is less in India than in 
 England. The Thugs are almost a separate nation, 
 and the Decoits are desperate ruffians in gangs. The 
 Hindus are a mild and gentle pebple, more merciful 
 to prisoners than any other Asiatics. Their freedom 
 from gross debauchery is the point in which they 
 appear to most advantage ; and their superiority in 
 
 * See especially Montgomery Martin's admirable Report an the Condition of India 
 (1838). 
 
292 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 purity of manners is not flattering to our self-esteem."^ 
 "Domestic slaves are treated exactly like servants, 
 except that they are regarded as belonging to the 
 family. I doubt if they are ever sold."^ It is highly 
 creditable to the Hindus that Siva-worship through 
 the symbol of reproduction, the lingam, once widely 
 spread in India,- is now found to have "no hold on 
 the popular feeling, and to suggest no offensive ideas." 
 "It is but justice to state," says Wilson, "that it is 
 unattended in Northern India by any indecent or 
 indelicate ceremonies ; and it requires a lively imagi- 
 nation to trace any resemblance in its symbols to the 
 objects they are supposed to represent. The general 
 absence of indecency from public worship and re- 
 ligious establishments in the Gangetic provinces was 
 fully established by the late General Stuart, and in 
 every thing relating to actual practice better authority 
 cannot be desired."^ The licentious customs attri- 
 buted to the sakti-worshippers the same authorities 
 state to be seldom practised, and then in secrecy ; and 
 to be held illicit even by their supporters, if instituted 
 merely for sensual gratification.* Statistics show that 
 the profligacy of the large cities of British India 
 hardly exceeds that of European communities of 
 similar extent. And to the amount actually existing 
 the habits of Europeans have largely contributed ; 
 while the efforts of the government to diminish this 
 form of immorality have done much to counterbalance 
 these bad influences, as well as to suppress the older 
 religious ceremonies which involved it.® 
 
 1 Histoty of British India., pp. 375-381. See Ritchie, British World in the East, 
 I. 1S6. 
 
 * Elphinstone, I. 350. 
 
 8 Wilson, Essays on Religion 0/ Hindus, II. 64 ; I. 219. * Ibid., I. 261. 
 
 ^ Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 423. 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 
 
 293 
 
 The great diversity of opinion as to the practical 
 morals of the Hindus is doubtless due in part „ ,. 
 
 ^ Morality. 
 
 to the great varieties of mpral type that must 
 exist in so immense and complex a population as 
 that of India, subjected to such variety of foreign 
 influence for thousands of years. It does not appear, 
 however, that the Hindus have been more inclined 
 to sensuality than other races. This is true of them 
 even as sharing the almost universal cultus of the pro- 
 ductive principle in nature, whose symbols seem to 
 have represented the sacred duty of man to propagate 
 his kind. They have always had sufficient sense of 
 propriety to carve the statues of their gods in a way 
 not to give offence to modesty.^ Yet their vices must 
 on the whole have been such as belong to the impres- 
 sible temperament of tropical races, the passive yield- 
 ing fibre that obeys the luxury of illusion and reverie. 
 The truth must be somewhere between the unbounded 
 praises lavished by Greek writers on the ancient Hin- 
 dus and the excessive censure of their descendants 
 by Christian criticism. 
 
 It is in no un mindfulness of these probabilities in 
 the case that I add a few more good words for this non- 
 Christian people from competent witnesses. Malcom 
 " could not think of the Bengal sepoys in his day without 
 admiration." Hastings said of the Hindus in general 
 that they were " gentle and benevolent, more suscep- 
 tible of gratitude for kindness shown them and less 
 prompted to vengeance for wrongs- inflicted than any 
 people on the face of the earth; faithful, affectionate, 
 submissive to legal authority." Heber, whose detes- 
 tation of the religions of India was intense, yet records 
 similar impressions. "The Hindus are brave, cour- 
 
 * Stevenson,, in Jour. Roy. As. Sffc..^ 1842, p. 5. 
 
294 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 teous, intelligent, most eager for knowledge and 
 improvement; sober, industrious, dutiful to parents, 
 affectionate to their children, uniformly gentle and 
 patient, and more easily affected by kindness and 
 attention to their wants and feelings than any people 
 I ever met with.''^ Doubtless these statements, like 
 those on the other side, are highly colored ; but they 
 have great value in view of the character and op- 
 portunities of their authors. "The Hindus," says 
 Harrison,^ "are a mild, peaceable people, fulfil the 
 relations of life with tolerable exactness, naturally 
 kind to each other, and always ready to be hospita- 
 ble, even where poverty might exempt them : they are 
 never deficient in filial affection. It is a common thing 
 to find people in humble walks of life bestowing a third 
 or even half their scanty income on aged and destitute 
 parents." I will only add the somewhat ardent tribute 
 of the Mohammedan Abul Faz'l, vizier of the great 
 Sultan Akbar in the seventeenth century, a thoroughly 
 competent witness. " The Hindus," he says, in his 
 Ayin Akbari, " are religious, affable, cheerful, lovers 
 of justice, given to retirement, able in business, ad- 
 mirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity. 
 And their soldiers know not what it is to fly from the 
 field of battle." 
 
 What inhumanity must have been needed to rouse 
 such a race to the barbarities of Delhi and Cawn- 
 pore ! 
 
 It must be remembered that these barbarities were 
 Cruelties of "ot the work of the people as a whole, and 
 thew. that they were quite paralleled by cruelties on 
 the part of the Christian invaders both before and 
 afterwards. The horrors of Cawnpore were the work 
 
 » Heber's JmrmO, II. 369, 409. a English Colonies, p. 64, 66. 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 
 
 295 
 
 of Nana Sahib and his body guard of savage adher- 
 ents, his own soldiers "refusing to massacre the women 
 and children, which was accomplished by the vilest 
 of the city," while his own officers sought in vain to 
 dissuade him from his monstrous purpose. ^ Dr. Mc- 
 Leod invokes his countrymen to public confession, 
 with shame and sorrow, " of indiscriminate slaughter 
 perpetrated in cool blood by Christian gentlemen, in a 
 spirit which sunk them below the level of their ene- 
 mies." ^ The atrocities of this war, on the part of the 
 Hindus, were in fact the natural excesses of an excit- 
 able people, driven to madness, not merely by such 
 crimes as the causeless massacre of the loyal thirty- 
 seventh Sepoy regiment, at Benares, such treacheries 
 as the broken promise of higher pay to the army of 
 Oude, such outrages on the religious convictions of the 
 native soldiers as the compulsory use of carti'idges 
 greased with pork, but by a long-continued series of 
 enormities that had become habitual. As illustrative 
 of these, the fact will suffice that, a year or two before 
 the revolt of 1857, investigations by the govern- 
 ment brought to light a regular system of torture of 
 the most revolting description even upon women, 
 which for years had been applied in many parts of 
 India by native officers of the Company, in the collec- 
 tion of its revenues and for extorting evidence. This 
 insurrection was but the last of a series growing out of 
 similar causes, and upon the greatest scale of all. It 
 was the common cause of dispossessed kings and beg- 
 gared chieftains starting up and springing to arms alii 
 over India ; the issue of a policy of annexation and 
 "subsidiary alliances," pushed for half a century by 
 bribery, fraud, and force ; of the industries of milliona 
 
 * McLeodt Days in l^&rthern India-, p. 68. 
 
296 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 drained, and the hoarded wealth of ages swept off, to 
 fill the coffers of rapacious foreign masters ; of syste- 
 matic outrage and contempt as of the lower animals, 
 practised upon a race whose literature is magnificent, 
 and whose civilization runs beyond historic record ; 
 of a system of exclusion, which shut out the native of 
 India from office and opportunity, whether civil or 
 military : the issue, in short, of monstrous misgovern- 
 ment, which the noblest men had labored ineffectu- 
 ally to reform, and which had made the coming of 
 just such an earthquake as this, for every thoughtful 
 mind in India, merely a question of a few years more 
 or less of time. It could not be said that the East 
 India Company had attempted to suppress the religion 
 of the Hindus : it would give little countenance to 
 missionary efforts, and it even derived revenues from 
 the superstitious rites of the most ignorant classes ; 
 yet it had not succeeded in the slightest degree in 
 calming the nervous fears of the Sepoy army, which 
 knew its character by closest contact, that the native 
 beliefs and traditions would be recklessly trampled out 
 by its mere military and secular interests. 
 
 It is by no means my purpose to throw the respon- 
 justiceto sibility of the terrible scenes of 1857-58 upon 
 both sides, the East India Company alone. I have no 
 desire to hide either the difficulties of the position with 
 which they had to deal, or the previous semi-barbar- 
 ized condition of the Hindu States, upon which in 
 many respects certainly their rule was an improve- 
 ment. The brutality, corruption, and weakness of the 
 later Mogul princes of India, had disorganized these 
 communities ; and robber tribes and robber chieftains 
 were spreading desolation through portions of the 
 peninsula when the French and English began their 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 297 
 
 struggle for its possession. Still more important is it 
 to recognize the improvement in Indian affairs after 
 their administration — withdrawn from the East India 
 Company in consequence of the revolt — was assumed 
 by the British people. New civil and criminal codes 
 have been introduced, more wisely regardful of the 
 interests of the native tribes; municipal and other 
 offices have been transferred in some degree to native 
 talent ; and the extortion of rents has been measur- 
 ably guarded against. The results of these changes, 
 it is claimed, are already apparent in improved culti- 
 vation, purer administration, and happier social life ; 
 though such terrible facts as the Orissa famine in 
 1865, with its record of governmental neglect, become 
 all the more discreditable, in view of such claims. 
 While we -render all due credit to those who have 
 labored to bring about these measures, and are labor- 
 ing for still more important ones equally consistent 
 with the spirit of the age ; and while the noble record 
 of individual officers and scholars, like Bentinck, 
 Elphinstone, Briggs, Crawford, Jones, Lawrence, 
 through the long history of British India, should re- 
 ceive the lasting gratitude of science and humanity ,i 
 — we would not fail to note also the bearing of the 
 happy results so speedily claimed for a juster policy, on 
 the question of Hindu capacity and character. That 
 Mogul oppression should have brought about the de- 
 generate social condition of the natives at the com- 
 mencement of British rule, is nowise to their dis- 
 credit. "That such amelioration as is now described 
 should follow at once in the track of the earliest 
 
 1 The reader will find this record, which I would gladly pause here to review, in the 
 pages of Kaye's Lives cf Indian Statesmen^ Arnold's Dalhmtsie, and other like works, 
 ^miliar to the public in England and America. 
 
298 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 fair opportunity afforded them, after more than a cen- 
 tury of this rule, is surely a strong argument in their 
 favor. 
 
 And, after all, the conclusion we draw from this 
 painful history must differ widely from that of 
 
 Nemesis. ^ ■' ** 
 
 writers whose view springs from their natural 
 sympathy with the victory of a higher civilization over 
 a lower, atid from that only. This crowning insur- 
 rection, in the view of history, reflects' more credit on 
 the conquered than on the conquerors. If Macaulay's 
 logic be admitted as fair, when, in his brilliant essay 
 on the life of Clive, he affirmed that " the event of our 
 history in India is a proof that sincerity and upright- 
 ness are wisdom, that all we' could have gained by 
 imitating the duplicity around us is ,as nothing when 
 compared with what we have gained by being the 
 only power in India on whose word reliance can be 
 placed," — what inference could be drawn when his 
 premise was reversed by unanswerable facts, and the 
 event proved an utter absence of confidence in the 
 government of India from end to end of the land? 
 What a piece of irony does the complacent self-eulogy, • 
 echoed by so many less respectable voices, become ! 
 The event of European government in India yields 
 a very different lesson. When the rajas of Oude 
 marched in procession to give in their adhesion to the 
 British Government, after the conquest of that kingdom, 
 " all," says McLeod, " were thankful for their restored 
 lands, and the hofje of British protection. But there 
 was not one who loved us for our own sakes ; not one 
 who would not have preferred a native rule to ours, 
 even with tolerable protection of life and property ; 
 not one who did not regret the unrighteous destruction 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 
 
 299 
 
 of the Kingdom of Oude."^ So, in the war of 1857, 
 almost the whole Bengal -army was in sympathy with 
 the rebellion. 2 It was universally recognized at that 
 time that the long-continued rule of England in 
 India had in no degree reconciled the masses of that 
 vast empire to the authority of their masters. " If the 
 Russians should march an army into Scinde," said the 
 "Westminster Review," so late as in 1868, "a spirit of 
 disaffection and desire of change would agitate the 
 whole country." This persistent refusal to accept or 
 to trust selfish and despotic rulers, with whatever un- 
 civilized impulses it may be connected, gives hints of 
 higher loyalties. And humanity finds its real interest 
 in the impressive fact that, after centuries of wars and 
 tyrannies, Persian, Afghan, Mongol, Mohammedan 
 and Christian, there should yet have survived enough 
 of the old Aryan fire to turn on the latest invader in 
 determined and desperate revolt. Such wrath indeed 
 smoulders in the most gentle and laborious races, 
 and in them is most terrible when its frenzy comes at 
 last. In the East and in the West alike, a Nemesis 
 has awaited proud and selfish nations for exploit- 
 ing races weaker than themselves. The passion of 
 the Hindu and the patience of the American Negro 
 are dissimilar qualities ; but the wrongs of both are 
 avenged. 
 
 The Hindus do not deserve contempt on any ground. 
 They are made for noble achievement in phi- „ . 
 
 ^ _ ^ Promise. 
 
 losophy, in assthetics, in science, and even, 
 with Western help, in social and practical activities. 
 Their full day has not yet come. Their vitality is far 
 from spent: they are not in their senescence, but in 
 
 1 Days in Northern India, p. 88. ^ Ibid., p 166. 
 
300 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 their prime. Their chiefs, often ferocious and crafty, 
 are as often heroic and magnanimous. Sivaji, Hyder 
 Ali, Tippoo Saib, Holkar, and others, were brilliant 
 soldiers, and fought valiantly for their cause to the 
 death. India has no lack of subtle thinkers, learned 
 scholars, able administrators, shrewd merchants, nor 
 yet of generous helpers in the improvement of the 
 people. An estimate made by British officials in 1829 
 represents the works of public utility constructed by 
 individuals, without view to personal profit, in a single 
 district of half a million people, as amounting in value 
 to nearly a million pounds sterling,- besides plantations 
 of trees enclosing two-thirds of the villages.'' Hindu- 
 stan has native scholars of eminence both in Sanskrit 
 and European letters, whose editorship of Sanskrit 
 works as well as contributions to the philosophical 
 and ethnological journals are at this time especially 
 of great value. Deva Sastri mastered the Eastern 
 and Western systems of Astronomy. Rajendralal 
 Mitra was entrusted with the task of expounding the 
 ancient coins discovered in 1863, and has brought out 
 important Brahmanical and Buddhist works. The 
 lamented Radhakanta Deva Bahadur, the author of 
 an immense Sanskrit encyclopaedia, was an honorary 
 member of numerous learned European Societies. 
 Fresh editions of the national epos, and other great 
 works of antiquity, with valuable commentaries, 
 paraphrases, and learned revisions, have within 
 a few years appeared under the auspices of the 
 Asiatic Society of Bengal, which owe very much of 
 their excellence as well as their elegance to the per- 
 sonal industry, abihty and munificence, of native 
 
 « » See Westm. Rev., July, 1868. 
 
HINDU CHARACTER. 3OI 
 
 scholars.^ There is ample ground for predicting that, 
 as further friction with Western thought shall elicit 
 the special genius of the Hindus, it will be found 
 capable of supplying many desiderata in our Western 
 civilization, contributing in ways as yet unimagined 
 by us to the breadth and fulness both of our religious 
 and social ideals. 
 
 The effect of a sensuous, enervating climate on the 
 Aryan has, however, been in many ways Power and 
 prodigious. His very idealism became a '^^*^="- 
 persuasion of the nothingness of the individual. 
 The lack of practical stimulus inclined his intellect 
 to contemplation, and turned his first endeavor at the 
 organization of Labor into what looks to us more like 
 an organization of Idleness : the drone priest at the 
 head, the drudging menial at the foot, the lazy soldier, 
 a blight on industry, between the two. Hindu life, in 
 its twofold aspect, grew more and more like the great 
 rivers it dwelt by, in their alternate flood and failure, 
 overflow and return. In Thought, a great, broad, 
 still, dreamy sea, its bare, motionless face upturned 
 to the sky ; in Action, a cooped and stinted stream, 
 however stirred here and there, girt with broad strips 
 of thirsty desert and even treacherous slime. Surely 
 it is refreshing to find, under these dead-weights of 
 physical nature, the earnest endeavor for co-opera- 
 tive work, the love of agriculture, the unconquerable 
 germs of liberty. The degeneracy itself has its 
 hopeful side. It does not prove that the physical 
 must inevitably overmaster the spiritual everywhere, 
 
 1 Many of these are mentioned in a synopsis of the recent publications of the Asiatic 
 Society of Beneal, in ZeiUchr. d. D. M. G., XXV. (1871), p. 656. Their contribntiona 
 to the Biiliotheca Indica have been of especial value. Gildemeister (^iZi Sanskr-, 1847) 
 mentions more than 60 Hindu scholars of our time, besides 100 earlier ones. 
 
302 RELIGION AND LIFE. 
 
 except under specifically Christian disciplines. It 
 illustrates the universal law, that the life that spends 
 itself in thinking or dreaming, and fails to put its 
 brain into its hand, under whatever disciplines or 
 " dispensations," unmans itself, and becomes impotent 
 even to think and dream. 
 
TT 
 X J. 
 
 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 o>®:&o- 
 
 I. 
 
 VEDANTA. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 nPHE theme now before me recalls a profound im- 
 pression of the naturalness of theism, left ^he circle 
 on my mind many years since by the wonderful ^^ symbol. 
 circles of Stonehenge. The circle is the integer of 
 Form. Repeated in the apparent courses of the stars, 
 in the seasons, in vegetation, in alternations of life 
 and death, crowning all natural forces with recurrence 
 and, consent, it held sway in the soul of the rude wor- 
 shipper also ; and there on the round plain, where only 
 the sweep of self-re-entering lines meets the eye, 
 whether above or around, he had built his colossal 
 altar in its image, even out of the natural stones, with- 
 out cement, almost without art. The half-conscious 
 child of Nature had laid his hand on her central truth, 
 — " Greater than the many is the One." 
 
 It is a fact of psychological interest that similar 
 megalith! c structures in circular form and of prehis- 
 toric origin have been found in Ireland, Scandinavia, 
 Germany, Arabia, and India. ^ The oldest monu- 
 ments in Southern Asia are probably of this char- 
 acter.? The history of religious art sho.ws us a very 
 early and wide-spread use of this natural symbol of 
 wholeness, or all-embracing unity. 
 
 * Eiknoginie Gauloise (Paris, 1868), p. 520; Lubbock's Prehistoric Man. 
 2 See Meadows Taylor, in yournal of BoTtthay Branch of Roy. As. Soc. {IV. 380)^ 
 Ferguson {Rude Stone Monuments^ thinks these cromlechs are of more recent origin. 
 
 20 
 
3o6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is nearly two hundred years since Cudworth's 
 learned demonstration that the polytheism of 
 
 Universality - , 
 
 of the idea the ancient world was but the cover of a deeper 
 of Unity, f^j^j^ jj^ Qj^g Supreme God.^ The argument 
 was confined to certain great philosophical and mytho- 
 logical systems, and marred by a strong dogmatic 
 bias towards deriving the wisdom of the ancients from 
 Hebrew sources. It did not deal with the natural laws 
 of religious belief, which show us a theistic germ 
 unfolding in the earliest stages of social growth. Illus- 
 trations of these laws are now, however, quite abun- 
 dant ; and the grounds of this all-pervading aspiration 
 of mankind should be recognized by every thoughtful 
 mind. 
 
 Unity is the sublime conclusion of science ; but 
 religion does not wait for science. The soul is 
 clearer-sighted than the understanding. It blends 
 poet, philosopher, and saint in the wonder and awe of 
 the child^at what he simply sees. and feels. 
 
 The most unreflecting savage cannot quite escape 
 the impression that he is the one cause of the 
 
 Its grounds ^^ . 
 
 in natural multiplicity of acts which make up his life, 
 mtmtion. j^^ ^^ least uncoHsciously follows this thread 
 of inward unity in dealing with the varied phenomena 
 of outward nature. Just as he shapes an ideal in the 
 image of every passion and propensity within him, so 
 he is always more or less haunted by the intimation 
 of some highest all-containing presence, in the image 
 of Ihat ipersanal identity which all these passions and 
 propensities represent. In all his worship of elemen- 
 tary forces, there is the play of this guiding instinct, 
 
 * Intellectual System (Harrison's ed., London, 1845). See, especially, I. 435; II. 226, 
 246, 300. 
 
VEDANTA. 307 
 
 this law of his inner being. As mental growth ad- 
 vances, higher forms of the intuition are attained. 
 
 Either the gods are referred back to a first God, to 
 somewhat in the dim Unknown whence they all it^ ^^^^ 
 emerge, or to a constant central force of living f°™=- 
 deity, — and in these ways have been shaped certain 
 Greek and Semitic theogonies, — or else, if that point is 
 not yet reached, all the gods are made implicitly one ; 
 as we have seen in the Vedic hymns, where worship is 
 always essentially the same, an effort for supreme 
 devotion to each and every name in turn. Self-con- 
 sciousness may be ever so- rudimentary, it sufEces 
 for this implicit unity in the movements of the relig- 
 ious instinct. All worship, even in the lowest tribes, 
 has at least this in common, — that it is an up- 
 ward look : the names of primitive deities are found 
 to be curiously associated with terms that mean over- 
 head, above, or with root-sounds that signiiy, upward 
 inotio7i. The subjective attitude of these simple minds 
 in worship is always a more or less similar resultant 
 of blended hopes and fears. And, on the other hand, 
 the objects of th?fese emotions are always more or less 
 consciously referred to the all-surrounding and enfold- 
 ing Whole ; which contains in its mysterious depths all 
 their minor capabilities of help and harm, and which 
 the orbed eye finds constantly present, whether it 
 looks upward into the infinite spaces, or traces the 
 paths of all-pervading light, or searches the horizon 
 line." 
 
 The rude cromlech speaks to the universal relig- 
 ious sentiment. The belief in an all-embracing and 
 all-controlling One, however diverse in form, is not 
 special to tribe or religion. It is human. In the 
 
308 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sense I have noted, it is no exaggeration to say with 
 Maximus Tyrius, "All mankind are agreed that there 
 is one God and Father, and that the many gods are 
 his children."! Even from the rude races of America 
 and Africa, the latest researches already referred to 
 bring ample testimony to this tendency of belief, in 
 names of supreme meaning, more or less perfectly 
 expressive of. unity, even if not clearly conceived as 
 involving it.^ What, to a more advanced stage of 
 reflection , are deities but forms of deity ? The gods 
 are but " co-rulers with God," this one name express- 
 ing the essence of sway, on which the special force 
 of each depends. Neither in Plato nor Maximus 
 Tyrius, neither in Hebrew Psalmists nor Christian 
 Fathers, does the term gods, so often used, imply 
 the denial of One as Supreme. On the contrary, the 
 sovereigii unity receives thereby a greater fulness 
 of life and relation. " His manifold powers, diffused 
 through his works," says Maximus, "we heathen 
 invoke by different names. Of the gods, there are 
 many names, but one nature." "Let us worship 
 Him," says Proclus, " as unfolding th? whole race of 
 deities, as the God of all gods, the unity of all unities, 
 as holy among the holy ones, and concealed in the 
 intelligible gods." "Owing to the greatness of the 
 Deity," says the Hindu Nirukta, "the One Soul is 
 lauded in many ways. The different gods are mem- 
 bers of the One Soul." 3 
 
 1 Dissert. XVII. 5. See, especially, Lamennais, Essai sur VIndiffirence en Matiin 
 de Religion,. €a. xxvi. De Belloguet, in a learned word on Druidism (Ethnoginie 
 Gauloise, has carefully traced this belief through the various branches of the Aryan 
 family, especially the Celtic. On the theistic elements in the religion of the Babylonians, 
 Chaldseans, and Phoenicians, see Fiirst, Gesch, d. BilrL LU., I. 45-49. 
 
 2 Brinton's Myths 0/ New World, ch. ii. ; Livingstone's Africa; Baring Gould's 
 Origin and Development of Religious Belief I. 274. 
 
 » Muir's Sanskrit Texts, IV. 134. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 309 
 
 These poles of unity and variet}' coexist in strictly 
 theistic religions also. We call the Hebrews 
 
 ° Poknty of 
 
 monotheists ; but Jehovah was " God above all Theisuc 
 gods," and Elohim was a plural noun. If a '^^'"'' 
 Hindu synthesis reconciles Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, 
 in a form of theism, so Christianity has its triperson- 
 ality of God. Even its liberal sects are, in substance, 
 adorers both of a Christ and a God. The Gnostics 
 were believers in a Divine Unity, yet with hypostases 
 and aeons they made God thirty-fold. The ruder 
 Romanist adores saints and pictures, holy coats and 
 handkerchiefs. He would probably find it difficult to 
 separate these, in his sense of personal reliance, from 
 deity itself, which he nevertheless knows to be one and 
 only one. Practically, the idols of the Christian world 
 are numberless. They are not personified,, like their 
 analogues in the ancient world ; so that we do not 
 apply to this form of worship the term polytheism. 
 And 3'et it would probably be hard to prove that the 
 sense of Supreme Unity was intercepted by swarming 
 divinities in the average Greek mind more efTectu- 
 ally than it is by these materialistic and traditional 
 idolatries, the fetichism of modern society and trade. 
 The idea of the Infinite and Eternal, in its distinc- 
 tion as spiritual reality from the vague cravings of 
 unlimited special desires, has to be continually renewed 
 by thinker and prophet, as of old. 
 
 As this idea of infinite Mind, one in itself, and 
 containing all things, has never been lost by . 
 man, so it has not anywhere been wholly the one in- 
 absent. It is organic and vital ; and its flame 
 has at times burned low only to startle some Moses, 
 Pythagoras, Zoroaster, into making fresh appeal to 
 the simple sense of reality, and recalling man to him- 
 
310 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 self. The Greek Mysteries, brought, it is probable, 
 from the East by the Dorians, were specially effective 
 for two thousand years, in this direction as well as 
 in maintaining faith in moral sanctions and spiritual 
 destinies beyond death : and almost all the great men 
 of ancient times seem to have been initiated into them.^ 
 To the philosophers indeed the " large utterance " of 
 those ancient gods spoke of a transcendent One ; while 
 the popular faith beheld all its deities gathered at the 
 common hearth of Hestia, at the world's centre, and 
 around the Father Jove. Even the monstrous figures 
 of popular Eastern mythology were vestiges of this 
 inevitable instinct. Brahma with his foot in his mouth, 
 and Vishnu ori his coiled serpent, or with his necklace 
 of worlds, are but mythic sport with the ideal Circle, 
 that sacred line which returns into itself; the natural 
 symbol of the One. The three-headed, hundred- 
 armed, thousand-eyed divinities of the Greeks and the 
 Hindus did but multiply numbers, in order to embrace 
 the more in unity. It was the play of a Pythagorean 
 instinct in the rude imagination of childish races. 
 
 To find this sense of a Supreme Unity or wholeness 
 The Hindu oxi which all religion rests, in its most absolute 
 pieroma. form, wc must appreciate the philosophical 
 capacity of the Aryan Hindu. Here was the very 
 field for his vast generalizations upon a few observed 
 data, for his measureless abstraction, his passion for 
 
 ' " Go on in the right path ; and contemplate the one ruler of the world. 
 He is one, and self-proceeding. From Him only are all things bom ; 
 He works in all, unseen by mortal eyes, yet seeing all." 
 i.Or^klc Hymn of the Mysteries, quoted by Clem. Alex., Exhort, to the Heathen, VXI.) 
 
 " When you pray, go with a prepared purity of mind, such as is required of you when 
 you approach the rites and mysteries " (Epictetus, III. 21). " The Eleusinian mysteries 
 are called Initia. both because they are indeed the beginnings of a life of true principles, 
 and as teaching us to realize a better hope in death" (Cic, De Legibus, II. 14). "Of 
 them stands human nature most in need " (Isocratee, Pa?tegyr.)* 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 3" 
 
 pure thought in its ultimates. All forms of the con- 
 ception of unit)', from the simplest to the most subtle, 
 were involved in the nebulous fulness of his idea. ,It 
 was indeed a Pleroma (to use Neo-Platonic terms of 
 speech), from which the various theological systems 
 of the world may be drawn forth, as ceons, at least 
 by speculative construction ; though of course but as 
 ideal foretypes of what was to be unfolded in the 
 solidity of science and practical use, by other times and 
 more energetic races. In the Hindu mind, it stood 
 simply as the fr'ee play of pure idea ; the unity of all 
 essence and all existence ; the sweep of an Infinite 
 Circle ; deity as inclusion and evolution of all forms. 
 This is the central sun of Hindu philosophy ; the key 
 to its religious . mysteries, and its philosophical re- 
 dactions. "Who so worships this or that special and 
 separate being," says the Brihad Upanishad, " worships 
 determination, not totality, — worship thou Soul, in 
 which all the differences become one." ^ 
 
 It is interesting to note how this aspiration haunted 
 and swayed the Hindu mind, from infancy to Develop- 
 the most abstract introversion of its later sys- "™'°^'^'^' 
 
 •J unity in Hin- 
 
 tems. Students like Pictet and Miiller be- du thought. 
 lieve that they find signs of " an original monotheism," 
 positive or implicit, in the primitive faith of the pre- 
 Vedic times. ^ Cosmic iheism would, as it seems to 
 me, be a better expression for what tvas not, in any 
 sense, opposed to polytheism, nor yet in any sense a 
 distinct primitive revelation, from which men after- 
 wards fell awa-y. A step further down, in the earlier 
 Hymns of the Veda, we find Varuna, rounding the 
 universe with order, maker of the sun's paths and 
 
 1 Brihad^ I. iv. 
 
 ' Miiller, Samk. Lit., pp. 52S, 559 ; Pictet, Les Aryas Primiii/s, II. yotnu. 
 
312 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 preserver of all sacred limits, alike in the worlds of 
 sense and soul ; absorbing into one the primitive in- 
 stinctive notions of nioral sequence and spiritual 
 authority, of justice, providence, and fate.^ It is be- 
 lieved by some that this name Varuna, identical with 
 Ouranos of the Greeks, whom Hesiod makes the 
 father of the gods, was itself the oldest in Aryan 
 mythology.? It must, however, have required a long' 
 time to mature so .distinct and positive a conception of 
 Moral Order as is contained in the Vedic Hymns to 
 Varuna. If in a tnore -primitive meaning his name 
 was really the oldest, it must have given way to that 
 of Indra, as the next name of the Supreme in this 
 development of religious sentiment, or sense of whole- 
 ness. Like Varuna, Indra concentrated all powers : 
 not at the far off limits of thought, but in the sense of 
 a closer presence, felt in the ethereal expanse, into 
 which the stars fade and the moon wanes and the 
 clouds melt, and shifting light and shadow resolve 
 their mystic play. The vast abyss of creative light 
 absorbed all phenomena, and deity shone in the sym- 
 bol of Fire, through man and beast, through star and 
 sod. Then, as introversion grew, came more definite 
 concentration of the religious idea around light as a 
 nearer image of the conscious soul, at oijce self-centred 
 and radiating through all ; whereof the Sun was the 
 natural symbol, and so became under many names 
 the next emphasis, or phase, of unity for the spiritual 
 process we are tracing. Then all the verses of the 
 Veda are concentrated in the Gdyatri: "we meditate 
 on the adorable light of the divine Savitri." All its 
 deities are resolved into gods of the earth, the air, the 
 
 ' See Roth, in Zeiischr. d. Denisch. Morg. GeselUck.^ vol. vi. p. 77. 
 ^ Koeppen, Religion des Bitddha^ I. p. 3 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 313 
 
 sky, "whose names differ according to their works; 
 but there is only one godhead, the Sun, life of all 
 beings, of motion and of rest."^ All these are further 
 gathered into one "lord of creatures" (Prajapati) or 
 "deity of them all;"^ and, again, their whole mean- 
 ing is absorbed into the sacred monosyllable A UM, 
 and even drawn into inward concentration in the triple 
 suppression of the breath, with mind fixed on the Su- 
 preme."^ Or all symbolism is dropped, as the depths 
 of consciousness are explored ; and that questioning 
 about the how, the whence, and the whither of life, 
 which had been stirring thoughtful minds through all 
 these ages, is solved in " One Eternal Soul" invested 
 with every appellative of Infinite Power, Wisdom, 
 Goodness. Brahma, Adhyatma, Purusha, had one 
 meaning. "Spirit alone is this All." "Him know ye 
 as the One Soul alone : dismiss all other words."* 
 
 Such the aspiration to Unity in pantheistic instincts, 
 which nothing but absorption therein could satisfy. 
 
 Let us recognize the nature of this change from the 
 world of action to the world of contemplation. Nature of 
 Probably it was not to any great extent shared *= process. 
 by the mass of the Aryan community, whose epic 
 traditions indicate intense susceptibility to sensuous 
 
 ^ old Vedic commentary: see Lassen, I. 768. ^ Colebrooke, Essays, I. 
 
 8 Manu, II. 83. The mystic syllable OM {aum) is the constant sign of that worship of 
 unity, wllich pervades Hindu thought. Bumouf (.Sawj^fe. Diet.) refers it to avatji, as from the 
 Zendic ava {this one), marking existence, — ^^ He thai is to bs?^ But, more probably, it 
 was a combination of the initials of the three main elements of Vedic deity, — ■ Agni, Varuna, 
 and the Maruts. The M&ndukya. Upanishad refers the three letters to Brahma, as wak- 
 ing, dreaming, and sleeping; in other words, as manifested outwardly, as manifested to 
 himself, aiid as ««m'anifested, in the imity of his essence ; while the whole word, abolishing 
 the distinctions of the letters, represents his absolute nature. The formula of the Bhaga- • 
 vadgitii is Ont tat sat, or " God is that [i.e., the universal] reality." Later still, the same 
 syllable unites Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva in a trinity. It expresses the Buddhist oneness 
 of "Saint, Law, and Congregation." It is the prelude to all Buddhist formulas of prayer. 
 To the Bralimanic Otn tat sat corresponds the Thibetan G-m niani pcidme hdm. In sum, 
 this sacred word, adored throughout eastern Asia, fully represents the continuity of Hindu 
 religious sentiment, and its devotion to ideal imity, through all phases, epochs, and results. 
 * Mundaka Upanishad, II. i. 10; ii. 5. 
 
314 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 enjoyment and a stormy physical energy. The simple 
 vigorous impulses of Vedic life were developed into 
 physical passions which it required all the finer mioral 
 and spiritual elements of the race to check, and which 
 indeed very gradually yielded, even to 'the enervating 
 influences of climate and social organization. Yet it 
 is reasonable to believe that a tendency to mystical 
 contemplation, so spontaneous and profound as is 
 shown in all the religious compositions of the post- 
 Vedic age, implies a deep root in national character, 
 and must have been in affinity with the instinctive 
 religious temperament of the people. We have al- 
 ready noted its germs in the hymns. In these there 
 is already a ground of diverse tendency; many of 
 them being of a thoughtful and peaceful, others of a. 
 warlike and even revengeful, nature. 
 
 The change in the religious sentiment which we are 
 now considering certainly involved a loss of that ener- 
 getic, healthful sense of the real world and the present 
 life, which belonged to the Vedic age. It was, how- 
 ever, effected by intenser concentradon on the inward 
 life of ideas and principles. And the compensations 
 thus secured make the process an important one in the 
 history of religion. 
 
 The spirituality of the result need not surprise us. 
 Spirituality This religion was primarily the worship of 
 thrjorshi^ Unity. A thirst to find the One in the mani- 
 of Unity, fold is intellectual inspiradon. We must re- 
 member how mysterious a step in itself is the genesis 
 of the idea of unity or wholeness. It is a step of 
 the personality, beyond observation of facts, beyond 
 experience ; an intuitive affirmation, for which no data 
 of the senses account. And the direction of the mind 
 towards it is the passage from the senses to the spirit. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 315 
 
 We have seen how manifest it is in the Vedic hymns. 
 The gods are universal, their functions interchange- 
 able. Each absorbs the rest, and might readily stand 
 for the whole. " Agni is light ; light is Indra ; the 
 Sun is light." ^ " Aditi is heaven ; is the firmament ; 
 is father, mother, son ; is all the gods ; is the five 
 orders of men ; is generation and birth." ^ As Indra 
 " contains all things in himself, as the felloe of a wheel 
 the spokes,"^ so these oldest hymns hold the later 
 pantheism itself in germ. Sacrifice itself is here but 
 the circulation of one divine life through the round of 
 god, nature, man. It is said of the sacrificial plant 
 that it contains all the worlds and is father of the 
 gods.* So the sacrificial horse assumes the names of 
 the gods.* And the secret sense of oneness in all life 
 is uttered in other hymns that pour forth thoughtful 
 yearnings to solve the mystery which enfolds all 
 things within and without in its shadow, the mystery 
 of being itself. For these yearnings the universe is 
 a mystic whole. And not less profound and universal 
 the answer : — 
 
 " In the beginning the One breathed by itself, yet without breath. 
 Other than It there nothing since has been." ° 
 
 But the Rig Veda holds to Theism also. Aspiration 
 for the One is in fact the worship of Thought worsMp of 
 itself, and could leave out of sight no function 'bought. 
 of Mind. Thus the gods are all creators. There are, 
 as we have seen, hymns in which deity appears in all 
 
 * Rig Veda. So, in the later Greek inscriptions, we read of Zens Bacchus, Zeus iEscu- 
 lapius, &c. Similar compounds are formed with the Egyptian Ra., as Ammon Ra, Osiris 
 Ra, &c. 
 
 s Ibid., I. 89, 10; I. 164. » Ibid., I. 33, 15. 
 
 * Ibid., IX. 86, loj 109, 4. » Ibid., I. 163, 3. 
 
 * Rig Vedat X. 129. 
 
3l6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the personality and energy of the Hebrew Jehovah ; ^ 
 hymns in which creative Mind is adored as " God 
 above all gods." ® Rude as they were, these psalmists 
 had a profound veneration for the power of Thought. 
 Their Constant prayer was for intelligence ; their praise, 
 a distinct recognition of the creation of all things by 
 mind. The very name they gave to prayer (mantra) 
 had the same meaning. And as, in later times, the 
 gods were believed subject to the powers wielded by 
 intense mental concentration, so prayer, the earliest 
 form of such concentration, was held in Vedic times 
 to possess a similar mastery.^ The word Brahma, 
 probably derived from the root brih, meaning upward 
 movement or endeavor, was first used to designate 
 this intelligent energy of prayer ; * and it was this very 
 word that grew to be the highest name for deity, thus 
 identifying God with conscious, efficient Mind. First, 
 there was a Lord of Prayer, Brahmanaspati, perhaps as 
 bearing upward the devotion of the worshipper ; then 
 the power of devotion considered as the might of the. 
 gods ; and finally Brahma, the prayer-deity, absorbs 
 them all. And so this Name above all their names 
 meant the divinization of devout thought, meant intel- 
 ligence in the unity of its essence and the fulness of 
 its, life. 
 
 But even Brahma was held amenable to all deeper 
 " devotion " than his own. For the worship of intelli- 
 gence involved from the first the right and power of 
 
 1 See hymns quoted by Maury, Croycmces ei Ligendes, p. 120. 
 
 2 Rig Veda, X. 121, translated by Miiller. 
 
 » Rig Veda, I. 67, 3, " Prayers uphold the sky." See Roth, Brahma und die Brah- 
 mdnen, in Zeiisch. d. D. M. Geselfsck., I. 66-86. 
 
 ' Roth, as above. Brahma (neuter) becoming BrahmS (masc), which meant, Brst, the 
 pronouncer of the prayer ; whence, later, Brahmanas, the priesthood. Haug (Brahma 
 und die Brakmanen, 1871) derives the word from vrih, meaning "to grow." The com- 
 bination of these two ideas, "to aspire" and "to grow," is the noblest basis of the 
 religious sentiment. 
 
VEDANTA. 317 
 
 man to change his ideals, and supply his faith, not 
 with new S3'^mbolic forms only, but with fresh con- 
 ceptions and names of deity. 
 
 Through the mystical depths of their own thought, 
 following its intuitions of being and cause, and 
 yearning to find those ultimate truths in which for essential 
 it could rest, the later speculative students of ^"^' 
 the Veda, many of whom were poets also,^ pursued 
 their way. The typical form of philosophy to which 
 ■ their studies gave rise is the Vedanta, " end, 'or scope, 
 of the Veda." 
 
 They saw that behind all forms of existence there 
 was pure substance, not to be qualified nor defined, — 
 unconditional Being, whereof we can only say, It 
 alone truly and perfectly is. "Of all m3'steries, I am 
 silence, " says the divine One in the Bhagavadgita. 
 But there was a closer mystery than silence : a solution 
 of all questions, speaking in all beings and worlds, 
 yet escaping every limitation, whether by name or 
 by thought, and comprehended only in the breath- 
 ings of inward aspiration. And, that they might 
 not seem to limit this " Soul of All " by terms that 
 suggested human distinctions and conditions, they 
 were apt reverently to speak of God, or Brahma, in 
 the neuter; saying, as we also do, "It" and "That," 
 whenever moved by deeper awe ; or " This " rather, 
 
 ^ I speak here of the writers of the Upanishads {Jit. Sittings) : philosophical poems, 
 belonging, according to Miiller, Lassen, and other high authorities, to the fifth, sixth, 
 and seventh centuries before Christ. A list of these poems, 149 in number, is given 
 by Miiller in the Jounui.1 of ike German Oriental Society for 1865, and an analysis of the 
 more important in Weber's Indiscke Studien' In preparing these chapters on Hindu 
 philosophy, I have used translations of the principal Upanishads by Rber and Weber : the 
 Sutras of Kapila, by Ballantyne: and the Bhagavadgita, by Lasse'n, Wilkins, and Thom- 
 son. For the VedSnta, or Uttara MimansS philosophy, the authorities are the Brahma- 
 Sutras, ascribed to Vyisa, of which an account is given by Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i., 
 and the Upanishads. 
 
3l8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 when the awe deepened into a recognition of natural 
 intimacy or even inseparable union ; plainly meaning 
 therefore by the neuter not an emptiness, but a fulness ; 
 not .neuter as by death, but as by life ; not as lowest 
 gender, but as making gender trivial through that 
 which transcends generation, the essential ground of 
 . personahty itself. " The truth of truth ; " ^ " The Un- 
 manifested One ; " ^ " Greater than what is great ; " ^ 
 "Higher than thought;"* " Different from what is 
 known, beyond what is not known ; " ^ " More distant 
 than what is distant, yet near, in the very heart ; " ^ 
 " Unknown to those who think to know, though verily 
 ear of the ear, eye of the eye, mind of the mind, 
 speech of speech, hfe of life," '' — such the negation of 
 every possible limit, by which they sought to express 
 the necessity of Absolute Being, as condition of all be- 
 lieving and all thinking. Nor did they fail to put this 
 negation strongly, at some points, as later philosophy 
 has done, and to declare that " Not-being" (asai) was 
 the ground of Being (sai) ; ^ a formula which then 
 meant, as it now means, sin;ply the eternal need of a 
 deeper foundation for thought than any definite specific 
 forms of thinking ; and for being, than the limited 
 modes under which we conceive it. The neuter 
 Brahma meant reahty itself, that which makes all 
 existences contain more than comes and goes. It 
 must be interpreted by such sentences as these : " The 
 highest Brahmana of the wise is the -Rigki, the True. 
 Through Truth the wind blows, the sun shines. 
 Truth is the support of speech. By it the universe is 
 
 > Brihad U^anishad, II. ii. 20. 2 Manti, XII. 50. 
 
 8 Mmidaka. Up., II. i. 2. . Mitri Up. (in Weber's Ind. Stud., I. 373). 
 
 ' KenaUp.,l.-i. ' MundakaVp.,lll.\. j. 
 
 ' Kena Up., II. 3 ; I. 2. 
 
 • Chandagya. Up., VI. i. So Rig Veda, X. 72, 2. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 319 
 
 upheld. It is highest of all." ^ " Falsehood is encom- 
 passed by Truth. It harms not him who knoweth 
 this."^ "The eternal world is theirs, in whom is no 
 crookedness, no delusion, no lie."^ 
 
 One Absolute Reality ; unchangeableness of Truth ; 
 imperishableness of Substance, — this was what these 
 mystical half-poets, half-philosophers, would affirm ; 
 this was what they breathed silently in the sacred 
 syllable Om : whereof they said that " it contained all 
 the gods,"^ and that "as the palasa leaf is supported 
 by a single pedicel, so the universe by Om." * This was 
 what they spoke aloud in the neuter "Tad," or That. 
 "Info That (One) all This (Universe) enters, out of 
 That it beams. That is what was and shall be." ^ 
 It was what they meant by saying, " The indestruc- 
 tible One is verily without form, or life, or mind, or 
 origin, self-existent spirit."® "There is another name, 
 different from the definition, ' He is not this, He is 
 not that,' — namely, the truth of Truth." '^ 
 
 " I am that I am." This was the highest Hebrew 
 affirmation of deity. " I am that which is : ^^gj^^^^img 
 no mortal hath lifted my veil," — this was in different 
 the Egyptian. "Essence, To w,"— this the^"'""' 
 Greek. "The way of Nature and Reason," — this 
 the Chinese. " Substarfce ; the Real ; the Absolute," 
 — this the ultimate of our Western religious thought. 
 And all these alike reach behind indiifidual forms of 
 deity, to the ground of being itself. Thus the neuter 
 Brahma has lived on, repeated under different forms 
 through the ages ; for without a basis in that which 
 must be, and which no special will can change nor 
 
 ^ Mah&n&r&yana Up. (Weber, II. 80-95). 
 
 « Brihad Up., V. v. ; Pmiia Up.., I. 16 = Nirukta. 
 
 ♦ YAjnavalhya: cited by Colebroolte, (I. 130). e Kaiha Up., IV. 9. 
 
 • Mund. Up., II. i. 2. ' Brihad., II. iij. 6. 
 
320 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 control, there is not only no ethical sanction nor 
 conviction, but no proper sense of life itself as real. 
 
 The Vedantist concentrated his thought on this idea 
 of pure substance, to some detriment of the rights of hu- 
 man personality. A tendency to this is apparent even 
 in the interchangeableness of the Vedic deities ; their 
 lack of individuality ; their flow into each other, like 
 waves of a sea. It is matured in the pantheism of the 
 Upanishads, where the individual fades into the One ; 
 and in the doctrine of Transmigration, which floats 
 him away on tides of manifold unremembered lives 
 and overmastering retributions. This failure of the 
 right of personality, with all its melancholy conse- 
 quences in the later institutions of the Hindus, was 
 due not to the idea of one absolute substance, but to 
 the lack of qualities requisite to balance their devotion 
 to it, and bring adequate respect for persistence in 
 definite forms of being and action. Nor must we fail 
 to note that these contemplative men were moved by a 
 profound sense of the necessity of freeing their con- 
 ception of the divine substance of truth and right from 
 all contingency on human passions and desires, from 
 the limits which beset all individualities, from the very 
 possibility of its sinking into a creature of caprice. 
 Did they in this wholly forget the truth of personality ? 
 Did they not pursue that on which personality most 
 depends? What is the meaning of the word as ap- 
 plied to God or to man? Here our Hindu mystics 
 deserve attention. 
 
 All s-pecial forms under which deity is ordinarily 
 
 Personal couccived as " personal " are so many expres- 
 
 andimper- sions of individualism, and so of exclusion and 
 
 limit. Even for the moment they content us 
 
 only because subtly identified by us with the real in- 
 
VEDANTA. 321 
 
 definable Infinite beyond them, which involves person- 
 ality indeed, but in an unlimited sense of the word, 
 transcending all specific forms of perception and voli- 
 tion. In other words, such limitary personal, or 
 rather individual, deity is endurable to thought, only 
 through tacit reference of it to unconditional Being, 
 as a deeper ground. As of divine men we know that 
 it is by partaking of the essential nature of truth, 
 goodness, and right, that they are divine, and that 
 their personality stands in these, — so of all we may 
 ascribe to God, it is to be remembered that this or that 
 divine manifestation is not right and true because God 
 wills it, but that God wills it, — or, rather, it is in and 
 of God, because it is right and true. "Even deity is 
 divine," says Plato, "by the contemplation of truth." ^ 
 It is this final appeal to the Absolute that must off"- 
 set a certain intense idolatry of specific volition and 
 purpose which seems inherent in Christianity, and is 
 mainly derived from its Semitic origin. The gods 
 of Greece were themselves subject to the Oath : if 
 they broke into its sanctuary of truth, they ceased to 
 be gods. And so our reverence for deity demands 
 that what is personal rest on what is impersonal ; not 
 in the sense of unintelligent, or «OM-personal, but of 
 universal and substantial ; being held divine, only as 
 identified with principle and with essence. It will 
 escape the illusion of imagining that the Absolute is 
 empty, is nothing ; and going behind such specific 
 forms of individuated being and will as may, tradition- 
 ally or directly, be set before it as God, affirm what 
 transcends them all, that Truth, Right, Intelligence, ini 
 their substance, are God ; recognizing also that every. 
 
 ^ Fhadrus, c. 62. 
 21 
 
322 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 one's real personality, his vital, enduring reality, rests 
 on his participation in these. 
 
 Our contemplative Hindus, it is easy to see, were 
 so fascinated by the idea of the infinite, that 
 
 Failure on "^ 
 
 the finite they failed of justice to the rights of the finite. 
 side. Their introversion lacked the balancing force 
 
 of scientific and social interests which other races and 
 climes were to supply. Both Semitic and Aryan re- 
 ligions, on the other hand, have emphasized conscious 
 self-assertion in limited forms of forethought and plan, 
 as the very life of God ; while the practical relations 
 and aims of these energetic races have brought out 
 the corresponding element in the life of man ; so 
 that they have now intense faith in an exact opposite 
 to the Oriental ideal. 
 
 This intense will-worship and work-worship is, 
 East and howcver, as one-sided as the extravagance 
 ■"^^='- of the Hindu in the other direction. His 
 Mimansas and Upanishads will at least admonish 
 us that, under conditions most unfavorable to ener- 
 getic moral life, men have thoroughly believed in 
 an inherent right of truth as truth, as the sub- 
 stance of the world, to claim unlimited devotion; 
 that they have believed in a reality beyond phenom- 
 ena, a meaning for the conscience and the heart 
 in what we cannot trace or define, compared to 
 *which rites, dogmas, traditions, expediencies, inter- 
 ests, will of masses, personal profit or personal idola- 
 tries, even life and all the worlds, were held shadowy 
 and transient ; and that they committed themselves to 
 this as the substance of their own being. Our mod- 
 ern practical ideal is yet to be debtor to this Oriental 
 dream. We do not disparage our civilization when 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 323 
 
 we point out its' actual defects. Palpable signs of its 
 extreme need of the contemplative element appear, 
 practically, in the dissipation of mind and morals by 
 our vast material interests and competitions, and theo- 
 logically in that utter dependence on the efficacy of a 
 single body of ideal personal traditions and symbols, 
 which has passed for the substance of saving faith. 
 The remedy for both of these is in larger experience 
 of the universalities of abstract thought. Eastern 
 philosophy cannot teach us special ethics ; but it 
 brings into our view an unbounded faith in the reality 
 of the absolute and eternal as perceived by thought. 
 To forsake all dread of " abstractions," to cease re- 
 garding ideals as empty words, to become realists 
 for these instead of nominalists, is as essential for the 
 recognition of principles — truth, justice, humanity — 
 in their clearness and power, as the spirit of love is 
 to their application ; a truth which the popular re- 
 ligion, in our day, stands greatly in need of embody- 
 ing in its doctrine. That our practical resources are 
 so vast, calls for all the greater clearness of conviction, 
 breadth of idea, liberty and self-respect, in order to 
 the discovery of their real uses. And the first con- 
 dition is that the abstract become intensely real ; the 
 impersonal, sacred ; truth, its own authority. This is 
 our guarantee of intellectual and spiritual progress. 
 
 "Nowhere," says Quinet, "has there been made* 
 such lofty and solemn affirmation of the rights Brahma as 
 of essential being as in India." ^ ^°"'- 
 
 The faith of these dreamers was in no unreality, in 
 no mere dead substratum of formulas dnd words ; the 
 very opposite. The ultimate of their thought was 
 "Soul." This is their sacred, central, ever-recurring, 
 
 ' Ginie des Religions-, p. 133. 
 
324 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 final word. The same terms, dtman, furusha, which 
 expressed the spiritual essence in man, were carried up 
 to the deeps of Infinite Being, to affirm there also 
 what we mean by life, in the fullest sense of Mind.^ 
 The Brahma Sutras, or special Vedanta aphorisms, are 
 careful to prove, against the supposed negations of the 
 Sankhya, that deity is mind, "the omnipotent, om- 
 niscient, sentient cause." ^ The Bhagavadgita speaks 
 of the "eternal person;"^ the Upanishads, of the 
 "light which shines everywhere, seen within the solar 
 orb and the human eye, in heaven and throughout the 
 world, intelHgent, immortal, and for ever blefet."® 
 
 The whole aim of the Brihad Upanishad is to teach 
 that Life is the substance of all things and master of 
 death : — 
 
 " Life is verily oldest and best." 
 
 " The sun rises out of life and sets into life ; this the sacred law ; 
 
 it sways to-day and will sway to-morrow." 
 
 " Life is the Immortal One, names and forms but conceal this." 
 " Unseen, He sees ; unheard, He hears ; unknown, He knows." 
 " Life is preserver of all forms ; by life the universe is sustained." 
 " Life is the soul of the whole, is all the gods ; so that it is not 
 
 fit to say, ' sacrifice to this, to the other, god.' " 
 
 " As by footprints one finds cattle, so by soul one knows all 
 
 things.'' ^ 
 
 " Soul is the lord and king of all ; as the spokes in the nave, so 
 
 all worlds and souls are fastened in the One Soul." * 
 
 " Life (Prajapati) has sway over all in earth and heaven. As a 
 mother her children, protect us, grant us prosperity and wisdom." ' 
 
 1 " Atman " — probably derived from ah, "to breathe" (German, alkem), or else 
 " to think " — meant life, and was used to designate Soul, both individual and universal : 
 it was the Self, the Ego, being even familiarly used as the first person. See MuUer, Sansk. 
 Lit; p. 21 Fick's IVdrteri., p. 690. Eichhoff derives it from at, "to move." 
 
 2 Colebrooke's Analysis of these Sutras, Essays, I. 338. 
 
 ' Schlegel translates it mimen. Other designations of deity are "Oversoul" and 
 "Overworld." See, also, Thomson's BhagavadgUA, ch. viii. n. i, on pitntsha. The 
 Surya Siddhdnta (XII. 12) is to similar effect. 
 
 * Brihad Upan., VI. i, i ; I. v. 23 ; I. vl. 3 ; I. Hi ; I, iv ; I. iv, 7 ; II. v, 15. 
 
 * Praina Upati-, II. 13. 
 
VEDANTA. 325 
 
 " He does not move, yet is swifter than thought : never have 
 these gods, the senses, obtained him. He was gone before. In 
 His rest He outstrips them. He is far, yet also near. He is within 
 this All, yet beyond it." ' 
 
 " As birds repair to a tree to dwell there, so the world repairs to 
 the Supreme." ' 
 
 " He is creator, and all that moves or breathes or sleeps is 
 founded in him ; and He Is their goal ; indestructible life and 
 mind."^ 
 
 The ideas of Absolute Reality and Infinite Mind, of 
 Substance and Thought, are here reconciled. Intelli- 
 gence and its unknown basis in the nature of Being 
 are alike held fast as essential elements of deity. 
 
 Greek Plofinus said that the One could not dwell 
 alone, but must for ever bring forth souls from himself. 
 
 Not less were love and desire affirmed to be stir- 
 ring these deeps of Oriental deity : the long- Manifesta- 
 ing to go out of self, the impulse to sacrifice l°" *^7*'' 
 the absolute for the phenomenal, unity for Desire. 
 manifold life, is there.* The Hindu Kama, like the 
 Orphic Eros, is primal impulse to creation. A Veda 
 hymn says of the self-existent : " Then first came 
 love upon it, the new spring of mind." ^ And one 
 of the Upanishads puts it thus : " The supreme Soul 
 desired, 'Let me become many,' and performing holy 
 work created all things."® Another speaks of his 
 " love " as " all-embracing." ^ " The Self-existent said ' 
 within himself, ' In austerity is not infinity. Let me 
 sacrifice myself in all created things.' "^ The end- 
 less theme of the Vedanta philosophy is the production 
 
 ' VSjasaneyit Sank. Upati., 4, 5. ' Prasm, IV. 
 
 8 Mundaka Upan., II. ii. i, 2. ^ 
 
 * Ritter, Hist. Pkilos., II. ch. 2 ; Sankara's Comment, on Brihad, I. 4- 
 
 ° Rie Veda, X. 129 ; Miiller's Sansk. Lit., p. 564- ° Taittariya, II. 6. 
 
 ' Amritan&da Upan., Weber, II. 62. » ^atapatha Br&hmana, Muir, IV. 2S 
 
J 
 
 26 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of all life, of mind, the elements, the worlds, the 
 sexes, and the races, from the indestructible One.^ 
 "Prajapati causes his life to be divided, not content 
 to be alone." ^ 
 
 But not even as products, distinctly as they were 
 recognized as such, could phenomena be separated 
 from that spiritual substance, whose universality was 
 the most impressive of facts to the mystical sense. 
 
 " Immortal Brahma is before, behind ; above, below ; to right 
 and left ; all pervading : Brahma is this All, this infinite world." ' 
 
 " Whoever looks for world, or gods, or beings, elsewhere than in 
 the one divine Soul, should be abandoned by them. To know this 
 is to know all." * 
 
 " The sea is one and not other than its waters, though waves, 
 foam, spray, differ from each other." 
 
 " An effect is not other than its cause : Brahma is single without 
 a second. He is not separate from the embodied self. He is Soul, 
 and the soul is he." * 
 
 To this absorbing sense of the Unity of Life m its 
 ^, , essence, forms and existences are but as mists 
 
 The form re- 
 turns into rising from the sea, and returning in rain; 
 e essence, jjj^^ wiuds formed in the atmosphere and dying 
 again into its stillness ; not changing in nature, but 
 only in form ; the mists are still water, the winds are 
 air. 
 
 According to Manu, "The Self-existent created the 
 
 •waters by a thought; and moving on the deep, as 
 
 Narayana, the Spirit, placed therein a seed, or ^g^ ; ^ 
 
 from which He is himself born as Brahma, who 
 
 again reproduces himself as Mind, by whose devotion 
 
 ' Mundaka, II. i. ; BrUiad, II. i. 20. 2 Brihad, I. iv. 
 
 8 Mundaka, II. ii. 11. 4 Brikad^ II. iv. 
 
 B Colebrooke's Analysis of the Brahma Sutras, Essays^ I. 351. 
 
 In the Orphic also, as in most other early cosmogenic systems, the egg is the natural 
 ^mbol of production or evolution. 
 
VEDANTA. 327 
 
 all things are created from the bosom of the Su- 
 preme.^ Here is the circle : creation, or rather evolu- 
 tion of forms, is but an endless transmutation within 
 it; in substance, all things are the same. "The 
 circle of being," says Yajnavalkya, "revolves with- 
 out beginning or end."^ Says the beautiful Katha 
 Upanisha'd : — 
 
 " The world is like an eternal holy fig-tree, whose ropts are above, 
 whose branches descend. In Brahma all worlds repose. None 
 becomes different from this, their root. The universe trembles 
 with awe, moving within this, its supreme life." ' 
 
 When there is no longer any sense of separation 
 from this divine Whole, nor of difference from ,„ . „ ^ 
 
 ' All in God. 
 
 the common grounJ"and substance of all forms, 
 — in other words, when the soul loses itself in the 
 mystery of being, one and the same for all times and 
 persons and things that are, and knows that this un- 
 searchable depth is life and mind, — then is reached 
 the goal of all its striving. The wonder and joy it 
 feels in this participation is called by the Taittariya 
 "the song of universal unity."* 
 
 " As speech is common to all names, the eye to all perception 
 of things, and to all actions an agent, so for all souls is there iden- 
 tity of spiritual essence. This is their Brahma." ° 
 
 " The same that is here is there also. The same that is there 
 is here. He is but passing from death to death who sees differ- 
 ence in Brahma." 
 
 " This Soul of all is to-day, will be to-morrow. As water run- 
 ning off into valleys is scattered and lost, so do men run after differ- 
 ences, beholding attributes as apart from this. But the soul of the 
 wise, who knows what is the same, is like pure water on the ground 
 that remains in its place, aUke and undispersed." * 
 
 * Manu, I. S-iS. So the Surya Siddhanta^ XII. ® Y&jnavalhya, III. 124. 
 « Katha, VI. I, 2. * Taittar., III. x. s. 
 
 » Brihad, I. vL 8. ° Katha, IV. 10, 13, 14. 
 
328 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 " He who, dwelling in all elements and forms and knowledge, 
 whom they do not know, whose body they are, who from within 
 rules them, — //> is thy soul, the inner ruler, immortal. There is 
 none that hears or knows, but him. Whatever is apart from him 
 comes to nought." ' 
 
 Yet it is an error to suppose that spiritual pantheism 
 Human in- is incousisfcnt with belief in individual exist- 
 dividuaiity. gnces. It simply regards them as one in 
 spiritual essence, the ultimate common nature of 
 human and divine; and holds that they have no 
 real being independent of Infinite Spirit, which must 
 for ever be One. The Vedanta abolishes distinctions 
 in deity only, as the ideal of devout aspiration, and as 
 that ground of reality which must be one and the same 
 for all. 
 
 Nor does deity, thus conceived, become the mere to- 
 Divine tran- ^«^% of thesc distiuctious, nor yet their mere 
 scendence. identity. Brahma transcends all definite fac- 
 tors that can be summed up, as finite addition can 
 never reach infinity, nor even approach it. He 
 absorbs all, yet transcends all ; and this not only as 
 the infinite, but as the One. 
 
 If we observe our own mental processes, we shall 
 find that we do not conceive unity as a mere sum of 
 component parts. Always it appears as a different 
 and higher fact. The orchestral chord is more than 
 the sum of those tones which blend in it ; the roar of 
 the sea than the wave-plashes it gathers into one ; the 
 articulate word of history than the mere successive 
 syllables of the ages or races. The very spark is 
 more than flint added to steel ; the salt than acid mixed 
 with base. So Brahma as the Whole must mean more 
 than the aggregate. The One has not the limitations 
 
 1 BrUiad, III. vii. " Soul is uncreate and immortal " (Plato, PkoBdr- c. 53). 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 329 
 
 of the parts. It absorbs them, but it rules them and 
 lifts them into higher meaning. And this is as fully 
 recognized by the Vedantists as the non-difference of 
 the soul from the Supreme. 
 
 Again let us hear the Katha Upanishad : — 
 
 " Upon Him all the worlds are founded ; none becomes different 
 from him. Yet as the one sun, eye of the world, is not sullied by 
 the defects of the eye or the world, so the Soul of all beings is not 
 sullied by the evils of the world, because it is also without it. 
 Being of every nature to every nature, the One Soul is also 
 without them, in its own." ' 
 
 " Make known to me the Being different fr6m this whole of 
 causes and effects, past, present, and future." ^ 
 
 " They who know Brahma in this universe as different from it 
 become free." ^ 
 
 " The soul, immersed in things, is wretched in its helplessness : 
 when it sees the supreme Soul as different from these, and His 
 glory, its grief ceases." * 
 
 Both aspects are blended in the " divine wisdom " 
 of the Bhagavadgita : — 
 
 "The Supreme Soul is without beginning; not to be called 
 existent or non-existent ; possessing every sense, yet separate from 
 them all ; apart from, and yet within all ; both far and near ; not 
 divided among beings, yet as if it were." ' 
 
 " Behold this my kingly mystery. All things exist in me. My 
 spirit which has caused them sustains them, yet does not dwell 
 (confined) in them. Everywhere I am present in manifold forms, 
 by reason of being single and separable from them." 
 
 " I am the sacrifice, the fire, the incense. I am the father, the 
 mother of this universe ; the mystic doctrine, the syllable Om, the 
 Vedas ; the path, the support, the master, the witness, the habita- 
 tion, the refuge, the friend; origin, and dissolution, and inexhaus- 
 tible seed. I am ambrosia, and death ; what exists and what exists 
 not ; the soul, in the heart of all beings ; beginning, middle, and 
 end." 8 
 
 ' ATaZ/Sa, V. S-ii. 2 Ibid., II. 14. ' SveiisvaiaraUp.,\. T- « Ibid., IV. 7. 
 ^ BJuig. GUA, ch. xiii. This poem is not a Upanishad, nor purely Yedantic ; yet it 
 follows our present line of thought. 
 » Ibid., IX. X. 
 
330 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 What is here meant is not the mere indifference of 
 all things, but their ideal; since the " Holy One " also 
 declares himself to be the Best in each form and kind. 
 
 "Among lights, I am the sun ; among mountains, Meru ; among 
 waters, the ocean ; among words, the monosyllable Om ; among 
 forms of worship, silent worship ; among letters, A ; among sea- 
 sons, the spring ; splendor itself among things that shine ; silence, 
 among mysteries ; the goodness of the good, the knowledge of the 
 wise. " 
 
 He continues : — 
 
 " I have made and still uphold this universe by one portion of 
 myself" ' 
 
 So in the " Hymn of Purusha," where the Supreme 
 is described as sacrificing himself for the creation and 
 support of all worlds, it is said : — 
 
 " But Purusha (the spirit), who is all that was, is, or shall be, is 
 above this all. The creation is but the quarter of his being : the 
 other three parts are eternal in the heavens. Ascending with these 
 three parts, He is above and beyond the world : the fourth part 
 remains below to be born and die by turns." = 
 
 A later treatise, not Vedantic, shows how the divine 
 could be conceived as one with the world, and yet 
 above it : — 
 
 " As sound in tunes, as fruit in its flavors, as oil in sesame-seed, 
 so God exists in the world, yet in such wise that He may be sepa- 
 rated from it. He remains unchanged in all his works, just as the 
 sun does, while flowers open and shut in its presence." ^ 
 
 Such is the transcendence to all forms and worlds 
 here affirmed of immanent Mind. In this oneness 
 ■with the conceivable universe, it is not forgotten that 
 there must also be, exaltation above it, unfathomed 
 life beyond. 
 
 » Bhag. Git&, ch. x. 
 
 s Burnouf's translation, in Intrad. to Bh&gavaia Pur&na. 
 
 ' Siva Gn&n Pothdm, in ATtter. Oriental yountal, vol. iv. 
 
VEDANTA. 331 
 
 For such absorbed contemplation of the Absolute 
 and One, all sense of limit ceased; the finite xhe sense of 
 self was felt no more ; the infinite of thought ^soTtion. 
 extinguished its claims. There was still atma, a self; 
 but not the private, individual interest that bore the 
 name. Relative, conditional existence was merged 
 in the spiritual essence, felt as All in all, the one in- 
 clusive constitutive principle, by and through which 
 the sense of being was possible. " I distinguish not 
 myself," says the disciple of unity, " from this whole." 
 To soul all has become soul ; mind has recognized 
 its identity with the universal force, the primal, per- 
 vasive, and ultimate reason of all existence. How 
 should it speak of any form of mind as apart from 
 this, which is the substance of Mind? " How," asks 
 the Brihad, " should one know [as an intrinsically 
 separate object] Him by whom he knows ? " ^ " The 
 eye cannot see itself. How can we see the soul which 
 enables us to see ? " ^ 
 
 It lies in the direct line of present scientific tendency 
 that we should come to recognize the unity ^he unity of 
 of mind, by observing that all phenomena are """''• 
 differing expressions of one Force, which can be 
 no other than Thought. The correlation of physical 
 forces is pushed forward and upward, in the hope of 
 including that which in fact contains and conditions 
 them all ; but the result can only be demonstration, 
 even to the understanding, that molecule and proto- 
 plasm cannot dispense with intelligence, and that all 
 cosmical forces are identical with mind. 
 
 Meanwhile, as we are now indicating in Oriental 
 thought, intuition and contemplation are beforehand 
 with science, and reach the result from a side which 
 
 ^ Brihad, II. iv. 14. * Siva Gndn FotMm. 
 
332 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 precludes materialism. Speculation and sentiment 
 have thus foreshown the steps of experience through- 
 out human history. Man is divinely prescient of his 
 infinity as mind, as soon as he begins to meditate and 
 aspire. 
 
 Let us do Justice to this dream that drew the Hindu 
 seers upward through their morning twilight, before 
 the day of science and free intercourse of nations 
 could rise upon the East. That twilight was cheered 
 by rays which are somewhat intercepted in our West- 
 ern spectrum thus far, and which they may help us to 
 bring out. 
 
 "I distinguish not myself from the whole." This 
 The gift of is not aualysis J it is not science. Quite as lit- 
 theEast. iIq jg jt Hebrew fear, or Christian prayer, or 
 Greek self-assertion, or modern self-dissection. It is 
 not philosophy as the clear, cold understanding defines 
 the term ; nor piety in the sense of a worship of defi- 
 nite will, which knows a present deity only as one 
 who ?nay be absent. But it is the eternal poet, child, 
 saint, lover, in man. It is the loss of self in the 
 infinite of aspiration and faith. It is the free flow 
 of our life into the grander life it sees and loves. 
 The voice of the Eternal, alone heard, takes up the 
 hunian into itself, and the poet's tongue can but echo 
 its- words :- — 
 
 " I am what is and is not. I am, — if thou dost know it, 
 Say it, O Jellaleddin, -^ I am the Soul in all." 
 
 Is not man of one nature with what he worships? 
 Knovring Where his faith reposes, (Aere and ikai is he. 
 and being. So these Eastern mystics do not hesitate to 
 say : " Whoso worships God under the thought, ' He 
 is the foundation,' becomes founded ; under the 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 333 
 
 thought, ' He is great,' becomes great ; or under the 
 thought, 'He is mind,' becomes wise."^ "Whoever 
 thus knows the supreme Brahma becomes even 
 Brahma."^ It is only the prevalent habit of associat- 
 ing self-assertion with whatsoever is said or done, that 
 makes language like this, in any religion, shock and 
 repel. It is perfectly natural to the poetic sense, 
 to the spiritual imagination, to the spontaneity of 
 faith and the self-surrender of love. It is not " self- 
 deification," but that very spirit by which alone, in 
 any age or people, the vice of self-worship is to be 
 escaped. 
 
 Not yet have we heard any better statement of the 
 relation of individual to universal life than this : — 
 
 " Round and round, within a wheel, roams the vagrant soul, so 
 long as it fancies itself diiferent and apart from the Supreme. It 
 becomes truly immortal, when upheld by him." ' 
 
 " As oil in sesame seed is found by pressure, as water by digging 
 the earth, as fire in the two pieces of wood by rubbing them together, 
 so is that absolute Soul found by one within his own soul, through 
 truth and disciphne alone." ■* 
 
 " The soul must churn the truth patiently out of every thing." * 
 
 The poet does not forget that this is the end, not 
 the beginning, of human endeavor ; and must come 
 by paying the price. 
 
 The earnestness of this aspiration appears in the 
 stress everywhere laid upon the sufficiency To know 
 of really knowing and seeing truth. The ^^'0^^'° 
 modern or Western mind, concentrated on '™"i. 
 action, taught by its theology to distrust intellectual 
 intuition in religious belief, finds it hard to do justice 
 to the ancient principle, "Whoso knows or sees 
 
 » Taitiariya, III. x. 3. 2 Mundaka, III. ii. 9 
 
 * Svei&dvatarOy I. 6. * Ibid., I. 15. ^ Amritandda Upun.-i Weber, II. 62. 
 
334 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 truth becomes truth." But if this principle was not 
 moral power, how came it to be, as it certainly was, 
 the resort of thoughtful men who sought to compre- 
 hend and master the ills of life ? What must they have 
 meant by " knowing," who said, " Whatever nature 
 one meditates on, to that nature he goes : he who 
 meditates on God attains God"?i The Semitic myth 
 of the Fall of Man separates, even to antagonism, the 
 tree of knowledge from the tree of immortal life. 
 Here is a deeper synthesis, that makes the two to be 
 one and the same. 
 
 There is a worship of knowledge which is not 
 pride of understanding, but sincerity of mind, — the 
 longing to escape falsities, the sway of the will by 
 a supreme necessity of living by truth. "Truth alone, 
 and not falsehood, conquers : by truth is opened the 
 path on which the blest proceed."^ "No purifier in the 
 world like knowledge."^ In the simplest and purest 
 form of conviction, to know is not divorced from to 
 be ; in other words, the life goes into the thought, and 
 is one with it. And this sacred unity of Thought and 
 Being attends the highest philosophy as well. Plato 
 distinguishes "true science" from "opinion," affirming 
 that in this way to know truth is to become truth. Of 
 like purport is his great ethical postulate, that vice 
 is but ignorance ; none who see the beauty of virtue 
 being capable of violating her laws. "Wisdom," in 
 the Hebrew Apocrypha, shines with the same ade- 
 quacy, reflected in large measure from the Hellenic 
 mind. " She is the brightness of the Everlasting 
 Light ; and, being but one, she can do all things ; and 
 in all ages, entering into holy souls, she maketh them 
 
 » Biagr. Gitd, ch. viii. » Mundaka, III. 6. 
 
 » Shag. Giti, ch iv. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 335 
 
 friends of God and prophets." "Bondage," says 
 Kapila, "is from delusion."' "Whoso knows is eman- 
 cipated, and thirsts no more."^ Spinoza answers 
 across the ages that the knowledge of God is one with 
 loving Him. And the Christian mystic, of whose 
 genius the fourth Gospel is the product, puts into the 
 lips of his ideal " Word " this truth of universal relig- 
 ion : " Ye shall know the truth, and truth shall make 
 you free." 
 
 " The truth of being and the truth of knowing," 
 says Bacon, "is all one. A man is but what he 
 knoweth. For truth prints goodness ; and they be 
 the clouds of error that descend in storms of passions 
 and perturbations."^ 
 
 To be what one knows to be real is for ever the 
 goal of noble effort, simply because it is implied in 
 the unity and integrity of thought. Nothing is really 
 known so long as it stands aloof, as mere distinction 
 from the thinker, an external object only. Mind can 
 know only by finding itself in the thing known. 
 Nothing is really thought by us, whose being is not 
 made mystically one with our thought, through the 
 common element which makes knowledge possible. 
 Nothing is really spoken or named, unless the word or ' 
 name is in some sense merged in the reality it would 
 express. Hence, for Vedantic piety, the name needed 
 not to be spoken, but breathed only. " The best wor- 
 ship is the silent."^ Hence, too, the significance of 
 names and even syllables for Oriental contemplation, 
 as carrying with them something far deeper and 
 more real than an arbitrary symbolism for social con- 
 venience. Thinking, naming, knowing, are the ideals 
 
 ' Kapila, S&nkhya Aphorisms, III. 24. ^ Ibid., II. Introduction. 
 
 * Essay in Praise of KTtowledge. * Bhag. Gii&, ch. x. 
 
33t> REI.IGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of contemplative life. To identify them with being 
 was to prove them earnest and devout. 
 
 Is'not all intense faith, will, love, identified with its 
 ideal purpose? Does it not make thought one with 
 thing, knowledge with what it knows, and the name 
 with what it means? 
 
 We know truth by participation, not by observation. 
 To be absorbed into our idea or principle, so that it 
 is the life of our life, to find it the substance of our 
 path and opportunity, — this, not the mere perception 
 of it as an object, is to know it. Of God what else 
 can we know; save what we have found as life, ideal 
 or actual, in ourselves ? 
 
 Indispensable to universal religion is the unfailing 
 faith of all mystics, that to know and to be are one. 
 
 Veda, Upanishad, Sutra, — poetry, philosophy, 
 Search for praycr, — are possessed by the infinite de- 
 '™"'- sire for spiritual knowledge. With incessant 
 questioning they beset the mystery of being. The 
 Svetasvatara opens thus : " The seekers converse to- 
 gether. What form of cause is Brahma? Whence 
 are v/e ? By whom do we live and where at last 
 abide? By whom are we governed? Do we walk after 
 a law, in joy and pain, O ye knowers of God? " And 
 the Kena thus: "By whom decreed and appointed, 
 does the mind speed to its work ?" The Mitri asks: 
 "How can the soul forget its origin ? How, leaving 
 its selfhood, be again united thereto ? " In Yajna- 
 valkya's Code, the munis inquire of their chief: " How 
 has this world come into being, with gods, spirits, and 
 men ; and how the soul itself ? Our minds are dark : 
 enlighten us on these things." i 
 
 » Y&jn., III. ii8. 
 
VEDANTA. 337 
 
 In the Ved&nta poems, wise men and women pro- 
 pound questions, and are answered by wiser ones, or 
 ask in vain. Experience is revealed, foolishness 
 confounded. " Answer truly, or thy head shall fall 
 down," say these saints to each other, let us hope 
 symbolically. The problems that all generations 
 must meet are stated, solved, or left reverently in the 
 care of the Unknown. " How shall death be escaped, 
 and what are the fetters of life ? What is the light 
 of this soul, when the sun and moon have set ? 
 On what are the worlds woven and rewoven ? 
 What is this witness, ever present, the soul within 
 each ? If, O venerable one ! this whole world were 
 mine, 'could I become immortal thereby ?"^ 
 
 The wise answer wisely, and the questioner is 
 dumb. 
 
 " The king of the Videhas sat on his throne. Then came Yijna- 
 valkya. ' Why hast thou come, O Yijnavalkya ? Is it seeking 
 cattle, or with subtle questions ? ' — ' Even both, O king of kings ! ' 
 — ' Lei us hear what any has taught thee! *' ' 
 
 The boon the king asks of his seers is that he may 
 question them at his pleasure. " O sages, whoever is 
 best knower of Brahma, shall have a thousand cattle, 
 their horns overlaid with gold." " As a warrior rises 
 with arrows, and binds the string to his bow, so will 
 I rise before thee with two questions," says Gargi, the 
 daughter of Vachacknu ; " do thou inake answer." 
 " Ask on, O Gargi ! " And questions and answers 
 lead on through the circle of being, resting at last 
 in the " imperishable One, who unseen sees, unheard 
 hears, unknown knows, beside whom there is none, 
 that sees, or hears, or knows."* 
 
 ' BrOad, III. IV. VI. » Ibid., IV. i. » Ibid., III. viii. 
 
 33 
 
338 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 " The wise does not speak of any thing else but the Supreme, 
 his delight is in the soul ; his love and action also." ' 
 
 The earliest writers about the Hindus inform us 
 that this people spent their time conversing on life 
 and death. These lively Greeks were profoundly 
 impressed by the absorption of the Brahmans in the 
 thought of immortality. Megasthenes noted their 
 frequent discourse of death as the birth of the soul 
 into blessed life. And Porphyry marvelled at their 
 passion for yielding life, even when no evils pressed 
 on them, and their efforts to separate the soul from 
 the senses, esteeming those who died to be happiest, 
 as receiving immortal life. 
 
 Nachiketas, having earned the promise of a boon 
 Nachiwtas from Yama, or Death, demands to know if the 
 death!™* soul is immortal. And Death replies : ^ — 
 
 " It is a hard question : the gods asked it of old. Choose another 
 boon, O Nachiketas ! do not compel me to this : release me from 
 this." 
 
 N. " The gods indeed asked it of old, O Death ! And as for what 
 thou sayest, that ' it is not easy to understand it,' there is no other 
 speaker to be found like thee, O Death ! there is no other boon like 
 this." 
 
 V. " Choose, O Nachikdtas ! sons and daughters who may live a 
 hundred years ; choose herds of cattle, elephants, gold, horses, 
 celestial maidens ; choose the wide-expanded earth, and live as 
 many years as thou wilt. Be a king, O Nachikdtas ! on the wide 
 earth ; I will make thee enjoyer of all desires ; but do not ask what 
 the soul shall be after death. 
 
 M " All those enjoyments are of yesterday : perishes, O thou 
 end of man ! the glory of all the senses ; and more, the life of all 
 is short. With thee remain thy horses and the like, with thee 
 dance and song. 
 
 " Man rests not satisfied with wealth. If we should obtain wealth 
 and behold thee, we should live only so long as thou shalt sway. 
 The boon I choose is what I said. 
 
 > MundaU, III. i. 4. » Katha Ufan., I.-III. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 339 
 
 " What man living in this lower world, who knows that he decays 
 and dies, — while going to the undecaying immortals he shall obtain 
 exceeding bliss, — who knows the real nature of such as rejoice in 
 beauty and love, can be content with a long life ? 
 
 " Answer,, O Death ! the great question, which men ask, of the 
 coming world. Nachik^tas asks no other boon but that, whereof 
 the knowledge is hid." 
 
 V. " One thing is good : another thing is pleasure. Both with 
 diflferent objects enchain man. Blessed is he who between these 
 chooses the good alone. Thou, O Nachik^tas ! considering the 
 objects of desire, hast not chosen the way of riches, on which so 
 many perish. 
 
 " Ignorance and knowledge are far asunder, and lead to different 
 goals. I think thou lovest knowledge, because the objects of desire 
 did not attract thee. 
 
 " They who are ignorant, but fancy themselves wise, go round 
 and round with erring step, as blind led by the blind. He who 
 believes this world exists, and not the other, is again and again 
 subject to my sway. 
 
 "Of the soul, — not gained by many, because they do not hear 
 of it, and which many do not know, though hearing, — of the soul, 
 wonderful is the teacher, wonderful the receiver, wonderful the 
 knower. The knowledge, O dearest I for which thou hast asked, is 
 not to be gained by argument ; but it is easy to understand it when 
 declared by a teacher who beholds no difference in soul. Thou art 
 persevering as to the truth. May there be for us another inquirer 
 like thee, O Nachik^tas ! Thee I believe a house with open 
 door. 
 ' " The wise, by meditation on the unfathomable One, who is in the 
 heart, leaves both grief and joy : having distinguished the soul from 
 the body, the mortal rejoices, obtaining it in its subtle essence." 
 
 Nor is the questioner yet content. "Make known 
 to me this being which thou beholdest, as different 
 from this whole of times, of causes, and effects." 
 Then follows the praise of essential being ; of spirit, 
 as of one nature with deity : — 
 
 " It is not born, nor does it die : it was not produced from any 
 one, nor was any produced from it. Eternal and without decay, it 
 is not slain, though the body is slain. 
 
340 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 " If the slayer think, ' I slay,' or if the slain thinks, ' I am slain,' 
 then both of tiiem do not know well. It does not slay, nor is it 
 slain. Subtler than what is subtle, greater than what is great, it 
 abides in the heart of the living. 
 
 " He who is free from desire and grief beholds, through tran- 
 quillity of his senses, that majesty of the soul. 
 
 " Sitting, it goes afar ; sleeping, it goes everywhere. 
 
 "Thinking the soul as bodiless among bodies, as firm among 
 fleeting things, as great and all-pervading, the wise casts off all 
 grief. 
 
 " The soul cannot be gained by knowledge of rites and texts, not 
 by understanding of these, not by manifold science. It can be 
 obtained by the soul by which it is desired. His soul reveals its 
 own truth} 
 
 " Whoever has not ceased from evil ways, has not subdued his 
 senses, and concentrated his mind, does not obtain it, not even by 
 knowledge." 
 
 " Know the soul as the rider, the body as the car ; know intellect 
 as the charioteer, and mind,, again, as the reins. The senses are 
 the horses, their objects the roads." 
 
 " Whoso is unwise has the senses unsubdued, like wicked horses 
 of the charioteer. But whoso is wise has the senses subdued like 
 good horses of the charioteer. 
 
 " Whoso is unwise, unmindful, always impure, does not gain the 
 goal, but descends to the world again. But whosoever is wise, 
 mindful, always pure, gains the goal from whence he is not born 
 again, the highest place of the all-pervading One. 
 
 " Higher than the senses are their objects, higher than their 
 objects is the mind ; intellect higher than mind ; higher than intel- 
 lect the great soul.' 
 
 "Higher than this great one the Unmanifested ; higher than the 
 unmanifested the Spirit ; * higher than this is nought ; it is the last 
 limit and highest goal. 
 
 " Let the wise subdue his speech by mind, his mind by knowl- 
 edge, his knowledge in the great soul; subdue this also in the 
 placid Soul [peace of the soul]. 
 
 ' This is Sanltara's understanding of the text ; but RSer thinks, in common with Miiller 
 and Muir, that a more literal version would be : " It is attainable by him whom it chooses. 
 The Soul chooses this man's body as its own." In view of the context, however, tho 
 meaning is substantially the same, — that the mse seeker finds God within, and not through 
 outward revelations. 
 
 ' Compare Plato in Phadna, § 74. • The "rider." * Purusia. 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 341 
 
 "Awake, arise, get to the great teachers, and attend. The 
 wise say that the road to Him is as difficult to tread as a razor's 
 edge." 
 
 " The wise who tells and hears the eternal tale, which Death 
 related and Nachikdtas received, is adored in the world of 
 Brahma." 
 
 " It is evident," says Dr. Roer, tht translator of this 
 wonderful Upanishad, "that the K^tha derives the 
 knowledge of Brahma from philosophy, and denies 
 the possibility of a revelation." '■ We should say rather 
 it grandly identifies knowledge with revelation. Its 
 God is revealed to the wise by their own nature. 
 
 " One's soul reveals its own truth ; not to be gained 
 by mere knowledge of Vedas, by understanding nor 
 by science;" "not by word, mind, nor eye, but by 
 the soul by which it is desired ; " nor by intellect alone, 
 but by "union of intellect with soul."^ 
 
 There is nothing of which we read so much in this 
 Hindu thought and worship as Immortality . 
 It is the word for final beatitude, for the endof immor- 
 of all human aspiration. " Whoso is one with '^' 
 the Supreme obtains immortality," is the burden ot 
 precept, philosophy, and prayer. " Immortal become 
 those who know." ^ What meaning did they attach 
 to the term ? 
 
 Certainly the idea of self-conscious individuality 
 beyond death did not stand so definitely before these 
 dreaming souls as it does before the sharper intelli- 
 gence and the intenser individualism of the modern 
 mind.* But this was simply because self-conscious- 
 ness was not so definitely conceived as a present /act; 
 
 1 Kaika, Intrad. « Ibid., II. 23; VI. 12; II. la. 
 
 3 Ibid., VI. 9. 
 
 * It is denied in the BrtAad {TV. v. 13) tliat after death there is any self-consciousness; 
 but it is explained as referring to siich as are become pure soult — one with Brahma. 
 
342 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 because it is never definite to the contemplative imagi- 
 nation, which tends to escape it, rather than seeks to 
 hold it fast. 
 
 On the other hand that anxious dependence on it 
 which comes with the growth of the understanding, 
 and the complexity, and refinement of personal relation 
 to men and things, did not trouble them with the 
 doubts and fears' which beset it in view of the mystery 
 of physical death. 
 
 It is here that the feeling of personal liberty, so 
 much stronger in the Western than in the 
 
 Difference o 
 
 of Eastern Eastem raccs, shows at once its value and its 
 conscw"" defect. Their belief in definite creation as an 
 '''^=- act of divine Will, for instance, so cherished 
 
 by them, has this advantage over the Oriental belief 
 in Emanation, that it expresses and develops the 
 human sense oi free intelligent ^urfose; and thus 
 strengthens the hold of the individual soul on its own 
 conscious existence, and its faith in its own continu- 
 ance as a productive force. At the same time, this 
 strong individuality, nurtured not only by the belief 
 just mentioned, but in so many other ways, brings 
 a certain sense of isolation. Self-consciousness be- 
 comes a treasure that demands profoundest care. It 
 is besieged by anxieties and fears, arising from mys- 
 teries which the understanding, thus roused to full 
 faith in itself, and in itself alone, is yet incompe- 
 tent to fathom. But a larger liberty succeeds, which 
 drops the burden. It comes of fresh self-absorption 
 in ideas and principles, in the life of the whole, as 
 the unity of God and Man. 
 
 The absence of this jealous watch over personal 
 consciousness would naturally cause the Hindus to feel 
 comparatively little interest in continued existence 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 343 
 
 after death. Yet so strong is the desire of these 
 dreamers for real being, so entire their faith that they 
 are made for it, that they perpetually recur to the idea 
 of immortality ; haunted by the sense of a life beyond 
 death or change. And it is not merely another name* 
 for the joy of losing conscious being in the life of 
 Brahma. 
 
 For they followed the spirit through future lives ; 
 traced it back to past ones ; believed in reminis- , 
 
 ^ ^ ^ iDdividuai 
 
 cence of actions done in former states of being ; immortal- 
 shrank from future bonds of penalty for present "^' 
 deeds, as if they fully recognized that personality was 
 somehow continuous through these manifold births. It 
 was in fact associated with transmigration, if only as a 
 doom to be escaped. But it would seem impossible that 
 the goal which they yearned to attain beyond that, 
 and which seemed to them worth the sacrifice of all 
 positive special desires, could be other than a form of 
 conscious being. It is certainly the longing of all 
 mystical love and faith, to rest in no other object of 
 thought, to be conscious of no lower form of being, 
 than the One and Eternal. Yet they do not discon- 
 nect this rest, even in conception, from personal ex- 
 perience and the sense of communion with God. 
 One of the Upanishads, for instance, describes poeti- 
 cally the soul of the just^man as ascending to Brahma's 
 world : there it is questioned by Him about its faith 
 and knowledge, and, being wisely answered, is 
 welcomed thus : " This my world is thine." ' 
 
 As the old Hymns of the Rig Veda pray for distinct, 
 conscious immortality in the " world of imperishable 
 light, whither the fathers had gone before, and where 
 all desires shall be fulfilled," — so even the abstrap- 
 
 ' Kaushttaki U^an., Weber, I- 395-403. 
 
344 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 tions of later philosophy glow with assurance, how- 
 ever ill-defined and mystical, of essential life as the 
 crown of sacrifice and devotion. "On whatever 
 nature thou meditatest at thy last hour, with desire, to 
 "that shalt thou go."^ "The heavens are Light ;"2 
 " the highest thought is a drop of Light ; " ^ and the 
 departing spirit has a sunbeam for its guide.* " As a 
 serpent casts its slough, so this body is left by the 
 soul. Its immortal life is Brahma, even Light."" 
 
 Of the desire to keep track of the individual soul 
 on a definite path beyond death, we shall speak else- 
 where. But, after all, surely the vaguer sentiment 
 of a natural confidence in life itself is nobler ; leaving 
 this invisible future, in its form and detail, to the 
 benignity and wisdom of immortal laws; confident 
 that these must involve what is best for the nature 
 whose relations they unchangeably represent. 
 
 The Ved^nta philosophy, in its highest form, 
 iiranortaiity affirms that the proper definition of Immortal 
 toiowied e ^^^^ ^^ ^^ kuow God, by discernment of the 
 of God. soul as real being.® 
 
 Mere continued existence, from world to world, did 
 not, for such aspiration, constitute the substance or root 
 of Immortality at all. It hardly entered as a noticeable 
 element into the conception of this fulness of knowl- 
 edge and bliss. No pains were taken to prove the 
 fact. And the very thought of lapsing times and 
 renewed births was to be escaped, for the pure sense 
 of inalienable and eternal being. To know one's self 
 as one with necessary life was the fact of Immortal- 
 ity, and the evidence of the fact, at once. 
 
 _ » BhagavadgitA. « Brihad. s Tejmiinda Ufan., Weber, II. 6^ 
 
 * Thomson's Bhag. GiiS, note to p. 6q ; BroAma-Sutras, in Colebrook«, I. 366, . , 
 » Briiad, IV. i8, 7. Brtiad, IV. iv, 14. 
 
VEDANTA. 345 
 
 Manifestly the contents of the idea here indicated 
 are not to be supposed the same, whenever p-o^^gof this 
 and wherever the same terms are employed ="dence. 
 to express it. But, as Idea, it is for ever the 
 essence of all spiritual evidence on this subject. 
 How can we possibly know ourselves immortal, 
 otherwise than by experience of what is imperisha- 
 ble, and by knowing that we are in and of it, and 
 inseparable from it ? " To know thyself immortal," 
 said Goethe also, " live in the whole." 
 
 " Evidences of immortality " which do not meet 
 these conditions of assurance are crude and imper- 
 fect : their defect of spiritual vitality and relation is 
 fatal to them. Such are those which infer a future 
 life for all men from traditions of a single miraculous 
 resurrection ; and those which rest on testimonies to 
 the reappearance of many persons after their bodily 
 death, as through some natural law ; and those which 
 proceed on the ground that we can be spiritually fed 
 by the reflection of our curiosity or desire, or even by 
 the echoes of our gossip, from beyond the veil. Of 
 such physical evidences of mere continued existence, 
 the Vedanta philosophy knows nothing. It does not 
 seek its data on this external plane. 
 
 But of those higher forms of evidence, whose 
 method, still the best We know, has the most ,„ _ . 
 
 Illustrations. 
 
 intimate relation to essential truth and life, 
 that older piety, like the best of every later faith, has 
 full measure ; though their practical contents in Hindu 
 experience cannot of course compare with those of a 
 larger civilization. The SaVikhya philosophy proves 
 immortality from the effort we make to liberate our- 
 selves from the senses ; the Vedanta, from the reality 
 of all spirit ; Brahmanas and Upanishads alike, from 
 
346 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the knowledge of God in the soul ; and one Vedic 
 hymn, as Miiller translates it, from death itself. 
 " There was in the beginning no death ; therefore 
 no immortality." ^ 
 
 Soul itself was immortality, "indestructible, an- 
 cient," " not to be dissipated, not to be seized nor 
 touched ; " soul itself, in its essence one with the Su- 
 preme.^ It is one's own soul that teaches this, " if 
 he be desirous of immortal nature." "Wise, mindful, 
 always pure, subduing the senses, fixed on God, one 
 finds the place where fear is not ; the goal, the refuge, 
 the serene Soul : he escapes the mouth of death." ^ 
 
 The sum was this. To know the infinite and eter- 
 nal in all, makes immortal life. The Bhagavadgita 
 says, " He is bright as the sun beyond darkness at the 
 hour of death." * And the Mundaka, " He is the bridge 
 to immortality."^ "When He is known," says the 
 Kena, " as the nature of every thought, then immor- 
 tality is known."® It is "the death of duality in the 
 soul : when the notion of being different (in essence) 
 from the Supreme ceases, the soul upheld by him 
 becomes immortal."'' 
 
 " Cast ofF thy desires as the serpent his slough : break but this 
 bondage of the heart, thou art immortal here.'" 
 
 " That Supreme Soul, whose work is the universe, always dwell- 
 ing in the hearts of all beings, is revealed by the heart. Those 
 who know Him become immortal. None can comprehend Him in 
 space above or space below or space between. For Him whose 
 name is the glory of the universe, there is no likeness." 
 
 "Not in the sight abides his form, none beholds Him with 
 the eye. Those who know Him as dwelling within become 
 immortal." ° 
 
 > Sansk. Lit., 360. > Ufanishads, fassim : Bhagav. Gait. » Kaiha, III. IV. 
 * Bk. G., VIII. t Mundaka, II. ii. 5. - Kena, II. 4. 
 
 ' Brik.1 II. iv. : Svet&^aiara. 
 » Katha, VI. IS. » Svet&hi., IV. 17-30. 
 
VEDANTA. 347 
 
 In that interior sense in which the eternal only is 
 real, the transient is phantasmal. Conceived mays, the 
 as manifold, transitional, not as one in essence, phenomenal. 
 but as ever-flowing form, the world to the Vedantist 
 was but a shadow. Its phenomena referred him to 
 somewhat beyond, which they could but hint, which 
 their changefulness suggested by contrast only. 
 Every passing fact or form in its vanishing said : 
 " Not in me thy goal, thy rest. I am but masking 
 and disguise." We recall the cry of Job out of the 
 depths of this sense of the perishable : — 
 
 " Where is wisdom, and where the place of understanding ? It 
 cannot be found in the land of the living. 
 
 " The deep saith, ' It is not in me ; ' and the sea saith, ' Not in 
 me.' Destruction and death say, ' We have heard of its fame with 
 our ears.' God only knoweth the way to it, He only its dwelling- 
 place. 
 
 " Behold the fear of the Lord, that is thy wisdom ; and to depart 
 from evil, thy understanding." 
 
 The " wisdom " which the Aryan mystic, on his 
 part also, could not find in the land of the living, nor 
 in the sky nor sea, nor in destruction and death, v^as 
 to him also a reality ; and it turned the perishable to 
 a shadow, only as knowing the unchangeable to be a 
 reality. His " fear " was the fear of being swept 
 from that foothold by the tide of fleeting forms. His 
 "forsaking of evil " was in casting off" delusion, and 
 knowing truth as the one and imperishable refuge. 
 The shifting .play of forms in time and space, in that 
 they were not truth in this sense, was illusion. Did 
 they not change with the eye itself that beheld them? 
 Of what could their flowing and flitting give assur- 
 ance? This evanescence mocked the infinite thirst 
 pf man, and piqued it to negation. This was their 
 
348 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 mdyd. It was coextensive with the universe of 
 change. It was unreality; yet not in the sense in 
 which one who had learned to associate great human 
 interests with the visible world would use the word in 
 contradistinction to their reality. It will be better 
 understood in the sense in which it would be applied 
 to the world in contrasting such reality with its evanes- 
 cence, which in this point of view would become its 
 awreality. 
 
 May& was not a declaration of nonentity, not a 
 pure negation. It was part of the mystic's 
 nentmean- solutiou of his problem' of aspiration versus 
 ^^ imperfection, of ideal and actual, of the, 
 
 moral choice between a higher and a lower aim. 
 Maya was his explanation of that flicker of the senses 
 which disturbed his contemplation, and mocked his 
 effort to fix thought and heart on Being alone. His 
 mastery of wandering desires, and sorrow, and evil, 
 and of all that bitterness in the actual, which smote 
 on his ideal hope, was in that word Illusion. It solved 
 the mystery. It overcame the world. For it meant ; — 
 These things are not really as they seem. It is only 
 that I see them so for the moment. Their sense is in 
 what my soul shall make them mean through its one- 
 ness with the real ; which I shall know even as it is 
 when I am master of self and sense, and in knowing 
 become. 
 
 Give us, what we are now attaining so fast, full 
 understanding of material and social uses ; turn the 
 current of faith and work from the transcendental 
 dream of the East into the positive and clear actualism 
 of the West; yet this substance of the necessity 
 which the believer in mdyd felt, none the less truly 
 stands fast for us also. And its uses remain ; though 
 
VEDANTA. 349 
 
 what Goethe calls 'the "tenacious persistence of what- 
 ever has once arrived at actual being," the exactly- 
 opposite pole to that Oriental sense of instability and 
 transience, has now become the all-controlling spring 
 of thought and conduct. 
 
 Maya, in its root, ma, meant at first manifestation 
 or creation, marking these as real; then this Meaning of 
 reality considered in its mystery, the riddle "^=™''d. 
 which finite existence is to the sense of the infinite in 
 man ; and so, generally, the mystery of all subtle 
 untraceable powers, — and from this meaning of the 
 word come magic and mage; and last, in this com- 
 pleted mystic devotion, it meant the illusion that 
 besets all finite things. Such the power of the spirit 
 to take up the visible universe into its dream, to turn 
 its concrete substance into shadow, its positive real 
 into unreal, and dissolve the solid earth in the fervent 
 heat of faith. 
 
 Some have referred the complete conception of 
 mdyd to an advanced stage of Hindu philos- 
 
 -^ . ° . ^ . Function of 
 
 ophy. In the earlier Upanishads there is aMayiimhe 
 certain realism in the idea of the world and of-*'^^"'"'^ 
 life ; and they present these as consubstantial with 
 God, rather than illusory in any absolul^ sense. ^ It 
 has even been supposed -^^ I cannot see with what 
 reason — that mdyd originated in the negations of 
 Buddhism. But its substance seems to be inherent in 
 the structure of the Aryan mind, after all ; whose 
 habit, even in its most practical phases, is to treat 
 its present conception of a truth or a thing as partial 
 
 ^ See Baneijea, Dialogues on Hindu Philosophy^ p. 386- Colebrooke {Essays, I. 
 377) says that TftAyd does not belong to the original VedSnta Sutras. It is very fully devel- 
 opedi however, in some of the later Upanishads^ such as the SvetSsvatara. 
 
3SO RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and imperfect ; in other words, as (so far) illusion in 
 view of a better future one. On this habit of holding 
 the facts of experience as provisional depends the 
 power of progress which distinguishes it. This is no 
 fanciful analogy. To the courage and energy of the 
 Aryan race, as well as to its . contemplative faculty, in 
 the West as in the East, the actual is always plastic 
 and convertible. It flits like dreams in the waking 
 moment, before the higher possibility that beckons 
 beyond. All is mdyd, as contrasted with the perma- 
 nence of productive Mind. Neither in speculation 
 nor practice is any special form of being held to be 
 independent of this all-revising, reconstituting force. 
 The more it discerns of the world, the more intensely 
 does it transfer reality from the conceptions that are 
 behind to those that are before, and sweep these in 
 turn into the same transforming flood. Mind makes, 
 unmakes, and makes again. 
 
 Yet the true limitation of mdyd comes through this 
 very faith in mind as the only substantial reality and 
 power ; a fact which appears pre-eminently in the con- 
 sciousness of the Indo-European. I refer to the claim 
 of the individual soul to persistence, by virtue of hold- 
 ing in itself full recognition of this validity of mind. 
 Consciousness of being, in other words, involves par- 
 ticipation in being. No Eastern dream of universal 
 metamorphosis, or of the unreality of deflnite forms or 
 the evanescence of experience, is likely to shake the 
 sense which culture is enforcing, of somewhat per- 
 manent in the subjective source of one's changing 
 thought and growth, memory and desire. With us, as 
 well as with these mystic dreamers, such words as "con- 
 sciousness," "self," "identity," hover in a dim atmos- 
 phere of past changes and future possibilities. But the 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 351 
 
 indefiniteness of these ideas is passing more and more 
 surely into a sense of permanent relation to the whole ; 
 and this sense comes ^o be the real self-conscious- 
 ness, giving sublimer meaning and validity to life as 
 life. To have once arrived at personality, to generate 
 the perception of being, and to have consciousness of 
 it as real, is to partake of that reality. And whatever 
 is achieved by this personality participates in like man- 
 ner in its validity. So that even the fleeting detail of 
 life and conduct assumes eternal meaning. The use 
 of illusion is to deepen, not to destroy, this meaning ; 
 being genially interpreted as friendly to the soul, and 
 the natural index of its perpetual growth. We may 
 well believe that it had its helpful and hopeful aspects 
 to the more contemplative Oriental mind also, seeking 
 in its way to lose individual self-consciousness in the 
 life of the whole. 
 
 Maya was the fine sense of transition, of the flow 
 of form into form, that makes each intangible Analogues 
 and elusive; the sign of evanescence. In "fMays. 
 the delicate mythology of the Greek, it appears as 
 mother of Hermes, who is messenger of the gods, and 
 their deceiver also ; the cheat of expectation, the thief 
 of trusts ; whose brisk and versatile genius can never- 
 theless draw music from the laggard tortoise of time. 
 
 It is mdyd, too, that we trace in the keen dialectics 
 of the Eleatic School, chasing time and space and all 
 forms of perception through the vanishing points of 
 transition, to end in the same sense of the phantasmal 
 everywhere save in " the One." 
 
 And modern science comes back to mdyd in its 
 protean dance of forces ; its metamorphoses and cor- 
 relations, that prove the manifold to be illusory, and 
 all phases of force to be in essence one. 
 
352 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The common sense of civilization is not at war with 
 itsindispen-this ancient wisdom of Illusion. It needs no 
 sabieness. mystic to See that mdyd is not to be escaped, is 
 indeed the most practical of realities. Does not our so 
 palpable and solid world change with the eye that looks 
 on it ? Does it not mock our fixed ideas and our 
 stable definitions ? Not even does gold mean gold. 
 The boy's coppers are gold to him ; but what are 
 eagles to the miser ? Are dollars wealth, tied round 
 a drowning man's waist for preservation, and so 
 dragging him down to loss of all ? Are the shrewd 
 shrewd ? How the financial storm sweeps down the 
 business colossus beneath petty men who trembled in 
 his shadow ! Room yet for thee, gre^t Maya, with 
 the wisest of the children of this world ! 
 
 Is not all our knowledge relative ? Who of us sees 
 the facts as they are ? An owl's eyes peering into 
 darkness detects what we cannot. Molecular immo- 
 bility is an illusion. Every atom vibrates with cosmic 
 and local movements, imperceptible to eye or ear. 
 " The human organism reaches but a little way along 
 the scale of sensibiHty." And the universe is aflame 
 and vocal with subtler light and sound that it perceives 
 not. What comes with the touch of the insect's anten- 
 na, or the cilia of the rotifer ? Our chemist knows 
 what nature is made of, for his crucibles ; but let him 
 tell us what she is to the monad in the water-drop, 
 and show the relations of that image to the world, as it 
 stands in the thought that combines galaxies and seons 
 as we do stars and hours. What is nature to deity, 
 to the Soul that sees all as an Eternal Now ? And 
 beneficent Mkyk still helps us to solve the problems of 
 evil. For if sorrow and loss mean exactly what they 
 seem, then what sense is there *in our hope to find 
 
VEDANTA. 353 
 
 that in them which we see not ? If inscrutable wrongs 
 and vices are not to be newly read from a higher 
 point of vision, then what-are providence and growth, 
 and how shall we justify existence itself ? There is 
 no solution of these mysteries till we take to heart the 
 laws of illusion. Plutarch finely says, " Alter the 
 nature of your misfortunes by putting a different con- 
 struction on them." Always it is man's wisdom as 
 well as relief to expect metamorphoses, and to deny 
 stability of the hard solid facts that resist us. To read 
 between these lines ; to see loss as gain in the making, 
 fate as freedom, failure as success, death as life, — 
 thus still and ever to recognize illusion, — is the path 
 to reality. 
 
 ' Very solid is granite, very rigid is fact ; and you 
 shall take men and things as they are. Undeniable 
 indeed ; but how are they ? " Where the spider sucks 
 poison, the bee finds honey," says the proverb. What 
 we are, that we see ; and, sooner or later, we find that 
 the first step to knowledge is to doubt if things are what 
 they seem. Under the thought of the Hindu mystic, 
 that all below God is illusion, hides a secret that 
 masters pain and loss, and turns hindrance to help. 
 He saw that the permanent only was to be trusted ; 
 and his mdyd meant that he knew whatsoever did 
 not yield him this to be delusion and dream. Natural 
 illusions have their protective uses, their fine adapta- 
 tions and delights ; recognized more and more, the 
 larger the sense of practical capabilities in life. They 
 gird it with delicate talismans and charms ; soften rough 
 contacts ; hide sterner fates. All the more need, then,, 
 that, when we learn how they play with our credulity,- 
 we do not react to universal doubt, but pluck divine 
 certainties even from the heart of our dreams. And 
 
 23 
 
3S4 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 in the rush and whirl of social machinery, the phantas- 
 magoria of things, we want all the more of the tran- 
 scendental conviction that there is pure reality in the 
 best and highest only. It is better to believe the 
 world and the senses to be illusory than to believe 
 the eternal, the immutable, the ground of law and 
 duty and faith, to be a dream. 
 
 Hindu philosophy did not fail on this side. Crea- 
 The world tion indeed was illusion ; yet it had its 
 from^"'''^ substance in a divine intent ; and at least was 
 Brahma, not Separated therefrom. It was -Brahma's 
 own maya, his "breathing," his "sport," his "magic," 
 and so within him still ; ^ not the outside ball, made 
 of nothing, and flung out Of his hand to spin of itself, 
 In the Hindu myth that God created the world " by a 
 thought" there is even a deeper hold on the imma- 
 nence of Spirit than in the Hebrew, that it was called 
 into being by a " word" — soriiething sent out and 
 away from the mouth, as it were. "God said, and 
 it was," is the one : " God thought, and it was, " is 
 the other. 
 
 Hebrew religion, fervent and spiritual as it was, 
 Semitic and ^mphasized sefaration between God and the 
 Aryan world, especially the world of man. It was 
 Ideals. ^j^g shrinking of the soul before its own ideal, 
 in a deep sense of short-coming ; and these seeds of 
 fear and alienation in the religious sentiment grew 
 into debasing theologies which no imperfect bridge- 
 work of mediation or atonement can permanently 
 redeem. Hindu belief emphasized oneness of God 
 
 1 "He who is only One, possessed of mJya, united with m9y9, creates the whole." 
 Svei&svaiara, III. i; IV. 9. "The MAyi of the Vedantists," says the DabistSn, "is 
 the ' magic of God ; ' because the Universe is ' his playful deceit.' He gives it apparent 
 existence, himself the unity of reality; like an actor, passing every moment from form into 
 form." Dai.j ch. ii. 4. 
 
VEDANTA. 25S 
 
 with the world ; even in the play of illusions seeking 
 fearlessly fot the reality they disguised. It lacked 
 the awe the Semite felt' in presence of his own 
 conception of the Infinite. It was not a goad of 
 self-condemnation like his stern moral law. And it 
 could degenerate, though in different ways, into 
 mythology and rite as superstitious as the Semitic. 
 But its ground was faith, not fear ; and now that re- 
 ligion, mature enough to dispense with schemes for 
 "reconciling God and man," affirms, as its starting- 
 point, the immanence of deity, it is simply resuming 
 on a higher plane, and with practical insight, the truth 
 which early Aryan philosophy instinctively divined. 
 
 I do not forget that idolatry of the Veda, which 
 might seem to disprove these claims of devo- vedawor- 
 tion to the Spirit alone. In the wide freedom =1"p- 
 of discussion open to the Hindu schools, through 
 endless subtleties of speculation on the primal ques- 
 tions of being and thought, the authority of this 
 common bible, twisted and accommodated, like the 
 Christian, in every way that teachers or times might 
 demand, is for the most part accepted without ques- 
 tion. The Vedanta commentators, especially, labor 
 to prove that it is infallible and without human author, 
 identical with " the eternity of sound ; " and that the 
 rishis, who are called makers of the hymns, really 
 satv them only. How far this last theory implied that 
 the human faculties of these inspired men were sup- 
 planted by supernatural vision, may not be easy to 
 say. These are questions which bibliolatry raises in 
 all religions. But the. mystical worship of soul rose 
 easily out of such conventionalism into the assertion 
 of its own higher inspiration. Scarcely one of the 
 Upanishads fails to urge the superiority of the science 
 
356 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of soul to the study of scripture, or else to imply this 
 by the whole tenor of its thought. " Of what use," 
 they say, " are the hymns of the Rig to one who does 
 not know Him in whom all the gods abide ? " ^ To one 
 who said, " I know only the hymns, while I am 
 ignorant of soul," a sage replies, "What thou hast 
 studied is name. But there is something which is 
 more than name."^ "There are two sciences: the 
 lesser comprehends the rituals, astronomy, the study 
 of words, and the Vedas ; the higher is the science 
 by which the Eternal One is known." ^ 
 
 It may be of use to hear the testimony of the author 
 of the Dabistan, who wrote two or three centuries ago, 
 as to the spirit of the later Vedantists. He records a 
 visit made to one of their schools with an eminent 
 Hindu poet, who was filled with admiration at what 
 he heard there, and said, "My whole life is passed in 
 the company of devotees ; but my eyes never beheld 
 such independence, and my ears never heard any 
 thing comparable to the speeches of these emanci- 
 pated men." 
 
 A few passages brought together from the literature 
 of this Spiritual Pantheism will show the meaning it 
 gave to Soul, Duty, Deity, Life : — 
 
 " Whatever exists in this world is to be enveloped in the thought 
 The su- of the supreme Soul. Whoever beholds all beings in 
 preme soul, this soul alone, and the soul in all beings, cannot look 
 down on any creature. When one knows that all is soul, when he 
 beholds its unity, then is there no delusion, no grief." 
 
 " He is all-pervading, bodiless, pure, untainted by sin, all-wise, 
 ruler of mind, above all beings, and self-existent. He distributed 
 things according to their nature for everlasting years." * 
 
 " Adore Him, ye gods, after whom the year with its rolling days 
 
 * ^velaiBotara. ' Chhandogya. ° Mundaka, I. i. 5. < V&yasanejia Ufaa. 
 
VEDANTA. 357 
 
 is completed, the Light of lights, the Immortal Life. He is the 
 Ruler and Preserver of all, the Brids;e, the Upholder of worlds lest 
 they faU." ' 
 
 " The great, the Lord in truth, the Perfect One, the Mover of all 
 that is, the Ruler of purest bliss. He is Light and He is everlasting. 
 He, the Infinite Spirit, is like the sun after darkness. He is to be 
 adored by the deity of the sun : from Him alone has arisen the 
 ancient knowledge." 
 
 " By the Perfect Soul is all this universe pervaded. None can 
 comprehend Him in the space above, the space below, or the space 
 between. For Him whose name is infinite glory there is no like- 
 ness. Not in the sight abides his form. None beholds Him by 
 the eye : they who know Him dwelling in the heart and mind be- 
 come immortal." 
 
 " Without hands or feet He speeds. He takes. Without eyfe He 
 sees, without ear hears. He is all-knowing, yet known by none ; 
 undecaying, omnipresent, unborn ; revealed by meditation ; whoso 
 knows Him, the all-blessed, dwelling in the heart of all beings, has 
 everlasting peace." ' 
 
 " He is not apprehended by the eye, not by devotions nor by 
 rites ; but he whose mind is purified by the light of knowledge 
 beholds the undivided One, who knows the soul. Inconceivable 
 by thought, more distant than all distant things, and also near, 
 dwelling here in the heart for him who can behold." ' 
 
 " The wise who behold this Soul as the eternal among transient 
 things ; as the intelligent among those that know ; as that which, 
 though one, grants the prayers of many, — the wise, who behold the 
 one ruler and inner soul of all, as dwelling within themselves, 
 obtain eternal bliss ; they, not others." * 
 
 " This is dearer than a son, than wealth, than all things ; for this 
 is deeper within. Whoever worships the soul as dear, to him what 
 is dear is not perishable.' It is for the soul's sake that all are dear.' 
 
 " The soul is to be perceived only by its own true idea ; and only 
 by him who declares that it is real." ' 
 
 " Truth alone, not falsehood, conquers. By truth is opened the 
 road which the rishis trod, whose desires are satisfied, the supreme 
 abode. " ' 
 
 » BriJiad, IV. iv. 22. » dveiihatara. III. IV. VI. 
 
 » Mundaka, III. i. 7, 8. * Katha, V. 12, 13. 
 
 • Bri/ucd, I. iv. 8. ' Brihad, II. iv. 5. 
 
 ' Katha, VL 12, 13. » Mundaka, III. 6. 
 
358 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 " Let one worship the Soul as his place, and his work shall not 
 perish. Whatsoever he desires from the Soul, the same shall he 
 obtain." ' 
 
 " He gains that world and those desires which he imagines in his 
 .mind. Therefore let pne who desires prosperity worship Him who 
 knows the soul." ^ 
 
 " The wise who has studied the scriptures casts them by, as he 
 Soul is free- who seeks grain the chaiF." ' 
 
 dom. " Yijnavalkya, when asked how a Brahman can do with- 
 
 out the sacrificial girdle, answered, ' The soul itself is his girdle.' "-* 
 
 " They who fancy that oblations and rites are the highest end of 
 man know not any thing good. The foolish ones go round and 
 round, coming back to decay and death, oppressed by misery, as 
 blind led by the blind." » 
 
 " There is a higher and a lower science : the lower is that of the 
 Vedas, the higher that of the Eternal One." ' 
 
 " Worshipping deities as if these were apart from themselves, the 
 ignorant maintain their gods, as beasts support a man. It is not 
 pleasant to such gods that men should know Brahma," — and be 
 free.' 
 
 " To behold the soul in itself alone is to subdue sin, not to be 
 Soul is moral subdued by it." ' 
 
 discipline. " By holy acts shall one become holy, by evil ones evil. 
 
 As his desire, so his resolve ; as his resolve, so his work ; as his 
 work, so his reward." ' 
 
 "Whoso has not ceased from evil ways shall not obtain true 
 soul." "> 
 
 If prayer is aspiration to become one yvith ideal life, 
 Soul is then this Vedantic pantheism is itself essential- 
 prayer. jy ^ prayer. And its religious earnestness lifts 
 up the old eternal cry for guidance, help, and rest. 
 There is an old hymn pej-haps relating to the last 
 hours pf life, which is often quoted in the Upanishads. 
 
 > SrOad, I. iv. 15. s Mumlaka, III. 10. 
 
 » A mritaifida Up., V. 18. « yaiala, Weber, Indkche Stu^ltn, II. 73. 
 
 » Mundaka Up., I. ii. 7, 8, 10. = Mundaka Up., I. i. 3.' 
 
 ' Brihad. I. iv. lo. « Brihad, IV. iv. 23. 
 
 » Ibid., IV. iv. s- M Kaiha. Up., II. 24. 
 
VEDANTA. 359 
 
 It appeals to deity as dwelling in the Sun, whose 
 outward light is invoked to give way to its spiritual 
 meaning : — 
 
 " To me, whose duty is truth, open, O Sun ! upholder of the 
 world, the entrance to truth, hidden by thy vase of dazzling light. 
 Withhold thy splendors that I may behold thy true being. For I 
 am immortal. The same soul that is in thee am I. Let my spirit 
 obtain immortality, then let my body be consumed. Remember 
 thy actions, remember, O my mind ! GuideJ O Agni ! to bliss. O 
 God, all-knowing ! deliver from the crooked path of sin." ' 
 
 " As the birds repair, O beloved ! to a tree to dwell there, so all 
 this universe to the Supreme." ' 
 
 " From the unreal, lead me to the real ; from darkness to light, 
 from death to immortality. This uttered overcomes the world." ' 
 
 " There is no end to misery, save in knowledge of God." ■* 
 
 " ' Thrice,' let the saint say, ' I have renounced all.' " ^ 
 What was this absolute renunciation ? It did Renunda- 
 not mean surrender of self-indulgence for the ''™- 
 sake of practical uses. It meant rejection of the 
 senses and the world altogether. His problem was 
 to deliver his soul from all that was conditional, de- 
 pendent, transient. And since he tracked these forms 
 of experience through every phase of his being, it 
 would seem at first sight as if he deliberately sought 
 self-annihilation. But this could not be true in any 
 recognized sense of the word. For he called the 
 highest goal for which he strove beatitude, and its 
 path emancipation. Its bliss vras "knowing God," its 
 end " immortal lifci" 
 
 " A hundred fold the bliss of those who are gods by birth, is one 
 joy of him who reaches the world of Prajapati. But the world of 
 Brahma is the highest bliss of all." ' 
 
 • BrOmd, V. xiv; VAyasaneya. Sanhi Uf., 15-18. ' Pnuna Up., IV. 
 
 * Brihad, I. iii. 28. Yajur Veda Mantras. * Svei&svaiara^ VI. 30. 
 » Arunika Uf. (Weber, II. 178). • Brihad, IV. iii. 33. 
 
360 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 I find no evidence that earnest men have ever made 
 Not self- a religion out of the desire of nonentity. Mys- 
 annihiiation. ^jj^g have always yearned to lose the sense of 
 separate and limited selfhood in the depths of eter- 
 nal and absolute being ; and they have, as invari- 
 ably, been charged with desiring to abolish personal- 
 ity. And the charge has usually come from those to 
 whom the Absolute and Eternal was, as nearly as 
 could well be, non-existent. 
 
 To me it is quite incredible that a religious philoso- 
 phy, so absorbed in the idea of Infinite Life as this is, 
 should aim at destroying, in any absolute sense, that 
 very consciousness which revealed it. And can we 
 suppose any one to be longing for nothing with his 
 whole heart and soul ? Great efforts have been made 
 to prove the Buddhist Nirvana such an irrationality 
 as this.i But they are far from satisfactory, and do 
 not prove any thing but the extreme difficulty of 
 making the mystical consciousness of the Oriental 
 mind stand in the clear definite moulds of Western 
 thought. 
 
 It should be fully recognized that this ardent devo- 
 Life in God. ^'°" sought not death, but hfe ; not unreality, 
 but reality; to escape error, perturbation, 
 change ; conceit of the understanding, idolatry, of 
 self, absorption in sense, and slavery to things. " Our 
 fire is piety, and in it I burn the wood of duality ; 
 instead of a sheep, I sacrifice egotism. This is my 
 Homr 2 
 
 The Alexandrian school of Greek thought was 
 pervaded by this Oriental thirst for the One and Eter- 
 
 > Bumonf, Koeppen, St. Hilaire. But Duncker, Mohl, and MuUer have fully shown 
 the weakness of their interpretation. 
 
 " A Vedantist sage ; quoted in DaiUi&n, ch. ii. 4. Horn is the sacrificial butter. 
 
VEDANTA. 361 
 
 nal. It pursued this "ecstasy," or identity of the 
 soul with its ideal object as the only reality, with an 
 earnestness of faith of which the Enneads of Plotinus 
 remain a marvellous monument for all time. And 
 the same spirit gave religious fervor to the noblest 
 minds of Christian ages ; to the freest of those whom 
 the Church has refused to recognize, from age to 
 age ; a mystic passion for the Infinite that, however 
 unacknowledged, has been the fountain of the ideal 
 life in man. 
 
 The same in substance, however remote the practi- 
 cal Western mind from the life of the East, is Augus- 
 tine's ejaculation : " Thou hast made us, O Lord ! for 
 thyself J and our souls are restless till they return to 
 Thee." Mysteriously involved in the sense of immor- 
 tality is a secret reminiscence of the " immortal sea 
 which brought us hither." It haunts all religious 
 imagination from the Vedic hymns down to Tauler 
 and the Theologia Germanica; to Wordsworth and 
 Emerson, and the devout sonnets of Henry Vaughan 
 and Jones Very. Say the Upanishads : — 
 
 " He who has found God has ceased from all wisdom of his own ; 
 as one puts out a torch and lays it down, when the place he sought 
 in the darkness is found." ' 
 
 " As the flowing rivers come to their end in the sea, losing name 
 and form, so, liberated from name and form, proceeds the wise to 
 the Divine Soul." * 
 
 " By him who thinks Brahma is beyond comprehension is Brah- 
 ma known. He who thinks Him comprehended does not know 
 Him. Known as the one nature in every thought. He is truly 
 known. By this knowledge comes immortal life." ' 
 
 So sings the Sufi poet : — 
 
 " O Thou of whom all is the manifestation. 
 Thou, independent of 'thou and we,' Thyself 'thou and we,' — 
 
 ^ Amritan&da. * Mundaka. " Kena, 
 
362 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Thy nature is the spring of thy being : whatever is, is Thou ; 
 
 We all are billows in the ocean of thy being ; 
 
 We are a small compass of thy manifested nature." ' 
 
 And so the Christian mystic : — 
 
 " God is a mighty sea, unfathomed and unbound : 
 Oh, in this blessed deep may all my soul be drowned ! " * 
 
 Here to abide, in the Spirit " that is without strife, 
 without decay, without death, and without fear,"® was 
 the goal of that old ceaseless yearning to escape what 
 was called the " return to births," as involved in the 
 "bonds pf actions." In a similar light I would inter- 
 pret a little devotee song, written by a late missionary 
 at Benares, embodying this Oriental piety. Its appeal 
 to the religious sentiment shows the universality of 
 the idea better than any philosophical statement could 
 do: — 
 
 " The snowflake that glistens at morn on Kailisa, 
 Dissolved by the sunbeams, descends to the plain : 
 Then, mingling with Gunga, it flows to the ocean. 
 And lost in its waters returns not again. 
 
 On the rose-leaf at sunrise bright glistens the dewdrop, 
 That in vapor exhaled falls in nourishing rain : 
 Then in rills back to Gunga through green fields meanders, 
 Till onward it flows to the ocean again. 
 
 A snowflake still whitens the peak of Kailisa, 
 But the snowflake of yesterday flows to the main ; 
 At dawning a dewdrop still hangs on the rose-leaf, 
 But the dewdrop of yesterday comes not again. 
 
 The soul that is freed from the bondage of nature. 
 Escapes from illusions of joy and of pain ; 
 And, pure as the flame that is lost in the sunbeams, 
 Ascends into God, and returns not again. 
 
 It comes not and goes not ; it comes not again."* 
 
 1 Daiist&n. " Angelm Silesius. ' Prasna, V. 7. 
 
 * Buyers's RecoUections of Northern India. 
 
VEDANTA. 363 
 
 I have indicated some of the realities the Vedanta 
 philosophy was capable of seeing: I must Defector 
 note, also, what it failed to see. And here p^Tose- 
 may be recalled an expressive myth which betrays 
 the defect of self-conscious purpose and active will 
 in Hindu character. 
 
 All manifestation is Brahma's "play," returning into 
 his essence when the sport fatigues. In this childlike 
 mythology, he must have alternation of waking and 
 sleep. The life of the worlds, though it last for ages 
 of ages, is but " Brahma's day : " a night must come 
 when he must repose. That life fades when he slum- 
 bers, expands when he awakes ; as when a torch is 
 alternately kindled and extinguished, the light alter- 
 nately radiates from the centre and is recalled. In 
 the Hebrew myth of creation, the need of rest is as- 
 cribed to Jehovah also. But what we specially note 
 in the Brahmanic conception is the absence of a'ny 
 idea of -purpose in this universal Life. It proclaims 
 no law of growth. It Stirs no hope of human ad- 
 vancement. The spirit wakes, the spirit sleeps. 
 That is all. Nowhere struggle or endeavor ; nowhere 
 work ; nowhere progress recognized as the endless 
 fact, the meaning of the world. On the contrary, 
 there is involved in this movement a gradual degen- 
 eracy. And we find indeed the definite belief that 
 man loses successively, in each of four consecutive 
 ages, a quarter of the duration of his life : crime - 
 gradually increases, and the prevailing virtue is of a 
 lower grade. In the first age, this virtue is devotion ; 
 in the second, knowledge ; in the third, sacrifice ; in 
 the fourth, only almsgiving, as an external form. 
 And so the only possible counteraction to this ten- 
 dency, for the few who can escape it, is reverence for 
 
364 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the immemorial customs of that first, happier age. 
 Have we not here a philosophy of despair? 
 
 Yet a way of release from this apparent absence of 
 all motive and purpose was really found in the ardent 
 aspiration to union with deity, which has been de- 
 scribed. Nor does confidence in the power of spiritual 
 achievement seem to have been wanting, notwithstand- 
 ing the theory that placed the ideal of such achieve- 
 ment in the past. For Brahmanical faith, however, 
 the sphere of effort was not the visible world. 
 
 That all its earnestness and spirituality could not 
 Sources of savc this piety from ascetic extravagance was 
 "°^7''"'- owing to the fact that it could not be directed 
 
 dom from o 
 
 asceticism, to practical aims and social achievement. But 
 our own interest in the visible and transient world is 
 not a legacy that we have derived from any Oriental 
 religion. We owe it neither to Judaism nor to Chris- 
 tianity ; for the one did comparatively little to bring 
 out the uses of the outward order of nature ; and the 
 other, in the person of its founder, pronounced the 
 world to be under doom of speedy destruction. Juda- 
 ism indeed has given an impulse to man's active 
 powers by its idea of creation as an instant result of 
 divine purpose and will. Hebrew belief in the per- 
 sonal energy and authority of God has doubtless 
 helped develop corresponding qualities in the West- 
 ern mind ; and the humane motives for action, empha- 
 sized by Christianity, have seconded the practical 
 tendencies of modern times. But, on the whole, we 
 owe our faith in this visible world to Greek liberty and 
 Roman law, to modern science and art, and to the, 
 opportunities of social good involved in the circulation 
 of thought and intercourse of vigorous nations. It is 
 mainly the gift of energetic races, and depends less 
 on religious than on ethnological causes. 
 
VEDANTA. 365 
 
 In the circumstances of the Hindu, it was his special 
 glory, as well as his peril, that every thing of the op- 
 flowed to abstract ideas, to pure thought. As ^^"° 
 far back as the Greek invasion, Megasthenes dency. 
 found the Hindus spending their time in talking about 
 life and death. ^ They are still, in their degeneracy, 
 natural metaphysicians. Dogma is their staff of life. 
 They draw water out of invisible wells, as we do out 
 of visible ones, for daily drink. The deserts swarm 
 with anchorets, practising strange rites and muttering 
 spells. The city streets are perambulated by painted 
 mendicants, rubbed down with ashes, and carrying 
 skulls for drinking vessels. Ragged gosains sit by 
 the waysides and under the trees, unfolding super- 
 sensual ideas to rustic academies,^ and visionary 
 fakirs ply them with fables and dreams. The very 
 children learn theological and philosophical sutras 
 mechanically, as we do alphabet and multiplication- 
 table.^ They are still demonized by abstraction ; 
 despising practical limitations, ignoring tangible 
 facts. 
 
 Of course this national temperament has its higher 
 and its lower forms. And as the passion for invisible 
 mysteries degenerated into jugglery and magic, so it 
 rose into the mystical aspirations of these poet philoso- 
 phers and seers. There is indeed no form of religion 
 thus far which has not had analogous results, if not 
 in these extreme forms. Christianity, for example, has 
 borne supernaturalism and ecclesiasticism as well as 
 aspiration and sacrifice and love, having sown germs 
 of bondage as well as of freedom. 
 
 ' Straho, XV. 59. ^ See Allen's India, p. 404; Buyers's Northern India. 
 
 * MuUer, Sansk. Lit., p. 74. 
 
366 RELIGIOtJS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The effort of Hindu devotees to escape the senses 
 Causes of ^nd the world of action has already been in 
 asceticism, pj^^t explained as a protest against the charms 
 and temptations of a torrid zone. These ascetic 
 disciplines were commensurate with the forces they 
 sought to overcome. The very word for their aus- 
 terity was tafas, or heat. They did not need to 
 carry the imagination into other worlds, in order to 
 locate their purgatories of fire. They recognized this 
 world of sensuous nature as the thing they had to 
 master. Their valor and faith lay in pronouncing the 
 ever-present foe of freedom and purity an illusion, 
 destined to vanish after all in the sole reality of spirit. 
 
 If in those times and in such a climate, there was 
 wanting practical force to make nature represent 
 moral and intellectual purpose, it was certainly much 
 to believe so utterly as these ascetics did in the power 
 of the ideal to overcome the world, to disenchant the 
 soul from subjection to its masteries and spells. 
 At the heart of Hindu religious consciousness was 
 faith in the omnipotence of thought. Let us note the 
 significance of this faith. 
 
 The meaning of the world for each of us lies in his 
 Thepri- ^^'^ thought concerning it. What the mind 
 macyof is to itsclf, such is the universe to the mind, 
 oug t. ^j^^ inward makes the outward. " "We receive 
 but what we give." In the child, " that best philoso- 
 pher, who yet doth keep his heritage," the truth we 
 here emphasize exists as unconscious instinct, and 
 implicit wisdom. He is, in his own sphere, the 
 " mighty prophet, seer blest." i3at it finds manlier 
 play in the conscious use of materials for ideal ends. 
 To this primacy of the inward forces, to this their 
 
VEDANTA. 
 
 367 
 
 power of creating the. world in their own likeness, 
 even the clearest practical perception and the largest 
 social experience must hold fast, or else the " yoke " 
 comes with the task ; a weight, " heavy as frost, and 
 deep as life." The secret of power is to refer circum- 
 stance and surrounding to the consciousness, as cen- 
 tral and determinative force, and to provide that this 
 light by which we see, this all-shaping, all-construct- 
 ing genius of life within us, maintain itself at its 
 best. 
 
 Now, since this inherent creative function of thought 
 must needs make the outward world in some form 
 confess its sway, in what can its dignity consist in a 
 state of society where there are no practical materials 
 to which it can be applied ? Plainly, in concentrat- 
 ing on itself, and in affirming itself to be the sole 
 reality. In other words, the ascetic maintains self- 
 respect, through annihilating the senses, or the per- 
 ception of them, by his mental effort. He keeps 
 thought sovereign by proving its sufficiency for itself, 
 where outward material is wanting. Yet as actual 
 details, elements, and forces, however strenuously 
 denied, are inevitable, as is also the need of some 
 kind of mastery over them, so their reactions on such 
 unbalanced idealism turned it into a claim to the pos- 
 session of their secret springs through concentration 
 of thought alone. Thaumaturgy, the preternatural 
 gift of wonder-working with elements and forms, has 
 simply meant that thought shall master things, if 
 not through knowledge of their practical uses, then 
 through its own inherent right to master them. 
 Thought, it says, is primal, creative : things are its 
 shadow, its echo, its plastic material, and should 
 obey. 
 
368 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 This is the divine element that shines through the 
 In than- fantastic disciplines of Hindu Yogis and Chris- 
 maturgy. ^ian pillar saints ; behind the absurdity, the 
 spiritual pride, the insanity even, of superstition, that 
 are of course no less evident. The ascetic has chosen 
 his realm, and to his own thought he is master of it. 
 Wherever he concentrates his thought, there, for him- 
 self and to his own consciousness, he shall control 
 phenomena. Thinking devoutly on the sun, it shall 
 yield him universal sight; on the pole-star, it shall 
 concede him all star powers. Carry mind to the 
 bottom of the throat, and hunger shall cease ; to the 
 space between his eyebrows, and external contact is 
 reduced to a minimum. Let it desire freedom from 
 the body, and he shall be free of all elements and 
 forms. Mind, in concentration and essence, is here 
 the sovereign power. Now if here instead of mind, 
 you put the word faith, you have the Hebrew claim 
 of miraculous power ; whether to change stones into 
 bread, or water into wine. 
 
 So with the fate that tied souls to transmigration. 
 Was it not the consequence of interested motives ; of 
 thought, wandering from its centre, fettered to things? 
 " Think on freedom then, on the life beyond self," says 
 the ascetic, "and the bonds are broken, the very wheel 
 of birth and fate and form is dissolved." Do we smile 
 at the ignorance? That we may easily enough do. 
 But there is more than we have noted, behind it. 
 There is intuition of the rights of thought, of will, of 
 soul. It is the childhood of a gigantic energy ; the 
 germ of liberty and progress ; none the less so because 
 crude and ignorant, and for ages not finding condi- 
 tions of higher development. And the materialism 
 that can only ridicule it has left out of its own phil- 
 
VEDANTA. 369 
 
 osophy the element that philosophy can least afford to 
 spare. 
 
 Asceticism has its unheroic side, not peculiar to the 
 Hindu. The Vedanta text has been virtually . 
 
 •^ Ascetiasm. 
 
 the burden of world-weariness and listlessness 
 in all times. " What relish for enjo3'ment in this 
 unsound body, assailed by desire and passion, avarice 
 and illusion, sorrow and fear, absence from the loved, 
 presence of the hated, disease, leanness, old age, 
 and death." 1 Or hear the old Hebrew preacher: 
 " The thoughts of mortal man are miserable, and 
 his devices uncertain : for the earthly body weigheth 
 down the soul." How large a proportion of Christian 
 preaching, from first to last, has whined over the 
 vanity of the world and the flesh ! The practical 
 genius of the West, its opportunity of culture and 
 construction, at last makes this Christian other-world- 
 liness quite intolerable ; though there are still creeds 
 that, like the old Egyptian monks, are watering its 
 dry sticks in the sand. 
 
 But we are to remember that a religion that should 
 dare to claim the state, market, scientific progress, and 
 social reform, as free fields of natural human develop- 
 ment, could not possibly have existed till this present 
 time of secular interests and largest ethnic inter- 
 course. The Oriental world had neither gift nor 
 place for this hope in visible things. From India to 
 Palestine, from the Veda to the Gospels, why should 
 they not have lacked substance, to the watching soul, 
 like a vapor that was soon to pass away? Social 
 aspiration and moral enterprise could not find play, 
 even " on midnight's sky of rain to paint a golden 
 
 * See also Y&j'nav., III. 8, 106. " He who seeks substance in human life, which is 
 pithless as the Kadali stem, and hollow as a bubble, is without reason." 
 
 34 
 
370 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 morrow." And as the Hebrew Christ fastened his 
 hope on a speedy " coming of the end," so the Hindu 
 saint put his " golden morrow " into that Absolute Life 
 in which all worlds should sink like a dream. And 
 to reach that Life, what absolute surrender his disci^ 
 plines made of mind and body and will to an ideal 
 good ! Asceticism was, there at least, a brave and 
 believing religion. 
 
 This faith in the rights of mind over matter, which 
 Germs of in its lowcr forms becomes asceticism and 
 indo-Eu- ijjagic is the germ of that intellectual grasp 
 thought, and subtlety which has lifted the Indo- 
 European race above the rest of mankind in what 
 depends on the brain alone. Hindu speculation holds 
 not only germs, but even types, and in many respects 
 very noble ones, of the deepest philosophical systems 
 of the West. It has been said, doubtless in this sense, 
 to have " exhausted all the forms which other times 
 and peoples appropriate severally to themselves." ' 
 Liberty of thought was, for Hindu purposes, perfect, 
 in the sacerdotal class in India. ^ The contentions of 
 the schools afford ample proof of this. There was 
 nothing to limit their, speculative genius. They be- 
 lieved the Infinite ever accessible to the seeker ; and 
 the traditions and holy books were but helps on the 
 way, to be set aside for a nobler goal. 
 
 So in this teeming brain, haunted by a sense of the 
 eternal and unseen, there rose an earlier, or 
 
 Scope of ■ 
 
 Hmdusys- perhaps we should say rather an Oriental, 
 terns. Platonism, Stoicism, Mysticism, Cynicism, 
 Pietism. Forms of thought and faith kindred to these 
 Western systems have been fermenting in the Hindu 
 
 > Wagner, AUgemeim Myihol, p. 88. a See Muir, III. 57. 
 
VEDANTA. 3^1 
 
 mind from the times of the later Rig Veda hymns 
 down to the present day. Its Brahma holds in solu- 
 tion, more or less vaguely defined, the Orphic hymn 
 and the Eleatic philosophy. Here, in Eastern form 
 indeed, and without Hellenic energy of will, is the 
 mystical Orphic " Zeus, first, midst, and last ; Zeus, 
 element and ruler; Zeus, essence and father; 
 Zeus, one and all." Here the " Kosmos " of Xeno- 
 phanes, "that sees, hears, and thinks;" his "all-rul- 
 ing, spheric Unity of Mind, incomprehensible, with- 
 out beginning, end, or change ; " and the " Ens unum " 
 of Parmenides, whereinto all differences dissolved. 
 Here the Anaxagorean "Nous," or Mind, "ruler of 
 all." Here negation of the manifold ; Heraclitean 
 sense of universal flux ; Zenonic dialectics, proving 
 that there could be no substantial being in this 
 perpetual evanescence. Here the Western Cynic is 
 foreshadowed in the Eastern Gymnosophist.^ Here 
 Philo's Logos (svdiadsTog xul ngocpoQiKog) , essential and 
 manifest, embracing all. Here Seneca's " All, one 
 only, and deity." ^ Here Marcus Aurelius's " One 
 God, one substance, one law, one common reason, 
 and one truth. "^ Here the "ecstasy" of Plotinus ; here 
 Persian Sufism, mystic Jelalleddin and Sadi ; here 
 Berkeley's idealism, and Malebranche's vision of " all 
 in God." Here, without its scientific basis or its intense 
 practical vitality, Goethe's sense of a universal cosmic 
 Soul. 
 
 And here Hegel's identity of Thought and Being, 
 of subject and object. The Vedanta must have 
 influenced Plotinus : it anticipates Spinoza. The 
 Sankhya foreshadows at once the skeptics, the posi- 
 
 ^ On this point see Grote's Piaia, cli. xxxviii. - Episth , )z. 
 
 " Meditations^ VII. 9. 
 
372 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 tivists, the rationalists, the quietists, of later times. 
 Aji earlier Kantian criticism, as elaborate too in its 
 way, denies the certitude of the understanding, yet 
 holds fast to the rock of moral sanctions. An earlier 
 Fichtean intuition affirms selfishness to be the false and 
 unreal, and pursues the liberty' of spiritual obedien 
 as "the blessed life." All these are of course in forms 
 peculiar to Hindu genius. 
 
 Here also is the substance of all great philosophies 
 of evil, — holding that it is the condition of finiteness, 
 or comes of things taken in fragments, seen in part ; 
 that the world must not be conceived apart from God, 
 if we would know it as it is. 
 
 And here are unmistakable forms of spiritual cour- 
 age and trust, and all-controlling aspirations to the 
 highest thought, as the soul's native place ; to absolute 
 good, as rounding the universe and leaving out no life 
 that is or can be ; aspirations which foreshadow Chris- 
 tian ideals of the divine, and yield, as do the best of 
 these also, hints of a purer worship yet to come, that 
 shall supplant defects which are constantly character- 
 istic of Christian thought ; and especially that imper- 
 fect sense of the essential unity of all life, and that 
 lack of intellectual liberty which must ever result from 
 all exclusive claims of personal or historical authority 
 over the religious nature of man. 
 
II. 
 
 SANKHYA. 
 
sAnkhya. 
 
 /^UR sketch of Religious Philosophy thus far, 
 ^^ while illustrative of the general features of 
 Hindu thought, has represented in the main what is 
 called the Vedanta or Orthodox school of belief. 
 This is founded on the Vedas, as well as most con- 
 genial with the national mind. Yet we have already 
 seen that it was capable of emancipating itself from 
 idolatry of scripture, and affirming the intimacy of 
 man with God through his own essential nature. We 
 have now to examine a different path to the affirmation 
 of spiritual being and sovereignty ; one in which 
 these elements of freedom are still more prominent, 
 the Sankhya system of Kapila. 
 
 Little is known of Kapila ; whose name, a synonym 
 of Fire, hovers, like the names of other found- Kapiia and 
 ers of Hindu schools, between mythology and *' ^^"'^y'- 
 history. He is held by some to have been an 
 incarnation of Agni ; by others, of Vishnu. The ori- 
 gin of his system cannot be definitely assigned to any 
 special date. More important than any such histori- 
 cal determination is the fact that its persistence and 
 productivity show it to be a natural and spontaneous 
 growth of the Aryan mind. 
 
 Like all other systems of Oriental philosophy, it is 
 
37^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 comprised in a series of aphorisms, or Sutras, adapted 
 for retention in the memory, and as texts for instruc- 
 tion. And these aphorisms, though already carefully 
 studied and expounded by scholars like Colebrooke, 
 Wilson, Weber, Miiller, and Ballantyne, are still much 
 obscured by an exceedingly compact and elliptical 
 style, and by the difficulty of translating and even of 
 comprehending modes of thought and speech peculiar 
 to the Oriental mind.^ 
 
 The earnestness with firhich Oriental studies are 
 now pursued, both in Europe and the East, justify the 
 hope that we shall soon possess ample data for ap- 
 preciating the vast store of philosophical germs and 
 developments contained in the six great Hindu sys- 
 tems, or durdanas, of which the Sankhya is the most 
 practical, scientific, and consequent, and, as some 
 think, the oldest.® It is for these reasons, as well as 
 from its apparent attitude as the opposite pole to the 
 religious philosophy of the Vedanta, that I have 
 selected it from among these different schools for 
 special presentment, according to my apprehension of 
 its meaning. 
 
 Nothing we know of the whole body of Hindu 
 Unityofaim P^^ilosophy is more impressive than the unity 
 in Hindu of its aim. Covering the whole field of specu- 
 phUosopiiy. j^jj^g thought, seeking to unfold, the mystery 
 of the universe from every point of view, these schools 
 
 » The purpose of the present work is satisfied by presenting such general idea of the 
 substance of the Sinkhya as can be derived ii-om the results of these labors ; and especially 
 from the translation and commentary of Dr. Ballantyne in the Biiliotheca Indka, printed 
 at Calcutta in 1862-65. Of great value also for the comprehension of these Sutras is the 
 SAtikkiia K&rika, (seventy Memorial Sentences, definitive of the system), which has 
 been translated with commentaries, native and other, by Professor Wilson. Sutra is 
 probably from siv, to sew, and refers to the string with which the leaves containing the 
 aphorisms are bound together. 
 
 ^ Weber, V„rUs. p. 212 ; Thomson's Bhag. Gita, Inirod.. ch. iii. The dars'oKas are 
 the two Saokhyas, the two MimansSs, the Nyiya, and the Vais'eshika. 
 
SANKHYA. 377 
 
 are yet penetrated by one and the same motive, — to 
 reach mukti, or mokska, deliverance from bonds. 
 They are tributes of the intellect to demands of the 
 moral and spiritual being. They are at once, on the 
 one hand, an involuntary confession of the heavy con- 
 ditions imposed on human existence by the absence 
 of social science, and practical and political liberty, 
 as well as by manifold forms of moral weakness and 
 enslavement to desire, growing out of constitutional 
 and climatic disadvantages ; and, on the other, in 
 decisive reaction upon these bonds, asserting full 
 capacity to ascend into a sphere of freedom, reality, 
 and true vision. 
 
 All these schools are possessed' by the sense of 
 moral sequence, of the inevitable fruitage of every 
 action after its own kind, embodied in their concep- 
 tion of karma. On this proceeds the belief, also 
 common to them all, in transmigration, or the "bonds 
 of birth ; " and in the spiritual body, which attends the 
 soul, as the ultimation of its past life, and determines 
 the new form it is to assume at death. And to escape 
 that bondage to renewed births, by transcending the 
 power of actions to necessitate them, was a grand 
 common purpose of all Hindu systems. 
 
 Kapila's first aphorism, " The end of man is the 
 complete cessation of the threefold pain," has 
 
 . . Negation 
 
 a negative aspect, impressed on it by intense and affirma- 
 consciousness of the force of human limita-"™' 
 tions, which does little justice to the serenity and joy 
 of his unfolding process of emancipation, and to the 
 positive assurance of good that beckons him onward 
 like a sun in the heavens of thought. Beyond all 
 endeavors at rejection, beyond the ceaseless and 
 radical " nay, nay," with which it met all definite 
 
378 " RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 forms of life or action that claimed to satisfy its ideal 
 of freedom, there was a clearly positive faith, a definite 
 and unswerving aim. And Kapila's negation does 
 not essentially differ from the mystical promise of the 
 Vedanta, which emphasizes the " enjoyment of Brah- 
 ma " as the end of man. 
 
 Emancipation of the s-piritual essence is the all-em- 
 bracing inspiration of the Hindu Word, whether the 
 emfhasis be placed on the process or the fulfilment. 
 Of all its forms of speculation, this moral aspiration, 
 this ascent from pain to peace, from darkness to light, 
 from bonds to liberty, as the one imperative and the 
 one practicable thing, is the vital substance. This is 
 the "hfe more than meat" of Hindu faith. This 
 common purpose is, in fact, the form under which 
 the grand instinct of unity, which we have found to 
 be characteristic of the race, made itself master of 
 their philosophical capacities. 
 
 The JVydya of Gotama was a method of Logic ; 
 The other yet it aimed at no less than to discover what- 
 systems. soevcr could bc known, and how to attain the 
 assurance of reality. Roar characterizes its idea of 
 God as coming " nearest to the Christian conception 
 of an Infinite and Personal Spirit." However this 
 may be, it pursues all objects of thought; and with 
 such fulness and definiteness in its forms of cognition 
 as to " allow a place for the treatment of every modern 
 science ; " and this purely in order to the " deliverance 
 of man from evil." ^ The Vais'eskika of Kanada is a 
 similar search for universal certitude, through an ex- 
 haustive analysis of categories in many respects more 
 
 » See the careful analysis of Hindu Systems hy Muller, in ZeiiscM. d. D. M. G., VI. 
 pp. 1-34 and 219-242. and VII. pp. 287-313 ; Madhusadana's Review of Hindu Litera- 
 ture in Weber's Indische Stitdien, I. 1-12; Duncker's Geschichte d. AUerthums, II. 
 163-173. 
 
SANKHYA. 379 
 
 searching and complete than those of Aristotle ; and 
 not without many striking divinations of physical laws 
 and phenomena, — such as an atomic system, the per- 
 ception of four primary elements, and of a finer ether 
 as vehicle of sound. ^ But this also was a baptism of 
 the whole field of human faculty and resource to the 
 same purpose of spiritual emancipation. Kanada 
 opens his Sutras with the words : " Let us unfold the 
 way of duty " {dharmd) . " Duty is that which leads 
 to wisdom and the highest good."^ To the same end 
 the Vedanta, or speculative portion of the Mimdnsd, 
 expounds the meaning of revelation and the unity of 
 the human soul with the divine. The Toga of Patan- 
 jali describes the disciplines by which that union is to 
 be achieved. Finally, the Karma Toga of the Bha- 
 gavadgita resumes the substance of all systems in 
 philosophical synthesis, and crowns them with a poetic 
 vision and a moral enthusiasm, that seem the triumphal 
 song of deliverance by Thought. Such the earnest- 
 ness of this old persistent study of the laws and pro- 
 cesses of mind.* 
 
 1 Roer's Tnmsl. of the Vais'eshika Philat. in Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., XXI. XXII. 
 
 2 Or, "which through exaltation leads to emanapation " (Ballantyne). — Banerjea 
 (Diaiogves 07i Hindu Philosophy) pronounces dharinit to "be only "class (or caste) duty." 
 But can any word, used as the generic expression of obligation, the synonym of oughit and 
 this in all systems and relations, mean nothing else than the performance of a given set of 
 observances ? The same word is used by Buddhists, who reject caste, to denote their jnaraX 
 law. It is used wherever we should use the word ought. But Mr. Banerjea thinks also 
 (p. 280) that all the schools are atheistic, because they are more or less pantheistic (jz^), 
 and because they do not teach "a Creator, separate from the world " {Pref., ix.). And 
 his true sage, the Christian Satyakama, is as credulous about Bible miracles and mysteries 
 as the philosophers he is refuting are towards the Vedic ones. " Duty,'' in Mr. Baneijea's 
 philosophy, " can only receive sanction from the will of a personal God." If this only means 
 thaf the principle of right doing implies intelligence as the root of being, and fountain of 
 law, it is of course admitted. But when, in illustration of the real meaning, we are told 
 that '* all idea of duty is repudiated in the Veddnta, because the human soul and deity are 
 there identical" (p. 83), we begin to comprehend how very much this author's notions of a 
 "personal God" have unfitted him to apprehend mystical piety and the unity of being 
 with its manifestations. 
 
 ' The subtleties of ^indu dialectics turn upon formulas and words, and are probably 
 
380 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 "This philosophy," says Gaudapada, in his com- 
 mentary on the Sankhya K^rika, " was im- 
 ofaTsiIk- parted to Kapila as a boat for crossing the 
 ^^ ocean of ignorance in which the world was 
 
 immersed." " Revelation," says the Karika itself, 
 "is ineffectual; for it is defective in some respects 
 and excessive in others. To know how to dis- 
 criminate perceptible principles from the One that 
 cannot be perceived, and from the thinking soul, is 
 better." ^ 
 
 The Sankhya, therefore, is rationalistic. It is care- 
 ful to define the principles of a true dialectic for the 
 discovery of truth. And its grounds of proof are 
 three : perception, inference, and right afiirmation, 
 which it further designates as a form of Sruti, or 
 "revelation."^ This last is declared by the com- 
 mentators to mean the Vedas ; but both Kapila and 
 the Karika mention it last in order of importance. 
 " The Sankhya," says Roer,^ " was frequently in op- 
 position to the doctrine of the Vedas, and sometimes 
 openly declared so. Although it referred to them, it 
 did so only when they accorded with its own doc- 
 trines ; and it rejected their authority in case of dis- 
 crepancy." 
 
 Kapila, after a Hindu way, was a positivist. He 
 The root did not trouble his mind with seeking a first 
 principle. Cause or Source of all. That were but 
 " regressus in infinitum." He did not demand how 
 
 carried to a degree of refinement never equalled elsewhere. Yet there is a Spartan, 
 or rather Stoic, simplicity about the plain rude \\i.\.%{ioles\ where hosts of pupils, generation 
 after generation, have plied these mental gymnastics under countless masters of the great 
 systems of philosophy, which profoundly impresses the European philosopher. Not less 
 striking is the rule of these dialectics that every one shall present the view of his opponent, 
 and exhaust all that can be said in its behalf, before refuting it and maintaining his own. 
 E. B. Cowell in Proceedings of Bengal Society^ June, 1867. 
 
 « Sankhjya K&rik&, II. » KArikA, V. » lutrod. to ivet&hatara. 
 
SANKHYA. 381 
 
 things came to be here, but what they are, and to 
 ■what end they are here. He took the reahties he felt 
 and saw, referred them to certain root principles as 
 primary and substantial, and made these his starting- 
 point for the discriminations which should teach the 
 truth of being. 1 And these primary substances or 
 "roots "^ he found to be two in number, and essentially 
 distinct; the one representing the material of which 
 the complex e:^perience of actual consciousness is 
 shaped ; and the other, its constant and inviolable be- 
 holder, representing the ideal essence for which it all 
 exists, and by virtue of whose higher presence it be- 
 comes of value. This latter substance he did not very 
 clearly define, except by contrast with the other : how 
 was it possible to define the ineffable freedom and 
 bliss of that life of which all experience but serves 
 to teach the transcendence ? But the point of moment 
 and the path of life was in knowing that such an ideal 
 personality really is and abides ; that the world exists 
 and experience is developed, for its sake ; and that 
 one can be delivered out of all the perturbations 
 and errors and blind subserviences which he finds 
 in his experience, into its pure freedom, light, and 
 peace. 
 
 This, as I understand it, is the substance of Kap- 
 ila's distinction between Prakriti, or "nature," and 
 Purusha, or " soul." It was at once speculative and 
 moral, it affirmed that each individual's action, pas- 
 sion, perception, had its value in and through its rela- 
 tion to an ideal personality above and beyond it, for 
 whose purposes it was working, and whose purity andi 
 freedom were constant and secure. 
 
 It has been usual to translate Prakriti by the terms 
 
 1 Aphorisms of Kafila, I. 68. « Ibid., I. 67. 
 
382 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 " nature " and " matter." But it certainly does not sig- . 
 nify either nature or matter, in the senses now 
 
 Superiority '' _^ _ . . , 
 
 of mind even given by US to those terms. Praknti^ means 
 inPraknti. ^ primary principle, a self-subsistent orig- 
 inal essence ; and in this sense " Mula (the root) 
 Prakriti" is taken by Kapila to represent the sub- 
 stratum of all experience, except Purusha, or Soul, 
 which is the other, and the ideal, root-principle for 
 which it exists. Prakriti " is not crude, visible, or 
 divisible matter," but that " first principle which was 
 taught in Greece also by Pythagoras, Plato, and Aris- 
 totle," and which in fact " has no property of body."^ 
 It is all-pervading, immutable, one, without cause or 
 end. It enfolds and evolves ^ -senses, without being 
 sense as distinct from spirit. It contains and evolves 
 mind also ; and this not in a materialistic sense, as a 
 mere outside -product of its creative power, — because 
 the great positive principle of Kapila is that, as there 
 is no production of sotnething out of nothing, the effect 
 already pre-exists in the cause, and like comes from 
 like only, just as " the act of the sculptor can only 
 produce the manifestation of the image . that was 
 already [ideally] in the stone." ^ Mind, therefore, 
 pre-exists in the essence of Prakriti, which conse- 
 quently cannot be mere " matter " as distinct from 
 mind. But Prakriti evolves both senses and mind, 
 only through the presence and purpose of " Soul," 
 which again must not be confounded with mind, as 
 thus evolved in a secondary, instrumental, and sense- 
 entangled form. 
 
 1 From pra, ie/ore, and kri, to make (procreo), indicating pre-existent, productive 
 forcCf 
 
 » Wikon's K&rik&, p. 82. 
 
 » Vijnana Bikhshu's commentary on tlie SSnkhya. Aphorisms, I. 78, 120. 
 
SANKHYA. 383 
 
 Prakrit! is also the equipoise, or essential substratum, 
 of the three gunas [or qualities] of " goodness, The three 
 foulness [or rather, appetence], and dark- ti"=>ii'«s. 
 ness," — elements which in a mixed, consorted, and 
 confused manner, are, as bonds (guna), involved in 
 all experience, moral and intellectual ; but which must 
 pass away, with all their blind gravitations, in the 
 serene light and liberty of " Soul." These gunas cer- 
 tainly cannot have been regarded as merely physical, 
 however related to the organs of sense, and the bodily 
 investment of mind. They correspond, probably, as 
 nearly as we can express them, to physical and moral 
 temperaments.^ Thus goodness is described as " en- 
 lightening," foulness as "urgent, or passionate," and 
 darkness as "heavy and enveloping." ^ The guna of 
 "goodness" is, it would seem, a temperamental, un- 
 discerning instinct for what is right and good. The 
 guna of " foulness " (or appetence) is that perturba- 
 tion of the passions, that blind headiness of desire, 
 that vehement grasp and cling upon things as if they 
 could not be spared, which blurs the sight, and stains 
 the motive, and enslaves the will. The guna of 
 " darkness " is the gloom of downward gravitation to a 
 sensual and brutish state. These products of Prakriti 
 are said to consort with each other, as resulting, in 
 different degrees and different aspects and directions, 
 from one and the same action.^ And these are in 
 equipoise and perpetual possibility, in Prakriti, as the 
 three streams are united in the Ganges.* 
 
 From this first principle or " primary root," this un- 
 
 ^ The Gnostics, in like manner, recognized three kinds of men, the ^neumaiical^ or 
 spiritual ; the fisyckical, attracted both to sense and spirit ; and the hylical, or material. 
 2 K&rika, XIII. > Ibid., XII. 
 
 • Comment. 0/ Gaudap&da on KArikA, XVI. 
 
384 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 changing essence of all things " mutable, discrete, mer- 
 The seven gent in their causes again," ^ come what Kap- 
 prindpies. jj^ calls the seveu "produced and productive 
 principles." They are called vikriti (from vi, differ- 
 ently, and kri, to make), indicating that they are not 
 external products made of nothing, but modifications 
 rather of the root itself. 
 
 These are (i) "Mahat," the Great one, called also 
 buddhi, or understanding, meaning doubtless Mind 
 in its active relations and consequent limitations ; 
 whence, (2) "Ahankara," self-consciousness, or ego- 
 ism; whence, (3) five "subtile rudiments," which are 
 the grounds of our cognition of sound, touch, smell, 
 form, and taste. And these seven powers potentiate for 
 us — or, as Kapilasays, "produce" — the five organs of 
 sensation, the five organs of action, and the five gross 
 elements, or lowest form of matter, to which is added 
 "manas," or »?2«£? as the percipient and sensitive ele- 
 ment, that refers them to a single consciousness.^ These 
 last are "products, but unproductive." And the outward 
 organs of sense are called the gates or doors, while 
 the higher internal forces that make these their means 
 of communication — namely, understanding, self-con- 
 sciousness, and sensibility — are called the warders.^ 
 
 " He who knows these twenty -five principles," says 
 The twenty- Kapila, "is liberated, whatever order of [social] 
 '™- life he may have entered." * 
 
 Now, of the seven productive principles that flow 
 Further from Prakriti, Mahat is further defined by its 
 definitions, faculties of " virtue, knowledge, and power:" 
 
 ' Aristotle says {Metaph., I. 3), that " there must be a certain permanent Nature, at 
 primary matter, from which other entities are produced, and wiiich remains in a state of 
 conservation." 
 
 » K&rika. Also, Aphorisms, I. 61 ; II. 17, 18. » K&riki, XXXV. 
 
 « GaudapSda on K&r., 1. 
 
SANKHYA. 385 
 
 virtue (or dharma) being the fulfilment of the duties 
 of humanity, and power being the " subjugation of 
 nature.'" Ahankara is egoism, or consciousness, 
 considered as involving the pride (abhimana) that, 
 for Hindu conscience, always vitiates the feeling of 
 individuality ; and the " self-sufficiency that says there 
 is no other supreme but me."^ Both " understanding" 
 and " egoism " are of course imperfect : the one as 
 affected by mental incompetency, error, and manifold 
 circumstance ; the other as the illusion of self-com- 
 placency. And their use is in subserving the spiritual 
 ideal, by pointing to somewhat beyond, and in con- 
 trast with themselves. What Kapila meant by the 
 " subtile rudiments" is not so easy to determine, — per- 
 haps some finer elementary substance, from which the 
 grosser organs were supposed to emanate ; but, more 
 probably, the subjective, intelligent ground involved 
 in sensation ; the perceptivity required for the act of 
 receiving outward impressions ; and this taken as 
 generator of the special senses themselves, — one sub- 
 tile form for each sense. 
 
 Concerning all this, we must observe that, as is 
 usual with Hindu thinking, so here, intelli- precedence 
 gence generates gross matter, not the reverse ; °' ""^"" 
 
 o o ' ' gence to 
 
 and if Prakriti, the root of these seven intelli- matter. 
 gent principles, is called "unconscious," this is meant 
 in no absolute sense, and in none that invalidates the 
 precedence of intelligence ; since, however uncon- 
 scious, it is still active ; and active, moreover, in serv- 
 ing a higher intelligence still ; " fulfilling the purposes 
 of soul, spontaneously and by an innate property ; its 
 instruments performing their functions by mutual in- 
 
 1 GaudapJda on K&r., XXIII. 
 
 ' Vachespati's Comment on K&r., XXIV. ; Aph., II. 16. 
 25 
 
386 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 vitation, the soul's purpose being the motive."^ "For 
 this alone does Prakriti act, to fulfil the soul's desire." ^ 
 
 Among the errors about the nature of soul which 
 constitute bondage, that of confounding it with matter,^* 
 or any of the products of Prakriti, is pronounced 
 by all Sankhyan authorities to be the most radical. 
 " Soul," says Kapila, " is something other than body ; 
 since what is combined, and so discerptible, is for the 
 sake of some other that is indiscerptible." " Soul is 
 not material, because it is the experiencer ; and because 
 of its superintendence over nature."* 
 
 Further : the principle of intelligent perceptive 
 power (mahat) is capable of discriminating 
 
 Soul distinct f ^_^ \ n-r.i--K i- 
 
 andsover- bctwccn Purusha and Prakriti ; ° and m so 
 "^' doing recognizes soul as superior to both 
 
 " nature " and itself, in consequence of its being intel- 
 ligence in a higher sense than itself. For soul, 
 according to Kapila, must not be confounded with 
 mind as such ; * having a higher form of knowledge ; 
 pure, independent, undisturbed vision. " Soul is the 
 seer, the spectator, bystander."'' Have we not here a 
 hint of intuition, in its distinction from o-pinion; of 
 the higher reason in contrast with the limits of the 
 understanding ? 
 
 I have said that Kapila, after a Hindu way, was a 
 positivist. But he certainly was not a mate- 
 
 Positivism ^ ^ _ -^ _ 
 
 in the sank- rialist. The Sankhya has plainly in many 
 ''^' respects a transcendental method and faith. 
 
 But what is the meaning of that " spontaneity and 
 innate property" of unconscious Prakriti, that inde- 
 pendent force by which it acts, even in " service of 
 
 « K&rik^ XXXI. 2 Ibid., XUI. ; Aph., II. 36, 37. 
 
 • Wilson's Comment, tm Kctr-t XLV. * Aphorums, I. 139, 142, 143. 
 
 » K&rikA, XXXVII. • Afh., I. 129, 130. 
 ' Aph., II. 29 ; KStrika, XIX. 
 
SANKHYA. 387 
 
 soul " ? Have we not here a germ of positive science ? 
 Is it any thing else than an instinctive presentiment of 
 natural law, and of the development of the world there- 
 by ? And is not the remanding of soul to the position of 
 a " witness and seer," not interfering with those innate 
 properties of spontaneous development, an imperfect 
 recognition of the invariability of natural law, and its 
 independence of all external volition or arbitrary in- 
 tervention ? I cannot find a better explanation than 
 this of his meaning, when, as if fascinated by the 
 self-adequacy of nature, he refers the orderly processes 
 of experience to modifications of an active but uncon- 
 scious principle. Yet the unconsciousness of Prakriti 
 is, as we have just seen, only relative to itself as pro- 
 cess, as mode, or as law. It stands in the closest rela- 
 tion to conscious intelligence, or soul, which, if not its 
 cause, is allowed to be the motive from which it acts 
 and the force which "superintends" it.^ These are 
 hints that soul, in the Sankhya, really means spirit 
 guiding the course of nature, though Kapila does not 
 seem to have followed them out. So the strictest 
 modern positivist must recognize in natural law that 
 unity, beauty, order, mystery, which are in fact repre- 
 sentative of whatever intelligence holds most worthy 
 of itself. 
 
 What does Kapila mean here by "soul" and its 
 " desire ".'' How does Prakriti point to that for whose 
 service it exists ? In other words, how does the actual 
 enforce faith in the ideal ? Here is the compact 
 answer to the last questions : — 
 
 " Since sensible objects are for use of another [than them- 
 selves] ; since the opposite of that which has the three qualities 
 must exist ; since there must be superintendence ; since there must 
 
 » K&rik&, XVII. ; Aphorisms, I. 142- 
 
388 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 be one to enjoy ; and since there is a drawing to abstraction, — that 
 is, since every one desires release, — therefore [know we that] 
 Soul is." ' 
 
 What then is Soul ? It is affirmed to be free from all 
 ^,,^t is qualities which produce the imperfections of 
 SO"!' experience, — free, therefore, from their activ- 
 
 ity or pursuit of special objects, which in experience 
 produces dependence, bondage, loss, and grief. As 
 steadfast, imperturbable, perfectly self-subsistent, it 
 must be related to the world of imperfect conditions 
 as a witness and a bystander only, not a participant 
 in these defects. 
 
 In other words, — as we should say, and as the 
 Hindu, in his fashion, says here, I think, quite clearly, 
 — an ideal capability stands fast in us, as the real sub- 
 stance of ourselves, untouched by the errors and stains 
 of life, unabated by its discouragements, with serenity 
 beholding them, as it were, in their real outwardness 
 to its own essence. 
 
 Yet this ideal essence, like the Hellenic-Hebrew 
 Souinot "Wisdom," though " remaining in itself, makes 
 reaUy bound, ^n things uew." It is constantly united with 
 Prakriti in the individual consciousness, and so ap- 
 pears to share in its infirmities, to be bound in 
 all the fetters of experience. But the appearance 
 is illusory. The soul is not really bound. In all 
 this confused activity, this unsatisfactory doing, it is 
 " the qualities " that are active, while the " stranger " 
 [soul] but appears the agent.^ It is like our con- 
 founding fire and iron in a heated bar, or sun and 
 water in reflections from a stream ; like the color of 
 glass when a rose is near it. It is illusion : " verbal ; 
 resides in the mind, not in the soul itself." ^ The soul 
 
 ' Karika, XVII. » Ibid., XX. » Afk., I. 58. 
 
SANKHYA. 389 
 
 cannot be bound. " Verily not any soul is bound, 
 or released, or transmigrates ; but nature (Prakriti) 
 alone is so, in relation to the variety of beings."^ 
 In other words, the bondage men feel is not essential 
 bondage ; ^ and thoroughly to know this by faith in 
 the soul as absolute, imperishable, and free,^ is libera- 
 tion. Plotinus, also, asserts the soul to be an essence 
 which miseries and changes cannot touch ; that these 
 reach only to the shadow of it, not the substance ; that 
 its bliss is in pure seeing, free of the blindness of ma- 
 terial desires and pursuits. How the soul comes to be 
 united with " nature," or the defects of experience, 
 Kapila does not ask. He accepts the fact. Whence 
 comes our ideal vision, is not the first, nor the main 
 question, nor soluble for the scientific understanding at 
 any time. For what end it is always with us, is the 
 point of moment. And Kapila's answer is that, prac- 
 tically, " union is for the sake of liberation." Till 
 true discrimination is attained, till the validity and 
 independence of this higher personality is appreciated, 
 there remains the illusion which is bondage and pain. 
 The lame and the blind are journeying, and agree to 
 help each other : the blind carries the lame on his 
 shoulders, and the journey is accomplished, since the 
 one can walk and the other show the way. So " soul " 
 conjoined with " nature," if it cannot move, can see ; 
 and " nature," if it cannot see, can advance under 
 guidance. Thus liberation is effected, and the jour- 
 ney ends.* The Sankhya loves to describe the essen- 
 tial good- will that resides in the process, arduous as it 
 is; the real harmony of ideal and actual, the friend- 
 ly purpose that animates this necessary illusion and 
 
 > K&rika, LXII. ; Aph., I. 160, 162. > Afh-, I. 7- 
 
 » Afh; I. 12, IS, 19. * K&rika, XXI. 
 
390 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 defect; the effort, as it were, of Prakriti herself to 
 deliver man from his pain. That man shall know 
 and discern her truth, — not that she hold him 
 bound in ignorance, — is her purport. Unconscious 
 nature lives and loves, in his desire. " As people 
 engage in acts to relieve desires, so nature to liberate 
 soul; generous, seeking no benefit, nature accom- 
 plishes the wish of ungrateful Soul." i Her evolution 
 goes on " for deliverance of each soul : " it is " done 
 for another's sake as for self." '^ Here is unity of 
 spirit plucked even from the abysses of speculative' 
 analysis, of essential distinction ! " Nothing," says 
 Gaudap^da, " is, in my opinion, more gentle than 
 Prakriti : once aware of having been seen, she does 
 not expose herself again to the gaze of soul." ^ How 
 delicate and genial is this sense of illusion, which 
 makes error vanish from the eyes of truth, as one 
 who knows she should not be seen ! 
 
 Similar ideas are found in the Gnostic systems. 
 And the fundamental principle of both philosophies 
 is the same. "Bondage is from misconception."* 
 It consists in errors about the nature of soul. If this 
 seems to ignore the moral element, we have seen that 
 the intellectual and the moral are closely associated in 
 the old philosophies of the Aryan race: that "knowl- 
 edge" involves entering into the nature of what is 
 known, becoming one with the ideal, through aban- 
 donment of all selfish and sensual interests. 
 
 All Oriental wisdom assumes to a greater or less 
 Moral reia- ^^^S'"^^ ^^e truth of the Platonic maxim, that to 
 tiorisofthis know virtue is to love it, and that whoso really 
 "^^ sees vices must shun them. That moral evil 
 
 ' K&rih&, LVIII. LX. > Ibid., LVI. 
 
 » Ibid., LXI. 4 ^^^._ III. 24. 
 
SANKHYA. 391 
 
 is from misconception, and is to be cured by the pure 
 vision of truth, is at least a principle tending to 
 purify the conscience, and urge it to the pursuit of 
 the real, to surrender of the shadow and the surface 
 to win the substance of virtue. In the absence of 
 that light which science lends to the conscience, the 
 moral effect of this absolute faith in right knowing must 
 have been relatively greater than that of distinctively 
 intellectual motives at the present day. 
 
 The Sankhya is philosophy rather than ethics ; and 
 its aphorisms do not enter definitely into the „ , . , 
 
 .... Ethical 
 
 special disciplines by which pure " soul " was value of the 
 to be I'eached. Yet the very substance of its ^^°'*5^ 
 " discrimination " is the preference of higher to lower 
 principles ; of the eternal to the transient ; of ideal 
 personality to self-centred individuality ; of spirit to 
 sense ; of duty to desire. And the sum of those 
 "defects of the understanding" which cause "delay of 
 liberation " is distinctly defined to be " acquiescence ;"^ 
 the self-complacency that causes it to stop short of that 
 perfect sacrifice by which truth is fully known. 
 
 Of the forms of such "acquiescence," four are in- 
 ternal. The first relates to nature, and consists in 
 merely recognizing principles as of nature, without 
 going further ; the second, to means, a mere depend- 
 ance on observance ; the third, to time, a mere wait- 
 ing, as if liberation would come in good season ; the 
 fourth, to luck, expecting it to turn up by chance. 
 The other, or external, kinds of acquiescence, are 
 forms of abstinence from objects, merely because of 
 the trouble and anxiety they bring. ^ 
 
 The practical philosophy of the Sankhya, as far as 
 
 » K&rika, I ^ GaudapSda on K&r., L. 
 
392 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 it can be seen in the Aphorisms, in fact, reminds us of 
 the manly precepts of the later Stoic and the breadth 
 of the Eclectic schools. 
 
 " Not in a perturbed mind does wisdom spring." 
 
 " The lotus is according to the soil it grows in." 
 
 " Success is slow ; and not even, though instruction be heard, is 
 the end gained without reflection." 
 '" Not by enjoyment is desire appeased." 
 
 " Go not, of thine own will, near to one driven by strong desire." 
 
 " He who is without hopes is happy." 
 
 " Though one devote himself to many teachers, he must take the 
 essence, as the bee from flowers."' 
 
 How far the sacrifice must be carried may be learned 
 Limits of from the following decisive aphorism of the 
 
 .tif-abnega- K^rika : — 
 
 tion. 
 
 " Liberation obtained through knowledge of the twenty-five princi- 
 ples teaches the one only knowledge, — that neither I am, nor is 
 aught mine, nor do I exist." ' 
 
 Such is Wilson's translation, which doubtless a little 
 periphrasis would make more intelligible to the Teu- 
 tonic mind. 
 
 How are we to understand such a statement as this? 
 If it were the language of sentiment, instead of being, 
 as it is, a positive aphorism of philosophy, it might 
 find its equivalents in the mystical piety of every age. 
 That it should here mean either nihilism, or the " desire 
 of annihilation," is plainly impossible. We have seen 
 that even the Vedanta, in resolving all existence into 
 illusion', except the life of the soul in the absolute and 
 eternal, taught no such purpose of self-destruction. 
 Can we then imagine this to be, in any sense, compati- 
 ble with the intense realism of Kapila, who firmly 
 insists not only that nature is a positive principle and 
 
 > Apt; IV. s /C&riid, LXIV. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 393 
 
 entity,! but that soul is not one, but many ; and that 
 each of these souls is a unit, or monad, real and 
 imperishable?^ The whole aim of the Sankhya is 
 liberation "^for the sake of this" which is the -prosper 
 ■personality , and nowise to be lost, nor merged, nor 
 marred. Kapila indeed takes special pains to declare 
 that "the soul's aim is not annihilation."* And the 
 commentators on the verse above quoted explain it to 
 mean that the one true wisdom is "difference from 
 egotism," and "exemption from being the seat of 
 pain;" i.e., from the errors and bonds of the under- 
 standing in its consciousness of agency.* " By these 
 expressions, — 'neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor 
 do I exist,' — we are not to understand negation 
 of soul. This would be direct contradiction to the 
 Sankhya categories. It is intended merely as nega- 
 tion of the soul's having any active participation, in- 
 dividual interest, or property, in human pains and 
 human feelings. The verse does not amount, there- 
 fore, as Cousin has supposed, to "le nihilisme absolu, 
 dernier fruit du skepticisme." ^ 
 
 It should seem that the term ^^ human ^^ in Wilson's 
 explanation, as indicating what is to be dismissed from 
 the life in liberation, covers too large a ground ; since 
 the soul, as Kapila conceives it, is properly the very 
 essence of our humanity, and all human experience is 
 for its sake.^ 
 
 Yet, inasmuch as in Hindu thought knowledge of 
 soul can be attained only by becoming soul, it Disparage- 
 would follow that the interests of the body, "utL^d. 
 
 ^ Aph.,l.n; VI. S3. 
 
 * Aph.f I. 144, 149-151. "As the elements are real, so is the soul real." YS.jnaV't 
 III. 149- 
 
 ' Afh., I. 47. ' Chandriki, quoted by Wilson, p. 180. 
 
 5 Wilson, p. 181. » Afh., II. 46. 
 
394 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and properly the body itself, must pass away before 
 liberation, in the pure and perfect sense, can be 
 achieved. Disparagement of man's physical and 
 practical relations is of course the weak point in this 
 as in all Oriental philosophy. Kapila's insistence 
 on the "isolation" of soul, and its distinction from 
 "nature," involves a constant endeavor to separate the 
 two in the interest of the former, which even his 
 realistic view of " nature," and his perception of her 
 essential sympathy with the " aim of soul," cannot 
 counteract. Thus while he affirms that liberation is 
 possible in this life, and without the dissolution of 
 the body, he is careful to explain that, when this is 
 attained, soul remains invested with body only as the 
 potter's wheel continues to whirl, after the potter has 
 left it, by the impetus previously given. ^ The aspira- 
 tion after purely spiritual existence in the present life 
 has produced similar disparagement of outward rela- 
 tions in Christianity also, from the New Testament 
 down to the renaissance-epoch in modern Europe, and 
 even till the recent growth of physical science. Its 
 asceticism could only be counterbalanced by social 
 interests and practical aims ; and these have but fol- 
 lowed up the "necessary discriminations" insisted 
 on by the Kapilas and other rationalists of old, with a 
 higher synthesis of soul and sense. 
 
 But, liberation not being accomplished in this life, 
 Lin or ^o'^y '^^s, according to the Sankhya, not 
 spiritual escaped at death. It accompanied the soul 
 '°°^^- still, in its subtile form, the linga Sarira? 
 or " spiritual body," which consisted of all those prin- 
 ciples and rudimental elements which flow from Prak- 
 
 » K&rika, LXVII. 
 
 * Linga signifies a characteristic, or mark, ^arira is the iodji. 
 
SANKHYA. 395 
 
 riti, with the exception of the enveloping gross organs 
 and bodily frame ; these, and only these, perishing at 
 death. The linga, with all its component parts, — un- 
 derstanding, egoism, and the subtile organs that serve 
 them, — is subject to transmigratioil, requires the sup- 
 port of a special vehicle or body, and ceases only with 
 the process of liberation, and the full realization of 
 soul.^ 
 
 Here Kapila stops. He does not tell us what he 
 holds this life of realized soul to be, save in its Kapiia's 
 difference from all present experiences through '*'™'- 
 the understanding, from all our self-conscious feeling 
 and action. Not his to describe the end, but to state 
 the distinctions that condition it, and to hint the way 
 to it. But the implication seems to be, that with the 
 fulfilment of man's highest ideal comes the ineffable 
 reality, which we can neither understand nor con- 
 ceive ; but to which all that we see, and know, and 
 feel, and dream ourselves the doers and possessors of, 
 is but the imperfect and transient means ; the deaf, 
 dumb, and blind servant of a secret which its finiteness 
 helps, by very contrast, to reveal. 
 
 The substance is this. There is a reality, abid- 
 ing eternally, to know which is life, and be-Hisaffirma- 
 fore which all other intelligence, as Paul says ''™- 
 of " tongues and prophecies and knowledge," shall 
 " vanish away." And as the apostle's reason for the 
 evanescence of these is that " we know in part, and 
 prophesy in part, and when that which is perfect is 
 come that which is in part must be done away," Kap- 
 ila would probably ask why the specially Christian 
 faith, hofe, and love, which Paul thought sure to 
 
 ^ The BJtagav. Gitd says that, " when spirit abandons a body, it migrates, taking with it 
 its senses, as the wind wafts along with itself the perfume of the fiowers." 
 
396 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 abide when knowledge shall have been proved a vain 
 thing, must not also, as being in like wise imperfect 
 and partial, pass away when that which is perfect is 
 come. And shall we not hear Kapila and Socrates as 
 well as Jesus and Paul ? Are ideals of pure knowledge 
 essentially less adequate than ideals of faith and love, 
 if these disparage knowledge? Will not the future 
 insist on the necessity of independent seeing, in order 
 to right believing and true helping, — on the unity 
 of science and love? 
 
 For fuller understanding of this interestmg system, 
 The Aphor- let US revicw its leading characteristics, with 
 isms. special illustration from the aphorisms ascribed 
 to Kapila himself. 
 
 The Sankhya proves the capacity of Hindu genius 
 Differences for 3. vcry different form of thought from that 
 an/sSk-'' which wc havc been tracing through the mys- 
 hya. tical unities of the Vedanta. There is no pas- 
 
 sive receptivity of mind, no dissolving of distinctions 
 in the infinite as the only real. Precisely the opposite. 
 The word Sankhya refers us to numbers as definite 
 entities: it means to distinguish, to weigh, to judge. 
 "Learn to discriminate, and be free," was the precept 
 of this philosophy ; and that it was needed in Indian 
 thought has already become sufficiently plain. 
 
 Both Vedanta and Sankhya aim at spiritual emanci- 
 pation. But the one assumes absolute unity, and 
 seeks freedom by solving all distinctions therein ; the 
 other assumes essential distinction, as between " soul " 
 and blind " natural " forces, and seeks freedom by dis- 
 solving the bondage which consists in confounding 
 them. 
 
 The Vedanta affirms all spirit to be absolutely one : 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 397 
 
 the Sankhya recognizes the diversity of persons as 
 real. So that while the Vedantist escapes bondage 
 when he sees himself to be one with Brahma, the 
 S&nkhyan is free when he knows himself as really 
 separate from all blind and confused conceptions, all 
 crude, intractable material in the natural order of ex- 
 perience. "To know that one was not bound when 
 one seemed to be so, — this," says Kapila, " is libera- 
 tion." So the Vedantist could say, but hardly in the 
 interest of individual being. For him the real soul 
 was free, in that its substance, was not in the indi- 
 vidual self, but in God. For the other it was free, in 
 that it was itself substance, as individual, which bon- 
 dage could not really touch. The Nyaya, also, 
 affirms individual souls to be real, eternal, and even 
 infinite.^ - 
 
 For the Vedantist, bondage was unreal, because the 
 ego that was bound and the phenomenal world which 
 bound it were alike void of essential life. 
 
 For the Sankhyan, bondage was unreal, because 
 while the world that seemed to bind it was granted 
 real, the true ego, also real, for ever stood beyond its 
 power. Definite forms of existence were maya (illu- 
 sion.) for the one : bondage itself, bondage alone, was 
 maya for the other. 
 
 The Sankhya is analytic, as the Vedanta is synthe- 
 tic. It reacts against the very idea of unity ; and, so 
 far as is possible, avoids it; being, in fact, not a sys- 
 tem of theology at all, but a system of analytic phi- 
 losophy in the interest of individual (speculative and 
 moral) freedom. Without denying an ulterior synthe- 
 sis, it affirms its two primary principles, Purusha (the 
 soul) and Prakriti ("nature"), which again are divis- 
 
 ^ Colebrooke's Analysis, Essays, I. 268. 
 
398 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ible ; since of souls there is multiplicity, and of Prak- 
 riti there is a primal and also a developed, " phe- 
 nomenal," form. 
 
 Prakriti, "rootless (or primary) root," is not, let us 
 Meaning of oncc more note, material nature in any abso- 
 Piakriti. i^jj-g sense ; since, as developed through contact 
 with " soul," it appears in a series of evolutions, of 
 which the first member is apprehension, and the sec- 
 ond self-consciousness, or self-will, the egoistic ele- 
 ment ; out of which, as Hindu thought is wont to make 
 mind precedent and body derivative, are generated the 
 subtile organs and gross body of sensation and action.^ 
 To explain the real meaning of the conception, we 
 have the further fact that Prakriti is also the original 
 equipoise or latent potentiality of three psychological 
 qualities, evolved in man through its union with mind,^ 
 — the ascending quality {sattva, or goodness), allied 
 to essence and light ; the impulsive, ungoverned ro- 
 tating quality {rajas, or passion) ; and last, the down- 
 ward-tending quality of weight and darkness {tamas, 
 or irrationality). Of this triplicity of qualities, which 
 runs through the whole of Hindu thought, and which 
 has formed substantially the basis of psychological 
 conceptions in other races also, Prakriti was the mere 
 potential ground, or indifference, generating them in 
 definite forms, only through union with soul, itself 
 unconscious ; " energizing spontaneously, not by 
 thought," yet really existing as Prakriti, in these 
 qualities, the phenomena of mind. 
 
 From all which, we can perhaps divine the meaning 
 of the word in this subtle system of analytics. Prak- 
 riti cannot be dead matter ; nor is it independent mind. 
 It indicates simply, in my judgment, an effort to ex- 
 
 ' Aiih., I. 71, 73; II. 16, 18. ^.Afh., III. 48-50. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 399 
 
 press that mysterious interweaving of unconscious and 
 active powers, which obscures the relation of mind 
 with body, not to Hindu vision only, but lo all human 
 insight hitherto attained. 
 
 Over against this, Kapila posits essential man , 
 seeking to lift the conception as far as possible Meaning of 
 above these sources of error, confusion, and i'"™'ia. 
 consequent bondage, with which man is phenomenally 
 connected, and to affirm his inalienable ideal sover- 
 eignty. "Soul (purusha) is;"^ and it is substantial 
 and valid in every individual soul ; not competent 
 merely to liberate itself from this blind Prakriti and 
 its bondage of illusions, but in and of itself vitally 
 and for ever free, the ultimate force " for whose service 
 this exists and energizes." Hence it is seen only 
 when felt as throned serene behind the warfare of life, 
 inviolate ; a witness and seer in itself, " neither agent 
 nor patient," though taking the tinge of qualities by 
 reflection merely, so as to appear both the one and 
 the other, just as glass reflects the color of the object 
 near it ; and moving the organs " by proximity only," 
 through some subtle authority lying behind contact, 
 and of a higher quality than that; as the loadstone 
 moves the iron, or a king his army through orders 
 and not by engaging in the fight.'"* A grand concep- 
 tion, or divination by pure intellect, of the authority 
 of mind over circumstance, and of the impossibility 
 of final moral and spiritual failure. This is to lay 
 a noble basis for psychology and theology in the 
 dignities of personal being ; and for that inward union 
 with imperishable principles which lifts it above 
 transiency and loss. It is the afiirmation of ideal 
 ■personality, in a very high form. 
 
 ' Apk.y VI. I. 2 Aiih., I. io6; II. 29; I. 96. 
 
400 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Here then the two principles ; not absolute duality, 
 Not pure since Prakriti is said to generate _/br the sake 
 dualism. qJ^ {/ig souI, and thus soul alone is declared 
 really and absolutely to be. Yet the S^nkhya makes, 
 no systematic effort to reduce the two to one, nor even 
 to urge the unity of either with itself. It is too much 
 absorbed in the endeavor to distinguish the proper 
 personality from temporary illusions, overmastering 
 passions, and special solicitudes, and too thoroughly 
 possessed by its glad vision of the soul as divine 
 repose, as free beholding, as pure transcendence. So 
 the substance of its insight is freedom ; its watch- 
 word, "the separateness (or detachment) of soul.''^ 
 
 So profoundly was the Hindu mind prepossessed 
 bv the synthetic tendency, that an analytic 
 
 Rationalism J J , .< _ .'_ 
 
 ofthe sank- process was but natural reaction, sundermg 
 ""^ the elements, and drawing forth their respec- 
 
 tive validities. Thus the Sankhya takes special pains 
 to prove, against Vedantic absorption of the many in- 
 to the One, that there is a real multiplicity of souls?' 
 And it explains the Vedic texts which affirm the one- 
 ness of soul, as referring simply to the comprehen- 
 siveness of " genus." ' 
 
 The Sankhya is rationalistic, as the Vedanta is 
 pietistic. It is sceptical, as the other is believing. 
 It is active criticism, as the other is unquestioning 
 faith. It appeals to common sense and realistic per- 
 ception against the unbalanced mysticism that merely 
 absorbed all things into one. It is an effort to escape 
 from this into the true sense of spiritual being, by 
 concentration on perception, inference, testimony, and 
 the exclusion of all causes of false notions.* 
 
 » Afh; v. 65 ; yi. I, 70. ! Ibid., I. i4»-isi. 
 
 » Ibid., I. 154. « Ibid., I. 87, 89 100. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 401 
 
 The Vedanta in its best form recognizes that the 
 highest truth cannot be reached by the study ,. 
 
 '^ _ •' - Liberties. 
 
 of the Vedas, and that the wise may " throw 
 them by, as one who seeks grains the chaff." Its 
 piety left paths open out of the bibliolatry that beset 
 its schools. 
 
 But the Sankhya made a more radical protest ; 
 for it starts from postulates of reason, not of xreatmem 
 faith. The worship of the letter, the author- °f"'="^^'>^- 
 ity of a book, must cease. Kapila declares plainly, 
 The Veda is not eternal :» it is not supernatural nor 
 superhuman ; its meaning does not transcend the com- 
 mon intuition. He who understands the secular mean- 
 ings of words can understand their sense in the Veda. 
 There is no special bible sense ; there is no authorit}' 
 of scriptures apart from their self-evidence and the 
 fruit of their teaching. They do not proceed from a 
 supreme Person (I^wara) ; for since one liberated 
 could not desire to make them, and one unliberated 
 could not have power, no such supreme Man or Lord 
 can have been their author. They are there; a breath 
 of self-existence ; a fact in other -words, traceable to 
 no special mind. That is all that can be said.i Kap- 
 ila, it is true, on the other hand, did not dispute the 
 Vedas. But he called them " self-evident conveyers 
 of right knowledge, through the patentness of their 
 power to instruct rightly." ^ In other words, he rested 
 his respect for them on their appeal to his own reason, 
 and judged them by their tendencies. What he found 
 contrary to his intuition and his judgment, he ascribed 
 to such and such a motive, and quietly set it aside.* 
 Their central idea of unity, for instance, he disposes- 
 
 I Afh., V. 40-51. " Aph., V. SI. 
 
 ' Roer, Introd. to ^zietSfvatara Ufan., p. 36. 
 
 26 
 
402 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of thus: "Such texts as, 'all is soul alone,' are there 
 ' for the sake of the undiscriminating,' ' to help the 
 weak to meditation.' " ^ In view of all this, it can 
 hardly be supposed that Kapila allowed absolute 
 authority to the Vedas. Decidedly, criticism of the 
 " holy text " has here begun. Its later development 
 forms a striking feature of the Buddhist and Puranic 
 systems, which, in the main, follow the Sankhya.^ 
 
 " Scriptural rites and forms are but works : they are not the 
 OfrituaUsm. c^ief end of man." ' ^ 
 
 " Pain to victims must bring pain to the sacrificer of 
 them." ■• 
 
 How indeed, with his intense conviction of the free- 
 dom of the soul, could Kapila believe that any outward 
 conformities would satisfy its desire ? To know itself 
 is its wisdom and its rest. Here is what he says 
 of it : — 
 
 " Soul is other than body ; not material, because overseeing 
 Of spiritual physical nature, and because, while this is the thing ex- 
 lib^rties. perienced, the soul it is that experiences." ^ 
 
 " Atoms are not the cause of it, for atoms have neither pleasure 
 nor pain."" 
 
 " Light does not pertain to the unintelligent, and the soul is 
 essential light." ' 
 
 "Mind, as product of undiscerning activity (Prak- 
 riti) and as made of parts, is perishable, but noi soul." ^ 
 It is an error to mistake even mind, as such, for soul.® 
 
 " Only soul can be liberated ; because only that can 
 be isolated, in which blind, changeful quahties are but 
 reflected, and do not constitute its essence." '" Simply, 
 
 » A/&., V. 63, 64. « Wilson's Essays. 
 
 ' A/h., I. 82. 4 Ibid., I. 84. 
 
 5 Ibid., I. 139-142. « Ibid., I. 113. 
 
 ' Ibid., I. 14s. » Ibid , I. 136; V. 70-73. 
 
 • Ibid, I. 129. 10 Ibid., I. 144. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 403 
 
 as we have seen, a form of expressing that pure in- 
 dependence which this system claims for spiritual 
 substance, or rather for spiritual integrity. 
 
 " The soul is solitary, uncompanioned : it is constant freedom, a 
 witness, a seer." ' 
 
 " Liberation is not through works, which are tran- 
 sient; nor through the worship of the All, whatuber- 
 which must be mingled with fancies about the *''°° "=■ 
 world ; "^ " nor through the desire of heaven, for that 
 desire is to be shunned."** "It is not the excision 
 of any special qualities ; not possessions, nor magic 
 powers ; not going away to any world, since soul is im- 
 movable, and does not go away ; not conjunction with 
 the rank of gods, which is perishable ; not absorption 
 of the part into the whole ; not destruction of all ; not 
 the void, — nor yet joy:"* but more and better than 
 all these, to know the difference which separates the 
 lindiscerning movement of qualities, or tendencies to 
 goodness, passion, and darkness in the senses and 
 the mind, from free spiritual being, and so "to thirst 
 no more ; " ^ "a work not of a moment, but of that 
 complete concentration and devotion, which has many 
 obstacles." * 
 
 How finely affirmative through all this negation is 
 Kapila's appeal to pure reason to prove that Appeal to 
 bondage is not essential to the soul ; ^ that for '■^'^™- 
 ever, within man, whether he knows it or not, and lifted 
 above the possibility of subjection to evil, witness and 
 yeer, watching and waiting its hour, indefeasible and 
 inviolate, is the principle of purity and freedom ! ^ 
 " To know the difference, and that one was not bound 
 
 1 Aph., V. 6s ; I. 162; II. 29. ^ Afh., III. 26, 27. 
 
 » Ibid., III. 52. , * Ibid., V. 74-83. 
 
 6 Ibid., II., Vijn^na Bhikshu's Introd.; so Svet&hatara, III. 10; IV. 7-17. 
 « Ibid., II. 3. ' Aph; I. 7, &c. ' A^h., I. 162. 
 
404 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 when one seemed to be so,"^ — is Kapila's idea of 
 " liberation ; " and he knew it was not to be reached 
 without paying the price in all that surrender of lower 
 desires on which he insists. 
 
 To take all this on the authority of pure Reason ; 
 to believe it because it seemed most rational and be- 
 coming, and so to stake the issues of life upon it, — is 
 surely an achievement for all ages and religions to 
 respect. 
 
 For this great work of liberation, Prakriti is but an 
 „. , instrument. She, the really bound, "binds 
 
 All IS for -' _ 
 
 man's ideal hcrsclf seven ways, but becomes liberated in 
 ^'' one form only," which is " knowledge " of the 
 
 truth of things.^ All is thus for the ideal life of man. 
 "The soul is the seer, the organs are its instruments."* 
 " Creation is for the soul's sake, from Brahma down 
 to a post; till there be liberation thereof."* "Nature 
 serves soul like a born slave ;" " creates for its sake, as 
 the cart carries saffron for its master."^ And " sense " 
 itself becomes " supersensuous " through this necessity 
 for mind as the explanation of its phenomena. " It is 
 a mistake to suppose that sense is identical with that 
 in which it is seated." ^ 
 
 That all this inherent sovereignty is ascribed to 
 Is the sink- ^^^'y individual soul, and the "multiplicity of 
 hyaathe- souls " iusistcd on, has been thought to involve 
 unbelief in unity of essence above this multi- 
 plicity of individuals ; and hence the division into 
 " Theistic " and " Atheistic " Sankhya ; Kapila being 
 regarded as representative of the latter, and Patanjali 
 of the former. 
 
 It is true that Kapila's jealousy for the freedom 
 
 > Afh., I. I5S- " Afh., III. 73- » Afh., II. 29. 
 
 « Ibid., III. 47- ' Ibid., III. 51 ; VI. 40. • Ibid., II. 23. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 40s 
 
 and self-subsistence of spirit carried liim to the fur- 
 thest possible isolation of its essence, in each and 
 every individual being, from finite conditions. But 
 the Sankhya cannot, even in his logic, be called athe- 
 istic. On the contrary, as Bunsen has noticed, " God, 
 regarded as the undivided Unity, therefore the eternal 
 essence of minds when perfected, is an assumption, or 
 postulate, running through the whole system, like 
 that of the existence of light in a treatise on colors ; " 
 and fairly inferrible, as a " Divine Order of the Uni- 
 verse," from the "recognition of reason, knowledge, 
 righteousness, as common attributes of these individ- 
 ual minds." ^ And the latest translator of the Bhaga- 
 vadgit^, in an elaborate review of Hindu philosophy, 
 asserts, from a point of view quite different from Bun- 
 sen's, that the Sankhya "not only does not deny the 
 existence of a Supreme Being, but even hints at it in 
 referring the emanation of individual souls to a spirit- 
 ual essence gifted with volition."^ The idea of a 
 multiplicity of souls, real, endless, and eternally dis- 
 tinct from body, is not inconsistent with theism ; since 
 the Nyaya, which follows the Sankhya in this belief, 
 also declares the Supreme Soul (Paramatma) to be 
 "one, eternally wise, and the source of all things."^ 
 It is curious to note how similar, in many respects, 
 is Patanjali's description, in his theistic Yoga* sys- 
 tem, of an " Isivara," or Lord, to that which Kapila 
 gives of "Soul," — "untouched by troubles, works, 
 fruits, or deserts." Were not both seeking, each in 
 his own way, the spiritual ideal in its independence of 
 limit or change? Kapila could not have admitted 
 
 1 Gud in History, I. 336- 
 
 » Thomson's Bhag. Giti, IrUrod., p. Iviii. Such definite reference to emanation I have 
 not been able to find in Kapila. 
 
 » Colebrooke's Esmys, 1. 168. * " Yoga " means amjunctum (with deity). 
 
406 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 an liwara, like that of the Yoga, who is in one sense 
 distinct from all actual souls ; yet his conception of soul 
 itself afforded ample basis for the idea of infinite Mind. 
 Theistic scholiasts on Kapila's aphorisms affirm that 
 his denial of an Iswara is but hypothetical, not abso- 
 lute. It would have been more correct to say that it 
 did not deny central and immanent deity. 
 
 In truth it was Kapila's function to apply a disinte- 
 grating analysis to the monarchical su-pernaturalistic, 
 as well as to the blindly pantheistic, conceptions of his 
 time. 
 
 He simply shows that there is no evidence of an 
 Iswara, or Lord, — that is, of a " governor of nature," 
 in such a sense as the separation of soul from nature 
 aiid its isolation as witness forbade ; one, namely, 
 whose action would involve imperfection ; 1;he sway of 
 some " passion " or desire ; a certain needy " working 
 for his own benefit or glory, like a worldly lord ; " ^ 
 one whose interference should be necessary to the 
 retributions of conduct, — an inadmissible condition, 
 in his view ; since works produced their consequences 
 by having their law for ever in themselves. Christian 
 theology also has its Is'wara. The interfering, self- 
 interested Providence, the " deus ex machina " of the 
 supernaturalist, is found in all religions, whether in 
 early or late stages, wherever there is an unreasoning 
 faith. It was this idea of a mechanical Deity that 
 Kapila seems to have rejected so positively in the 
 name of an inherent virtue in the constant course of 
 things ; the adequacy of those laws of being which he 
 sought to unfold. And the like protest of rationalism 
 returns to-day, at the culmination of a Semitic faith 
 also, with similar sanctions and justifications. The 
 
 ' A^h., V. 3, 4, 6. 
 
SANKHYA. 
 
 407 
 
 selfishness of a God who could create man " for his 
 own glory," and interfere capriciously with the laws 
 he has made, renders denial of such Iswara a duty 
 still. 
 
 All this is not positive piety, not heartfelt theism. 
 But neither is it atheism. It does not deny deity to 
 spirit. It denies creation and interference ab extra, 
 by spirit ; and this, in order to exalt it above all that is 
 conditional, and to isolate it so. that it may affirm its 
 own highest ideal of freedom and self-subsistence. 
 And, with all its emphasis on the multiplicity of souls, 
 it constantly describes soul as such, — not souls, but 
 soul, — as if it were indeed but one in essence, after 
 all : one of those unconscious confessions, by which 
 all reasoning assumes the necessity of primal unity ; in 
 other words, of God. Love indeed does not move in 
 these depths of logic. But the intellect also has its 
 work to do, and we have here a legitimate form of this 
 work. 
 
 If Kapila is not distinctly ethical and theistic, it is, 
 we repeat, because he is not teaching a religion, but a 
 system of analytic philosophy; because the Sankhya 
 is a criticism, not a confession of faith. If it is in- 
 complete ; if it does not fuse its own elements and 
 reconcile its own poles of thought, it is yet a protest 
 against the one-sided mysticism and supernaturalism, 
 which do not sufficiently guard the dignity and seren- 
 ity of spirit, in the form under which they conceive its 
 relation to the world. 
 
 It was in fact found easy to develop out of the 
 Sankhya those very elements of universal 5-^^^ of the 
 religion which it failed of positively affirming, sankhya. 
 Its intellectual criticism was the condition and germ 
 at once of the purest theism and the most practical 
 
408 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 humanity in Oriental history ; of lessons in love and 
 worship which Christendom cannot afford to despise 
 nor to ignore. 
 
 Its clear separation of soul from sense was unfolded 
 into the theistic Sankhya and the Karma Yoga of 
 the Bhagavadgita, in which the old Vedantic panthe- 
 ism is inspired with the thought of deity as both inde- 
 pendent and providential ; as at once purely spiritual, 
 and the All in all. 
 
 Its free dealing with bibliolatry and tradition., its 
 appeal to practical reason, and its trust in the ade- 
 quacy of the dialectic faculty, issued not only in the 
 independence of the best Puranas ; but, far better than 
 this, in the pure democracy and boundless brother- 
 hood of Buddhism, — a gospel of " mercy for all." 
 
 Had those contemplative philosophies been so par- 
 alyzing to the heart and will as they would at first 
 seem, they could not have afforded groundwork, for 
 even a reaction to this great impulse, Oriental in its 
 scale and ardor, to emancipate the world through 
 love. 
 
 Our review of Hinduism already justifies us in af- 
 instinctof firming that the profound intuition of Unity 
 Unity. traversed the whole field of desire and belief, 
 and that in this one branch of the Aryan race it found 
 scope for revealing those great typical moulds in 
 which its aspirations are elsewhere found to grow. 
 
III. 
 
 THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 'T^HE date of the Bhagavadgita, or " Divine Lay," 
 the most important episode of the Ma- ^hc Divine 
 habharata, although uncertain, cannot be far ^v- 
 distant on either side from the beginning of the Chris- 
 tian era.^ It embodies, in the form of dialogue, a 
 revelation by Krishna, as incarnation of the Supreme, 
 to the hero Arjuna, on the field of Kuru ; and the 
 armies of two opposing dynasties, about to join battle, 
 are drawn up in silence to await the close of this 
 transcendental communion between the man and the 
 god. Its initial motive is to remove the scruples of 
 the prince against destroying human life, which- have 
 paralyzed his power to fulfil the duties of a soldier 
 and a ruler. To this end it celebrates the sovereignty 
 of the soul over the body, its eternal essence, which 
 death cannot harm, and the fulfilment of personal 
 duty as the way of life and the path of glory. The 
 use of such arguments to reconcile men to the sternest 
 obligations involved in a state of war is itself an im- 
 pressive illustration of the power of ideal interests. 
 It contrasts favorably with the use of arguments from 
 immortality to justify the destruction of the heretic's 
 body in order to save his soul from eternal woe, or to 
 
 ' Thomson's transl,, ItUrod., p. cxiv. ; Lassen's Pre/ace, p. xxxvi. 
 
412 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 make the threat of future punishment more appalling.* 
 The meditations of Arjuna before a Hindu epic battle 
 contrast in many ways with the prayers of Cromwell's 
 soldiers before a real English one. They are, how- 
 ever, alike in the recognition of ideal relations in the 
 sternest actual work. 
 
 But this is incidental to the great purpose of the 
 poem, which covers the whole ground of theology, 
 philosophy, and ethics. It is the final flower of 
 Hindu intellect and piety ; the summary reconciliation 
 and poetic fusion of the best elements that preceded 
 it in the mystical, rationalistic, and practical schools. 
 
 It is better known to modern scholars than any 
 other production of Oriental genius ; having been 
 again and again edited with rare critical industry, re- 
 sulting in the statement of Schlegel, based on diligent 
 comparison of a great number of manuscripts, that 
 the differences between these are almost impercep- 
 tible; while Lassen, after a still more extended use 
 of materials, adds but fifteen slight emendations.^ 
 The disagreement among translators and critics on 
 here and there a passage^ interferes in no degree 
 with our sense of possessing an accurate transcript 
 of this, the most important of all records of Eastern 
 faith, into the languages of the West.* And the en- 
 thusiasm of its European students almost rivals that 
 veneration which in India has assigned it a place 
 not inferior in dignity and authority to the Vedas 
 themselves.^ 
 
 Wilhelm von Humboldt celebrates it as " the most 
 
 > See Matt. xii. 32 ; xxv. 41. a Lassen, p. xxxiv. 
 
 » See especially WUson's criticisms on Lassen and Schlegel (Essays on Sa?iks. Litero' 
 iurei vol. iii.). 
 
 « The translations consulted in the present chapter are Schlegel's Latin version, edited 
 by Lassen (18^6), and the English versions of Wilkins (1785) and Thomson (1855). 
 
 B Lassen, p. xxvii. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 413 
 
 beautiful, perhaps properly the only true, philosophical 
 song, that exists in any known tongue." Lassen 
 shrinks from attempting to recommend it, lest he 
 should imply that it has need of any praise of his. 
 Warren Hastings notes a " sublimity of conception, 
 reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled ; " and Schle- 
 gel closes his Latin version with a pipus invocation of 
 the unknown prophet bard, "whose oracular soul is as 
 it were snatched aloft into divine and eternal truth 
 with a certain ineffable delight." 
 
 It is indeed, though not without its imperfections 
 like the rest, one of the grand immortal forms in relig- 
 ious literature ; an eternal word of the Spirit in man. 
 
 It combines in broad and inspired synthesis the 
 various points of view from which the Hindu ^j compre- 
 schools had contemplated the union of philoso- hensiveness. 
 phy and faith. Opening with the practical doctrine 
 of duty, as conceived by the Yoga, it unfolds the Idea 
 of God from the best side of the Vedanta, and the 
 speculative analysis of man's spiritual relations after 
 the formulas and in the freedom of the Sankhya, and 
 ends with the substance of mystical piety, — deliver- 
 ance, through self-renunciation and devotion, into 
 union with deity. 
 
 It adheres indeed to the system of caste ; yet seeks 
 to soften its injustice^ by declaring perfection nsuniver- 
 open to all who do faithfully their own work, ^^''y- 
 and making this very dogma of natural subordination 
 emphasize the call to every class to seek refuge in 
 God. Even while, with the old contempt which 
 Buddhism had repudiated so nobly, it once mentions 
 women with the lowest castes, it yet declares that 
 
 ' A method not unlike that of the early Christian teachers touching slavery. 
 
414 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 all who resort to God will reach the highest goal.'' 
 Krishna says : — 
 
 " I have neither friend nor foe : I am the same to* all. And all 
 who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." ° 
 
 " To them who love me, I give that devotion by which they 
 come at last to me." " 
 
 " The soul in every creature's body is invulnerable ; * and none 
 who has faith, however imperfect his attainment, or however his 
 heart have wandered from right discipline, shall perish, either in 
 this world or in another. He shall have new births, till, purified 
 and made perfect, he. reaches the supreme abode." * 
 
 " Mankind turn towards my path in every manner, and accord- 
 ing as they approach me so do I reward them." * 
 
 Deity here is not abstraction, but speaks to man as 
 , . . Creator, Preserver, Friend. Krishna is thfi 
 
 Its god inti- 
 mate with companion and intimate counsellor of Arjuna, 
 
 '°^' revealing to him out of pure love'' the law 
 
 of duty and the path of immortal life ; yet preserving 
 the majesty and mystery of the Infinite. This is the 
 "Supreme Universal Spirit," above and behind the 
 universe, as well as its inmost substance ; the Maker 
 as well as the All. " I am the origin of all ; from me 
 all proceeds.'"* "•Thou," says Arjuna, "thou only, 
 knowest thyself by thyself, O Creator and Lord of 
 all that exists, God of gods, most ancient of Beings !"^ 
 And Krishna says, "I am the soul that exists in the 
 heart of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle, 
 the end, of all things." i" 
 
 He is death as well as life ; absorbing all forms, to 
 
 The vision ^^^ terror of the finite worshipper; yet the 
 
 of Time as terror is not meant to be final. Arjuna would 
 
 estroyer. i^gj^^j^j jj^g vvhole infinite of deity with mortal 
 
 eyes. His prayer is answered ; and he sees what 
 
 1 Bh. G; ch. ix. 2 Ibid. > Ibid., ch. x. « Ibid., ch. ii. 
 
 » Ibid., ch. vi. « Ibid., ch. iv. v Ibid., ch. x. » Ibid., ch. i. 
 
 * The term is Purushai or person, cli. x. lo Hjj^, ^^ ^^ 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 415 
 
 mortal eyes can see, the onward sweep of atoms and 
 worlds and souls from life to death. This is the terri- 
 ble, all-devouring form under which the god appears. 
 The mystery of time, whelming all objects of sense, is 
 concentrated into One Visible Shape, clothed by the 
 tropical imagination, which most dreads the power of 
 fire, in terrors and splendors that no eye can endure. 
 The transient, for ever vanishing into the bosom of 
 the eternal, stands manifest in one immeasurable sym- 
 bol. Flaming mouths and ventral abysses open to 
 engulf it; down these, through rows of dreadful 
 teeth, the human heroes rush, by their own will, as 
 full streams roll on to meet the ocean, as troops of 
 insects seek their death in the taper's flame.^ Very 
 apt symbolism it is, in view of the other* and immediate 
 purpose, to reconcile the hero to the dread necessity 
 of carnage that fronted the assembled hosts. 
 
 As in the old Hebrew legends men fall upon their 
 faces before the vision of Jehovah, so is it u^ fHendiy 
 with Arjuna here. But this " awe is mingled "^an^e- 
 with delight." And its cry of trust is, — 
 
 " Thou shouldst bear with me, O God ! as a father with his son, 
 as a friend with his friend, a lover with his beloved. Be gracious, 
 O habitation of the universe ! show me thy other [more human] 
 form.'" 
 
 And the vision of destruction vanishes, when the 
 divine relations of destruction are thus made plain, 
 into the familiar shape of the companion and friend. 
 Through the terrors of Death and Time, that eternal 
 good-will has been abiding unchangeable ; and the 
 sublimest lesson of life is learned. 
 
 " Be not alarmed, nor troubled, at having seen this my terrible 
 
 1 Bh. a, ch. ». ' Ibid. 
 
41 6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 form. But look free from fear, with happy heart, upon this other 
 form of mine. 
 
 " That which thou hast seen is very difficult to behold ; not to 
 be seen by studying the Vedas, nor by mortifications, nor alms- 
 givings, nor sacrifices. Even the gods are always anxious to be- 
 hold that form. But only by worship, which is rendered to me 
 alone, am I to be seen, and known in truth, and obtained. He 
 cometh to me whose works are done for me, who holdeth me 
 supreme ; who is my servant only ; who hath abandoned all conse- 
 quences, and liveth amongst all men without enmity." ' 
 
 This Hindu form of the faith that deity is present in 
 , human shape, to teach, console, instruct, and 
 
 Hindu aud ^ 
 
 Christian in- save men, and to make clear and sweet to 
 carnations, ^j^^^^ ^j^^ mysterfes of death and change, 
 
 differs from the Christian idea of incarnation, as set 
 forth in the gpspel of John, in this respect among 
 others, that it does not seek to confine the freedom of 
 the universal and infinite to a single historic form. 
 Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, the all-pervading 
 Preserver, is not claimed to be the only possible Word 
 of God in the flesh for all time. Not once for all is 
 this immanent life invested in a man. 
 
 " Although I am not in my nature subject' to birth or decay, and 
 am lord of all created beings, yet in my command over nature as 
 mine own, I am made evident by my own (miyS) power ; and as 
 often as there is a decline of virtue and insurrection of vice and 
 injustice in the world, I make myself evident ; and thus I appear, 
 from age to age, for the preservation of the just, the destruction of 
 evil-doers, and the establishment of virtue." * 
 
 This is the Krishna of philosophy ; but it expressed 
 a truth that lay deep in the religious instinct of the 
 people. 
 
 Accordingly, for the worship of the "all-pervading 
 Preserver," incarnation, or avatdra (descent), runs 
 
 > Bh. G., ch. id. « Ibid., ch. iv. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 417 
 
 through every form of life, beginning in earliest ages 
 with the creatures in which it was supposed that the 
 primitive piety of mankind must have beheld deity, 
 and passing on through a series of saints, heroes, 
 redeemers, to a final judge, so reaching to the bounds 
 of time. In the latest Puranas no less than twenty- 
 two of these avataras are ascribed to this unfailing 
 providence ; ^ not all indeed of a noble or worthy 
 quality, but such as the varying degrees of spiritual 
 and moral intelligence in the worshippers compelled. 
 
 It has never been shown that any appreciable influ- 
 ence was exerted by Christianity upon the for- Avatarasys- 
 mation of this Avatara system of the Hindus, 'rchristtan 
 Neither the Apostle Thomas, nor Nestorian influence. 
 Christians from Syria, nor a stray legend about some 
 distant realm of mystical monotheists, that turns up 
 among the leaves of the old epic, nor traces of very 
 secluded and unimportant Christian settlements in later 
 times upon the coasts of India, can be made available 
 for refuting the claim of Hindu religious genius to unin- 
 terrupted assurance that preserving deity is manifested 
 in constantly renewed forms upon the earth. Lassen, 
 after a careful inquiry into the traditions of a Christian 
 origin of this belief, reaches the conclusion that we 
 cannot ascribe to missionaries of the chuixh any in- 
 fluence whatever in shaping these religious concep- 
 tions of the Hindus.^ 
 
 The Krishna Avatara, in special, has been sup- 
 posed, not only from the resemblance between the 
 
 * See Lassen's account of them in iTtdische Altertkumskunde^ IV. 578-586. Also> 
 note on Thomson's Bkag. C, p. 147. 
 
 2 Weber {,Ind. Stud-, I. 400) and Hardwick (Christ and other Masters, I- 254) main-- 
 tain the theory of Cliristian influence ; but all its points seem to be fully met by Lassen, 
 and no real evidence has been adduced in its defence. There is no proof whatever that the- 
 Apostle Thomas aver saw India, and none that Nestoiian missions had any influence there- 
 before the fifth century. 
 
 27 
 
41 8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 names Krishna and Christ, but from certain corres- 
 pondences in the later Puranic legends with 
 Krishna those of the infancy of Jesus, to have origi- 
 Avatara. jjj^jgj jjj thesc relations with Christianity. But 
 the resemblances are of slight import ; and the belief 
 itself goes back, at the latest, to the time of Megas- 
 thenes, three centuries before the Christian era. This 
 writer describes Krishna as the Indian Hercules, who 
 had "traversed the whole earth and sea, to purify 
 them from evil ; '' and even identifies his worship with 
 Mathura, the native place of Krishna in the legend.' 
 
 The similarity of the names, Krishna and Christ, is 
 Its possible purely accidental. The word Krishna means 
 relations, fj^g Hack. And it forms the pivot of a very 
 curious tendency among the Aryan Hindus to vener- 
 ate that very color which they despised in the aborigi- 
 nal tribes of India, and which marked the lowest and 
 most degraded of the castes. For, in spite of these 
 antagonisms, strange symbols of a deeper brother- 
 hood seem to crop out in several interesting myths, 
 both philosophical and poetic. Here, for instance, in 
 the Bhagavadgita, Krishna, or the black, is the intimate, 
 friend and divine cpunsellor of Arjuna, or the white, — 
 a feature which cannot be accidental. And in the 
 Vishnu Purana, Vishnu sends two of his hairs, the 
 one white, the other black, to remove by their joint 
 virtue the miseries of the whole earth. I can hardly 
 help believing that this respect for the dark skin points 
 to very early recognitions of a common humanity ; 
 and it is not improbable that Krishna worship itself is 
 the mark of some profound influence exerted on the 
 faith of the aristocratic Ar^-^ans by the conquered tribes 
 of India. The generally democratic character of this 
 
 ^ Lassen, I. 647; II. xio7< 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 419 
 
 wide-spread and deeply rooted form of worship would 
 thus be explained. And the exaltation of a repre- 
 sentative of the enslaved race as divine guide of their 
 white master, in the noblest intellectual achievement 
 his literature can boast, is a piece of fine poetic justice, 
 which gives dignity to the whole history of the Hindus. 
 And it associates the oldest with the latest phases of 
 our Aryan pride of race, in a common lesson for com- 
 ing time. 
 
 From the early period above mentioned, down to 
 the latest Purana, the Bhagavata, in the thir- ^^^^^^^g 
 teenth century, Krishna comes constantly into 
 view, in the utmost variety of forms, — as protecting 
 hero ; as saint and sage, mastering evil spirits instead 
 of physical and outward enemies ; as inspired shep- 
 herd boy, idyllic lover of the country maidens, and 
 wonder-worker in the spheres of popular interests 
 and pursuits ; assuming in the epic mythology, where 
 all the numberless rills of popular belief have flowed 
 together, all imaginable powers and forms of charac- 
 ter. 1 He says in the Bhagavadgita, " I am represen- 
 tative of the supreme and incorruptible, of eternal law 
 and endless bliss." ^ 
 
 In the Bhagavata Purana he is exalted as the ideal 
 centre of all virtues, human and divine ; and saviour 
 of men through the blessings he bestows on all who 
 enter his spiritual being through meditation and holy 
 discipline.^ His worship is thus a purely native prod- 
 uct of Hindu sentiment. And the sublime assertion, 
 in the Bhagavadgita, of his incarnation whenever 
 right needs to be re-established and wrong to be over- 
 turned, requires no other explanation than an intuitive 
 
 > Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. iv. " Ibid., ch. xiv. 
 
 • See Th. Pavie's Krishna et sa Doctrine (Paris, 1852). 
 
420 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 faith in the intimate union of deity with life and the 
 world. 
 
 We may further observe, as characteristic of Hindu 
 Relation to religious development, an effort in the history 
 pantheism, of Krishna-worship to purify pantheism of its 
 cruder elements. The pantheistic sense of divine im- 
 manence and universality naturally involves profound 
 moral and spiritual meaning. With the advance- 
 ment of thought, such better significance is brought 
 to the interpretation of popular beliefs of whatever 
 nature. Krishna is the common term which Hindu- 
 ism has maintained as the thread of its religious 
 tradition ; and, in the heterogeneous web of the Ma- 
 habharata, all its meaning for the popular mind has 
 been wrought over in the interest of the higher form 
 of pantheism just mentioned. So that the Krishna of 
 the epic presents the very noblest traits which the 
 Hindu mind was able to conceive, as will be seen 
 hereafter. 
 
 The play of illusion, under which his assumption of 
 all forms of human sympathy and desire is believed 
 by the more spiritually-minded to be masked, is 
 frequently lifted away, revealing what is held to be 
 his inmost reality, by which the often questionable 
 phenomena are to be mystically interpreted ; a pro- 
 cess of compromise to which all distinctive religions 
 have in their different ways, from time to time, sub- 
 jected their sacred books. The substance of this 
 higher pantheism is expressed in language like the 
 following : — 
 
 " Know that Dharma (righteousness) is my first-born beloved 
 Son, whose nature is to have compassion on all creatures. In his 
 character, I exist among men, both present and past, in different 
 disguises and forms. While all men live in unrighteousness, I, the 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 42I 
 
 unfailing, build up the bulwark of right, as the ages pass. Assuming 
 various divine births to promote the good of all creatures, I act 
 according to my nature." ' 
 
 Upon this grand postulate of the constant presence 
 and watchful intimacy of deity with man, as sympathies 
 guide and deliverer, the Bhagavadgita sought °^'|'^'°^|'^_ 
 to unfold the sympathies of past and present avadgM. 
 forms of faith. 
 
 It declared that knowledge and action are one in 
 worship. 2 
 
 " Children only, not the wise, speak of the Sinkhya (rational) 
 and the Yoga (devotional) religious systems as different. He who 
 sees their unity sees indeed. The place which is gained by the 
 followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other." ' 
 
 " He who can behold inaction in action, and action in inaction, is 
 wise amongst mankind." * 
 
 " There are divers ways of sacrificing ; and all purify men. But 
 the worlds are not for him who worships «o/." * 
 
 For one to reach this higher point of spiritual recog- 
 nition, the Veda, with the subde questions Biweand 
 thereon that have distracted the conscience, medi^to-^- 
 must have become secondary, and be held as transient 
 means to a spiritual end. 
 
 " When thy mind shall have worked through the snares of illu- 
 sion, thou wilt become indifferent to traditional belief. When thy 
 mind, liberated from the Vedas," shall abide fixed in contemplation, 
 thou shalt then attain to real worship." ' 
 
 " Thou shalt find it in due time, spontaneously, within thyself." ' 
 
 This freer treatment of the " sacred scriptures " de- 
 
 1 MahHih; XIV. ' Bhag. G., ch. iii. " Ibid., ch. ». 
 
 < Ibid., ch. iv. " Ibid., ch. iv. 
 
 « So Thomson translates nirmda, which according to Wilson also (Essays on Sanskr. 
 LU., III. 128) means "certainty of the futility of the Vedas." Schlegel translates the 
 passage thus: "sententiis theologicis antea distracta." Only Wilkins differs: his reading 
 is, "by study brought to maturity," which can hardly be correct. 
 
 ' Bhag. G; ch. ii. ' Ibid-, ch. iv. 
 
422 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 serves notice, as showing how strong is the demand, 
 Reactions evcH in a racc whose faith naturally turns to 
 S^'.'" the past, for escape from a bible-worship, 
 which still dominates far more enHghtened communi- 
 ties. In every great form of Hindu philosophy we find 
 this opening upward into freedom from sacred text and 
 rite. The Vedanta declares "the science of the Vedas 
 inferior to the science of soul." The Sankhya denies 
 the eternity of the hymns, and asserts fullest liberty 
 of interpretation. The Bhagavadgita holds real wor- 
 ship to be that in which the Vedas have no further 
 place, having done their work, and given way to the 
 vision and enjoyment of deity. The Ramayana and 
 Mahabharata speak of themselves as equal to the 
 Vedas. The Puranas, in general, go much further. 
 The Bhagavadgita says : — 
 
 " As great as is the use of a well when it is surrounded by over- 
 flowing waters, so great and no greater is the use of the Vedas to a 
 Brahman endowed with knowledge." 
 
 But the Bhagavata Purana : — 
 
 "Men do not worship the Supreme when they worship Him as 
 circumscribed by the attributes specified in the hymns. Thou who 
 strewest the earth with thy sacrificial grass, and art proud of thy 
 numerous immolations, knowest not what is highest work of all." 
 
 The Brahmanas speak of the limitations of the 
 Vedas in the same tone. Even Manu perceives that 
 the spirit must interpret the text, to make it of service. 
 The progress of experience brought fresh inspirations 
 that criticised the older ones ; and there were bitter 
 controversies between the supporters of the different 
 Vedas, fatal to the pretence of inviolable authority in 
 either.^ 
 
 ' See texts in Muir, III. ch. i. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 423 
 
 The " spiritual knowledge " which is to be substituted 
 for all written or traditional objects of faith, 
 
 •' Spirituality. 
 
 as the supreme end of life, is called jndna^ 
 
 The Bhagavadgita describes what it reveals as deity, 
 
 in terms most clearly expressive of spiritual being : — 
 
 " It is that which hath no beginning, and is supreme ; not the 
 existent alone, nor tlie non-existent alone ; with hands and feet on all 
 sides, at the centre of the world comprehending all ; exempt from all 
 organs, yet shining with the faculties of all ; unattached, yet sustain- 
 ing everything; within and without ; afar, yet near; the light of 
 lights, the wisdom that is to be found by wisdom, implanted in 
 every breast." ^ 
 
 " The recompense of devotion is greater than any that can be 
 promised to the study of the Vedas, or the practice of independ- 
 austerities, or the giving of alms." ^ ™<:e. 
 
 " Better than material sacrifice is the sacrifice of spiritual 
 wisdom." ■* 
 
 " Men are seduced from the right path by that flowery sentence 
 proclaimed by the unwise, who delight in texts from the Vedas, and 
 say, ' there is nothing else than that,' covetous of heaven as the 
 highest good, offering regeneration as the reward of mere perform- 
 ances, and enjoining rites for the sake of pleasures and powers." * 
 
 " The worship of personages as divine bestowers of all good 
 seeks to propitiate such personages ; and receives, as from them, its 
 reward, which yet comes after all only from God. But the reward 
 of these disciples of little mind is finite. They who worship gods 
 go to their gods. They who worship me come to me. Only the 
 unwise believe that I, who neither am born nor die, am confined 
 to a visible form." ° 
 
 While the power of attaining union with essential 
 truth and good, independently of permanent Ethical cd- 
 or exclusive mediators, is thus affirmed as in-""'^;^<=''°''- 
 dispensable to the highest life, the ethical conditions 
 of such attainment are not slighted. The authority 
 of the moral nature has all due reverence. 
 
 » Compare Greek yvaal(, Latin kmc-o, Saxon irtmu. ' Bhag. G-, ch. xiii. 
 
 » Ibid., ch. viii. • Ibid., ch. iv. « Ibid., ch. ii. " Ibid., ch. vii. 
 
424 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 What is the secret of duty ? O Arjuna ! the old 
 eternal answer, — the soul knows no other : — Master 
 the senses, and subdue desires. Of all actions the con- 
 sequences are bonds determined and inevitable. What 
 is the self-centred act, what the pleasure of mere 
 physical contact, that comes but to pass again, leaving 
 imsatisfied desire behind it, but " a womb of pain " ? 
 Is then all activity to be renounced ? By no means. 
 
 " No one ever resteth a moment inactive. Every one is in- 
 voluntarily urged to act, by principles which are inherent in his 
 nature. Inertness is not piety. Perform, then, thy functions. 
 Action is better than inaction." 
 
 " But as this world entails the bonds of action on every work 
 but that which has worship for its object, therefore abandon, 
 
 son of Kunti ! all selfish motive, and perform thy duty for God 
 alone." 
 
 " Even if thou considerest only the good of mankind, still thou 
 shouldst act. For what good men practise, others will practise 
 likewise." 
 
 " I have no need of any good, that I should be obliged to do any 
 thing throughout the three worlds ; yet do I for ever work. For if 
 
 1 did not, — men follow in my steps in all things, and the people 
 would perish." ' 
 
 " But every work is comprehended in wisdom : seek thou this, 
 by worship, inquiry, service." " 
 
 " Whoso abandons all interest in the reward of his actions shall 
 be contented and free : though engaged in work, he, as it were, 
 doeth nothing. The same in success and failure, even though he 
 acts he is not bound by the bonds of action. His mind led by 
 spiritual knowledge, and his work done for the sake of worship, 
 his own action is, as it were, dissolved away." 
 
 " God is the gift, the sacrifice, the altar-fire ; God the maker 
 of the offering ; and God, the object of his meditation, is by him 
 attained." " 
 
 " Let thy motive lie in the deed, and not in the reward : perform 
 Motive, '■^y '^"*y' ^"'^ make the event equal, whether it ter- 
 minate in good or ill. This is devotion." ^ 
 
 ' Bhag. C, ch. iii. • Ibid., ch. iv. » Ibid., ch. ii. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 425 
 
 " He who puts aside self-interest is not tainted by sin, but re- 
 mains unaffected, as the lotus-leaf is not wet, by the waters." ' 
 
 " What is given for the sake of a gift in return, or for the sake 
 of the fruit of the action, or reluctantly, is a gift of inferior quality." ' 
 
 " Whatever thou doest, do as ofifering to the Supreme." ' 
 
 " He who casts off desires, he into whose heart desires enter but 
 as rivers run into the never-swelling, passive ocean, he is Mastery of 
 tranquil ; and there springs in him separation from all desires, 
 trouble. He only whose thoughts are gathered in meditation can 
 find rest." ■• 
 
 " The wise are troubled to determine what is action and what is 
 not. I will tell thee the path of deliverance. He is the doer of 
 duty who beholds inaction in action, and action in inaction, free 
 from the sense of desire : his action is consumed by the fire of 
 knowledge." ^ 
 
 " As a candle placed in shelter from the wind does not flicker, 
 so is he who, with thoughts held in devotion, delighteth in his soul, 
 knowing the boundless joy that the mind attains beyond sense, 
 whereon being fixed it moveth not from truth ; and who, having 
 attained it, regardeth no other attainment as so great as it is, nor 
 is moved by severest pain." * 
 
 •' Seek refuge in thy mind." ' 
 
 " Let one raise his soul by his own means : let him not lower 
 his soul ; for he is his soul's friend or enemy. He who seif-respect. 
 has subdued himself by his soul finds that self which, 
 by reason of the enmity of what is not spiritual, might be a foe, 
 the friend of his soul." " 
 
 " Draw in the senses from objects of sense, as the tortoise 
 its limbs ; for when the heart follows their roaming it Spirituality 
 snatches away spiritual wisdom as a wind a ship on the of purpose, 
 waves." " 
 
 Yet even in the practice of ascetic disciplines, com- 
 mended to the devotee vv^ho would concentrate Moderation. 
 his mind on God alone, excess is discounten- 
 
 1 BAa^. G., ch. V. ^ Ibid., ch. xvii. ' Ibid., ch. ix. 
 
 * Ibid., ch. u. Ibid., ch. iv. « Ibid., ch. vi. 
 
 ' Ibid., ch u. ' Ibid., ch. vi. ' Ibid., ch. il 
 
426 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 anced ; and fanatical abstinence from food, sleep, 
 recreation, action, are discouraged, — he only being a 
 true devotee who is moderate in all things, and, above 
 all, in his desires.^ How these opposite tendencies 
 are reconciled does not indeed appear. It has been 
 supposed ^ that indifference to results was substituted 
 for abandonment of action, from a sense of the neces- 
 sity of modifying the strictness of ascetic practices, 
 which is very probable. 
 
 Such are the cultures of piety, — contemplative 
 Practical maluly, and in their final aim. But practical 
 virtues. virtues are held as equally imperative. Such 
 are fearlessness, temperance, rectitude, veracity, a 
 harmless spirit, freedom from anger, liberality, mod- 
 esty, gentleness, benevolence towards all, stability, 
 energy, fortitude, patience, purity, resolution, and the 
 absence of vindictiveness and conceit.^ These are 
 enforced as positive duties. They are described, also, 
 as the path of those who are " born to the lot of divine 
 beings," while those who have them not gravitate the 
 other way. 
 
 All actual conditions were, to the Hindu, profoundly 
 Natural retrospective. They must somehow find their 
 destiny. ground in the determinations of a divine Order. 
 There was more in moral good and evil than mere 
 fruit of culture. And to be " born to the lot " of divine 
 or depraved beings must of course have meant some- 
 thing beyond caste-distinctions. A sense of destiny 
 came mightily down on the dreamer's vision, as he 
 thought of the prodigious force of natural endow- 
 ment in determining the paths of conduct. Virtues 
 were upward tracks, for which, it was plain, some had 
 
 > Bhag. G; ch. vi. » Wilson, III. no. » Bhag. G., ch. xvi. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 427 
 
 a kind of natural fore-ordination ; while the birth-doom 
 of others drove them in the opposite direction into 
 correspondent vices. And here the poet's moral judg- 
 ment seems too much absorbed in the sense of inevi- 
 table consequence to recognize that apparent injustice 
 in such predestinations, which demanded solution. 
 And he turns the evil-doers away ^ upon their down- 
 ward path of bestial transmigrations, with as little 
 apparent sympathy as is conveyed in that kindred 
 sentence from another gospel : ," These shall go 
 away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous 
 into life eternal." Doubtless in the one case, as in 
 the other, the special aspect under which moral evil 
 was, for the moment, intensely conceived, excluded 
 other and kindlier elements of faith, which elsewhere 
 enter into both these gospels, though in different ways. 
 With the Hindu, the deliverance from these bonds of 
 destiny might surely be found in the all-embracing 
 mystic unity of spiritual life, as with the Hebrew in 
 the depths of the Fatherhood of God. And yet it is 
 evident of the one as of the other gospel, that its cen- 
 tral idea had not reached its own full significance, as 
 a guaranty for the preservation and perfection of 
 all spiritual forces, even in the mind of its greatest 
 teacher. 
 
 But we must not overlook the fact, that this whole 
 poem is intent on pointing out the ways in which the 
 dark, bewildering, bestializing gunas, or organic qual- 
 ities, might be " burned away in the fires of worship." 
 It implies a certain inherent and absolute power in 
 these disciplines and endeavors, to accomplish their 
 purpose. They involve a higher freedom, which 
 contravenes the apparent fatalities of evil. 
 
 • Bhag. G; ch. xvi. 
 
428 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 And for all aspirations alike there was the One Life 
 The path that animated all lives, an unfailing promise, 
 opentoau. justification, and resource. 
 
 " Rest assured, O son of Kunti ! that they who worship me, 
 shall never die. I am the pledge of their bliss." ' 
 
 " Forsake all other reliance, and fly to me alone. I will deliver 
 thee from all thy transgressions." ' 
 
 " Even if one whose ways have been ever so bad worship me 
 alone, with devotion, he shall be honored as a just man ; for he has 
 judged aright. He soon becometh of a virtuous spirit; and entereth 
 eternal rest." ^ 
 
 " He my servant is dear to me, who is free from enmity, the 
 friend of all nature, merciful, exempt from pride and selfishness, the 
 same in pain and pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, of subdued 
 passions and firm resolves, and whose mind is fixed on me alone. 
 
 " He also is worthy of my love who neither rejoices nor finds 
 fault ; neither laments nor covets ; and, being my servant, has 
 forsaken both good and evil fortune. 
 
 " He is my beloved who is the same in friendship and hatred, in 
 honor and dishonor, unsolicitous about the event of things ; to 
 whom praise and blame are as one ; who is of little speech, and 
 pleased with whatever cometh to pass ; who owneth no particular 
 home, and who is of steadfast mind. 
 
 " They who seek this amrita [immortal food] of religion, even as 
 I have said, and serve me faithfully, are dearest of all."* 
 
 Here the independent witness-soul of the Sinkhya 
 Concen- is Combined with a Vedantic reverence for the 
 ^t" il One Universal Life, and a Buddhistic recogni- 
 worship. tion of action and social duties. The meaning 
 of this blending of stoical indifference, pious ardor, 
 and human love, can only lie in the effort to consecrate 
 the whole of life, to fuse every element of the human 
 ideal in the one purpose of worship, as substantial 
 unity with the Highest, as all-sufficing joy. 
 
 1 Bhag. G., ch. ix. 2 Ibid., ch. xviii. 
 
 ' Ibid., ch. ix. « Ibid., ch. xii. (Wilkins). 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 429 
 
 " They who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." ' 
 
 " By him who constantly seeks me, without wandering of mind, 
 I am easily found." ' 
 
 " Thinking on me, absorbed in me, teaching each other, and 
 constantly telling of me, the wise are blessed. To such as seek 
 me with constant love, I give the power to come to me. Through 
 my compassion, while remaining in my own essence, I yet turn their 
 darkness into light." ^ 
 
 " Most dear am I to the spiritually wise, and he is dear to me. 
 The distressed, the seeker for light, the desirer of good, the wise, 
 are all exalted ; but the wise, whose devout spirit rests on me, I 
 hold even as myself."'' 
 
 " Though thou wert the greatest of offenders, thou shalt cross 
 the gulf of sin in this bark of spiritual wisdom. He who hath 
 faith shall find this ; and, having found it, shall speedily attain rest 
 for his soul. No bonds of action hold the mind which hath cut 
 asunder the bonds of doubt. Son of Bharata, sever thy doubt in 
 worship, and arise ! " * 
 
 And, on the other side, the inevitableness of moral 
 penalty is as positively asserted. It rests not Moral pen- 
 on any arbitrary decree, but on the essential ^'"'=- 
 qualities of conduct. It is associated indeed in certain 
 aspects with the notion that the castes originated in 
 these moral qualities, and their due subordinations;^ 
 for the Bhagavadgita does not attain the grand dem- 
 ocracy of Buddhism. But the inherence of moral 
 consequence according to purely moral quality is 
 nevertheless strictly defined : — 
 
 " The pleasure that springs ftom serenity of mind is first like 
 poison, and afterwards like the amrita of immortals ; but the pleas- 
 ures of the senses begin like amrita, and end as poisons ; and the 
 pleasure that is from sleepy sloth is the utter bewilderment of the 
 soul." « 
 
 According to the quality that has ripened into pre- 
 dominance is the form the individual spirit assumes ; 
 
 » Bhag. O., ch. ix. ' Ibid., ch. viii. ' Ibid., ch. x. 
 
 * Ibid., ch. vii. " Ibid., ch. iv. » Ibid., ch rviii. 
 
430 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 gravitating at death to the " imperishable place," or 
 downwards, through lower forms of life, even to the 
 " wombs of the senseless," or inorganic matter, if the 
 deathly blight of indifference shall come to that at 
 last.i "Threefold the gate of this hell, — avarice, 
 anger, and lust."^ Thus the bad are consigned, not 
 to endless misery by one dread sentence, but to pro- 
 bations manifold; and, if hopelessly sunk, reaching 
 at last a quasi annihilation, by laws of affinity alone ; 
 not to be preyed on by the worm that dieth not and 
 the fire that is not quenched ; but, more mercifully (if 
 that word be applicable at all) , to become the clod or 
 the stone, which testify that the capability to sin and 
 to suffer are alike no more. So that hope ceases only 
 with consciousness itself; for transmigration is a re- 
 volving wheel, and with every fresh birth comes fresh 
 gift of opportunity for such intelligence as may still 
 survive. 
 
 " All worlds up to that of Brahma are subject to 
 , [the law ofl return." But there is a state 
 
 The blessed >- J 
 
 life beyond from which they who enter it do not need, as 
 they cannot desire, to return. 
 
 " There is an invisible, eternal existence, beyond this visible, 
 which does not perish when all things else perish, even when the 
 great days of BrahmS,'s creative life pass round into night, and all 
 that exists in form returns unto God whence it came. They who 
 obtain this never return." ^ 
 
 " They proceed unbewildered to that imperishable place, which 
 is neither illumined by the sun nor moon ; to that primeval Spirit 
 whence the stream of life for ever flows." ^ 
 
 " Whoso beholds me in all things and all in me, I do not vanish 
 from him, nor does he vanish from me ; for in me he lives." * 
 
 " Bright as the sun beyond darkness is He to the soul that 
 remembers Him in meditation, at the hour of death, with thougjht 
 
 ^ Bhag. G., ch. xiv. * Ibid., ch. xvi. » Ibid., ch. viii. 
 
 * Ibid., ch. XV. 6 Ibid., ch. vi. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 43 1 
 
 fixed between the brows, — Him the most ancient of the wise, the 
 primal ruler, the minutest atom, the sustainer of all, — in the hour 
 when each finds that same nature on which he meditates, and to 
 which he is conformed." ' 
 
 " They who put their trust in me, and seek deliverance from decay 
 and death, know Brahma, and the highest spirit (Adhyitma), and 
 every action (karma). They who know me in my being, my person, 
 and my manifested life, in the hour of death know me indeed." ' 
 
 Who is this that is so known ? 
 
 " The Soul in all beings, the best in each, and the inmost nature of 
 all ; their beginning, middle, end ; the all-watching preserver, father 
 and mother of the universe, supporter, witness, habitation, refuge, 
 friend ; the knowledge of the wise, the silence of mystery, the 
 splendor of light ; and death and birth, and ail faculties and 
 powers ; the holiest hymn, the spring among seasons, the seed 
 and the sum of all that is." ' 
 
 And whoso by inward worship of God overcomes 
 the blind qualities and dispositions, by devotion shall 
 enter at once into His being. ^ 
 
 These conceptions of a future life seem to hover 
 between absorption into deity and revolving cy- personal 
 cles of ever-renewed births. Yet, through all '■"""'rtauty. 
 this indistinctness, a certain sense of permanence must 
 have been felt by those whose minds dwelt so con- 
 stantly on the thought of somewhat eternal in the very 
 consciousness of spiritual being. We have already 
 seen that the mystical Hindu mind did not demand so 
 distinct an assurance of continued personal conscious- 
 ness after death as does the intense individualism 
 of modern thought. Such positiveness of prediction 
 would have been associated with limitations rather than 
 with freedom : always the longing of mystical faith 
 has been to lose limit in pure self-surrender, and find 
 freedom in absolute present trust. 
 
 1 S^£: G., ch. viu, ' Ibid., ch. vii. 
 
 s Ibid., ch. ix. *. xi. ♦ Ibid., ch. xiv. xviii. 
 
432 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Yet the Bhagavadgita recognizes the desire of con- 
 tinued being, as indeed it does not fail of recognizing 
 almost every genuine aspiration. And when Krishna 
 would allay the compassionate scruples of Arjuna 
 against destroying human life, he points to the im- 
 perishable personality that resides in every soul. Its 
 description fully corresponds with what we mean by 
 that term. One with infinite soul, expanded to share 
 the universal life, yet in a real sense distinct in itself, 
 as being that in each soul which makes it real and 
 eternal, it comes home to our experience as our own 
 deepest sense of immortality, which transcends the 
 thought of beginning as of end. 
 
 " As the soul in this body undergoes the changes of infancy, 
 youth, and age, so it obtains a new body hereafter. 
 
 " Know that these finite bodies have belonged to an eternal, 
 inexhaustible, indestructible spirit. He who believes that this spirit 
 can kill, and he who believes it can be killed, both are wrong. 
 Unborn, changeless, eternal, it is not slain when the body is slain. 
 
 " As a man abandons worn-out clothes and takes other new ones, 
 so does the soul quit worn-out bodies and enter others. Weapons 
 cannot cleave, nor fire burn it. It is constant, immovable ; yet it 
 can pass through all things. 
 
 " If thou hadst thought it born with the body, to die with the 
 body, even then thou shouldst not grieve for the inevitable ; since 
 what is born must die, and what is dead must live again. All 
 things are first unseen, then seen, then at last unseen again. Why 
 then be troubled about these things ? 
 
 « Some hold the soul as a wonder, while some speak and others 
 hear of it with astonishment ; but no one knoweth it, though he 
 may have heard it described. The soul, in its mortal frame, is invul- 
 nerable. 
 
 " Grieve not then for any creatures, and abandon not thy duty. 
 For a noble man that infamy were worse than death." ' 
 
 " It is good to die doing thy own work : doing another's brings 
 danger." * 
 
 ' Bhag. G., ch. iU s Ibid., ch. iu. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 433 
 
 The sense of immortality is here associated with 
 the idea of duty, conceived indeed after a Hindu 
 fashion. Wherever such connection is recognized as 
 essential, there, under whatever special form duty may 
 be presented, we may be sure that personality is in- 
 volved in the idea of eternal life. 
 
 This " invulnerable soul " is in every one of the 
 living beings before Arjuna on the battle-field ^n destinies 
 of Kuru. " An imaginary thing can have no ^™*- 
 existence, nor can that which is real be other than a 
 stranger to nonentity." ^ Is not this an implication 
 of full faith in personal destinies? What limitation 
 is possible to the sweep of this invulnerability of life 
 through all special lives? What is it but the living 
 path and the living goal, at once, for them all? It is 
 a protest against the fate elsewhere in the Bhagavad- 
 gita assigned to those who are fallen lowest in delusion 
 and vice. The " wombs of the senseless " disappear 
 before it. How can the soul die down into a clod, if 
 soul is invulnerable? By this rescue of the substance, 
 all that waste is made impossible. The higher " con- 
 servation of force," which resides in intelligence itself, 
 forbids it. The " wombs of the senseless," like the 
 "everlasting woes" of Christian theology, are, in 
 fact, but mythological and dramatic fictions, in which 
 the fears and hates arising from certain stages of 
 moral development invest the idea of spiritual destiny. 
 Intuitions of the eternal validity of that which is in- 
 most substance and proper selfhood in every one, flash 
 out by the side of these mythologic fancies, and reach 
 beyond them, discerning the real purport of existence. 
 This inmost personal life, rooted in essential life, con- 
 tains all guaranties of good : whatever else dies out or 
 
 ^ Bhag. G., ch. ii. 
 28 
 
434 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 revolves through phases of matter, coming up again 
 in vapor or tree, that which is called "soul" in each, 
 the intellectual and moral quality, the sphere of aspi- 
 ration and relation to the infinite, however it may 
 change and develop, must escape such fate, — must 
 abide, according to this philosophy, in the imperish- 
 able place of soul itself. Honor to pantheism for 
 affirming the oneness of spiritual substance, for the 
 sweep of its great circle that leaves no life homeless 
 and wandering outside God. 
 
 The recognition of an inmost personality, lifted in 
 pure independence of all the change and loss 
 
 Correspond- '■ ^ ^ ... 
 
 encewith jnvolvcd in actions and their fruits, is as posi- 
 the sankhya. ^.j^^ j^^ ^-^q Bhagavadgita as in Kapila's dis- 
 tinction between Prakriti and Purusha. In fact, this 
 distinction, with the whole Sankhya system, ^ is here 
 fully set forth ; though as but a single side of an 
 eclectic philosophy, and combined — Kapila would 
 hardly say, reconciled — with that oneness of spiritual 
 being to which he objected as opposed to individual 
 claims. 
 
 "He who beholdeth all his actions performed by Prakriti, at the 
 same time perceives that his itma [self] is inactive in them. The su- 
 preme soul, even when it is in the body, neither acts nor is it affected, 
 because its nature is eternal, and free of qualities. As the all-pene- 
 trating ether, from the minuteness of its parts, passeth everywhere 
 unaffected, so this spirit in the body. As one sun illumines the 
 whole world, so does the one spirit illumine the whole of matter, 
 O Bhirata ! They who thus perceive the body and the soul as dis- 
 tinct, and that there is release, go to the Supreme." ' 
 
 This effort to combine the Sankhya with the Ve- 
 Universaiity dauta is but oue element of the vast synthesis 
 oftheGita. of faith attempted in the " Divine Lay" which 
 
 > The reader will recall the explanation of this distinction, as •suggested in the chapter 
 on the Sinkhya in the present volume, p. 388. 
 ' Bhag. G; ch. xiii. 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 
 
 435 
 
 we are now studying. It has been described^ as 
 evading all great questions which divide the schools 
 of belief, ■ as hovering between faith and works, 
 reason and devotion, the worship of the invisible 
 and the worship of the visible God.^ It is certain 
 that the reconciliation of opposite tendencies is by no 
 means clear or satisfactory. It is syncretism rather 
 than fusion. It is intellectual recognition, rather than 
 final system. But the breadth of this recognition is 
 what deserves our admiration, the large justice done 
 to every existing element of Hindu thought. Like its 
 own Brahma, the Bhagavadgita is the best of every 
 form, revealing its highest aspect, its spiritual pur- 
 port. Faith is good, and works are good ; but the 
 goodness of each is in the subordination of one to the 
 other. Absorption and transmigration are both real ; 
 but their meaning for the desire of immortality is in 
 their respective meanings as the true end of life and 
 the consequence of conduct. Not less real the worth 
 of the Veda for the greater worth of nirveda, the 
 divine certainty that lies beyond it. Sacrifices are 
 good, yet only as the step to a higher service of God. 
 The Sankhya witness-soul is exalted ; not less so the 
 soul performing these duties that belong to its path in 
 life. The gunas, or qualities of blind nature, have 
 their tremendous moral issues; not less true are the 
 all-dissolving Unity of Brahma, and the illusion of this 
 universe that comes and goes, these worlds of life 
 that are "subject to return." The eternal Substance 
 abides, beyond all forms of existence, inconceivable, 
 unknown. Yet every term by which the inmost per- 
 sonality of man is expressed is carried up into this 
 divine substance, making it a fulness of life. It is 
 
 1 Wilson, Essay on Bhagav. GU& {Sanskr. Lit., III. 144). 
 
436 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Purusha, personal soul. It is Purushottdma, Ultimate 
 Personality. It is Adhydtma, Over-Soul, or Divine 
 Self. It is even Mahesvara, the Great Lord. It is 
 •the Avatara, the perpetual providence, ever manifest 
 in visible form to save the world. 
 
 This boundless hospitality to existing beliefs indi- 
 cates at least the force with which the religious senti- 
 ment was embodied in them all at the time when the 
 Bhagavadgit^ was written. One element betrays the 
 Brahmanical source from which it flowed, the main- 
 tenance, however modified, of caste. Brahmanism is 
 here seen, surrounded by rationalizing independent 
 tendencies, seeking to accommodate itself to their 
 demands, while maintaining the unity of religious 
 development as a whole. Like the somewhat analo- 
 gous production of the Christian Church, the Johannic 
 Gospel, it is the work of the highest spiritual genius, 
 the most deliberate and careful constructive skill, 
 the most earnest desire of religious unity, which the 
 tendencies it represented had at their command ; and 
 a spirit is moving through its speculative deeps, that 
 could not be bound within the limits of any creed, — 
 the spirit of Universal Religion. 
 
 We cannot wonder that in a time of contending sects, 
 The maker ^"d amidst the distinctions of caste, the disclo- 
 of the Lay. g^j-e of this " subllmc mystery " to the reviler, 
 the indifferent, the unspiritual, should be forbidden. ^ 
 How indeed, leaving caste out of the question, could it 
 be made known to such ? No deep religious faith fails 
 wholly of that wisdom which knows where not to cast 
 its pearls. As the Hebrew reformer clothed his doc- 
 trine in parables, for those who hearing did not hear, 
 and as the Greek philosopher veiled his in symbols, so 
 
 ^ Bhag. G.f ch. xviit- 
 
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 437 
 
 the Hindu mystic admonished his disciples that prepa- 
 ration was needed for receiving what only the eye of 
 thoughtful attention could even behold. And was not 
 this light of pure thought indeed shining in compara- 
 tive darkness ? Was it not on the heights of con- 
 templation, in a region which the disciplined intellect 
 alone could make a home ? Yet we detect also behind 
 these ethical and spiritual considerations the strict re- 
 quirements of caste. Not here the broad humanity of 
 Buddha, whose word was a gospel rather than a phi- 
 losophy, and probably uttered with less of esoteric 
 mystery or exclusiveness than that of any other teacher 
 of the ancient world. The claims of the philanthropist 
 differ from the claims of the seer. 
 
 Shall we not say with the latest English translator 
 of this wonderful song, sung in the far East two 
 thousand years ago, that " it is sufficient praise for the 
 mystical old Brahman to have inferred, amidst dark- 
 ness and ignorance, the vast powers of mind and will, 
 and to have claimed for the soul the noble capacity 
 of m.aking the body and even external matter its 
 slave ? " 
 
IV. 
 PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 
 
PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 
 
 TF the Bhagavadgita is pantheistic, it is none the less 
 ■*- theistic also. While these two terms in The demand 
 their extreme meaning represent widely differ- "'^ *' ^s=' 
 ent conceptions, here is a higher unity which seeks to 
 include what is best in both. Whatever may have 
 been the result of this effort, its comprehensiveness 
 deserves special notice, in view of the demand of our 
 civilization for a breadth and freedom which can ap- 
 preciate every real element of human belief. In this 
 spirit of the age, Goethe wrote to Jacobi that he could 
 not be content with one way of thinking ; that as artist 
 aijd poet he was a polytheist, while as student of 
 nature he was a pantheist. 
 
 All phases of religion appear alike imperfect, if 
 defined as mutually exclusive systems. But their 
 real affinities are coming to be comprehended in the 
 unity of personal experience. We are learning to 
 recognize theism, polytheism, and pantheism as legiti- 
 mate parts of ourselves, to resume them under as- 
 pects which explain their power over races and times 
 other than our own, and so to relieve the steps of 
 human endeavor from disparagement by exclusive 
 creeds. 
 
442 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ' There are phases of skepticism and phases ot 
 , . science which seem to turn from religion as 
 
 Justice to ... . . 
 
 pantheism Well 38 intuition with swceping denial. There 
 nee ed. ^^^ phases of superstition apparently blind to 
 all rights of skepticism and science. But both science 
 and religion in our day are to receive a republican 
 breadth of meaning. They will not only guard the 
 right of every faculty and every aspiration to plead 
 its own cause, but respect the witness it may be able 
 to bring in its own behalf from the confidence of 
 mankind. 
 
 To how purely negative a criticism has pantheism 
 been subjected ! Yet there must be truth in a form 
 of belief which has satisfied enduring civilizations, 
 and which has reappeared in philosophy and ethics 
 wherever these have reached a high development, 
 without regard to the lines which separate recognized 
 religions or even races. It has usually been through 
 some form of spiritual pantheism that these distinctive 
 religions have escaped their limitations, and risen into 
 a universality unknown either to their founders or 
 to the ordinary current of their history. We may 
 instance the Sufism of the Mohammedans, the Ngo- 
 Platonism of the Greeks, and- the Mysticism that 
 preceded the Reformation in Germany and Italy, and 
 showed a far larger and profounder spirit than that 
 movement. Modern philosophy has received its 
 strongest impulse from a similar tendency in German 
 thought. And the unities of political, intellectual, and 
 religious life, at the present time, make the relation 
 of pantheism to the coming age a question of real 
 moment. 
 
 Whatever inferior forms of experience may havt 
 received or assumed the name, it is of great impor- 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 443 
 
 tance to emphasize that special purport of pantheism 
 which accounts for its frequent recurrence and its 
 noble fruits. Our study of the Hindu schools of re- 
 ligious philosophy should help us to this result. 
 
 It is commonly insisted that all pantheistic systems 
 are ways of confounding the Creator with the what u 
 creation, and sinking the soul in the senses. Pantheism' 
 This form of statement comes mainly from Semitic 
 habits of thought inherited by Christianity. Panthe- 
 ism could expect no other reception from their intense 
 jealousy for the rights of an external deity, by whom 
 the world is made out of nothing, and the human soul 
 autocratically ruled. 
 
 But, if pantheism were what this fixed impression 
 of the Christian Churfch as a whole represents it, it 
 would certainly be far from resembling the aspirations 
 of those Hindu seers whom we have been studying 
 in the preceding chapters of this volume. They, of 
 all men, sought emancipation from the "wheel of the 
 senses," and fervently believed in the possibility of 
 union with the Absolute and Eternal. 
 
 In reality, pantheism, whether as sentiment or 
 philosophy, is not the worship of a finite and visible 
 world. In its nobler forms it is essentially of the 
 spirit, and rests, as its name imports, on these princi- 
 ples : that Being is, in its substance, one ; that this 
 substantial unity is, and must be, implicated in all 
 energy, though indefinably and inconceivably, — as 
 Life, all-pervading, all-containing, the constant ground 
 and ultimate force of all that is ; and that the recog- 
 nition of this inseparableness of the known universe 
 from God is consistent with the worship of God as 
 infinitely transcending it. 
 
 A theism of pure sentiment, following the Hebrew 
 
444 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 prophetic consciousness of intimacy with God, yet, like 
 . . that earlier Semitism, too monarchical in its 
 
 Linuts of 
 
 Christian theory to recognize how completely all manifes- 
 theism. tation must be one with its spiritual substance, 
 was the religious inspiration of Jesus and his compan- 
 ions. Not less was this the limit for every form under 
 which Christianity could appear. Even the Gospel of 
 John — though a later product, drawing largely from 
 Greek and Oriental fountains, and imbued with mystical 
 elements apparently unknown to the original faith as 
 it was in Jesus — stopped short, on this track, with 
 limiting the ^ure immanence of God in the universe 
 to the ideally constructed person of Jesus, as the "Word 
 made flesh." All pantheistic forms or tendencies of 
 distinctive Christianity have had the same limitation , 
 and this obscures the universal element, which never- 
 theless underlay and in fact prompted them. 
 
 The ideal demand of modern life is for fuller recog- 
 ^ ^ nition than was ever before possible, that spirit- 
 ideaiof ual being is of one substance. All religions 
 ™"^' measurably express this truth, and their aspira- 
 tions after universality imply it. But their distinctive 
 tendencies have interfered more or less harmfully with 
 its free development and just emphasis. With the 
 knowledge of universal laws there enters a more 
 genial and inclusive spirit. 
 
 Philosophy now aims at complete expression of the 
 essential unity of subject with object, in what Aristotle 
 called "thought thinking itself;" thus reaching the 
 ultimate conception of One Spiritual Substance em- 
 bracing all being within the scope of its self-affirma- 
 tion. ^ The Imagination of our time divines, beyond 
 
 1 This is involved even in the " relativity of all knowledge," which might seem to 
 make it void ; since the conception of this relativity implies recognition of its opposite^ tho 
 non-relative or absolute, as the test of its own reality even as a conception. 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 445 
 
 this metaph5'sical conception, that the living universe 
 is the play of deity, through all forms and forces, all 
 dream and faith and action, all names, all symbols, 
 all religions. Its Piety and its Humanity must be 
 more than a mere recognition of what is eternally 
 good and true, as an object of thought : they aim at 
 the expression of this, as far as possible, in forms of 
 which it shall be at once the productive cause and the 
 inseparable life. Its Sciences must recognize that 
 what lies beyond their tests and explanations is really 
 the one master force involved in every step of evolu- 
 tion from lowest to highest forms, the substance of 
 these force-factors out of which all constructions flow. 
 Its God must be no mere Creator of a distinct uni- 
 verse, in the sense of maker, constructor, provider ; 
 but far more, even the inmost Essence and Principle 
 of all. The age, in fine, is resuming, in the fulness 
 of its experience, the ideal meaning of all spiritual 
 motives profound enough to have acquired distinctive 
 names, and to have entered into the classification of 
 religious systems. 
 
 I am not then forgetting the larger light of science 
 and practical relation in the civilization of the West, 
 when I bring the " Hindu dreamers " to help towards 
 a better understanding of the needs of our time. It is 
 these very forms of intellectual maturity that impel us 
 to seek fresh meaning in all ancient divinations of the 
 Unity of Being. 
 
 The mystery which we are to ourselves, and find in 
 all things around us, not only transcends our ^he mystery 
 theological terms, but effaces all scientific land- "^ ''^s- 
 marks and distinctions. It is by thought we know all 
 that we call God, the world, ourselves; and in aU 
 
446 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 directions alike is thought incomprehensible to the 
 thinker. Facts, phenomena, the operation of forces, 
 we claim to understand simply because we employ them 
 for our purposes, select them to meet definite demands; 
 combine them in positive constructions. But of force 
 we only know that it acts in certain ways, not how it 
 can act thus, nor how act at all. And of the fleeting 
 play of phenomena, what can we say but that the con- 
 nection between mind and the physical organs through 
 which they are perceived — nay, between mind and 
 its own activity — is a mystery penetrable by no faculty 
 that we possess. With a change in our mode of exist- 
 ence, the familiar universe would roll up as a scroll; 
 though it were only to reappear in such new, unim- 
 agined form as may accord with new desires or needs, 
 — so slight the hold of either our volition or our com- 
 prehension on the relations of our being. Yet we 
 inevitably trust the reports of consciousness concern- 
 ing its own objects. And how should this unison be 
 possible, and this confidence and calm abide in the 
 depths of the reason, but for an inmost identity of es- 
 sence, including' within itself alike the truster and 
 what he trusts P 
 
 This presence of the unfathomable, in which all ex- 
 perience is involved, cannot be set aside on the ground 
 that it is always unknown,- and that a purely unknown 
 factor may be eliminated from the problem. It abides 
 everywhere : it is that which we do know most surely, 
 even if we know nothing else, unless knowing means 
 comprehending, in which case we should do well to 
 drop the word altogether. 
 
 Nor can a universal element be eliminated and left 
 out of the problem, — like a constant factor in arith- 
 metic, — on the ground that it is constant and every- 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 447 
 
 where of equal force. ^ It is dynamic, not arithmetical. 
 It enters into the substance of each experience, with 
 special influences in each. Its presence affects the 
 spirit and attitude of inquiry, shapes the definitions, 
 and saves from absorption in the finite side of experi- 
 ence. " They who prize experience exclusively," said 
 Goethe, " forget that experience is but the half tof ex- 
 perience." 
 
 Our victorious science fails to sound one fathom's 
 depth on any side, since it does not ex- 
 
 '•. •' . Thepanthe- 
 
 plain the parentage oi mind. For mind was istic side of 
 in truth before all science, and remains for"'""^'*'" 
 ever the seer, judge, interpreter, even father, of all its 
 systems, facts, and laws. Our faculties are none the 
 less truly above our heads because we no longer won- 
 der, like children, at processes we do not understand. 
 Spite of category and formula, of Kant and Hegel, 
 we are abashed before our own untraceable thought. 
 The stars of heaven, the grass of the field, the very 
 dust that shall be man, foil our curiosity as much as 
 ever, and none the less for yielding to the lens, the 
 prism, arid the polariscope of science ever new tri- 
 umphs for our pride and delight. Not less mystical 
 is mind because it will no longer be suppressed and 
 stultified by mysteries of faith. True as ever is what 
 Krishna says in the old Eastern reverie : — 
 
 " Some regard the soul as a miracle, while some speak of it, and 
 others hear of it, with like astonishment ; but no one comprehends 
 it, even when he has heard it described." * 
 
 What know we of matter ? Philosophy can define 
 it as a form in which spirit manifests itself to spirit, 
 a reflex of thought, an expression or mode of mind ; 
 
 1 This is Mr. Buckle's mode of historical computation : " The moral factor is con- 
 stant : ergo^ it has no influence." 
 
 2 Bhagai'adgU&, ch. ii. 
 
448 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 and so escape the dualism that would seem involved in 
 its being an independent reality. The spiritual is its 
 substance, is what it means, is what we are conscious 
 of, after all. What, then, is spiritual essence? We 
 cannot define it, we know not how, only that it acts ; 
 still less do we know what it is. To remember, to 
 hope,' to love: these we explain only by themselves 
 again. That they are is itself the mystery, all- 
 pervading, infinite, — To Be. 
 
 Into such transcendence the whole of life enters, 
 and with it all science, matter, force, and form. By 
 this one fact of mystery alone, though we should look 
 no further, the infinite of mind is found inseparable 
 from all experience. And this " Unknowable " is 
 known to be not merely continuous with the human, 
 nor interpenetrating it merely, as space is per- 
 vaded by light, — but more. As a man's mind is in 
 his thought and his love, so is essential mind the 
 unfathomable life in which all intelligent spiritual 
 forces move.^ • 
 
 And this truth has still closer relations with our 
 In ethics moral and spiritual nature. The sense of 
 and faith, limit that for ever besets the understanding, 
 withholding from us the meaning of the world and 
 the purpose of existence in a certain repulsion as 
 towards aliens and strangers, necessitates a path 
 upwards to the freedom of an all-embracing idea, an 
 all-dissolving unity, in which our individual imperfec- 
 tions shall, ideally at least, cease to separate us from 
 the whole. This dualism, as between one who seeks 
 
 * ?i-^^Q&t {Psychology, p. 110) regards snch ideas as anthropomorphic, and so without 
 authority. But if the substance of the universe is not mind, as we are mind who think it, 
 then the very conception of existence, on which that of substance depends, is also base- 
 less as resulting from our mentality alone. 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 449 
 
 and one who shuns, can yield only to a sense of in- 
 most identity. The soul must gather the world and 
 itself under one conception. It must see the whole, 
 in other words, in God. Only the inseparableness of 
 finite from infinite can assure our life of an origin and 
 purport adequate to its nature. " Because God is," 
 saith the soul, " therefore I am and shall be, — in 
 God." 
 
 But to this assurance there is no other path 
 than that of moral consecration. The reconciliation, 
 the freedom, the unity, come only with absorption 
 of the conscious self into the truth of principles, 
 convictions, ideal aims ; with finding, in the best 
 moments, somewhat of thought or feeling, which 
 " having been must ever be ; " with participation in 
 somewhat of divine nature and endless promise, 
 through an absolute love and service : so that it 
 shall no longer be the private self, but soul as soul, 
 which affirms within us, and once for all, — " I am." 
 » 
 " O grace abundant, by which I presumed 
 To fix my sight upon the light eternal, 
 So that the se'eing / consumed therein ! 
 I saw that in its depth far down is lying 
 Bound up in love together in one volume 
 What through the universe in leaves is scattered ; 
 Substance, and accident, and their operations, 
 All interfused together in such wise 
 That what I speak of is one simple light.'''' ' 
 
 Such experience is limited to no age nor race 
 Through such paths as these, in such form as w as 
 possible within his special horizon, as I believe, the 
 Hindu saint arrived at his pantheistic faith. This is; 
 the substance of the process, with whatever errors 
 
 ^ Paradisot XXIII. (Longfellow's transl.). 
 29 
 
4SO RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 mingled, by whatever superstitions marred. Through 
 such experiences not the saints and seers only, but 
 simply earnest people, through much imperfection, 
 have in every religion reached the certainty of infinite 
 good, under whatever name, as inseparable from 
 their own inward being. 
 
 These are truths not of the reason only, however 
 Its ethical they may accord with its higher processes ; 
 ™'"'- but primarily of religious sentiment, and espe- 
 cially in its dealing with the facts of moral and phys- 
 ical evil. For the root of all effective force against 
 these facts as actual is in holding the good to be the 
 one reality ; in finding fast anchorage in this ultimate, 
 essential fact which they are bound to subserve ; in 
 being sure that the whole process of life is somehow 
 contained within the infinite rectitude of God. The 
 Hindu dreamer, seeking to abolish evils by thinking 
 them away; and the practical worker, in practical 
 races and times, more effectually battling them down 
 by action, — alike assume that the rd'kl and essential 
 are to be found only in the good. Both seek to reach 
 true being by denying the claim of "evil to be positive 
 and permanent ; to read the world with clearer insight 
 of its meaning ; to affirm for the actual its ultimate 
 significance in the ideal, in God. 
 
 We master the despair with which the prevalence 
 of evils would otherwise overwhelm us, by assuring 
 ourselves that evil is properly " good in the making," 
 a condition of finite growth. This is but recognizing 
 the fact that our philosophy cannot possibly be sound 
 and healthful so long as it does not explain the finite 
 by the infinite, and interpret the life of man in its 
 wholeness as manifestation of God. 
 
 The best and bravest souls have always treated evils 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 45 1 
 
 not as if their depressing side were the substance of 
 their meaning, but as involving issues of all-reconcil- 
 ing good. This mystic faith, that things seen but in 
 part are seen in illusion, and that they are seen but in 
 part till they are brought out into relations that accord 
 with ideal good, is as practical as it is speculative. 
 Science itself can offer no other interpretation than 
 this of the physical evil, which "final causes" and 
 "special interferences" only aggravate by their im- 
 plication of a divine intention. Its help is for the 
 sternest and bitterest lot. It is an instinct of cheerful 
 hope, where it has not yet become a clear perception 
 of the reason. It inspires the will, where it finds no 
 hold in the understanding. Its secret assurance is 
 perhaps strongest in the simplest natures that are least 
 perplexed with casuistry or doubt. It is apt to find 
 clear and hopeful solutions of duty, whether men are 
 dealing with their own sense of wrong-doing or with 
 outward and social wrong. 
 
 We must act upon the testimony of the practical 
 consciousness ; hold common sense sacred ; ignore no 
 facts that life teaches; neglect no function of the 
 understanding. But there is need of a philosophy in 
 which the ideal only is seen as real ; of hours when 
 the eye is opened with vision of the divine alone. 
 Alas for common sense itself, if our ideals have taught 
 us no more than our understandings ; if banks and 
 ships and railroads do not sometimes dissolve as illu- 
 sions in the white light of noble dreams ; if even the 
 woes and sins of the world, which permit no rest to 
 the eyelids of faithful men, could never vanish before 
 their sight into the infinite depths of Divine Order; 
 never melt, even for an hour of happier inspiration, 
 into the mystery of all-embracing good ! 
 
452 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 But is not this pure Fatalism, and destructive to the 
 Relation moral being ? To this question we must reply 
 to fate. tj^at, while destiny or fate in the sense of abso- 
 lute external compulsion would certainly be destructive 
 not only of moral responsibility, but of the personality 
 itself, yet religion or science without fate, in another 
 sense, is radically unsound. The word properlj^ means 
 "fixed, settled, irrevocably spoken ;" that is, it notes the 
 final truth and substance of things. To make it mean 
 only hostile sovereignty — what is desperately bad, and 
 rendered so by a dead, mechanical, motiveless, yet 
 external power — is to misapply it. Rather should 
 it signify what is impregnably certain ; and if good is 
 so, — things being regarded in their inherent and ulti- 
 mate meaning, — then good, not evil, is fate. Is not 
 truth itself, then, fate: — truth, which is but another 
 name for the sanity and integrity of nature and law ; 
 truth, which is the health and sweetness of universal 
 order; truth, which is therefore interchangeable, as to 
 its meaning, with good? Why should not the very 
 perfection of the moral and spiritual laws, whose be- 
 nignity it is no part of our liberty of thought or will 
 to alter or suppress, to make or to mar, stand to the 
 soul as its fate? Subject as we surely are to organi- 
 zation, heredity, conditions innumerable, shall we not 
 hold that the ideal good also, which we dream of beyond 
 these limitations, is our ultimate destiny? We cannot 
 separate perfection and fate. Deity, whose sway is 
 not destiny, would not be venerable, nor even reliable. 
 It would be a purpose that did not round the universe, 
 a love that could not preserve it. Theism without 
 fate is a kind of atheism. And a self-denominated 
 "atheism," yet holding justice to be the true necessity, 
 or fate, is properly theism, though it refuse the name. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 453 
 
 Sovereign right and good at the centre of soul and 
 nature, what is that but God? 
 
 So that destiny should not be defined as hostile 
 sovereignty or suppressive decree. But we p^^^j^^ 
 must go further. It cannot be pure outward reconcUed 
 force, compelling man, even to his good. *" 
 Even worshipped as the dearest ideal, even cherished 
 as the power of God to set aside human defect and 
 guarantee the best, it would still abolish liberty, the 
 substance of the soul, — if it were this. The impell- 
 ing forces therefore represent not foreign mastery, but 
 natural growths God is the inmost life of the human, 
 not the external will that shapes it as the potter moulds 
 his clay. The fate that man must accept is but the 
 real law of his own nature, whereby it is in accord 
 with the universal life. It is thus not only consistent 
 with freedom, but coincident with it. While he resists 
 his own essential humanity, while he fails to express 
 or to seek in his individual purpose that harmony with 
 the universal order, his will can in no proper sense be 
 called free : it is enslaved to illusion and bound to 
 failure, and can reach nothing he really needs or can 
 intelligently love. Liberty itself can be found only in 
 knowing essential good to be the moving force of his 
 own spiritual being. This unity is the true self; in 
 this is personality ; therefore it is spontaneity, joy, 
 health, success. The fate that abolishes individual 
 caprice is the seal of freedom. Hence the inspiration 
 that comes in self-abandonment to an idea or a duty. 
 It identifies our fate with our freedom. All great 
 aspiration brings the sense of destiny, because it frees 
 from inward conflict, from the resistance of finite 
 caprice to infinite good ; and in this deep natural alli- 
 ance and harmony of forces the doubts and fears are 
 dissolved. 
 
454 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Even in the less enlightened forms of personal 
 energy, we note that the sense of destiny comes in, 
 wherever there is unity of the motive powers, al- 
 lowing entire concentration of purpose. This is 
 the condition of valor, assurance, authority. The 
 vivacious Norse Sagas are full of fatalism, and 
 every storming Viking believed that his destiny was 
 written in his brain at birth. "Odin," says the Heim- 
 skringla, "knew beforehand the predestined fate of 
 men, or their not yet completed lot." "No soul can 
 die unless by permission of God," says Mohammed 
 in the Koran, for the encouragement of his followers. 
 "Everyman's fate have we bound about his neck." 
 Better still, fate is the refuge and strength of Greek 
 Prometheus in that sublime martyrdom which he en- 
 dures as the penalty of his love for man. It is free- 
 dom and justice approaching in the future, to dethrone 
 the tyrannical gods of the past. And this divine 
 myth of the identity of fate with noble will is a normal 
 type of all ethical and spiritual inspiration. 
 
 The heroes and the saints are fatalists, and read 
 doom and triumph alike by one token : " for this 
 cause came I unto this hour." The Stoic schools, 
 both Greek and Roman, have proved that spiritual 
 pantheism, as the essential unity of the human and 
 divine, is reconcilable with the strongest conviction of 
 moral freedom ; ' affirming in theory, and carrying 
 out into actual hfe, a degree of personal independence 
 and self-respect as remarkable as their confidence that 
 fate and providence are one.^ The pantheistic fol- 
 lowers of the Bab, a modern Persian heretic, have 
 
 * See Zeller's Stoics, pp. 170, 205, 227. 
 
 ' Stolaus Eclog., I. 179; Seneca de Bene/., TV. 7. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 455 
 
 met incessant persecutions of the most barbarous kind 
 with astonishing courage and enthusiasm. ^ 
 
 And why should the fact be otherwise? Immanent 
 deity, become intensely real for the consciousness, 
 should not only consecrate the whole life to duty, but 
 should give the powers that freedom of aspiration 
 which a universe so consecrated cannot but guarantee 
 to all its own natural and proper forces. "It is an 
 error to suppose," says Heine, "that pantheism leads 
 to indifference. On the contrary, the sense of his 
 own divineness will stir man to reveal the same, and 
 from that moment really grand actions and genuine 
 heroism will enter and glorify this world." '^ 
 
 The life and death of the pantheistic Fichte were 
 full of noble service, both patriotic and humane. 
 Spinoza was the harbinger of free thought and scholar- 
 ship, the Columbus of ethics and theology as well as 
 of philosophy. The mystical " Friends of God " in the 
 Middle Ages were the fathers of modern philanthropy : 
 their "Theologia Germanica," Luther tells us, first 
 brought him inward light and peace. From the spirit- 
 ual closet of a pantheistic dream issued the Reforma- 
 tion. And every time the world is about to move a 
 fresh step forward, there is somewhere in seclusion 
 a mystical brooding sense of all-mastering and all- 
 absorbing deity, that holds in its bosom the germinant 
 religious and social revolution, and sends forth the 
 earliest witnesses and purest martyrs in its cause. 
 
 It must not, then, be supposed that Hindu Panthe- 
 ism and Fatalism were wholly irreconcilable Hindu Pan- 
 with moral earnestness, or even energy. 1 1^°'™^'' 
 cannot admit, for instance, that Mr. Banerjea, sense. 
 
 1 See their liistory in De Gobineau's Relig. de VAsie Central^, 
 * De PAUemagnet I. p. 103. 
 
456 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 a Hindu convert to Christianity, has furnished con- 
 vincing proofs that the Vedanta, making the universe 
 and the soul identical with God, destroyed the idea of 
 duty. The same was said of Spinozism, by Jew and 
 Christian. Yet Spinoza himself, cast out of the syna- 
 gogue with curses as the sum of all wickedness, was, 
 in morality, piety, and spiritual earnestness, far in 
 advance of all his accusers, then or since. Moral 
 purpose in the Hindu was apt to take inward, rather 
 than outward, directions : this was incident to his 
 ethnic and climatic conditions. But how large a 
 degree of such purpose was involved in the effort to 
 overcome self and the senses by his method! It was 
 contemplative indeed, not social. He watched the 
 flow of change as it swept through all forms, as one 
 watches in reverie the waves of a running stream, 
 or the drift of clouds across the sky ; and the thought 
 that he was himself but part of the current made him 
 feel himself profoundly a child of fate. And he was 
 fond of such sayings as these : — 
 
 " Life, death, wealth, wisdom, works, are measured for one while 
 on his mother's bosom." 
 
 " Their fated allotments the very gods must bear. As pieces of 
 drift-wood meet in ocean, and remain together a little time only ; 
 as a traveller sleeps under a tree, and the next day departs, — so 
 friends and possessions pass : there is no return." ' 
 
 " When his time is come, the bird who can see his food a long 
 way off cannot see the snare." 
 
 " Birds are killed in the air ; fishes caught in the sea : what help 
 in choice of place ? " 
 
 " When I see the sun and moon in eclipse, and the wise man in 
 want, then I say, Fate is master." ' 
 
 " Where' are the princes of the earth with their chariots and 
 armies ? The earth that saw them perish still abides." 
 
 > Ramtly&iia. « Hitopadesa, I. 44-46. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 457 
 
 " Who sees not that this body passes away every moment ? 
 Like a pot of clay in the water, it falls in pieces." 
 
 " So many dear ties as man may form, so many thorns of sorrow 
 are planted in his heart." 
 
 " Foolish is he who would lay up riches in a world that iS like 
 a bubble.'' 
 
 " As waters flow away and come not back, so the days and nights 
 of mortal men." 
 
 " The society of the good, which brings us a little joy, is bound 
 to the yoke of pain ; for it ends in separation. 
 
 " And there is no healing for the heart that is wounded with this 
 sword." ' 
 
 But the inference shows that the wisdom to draw 
 help from these necessities was not wanting. 
 
 ■ " Therefore be thou resolved, and think no more of sorrowing : 
 here is the healing for thy wounds." * 
 
 " Every thing on earth has its pleasure and its pain. Death 
 comes to all that is born, and new birth to all that dies. Grieve 
 not for what must be."' 
 
 And what was this intense feeling of the transient 
 but equally intense suggestion of the eternal ? Did 
 not the lower fate point to a higher ? If change 
 sweeps over all, what makes the changes but a 
 changeless law ?* What makes a changeless law 
 but an eternal life ? Vicissitudes pass, God is. And 
 "we are, — in God. So, with all his moral energies, 
 the devotee of contemplation strove to reach perma- 
 nent peace, at the heart of a restless world. 
 
 The old lawgivers found no lack of moral sanction 
 here. 
 
 1 Hitof.y IV. 67-77 ' Ibid., 82. 
 
 » Ram&y&na; Bkag, GU&, &c. 
 
 * " Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Euripides agree that 
 
 ' nothing dies ; 
 
 But different changes give their various forms.' " 
 
 Plutarch, Sentim. iifNatiirt- 
 
4S8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 " If one considers the whole universe as existing in the Supreme 
 Spirit, how can he give his soul to sin ? " ' 
 
 " He who understands divine omnipresence can no more be led 
 captive by crime." ' 
 
 A Upanishad says : — 
 
 " Such a one, who beholds the soul in the infinite soul alone, 
 him sin does not consume : he consumes sin ; becomes free from 
 doubt, and is pure." ' 
 
 The pantheistic bias of Hindu thought does not 
 Trust exclude a trustful and hopeful spirit. Through 
 most Indian poetry there flows a delicate sense 
 of divine benignity in the natural processes of life. 
 The Hitopadeda, the people's ancient Book of Precepts 
 and Fables, whose choice sentences are gathered out 
 of all the Hindu classics, says : — 
 
 " Hear the secret of the wise. Be not anxious for subsistence : 
 it is provided by the Maker. When the child is born; the mother's 
 breasts flow with milk. He who hath clothed the birds with their 
 bright plumage will also feed thee." 
 
 " How should ricTies bring thee joy, which yield pain in the 
 getting, and pain in the passing away, and turn the head of the 
 winner with folly ? What trouble so great, in this life of many 
 cares, as the for ever unsatisfied desire ? That only which one no 
 longer seeks with anxious heart has he really attained." * 
 
 The Vedanta says : — 
 
 " As birds repair to a tree to dwell therein, so all this universe 
 to the Supreme One." ' 
 
 " He, the All-wise Preserver, dispenses the objects of our desire. 
 To know Him is to be free : there is no end of misery but through 
 this knowledge of God. To him whose trust is in God reveal 
 themselves the mysteries." ' 
 
 Says the Divine One in the Gita : — 
 
 » Mmu, XII. ii8. a ibid., VI. 74; so Spinoza. 
 
 " BriAad, IV. iv. 23. « From Mailer's veision, I. 170-179. 
 
 » PraAut, IV. 7. • ^vetaiavatara, VI. 13-23. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 459 
 
 " I am the Preserver who watches in all directions. Be not 
 alarmed at having seen me in the terrible shape of all-destroying 
 Time. Hasten to look, free from fear, on my human and friendly 
 form." ' 
 
 Another text, of frequent recurrence in the philo- 
 sophical and ethical books, makes mortality itself 
 the ground of spiritual faith : — 
 
 " From what root springs man, when felled by death ? Say not, 
 ' like a tree, he springs from seed.' If the tree be destroyed with its 
 root, it grows not again. If then man be cut down by death, from 
 what root shall he spring to life again ? It is God, the highest aim 
 of one who abideth in and knoweth Him." ^ 
 
 In the Ramayana, Bh^rata is adjured by the sages 
 not to mourn too bitterly for his dead father : — 
 
 " O wise Bharata ! grieve not for the departed. He is no longer 
 an object for grief, and too many tears may bring him down from 
 the heaven to which he has gone." ^ 
 
 And Arjuna, permitted to ascend, though living, to 
 the heaven of the just, 
 
 " Follows the path unknown to mortals, where no golden sun 
 nor silver moon divides the time, but the mighty hosts of men 
 shine with the splendor of their own virtue, in a light which we 
 ^far off think to be the tremulous fires of stars-. 
 
 " There sees he the good kings, the brave and faithful men who 
 were blessed with glorious deaths, and holy prophets, and pure 
 women in chariots that wing the heavenly spaces." * 
 
 In the absence of historical and biographical facts, 
 we are obliged to infer the ethical ideal and Ethical 
 attainment which Hindu civilization permitted, iu^s'^'iois- 
 from the prevailing maxims and proverbs ; the wisdom 
 that "has been circulating for ages, in sentence and in 
 song, among the masses of this immense empire. 
 
 « Siaer- G., ch. id. ' BriAad, III. ix. 28. 
 
 • Ram&y., B. 11. * MaMbh., III. 
 
460 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Here, for example, is manly diet, from the Hitopa- 
 The Hito- des'a, for the believer in fate : — 
 
 padesa. 
 
 " Twofold is the life we live in : fate and will together run : 
 Two wheels bear the chariot onward : will it move on only one ? " 
 
 " Nay, but faint not, idly sighing, ' destiny is mightiest.' 
 Sesamum holds oil in plenty ; but it yieldeth none unprest." ' 
 • 
 
 " Fortune comes of herself to the lionlike man who acts. It is 
 the abject who say, ' All must come from fate.' Forget fate, and be 
 brave. If thou failest, having put forth all thy force, the blame is 
 not thine. 
 
 " The deeds done in a former life are what is called fate. There- 
 fore let one exert himself with unwearied energy in the present. 
 
 " As the potter shapes the clay at his will, so a man shapes his 
 own action. 
 
 " Though he see his desired good close at hand, fate will not 
 bestow it on him : it waits the manly deed. 
 
 " A work prospers through endeavors, not through vows : the 
 fawn runs not into the mouth of a sleeping lion." ' 
 
 " Take good and ill as they come ; for fortune turneth like a 
 wheel. 
 
 " Frogs to the marsh, birds to the lake, so all good to the man 
 who strives for it : as one who seeks him, so hastes it to the hero 
 who dallies not, is virtuous, grateful, and a faithful friend." ' 
 
 " By his own doings one rises or falls, as one man digs a well 
 and another throws up a wall." * 
 
 " Seek not the wild ; sad heart ! Thy passions haunt it. 
 Play hermit in thy house, with will undaunted. 
 A governed heart, thinking no thought but good. 
 Makes crowded houses holy solitude.'' 
 
 * HUopad. Inirod.t 29, 31. The verses are from ArnohTs pleasant abridgment of this 
 old Book of Good Counsels (Lond. 1861), and are literal translations. The prose pas- 
 sages are selected from MUlUr^s German version (1844). I have also carefully compared 
 with this the French version of Lancereau (1855) and the English by Sir IVilliam. jfones. 
 This last is hardly trustworthyj and Miiller thinks it cannot have received the author's 
 entire elaboration. Such liberties are taken by the native copyists of the Hitopade^ 
 that, in MUller's opinion, no true edition is possible, and each translator must select the 
 special text he will follow. This fact helps to explain the very marked difference in 
 these versions. 
 
 » Ibid.- iiUrod., 30-35. ' Ibid., I. 164-166. * Ibid., II.-4S. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 461 
 
 " Thine own self, Bhirata, is the holy stream, whose shrine is 
 virtue, whose water is truth, whose bank is character, whose waves 
 are sympathy. There bathe, O Son of Pandu ! Thy inward life 
 is not by water made pure." ' 
 
 " Better be silent than speak ill ; better give up life than love 
 harsh words ; better beggar's fare than luxury at another's board." ' 
 
 " Only that life is worth living which is free. If they live who 
 depend on others, who are dead ? " ' 
 
 " He has all good things whose soul is content: the whole earth 
 is spread with leather, for him whose own feet are well shod." 
 
 " He has read and heard and acquired all things, who turns his 
 back on hope, and expects nothing." * 
 
 " Do not rage, like a cloud, with empty thunder : the noble man 
 does not let the good or ill that foes have done him be seen." ' 
 
 " What is a brave man's fatherland, and what a foreign country ? 
 Wherever he goes, his strength makes that land his own." * 
 
 " A bad man is like an earthen pot, easy to break and hard to 
 mend. A good man is like a golden vase, hard to break and easy 
 to mend." ' 
 
 " Disposition is hard to overcome. If you make a dog a king, 
 will he not still gnaw leather .■' " * 
 
 "A gem may be trodden under foot, and glass be put on the 
 head : yet the glass is only glass, and the gem is still a gem." ° 
 
 " How shall teaching help him who is without understanding ? 
 Can a mirror help the blind to see ? " '" 
 
 " It is to no purpose that the bad man says, I have read the 
 Vedas and the Laws. His character rules him, as it is the property 
 to milk to be sweet." " 
 
 " Wise men seek not things unattainable : grieve not over the 
 lost, and stand firm in time of trouble." " 
 
 " In. the poisoned tree of life grow two sweet fruits, — the enjoy- 
 ment of the nectar of poetry and the society of noble men." " 
 
 " Integrity, self-sacrifice, valor, steadfastness through all changes, 
 sympathy, loyalty, and truth are the virtues of a friend." " 
 
 • Hitopadeia, IV. 83, 86 From Wi^MahSih. ^ Ibid., I. 129. ' Ibid., II. >i. 
 
 » Ibid., I. 135, 137- ' Ibid., IV. 91. » Ibid., I. 96. 
 
 ' Ibid., I. 86. " Ibid., III. 58. » Ibid., II. 67. 
 
 " Ibid., III. 117. " Ibid-. I- '!• " Ibid., I. 161. 
 
 « Ibid, 1. 145- " Ibid., I. 89. 
 
462 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 "By whom is this jewel created, this word of two syllables 
 (Mitrim, friend), wherein we pour the joy of love, which guards us 
 from sorrow and foes and fear ? A friend who gladdens the heart, 
 sharing one's pleasure and pain, is hard to find. Friends in pros- 
 perity, self-seekers, abound ; but misfortune is their touchstone." 
 
 " Be hospitable to thine enemy when he comes to thy door : the 
 tree withdraws not its shade even from the wood-cutter. 
 
 " Good men are compassionate to the lowest beings. The moon 
 refuses not its light to the hut of the Chandala. 
 
 " A guest who departs from a house disappointed, leaves his 
 own sins behind him, and carries away the virtue of its owner. 
 
 " Even a low-born man who comes to a Brahman's house must 
 be honored : the stranger is on the same footing with the gods." ' 
 
 " He alone is to be praised, he is blest, from whom the weak and 
 suppliant go not away with hopes destroyed." ' 
 
 "The friendship of noble persons endures to the end of life; 
 their anger is quickly appeased ; their liberality is without self- 
 interest." ■* 
 
 " Only the foolish ask, ' Is this one of us or an outside person ? ' 
 To the noble the whole world is a family." * 
 
 "One should spare his neighbor, thinking of the pain one feels 
 when he sees that he must die." 
 
 " O sacred earth ! why dost thou endure the false man, who re- 
 turns noble and trusting kindness with evil treatment?"* 
 
 " This life, which is like a wave trembling in the wind, is in a 
 right cause to be sacrificed for the good of others." ' 
 
 " Let the wise man give up his goods for the sake of his neigh- 
 bor ; for the sake of the good let him even give his life." ' 
 
 " As life is dear to thee, so is it to other creatures : the good 
 have mercy on all, as on themselves. 
 
 " He who regards another's wife as his mother, his wealth as vain, 
 and all creatures as himself, is wise. 
 
 " Give to the poor, O son of Kunti ! not to the rich. Medicine is 
 for the sick, not for those that are well. 
 
 " The gift, bestowed with right purpose, at right time and place, 
 on one who cannot repay it, is to be called a real gift." " 
 
 » Hitofadeia, I. 203, 204. " Ibid., I. 52-57- ' Ibid., I. 183. 
 
 • Ibid., I. 180. 6 Ibid., I. 64. « Ibid., I. 61, 73. 
 
 ' Ibid., III. 140. » Ibid., I. 38. e Ibid., I. 10-14. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 463 
 
 " Between virtues and the body there is infinite difference : the 
 body perishes in a moment, virtues endure while the world lasts." ' 
 
 " The wise will follow duty, as if death were already grasping his 
 hair." « 
 
 The following are from the Panchatantra, a still 
 
 older collection of tales and sentences, whose pancha- 
 
 relation to the Hitopadesa is not yet very '^°'"- 
 clearly understood : — 
 
 " In all actions, to be like one's self is the praise of the wise ; 
 this makes smooth the right path, so full of hindrance." ' 
 
 "When the just falls, it is like a ball of feathers, but the wicked 
 falls like a clod." ■* 
 
 "A noble person never fails in protecting others, even in his 
 extreme need ; as the pearl loses not its whiteness, though it have 
 passed through the flames." * 
 
 " The storm blows down the strongest tree, if it stands alone ; 
 but not the well-rooted trees that stand together." ' 
 
 " He who is kind to those that are kind to him does nothing 
 great. To be good to the offender is what the wise call good." ' 
 
 "A good prince is eye to the blind, friend to the friendless, 
 father and mother of all who do well." ' 
 
 " Where he is honored who is unworthy of honor, and he de- 
 pised who deserves respect, there come three things, — famine, 
 pestilence, and war."" 
 
 The fact that these popular " Books of Wisdom " are 
 mainly of Buddhist origin i" does not weaken their 
 testimony to the union of practical morality with pan- 
 theistic sentiment. The Hindu masses who have 
 rejected Buddhism as a system of negations cherish 
 these manly maxims as the true philosophy of life. 
 They are heard on the lips of the poorest people, and 
 circulate freely through city and village. As in the 
 
 1 Hitopadesa, I. 43- " IWd., Introd., 3. 
 
 8 Panchat. CBenfey's German transl.) B. III. « Ibid., II. 
 
 » Ibid. IV. » Ibid., III. ' Ibid., IV. ix. 
 
 • Ibid., I. xii. » Ibid., III. %. 
 
 ^ See Benfey, EinUUuTig z. PaTtchatanira, 
 
464 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 gnomic literature of other races, so here, the higher 
 ethics are combined with maxims of prudential and 
 even of selfish quality, though these last are very 
 rare.i Plaints of poverty, and policies that secure 
 success are quaintly mixed with admonitions on the 
 brevity of life and the vanity of riches. And, as with 
 Buddhist teaching generally, the inculcation of good 
 will sometimes runs out into extravagant forms of self- 
 sacrifice. These fables are in fact an honest picture 
 of human life, and proverbs are not wanting which 
 answer to every human quality represented therein. 
 That those of- sense and shrewdness should abound 
 is but another proof that pantheism does not exclude 
 practical capacities and aims. 
 
 Bhartrihari, a very ancient gnomic poet, whose 
 " sentences " on human life and conduct are very popu- 
 lar in India, begins with the praise of love and beauty, 
 and ends with the praise of devotion : — 
 
 " Wisdom is a treasure thieves cannot steal. It grows by spend- 
 ing, and it cannot pass away. The wise are the rich; and ye, O 
 princes ! will never become their equals." 
 
 " Without the wisdom that burns away our sins, the Vedas are 
 nothing but men's trading wares." 
 
 "Virtue has no need of penances, nor a pure heart of washing 
 in the Ganges, nor a true man of human protection, nor magna- 
 nimity of any ornament, nor the wise of any treasure but wisdom." 
 
 " Though thy efforts fail, be steadfast, and thou shalt be exalted. 
 The torch thrown on the ground goes not out." 
 
 " He who has given himself to virtue, and felt the joy of obedi- 
 ence to duty, will give up life, but not his purpose." 
 
 " If the thistle has no leaves, is the spring to be blamed ; or the 
 sun, if bats fly not by day ; or the cloud, if no drop of rain fall into 
 
 1 The worst of these in the Hitopadesa are suggested by the good mouse (B. i.) — 
 purely for the purpose of testing the heroic professions of the king pf the doves, who begs 
 him to gnaw his subjects out of the net before himself, thus preferring their safety to his 
 own. The selfish maxims are promptly rejected, and answered by others of the opposite 
 quality ! whereat the mouse praises this wisdom of self-sacrifice as worthy of a kmg. 
 
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 465 
 
 the cuckoo's beak ? So blame not fate : not so wilt thou change its 
 path." 
 
 " Go not aside from wisdom : then shall fire become as water, and 
 the sea as a well ; Meru shall be as a hillock, and the lion as a 
 gazelle ; poison shall be sweet as nectar, and serpents a crown of 
 flowers.'' 
 
 "As shadows in the morning is friendship with the wicked: 
 hour by hour it wanes. But friendship with the good grows like 
 the shadows of eve, till life's sun shall have set." 
 
 " The drop of rain falls on glowing iron, and is no more. It falls 
 on a flower, and shines like a pearl. It sinks into a shell at the 
 happy hour, and becomes the pearl itself Such the difference be- 
 tween kinds of friendship among men." 
 
 " To do good in secret, to conceal one's good act, to help the 
 poor when he comes, to be moderate in prosperity, always to speak 
 kindly, is the path of wisdom." ' 
 
 I add a few selections of similar ethical purport 
 from other popular Hindu writings : — 
 
 " In thy passage over this earth, where the paths are now low, 
 now high, and the true way seldom distinguished, thy steps must 
 needs be unequal ; but fidelity to thyself will bear thee right on- 
 ward." * 
 
 " Let thy motive lie in the act, not in the reward. Having sub- 
 dued thy passions, do thy own work, unconcerned for the result. 
 Then shalt thou stand untainted in the world, as the lotus-leaf lies 
 on the waters unwet." ' 
 
 The Mahabharata says of Arjuna that — 
 
 " Neither lust nor fear nor love could tempt him to transgress 
 his duty, or to do evil : " — 
 
 and R^ma in the Ram&yana that — 
 
 "As birds are made to fly and rivers to run, so the soul tO' 
 follow duty." 
 
 " As the fragrance of a blossoming tree spreads far, so the frai 
 grance of a pure action." ■* 
 
 » Bhartr- (Von Bohlen's Latin vers.) I. 13 ; III. 72 ; I. 45, 75 ; II. loo-; I; 89) 
 
 78, 5o> S7- 
 
 » Sakuntaltt. ' Bhagavad-GUli. * Mah&nHr&yana Upax., VU 
 
 30 
 
466 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 "As the stars disappear, so fades the memory of a kindness out 
 of an evil heart." ' 
 
 " Our senses are like lattices, at which the deities keep watch. 
 And if the soul unconsciously leaves them open to the poisonous 
 air of temptation, sincere prayer to these heavenly guardians will 
 save the precious light." 
 
 " How can he who loves all men be torn by affliction i Or he 
 who hates be free from terror ? or the voluptuary from misery ? 
 How can he fail who acts wisely ? How can he be happy who mur- 
 murs at Providence ? Who can be glorious without virtue ? who 
 truly dishonored without blame ? And how without justice shall 
 the kingdom stand?'"* 
 
 " He who lives pure in thought, free from malice, contented, 
 leading a holy life, feeling tenderness for all creatures, speaking 
 wisely and kindly, humble and sincere^ has Vasudeva (Vishnu) ever 
 in his heart. The Eternal makes not his abode within the heart of 
 that man who covets another's wealth ; who injures living creatures ;• 
 who speaks harshness or untruth ; who is proud of his iniquity ; 
 whose mind is evil." ' 
 
 " Men are ever seeking, never attaining, bliss. They die thirst- 
 ing. The whole world is sufiFering under triple affliction. Why 
 should I hate beings who are objects for compassion ? why cherish 
 malignity towards those who are more prosperous than myself? I 
 should rather sympathize with their happiness. For to suppress 
 unkind feelings is itself a reward."* 
 
 " It is the duty of the good man, even in the moment of his de- 
 struction, not only to forgive, but to seek to bless his destroyer, even 
 as the sandal-tree sheds perfume on the axe that fells it." ' 
 
 " Heaven's gate opens to the good without a gift : the gate shut 
 fast to the wicked, though he bring hundred-fold oflFerings. 
 
 "Put a thousand horses in the scale, yet shall virtue be the 
 heavier weight. 
 
 " The sweet scent of flowers is lost on the breeze, but the fra- 
 grance of virtue endures for ever. 
 
 " Whatever men do of good or evil, they shall reap the fruit in 
 due season. 
 
 " The foolish, like a child, knows not if things grow better or 
 worse ; and while, drawn by the roses, he lets the orchard go, he 
 will mourn over the fading flower, and lose the golden fruit." « 
 
 > Ifi»du Play (Wilson). » RamAyA-m.. » Vishnu Purina, III. vii 
 
 « VUhrm Pur&na, I. xvii: ^ Halhed's Gentoo Code. « Ratn&y&na. 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 467 
 
 And SO we may judge whether Manu is not justified 
 in claiming what he does for the rehgion of his race. 
 " Of all duties the first is to know the Supreme. It is 
 the most exalted science, and assures immortal life. 
 For in the knowledge and adoration of God, which 
 the Veda teaches, all rules of good conduct are com- 
 prised." "Wisdom," says the Hitopadesa, "is the 
 highest good of man ; for it cannot be sold nor taken 
 from him, nor can it ever die. He who hath it not, 
 the destroyer of doubt, the mirror of the unseen, the 
 eye of all, is blind." ^ 
 
 The belief that the substance of life is one and 
 divine has its forms in all ages, ^-recognitions, 
 more or less enlightened, of a constant spir- tionofiife 
 itual fact ; to which thought is again and again ^ °°°' 
 remanded, under broader and clearer aspects, as man 
 advances to new forms of culture. And this better 
 knowledge comes mainly from doing justice to the 
 balancing fact of difference, or individuality. 
 
 In the Hindu mystic, a child of religious instinct 
 and dream, the unity of life was an exclusive con- 
 sciousness, an all-absorbing wonder and delight. 
 For the religious sentiment of itself is not analytic, 
 but integrative ; absorbed in what it loves, it sees not 
 parts, but wholes ; it dissolves antagonisms and dis- 
 tinctions, just as it does doubts or fears, in its own 
 fervent heat. While the understanding is unde- 
 veloped, this mystic sense of oneness is of course 
 blind to the capabilities of life, and the meaning of 
 its relations. As in Brahmanism, it even helps to 
 eternize social wrongs ; either ignoring them as illu- 
 sion, or else accepting them as elements of a divine 
 order, and reconciling them in its all-dissolving dream. 
 
 ^ Hitop.^ Inirod.f 4, g. 
 
468 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Yet this dream is divination also of a central truth, 
 whose practical and social meaning grows with prog- 
 ress, and appears in the latest science and faith. 
 
 For these are really the goal involved in that mystic 
 point of departure, that intuitive ideal of the unity of 
 life. The course of history justifies and reaffirms it 
 on a broader plane, having at last developed its human 
 values. We can here but sketch this process. 
 
 In the Oriental philosophies, unity is for the most 
 Its historical P^rt a rcligious abstraction, an ideal of con- 
 evoiution. templatiou. But with Greek and Roman the 
 understanding comes to its rights.. The individual 
 asserts his validity. The human and finite are 
 marked off", as against the infinite, and studied, in and 
 for themselves. And in this polarity or antagonism 
 come liberty and progress. Man recognizes his own 
 regulated powers to be the path to truth, beauty, good. 
 It is no longer the unlimited, but limit, that is divine. 
 What Kapila and his Sankhya reaction on Vedantism 
 showed in germ thus reaches maturer expression 
 under more favoring skies, in more energetic races. 
 Here all is relation, contrast, difference. 
 
 With the Greek comes the triumph of dialectics, 
 the clear analysis of ideas and principles, the keenest 
 sense of individual purpose. With the Greek appears 
 duality of matter and mind ; also of matter and num- 
 ber. Pythagoras determines the harmonious relations 
 of finite things. Xenophanes, who pronounced unity 
 to be the ultimate fact, as distinctly as the Vedantists, 
 and who recognized the illusion of the phenomenal 
 world as fully, yet not the less insisted that all visible 
 things should be studied, and had his own natural 
 history of their origin and development. So the 
 Ionian cities first thoroughly distinguished politics 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 469 
 
 from theocrac)^ ; and Greek life emancipated govern- 
 ment, making it a separate independent science. And 
 the first great step was taken towards freeing men 
 from religious bondage when Xenophanes pointed out 
 the fact that they made their own gods. 
 
 " The gods have not given every thing to man. It is man who 
 has ameliorated his own destiny." 
 
 The Prometheus of .^schylus, resisting Jove for the 
 sake of mankind, and predicting his downfall at the 
 hands of the son of a mortal woman, illustrates the 
 same protest of the human, against an overwhelming 
 sense of infinity. Taine has admirably pointed out 
 this quality of the Greek mind. " The Greeks have 
 no sentiment of this infinite universe, in which a 
 generation of people is but an atom in time and place. 
 Eternity does not set up before them its pyramid of 
 myriads of ages. The universal escapes them, or at 
 least half occupies them, or remains in the background 
 in their religion." ^ In Rome, on the other hand, the 
 universal was everywhere pursued, yet always in con- 
 crete and human forms, — as political organization, 
 as jurisprudence, as world-wide sway. 
 
 Even in Greece and Rome, however, we still find 
 the religious sentiment to be, on the whole, inclusive 
 of all human spheres and functions. It gives man 
 and nature their meaning for art, science, philosophy, 
 domestic, social, municipal life ; so that there is still 
 a sense in which life might make the impression of a 
 divine unity. But the process advances. 
 
 Aristotle has defined ; analyzing man and nature as 
 he could. Bacon goes further ; plots the sciences on 
 a map, and marks the regions yet to be filled. Men 
 botanize, dissect, unroll the earth's pages, loose the 
 
 ^ Art in Greece, p. 38. 
 
470 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 bands of Orion, and resolve the galaxy into myriads 
 of worlds. It is telescope and calculus, instruments of 
 analysis, that are divine. We learn the mechanics 
 of religion, politics, commerce, art. Men search out 
 the cunning workmanship of the universe. They are 
 all eye to detect how it was contrived by a Being who 
 plans, devises, manipulates, constructs like themselves. 
 In this inspection of definite processes the immanence 
 of the infinite gradually recedes from thought, and 
 religion enters the phase of a more or less external 
 deism, oscillating between the Paleys and Voltaires ; 
 knowing God only as a manipulator of materials 
 provided for him from without, just as one knows an 
 architect by the style of his hoiise, or a watch- 
 maker by his watch. It is not strange that analytic 
 science, elated by its discoveries in this realm of de- 
 finable relations and palpable mechanism, and in- 
 attentive to the infinite substance that must condition 
 all phenomena, should .concentrate its homage at last 
 on the processes by which it achieves its triumph. 
 Analysis, in fact, by its own function of taking the 
 world to pieces, instead of receiving the impression 
 of its unity and integrity, is reduced to holding this 
 critical process as the essential thing, the vital fact of 
 the universe. Mind and nature become in its theory 
 simply objective material for testing and reducing, 
 mere . hylic mass for manipulation by its forces ; 
 whether to afford them. discipline, or to give scope to 
 their energies, or to reflect their praise. 
 
 This merely analytic process is quite incompetent to 
 reveal truth in the form of life. To dissect its objects, 
 it must destroy them. It slays that beautiful unity of 
 functions and relations, in which life is mysteriously 
 shrined. In the heap oi dead fibres*' and organs, on 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 471 
 
 which it has operated, and which it displays in their 
 mere outward mechanism, what resemblance is there 
 to the living, breathing, inspired body? What resem- 
 blance to the former life can you get by putting thfem 
 together again? Phosphorus in the growing grain is 
 food for human brains : extract this phosphorus by 
 chemical process, and it is poison. Being must be 
 seen in its natural and vital relations, in its integrity^ 
 or it is not seen at all. Under the power of mere 
 analysis, science would become puj-e autopsy, and 
 nature have no informing soul. 
 
 The genius of scientific and practical races has 
 therefore not been without its tendencies to transform 
 the living universe — which for the contemplative spirit 
 is thrilling with a mystic divine pulsation, and which 
 Plato even called a living creature — into a well-devised 
 machine. Their vast capacities, under the lead of 
 analysis, have developed its definable uses, rather 
 than felt the mystery of its life. As one after 
 another they have unfolded its flowing activities, its 
 unfathomed forces, they have seemed to claim these 
 by right of creation quite as much as by that of dis- 
 covery ; to throw off the Infinite as a separable ele- 
 ment, and then refuse it all place in the triumph of the 
 very powers which it conditions and supplies ; writing 
 on each freshly won field, " God is not here, but, if 
 anywhere, behind and beyond ; " insisting all the 
 time, observe, that the idea of God as a distinct exter- 
 nal power is the only idea of God, being that which 
 analysis must report. Their physical science goes 
 further still, and in its search for physical origins of 
 life has often quite overlooked the substance for the 
 processes of nature, and mistaken the mechanism of 
 life for its aKplanation and cause. 
 
4^2 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 But science cannot penetrate far on her divine path 
 ^""^sii without discerning that it is divine. Science 
 
 mature sci- , 
 
 ence. has no commission to take the mystery out of 
 nature, to exorcise from its laws the hfe that preserves 
 them from being fathomed by progressive thought, 
 or marred by imperfect will. So much is clearly dis- 
 cerned by the broadest scientific minds of the day. 
 
 Science solves no problem but by recognizing 
 another and more interior, disclosed by the solution 
 itself, as a flower within its opening sheath. The 
 freest explorers of nature not only see most clearly the 
 unity of the universe, tracing its laws through their 
 relations to each other and to the whole, but also the 
 infinitude of these relations, inexhaustible for every 
 atomic fact. Not less is the unity of life revealed in 
 the wonderful gradations of its forms ; in the compre- 
 hension of all lower stages within all higher ones ; 
 and in endless subtle affinities, transitions, transforma- 
 tions, that forbid absolute lines of separation between 
 these stages of ascent. And the whole drift of mod- 
 ern science is towards the recognition of what has 
 been described by one of its ablest exponents as " one 
 harmonious action, underlying the whole of nature, 
 organic and inorganic, cosmical, physical, chemical, 
 terrestrial, vital, and social."' 
 
 Yet this unity is, it must also be observed, of a 
 purely transcendental kind. It is not explicable, or 
 even expressible, by the processes of science, which 
 can but trace the order of phenomena, and must 
 therefore confess herein the immanence of the infinite 
 throughout its fields of research. Science, then, must 
 inevitably bring fresh tributes to mystic contempla- 
 tion, and reconcile liberty and knowledge with that 
 
 » Mivart, Genesis of Species^ p. 239. 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 473 
 
 old eternal longing of the soul for the unfathomable 
 One. 
 
 Of this whole process, miracle is of course the in- 
 tolerable negation. If it were possible for the 
 notion that the course of natural law can bejectionof 
 violated or suspended to hold its ground, it™"*^^^- 
 would utterly abolish the power of science to reveal 
 immanent deity, and even the idea of deity as infinite 
 intelligence. Logically, there could be no science, 
 and no religion ; only observations of phenomena that 
 point to no universal or reliable basis of belief. How 
 could these observations really reveal One who may 
 contradict them to-morrow? But such contempt of 
 nature and distrust of its orderly laws is not properly 
 Aryan. With races of this stock science hastens to 
 fulfil its religious function. The Semitic mind also 
 has learned to greet this form of revelation as freely 
 as the Aryan. 
 
 Oriental faith in miracles knew no bounds. But 
 miracle was as universal in the East as law with us, and 
 so that stupendous mythology had meaning for the re- 
 ligious sentiment. There was no vain distinction made 
 between miraculous and natural revelation ; but the 
 whole actual or possible of nature and life was, as it 
 were, insphered in deity. In a child's wonder at all 
 he sees, special wonder-working counts for no more 
 than plain nature. 
 
 The scientific conception of invariable law comes, 
 then, not to destroy this divine dream that the xhe 
 universe is in God, so dear to contemplative "^ 
 minds in every age, but to interpret and fulfil it. 
 Man has been learning to reconcile freedom, even 
 in deity, with orderly and unchanging ways, and to 
 clear his own ideal of perfection from every element 
 
 mission 
 science. 
 
474 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of exclusiveness or divided power. He has been 
 learning that the closest study of mind and nature 
 does not frge him from the conviction that infinite in- 
 telligence is the inmost ground of finite, but confirms 
 it by all the certainties of law. The mystic faith 
 which, while yet an infantile instinct, sang of Brahma 
 as the All, and of the world of forms as his divine 
 play, has thus permanent meaning for man ; and all 
 its phases in history have been pointing beyond them- 
 selves to a maturity which only science could bring. 
 Clothed in new knowledge as in new names ; inter- 
 preted by things natural and practical, and giving 
 these a sublime reach of relation and promise ; set to 
 largest social uses, and inspiring them with universal- 
 ity, identifying religion with the free growth of every 
 human faculty, with labor and with life, and so eman- 
 cipating it from dependence on mediator or miracle, — 
 this mystic faith in the oneness of God and man 
 reappears at last as a freedom and intelligence, which 
 neither distinctive Brahmanism, Judaism, nor Chris- 
 tianity could express. 
 
 I perceive no power cither in the friends or foes of 
 „ . . , science to resolve it into spiritual negation. It 
 
 Spintual re- ^ & 
 
 lationsof can neither become the slave of superstition 
 nor the bar to sentiment and ideal vision. It 
 refuses to be ruled by the hostile supernaturalist, who 
 imagines that a development theory must involve 
 atheism. It must no less distinctly decline the pro- 
 posal of the student of nature to banish, in the name 
 of law itself, " what we call spirit and spontaneity," 
 from human thought. ^ 
 
 For a law, physical or psychological, is no mere 
 automatic machinery. It is a mode of action^ so 
 
 1 Hiudey on Physical Basis of Life. 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 475 
 
 orderly, so harmoniously related to other laws, so 
 expressive of what we most reverence in thought, 
 that to divorce it from mind would be to refuse belief 
 in the ideal forms of those attributes which most 
 dignify mind; those highest functions to which in- 
 telligence, as we find' it in ourselves, clearly points 
 upward. Instead of being apart from mind, the con- 
 stancy of natural law implies an inseparable mental 
 force, none the less real because without the limita- 
 tions which human intelligence involves. Its univer- 
 sality does not make it the less, but the more divine. 
 A man may make wheels, springs, and levers his 
 agents, and withdraw; for inertia and weight do not 
 depend on his fingers, and the machine will get on for 
 a while without his aid. But deity cannot leave the 
 laws of the universe to work alone, since they are sim- 
 ply forms of divine energy ; the activity of the law 
 being nothing else than the instant energy of imma- 
 nent mind. That this energy transcends all we ex- 
 perience as personal consciousness does not alter the 
 fact that it is a form of mind. 
 
 What serves it to remand this wisdom and power 
 to a distinct sphere, and lay it quietly aside as "The 
 Unknowable " ? How indeed can that be unknowable 
 of which we know that it exists, and of which, if we 
 are to allow ourselves competent to science in any 
 form, the very meaning for us is constant self-mani- 
 festation in phenomena? 
 
 The mind and heart of man still fail not to enter- 
 tain the never solved, yet never wholly unanswered 
 questions which a secret intuitive assurance will not 
 suffer him to dismiss. 
 
 What is this instant intelligence whereby the uni- 
 verse becomes unity and order and growth ? What 
 
476 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 harmonizes nature and man ? What brings the atoms 
 together each moment to form the coherent globe, and 
 yet holds them at the same moment apart, so that two 
 shall never touch ? What lifts each separate billow 
 of the sea, yet binds it to obey the tidal swell ? 
 
 Discussion as to which is the one great force in 
 material atoms, attraction or self-repulsion ; or whether 
 all things come to pass through action and reaction 
 of the two, — makes no difference to our questions, 
 which go deeper. 
 
 What is that in conscience which is so at one with 
 gravitation and affinity and light ? What mysterious 
 sway makes recollection and hope, past and future, 
 alike our servants ? What directs the remedial retri- 
 butions, silent and sure, to bring us back to nature 
 and right ? 
 
 What is that most minute attention which guards 
 the pulsations of the heart ; keeps thought, affection, 
 will, coherent and untroubled ; buoying up individual 
 existence on the unfathomed sea? And what makes 
 the deep that brought us hither, and into which we 
 return, to be in all its mystery a home into whose care 
 we entrust what is dearest to us with such wondrous 
 calmness? 
 
 Questions these as old as mind and heart, earlier 
 than the study of natural laws, and not set aside there- 
 by. And what of the answer ? Was it only because 
 he had so little knowledge of the definite processes, 
 the delicate' distinctions which science reveals, that the 
 Hindu, pondering over these mysteries, solved all 
 questions by pronouncing the one word Adhydtma, — 
 Over-soul ? Was it his ignorance that spirit and 
 spontaneity must be dismissed, upon the discovery of 
 law, that prompted the answer, " Mind is all " ? Yet 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 477 
 
 it would appear that our science of invariable har- 
 monious law itself can give no other answer; and 
 we must still demand what invisible life is plying at 
 this seamless warp and woof of "evolution," "natural 
 selection," "metamorphosis." Is it we individually, we 
 collectively, who do it, — we who can neither make nor 
 mar one of these laws, and who advance only by 
 accepting and rightly using them according to laws 
 of reason and love ? Is it, as some dream, spirits 
 wiser than we, a hierarchy of diviner insights and 
 powers ? We gain not a step by such ascent, to- 
 wards reaching the constitutive force of law. Spirits 
 themselves are not less truly expressions of this force 
 in their mental energies, for being also free, produc- 
 tive, personal. Their spontaneity itself rests on this 
 mystery of orderly law, like the movements of atoms 
 and of suns. Morality is personal liberty ; but it is no 
 less the movement of immutable law, transcending 
 the individual, while it lifts him into the freedom and 
 strength which belong to universal truth. 
 
 We call the intelligence, of which universal law is 
 the movement, God. But in reality we have no name 
 for it, because no name can cover the whole. Law, 
 Life, Love, Unity, Fatherhood, Brotherhood, this re- 
 ligion, that religion, all are waves of the One Divine 
 Sea. 
 
 None of these syllables have quite expressed the 
 truth that is found only in the whole. They yield but 
 fragments of a sense that was never sounded, of a 
 growth that cannot end. 
 
 The yedantic worship of One Life in all was 
 darkened by idolatry of tradition and of caste. Escape from 
 Yet it should be noted that caste and tradition 1'™'*''°''=- 
 were held to be steps only, to higher unity of being 
 
478 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 which should dissolve them away. After all, the rela- 
 tions of the devotee with his ideal of the Supreme 
 were felt to be personal and direct : his own sacrifice, 
 his own disciplines, not another's, were relied on to 
 make his illusions vanish and reality appear. 
 
 All special religions have, in like manner, presented 
 obstacles of their own to that free recognition of the 
 infinite which they sought. Especially is this true 
 of their pretensions to supernatural revelation, which 
 science is so thoroughly setting aside in the name of 
 law. In the lower stages of culture, supernaturalism 
 is indeed a reaching forth to find God : it means that 
 there is at least a divineness in things exceptional or 
 wonderful, for those who have not yet learned what 
 sacredness there is in things familiar and near. It is, 
 primarily then, a form of spiritual progress, and satis- 
 fies real needs. But, when prolonged into scientific ages 
 and enlightened races, claims of this kind practically 
 teach that God is not in man, in nature, in history ; 
 but out of man, against nature, de/tind history; en- 
 tering the world once on a time, with what men 
 are expected to receive as truer than truth, more 
 legislative than law, more loving than love. They 
 teach that spirit is to be held the more divine 
 for secluding itself in the prescriptive claim'of one 
 or of a few. They teach that the infinite is the 
 better recognized for confining its manifestation to a 
 class, an epoch, an individual life. All this limita- 
 tion of universal forces, this prescription of divine 
 paths, this foreclosure of inspiration, the liberty of 
 our day holds to be no better than sarcophagus or 
 shroud. It will choose rather that pantheism of 
 the Spirit that finds God instant and informing in all 
 history, experience, law, and work. What Eastern 
 
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 479 
 
 contemplation could foreshadow, Western vigor and 
 grasp of things will have to deliver out of its limita- 
 tions, old and new, by bringing the unities of races 
 and sciences and faiths, to serve, now that their day 
 too has come, this eternal desire of the soul. 
 
 Never can man, with whatsoever motive, even in 
 theory separate himself from God. Theology has 
 vainly attempted it, under promptings of fear and 
 self-contempt. Even the noble sentiment of humility 
 has been pressed by a sense of imperfection and in- 
 ward evil, to the point of imagining a gulf positively 
 separating the divine from the human. It has thus 
 attempted what would divide deity itself, and abolish 
 at once both human and divine. This also was in 
 vain. 
 
 It is the virtue of modern culture, intellectual and 
 moral, that it educates man in self-respect; so that 
 he shall no longer think himself bound to deny the 
 validity of his own nature, in order to affirm the reality 
 of the divine. It does not hesitate to assure him that 
 it is only where he finds his own real being that he is 
 finding God. 
 
V. 
 
 INCARNATION. 
 
INCARNATION. 
 
 'T*HE literal meaning of Incarnation is that deity 
 -*■ assumes a material body, in order to be universality 
 clearly recognized as present in the actual °*' ""^ '"*^- 
 world. Substantially, the belief implies a profounder 
 truth, which its various forms imperfectly express ; — 
 that Life is in its inmost sense one with God. It is 
 essential to the religious sentiment, and has as many 
 forms as there are religions in the world. God must 
 be not abstraction, but life. Somehow the world must 
 manifest the Highest Spirit. Philosophy affirms that it 
 must be so, by the very nature of being, notwithstand- 
 ing the conditions of relativity and imperfect vision 
 under which we must behold this manifestation. The 
 heart pleads that it is surely so, because God loves 
 us, and nothing will satisfy this love but to take our 
 nature, that he may be among us as a friend.. The 
 disciples of every positive religion insist that it has 
 been so, in this or that exalted personage who has 
 appeared, to found a faith. The devout thinker says : 
 It is so, now and always ; for what is God but the 
 life of the universe, as of the soul? 
 
 No race of men, in other words, is satisfied to think 
 of the world as separate from ideal good. And every 
 religion devises some special way of bringing the one 
 into the other, even though it may overlook or deny 
 
484 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 some completer way ; because all instinctively divine 
 that the two are essentially one. Of course the form 
 chosen is noble or otherwise, according to the charac- 
 ter of the civilization ; but the endeavor is not any- 
 where wanting. Even where little inspiration or faith 
 is left, religions throw themselves back upon past 
 ideals, which are believed to have exhausted the 
 sources of truth. And this idolatry becomes the more 
 anxious and jealous, the feebler the faith in revelation 
 through living consciousness and present opportunity. 
 The manifold superstition that hastens to call itself 
 " inspirational " proves at least the need of being some- 
 how assured of a divine presence. Lacking the 
 heavenly form, men will grub within the earth for sub- 
 stitutes. Nor is there any creature so insignificant, 
 down to beetle and worm, but it has been some- 
 where supposed to guest a god. And if science 
 delights to discover the forces of gravitation and re- 
 pulsion in every atom, and the mysterious dynamics 
 of life in every organic molecule, may not the relig- 
 ious instinct well have sought to greet the divinity in 
 every form of being from the loftiest to the least? ' 
 
 The highest type of the idea is of course that of 
 Incarnation iucamation in Man ; and this also is not ex- 
 inman. clusively revealed to any race, nor in any per- 
 son. It is human, as is also the faith that deity is in 
 sympathy with man, and uplifts him through experi- 
 ence of his needs and desires. 
 
 Of this assurance how various the forms in human 
 history, all more or less imperfect expressions of 
 the idea. For the Hindu, it was God manifest in 
 the Brahman, or divinely absorbed man; for the 
 Hebrew and Mohammedan, in the prophetic man ; for 
 the Greek, in the Delphic man or woman, oracular 
 
INCARNATION. 485 
 
 and ecstatic ; for the Celt, in the Druid man or wo- 
 man ; for the modern Persian mystic, in the Bab, or 
 man who represents the open " gate " of God ; for the 
 Christian, in the Christ, or man supposed to have 
 been the one only possible Form of God, or else 
 exclusively "anointed " to be the central life of hu- 
 manity, or nucleus of its faith in God. Then for the 
 Roman Catholic, to meet the needs of that great 
 organization which had followed logically on the sub- 
 mission of mankind to this central Christ, it was in- 
 evitably the papal man. 
 
 But there are far broader and more spiritual forms 
 than any of these, — into which the idea of incar- 
 nation is now steadily advancing. God becomes in- 
 carnate through the eternal principles that underlie 
 the conscience and the affections of man ; in his reason 
 and his faith ; organized into character as intellectual 
 light and noble love. And again God is incarnate in 
 the social man, in humanity itself, developed at once 
 in the individual and in the race, as is possible only 
 through the free intermingling and mutual balance of 
 all human elements, and inspiring institutions with 
 those principles of personal freedom and moral order 
 by which the* human becomes one with the divine. 
 We are henceforth to find this unity in actual life ; in 
 wise, productive labor of brain and hand ; in an inte- 
 gral culture of the individual and the race, instead of 
 reading it as a tradition of the past, veiled behind my- 
 thology and philosophy, as an idealization or a divine 
 dream. For all the lofty sentences of Eastern wisdom 
 do not tell us how far men lived according to the best ; 
 and it would also seem that the more the New Testa- 
 ment is studied in a genuine spirit of historical re- 
 search, the less can be affirmed with certainty about 
 
^86 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 that personal life which Christians have been taught 
 to adore. 
 
 But everywhere in some form recurs the assurance 
 that God is manifest in man. Ever since man, made 
 in the divine image, came to conscious spiritual life, 
 he has felt the necessity to find his nature indeed 
 divine ; to behold deity in it, transfiguring its outward 
 part in the shimmer of miracle, or else its inward and 
 spiritual part, and thence the body and its uses, in the 
 real splendor of truth and love. The aspiration never 
 dies out of the soul, because God and the soul are 
 essentially one. 
 
 And this, which Oriental instinct divined, was re- 
 cognized in many noble ways, not only in its relation 
 to the desire of progress, but as balance to the sense 
 of moral evil and spiritual need. 
 
 Emile Burnouf ^ thinks that incarnation in the com- 
 Aiyanincar-plete seuse IS pre-cmineutly an Aryan belief; 
 nation. ^j^^t it is easier for an Aryan to conceive God 
 as incarnated in man than to conceive prophetic inspi- 
 ration in the Hebrew sense. *^ This is but to say that 
 the Aryan religious sentiment is pantheistic. And 
 the statement is true. There is a breadth and abso- 
 luteness in its conception of the unity of all truth, 
 which is not satisfied with leaving man outside divin- 
 ity, the mere recipient of gifts from a source apart 
 from his nature. The divine desire in the soul implies 
 the divinity of the soul. The object of worship is 
 more than object : it pre-existed in the worshipper, 
 and prompted the aim and the prayer. The yearnings 
 
 ^ Art. cm the Science of Religions, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 
 
 = As an illustration may be mentioned the Persian sect of Bibists, already referred to, 
 which has spread over a large portion of Pereia, and, like Sufism, engrafted upon Islamite 
 theism a pantheistic faith. See Gobineau, p. 477. 
 
INCARNATION. 487 
 
 of the spirit are more than a sense of need : they are 
 the strength of an inward ideal seeking its own. And 
 the perception of this truth is eminently Aryan. The 
 tendency of Indo-European philosophy to identify sub- 
 ject and object in the processes of existence is but 
 the speculative form of a profound instinct in this 
 race, which demands that culture shall express by its 
 freedom and fulness the essential unity of the human 
 with the divine. 
 
 Burnouf fails to appreciate this philosophical scope 
 of the fact he has attempted to state, when he ventures 
 to infer from it that the dogma of the divinity of Jesus 
 will stand permanently for all Aryan races as a truth 
 of positive religion. It is mainly from Aryan idealiza- 
 tion indeed that the dogma in question has proceeded. 
 Jesus himself was of Semitic descent : the earliest 
 records of his life are of similar origin, and form no 
 exception to the instinctive reluctance Of the Semite to 
 ascribe pure deity to the human. To effect this, they 
 required to be clothed in purely Aryan conceptions 
 from Greek and Oriental sources. And they were in 
 fact so transformed, in the Christian consciousness. 
 The ideal demand thus proved itself independent of 
 specific historical or biographical truth. But the fact 
 that it has been so at last becomes manifest, by the 
 progress of inquiry, to all ; and then the absoluteness 
 of this special personal symbol can no longer be main- 
 tained. It was provisional and temporary ; represent- 
 ing one stage only in the development of that Aryan 
 demand for incarnation in man, which passes on to* 
 broader levels and maturer sight.^ 
 
 1 This is iiilly recognized even in Bibism, which Gobineau describes (p. 326) as defi- 
 nitely a£Srming that God lias not willed humanity to believe that revelation had reached its 
 limit, or that its own revelation was shut up within a single personage. 
 
488 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Of all personal incarnation that which man has 
 
 incamatioii Hiost lovcd in all agcs is God manifest as 
 
 as Saviour. SaviouT ; and it has as many forms as there 
 
 are stages and epochs in. his comprehension of his 
 
 .own Spiritual and moral needs. 
 
 The Christian belief that God was incarnated once 
 for all for this purpose, undoubtedly contained, in its 
 earnestness and concentrative power, the germs of 
 broader and maturer conceptions than itself. These 
 have always been apparent in efforts, more or less 
 successful, to escape the limitations which as dogma 
 it affirms. The time has come when these efforts 
 have learned their own significance, and resulted in 
 an idea of incarnation, consistent with Universal 
 Religion. 
 
 To all such exclusive forms of the idea succeeds the 
 nobler faith that incarnation is the permanent fact of 
 human nature, and comes into special view wherever 
 beautiful and beneficent lives are lived, or thought is 
 uttered, in earnest accord with its universal laws ; 
 and that the " saving " power, which is neither more 
 nor less than the educating, humanizing power, and 
 coincident with culture, is, as power of God, one and 
 the same thing in them all. Whenever any part of 
 the world, spiritual or material, is redeemed to its 
 natural and so divine uses, there God, as man, becomes 
 Saviour. And who shall fathom how much of this there 
 has been in past human lives, or how much there is 
 in present ones? 
 
 The conception of this movement comes to absorb 
 into its unity, one by one, the manifold stages of 
 human progress ; and we apprehend deity as manifest 
 in each age under such forms as its knowledge of life 
 and nature have enabled it to recognize. 
 
INCARNATION. 489 
 
 In periods when a sense of degeneracy inevitably 
 possessed men, and they turned their faces The Hindu 
 backward to find golden ages in the past, '^=^- 
 because there was as yet no foothold for practical con- 
 struction through the intercourse of energetic races ; 
 when the outward world therefore repelled them as 
 illusion, and refuge in the inward became a necessity, 
 — it is refreshing to find the belief that deity becomes 
 manifest as deliverer -whenever man's needs require, 
 or his aspirations and devotions enter the ever open 
 door of a mystic union with omni-potence. 
 
 This instant access to the best was not through all 
 sainthood and heroism only, as these were then ns universal 
 conceived by the traditional ideal. In the*''=™°"- 
 oneness of all life, Hindu faith beheld everywhere the 
 Supreme sacrificing, himself for all ; ^ '^ through de- 
 votion " taking on himself the whole possibility of 
 human misery and want. Brahma is in the form 
 of every element, every creature. He is their unity, 
 and it is his sacrifice that consecrates them all. 
 
 It was a redeeming element of Hindu caste itself, 
 that it constituted every saint an incarnation of Brah- 
 ma for the preservation of the world, in virtue of his 
 fulfilment of the ideal of sainthood. This equal 
 opportunity, even within the limits of a hereditary 
 class, was at least the recognition that fresh access to 
 union with deity by discipline and faith could never 
 be wholly foreclosed. Nor was any past form of 
 sainthood regarded as in permanent possession either 
 of supreme and final virtue, or of invincible authority. 
 Its throne was held provisionally, and liable to pass 
 to a stronger master in the sphere of " devotion." 
 
 ^ Sec Sankara's CommetUary on the Brihad Upan-t where the Brihmana is quoted at 
 length. 
 
490 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 This democratic element in Brahmanical holiness has 
 already attracted our interest. Under favoring cir- 
 cumstances, it would have reconciled incarnation with 
 liberty and progress. Although such instincts of 
 growth had little practical opportunity, and cannot 
 here receive the living meaning which a more en- 
 ergetic civilization would put into them, they were 
 nevertheless not wholly a dream. Their influence is 
 traceable through the whole course of Hindu religious 
 history. 
 
 The moral defects of an unrestrained play of the 
 idea of incarnation, in races and ages of imperfect 
 culture, are obvious. And, on the other hand, the 
 very limitations of this idea in the Christian conscious- 
 ness, its confinement to a single historic form, severely 
 simple and ethically noble, has been temporarily of 
 great service in sobering the sensuous imagination 
 and guiding the moral sentiment of mankind. Chris- 
 tian mythology, cautious and tame beside Hindu, is 
 proportionately purer. The virtue of a mythology, 
 however, considered as play of the religious imagina- 
 tion, lies not only in ethical purity, but in freedom and 
 scope also. Full justice to the religious nature of 
 man will recognize both these sides, and find germs of 
 permanent service in both. 
 
 As representing the freedom of deity to assume 
 Breadth of living forms of manifestation, Christian my- 
 
 human re- , , . , ■ •' 
 
 lation. thology IS certamly tame beside that of India. 
 Its Virgin conceives her Child through the miraculous 
 overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. But the wives of 
 Dasaratha in the Ramayana conceive and bear sons 
 who are gods, simply by eating sacrificial food. And 
 Sita, who is the celestial Lakshmi in human form, 
 arises from the Earth in a silver vessel turned up by 
 
INCARNATION. 49I 
 
 the plough in clearing a place for sacrifice ; for Sita 
 is the furrow, and her worship as wife of Rama, the 
 incarnate preserver, divinizes the bounteous earth and 
 the labors that redeem it ; as her separation from him, 
 and disappearance in the arms of the earth itself, 
 amidst a divine flame that issues from the cloven 
 ground, expresses the sowing and death of the seed. 
 In similar recognition of physical uses, the gods churn 
 the sea of milk, throwing into it every kind of medi- 
 cinal plant that grows ; and out of the amrita or im- 
 mortal food that comes of this divine toil ascend 
 goddesses that bless mankind. 
 
 Oriental civilization being based on the family, we 
 are prepared to find much of the incarnation-lore of 
 India centering in the functions and destinies of kin- 
 dred. These may, in fact, almost be said to consti- 
 tute its tragedy and triumph, in epos and drama and 
 sacred song. Strife and reconciliation, duty and sacri- 
 fice, penalty and reward, find their divine expression 
 in the idealization of these simple relations. And 
 Kalidasa, with entire simplicity, describes the four 
 sons of Raghu shining by division of their father's 
 being, as justice, use, redemption, and love descended 
 from heaven to become incarnate in four human lives. ^ 
 
 Rama, as incarnation of Vishnu for human deliver- 
 ance from evil, is hailed by aged saints, who vishnuas 
 die gladly when their eyes have seen the long ^^^^ 
 expected One.^ He supplants all the older gods, who 
 pour on their heads the dust that is under his feet. He 
 absorbs all their powers into himself; but it is because 
 he represents all functions and demands of Ufe. He- 
 passes through every phase of the Hindu sense of per- 
 sonal duty. He fulfils every relation recognized in the 
 
 *■ Ragkuvania, X. ^ R&m&y.^ III. 
 
492 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Oriental ideal of service and of command, assuming 
 in succession the three stages of student, married, and 
 hermit life. He suffers all injustice, even to complete 
 deprivation of his natural rights. He condescends to 
 wear the bark dress, and to dig roots with a spade, 
 though born to a throne ; and this through obedience 
 to filial love and duty, that a father's word might not 
 be made void. His conviction is his life and strength 
 and immortality. He brings out by his self-sacrifice a 
 soul of tenderness and magnanimity in his relatives ; 
 "overcomes mankind by fidelity, Brahmans by gen- 
 erosity, preceptors by his attention to duties, and all 
 enemies by the sword and bow." His forgiveness of 
 injury is not less perfect than his power to punish 
 it. He pays funeral honors to his bitterest foe. He 
 cherishes no anger against the false queen who has 
 deprived him of his crown, driven him into exile, and 
 brought his father to untimely death. He even seeks 
 excuses for her, and commends her to the care of his 
 brother, on whom she has forced the crown that 
 belonged of right to himself. One who mourned 
 excessively for a lost brother he admonishes thus : — 
 
 " Man must not be carried away by grief, but hasten to a better 
 mind. Tliou hast shed tears : it is enough. Necessity is lord of 
 the world. But let man never forget the good on which he should 
 fix his eyes ; for fate embraces in its movement duty, use, and joy. 
 We have given what we ought to grief: now let us do what is 
 becoming." 
 
 His virtues are exaggerations, and conformed to 
 Oriental ideals and motives ; but, whatever its faults, 
 we must note, as the special nobility of this poetic 
 incarnation, which enters profoundly into the popular 
 faith, its effort to embody the whole duty, at once of 
 
 ' Rim^., IV. 
 
INCARNATION. 493 
 
 a king, a husband, a 'son, a brother, a hero, a saint, a 
 deliverer of mankind from moral evil. He is adored 
 as " protector of the defenceless, extending mercy to 
 the oppressed." 1 Even his foe, whom he is obliged 
 to slay, commits his son to his care in perfect trust, 
 at death.^ When counselled to obtain the throne by 
 treachery, he replies : — 
 
 " Far from me as poison be a gain, even were it of the throne of 
 heaven, which is obtained by the iniquity of destroying a friend." 
 
 A victor over his enemies by his superhuman powers, 
 he generously ascribes his success to his companions 
 in arms. 
 
 Rama's absolute sacrifice of his own interests to his 
 father's authority is an exaltation of the patriarchal 
 ideal above the Brahmanical. Social relations are 
 here shown to be amenable to a higher law than caste. 
 Here, as Michelet has enthusiastically said, "is a new 
 revelation ; God incarnate in a non-Brahmanic caste ; 
 the ideal of holiness transferred to a Kshattriya ; as 
 later, in Europe, St. Louis, a warrior, a king, becomes 
 the spiritual ideal, of whom a contemporary exclaims, 
 'O holy layman, whose deeds the priests should 
 emulate ! '" » 
 
 Rama is indeed the universality of the divine life. 
 The arrow with which he slays the Satan of the epic, 
 Ravana, is "made from the spirit of all the gods." 
 He is intensely human. Overwhelmed by his afflic- 
 tions, he is consoled by the gods. " Having appeared 
 on earth in human form, his actions must accord with 
 those of human beings." Human he is to the point 
 of yielding to temptations now and then for the mo- 
 
 ' Adhy&tnta R&m&y. (the Vaishnava version of the epic). Wheeler, II. p. 30S, 404. 
 * Sdmiy.j IV. ' Biile de VHumaniii, p. 52. 
 
494 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ment. Thus he puts away Sita after all her fidelity, 
 merely because her virtue had been exposed to peril 
 while in the hands of her demon ravisher, and suffers 
 her to enter the fire to prove her innocence ; a dra- 
 matic invention, to bring out the national sensitiveness' 
 in regard to female chastity, at the same time that it 
 affords Rama the opportunity of naively reproaching 
 himself for injustice to her, and so makes his very 
 weakness inspire new affection, and associate him 
 with human and even childish experience. 
 
 " His face became like the moon in the month of snows : if he 
 had sent his queen from his palace for fear of evil speech, he had 
 not been able to banish her from his heait."^ 
 
 There is at least a democratic touch in this feature 
 of the story. He explains the act by saying, " I knew 
 she was true ; but I put her to the test lest the people 
 should blame me " for lack of respect for the purity 
 of wifehood. So when in irritation he slays a Sudra, 
 the victim is transported in a beautiful form to para- 
 dise.^ Rama at last ascends to heaven from the banks 
 of the Sarayu, resuming his divine essence, amidst all 
 holy persons, revelations, powers, elements, in sight 
 of all the people and even the lower animals. In the 
 heavens appear all the gods, in infinite splendor, 
 amidst fragrant winds and rain of flowers. As Rama 
 enters the sacred waters, Brahma from the sky pro- 
 nounces the words : — 
 
 " Approach, O Vishnu ! enter thine own body, the eternal ether. 
 Thou art the abode of the worlds." ' 
 
 By the blessing of Rama's name and through 
 DeUverance prcvious faith in him, all sins, according to 
 ftomsin. Vaishnava belief, are remitted; and "every 
 
 1 Raglamama, XIV. « Adhy. R&m&y. (Wheeler, p. 393). 
 
 » Rdm&y., VII. 
 
INCARNATION. 495 
 
 one, whatever his iniquities, whether a Brahman or a 
 Chand&la, a king, or a beggar, who shall at death 
 pronounce this name with sincere worship, shall be 
 forgiven." The gods, conversing together of the re- 
 pentance and restoration, in this way, of an evil spirit 
 who had sought to compass the ruin of Rama, say : — 
 
 " Behold how this sinner has been saved ! Such is the benevo- 
 lence of Rama. What good actions has this demon performed that 
 he could deserve such happiness ? He has, from having resigned 
 his life at Rama's feet and beholding him, been absorbed into him." ' 
 
 Hindu theology understands even better than Chris- 
 tian how to shift off the burden of an evil conscience, 
 by trust in vicarious merits. This offence against the 
 moral laws in either case we are not commending to 
 an enlightened age. Yet in its origin the idea has 
 very plain relation to the sense of an omnipotent 
 power and purpose to relieve from crushing burdens 
 of moral and spiritual penalty. In the expression of 
 absoluteness in divine good-will, no form of incarna- 
 tion has attempted so wide a scope as the Rama of 
 this epic mythology, whose worst enemies, while they 
 are punished, after Hindu fashion, with much outlay 
 of terrific penalty, are yet all taken up into heaven at 
 last, through such force of good as may have once 
 been in them, and the all-embracing benignity and 
 mercy of the god. 
 
 These liberal and benignant elements are repro- 
 duced in the modern Vaishnava sects, founded „ 
 
 Democratic 
 
 on the worship of Rama : such as those of and humane 
 Ramananda and Kabir, of Rai-Das and Dadu, °'''"™'° 
 of which further notice will be taken hereafter. These 
 teachers were for the most part men of the lowest 
 
 ^ Adhy R&m&y,^ p. 287. 
 
496 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 castes ; and the mythology that has already gathered 
 about their names centres in the democratic reaction 
 against caste and ecclesiastical authority which has 
 gone steadily on throughout Hindu history. Of this 
 element Vishnu, as JRdma, is the constant represen- 
 tative. 
 
 The relation of this humanitarian spirit to the 
 worship of Rama is illustrated by the charters of land 
 granted by the later Hindu kings, and written on 
 metallic tablets, which are constantly coming to light. 
 Their stereotyped phrase quotes Rama as declaring 
 that " to give away land is to cross oceans of sin ; 
 while to resume or reappropriate it is to fall back into 
 hells of transmigration." 
 
 The incarnation of Vishnu as Krishna is of a more 
 Krishna complex character, and covers a still larger 
 ground of historic relation ; embracing in the 
 diversity of its phases the whole compass of Hindu ex- 
 perience. In Krishna every popular and every specula- 
 tive ideal, every instinct and every conviction that sought 
 religious sanction, has found its embodiment ; each in 
 turn assuming this traditionally consecrated name. In 
 its service therefore, as well as in its sound, the name 
 corresponds with that of Christ in the religious history 
 of the Western nations. It has represented every stage 
 of progress, every degree of enlightenment, or of the 
 lack of it, in Hindu history. It is the divinization of 
 desire and hope from lowest to highest level, the sport 
 of the superstitious fancy and of the devout imagina- 
 tion alike. They have made it mean whatever they 
 would. It is vain therefore to look for moral or spec- 
 ulative unity in what is plainly but a common name 
 for the whole of Hindu aspiration, exclusive only of 
 its most rationalistic side ; a thread by which it has 
 
INCARNATION. 497 
 
 given some semblance of continuity to its past. In 
 this respect it does not differ from the endless dis- 
 cordance of high and low ideals, which Christianity, 
 through its ages of sectarian strife, has comprehended 
 under the name of Christ, reaching back indeed 
 through the earliest records of his life. If all these 
 had at some epoch been brought together into one 
 vast Christian Bible, in which the Church had ever 
 since been seeking by repeated elaborations and mys- 
 tical reinterpretations to preserve the continuity of its 
 faith, through the one term common to the whole, — 
 the name of Christ, — it would be analogous to what 
 has happened in this Krishna-worship of the Hindus. 
 An indefinite expansion of the name of Christ, to 
 cover all stages and forms of recognized faith, and all 
 sacred records on which they rest, is really the fact of 
 Christian history, although the whole process is not 
 concentrated in such a Bible as has been suggested. 
 So true is this, that the name has long since ceased 
 to be of service for conveying an idea of the actual 
 religious belief of its confessors. 
 
 Now the Mahabharata is for the Hindu masses a 
 Bible somewhat of this description, though TheKrishna 
 by no means exclusively in honor of Krishna. ^*'==- 
 It is an immense ocean, into which almost every stream 
 of Hindu faith and feeling has by one path or another 
 found its way. Age after age, barbarous, heroic, or 
 ecclesiastical, has contributed its popular traditions, its 
 religious speculations, its morality and its faith, to 
 swell this colossal epic; and it embodies, on a pro- 
 digious scale, every element of dramatic, intellectual, 
 and spiritual, as well as popular and national interest 
 familiar to the Hindu mind. It has probably under- 
 gone frequent readjustments to fresh experience under 
 
 32 
 
498 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the influence of the religious classes. From time to 
 time fresh fragments of ethics and philosophy have 
 been interpolated, often in the strangest context : the 
 profoundest spirituality flows from the lips of dying 
 barbarians, and metaphysics are sounded to their 
 depths in the intervals of internecine strife. 
 
 The Bhagavata Purana^ is another vast body of 
 incarnation myths and traditions, more especially de- 
 voted to the worship of Krishna, whose manifold 
 births and forms are traced through all cosmogony, 
 theology, philosophy, and who here becomes the 
 universal absorbent and solvent of traditional beliefs. 
 Both Epic and Purana are the free play of Hindu 
 imagination and fancy, and turn past, present, and 
 future into song. They connect the national life with 
 the simple ages of minstrelsy, purporting to come 
 from the lips of bards. 
 
 The Krishna of the Epos might seem to be imperfect- 
 Krishnamy-ly defined as an incarnation, to the religious 
 thoiogy. sense. He seerris sometimes to be man, some- 
 times God of gods. At one time his divinity is denied, 
 at another he seems unaware of it. He is opposed, 
 slighted, assailed, wounded. Even as incarnation, he 
 is but a hair from Vishnu's body. But in the Pura- 
 nas, he is the Supreme alone.^ He is Vasudeva, God 
 with the world, in all beings, and without appeal. 
 He combines all exalted appellatives and powers, and 
 many that we should hold as quite other than exalted. 
 But through all incongruities the religious interest 
 is held fast to the person of Krishna, as central incar- 
 nation of protecting and retributive deity, as well as 
 
 ' Translated by Eugine Bumouf. 
 
 > In the Brahma Vaivartta, he is adored by all the gods. See WUson's analysis in 
 Essays tm Sansk. LU,^ I. 94-. 
 
INCARNATION. 499 
 
 the embodiment of ideals and delights essentially 
 human. That much of personal biography is to be 
 discerned through this immeasurable haze of fable is 
 improbable enough. It seems quite as impracticable 
 to construct a positive basis or nucleus of historical 
 fact out of the mythology of the cowherd boy, or the 
 Kshattriya hero, as out of the supernaturalism of the 
 god. And certainly the moral value of the Krishna 
 faith is in no degree determinable by tracing it back, 
 upon mythical authority, to somebody who was " orig- 
 inally a mere cowherd, stealing butter and performing 
 similar pranks when a boy, and rendering himself 
 famous by his amours when a man " ! i 
 
 The democratic character of this faith in its original 
 form has already been inferred^ from the relation of 
 the name Krishna (or the black) to the color of the 
 lowest caste and of the aboriginal races of India. Its 
 suggestions of an ancient sense of brotherhood, and 
 of a powerful influence on Aryan faith from the side 
 of conquered or enslaved tribes, as well as the poetic 
 justice of which this worship of the black by the 
 white is a historic landmark, seem to me very im- 
 pressive. 
 
 The idyllic legends of the Krishna-Govinda (or 
 cowherd), his boyish pranks, his miraculous feats, and 
 amours among the cowherdesses, are evidently based 
 on the folklore of rude country tribes, like those of 
 the patriarchal Hebrew age. Their grotesque humor 
 reminds us of the miracle plays of the Middle Ages, in 
 which the New Testament myths, grown too familiar 
 to be venerated, were freely handled for the general 
 amusement ; and this wild jungle of tropic fable has 
 far more than the animal exuberance and lawless 
 
 ' Wheeler's Hiit. of India. ^ See chapter on the BhagavadgUct. 
 
500 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 sportiveness of the "Arabian Nights." Doubtless the 
 coarseness of its natural meaning was spiritualized 
 away by the later, more enlightened, Krishna-wor- 
 shippers,^ just as the barbarities and sensualities of 
 the older Bible legends have been by later Jews and 
 Christians. 
 
 But in the main body of the epos, Krishna assumes 
 ,, ,, , a nobler function. Through all the fratricidal 
 
 Noble func- ° . 
 
 tionsof horrors of the great war between kmdred 
 Krishna, p^^jjug ^ikJ Kurus, the most tragic tale ever 
 told in song, he enacts the part of mediator and con- 
 soler : he is not a warrior, but a peace-maker ; inter- 
 feres in the strife purely in the interest of justice, and 
 mourns with the love of a brother over the fearful 
 consummation of evil-doing which all his efforts fail to 
 prevent. Though a Kshattriya in his human form, and 
 though other passages relate his tremendous exploits 
 in destroying the wicked, he refuses to fight in this 
 unnatural war; will be only Arjuna's charioteer, on 
 the just side, if war must be ; and Arjuna chooses his 
 presence, as of itself more than armies, and as fullest 
 assurance of victory. Though able to compel obe- 
 dience, he respects the freedom of those who choose 
 to disregard his wise and humane counsels, while he 
 strives to compose the bitter feud between brothers. 
 Warned that the attempt would be useless, he says : — 
 
 " To deliver the world from all this preparation for strife is the 
 highest of duties ; and it is right to give all one's efforts to such a 
 duty, whether they succeed or fail." 
 
 Sent to the hostile Kuru princes with this intent, he 
 is received with divine honors, in festival raiment, with 
 offerings of sandal-wood and perfume ; carpets are 
 
 » Bh&gav. Purdna, X, 
 
INCARNATION. 50I 
 
 strewn in his path, and the king goes out on foot to 
 meet him. Yet his advice is rejected, and his person 
 threatened. And when his hopes that kindredship 
 would have enabled him to save the infatuated Kura- 
 vas from destruction are proved vain ; when his tender 
 and noble appeals, and his prophecies of coming deso- 
 lation, alike fail, he returns sorrowing, after embracing 
 the noblest of these fated ones, with tears over the 
 bitter future that must come to them all. 
 
 When the multitude of Brahmans crave of him for- 
 giveness for sin, he answers, " If your hearts be pure 
 and single before God, there is hope of forgiveness 
 from Him." He consoles Arjuna for the loss of his 
 son, saying : " His fame will endure for ever, and it 
 might be said that he is still alive. Children, like 
 worldly goods, are given to us by God ; and he can 
 resume them at his pleasure." 
 
 He comforts a woman for a similar bereavement by 
 reminding her "how happy a mother should be whose 
 son has met so glorious a destiny." At the end of the 
 war he- bids the victors administer justice to all the 
 oppressed, and promises them reward for their good 
 deeds in another life. 
 
 After the doom has fallen upon his people, and his 
 brothers and companions have perished, as he sits 
 alone in his sorrow in the forest, he is fatally wounded 
 by a careless hunter, whose remorse he seeks to allay 
 in the hour of his own death, saying, " Go thy way : 
 thine is not the blame." We should not expect that 
 very exalted moral standards would be found inter- 
 woven with a movement of warfare so brutal and 
 ferocious as that of the Mahabharata, where the world 
 seems given over to the nemesis of wrathful and de- 
 structive passions ; yet it really abounds in noble 
 
502 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 reconciliations, in heroic self-disciplines, in the loyal- 
 ties of tender affection. And in this epic Krishna is, in 
 his relations to the Pandu war, a redeeming presence 
 of justice, magnanimity, and mercy, which, spite of 
 all the monstrosities of supernaturalism, flows in a 
 golden thread of providential purport through the 
 retributive woof of wrong and pain. 
 
 This ideal incarnation aspires, therefore, to include 
 „ . . all nature and life, and to divinize all human 
 
 PartiCTpa- 
 
 tioninthe duty by the direct participation of deity in its 
 
 whole of life. t tj i_ 
 
 manifold spheres. 
 
 " Priest, .teacher, marriageable man, householder, and beloved 
 companion, because he is all this, therefore has Krishna been hon- 
 ored. Generosity, ability, sacred wisdom, heroism, humility, splen- 
 dor, endurance, cheerfulness, joyousness, exist constantly in- this 
 unfailing one. It is Krishna who is the origin and end of all the 
 worlds. All this universe comes into being through him, the 
 eternal Maker, transcending all beings. And he enlightens 'and 
 gladdens the assembly, as a sunless place would be cheered by the 
 sun, or a windless spot by the wind." ' 
 
 Krishna, in short, represented the genial and happy 
 sense of unity for all finite relations with the" infinite 
 and eternal. The universality of the religious instinct, 
 shown in this combination of the cosmical with the 
 manifold human in one divine personality, is an ele- 
 ment of very great interest. 
 
 In absorbing the universe into their divinity, the 
 Krishna of Eastern, and the Christ of Western faith 
 are in their diverse ways analogous. The Christian 
 incarnation, however, while superior in spiritual ele- 
 vation, does not attempt to represent that direct per- 
 sonal exferience of actual social functions which 
 makes the special interest of geniality and breadth in 
 Krishna. Resting its claims on actual history, not on 
 
 » Mah&th., VI. 
 
INCARNATION. 503 
 
 mythical license, it has to recognize its own limits in 
 the biographical fact, that Jesus was eminently indi- 
 vidualist in his ideal, isolated in his personal relations, 
 and negative in many of his precepts and beliefs to- 
 wards social and public interests ; nor has it ever been 
 able to free itself from the positive limitations of its 
 human scope, which belong to that historical form in 
 which it still centres. It is an old proverb that "no 
 man is so great or wise as all mankind." 
 
 I do not forget that the Christ has been believed to 
 be mj'stically formed within all true believers, what- 
 ever/unctions they Tnay fulfil. But this faith does not 
 exalt the functions themselves, as actual human rela- 
 tions, with the dignity of divine personal participation 
 in them. It has ever been apt to mark, instead, a with- 
 drawal from the secular life into an interior pietistic 
 sphere. Our modern ideal does indeed claim such 
 participation, in a real sense, for all becoming human 
 relations, all the " works and days " of our life. If 
 God is manifest anywhere for us, it is in these. But 
 such faith rests on that large respect for life, which 
 is of recent origin. It could hardly have derived its 
 sanctions from a personal incarnation, whose worship- 
 per would be shocked to conceive him as having been 
 a father, a husband, a lover, a householder, a genial 
 associate, or a faithful citizen, accepting the real emer- 
 gencies of society, and bearing his part in them. We 
 have seen that such complete union of deity with life 
 is hinted in the childish mythology of the Krishna 
 faith. The maturer form of this belief which mankind 
 has now reached is due not only to purifying limi- 
 tations by the Christian ideal, but to the secular- 
 energy, science, and respect for practical uses, nat- 
 ural to the Western racesr 
 
504 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 It is no part of my present purpose to follow the 
 Krishna as coursc of Krishna-worship into the wilderness 
 unity of bu- qJ- ^jjg j^jgj. Pm-^nas, where its pathless tangle 
 
 man and ^ '-' 
 
 divine. of Hiythologj and speculation reflects the 
 whole inner world of Hindu character, at its best 
 and at its worst. It is sufficient to refer here to the 
 completeness with which it expresses the unity of the 
 divine and the human in the speculative passages of 
 the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavadgita is the 
 noblest illustration. As a specimen of these, I quote 
 the words ascribed to Brahma in witness of the su- 
 premacy of this later divinity, who has supplanted 
 him, as Christ has supplanted Jove and Jehovah in 
 the West : — 
 
 " That Being who is Supreme, who is to be, who is the soul of 
 all beings; and the Lord, it is with Him that I have been conversing, 
 O deities ! He of whom I, BrahmS., master of the whole world, am 
 the son, is by you to be adored. This Being is the highest mys- 
 tery, the highest sphere, the highest Brahma, the highest glory. 
 He is the undecaying, the undiscernijjle, the eternal. He is called 
 Purusha [personal spirit]. He is hymned and is not known. He 
 is celebrated as highest truth, power, joy." ' 
 
 But it is as continually reborn for the restoration of 
 Significance mankind, that Krishna hints of largest spirit- 
 vistou "^^ meaning. In this he represents Vishnu, 
 AvatSras. who, as pcrpetual Saviour, embodies in the 
 universality of his incarnation the religious postulate 
 of the unity of all life. The avatdras of Vishnu pass 
 through all ages of time as well as all grades of exist- 
 ence ; the lowest grade being referred to the earliest 
 epoch in time, the highest to the present and future. 
 He is Fish, Tortoise, Boar, Man Lion, Dwarf, Soldier, 
 Brahman, Krishna, and finally the Kalki or Judge at 
 
 » MahdihArata, B VI. 
 
INCARNATION. 505 
 
 the last day. He is even recognized, by the popular 
 faith, in the humane, all-loving Buddha. No age, no 
 form, exhausted this ever-present redeemer; ever 
 waiting at the doors ; ever reappearing writh fresh 
 underived forces and higher embodiment, through the 
 Eeons of an imagination, to which a thousand years 
 were but a day. The moral symbol also shines 
 through this as it shines through the poetic mythology 
 of incarnation in all religions. These avatdras are 
 all for what were regarded as humane, remedial, or 
 morally judicial ends. 
 
 " There is nothing thou hast not already in thyself: and the 
 cause of all thy births is nothing else than thy love for the world." ' 
 
 Thus as the Dwarf, Vishnu redeems the whole earth 
 from the impieties that have mastered it. The gods 
 being allowed by their enemies only so much as this 
 dwarf could cover when lying down, the whole earth 
 is overspread by his miraculous expansion : it is thus 
 shown to be an altar for sacrifice, and won for the true 
 worshipper.^ The highest hidden in the lowest, deity 
 in the most despised, — this is the mystery of moral 
 power. And always around this plays the mythologic 
 faculty. The dwarf's three miraculous paces that 
 span all the worlds, and win them for the good ; ^ the 
 wisps of straw in a saint's peaceful hand that discomfit 
 the hosts of a self-idolatrous king ; * the two mere 
 hairs, black and white, from Vishnu's body, incarnated 
 to remove the burdens and sufferings of the earth ; ^ 
 the human form, alone of all possible ones forgotten in 
 
 ^ KSZid&sa's Ragkuvama^ X. So the Harivansa distinctly afl&nns that they are all for 
 the good of the world (CXXIX. Langlois's Transl., II. 26). 
 2 Satapatha-Br^i7nana. 
 
 5 See Muir's Sansk. Texts, IV. ii. 4 ; Bh&gav. Pur&na, VIII. so. 
 * Muir, ibid. 5 ; Mahabh., V. ^ Vishnu Pur&na. 
 
So6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 contempt by the demon Ravana (who had obtained 
 the boon that he should be slain by no being he should 
 name) , becoming thereby the one guise under which 
 Vishnu can enter the world to deliver it from his 
 power ; ^ — these and many other similarly suggestive 
 fancies in the incarnation-lore of India are the child's 
 play of that moral instinct which discerns strength in 
 weakness. God felt in the atom makes the whole 
 world divine. 
 
 But it is as Krishna, the god-man of the Bhagavad- 
 gita, that Vishnu speaks the grand affirmation which 
 really lifts this Oriental faith in divine presence into 
 universality : — 
 
 " Although I am in my own nature incapable of birth or death, 
 and lord of all created things, yet as often as vice prevails over 
 virtue, so often 1 become manifested, to protect the good, to punish 
 the evil. I am present in every age to establish right." " 
 
 In truth, all the great Hindu reformers, as they 
 came in turn, — Kapila, Buddha, Sankara Acharya, 
 Chaitanya the Vaishnava teacher, and the rest, — have 
 been held to be incarnations of Vishnu the preserving 
 God. Ever on the serpent whose venom is destruction 
 reposes Vishnu, as if to guarantee that those terrible 
 coils are folded beneath him in lowly subjection ; and 
 " on the thousand-hooded heads the sign of good for- 
 tune is written." 
 
 And so through dream and superstition and childish 
 fancy, as well as thoughtful meditation, shines more or 
 less clearly the faith that God abides in the world, 
 and that moral evil itself enforces the assurance of 
 infinite restoring love. 
 
 But have we not here overlooked the difference 
 
 ' R&m&yana, I. J Bhag. Gitd, ch. iv. 
 
INCARNATION. 507 
 
 between real incarnation, and that which is mytho- 
 logical only ? On this point it is worth our 
 
 ° •' '^ Mythical 
 
 while to consider to what extent the difference and "real" 
 itself is real, and how far it has bearing on the"'^''°°- 
 substance of religion. 
 
 More or less of mythology must always invest all 
 belief in special incarnations. When the religious 
 imagination finds a point of attachment for such a 
 belief, it pays indeed some regard to historical and 
 biographical fact, accepting its influence for a time. 
 Yet it uses this positive element very freely in the 
 main, and more so continually to serve its own desire 
 and need. And it is impossible that the past should 
 be served otherwise. No historical person can contain 
 all that the aspiration to find the infinite in human 
 life really means. ^ Having this scope, incarnation, 
 as an idea, has no dependence on biographical facts, 
 however it may limit itself for a time by centering in 
 them. And so when the facts are positively known, 
 or when the divinized person is disclosed and classi- 
 fied, it simply takes new flight, winged with its new 
 meanings, finding fresh expressions for that which can, 
 by its very definition, accept no form as final. This 
 result is inevitable ; as true of Jesus as of Gotama ; as 
 true of incarnation, claimed for a real personage, as 
 of that which, like the avataras of Vishnu, is purely 
 ideal and mythological. 
 
 The " reality " of God in Man cannot be confined 
 within any definite person, whether historical or my- 
 thological. It covers all ideals, whether of thought 
 or of life. But it points forward to far more than 
 these, as yet unrevealed in the depths of human nature. 
 
 X This is, as I have said, recognized in Babism, which a£5rms eighteen personal manifes- 
 tations of God in history, and looks forward to a future B^b. 
 
5o8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 To its infinite promise, history and mythology, imagi- 
 nation and fact, faith and conduct, all lead the way. 
 
 Whether the faith in a special incarnation has for 
 its object a mythical or a historical person, the effect is 
 substantially the same. To their respective worship- 
 pers, both the one and the other are equally real, and 
 even equally historical. Equally valid, too, for the 
 soul is her own ideal, whether its realization can be 
 shown past dispute to have actually come to pass or 
 not. For her experience, at least, it is actual. 
 
 It is in the ideal itself that value inheres, not in its 
 Eights of having a historical type or source. It cannot 
 the ideal ^^ made dependent on sanctions from the 
 
 over the his- ^ 
 
 toricai. actual world, since its free desire is the very 
 power by which alone the actual is lifted into a step 
 of progress. In other words, it is only through the 
 freedom of the ideal from all definitive historical times 
 and persons, that incarnation, which as manifestation 
 of the Infinite can only consist in endless progress, 
 can be realized at all. 
 
 A grand historical figure has always its value as 
 element of human dignity, and aid to human growth ; 
 but it must inevitably be brought to the impartial tests 
 of that Spirit which cannot be exhausted nor confined. 
 And it is the Idea which sways a civilization, however 
 expressed, that proves how far it has really incarnated 
 the divine ; while the question whether it has a theo- 
 logical faith in some God-man, which claims to rest on 
 historical fact, is one of minor importance. 
 
 That Jesus was a historical person, and Krishna 
 but a mythological ideal, if that be so, does not of 
 itself make the Christian idea of incarnation more 
 " real," more valid, more enduring than the Hindu. 
 Krishna, for the Hindu, is as real to that sense of the 
 
INCARNATION. 509 
 
 divine to which incarnation must ever appeal, as if he 
 had actually lived, instead of originating in the relig- 
 ious imagination and faith of his worshippers. 
 
 Thus it would be vain to present the " historical 
 evidences of Christianity " to the Hindu mind, in order 
 to prove its exclusive incarnation-dogma, by showing 
 Jesus to have been a fact of history, while Krishna 
 was only a myth. Were these evidences ever so 
 strong, they would be to little purpose : since the cir- 
 cumstance that an ideal had once actually a form in a 
 personal life would carry no stronger proof of incar- 
 nation than the circumstance that another ideal has 
 now actually a form in human faith and zeal. 
 
 In like manner the discovery by Christian scholars, 
 in their study of Hindu religion, of what they ^^^ 
 may regard as faint heathen " foregleams and for chnsti- 
 dim presentiments of Christian truths," — such ^'^' 
 as trinity, atonement by the saint for the sinner, and 
 salvation by the merits of the saint, — justifies no ex- 
 pectation that the Christian forms of these' beliefs, as 
 "based on truth instead of dream," must be recog- 
 nized by the heathen mind as that for which it was 
 yearning, and for which its way has been prepared. 
 The resemblances simply show that, even as believers 
 in such conceptions and doctrinal forms, the Hindus 
 can satisfy their desire through their own sacred books, 
 legends and dogmatic constructions, without resorting 
 to the Christian. 
 
VI. 
 
 TRANSMIGRATION. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 
 
 ' I "HERE is another side of the Hindu conception 
 of life and nature which we have as yet Hindu idea 
 hardly touched. °^ ^'■ 
 
 The devotee strbve to extirpate the senses, to dis- 
 solve the external world in illusion. But do not 
 suppose that this effort represents his spiritual limit. 
 Do not infer that his religious instinct was incapable 
 of touching the opposite pole of experience. Nature 
 will not be abjured. The Yogi may will it a dream, 
 or the Calvinist pronounce it accursed. But the denial 
 enforces its own antithesis. And in the East a path 
 lay open to reaction in behalf of the senses, through 
 that principle which we have seen to be the soul of 
 Hindu faith ; namely, that all life is, in its inmost 
 essence, one and the same. 
 
 It has been believed by many, that Hindu poetry 
 represents the aspirations of the lower castes as n^ pontic 
 distinguished from the highest, or nominally rapawiities. 
 religious, class. But this cannot be admitted. If 
 intuitive imagination, intense ideality, and a deep, all- 
 absorbing sense of the mystery of being are qualities 
 of the poet, then the philosophy and religion of the 
 Hindu schools are eminently poetic. They are not only 
 so in substance, but in nearly all their great products 
 even choose the poetic form. That whatever genuine 
 
 33 
 
514 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 imaginative power they have tends to freedom and 
 universality is obvious from the nature of imagination 
 itself. 
 
 Even asceticism, however relentless, could not sup- 
 Love of press the enthusiasm of this poetic sense for 
 nature. jj^g bcauty with which a tropical nature sur- 
 rounded and beset it. Through hymn and precept 
 and philosophic discourse, through Veda, Upanishad, 
 and Purana alike, flows the perpetual symbolism of 
 day and night, of the rivers, the mountains, the sea. 
 Dawn and eve, the flow of seasons, the stir of life and 
 the habits of creatures in those solemn Indian forests, 
 are described in the epos and mythic tale with a deli- 
 cacy and tenderness hardly to be expected from a 
 people whose instinctive disposition, even where it did 
 not reach philosophical expression, was to regard 
 nature as illusion. 
 
 The Ramayana especially abounds in what we may 
 call mood-painting of nature, in which ever}' feature 
 of the scene is harmonized into one sympathetic and 
 responsive relation with the special human feeling for 
 the time in contact with it.^ So that the visible world 
 seems graciously made to lend plastic atmosphere and 
 expressive voice to all private meditation and friendly 
 communion. While Anasuya, the wife of a forest 
 saint, listens at twilight to the story of Site's youthful 
 love, she seems suddenly to awake, as by some mys- 
 terious and magnetic outward touch, to a sense that 
 the beauty and peace of the hour is expressing, better 
 than all words, what both their hearts find in the tale. 
 
 " See, O bright one ! the sun has set : the gracious night, set 
 with stars, has been drawing on. The birds, scattered by day in 
 search of food, are now softly murmuring in their nests. The 
 
 • KaUdlsa's MeghadiUa (Carriercloud) illustrates this perfectly. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 515 
 
 sages are moving, homeward from their ablu'tions', their evening 
 sacrifices are oiTered, and the blue smoke ascends from the hermit- 
 ages, tinged with the hue of the dove's neck. The trees are darken- 
 ing all around, and distant objects growing dim ; while the night- 
 loving beasts of prey are prowling, the deer are sleeping peacefully 
 by the altars and sacred places. The moon clothed with brightness 
 rises in the sky."' ' 
 
 It is so natural to these dreamers to find nature re- 
 sponsive to the human sentiment or mood of the hour, 
 that they constantly fall into instinctive recognition of 
 the fact. The poet thus describes the impression made 
 by the first experience of natural scenery upon Rama 
 and Lakshmana on their way to the wilderness : — 
 
 " They found the lakes eager to serve them by the sweetness of 
 their waters, the birds by their delicious warbling, the winds by the 
 fragrant dust of flowers which they bore along, the clouds by their 
 refreshing shadows." * 
 
 Pointing out to Sita the scenes of his exile, and 
 describing his pain at being separated from her, Rama 
 says : — 
 
 "These creepers, which could not speak, but which had pity on 
 my grief, showed me by their broken branches which way the Rak- 
 shasa had carried thee off, affrighted. I knew not whither thou 
 wert gone ; but the gazelles, forgetting to graze, and holding their 
 heads lifted, directed me southward, with their eyes. The clouds 
 poured down fresh rain on the mountain while I was shedding tears 
 at thy absence. At this season. When the wet earth sympathized 
 with my weeping, I could not bear the sight of the early spring 
 ■ buds, that seemed seeking to rival thy eyes." ' 
 
 And again as they pass a hermitage, he asks : — 
 
 " Do not the grand forest trees, under which the hermits have 
 plunged into deeps of meditation in the open air, seem to have 
 been themselves transported, by their own serene tranquillity, into 
 the divine life, in God ? " ■* 
 
 So when the arch demon Ravana approaches Sita, 
 
 ' R&m&t; III. » Raghmiansa, XI. « Ibid., XIII. • Ibid. 
 
5l6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 to carry her away captive, all nature is paralyzed 
 
 with fear : — 
 
 " As he moves, the breeze is still with dread, the tree shadows 
 thicken ; the twigs stiffen, and beasts and birds stand mute ; and 
 the waves of the river tremble with terror." • 
 
 The universe was peopled with subtle intelligences, 
 whispering presentiments and warnings, and assum- 
 ing every form and sound by turns with sportive free- 
 dom, unrestrained by that sober sense of limit and 
 definite function which shaped the divinities of the 
 Greek. Millions of spiritual beings moved in the 
 winds, the waters, the trees, the clouds : the living 
 creatures were but their masks, half-hiding, half- 
 revealing this weird possession of each form by the 
 infinite productivit}^ of nature. Hosts of fairies and 
 demons, troops of dancers and singers, Apsaras and 
 Gandharvas, hovered in the sky, rained flowers on 
 the altars and the festive crowds, or filled the air with 
 sweet and solemn music. Life was a stream that 
 flowed through endless transformations ; and it was 
 the delight of this mystical fancy to trace the protean 
 play from shape to shape, through all the changes of 
 natural birth and death, in man, in the lower animals, 
 in the vegetable and even in the mineral world ; and 
 to associate them by ideal identities, as earnestly as 
 modern science traces the atom through all the trans- 
 migrations of its history. 
 
 The senses asserted their rights. And the incessant 
 Source of eflforts of the devotee to escape their sphere 
 metemp-"^ °"^y tumed his thoughts the more intently, 
 sychosis. at intervals, on their importunate addresses. 
 And this is a source of the extraordinary propor- 
 tions assumed in Hindu thought by the idea of me- 
 
 1 R&mAy., III. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION . 5 1 7 
 
 tempsychosis. The belief that each human .soul 
 passes through a succession of lives, in different 
 bodily forms, visible or invisible, and in ascending, 
 descending, or revolving series, — human, animal, 
 vegetable, or even cosmical, from the plant to the 
 star, — has perhaps been accepted, in some form, by 
 disciples of every great religion in the world. It 
 is common to Greek philosophers, Egyptian priests, 
 Jewish Rabbins, and several early Christian sects. It 
 appears in the speculations of the Kabbalists, of the 
 Neo-Platonists, of later European mystics, and even 
 of socialists like Fourier, who elaborates a fanciful 
 system of successive lives mutually connected by 
 numerical relations. It reaches from the Eleusinian 
 Mysteries down to the religions of many rude tribes 
 of North America and the Pacific isles. Not a few 
 noble dreams of the cultivated imagination are subtly 
 associated with it, as in Plato, Giordano Bruno, 
 Herder, Sir Thomas Browne ; and especially notable 
 is Lessing's conception of a gradual improvement of 
 the human type through metamorphosis in a series of 
 future lives. Its prominence in the faith of the Hindus 
 affords ample material for studying its natural grounds 
 and conditions, as well as its significance for the uni- 
 versal experience. 
 
 Metempsychosis, as an idea and a faith, has been 
 substantially the effort to express certain im- its higher 
 perishable intuitions and organic relations. elements. 
 
 At the root of it lay first the sense of immortality : 
 the idea of life as not only transcending death, , 
 
 ■' c> Immortality, 
 
 but as multiplying itself through successive 
 
 forms of transient being, as if to emphasize and affirm 
 
 its own necessity again and again ; an entity which no 
 
5l8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 bonds of material investment could hold fast and no 
 dissolution destroy, however low it might descend 
 in the scale of nature. The sense of immortality is 
 indeed always in some sort a sense of inherent exist- 
 ence, and looks back-yvard as well as forward, behind 
 birth as well as beyond death ; infers /re-existence as 
 well as ^t?5^-exist€nce. It shrinks as much from an 
 absolute beginning of our being as from an end of it ; 
 and so must either leave the soul it is tracing back- 
 ward, in an impenetrable mystery, content with noting 
 its emergence thence, at the moment of what we call 
 birth, " trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our 
 home," — or else follow its earlier adventures with 
 the eye pf faith, through previous forms of being, 
 forgotten or dimly recollected. And so the contem- 
 plative imagination of the Hindus loved to brood over 
 these possible forms of successive births in both direc- 
 tions, from the island of this present life through 
 boundless oceans of the past and future. It was at 
 least a serene and immovable presumption of immor- 
 tality that made this dream-voyage through the 
 spheres of existence attractive and even possible. 
 
 Then there was the profound faith in immutable 
 Moral laws of morftl sequence. " Action," says Ma- 
 sequence. jj^^ "verbal, corporeal, mental, bears good 
 or evil fruit, according to its kind : from men's deeds 
 proceed their transmigrations," ^ In the philosophical 
 language of the Hindu schools, the " bonds of action " 
 are but another name for the endless consequences of 
 conduct. It was natural to explain in this way those 
 present moral as well as physical inequalities among 
 men, their differing characters and destinies, which 
 could not be accounted for by the data at hand. The 
 
 1 Man-H, XII. 3. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 
 
 519 
 
 sense of justice demanded that there should be found 
 adequate grounds for these differences, in antecedent 
 good or bad conduct ; which of course could only have 
 made their marks in earlier states of existence. Such 
 speculations have been common in the Christian vi^orld 
 also ; as solutions to justify not merely these actual dif- 
 ferences in human destiny, but even those imaginary 
 ones of theological invention, for whose infiniteness 
 there seemed no rational ground in men's actual doings 
 in this world. From Origen down to Edward Beecher, 
 the solution of this " conflict of ages" has been sought 
 in f re-existence, which one or another theory of 
 human nature and destiny had made a necessary 
 hypothesis, upon these constantly recognized princi- 
 ples of moral continuity and sequence. 
 
 We cannot wonder that the ancients satisfied their 
 instincts of justice by similar explanations of the mys- 
 teries of good and evil, both physical and moral. 
 
 It is the force of this ethical demand that every gift 
 or defect shall find its ground in positive de- Ethical de- 
 sert, shall point to some way in which it was "g!lf/°(' 
 earned, — that so frequently causes gre-at per- ence. 
 sonal virtues or powers to impress the imagination as 
 spiritual resources that only pre-existence can explain ; 
 as heaped-up harvests of former lives, spent in noble 
 disciplines and toil ; while excessive forms of vice 
 seem to require similar accumulations of evil tendency 
 through lives of correspondent tone. 
 
 Hereditary transmission is indeed the only answer 
 of science to these problems, — and this, in fact, is 
 transmigration of qualities and destinies, if not of 
 souls ; but it does not satisfy that demand of the moral 
 nature, which pre-existence, as we have seen, was 
 better suited to meet ; and so the solution of the in- 
 
520 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 equalities in question goes over with us more wisely, 
 among the possibilities of the life to come. Our oracle 
 is not memory, but growth. 
 
 The inadequacy "of these backward-looking solutions 
 is shown especially in the injustice of supposing that 
 the evil in men's characters or circumstances is punish- 
 ment for sins committed in a previous life, and conse- 
 quently is simply their desert. It would seem to forbid 
 kindness and mercy as interferences with such ap- 
 pointed retribution. It would seem to eternize such 
 conditions of evil, and to make their abolition a 
 crime. Some have even traced the persistence of 
 caste in India to the force of *his transmigration-faith, 
 and its associated theory of evil. The idea that evil 
 is always the sign and punishment of past sin was 
 not, however, peculiar to the Hindus, nor to the belief 
 in transmigration. It was held by the Hebrews also ; 
 and the protest of the natural heart and mind against 
 it is the central'idea of the sublime drama of Job. 
 
 In fact the grand humanities of Hebrew thought 
 combine with those of Buddhism to prove that men 
 have not always allowed their belief in this theory of 
 evil as the punishment of sin to produce its logical 
 consequences by paralyzing the desire of moral prog- 
 ress and hardening the heart. We even find that 
 the sources of belief in transmigration reveal germs 
 of a quite opposite character, of which we shall pres- 
 ently speak. 
 
 In truth, neither hereditary transmission nor metemp- 
 . sychosis can explain these mysteries of sift 
 
 A presenti- .' ^ ./ o 
 
 mentofsci- and dcfcct, or happiness and misery, which 
 
 depend on causes inconceivably subtle and 
 
 past fathoming. But not the less truly was the old 
 
 wide-spread belief in manifold births and lives an 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 5 21 
 
 earnest attempt to solve them on the principle of 
 inviolable moral consequences. And there is a sense 
 in which ancient dream and modern science are here 
 blended in a higher unity. Thus an Upanishad, relat 
 ing to birth, contains a description of the embryo soul, 
 as remembering former births and deeds, " having 
 eaten many forms of food and drunk at many 
 breasts ; " and as then, upon entering the world of 
 separate existence, losing the memory of these, while 
 yet the consequences remain.^ It would be hard to 
 find a fairer statement than this, at once of what we 
 know and what we dream, concerning the mystery of 
 our endowment from the past. 
 
 But the sense of immortality and the conviction of 
 inviolable moral sequence had in India a soil unity of 
 to work in, of which metempsychosis was the ''''*■ 
 natural and inevitable fruit. In the consciousness of 
 the Hindu, all life was included under one conception, 
 in one essence ; one ocean where individual forms and 
 grades of vitality were but transient waves that rose 
 and fell ; or, while holding their distinct and definite 
 being, were yet of like substance with the whole. It 
 was not so much that these individualities, or their 
 continued existence, could be actually denied ; but 
 rather that the emphasis was laid on life itself, as 
 idea, as common ground of all lives ; life, the mystery 
 in them all, the fullness, the freedom, the infinite 
 capacity of metamorphosis, of protean play. 
 
 In this mystical brooding over the unity of all life, 
 this sympathetic affinity, and sense of even inmost 
 identity with the whole, there lay of course a power- 
 ful motive to the love of all living creatures. " The 
 
 * Garhka Upanishad^ in Weber's Indische Stvd-, II. 6g, 70. 
 
522 ' RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Indian, united with all nature by ties of brotherhood, 
 had his ears open on every side to the voice of com- 
 passion." ^ And here was the reaction from ideal 
 dreams to interest in the visible outward world, of 
 which, as I have already said, the transmigration 
 theory of the Hindus illustrates the naturalness and 
 even necessity. 
 
 Why should not the quiet anchorets, dreaming on 
 The animal this Unity of all living and even lifeless forms, 
 world. on this common experience that like the light 
 came back in myriad reflections from them all to the 
 dreaming mind and heart, suppose the brute creatures 
 bqund to themselves by human ties? They stood in 
 much closer intimacy with these lower forms of being 
 than St. Francis of Assisi, who praised God " for our 
 brothers the sun, the wind, the air and cloud, by 
 which Thou upholdest life in all beings ; " who is said 
 to have made literal application of the text, "Go 
 preach the gospel to every creature," and to have 
 loved to linger along his way, that he might join his 
 "sisters, the birds, in singing praises to the Maker," 
 and even remove worms from the path, lest they 
 should be crushed by the traveller's foot. The Hindu 
 hermits fed and tamed the forest creatures, and learned 
 their language. " The gentle roe-deer, taught to trust 
 in man, unstartled heard their voices." ^ They saw 
 that upward striving towards man, on which modern 
 science itself hesitates to draw a line that shall sepa- 
 rate instinct and reason, and on which its comparative 
 biology founds the largest unities. They pitied the 
 dove torn by the eagle, the antelope fleeing from the 
 tiger. They saw tenderness in the eye of the bird; 
 and august serenity in the step of the elephant. 
 
 » Ft. V ScMegel. > iakuntam. 
 
TI^ANSMIGRATION. 523 
 
 The Raghuvansa describes a good king as " con- 
 joining qualities which ordinarily interfere with each 
 other, in pure accord, as the creatures lay down their 
 natural antipathies when they come to the peaceful 
 hermitage of a saint." The alarm of one of these pet 
 antelopes at sight of the royal hunter's arrow is thus 
 depicted by Kalidasa : — 
 
 " Aye and anon his graceful neck he bends 
 To cast a glance at the pursuing car ; 
 And, dreading now the swift-descending shaft, 
 Contracts into itself his slender frame : 
 About his path, in scattered fragments strewn. 
 The half-chewed grass falls from his panting mouth ; 
 See, in his airy bounds he seems to fly. 
 And leaves no trace upon the elastic turf." 
 
 The hermits interfere, and save their pretty charge. 
 
 " Now heaven forbid this barbfed shaft descend 
 Upon the fragile body of a fawn, 
 Like fire upon a heap of tender flowers ! 
 Can thy steel bolts no meeter quarry find 
 Than the warm life-blood of a harmless deer ? 
 Restore, great prince, thy weapon to its quiver. 
 More it becomes thy arms to shield the weak 
 Than to bring anguish on the innocent." ' 
 
 The mystery of animal instinct might well inspire a 
 certain awe and tender sympathy in such students of 
 it as these anchorets were ; so unerring is it, so finely 
 attuned to nature, so rich in presentiment and omen, 
 so magnetic in its fascinations. Montaigne quaintly 
 says : — 
 
 " It is yet to be determined where the fault lies that the beasts 
 and we don't understand each other ; for we understand them as 
 little as they do us ; and by the same reason they may think us 
 baasts, as we think them. From what comparison do we conclude 
 
 ^ Williams's transl. of SakuntaiH. 
 
524 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the stupidity we attribute to them ? When I play with my cat, who 
 knows whether I do not make her more sport than she does me ? 
 We mutually divert each other." 
 
 It is worth while, in view of this old and wide-spread 
 instinct for metempsychosis, to read his very sugges- 
 tive record of the points in which we must confess that 
 brutes are beyond us.-^ What wonder is it that the 
 eager soothsayers everywhere pried into the flight of 
 birds, the howling of dogs, the cackling of geese, the 
 hooting of owls, the cawing of crows, and searched 
 the very entrails of beasts, to get at the secret that 
 places them in such ra-p-port as they evidently inherit, 
 with human life? There was not a little true science 
 blended with the dreams and arts of the old haruspices ; 
 and there was still more of respect for the fine truth 
 and wisdom of instinct, in that persistent faith of the 
 people by which these auguries were sustained. In- 
 stinct knows its path ; is not deceived ; halts not, nor 
 wavers between opinions ; has the wisdom of artists 
 and lovers, of councillors and soldiers; listens and 
 divines like genius ; obeys an unseen guide through 
 solitary ways we cannot trace, "lone wandering, but 
 not lost." Man himself — whose mature vision sees 
 here the sweet symbol of an invisible care, that " in the 
 long way that he must tread alone will guide his steps 
 aright" — hastened, even while ignorant of natural 
 laws, to honor and consult this mysteriously sympa- 
 thetic oracle. He explored this hieroglyphic of nat- 
 ure, even before he could read his own thousrht. We 
 can well understand how the oldest wisdom should 
 have found its place in the mouths of the brute creat- 
 ures. It was man's early recognition of the sacred- 
 ness of life in general, and specially of that veiled lif^ 
 
 1 Essays, II. xii. {Apology for Rainwnd Sehonde.) 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 525 
 
 whose inarticulate speech was itself a kind of silence, 
 and intimated with double force the mystery that per- 
 vades and limits every form of language and com- 
 munion.^ 
 
 We must remember, too, that the first preaching of 
 Nature is in types and symbols of man. She sympathies 
 
 .. ,, , iiri'°^ mzn and 
 
 IS the endless and ever-present parable oi his nature. 
 experience. And long before he understands how to 
 cultivate patience, fortitude, trust, and love, as recog- 
 nized forms of virtue, they shine before him in divine 
 symbols that reflect his own spontaneous instincts, out 
 of the unfailing endurance of the beasts of burden, 
 the loves and labors of the birds, the peaceful accord 
 of the wild creatures with those orderly laws of nature 
 which prescribe their roaming and their rest. Even the 
 wide-spreading, sheltering trees are human to these 
 poetic ethics, and the grass of the field has a life be- 
 yond itself, and the waterfalls and rocks are souls. 
 An older Sermon on the Mount was m man, and 
 made him hearken gladly to worded lessons from the 
 liUes and the fowls ; for the voice of the teacher was 
 but an echo from his own childhood. There is tran- 
 scendent truth in the Hebrew myth that makes it man's 
 first dignity to divine the sense of the living creatures, 
 and to give them names. 
 
 The oldest books that delighted men, and gave life 
 a genial aspect, were the Fable Books. And ^.^^^^ 
 so richly and creatively did the imagination 
 flow in this direction, at the very outset, that most of 
 our present stock of fables are somehow traceable 
 
 ' See Plutarch's Essay an Land and Water Animals (Goodwin's Plutarch, vol. v.) 
 The interest inherent in the subject is illustrated by the fact that Professor Abbot, in his 
 invaluable Bihliography of the Doctrine of a Future Life, gives account of nearly two 
 hundred works concerning the " Souls of Brutes." 
 
526 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 back to primitive Eastern apologues. The oldest 
 known collections in the world are of Hindu origin. 
 The Sanskrit Hitopadesa, or "Good Counsels" of 
 Vishnu Sarma, and the still older Panchatantra (with 
 which recent discoveries are tending more and more 
 fully to identify it'), have been freely translated into 
 most languages of the East and of the West, and have 
 made the name of Pilpay, or Bidpai, the beloved phy- 
 sician, to whom they are mythically ascribed, im- 
 mortal, and everywhere at home. The far East is 
 thus an ever-present teacher of civilization, appealing 
 in the simplest and most effective way to the plastic 
 mind of childhood, an unfailing fountain of practical 
 and humane wisdom. The Hindu works just men- 
 tioned form the basis and type of most literature of 
 this kind, although Greeks, Hebrews, Teutons, and 
 other races, have each a stock of primitive gnomic 
 apologues and maxims, of a more or less original 
 cast.^ 
 
 It is most interesting to note that the earliest real 
 wisdom of life, the opening of its practical and social 
 meaning, has been also an expression of human sym- 
 pathy with the animal world. The morality of the 
 Hindu fable-books is, as we have already seen, of 
 good quality ; and their hearty common sense redeems 
 Indian literature from the charge of being competent 
 to sentimental and speculative interests only. Their 
 frank and manly dealing with the facts of common 
 life make them a democratic protest, and an appeal 
 
 ^ See Benfey, in TIk Academy for April, 1872. 
 
 2 Deslongchamps {Essaz sur les Fables IndieuTies) and Benfey {Einleit. z. Pants- 
 ch/itantra) carefully trace the relations of Western apologues and tales to these popular 
 Hindu works. Lassen, IV. 902, even ascribes the Arabian Nights' Entertainments to 
 Hindu sources. Weber {Indische Siudten, III.) has endeavored to separate a portion of 
 the Indian fables from the rest, as derived from Greece ; but he does so only to assign them, 
 further back, to a Semitic — still an Oriental — origin.. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 527 
 
 against social inequalities, in spite of their devotion to 
 royalty and other traditional institutions ; all of which 
 they admonish, rebuke, and instruct, with a fearless- 
 ness and authority that is more refreshing than that 
 of the Hebrew prophets, in so far as it stands wholly 
 on the ground and in the strength of familiar ethical 
 laws. The half-humorous indirectness of these pro- 
 tests and appeals, sent through the, lower creatures, is 
 as genial as it is sincere, and touches our sympathies 
 more strongly than sterner tones of denunciation. 
 
 The Persian compiler of the Anvar-i-Suhaili, which 
 consists of the substance of the Hitopadesa and the 
 Panchatantra, translated into Pehlevi in the sixth 
 century, describing the original Indian work, says, — 
 
 " In the time of Kasra Nushirwin this intelligence became spread 
 abroad, that among the treasures of the kings of Hindustan there 
 is a book which they have compiled from the speech of brutes, — of 
 birds and reptiles and savage beasts ; and all that befits a king in 
 the matter of government is exhibited within the folds of its leaves, 
 and men regard it as the stock of all advice and the medium of all 
 advantage." ' 
 
 These " Good Counsels " of the Brutes concern all 
 matters involved in social and personal relations, but 
 their special bearing is on the duties and opportunities 
 of kings. "The Fable, with the Hindus," says Professor 
 Wilson, "constitutes the science of Niti, or polity; 
 rules for the good government of society in all matters 
 not religious, the reciprocal duties of members of an 
 organized body ; and is hence especially intended 
 for the education of princes." This is true not only of 
 the Hitopadesa and the Panchatantra, but to an extent 
 of the epics also, which have even been called nitisas' 
 tras, abounding as they do in political teaching, and 
 
 ^ Anvctr-i^-ukaili^ Eastwick's transl., p. 6. 
 
528 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 especially from the animals. For these old monitors, 
 kings are divinities ; but it is, after all, only the ideal 
 ruler that has honor, all unworthy kingcraft being 
 severely handled both in the fables and maxims. 
 How significant a fact, that the teaching of practical 
 ideals should have been referred to this world of lower 
 creatures, which we have been taught to regard as 
 without gift of choice or power of progress ! 
 
 The use of the Apologue under despotic govern- 
 ments in the East as well as in the freer West (where 
 it is illustrated by the old German epos of Reynard 
 the Fox) , to convey satire and rebuke without offence 
 to established powers, — or, in Oriental phrase, "that the 
 ear of authority may be approached by the tongue of 
 wisdom," — has been often exaggerated, though to an 
 extent real. But it is hardly possible to overstate the 
 freedom of play allowed the imagination by these half- 
 human spheres of a strange unfathomable life. The 
 strictly ethical purpose of the Fable indeed imposes 
 certain limits upon the passion for hyperbole,^ as does 
 also that strong positive realism of animal qualities 
 and habits, which constitutes its material. But in 
 a religious and moral direction there was abundant 
 room for idealization in these mysterious fidelities 
 and powers. 
 
 And so we can easily understand how the later my- 
 Animaisyra-thology and popular poetry of India came to 
 holism. represent the deities in their incarnations as 
 assuming the brute even ofteneir than the human form, 
 while yet maintaining therein the noblest human vir- 
 tues, or manifesting spiritual capacities vainly sought 
 
 ' Not always obeyed in these old fahles, which are occasionally extravagant in their 
 descriptions of moral disciplines and sacrifices, — an argument, with Benfey, for their Budd- 
 histic origin. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 
 
 529 
 
 u 
 
 among men. Thus that strange, long-lived, heavy- 
 winged creature, the crow,^ was held to be older than 
 years could record. Perched on a rock or tree, he is 
 the most venerable of devotees, meditating on the 
 marvelteus lives he has passed through, and dispens- 
 ing to the eagle, monarch of birds, lessons of eternal 
 wisdom for the government of himself and his empireJ 
 The clumsy condor, sailing on massive wing over 
 Chimborazo, was held sacred by the. Incas and carved 
 on their sceptres, as the eagle on those of the Caesars. 
 No wonder the heavy crow, who climbs among ever- 
 lasting snows, is equally a wonder to the Hindu. 
 The Sanskrit language gives him no less than seventy 
 names. The serpent, worshipped by the aboriginal 
 Hindu tribes, and symbolic to the Aryans of wis- 
 dom, healing, eternity, has a hundred names. ^ There 
 were legends that consecrated the habits of the vul- 
 ture,* that careful and thorough eifacer of all revolting 
 signs of decay and death ; and of the fish, pathfinder 
 and leader of man through the watery wastes ; and of 
 the tortoise, broadbacked supporter that no burden 
 breaks down. The monkeys, those semi-human, self- 
 asserting proprietors of the primeval forests of the 
 Dekkan, become in the epics divine guides and deliv- 
 erers of man in his explorations of their pathless ex- 
 panses.'' The mythologist gave his god of wisdom 
 an elephant's head ; mounted the avenging goddess on 
 a tiger ; strung the bow of his Cupid with a thread of 
 honey bees ; inwove the habits of every creature with: 
 the protean metamorphoses of divinity. As the Assy— 
 
 1 Michelet, 77k Bird, p. 161. ^ R&m&y., VII. 
 
 ^ Pictet, Ort£^. Indo-Europ' 
 
 * See the beautiful tale, in the R&m&yaTMt of the chivalrous attempt of the vultnrei' 
 king to protect Siti from Rdvana, which costs him his life. 
 « RamA}!; IV. V. 
 
 34 
 
530 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 rian made and hallowed his cherubim, and the Egyp- 
 tian his sphinxes, by means of this sympathetic sense 
 of the unity of human and brute life, so the Hindu 
 took the ox and the cow as representative of the sanc- 
 tities of labor and beneficence ; an instinct of* special 
 veneration common to India and Persia and Egypt 
 and the Teutonic North. 
 
 " May he who has done wrong to my brother Rama," 
 says Bharata in the epic, "be the messenger of the 
 wicked ! May he kick his foot against a sleeping 
 cow ! " ^ To this day the country people in some 
 districts of India put blades of grass between their 
 teeth when they would deprecate anger, to remind 
 those whom they fear, of the human protection and 
 regard to which the cow is supposed to appeal. ^ This 
 honor to the cow is the most ancient and universal 
 form of devotion to animals known in India. The 
 patient, faithful, bounteous creature was so essential 
 and dear to the Vedic herdsmen that they made her 
 attend the dead on his journey to the world of the 
 fathers, to help him across the deep river, to guard 
 him from all foes.'* Even the gradual degeneracy 
 of mankind was quaintly enough symbolized by this 
 sacred animal standing in the golden age on four legs, 
 in the silver on three, in the brass on two, and in the 
 iron on one. 
 
 The zebus, or humpbacked cattle of India, are 
 indeed very beautiful animals, and may well have 
 inspired reverence among a primitive people. They 
 have mild, intelligent eyes, a kindly expression, and 
 their sides are covered with satinlike hair. As 
 working, and as milch cattle, they are of admirable 
 
 » Ram&yana, II. 2 Elliott's N. W. India, I. p. 241. 
 
 s See Pictet, II. 319; MuUerin Zeitsch. d. D. M. G., IX. Append. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 
 
 S3I 
 
 quality ; and their walk is almost as fast as that of a 
 horse. ^ The primal gratitude and veneration has con- 
 tinued throughout Hindu history. Kalidasa describes 
 in a poetic strain the devotions rendered by a king to 
 tlie sacred milch cow of a hermitage, in recognition of 
 her "bearing in her full breast the means of paying the 
 offerings due to guests, to manes, and to gods." All 
 this was certainly natural enough to the Indo-Aryan, 
 from the earliest Vedic times when the heavens and 
 the earth were one great pasture ground for his divine 
 herdsmen, who milked the rain-clouds for his support, 
 down to the days of hermits whose still, patient, dreamy, 
 ruminant life irresistibly suggests the image. Even 
 the intolerable divine cows and bulls of Benares 
 testify of what was once a mingled sentiment of 
 natural sympathy, gratitude for bounty, and religious 
 awe. 
 
 Plutarch says the Egyptians called their sacred bull 
 Apis " the fair and beautiful image of the soul of 
 Osiris." 
 
 That the animal symbolism of the Egyptians and 
 Hindus was associated with agricultural interests and 
 astronomical signs is unquestionable. But this simply 
 indicates how profound was the impression made by 
 these relations of the animal world with the blessings 
 of the earth and the sky. It may be, too, that the 
 epical incarnations in bears and monkeys, and the pop- 
 ular avataras of Vishnu in the shapes of fish, tortoise, 
 lion, and boar, were, as a recent writer suggests,^ 
 connected in some way with the fre-Aryan worship of 
 animals among the native tribes of the Dekkan, as was 
 certainly the case with the widely spread veneration 
 
 t See U. S. Agrictdtural Report iot 1865. = Wheeler's .^w^. of India. 
 
532 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 for the serpent in India ; and that their celebration in 
 the R^mayana was but part of the appeal of Neo-Brah- 
 manism to popular beliefs for the purpose of expelling 
 Buddhism. But behind all. these incidental causes 
 lies the deeper religious instinct which must explain 
 such traditional worship itself. This is the ground 
 of that striking difference which characterizes the 
 literatures of Europe and Asia, in their treatment of 
 brute nature. In the Hindu fables we find it instinc- 
 tively idealized : its best elements are gladly brought 
 out, and even the lowest treated with geniality. In 
 the Teutonic epic of Reynard the F6x, on the other 
 hand, the lowest are emphasized, and even the best 
 have little respect. In the East the brute world 
 belongs to religion ; in the West, to satire. In Brah- 
 manical legend, it has spiritual and moral validity in 
 itself: in the Christian and Jewish, its worth stands 
 mainly in its ministry to man, or as with the beast 
 shapes of St. Anthony's tempters, and the gargoyles 
 of Gothic architecture, as affording convenient mas- 
 querade for evil powers. It has been noted, too, as a 
 difference between the Hindu fables and the ^sopic 
 or Greek, that the former makes free use of the animal 
 world indiscriminately for the representation of human 
 character and feeling, while the latter employs the 
 creatures in a more critical spirit, according to their 
 special traits. ^ Yet this distinction may easily be 
 carried much too far for the truth. 
 
 It is not without reason that Michelet, pointing to 
 the functions of the cow and the ibis, the one to sup- 
 port human, the other to destroy reptile life, says : 
 "That which has saved India and Egypt through 
 
 ' Benfey, Eaileit. z. Pantsch. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 533 
 
 EiO many misfortunes, and preserved their fertility, is 
 neither the Nile nor the Ganges : it is respect for 
 animal life by the mild and gentle heart of man." '■ 
 
 " God made all the creatures, and gave them 
 Our love and our fear : 
 To show we and they are His children, 
 One family here." 
 
 The beautiful Isis-myth of Egypt binds the human, 
 animal, and inanimate worlds in common ties , , ^ 
 
 In the Egyp- 
 
 of tender sympathy with the divine. The god- tian uis- 
 dess is guided in her sorrowful search for the "'^' 
 lost Osiris by the divination of little children, and by 
 the instinct of the dog ; while the ark that holds his 
 sacred bod}' is protected by the loving embrace of a 
 growing tree. And so all three forms of natural life 
 are consecrated through powers of service faithfully 
 used, and held dear to the heart of man by their sym- 
 pathetic relations with the gods. 
 
 So, in the Hindu epic, hosts of gigantic bears and 
 apes, endowed with magic powers to change i„,i,g 
 their forms at will and control the forces of^™"^"'?"^- 
 nature, devote all their energies to aid the holy cause 
 of Rama in recovering his stolen Sita. There is no 
 obstacle too vast for their passionate zeal and might 
 to surmount, no service too noble or too delicate for 
 their love to render. The Indian poet dares ascribe 
 to the beasts of the forests, under this inspiration, all 
 the chaste and heroic virtues of chivalry ; and no 
 Minnesinger ever celebrated an ideal of purer honor 
 or nobler loyalty than "god -like Jatayus," the 
 vulture-king, or the titanic ape Hanuman,^ who 
 nevertheless tears up whole mountains in his arms, 
 
 ' Tie Bird, p. 148. 2 R&miy., V. 
 
534 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 destroys myriads of foes single-handed, and expands 
 his bulk at will, ten leagues at a time. And these 
 surpassingly helpful brutes are incarnations of gods ; 
 associated too with the elements, and forms of nature, 
 as sons of the sun, of the sky, of fire, of the wind. 
 So that the Hindu epic, like the Egyptian myth, 
 makes religion a bond of sympathy between the 
 brute, the human, and the natural worlds. 
 
 The Ramayana even beautifully interweaves this 
 tenderness towards the lower animals with the 
 origin of its own rhythmic movements as poetry. 
 The hermit Valmiki, seeing the distress of a female 
 heron whose partner has been shot by a hunter, utters 
 a reproof to the wanton sportsman for destroying the 
 bird that murmured so softly as it went ; and the gods 
 made that rhythm which the words of sorrow [soka) 
 spontaneously assumed the metre (sloka) in which he 
 should celebrate the praise of Rama. 
 
 I recall nothing in English literature that resembles 
 this delicacy of poetic sentiment, so much as Walter 
 Savage Landor's idyl of the peasant, who, striking 
 impatiently at a buzzing insect, " breaks the wing of a 
 bee and the heart of a hamadryad at once." 
 
 In the Mahabharata legend of the exile of the Pan- 
 dava princes, one of these brothers, who are divine 
 incarnations, dreams that the wild creatures of the 
 forest come to him trembling and weeping, and im- 
 plore him to spare what few had escaped the terrible 
 hunters, that they might be free from terror, and 
 multiply their race once more. And he is moved 
 with pity, and tells his brothers how the creatures 
 had implored his mercy ; whereat they depart from 
 the forest, and dwell in another place. ^ 
 
 1 MahAih., II. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 535 
 
 " Beneath human castes," exclaims Michelet again, 
 who may be called the literary apostle of a new 
 gospel of sympathy with the animal creation, " there 
 lies an immense caste, the poor brute world, to be 
 delivered, to be Hfted up. This is the triumph of 
 India, of Rama and the Ramayana. Hanuman 
 is the Ulysses and Achilles of this epic war. More 
 than any one else he delivers Sita. After the victory, 
 Rama crowns and celebrates him. Between the two 
 arrnies, before rnen and gods, Rdma and Hanuman 
 embrace. Talk no more of castes. The lowest of 
 men may say, Hanuman has freed me." ^ Modern 
 science, we may add, in the hands of our develop- 
 ment philosophy, may yet enforce from the physiolog- 
 ical side the genial lesson of this ancient song. 
 
 The mercy due from man to the brute life dependent 
 on his care, or ministering to his desires, is a lesson 
 indeed only to be learned of the East. It is g^",. 
 a touching and noble bequest she has laid up for ages, 
 and gives over at last to the proud civilization that in 
 other respects has outrun her, — in proof that she is 
 still able to inspire and advance mankind. Judaism 
 indeed had many noble humanities of this sort ; but 
 Christian teaching — almost, if not altogether, absorbed 
 in man — has seldom emphasized a tender brotherhood 
 with nature in her humbler living forms. " To bring 
 these things within the range of ethics," says Lecky, 
 " to create the notion of duties towards the animal 
 world, has, so far as Christian countries are concerned, 
 been one of the peculiar merits of the last century, 
 and for the most part of Protestant nations. How- 
 ever fully we may recognize the humane spirit trans- 
 mitted to the world, in the form of legends, from the 
 
 * Bible de rHutnaniie, pp. 59, 75. 
 
536 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 saints of the desert, it must not be forgotten that the 
 inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale is 
 mainly the work of a recent and a secular age ; and 
 that the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have in this 
 sphere considerably surpassed the Christians." ^ 
 
 After eighteen centuries of barbarity in this sphere 
 of our relations, — the revelations whereof, in its actual 
 condition, are to the last degree revolting, — the civ- 
 ilized West is just beginning to awake to the duty 
 of protecting our "dumb neighbors,"^ and to ask 
 whether the " beasts that perish " do not turn the 
 tables, in the argument of immortality itself, upon 
 the master, whose cruelties towards them mock his 
 own special claim to be made in the image of God. 
 We may yet appreciate Landor's tender tribute to 
 his dog: "few saints have been so good-tempered, 
 and not many so wise." 
 
 And in this point of view Art has a mission, never 
 AmUsion acccptcd, as it should have been, by Christian 
 for art. schools. It is interesting to note that Ruskin, 
 who regards sympathy with the lower animals as one 
 of the " great English gifts " in art, but admits that it is 
 yet " quite undeveloped," expresses the hope that " the 
 aid of physiology and the love of adventure will enable 
 us to give to the future inhabitants of the globe an 
 almost perfect record of the present forms of animal 
 life upon it, of which many are on the point of being 
 extinguished." 
 
 Under these larval masks, as the old philosophies 
 The masks affirmed, hide the dear and venerable gods 
 ofthe gods, the jus^ives, or the spirits of men, who shall 
 
 1 European Morals^ II. 188. 
 
 2 There are now in Europe, as appears from a recent address at Philadelphia, between 
 one and two hundred societies for the protection of animals, composed largely of eminent 
 men and women ; and the number is rapidly increasing. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION . 
 
 537 
 
 one day reveal their ancient lives, now under a tran- 
 sient spell of oblivion. And is not our own science 
 inquiring at this day, in pure respect for what educa- 
 tion is doing for the brute mind, and by the simple 
 logic that demands compensation in a future state for 
 unrelieved miseries in this, — if the brutes are not 
 immortal? 
 
 It is not easy, probably it is not possible, to discover 
 the si>ecial grounds which led to the consecra- . 
 
 -^ ° , _ Ongin of 
 
 tion of each form of animal life. The sym- animal wor- 
 bolism of the living world is past exhausting, ^'^'''' 
 and cannot be dogmatically defined. Cicero's theory 
 that utility was the basis of animal worship is inade- 
 quate : the utility of a creature can never fully account 
 for its becoming an object of adoration. Plutarch's 
 divinations of its meaning in special cases are often 
 ingenious, but as often fanciful and unsatisfactory. 
 The faith of the Egyptians, according to Diodorus, 
 was that the gods, having while weak found refuge 
 from danger in animal forms, made these sacred out of 
 gratitude, when they came to their thrones.^ This is at 
 least an intimation of belief in sympathetic relations 
 and moral ties reaching from the highest to the lowest 
 forms of life. Plutarch ridicules the legend ; but his 
 own theory goes further, and more philosophically, 
 in the same direction. While condemning the excess 
 to which animal worship was carried in Egypt, he 
 touches what was doubtless the spiritual fact rudely 
 expressed by this form of religion, in the following 
 passage from his Isis and Osiris : " On the whole, we 
 should approve those who honor not so much those 
 creatures as the divine in them, and hold them as 
 clear and natural mirrors, the instrument and art of 
 
 1 Diod., I. 86. 
 
538 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the all-ordaining God. Whatever nature lives and sees 
 and has motion in itself, and the knowledge of what is 
 proper for itself and for others, this nature derives, 
 as Heraclitus says, an efflux, or portion, from that 
 Ruler whose wisdom governs all." ^ And Herodotus 
 confirms this hint of a universal idea, when he tells us 
 that all animals, both wild and domestic, were alike 
 sacred in Egypt. ^ 
 
 Herbert Spencer's idea,^ that the habit of nicknam- 
 ing men from their resemblances to animals would 
 naturally result with their descendants in the notion 
 that these animals were in fact the ancestors, and 
 hence deserved religious honors, goes but a little 
 way in accounting for the piety of the ancients 
 towards inferior creatures. The processes here de- 
 scribed involve the very sentiment which they are 
 adduced to explain. We might as well suppose it to 
 be due to the equally ancient as well as modern habit 
 of naming animals for men, either in irony or whim, 
 as we dub dogs and birds ; or for honor, like the great 
 names of famous race horses, formed upon those of 
 their owners, which we find recorded in old Latin 
 inscriptions ; or for protection, as the old Latia'n 
 herdsmen used to name duly every sheep or heifer, 
 sometimes after the most noted families in Italy. In 
 fact such solutions merely illustrate the closeness of 
 the ties which have always united man with the brute 
 creatures. They do not go to the root of the old 
 piety, which is explicable only as a natural instinctive 
 disposition in man to feel respect, not alone for what 
 is stronger, but for what is weaker than himself. The 
 
 » De Iside, LXXVI. a Herod., IL 65. 
 
 » RecaU Discussions in Smnce. So Lubbock, Origin of Civilis., p. 178. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION . 
 
 539 
 
 lowest tribes of savages have the custom of apologiz- 
 ing to the animals which they kill.' 
 
 The conditions required for a sympathetic and 
 religious feeling towards the animal world, „. , 
 
 ^ ^ Hindu sense 
 
 which have been described, were all supplied of the unity 
 b}"- the mystical faith of the Hindus in the ° 
 unity of life. All creatures were one ; one in the 
 sacredness of life as such, in its very idea ; ^ one in 
 the thread of intelligence that traversed its unbroken 
 chain of forms, and could not well be severed any- 
 where ; and one, in those delicate relations and affi- 
 nities which give ground for ethical and spiritual 
 symbolism. In these aspects, intensified by the love 
 of suppressing distinctions and melting barriers and 
 blending forms, the unity of life gave ample scope for 
 the play of metempsychosis, or the transmutation of 
 vital forces. We may perhaps define this almost 
 universal belief of races without scientific culture 
 as the earliest analogue of our modern doctrine of 
 the unity and correlation of forces. 
 
 The transmigration-faith was, therefore, so widely 
 spread in the elder world, because it had its „, 
 roots in natural and profound aspirations. It 
 combined the twofold intuition of immortality and 
 moral sequence with that mystic sense of the unity 
 of being which is a germ Qf the highest religious 
 truth. And just as in early Christianity, which tended 
 to reject the outward world, and confined its sympathy 
 to the human and the angelic spheres, Origen had his 
 transmigrations and "circuits" of souls, — but through 
 those spheres only, — so in Hinduism a larger reach 
 
 * Lubbock, p. 184. 
 
 2 See remarks on the unity of life, as conceived by the Egyptians, in H. Martineau's 
 Eastern Life (p. 212), one of the most remarkable works of the present centuiy. 
 
540 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of the sense of oneness through the whole universe 
 made transmigration a circuit that swept animal and 
 even vegetable life also. And we are to bear in mind 
 also, how imperfect was the sense of individuality in 
 the mystical Hindu consciousness. It was only too 
 easy here to infer one's private destiny from the infinite 
 convertibility of forms in nature, the ceaseless flow, 
 and shift, and lapse, the protean play that seemed to 
 resolve all into one. 
 
 How the Hindus solved the subtle question — 
 ^^. whether that state could really be regarded 
 individual as a Continuation of the personal existence, 
 in which all traces of the past were effaced 
 in new relations of being, and only the conse- 
 quences of previous conduct were retained as deter- 
 mining destiny — is not at all apparent. But the 
 imagination solves, all problems that perplex the un- 
 derstanding. A certain delight in illusion itself is the 
 life of the transmigration mythology, and has every- 
 where associated it with magic, witchcraft, and the 
 power given by talismans and spells to assume animal 
 forms at pleasure. 1 And it is not probable that- the 
 forward look beyond death became less real and earn- 
 est for these anticipations of what to us would seem so 
 like positive annihilation. Doubtless with the Hindus, 
 as afterwards with Pythagoras, Plato, and the Alex- 
 andrian philosophers,^ this whole belief hovered, in 
 poetic dream, in the blending lights of mythology, 
 rather than stood definite for the understanding, or in 
 that rigid application to details which modern habits 
 of thought would require. Yet it was not for that 
 reason less real, or less powerful to. move the fears, 
 
 * See Apuleius's Golden Ass. 
 
 ' Simon, Hisi. de VicoU d'Alejcandrie, I. 446, 590. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 54I 
 
 the desires, or the affections of the masses of men. It 
 was not reserved for Tertullian ^ to reveal the fact that 
 the self-contradictions of a religious mystery make it 
 all the more fascinating to an unreasoning faith. 
 
 Regarding all life as at heart one and the same 
 with that which stirred within him, — and imprisoned 
 profoundly impressed by the sense of moral =™'=- 
 retribution, — the thought of immortality, too, brood- 
 ing over him past escape, — it was simply natural for 
 the hermit saint to cherish the behef that these lower 
 creatures, with their mysterious instincts appealing to 
 him in so many ways for protection, learning in so 
 many ways to comprehend his thought and fall in with 
 his habits, were the souls of his fathers and friends, 
 who, having yielded to the power of the senses, had 
 sunk into correspondent forms, and were now yearn- 
 ing back in mournfulness or remorse to the upright 
 manhood they beheld in him. At the same time a 
 certain awe of brute life as possibly incarnating deity, 
 the exploration of it to find intimations of spiritual 
 truth, of duty, and of love, prevented this actual ani- 
 mal world from seeming a mere field of retribution, 
 and threw transmigration for its harsher penalties 
 where Christianity also went for its hells, into vaguer 
 invisible spheres, in a world that might with more pro-' 
 priety be called future than these animal purgatories 
 could be. 
 
 It is important that we should note these influences 
 which associated transmigration with other ^ . . 
 
 *-* Expiation 
 
 ideas and interests than those of retribution ; andproba- 
 since the natural tendency of its fatalism would 
 be, if not cdunteracted, to make the present life itself 
 appear to be merely a process of expiating past of- 
 
 1 " Credo quia impossibile est" 
 
542 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 fences, ignoring its invitations to future excellence. 
 Such stern bondage to foregone lives does not enter 
 into the theory of Christianity ; its place being sup- 
 plied in the creeds by a similar bondage to reward and 
 penalty in the jfuiure life, through the belief that the 
 essence of the present is but "probation." In neither 
 case is free validity accorded to the living moment, as 
 the sphere and opportunity of the spirit. Both in the 
 East and the West, the affections have not failed to 
 make earnest protest, in divers ways, against the dis- 
 paragement. In this point of view the tender regard 
 of Brahmanical religion for the animal world, in which 
 it saw the fatalities of transmigration, is deserving of 
 special attention. 
 
 Metempsychosis, indeed, had no necessary connec- 
 incidentai ^^°^ ^^^^ penalty, in ancient thought as such, 
 relation to but covcrcd a broad cosmical conception; 
 ^"^ ^' namely, that of i^e Um(y of jLtyh. In Egypt, 
 for example, it was conceived as a natural and orderly 
 circuit of soul through the various forms of life, to re- 
 turn again to a human body after three thousand years. ^ 
 And in the funereal inscriptions of that country it is 
 nowhere found unmistakably associated with the idea 
 of punishment. 2 Pythagoras and Empedocles allude 
 to it as a natural rather than a retributory process. 
 The former " recognizes the voice of his friend in the 
 howl" of a beaten dog, and interferes to protect him. 
 And Empedocles declared himself to have been " a 
 boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, a fish," in illustration sim- 
 ply of the general truth that " the soul inhabits every 
 form of animal and plant." ^ Plato comes nearer the 
 notion of penalty ; yet in no wise of arbitrary punish- 
 ment, but of natural moral gravitation. Among the 
 
 1 Herod., H. 123. « Kenrick, ArK. Egypt, I. 403. » Diog. Laeru, B. vm. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 543 
 
 "souls that have lost their wings," those, he says, 
 come first to full recovery who in the circuit of their 
 human births have insight and will to choose the nobler 
 lives. And he makes the same law preside in the pas- 
 sage through lower forms of animated life ; each soul, 
 after a thousand years, choosing such form, bestial or 
 human, as it pleases.^ This sense of moral gravita- 
 tion, or of the natural consequences inherent in char- 
 acter, tends to interweave itself with all theories of 
 transmigration ; and we can frequently detect a natural 
 connection between certain types of character and the 
 special forms of animal life to which the law books 
 consign these types after death. ^ Yet we can by no 
 means do so as a general I'ule, for the reason that this 
 is only one of many elements in the composition of the 
 idea as a whole, which goes back upon a far deeper 
 ground for sympathy, as well as for hopes and fears. 
 The unity of life, more or less recognized by all races, 
 made metamorphosis easy and simple ; a free field 
 for all spontaneities of human expectation and desire. 
 Thus negro slaves transported to America sought 
 refuge from their miseries in death, in the hope to be 
 born again in the body of a child in their native land. 
 Various North-American tribes believe that the soul 
 of a dying person may be drawn into the bosom of a 
 sterile woman, or blown by the breath into that of the 
 nearest relative, and so come again to birth in the way 
 that the receiver desires.^ It is of course needless to 
 do more than refer to the beautiful mythology of meta- 
 morphosis in which Greek poetry and Hindu fable 
 so thoroughly delighted, in illustration of the freedom 
 
 * Phsedrus, c. 61. ^ See Y&jn&valkya-, III. 210. 
 
 » Brinton, Myths of New World, p. 253. 
 
544 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 of this field of human sympathy 'from all necessary 
 relation to retributory suffering. 
 
 In Hindu poetry, every creature that appears in the 
 vast tropical jungle of illusion through which you are 
 led is a soul in disguise ; a mask assumed by magic 
 spell or in personal caprice, for purposes good or evil, 
 or in pure love of changing one's form, and wander- 
 ing through the wide chambers of life. The special 
 genius of the poet is shown in the surprise effected by 
 the fall of the mask, the swift escape into a new one ; 
 in the flit from life to life, as of a spirit everywhere at 
 home ; and in the swift revulsions of pleasure and 
 pain caused by the play of such illusion upon human 
 emotions. And this takes off the edge of the tragic 
 furore which makes so large a part of these old 
 epics, and which is carried to such a pitch of destruc- 
 tiveness that nothing but a constant sense of illusion 
 could render it endurable. Here too, as in Veda and 
 Upanishad, the perpetual lesson is the indestructibility 
 of life, the resilience of the soul from death, and its 
 power to pass unharmed through all the fires of ele- 
 mental change. 
 
 Yet, as has been already said, one inevitable ten- 
 Hindu dency of the contemplative life in India was to 
 
 theory of •' '^ 
 
 penalty, regard this convertibility of forms through the 
 oneness of being, in its specially moral aspects. The 
 poets who unfolded laws of spiritual emancipation, and 
 the ascetics who sought to fulfil them, would natu- 
 rally emphasize penalty in connection with bestial 
 transformation, assigning the future of human vices 
 and passions to those forms of animal life to which 
 they seemed to bear a resemblance. And the point 
 most worth our notice is, that, looking upon life in so 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 545 
 
 many of these forms as symbolical at least of punish- 
 ment, they yet showed a tenderness towards them 
 which could have no other cause than the desire to 
 alleviate this remedial pain, and to help on the process 
 of purgation, that the imprisoned souls might at last be 
 freed. 
 
 I speak of the Hindu Inferno as remedial : I do not 
 deny that the punishment of the worst is often spoken 
 of as if final. Herder's idea of a threefold division of 
 the forms of transmigration into ascending, descending, 
 and circular, will not serve as a basis for the classifica- 
 tion of systems. In the Hindu faith we find all three 
 combined. But the result of this very fact is that the 
 idea of ascent and final unity with God is predomi- 
 nant. The very notion of circuit and return implies 
 that the basis of penalty is preservation; and the ab- 
 sorption of the whole into a divine unity points clearly 
 to an instinctive resolution of evil into good. 
 
 The Hindu imagination indeed, like Christian 
 Dante's, brooded over the capabilities of penal suffer- 
 ing in the spiritual organization of man.' Manu 
 represents the vital spirit of the wicked, as furnished 
 with a coarser body, expressly provided with nerves 
 susceptible of extreme torment ; while that of the good 
 shall have a body formed of pure elementary particles, 
 as closely related to delight in the celestial spheres. ^ 
 And according as the qualities of goodness, passion,, 
 or darkness prevail, do these spirits become deities, or 
 men, or beasts, after death. In proportion as sensual, 
 desires are indulged, does the acuteness of these 
 sheathed and preparatory senses become intensified.'* 
 
 1 For the dismal record of transmigration penalties, see Manu^ cli. xii. and Y&jna^ 
 valkya^ III. 206-215, 
 
 2 Manu, XII. 20, 40. 
 
 s Compare Buckle's account of Calvinism, Hist* of CivU-^ vol. ii. 
 
 35 
 
546 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Eastern imagination herein, as in other matters, 
 . . allows itself freer scope to paint the horrors of 
 
 Its limits. * '■ 
 
 penalty, from the fact that it is so unconscious 
 of any thing like literal and practical intention; a 
 palliative more or less admissible in the case of any 
 religion, when we would interpret its dogmas of future 
 retribution. In addition to this last, perhaps question- 
 able, protective element, a certain tenderness and plas- 
 ticity of the natural sensibilities comes in, to save the 
 Hindus from afSrming everlasting penalty as a complete 
 and conscious principle of faith. 
 
 To say nothing of the inevitable return of the uni- 
 verse, through whatsoever "wombs of pain," to the 
 bosom of the Supreme, emphasized by the mystical 
 Vedanta as the substance of faith, the Law of Manu 
 itself in one passage distinctly affirms the " restoration 
 of the wicked." ^ Yajnavalkya also describes the re- 
 turn of the vicious through these purgations to their 
 original better status and to new opportunity. ^ 
 
 At worst this Inferno of Transmigration, with all 
 its fantastic torments and their inconceivable durations, 
 has not so relentless a spirit towards the offender as is 
 involved in the developed Christian dogma of endless 
 punishment. And it is by no means so likely to sug- 
 gest itself to the reader of the Vedas, the philosophies, 
 the epics, or the dramas, that deity was held to be 
 glorified by the joy of saints over these penal miseries 
 of the wicked, as that a certain compassionate love, as 
 of a protector, and deliverer, was thought due from 
 man to the lower creatures ; though they must have 
 been regarded as representatives of a doom justly 
 inflicted upon human vice. 
 
 1 Manu, XII. 22. See Elphinstone, quoted in Allen's India, p. 430. 
 
 2 y&jnaV; III. 217, 218. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 547 
 
 On the other hand, as the system became more and 
 more elaborate, it must, like analogous schemes in 
 other religions, have lent abundant material for the 
 purposes of the priesthood ; whose control over these 
 tremendous mysteries of a future life secured them 
 mastery over mind and conscience in the present. 
 
 Bishop Heber, in view of these and kindred super- 
 stitions, denounced the Hindu religion as the worst he 
 ever heard of. Yet he has himself paid high tributes 
 to the virtues that could grow in its soil. And the 
 records of Christianity might well make us beware of 
 judging a whole faith by its least creditable fruits. It 
 may help to a fairer judgment, even of metempsychosis, 
 to recall the fine Mahabharata legend of King Judish- 
 thira ; who, after the woful strife of kindred chiefs is 
 over, striving to reach separation from the world by 
 journeying to the holy mountain, and seeing all his 
 noble brothers fall by the way, because not redeemed 
 by their sufferings from pride, or ambition, or over- 
 weening affections, reaches the presence of Indra, 
 followed only by his dog : heaven opens before him, 
 but he will not enter without this faithful companion. 
 
 " Away with that felicity whose price is to abandon the faithful. 
 Yon poor creature, in fear and distress, hath trusted in my power 
 
 to save it . 
 Not for e'en life itself will I break my plighted word." 
 
 Admitted by Indra, he finds his lost relatives are not 
 in heaven, but consigned to the regions of torment; 
 whither descending he bids the angel leave him, that he 
 may share their misery ; then wakes to find the spec- 
 tacle an illusion, to test the constancy of his love.i 
 Hardly less significant is the mythical account, in 
 
 > Mah&bh.^ VI. The story may be found in Alger's Oriental Poetry^ with a striking 
 translation of the passage. 
 
548 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the same epic, of the renewal of human life itself 
 after the great Deluge of Manu, through the tender- 
 ness of this saint towards the lower creatures. He 
 saves a little fish pursued by larger ones, which 
 proves to be Brahma in disguise ; and after transfer- 
 ring it from place to place as it grows, till at last the 
 Ganges cannot hold it, he receives from its gratitude 
 the reward of his labors. The now gigantic fish 
 warns him of the coming destruction of mankind, and 
 guides his ark through the great waters, from which 
 he emerges to repeople the earth. 
 
 We have indicated the origin of this profound 
 Spiritual Oriental belief, in genuine religious and moral 
 significance, instiucts. How far other experiences of a more 
 subtle character may have helped to suggest it, — such 
 as the peculiar sense of reminiscence and recognition, 
 as of former states of being, which physicists ascribe 
 to the double action of the brain, — it is now impossi- 
 ble to determine. But, whatever its relation to a future 
 life, transmigration, or at least metamorphosis, is cer- 
 tainly a spiritual fact, true of the present life. "Be 
 not," says Sir Thomas Browne, in his quaint way, 
 "under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest 
 and walkest about erectly under the form of man. 
 Leave it not disputable at last, since thou art a com- 
 position of man and beast, how thou hast predomi- 
 nantly passed thy days." "When men lose their 
 virtue," asks Boethius still more plainly, " do they not 
 also lose their human nature ? You cannot esteem 
 him to be a man, whom you see trausfo'rmed by his 
 vices Whoever leaves off to be virtuous ceases to 
 be human. And, since he cannot attain to a divine 
 nature, he is turned into a beast." ^ 
 
 ' Comol. of Philosophy, IV. iv. 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 549 
 
 That the lower types of animal life are somehow 
 taken up as constituent elements of the human is an 
 instinct of sentiment and a fact of scientific observa- 
 tion. Embryological stages alone might almost war- 
 rant a literal truth to that old mystical philosophy 
 which makes every man carry a beast within his body, 
 " wherewith, being plagued or else amused, the captive 
 soul doth bring itself into a bestial figure." ^ Dire 
 possibilities suggest themselves in the reflection that 
 -we are equally ignorant how the brute came to exist 
 outside us, as an express image of our rude instincts, 
 and how it came to appear within us, as larval phase 
 and moral quality. That there are limits in human 
 nature to actual transmutation in the descending line 
 may fairly be presumed, at least so long as science 
 fails, with all its intimations and inferences,' to show 
 us even the animal man in the act of ascending out 
 of the brute. And more than this : our personality 
 is a spiritual essence that resists solution ; a mystery 
 as indefinable by science as by superstition ; a secret 
 that has not yielded either to the dream of metemp- 
 sychosis or to the study of specific origin, to divina- 
 tion of the future or to exploration of the past. 
 Darwin may track it this way, or Manu that : the 
 subtle genius will not be hunted to its lair. 
 
 But the interweaving of the higher and lower lives, 
 the divine and the bestial, remains : it was as real to 
 the earlier as to the later consciousness of man, that 
 he is the microcosm of life, from the god to the 
 worm. There was evermore a warning instinct, the 
 ceaseless providence of a secret whisper, " Beware 
 the beast thou bearest within." 
 
 ^ Jacob Behmen's Mysterium Magnum. 
 
550 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Half in insight, half in fear, he wove his impression 
 into dogma ; and on that arose metempsychosis. Its 
 colossal system of powers and penalties weighed 
 heavily on his soul. For its round of ages and forms 
 was a bitter one to travel ; its claim for all types of 
 life to exercise influence on his destinies was an over- 
 whelming demand ; and his constant yearning was to 
 escape this circulation through the manifold stages 
 of existence, and to mount at once by a directer path 
 to immortal good. Brahmanism and Buddhism, with 
 their kindred philosophies have sought to provide 
 such ways of escape, as Christianit}' also has had its 
 fine evasions of its own dismal lore of eternal punish- 
 ment. 
 
 But metempsychosis had its nobler side. It asso- 
 ciated itself with all the tenderness of yearning and 
 regret. It served to bring out man's kindly senti- 
 ments, and expand them through the whole world 
 of animated forms. And it must have quickened 
 the aesthetic and poetic sense by teaching him to 
 trace the paths of that tender mystery of creative 
 genius, which is one and the same in the weaving of 
 a sparrow's nest and the transitions of human birth 
 and death. 
 
 I return to the point which I proposed to illustrate. 
 Sanity of This circuit of metempsychosis is the clearest 
 nature. possiblc cvideuce, for our study of the early 
 world, before practical science was, that man cannot 
 withdraw himself, even by religious influence, from 
 a saving balance, inherent in his own spiritual ten- 
 dencies and demands. The Hindu, dreamer as he 
 was, was forced, as we have seen, to recognize the 
 visible world he repelled, and to find religious purpose 
 
TRANSMIGRATION. 551 
 
 in its forms and forces, after all. He could not make 
 the living universe flow into the divine life, without 
 acknowledging the flow of deity through the whole 
 living universe. Such the sanity of nature, justifier 
 alike of soul and sense. 
 
VII. 
 RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 
 
 /CHRISTIANITY indulges the hope of absorbing 
 ^-' other historical religions, and sinking their christian 
 sacred names and symbols in its own. This «'pe'^'i™s. 
 anticipation demands our notice, as bearing directly on 
 the interests of Universal Religion. 
 
 It means, substantially, that Christianity has confi- 
 dent faith in its own adequacy to meet universal needs. 
 A like self-reliance is to be noted in all great historic 
 religions. They would not be religions, had they 
 not this instinct of universality. In proportion to the 
 earnestness of its conviction has each refused to hide 
 its treasure, and hastened forth with the glad tidings 
 of one all-sufficing gospel. Judaism made the world 
 ring with its cry to the nations to come up and serve 
 Jehovah. Buddhism has swept a third of mankind 
 into its wide-open folds of brotherhood. Confucius 
 sways an empire of empires, and China entitles her- 
 self the "Central Kingdom." The religions of Moses, 
 Jesus, Mohammed, — religions of the Desert as they 
 are, summoning men apart to intense concentration 
 on personal needs and exaltations, to a burning thirst 
 for living waters, — have transformed their passionate 
 egotism into a boundless absolutism, claiming divine 
 
556 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 right by " special revelation " to impose their formulas 
 upon all mankind. Even Persian Babism parcels out 
 the nations of the earth already, by anticipation, among 
 its ambitious chieftains.^ 
 
 All great religions involve this assurance of a right 
 to master the world ; and the method is now the sword, 
 now love and sacrifice, now prophetic affirmation, now 
 the proclamation of a dogma or a name. However 
 delusive the hope, there is a deeper truth than its own 
 exclusiveness allows it to apprehend, seeking expres- 
 sion in its dream. 
 
 For what all these religions are really affirming, 
 however unconsciously, is the adequacy of the human 
 faculties to find whatever, as spiritual forces, they re- 
 quire. The confessors of each faith hold their own 
 mode of satisfaction to be valid for all men, only be- 
 cause they know that all men have one nature. But 
 this implies that the power and the right of obtaining 
 such satisfactory solution cannot be limited to them- 
 selves. So that when the instinct of expansion which 
 impels them comes to be really comprehended, all 
 beliefs that assume the common human nature to be 
 inadequate should drop away ; and all exclusive claims 
 on the part of distinctive religious traditions and sym- 
 bols to represent it should be resigned. 
 
 And this time has now come, more fully and effec- 
 tively than at any former period, in the progress of 
 mutual recognition between the diverse religions of 
 mankind. Such claims are now a real bar to sympa- 
 thy, and can form no element of that unity which all 
 our experience expects. All distinctive religions — 
 and Christianity in the whole history of its relations 
 with Judaism and other faiths has assumed itself to be 
 
 ^ Gobineau, p. X93. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 
 
 SS7 
 
 one of these — are fragmentary and imperfect: if 
 not in certain ideal aspects, they are yet positively so 
 when regarded as alternatives to each other ; that is, 
 when claiming the right of supplanting and excluding 
 each other's definite names, symbols, and historical 
 associations in the world's regard. Civilization ac- 
 knowledges its debt to each, respects the validity of 
 each as aspiration on the same ample basis of a com- 
 mon spiritual nature ; but holds them all in abeyance 
 before those universal ideas and that complete human 
 culture, of which their specialities, whether personal, 
 dogmatical, or mythological, were but germs. No 
 distinctive religion can fulfil the universal functions of 
 our civilization. The plea that it is itself identical with 
 civilization, or exclusively entitled to speak in its name, 
 cannot now be entered even by the best of these special 
 organs of the religious sentiment. It cannot monopo- 
 lize truths implicitly contained in all great forms of 
 faith ; and, however natural the desire to make it cover 
 all that is for the "glory of God," it cannot ignore the 
 history of man. Here the zeal of the Christian dis- 
 ciple confounds things difterent and unequal. The 
 terms Christianity and civilization are not identical ; 
 since civilization reports the whole experience of 
 mankind, whereof this concentration on the person of 
 Jesus, whether in its recognized or its heretical forms, 
 is but a fragment. Distinctive Christianity has in fact 
 had little or no success outside the Aryan family of 
 nations ; and in the most advanced of these it is losing 
 its hold, and passing on into a freer theism. Only 
 the blindness of an exclusive faith can expect that 
 the hundreds of millions of the Oriental world, now 
 brought to our doors, are to bow down to the name of 
 Jesus, and adopt Christian symbolism ; and this at a 
 
558 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 time when historical criticism is claiming for Judaism 
 much of that very ethical and spiritual wisdom which 
 has hitherto been supposed original with the . prophet 
 of Nazareth. As well expect Christendom to worship 
 God under the sole name of Brahma, or Mahomet as 
 His only prophet. 
 
 The very fact that Christianity makes exclusive 
 claims in the name of a central historical person, to 
 say nothing of positive church or creed, proves that it 
 cannot become the universal religion. Nothing indeed 
 is more irrational than to expect old civilizations to 
 exchange their ancestral scriptures and mediatorial 
 names for those of other races. It is as nearly im- 
 possible as any change can well be. They will escape 
 their own idolatries in this kind, not to fall into others, 
 but to be freed into that religion of universal and 
 eternal truth which transcends all such limitations. 
 "This is my religion," said a Siamese nobleman to a 
 Christian missionary : "to be so little tied to the world 
 that I can leave it without regret ; to keep my heart 
 sound; to live doing no injustice to any, but deeds of 
 compassion to all." To convince him that he had so 
 sinned as to need salvation through Jesus Christ was 
 beyond the power of the proselyter, who succeeded 
 only in making him the more certain that his own 
 religion was the better of the two.^ 
 
 I can conceive no reason for believing that either 
 Inadequacy ^^ J^ws, the Chiucse, or the Hindus are des- 
 ofdistinctive tiued to become members of what is called the 
 religions. " Body of Christ." The Spirit has something 
 better in store for mankind than to hang fastened on 
 one historical name or idealization. The various reli- 
 gions, like the various races, are brought together at 
 
 ' Bowring's yimrttal of Embassy U Siam, I. 378. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 559 
 
 last, to rebuke conceit of special claims, and secure 
 the largest appreciation of God in Man. To stand 
 where this appreciation is possible is the first of duties. 
 "The leaves of God's book," says a Moslem proverb, 
 " are the religious persuasi6ns." It is time to read that 
 book with open heart and mind. And there is no 
 enforcement of the lesson more convincing than that 
 which is coming in the almost total failure of mission- 
 ary effort in the great empires of the East. 
 
 Poor Abbe Dubois, after thirty years' devoted mis- 
 sionary labor in India, not only pronounced his , . 
 belief that the Hindus could not be converted, missions in 
 and that Christianity had done its work in the 
 direction of heathenism, — but confessed, " with shame 
 and confusion," that he "did not remember any Hindu 
 who had embraced Christianity from conviction and 
 from disinterested motives," and that those converts 
 who continued in the church were " the very worst in 
 his flock." That the Protestant missions have even 
 less to boast of than the Catholic, in the matter of past 
 success or present promise, will be sufficiently clear 
 to any one who glances over the pages of Tennent, 
 Anderson, or Kaye. 
 
 I do not propose to enter into this special topic fur- 
 ther than to notice what is generally admitted, — that 
 the converts to Christianity in India come almost exclu- 
 sively from among that miserable portion of the popu- 
 lation which is naturally open to the influences of 
 any missionary enterprise, of whatsoever faith. Mr. 
 Wheeler says ^ that the current of national religious 
 ideas, " flowing in channels unknown and unappreciated 
 by the Western world, has rendered Christianity less 
 acce^able to the civilized Hindus of the plains than to 
 
 1 Hist, of India, II. 661. 
 
£60 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the barbarous aborigines who inhabit the hills." " Of 
 the one hundred and twelve thousand converts in the 
 whole of India," wrote Monier Williams in 1861, 
 " ninety-one thousand have been obtained in the south, 
 and of these not more thah three thousand belong to 
 the race of Hindus proper. The greatest missionary 
 success has been among the Shanars, a low caste 
 not Hindus by race or religion, whose business is 
 to extract the juice used for toddy from the palmyra 
 palm." 1 " In all Bengalese converts not a Mohamme- 
 dan is on record." ^ 
 
 On the intelligent and reflecting class Christianity 
 makes little or no impression. " Though the Hindus 
 respect the precepts of Christianity," says Miss Car- 
 penter very candidly .^ " and hold the morality of the 
 Bible in high esteem, to the reception of Christianity 
 they feel insuperable difficulties. Their faith in their 
 own sacred writings having been shaken., they do not 
 willingly accept any other revelation," — naturally 
 enough, we should say. " It is impossible for them 
 to accept miracles under any circumstances," — a still 
 more obvious necessity, having had quite enough to 
 do with them already. " And they regard a Christian 
 convert as a renegade," — very much as a Christian 
 sect regards those who abandon it for another, it 
 may be. But in these and other ways this estimable 
 philanthropist, whose effiarts for the practical education 
 of the Hindus, and especially for the emancipation of 
 women from their present deplorable condition, are 
 deserving of all praise, endeavors to explain the unde- 
 niable failure of missionary efforts among the better 
 classes in India. 
 
 * Lecture on the Study of Sanskrit^ p. 39. 
 
 * Tennent's ChristianUy in Ceylon^ p. 64. 
 
 * Six Months in India^ II. 71, 73. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 56 1 
 
 Mr. Kaye points to another serious obstacle to 
 these efforts, which simply proves what intelligent 
 Hindus have had good chances to learn, the vanity 
 of all pretensions on the part of special religions to 
 monopolize " saving " power. " During the first cen- 
 tury of our connection with India, not only was noth- 
 ing done for Christianity, but much against it. We 
 found the name of Christian little better than synonyme 
 for devil. Compared with the lives of our own peo- 
 ple, those of the natives really appeared to glow with 
 excellent morality." ^ If it be true that, as an intel- 
 ligent American traveller observes, "India is rising 
 from degradation through intercourse with Christian 
 nations," while yet " the dealings of England with 
 India have been any thing but Christian," — it is cer- 
 tainly natural that the Hindus should discover that the 
 good which Western civilization is bringing them does 
 not depend on the power of its special religious 
 doctrines over the conduct of their confessors. What 
 divine authority to rule men can they ascribe to a re- 
 ligion which forbids caste, — while the Englishman, 
 pluming himself on its monopoly of God, contemns 
 their wisest men for their heathen birth and culture, 
 or expects every Hindu to " make him a salaam " as 
 he passes by? 
 
 Absurd and irrational dogmas, assumptions of 
 divine right to prescribe forms of belief and personal 
 allegiance, are as readily detected by intelligent Hin- 
 dus as by other men ; and, when enforced by the 
 threat of eternal punishment by a foreign God for non- 
 belief in a Christ who is made their representative,, 
 must be in the highest degree repulsive and even con- 
 temptible to all thoughtful people in India, whether 
 
 * Christianity in India, pp. 41, 43. 
 36 
 
562 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 believers in the national religion or not. I pass over 
 this cause of missionary failure, as too obvious to be 
 dwelt on. 
 
 The discord of Christian sects probably stands in 
 Ihe way of missionary success as much as the charac- 
 ter of Christian dogma. When the Protestant preach- 
 ers represent the Catholic as little better than the 
 heathen, the Hindus honestly ask, "Why should we 
 become Christians, when you tell us that three-quar- 
 ters the Christian world have adopted a creed no 
 better than our own? "^ The Jesuits forged a Veda, 
 which they called Ezourvedam. The Dutch cut off 
 the nose of the statue of St. Thomas the apostle, 
 presumed founder of Christianity in India, knocked it 
 full of nails, and shot it out of a mortar. Denounc- 
 ing each other's creeds. Christians have been ready to 
 make money out of the heathenism they agree to 
 pronounce fatal to the soul. " Little brass images 
 of Krishna before which Hindu women bow come 
 from Birmingham."^ The East India Coinpany took 
 tribute from the festivals of Jagannath. Add to the 
 pronounced enmity between Catholics and Protestants 
 the mutual animosities of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, 
 Baptists, Methodists, and the bitter strife waged by 
 the sects on the soil of India and Ceylon, and the 
 expectations of the Christian Church will appear pre- 
 posterous indeed.^ 
 
 Mr. Wheeler says that the influence of the epics 
 Dee roots ^^^^^ ^n the masses is infinitely greater than 
 of native that of the Bible on modern Europe. They 
 *"*■ are represented at village festivals; their sto- 
 
 1 Bevon, Thirty Years in India, II. ago ; Tennetlt's CeyloHf I. 545. 
 ' Carleton's New Way round the World, p. 165. 
 8 See Tennent's Christianity in Ceylon, 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 563 
 
 ries are chanted aloud at almost every social gath- 
 ering, and indeed form the topic of conversation 
 amongst Hindus generall}^. "They are all that the 
 library, the newspaper, and the Bible are to the Euro- 
 pean ; whilst the books themselves are regarded with 
 a superstitious reverence which far exceeds that which 
 has been accorded to any other revelation, real or sup- 
 posed. [?] It is the common belief that to peruse or 
 merely to listen to the perusal of the Mahabharata or 
 the Ram&yana will ensure prosperity in this world 
 and eternal happiness hereafter. At the same time 
 they are cherished by the Hindus as national prop- 
 erty, and as containing the records of the deeds of 
 their forefathers in the days when the gods held fre- 
 quent communion with the children of men." ^ 
 
 In truth, though there has been scarcely an age in 
 Hindu history which has not been marked by reli- 
 gious ferment and change, no revolution of this kind 
 has ever made a deep or lasting impression on the 
 Hindu mind which has not been of native origin. So 
 vigorous is the natural growth that it refuses to be 
 grafted. According to the statements in Anderson's 
 recent work on Foreign Missions, the thirty societies 
 interested in the conversion of India, with their five 
 hundred and eighty missionaries and four hundred 
 stations, have, after this long period of British sway 
 over these vast multitudes, resulted in about fifty 
 thousand communicants, and two hundred and sixty 
 thousand "nominal Christians," with one hundred thou- 
 sand children in the mission schools.^ And this in a 
 population of one hundred and fifty millions ! Perhaps 
 even these figures are too large. Mr. Ward (India 
 and Hindus) estimated in 185 1 "that the whole num- 
 
 1 Hist, of India, I. 4. * Also Sir J. Bowling's Journal, I. 35^, 378. 
 
564 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ber of converts, exclusive of the Roman Catholics, 
 cannot exceed ten thousand." We can hardly wonder 
 that the Calcutta " Christian Observer," describing a 
 conference of missionaries, held in that city in 1855, 
 should admit that "an air of sombreness overspread the 
 whole, and that the lesson it emphatically conveyed 
 was that of showing how little we could do." ^ 
 
 After this review of Hindu philosophy and faith, we 
 ,. cannot wonder that at the present time, as ages 
 
 Present rell- . . 
 
 gious reform ago in the great Buddhist reformation, the re- 
 in ndia. ligious genius of this race asserts its capacity 
 for progress. The influence of Western missions in 
 setting aside Hindu for Christian forms of religious 
 association and doctrine has been infinitesimal ; but 
 the all-sufficient germs of pure theism contained in the 
 national mind, and its normal activity, from earliest 
 times, are now bearing fresh fruit, in efforts to over- 
 throw the degenerate polytheism of the modern Hindus 
 and the miserable social institutions that accompany it. 
 It is on these purely Hindu associations that many 
 sects have recently arisen in India, which denounce 
 the popular divinities ; and the social inequality and 
 barbarism now prevalent ; " substituting a moral for a 
 ceremonial code, and addressing their prayers to the 
 only God."*' 
 
 It was the ancient faith of the Vedas and the Upan- 
 Rammohun ishads that Rammohun Roy sought to restore, 
 Roy. when in the early part of the present century 
 he attempted to purify the religious life of his people. 
 He translated the substance of this grand theism of 
 his fathers from its original Sanskrit into the languages 
 of the masses; unfolding a philosophy and piety which 
 
 ^ Missionary Ittteiiig.^ VIII. 288. 
 
 " Wilson, Essays on the Religion of the Ifindus^ II. 76. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 565 
 
 amply justified him in declaring that "the superstitious 
 practices which deform the Hindu religion have nothing 
 to do with the pure spirit of its dictates." ^ " Though 
 Vedas, Puranas, and Tantras, frequently assert the 
 existence of a plurality of gods and goddesses, and 
 prescribe modes of their worship for men of insufficient 
 understanding, yet they also have declared in a hun- 
 dred other places that these passages are to be taken 
 in a figurative sense." ^ In his subsequent controversy 
 with Dr. Marshman, who depreciated his faith, upon 
 the ground that he did not accept Christianity in its 
 trinitarian form, he manfully maintains not only the 
 substantial truth and purity of his Hindu theism, but 
 even for the low popular conceptions of it equal rea- 
 sonableness with those affirmed in the Christian trinity. 
 If Christians affirm God to be One, though in three 
 persons, " they ought in conscience to refrain from 
 accusing Hindus of Polytheism ; for every Hindu, we 
 daily observe, confesses the unity of the Godhead," 
 even while making it consist of " millions of substances 
 assuming offices " according to the various forms of 
 "Divine Providence."^ It should be noted that Ram- 
 mohun Roy, while devoutly admiring the "Precepts of 
 Jesus," which he translated into his native tongue, 
 did not admit them to be in any wise inconsistent with 
 the spiritual faith which he drew from native foun- 
 tains ; and that he never " broke with Hinduism nor 
 adopted Christianity by any outward act or rite, even 
 to the directions given for his burial ; " * and this while 
 in sympathy with the English Unitarians in their devo- 
 tion to the person and teachings of Jesus. And, even 
 
 » Pref. to The Vedant, or Resolution of the Veds. ' Ibid., p. 86. 
 
 ^ Appeals in DefeTtce 0/ *' Precepts qfjesus^* p. 172. 
 
 * Frances Power Cobbe, Hours 0/ Work and Fiay, p. 69. 
 
566 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 while carefully avoiding any thing like denial of the 
 New Testament miracles, he was equally careful to in- 
 sist on the impossibility of using them as evidences 
 of Christianity, to the mind of a people who had rec- 
 ords of much more wonderful miracles, handed down, 
 upon what they regarded as unquestionable authority, 
 from their own traditional saints.^ 
 
 There can be no question that the personal isolation 
 subsequer.t of RammohuH Roy in his own country, and 
 reformers, ^^g hostility aroused by his zeal for religious 
 and social reform, drove him into closer relations with 
 Christianity as a specific faith than his spiritual needs 
 required. The numerous religious reformers, who 
 have sprung up in the same line of thought since 
 his time in India, have not followed his lead in this 
 respect ; having found ample grounds for their move- 
 ment in the national mind and its traditional instincts, 
 while advancing beyond its bibliolatry and tradition- 
 alism into the domains of free, universal religion. 
 Thus the Raja Radhakanta Deva Bahadur — whose 
 moral attainment was as remarkable as his intellectual, 
 the earliest native helper of the education 'of woman, 
 and the first to provide school books for the people, 
 of whom it was said that he not only never made an 
 enemy, but earned the love and admiration of all — 
 remained a Hindu in his religious faith. ^ 
 
 Most writers and observers have recognized a 
 The theistic strong disposition in the modern Hindus to in- 
 movement. dependent religious criticism, to rationalistic 
 investigation and a free acceptance of the principles 
 of natural religion. They have described it in various 
 
 - Appeals, &c , p. 226. Rev. J. Scott Porter, in his funeral discourse, affirms that Ram- 
 mohun Roy, before his death, expressed his entire faith in the New Testament miracles. 
 Zfasi Days of Ram' Roy in Etigland, p. 226. 
 
 ^ See Proceedings of R. At S. 0/ Bengal ior May, 1867. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 567 
 
 ways, each from his own point of view. Thus Dr. 
 Allen tells us, in his valuable work on India, that 
 there are many deists among the educated Hindus, 
 many who have no faith in the Sastras ; that their 
 libraries are furnished with English deistical works ; 
 that they discuss Christianity and treat Christian doc- 
 trines with levity ; that they control the native press, 
 and propose an eclectic system of faith from all re- 
 ligions, adapted to the present state of knowledge.^ 
 According to Dr. Anderson's work on Eastern Mis- 
 sions, " the Hindus have discovered what it is to be 
 intellectually free ; and, confounding distinctions of 
 right and wrong, antagonize the truth of God [_z.e., 
 the dogmatic theology of the missionaries]. There 
 is cause for anxiety lest educated Hindus, ceasing to 
 be idolaters, become stereotyped in skepticism."^ Edi- 
 torial tourists notice that " the educated Hindu usually 
 throws over idols, and becomes free-thinker; that he 
 does not adopt Christianity, which would lead to 
 ostracism, but rationalism rather; since by rejecting 
 myths and superstitions he does not lose social posi- 
 tion." ^ These subtle brains slip easily out of all nets 
 of conversion. The earliest result of the Anglo- 
 Indian college of Calcutta, an institution for the in- 
 struction of the Hindus in English branches of study, 
 was the importation and rapid sale of a thousand 
 copies of Paine's " Age of Reason," whose market 
 value quintupled on the hands of the sellers.* Miss 
 Carpenter reports in general terms that "educated 
 Hindus acknowledge One God and Heavenly Father," 
 and that they always responded to her " appeal 
 to Him." "The Prathana Samaj" [pure theism], 
 
 ' Allen's India, pp. 581-384. ^ Anderson, pp. 237, 238. 
 
 * Ci.A&ljan's Rouni the World, p. 209. * Christian Missionary Intelligencer,V&.. 98. 
 
568 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 says a Bombay journal, " is destined to be the re- 
 ligion of the whole world." ^ 
 
 We must here take into view the inevitable result of 
 Fusion of that intermixture of races and beliefs of which 
 religions, modem India has been the theatre. Islam has 
 doubtless done much to concentrate religious feeling, 
 and give it definiteness of moral and democratic 
 purpose. The full religious toleration established by 
 the Mogul emperor, Akbar, opened India in the six- • 
 teenth century to the largest freedom of speculation and 
 faith. Akbar was a believer by conviction in the 
 rights of mind and the sympathies of religions ; and 
 no nobler words than his, to this effect, have been 
 recorded by history. > Under his government that 
 legacy of thirty centuries, the old Aryan schism, 
 ceased ; and Persians and Indians were reunited in 
 a common worship. He was the great peacemaker, 
 the "guardian of mankind." On account of the free 
 discussion of beliefs by the learned men of all relig- 
 ions whom he brought together to speak before the 
 people, the custom of publicly reading comments on 
 the Koran was laid aside, and the sciences became 
 current in its place.^ It was said of him that " he 
 mingled the best and purest part of every religion for 
 his own faith." His preference was for the Zoroastrian 
 system ; but we see in him quite as strong evidence 
 of the capabilities of Oriental Islam for religious 
 hospitality and fusion. Of this tendency the Dabis- 
 tan, composed in the next century after Akbar, is a 
 wonderful monument ; and its charming review of all 
 the great religions of the time is conceived in the 
 broadest and most genial spirit. Its author, Mohsan 
 
 * Six Months in India^ II. 70, 71. s Dabist&rit ch. x. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 569 
 
 Fane, declares truly that he writes to give the " out- 
 ward and inward meaning of all beliefs, free of all 
 party spirit, without envy, hate, or scorn." 
 
 " The varieties of tlie rules of prophets proceed only from the 
 diversity of names. The time of a prophet is a universal one, 
 having neither before nor after, neither morn nor eve." ' 
 
 The fusion of Semitic monotheism with Aryan 
 dualism and pantheism in the East has developed a 
 degree of religious universality yet to be appreciated. 
 The Puranas, especially the Vishnu and the Bhaga- 
 vata, have in many respects spiritualized the popular 
 creeds and mythologies of India, and absorbed them 
 into va^t mystical unities with boundless scope of 
 affinity, in accordance with the genius of the race. 
 This wealth of material for a native breadth of relig- 
 ious sympathy is strikingly illustrated by the later 
 " Vaishnava " sects, which are widely extended in 
 Central and Northern India, and of which a fuller 
 account will be given in another section of this work. 
 Those especially of Ramanand, Kabir, Dadu, have 
 been described by Professor Wilson in his very interest- 
 ing essay on the Religious Sects of the Hindus. As 
 might be expected from their origin in the traditions 
 of the old worship of Vishnu, these schools for the 
 most part teach universal toleration, and have sought 
 to unite the different race-elements in Hindustan in 
 religious sympathy. This was eminently the aim of 
 Nanak also, the founder of the Sikh religion, in the 
 fifteenth century, whose peaceful and humane philos- 
 ophy combined an almost Vedantic mysticism with 
 practical benevolence and brotherhood. It was only 
 under the influence of later gurus, or teachers, and of 
 
 ^ Daiisi&ny ch. xii. 
 
570 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Mohammedan persecution, that the Sikhs were trans- 
 formed into a nation of soldiers, with aspirations for 
 material conquests. Nanak said : — 
 
 " He alone is a true Hindu whose heart is just, and he only a 
 good Mohammedan whose life is pure." — " Be true, and thou shalt 
 be free. Truth belongs to thee, and thy success to the Creator." ' 
 
 The Sikh Bible says : — 
 
 " God will not ask man of what race he is. He will ask what 
 he has done." 
 
 " Heed not the command of the impure man, though among the 
 nobles ; but of one who is pure among the most despised \yill 
 Ninak become the footstool." 
 
 " Put on the armor that harms no one. Let thy coat of mail be 
 reason, and convert thy enemies to friends. All founders of sects 
 are mortal. God alone endures for ever. Men may read Vedas 
 and Korans,'but only in Him is salvation." 
 
 It was said that, " when men listened to Nanak, they 
 forgot that mankind had any religion but one." So 
 when Kabir died, the Dabistan tells us, both Hindus 
 and Mohammedans assembled, the ones to bury, the 
 others to burn his body, each supposing him to have 
 been of their own faith. At last a fakir stepped into 
 the midst and said, " Kabir was a holy man, inde- 
 pendent of both religions ; but, having during his life 
 satisfied you, he must also, after death, meet your 
 approval," — whence the proverb : — 
 
 " Live so as to be claimed after death to be burned by the Hindus, 
 and to be buried by the Moslem." 
 
 The followers of Baba-lal, who unite elements of 
 the Vedanta with the mystical devotion of the Sufis, 
 adoring One God without confinement to forms of 
 worship, say, " God is the creed of those who love 
 
 ^ Duiist&«, ch. ii. 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 571 
 
 Him ; and to do good is best, for the followers of 
 every faith." ^ 
 
 The fine speculative quality of the Hindu brain is 
 in natural affinity with the freedom of inquiry Etjjmo 
 which animates the present age. This native I'l^'i't'es. 
 genius, quickened by opportunities of dealing with the 
 largest philosophy and boldest criticism of modern time, 
 and finding abundant analogies for these in the litera- 
 ture already familiar to it, is rapidly emancipating Hin- 
 duism from the degradation and lethargy of the past. 
 Frances Power Cobbe, a most competent authority on 
 the subject, has called attention to the facts, that " the 
 common tendency of conquered nations to adopt the 
 religion of the victorious race exists very slightly, if 
 at all, among the educated Hindus ; " and that, in the 
 words of the " Contemporary Review," there is even 
 " a growing silent alienation of the younger generation 
 of Englishmen in India from Christian worship and 
 communion ; " and this, too, among those "whose lives 
 are pure, who exhibit least of the worldly self-seeking 
 spirit, who are among the most thoughtful and culti- 
 vated." ^ Whatever feelings these facts may excite in 
 the missionary, or distinctively Christian mind, nothing 
 could afford more impressive proof of the power of 
 native Hindu genius, speculative and religious, to re- 
 generate the national character by its own natural 
 methods, without adopting an alien form of religious 
 faith. It is finding its own way out of special exclu- 
 sive confessions into the open day of Universal Relig- 
 ion. It has been said that the Gayatri, the morning 
 and evening prayer of all Brahmans, " might with 
 slight alteration be converted into a Christian prayer." 
 It needs no alteration whatever to become a part of 
 
 ^ Wilson, I. 352. * Hours of Work and Play, p. 64. 
 
572 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 the free Bible of Humanity. " Let us meditate on the 
 excellent Light in the divine Sun, and may his beams 
 illumine our minds." 
 
 There is unmistakable evidence of all this in the 
 The Brah- growth of the Brakma-Samaj, or " Church of 
 ma-samaj. ^jje One God ; " certainly a movement, which 
 for noble and generous purpose, for profound earnest- 
 ness of religious faith, and for significance in the 
 present epoch of intellectual and spiritual transition, is 
 unsurpassed, and which deserves the name of inspira- 
 tion as truly as any thing in history. By this statement 
 1 do not mean to exaggerate any of its actual merits, 
 any more than I would affirm the absence of defects 
 which a distance of half the circumference of the earth 
 may hide from us. Its essential meaning and purpose 
 demand no less a tribute than I have accorded it. 
 Here is a perfected theistic faith, growing up on purely 
 Hindu grounds, and rapidly expanding throughout 
 India; inheriting the grandest affirmations of the 
 Vedic Scriptures, yet nowise bound thereby ; blend- 
 ing the old mystic fervor with the purest practical 
 morality ; aiming at the entire religious and social 
 regeneration of India, at the abolition of caste and 
 polytheism, at the elevation of woman, through the 
 reform of marriage customs and domestic servitudes, 
 and the largest opportunity of culture and occupation. 
 Its spirit is thoroughly democratic, and it demands of 
 the Brahman that he throw away at once the sacred 
 thread that designates the twice-born man of the elect 
 caste, and consecrate himself to the service " not of 
 the wise and gifted, whose lives have already been a 
 boon, but to the poor, the stupid, and the sinful." 
 Originating in the pious scholarship and benevolence 
 of Rammohun Roy, in his effiirt to return to the sub- 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 573 
 
 stance of the old Vedic faith, and to engraft thereon 
 the universal ethics of love and justice, it has placed 
 itself on a broader basis than even he expected ; re- 
 cognizing that the aim should be not to become 
 merged in Christianity as a specific faith, nor in the 
 centralization of religious union in a discipleship of 
 Jesus ; but, in the words of its present enlightened 
 and enthusiastic leader, in his letter to the " Free 
 Religious Association" of American liberals, to 
 " propagate the universal and absolute religion, whose 
 cardinal doctrines are the fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of man, and which accepts the truths of 
 all scriptures and honors the prophets of all nations ; " 
 and by " promoting the intellectual, moral, and social 
 reformation of individuals and nations, to make theism 
 the religion of life."^ 
 
 The practical earnestness and profound conviction 
 of this remarkable man has done much to Keshub 
 
 - . , , * Chunder 
 
 bring to clear and strong purpose the vague gen. 
 yearnings of the intelligent classes in India, and 
 direct the ferment of reform into productive channels. 
 Unwearied in his missionary and literary efforts, 
 founding churches all over India, and inspiring his 
 co-laborers by the pulpit and the pen for ten years 
 past, he has found the fields ripe for his harvests, and 
 with prophetic faith recognizes the tendency of the 
 age in India to be, as elsewhere in the civilized 
 world, towards free and natural theism. Upwards of 
 sixty of these churches already exist in the various 
 provinces of India ; earnest missionaries, supported 
 by voluntary contributions, are preaching these pure 
 ethics and spiritual intuitions to the masses ; several 
 periodicals are maintained and widely circulated ; and, 
 
 1 See Proceedings of Free Relig. Assoc, for 1868 (Boston, Adams & Co.). 
 
574 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 if we may accept the testimony of one who has earned 
 the highest credence on subjects of this nature, " all the 
 educated youth of India (save a certain number wholly 
 skeptical in their tendencies) are in sentiment favor- 
 able to Brahmoism, and gradually fall into its ranks 
 as the indulgence or death of their fathers may permit 
 them to abandon Hindu rites." ^ The "skepticism" 
 here referred to is, in most cases, the free rationalism 
 of positive science, or that' large personal liberty that 
 finds its sphere outside all church organizations. 
 
 Thus approaches the final justification for whatsoever 
 Promise of ^as been of best promise in Eastern wisdom 
 India. aj^(j faith ; a new dawn after centuries of com- 
 parative death and night. It is nothing less than such 
 a grand form of religion as this, very far in advance 
 of the prevailing creeds of Christendom, that now 
 reaches its spiritual hands across the seas of race and 
 mind — just as the electric wire is encircling the mate- 
 rial globe, just as all the relations of trade and science 
 and politics are becoming oecumenical — to our own 
 natural religion in the West, now escaping the Chris- 
 tian and the Judaic dogma, as itself has the Brahman- 
 ical, upon the ground of those inherent, inalienable, 
 and immutable relations that unite Man with God. It 
 is through such elements as these that the future faith 
 of the world is germinating in the mysterious unities 
 of progress ; the new spiritual climate of science and 
 freedom ; the communion of races and beliefs. 
 
 I gladly add the ardent words in which Chunder 
 Sen announces this common prophecy of the East and 
 the West : — 
 
 ' F. P. Cobbe, Hours of Work and Play, p. 78. Similar testimony was given by the 
 students of the Presbyterian Colleges in Calcutta, in reply to questions put them in turn 
 by the correspondent of tlie London TimeS' 
 
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 575 
 
 " The future religion of the world which I have described will be 
 the common religion of all nations, but in each nation it will have an 
 indigenous growth and assume a distinctive and peculiar character. 
 No country will borrow or mechanically imitate the religion of 
 another country ; but from the depths of the life of each nation its 
 future church wiU grow up. In common with all other nations and 
 communities, we shall embrace the theistic worship, creed, and 
 gospel of the future church. But we shall do this on a strictly 
 national and Indian style. One religion shall be acknowledged by 
 all men ; one God shall be worshipped throughout the length and 
 breadth of the world ; the same spirit of faith and love shall per- 
 vade all hearts ; all nations shall dwell together in the Father's 
 house ; yet each shall have its own peculiar and free mode of action. 
 There shall, in short, be unity of spirit, but diversity of forms ; one 
 body, but different limbs ; one vast community with members la- 
 boring in different ways, and according to their respective resources 
 and peculiar tastes, to advance their common cause, ' the Fathei 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of Man.' " 
 
III. 
 
 BUDDHISM. 
 
 ot<!«o 
 
 I. 
 
 SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 
 
 37 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 
 
 TN defining the Hindu mind as the Brain of the East, 
 ■^ I have not intended to deny that it possesses Balance of 
 muscular and nervous elements also. These °^""'=- 
 are relatively in defect, while the cerebral is in excess. 
 But nature always seeks true balance. This brain is 
 of Aryan substance ; and we have already found its 
 quality suggestive of most forms of Indo-European 
 development, many-sided as that is. We have seen 
 that the practical energy which belongs to this family 
 of nations under cooler skies is hinted by many vigor- 
 ous reactions both in earlier and later times upon the 
 mystical quietism of Indian life. Of this nature were 
 the belief in active incarnation from age to age, as 
 often as virtue needed reinstatement by discipline, 
 strength, or love ; the interest felt by Brahman hermits 
 in living creatures ; the sympathetic realism of poets 
 in describing the more subtle phenomena of nature. 
 Such aptitudes are the more striking, in view of 
 their association with philosophies which turn the visi- 
 ble world into dream. We may add to these the na- 
 tional taste for dramatic and gnomic literature, the 
 exuberance of its flow into proverbs, fables, and 
 plays, as well as the acknowledged skill of the modern 
 
580 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Hindus in many difficult and delicate handicrafts, and 
 the business tact and enterprise conceded to the mer- 
 chants of Calcutta and Bombay. 
 
 The earliest Aryans were, as we have seen, an 
 independent, energetic race. The later hero 
 
 Martial and t- £> 
 
 democratic of the cpic wars rescmblcs those of the Scan- 
 quaiiUes. (jinavian sagas and the Homeric poems, in 
 his bold bearing towards the gods. He demands pro- 
 tection as a right : he does not hesitate to defy fate, 
 and to unsheathe his weapons against the lightnings of 
 angry deities. Still later the belief prevailed that not 
 only Brahman devotees, but Kshattriya chiefs, could 
 awaken the jealousy of these superhuman masters, 
 and even force them from their seats. The Mahab- 
 harata declares that neither penitence nor wisdom can 
 bestow such bliss as they attain who die on the field 
 of battle. " Remember," says the mother of the Panda- 
 vas to her sons, "that you are Kshattriyas, — not born 
 to till the ground, nor trade, nor beg for bread, but to 
 use the sword, to slay or be slain ; and that it is a 
 thousand times better to be slain with honor than to 
 live in disgrace. Prove to the world that Kunti is the 
 mother of a noble race." The modern Sikh or Raj- 
 put, who worships his sword and his shield, is a true 
 representative of the epic Pandu and Kuru chiefs. 
 The heroic deeds of Krishna and Rama were sung by 
 rhapsodists at the courts of the petty Indian kings long 
 before some Hindu Pisistratus gathered and arranged 
 their effusions, to be stamped with the symbolical 
 names of V^lmiki and Vyasa.^ In fact the whole 
 history of the martial element in India, ancient and 
 modern, strikingly resembles the growth of the same 
 element in Greece and Northern Europe. 
 
 • Lassen, /W. Ali., I. pp. 482, 839. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 581 
 
 We have seen, further, that the ancient system of 
 independent village communities, which has held its 
 ground in India down to the present time, was a sys- 
 tem replete with vigorous germs of self-government. 
 We have observed that the constitution and usages of 
 the caste system bear resemblance in certain respects 
 to those of the ancient Germanic tribes, especially in 
 the independence of each caste in matters which con- 
 cern its own organization and internal affairs ; ^ and we 
 have traced the democratic forces which have disin- 
 tegrated the system itself. 
 
 It is a long way from Indra, the lightning-God 
 of the old Veda, to Brahma, the contemplative Spirit 
 adored in the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita. But, 
 at every step in the transition, the practical and ener- 
 getic side of the Aryan character, of which Indra was 
 the typical deity, maintained its ground, in some form 
 of reaction on the tendency to inertness and dream. 
 
 We pass to the most important of all these reactions 
 in belief and institution, to that most impressive move- 
 ment in all Asiatic history, where the practical philan- 
 thropy of the West may find itself anticipated within 
 the most abstract philosophy of the East, — the Budd- 
 hist Reformation. 
 
 Every positive religion begins in a natural aspi- 
 ration, which is also a true inspiration. It is ^he process 
 embodied in the Prophet, who is wont to be a of religions. 
 poet, and lover of men. Gradually it gathers about 
 it the machinery of organization. The common un- 
 derstanding among its believers becomes a principle 
 of mutual supervision to protect its interests and assure 
 its triumph. The common faith ceases to be one with 
 all life and law, the free growth of the person, and is 
 
 * See Buyers's Recoil, qf Northern Iftdui^ p. 4S7. 
 
582 BUDDHISM. 
 
 set off as a special commandment from without and 
 from above, to comply with certain conditions and ac- 
 complish certain objects. It is embodied in a Church 
 with holy names, books, fixed creeds, formulas, sym- 
 bols, all of which have become fetiches at last ; also 
 in the functionary of the same, the Priest. But fresh 
 aspirations are aroused by the process itself, since the 
 soul cannot be driven into permanent dotage ; and 
 these strike oif from it, finding their way upward, 
 pushing aside its forms, and even its name. A new 
 meaning will first be sought in the old formulas, 
 nearer, it is fondly dreamed, to their original meaning. 
 But it is soon found that the new wine is not for the 
 old vessels ; that the age is not content to give its new 
 children the quaint names their grandfathers were 
 called by, out of the old Bibles ; and so the dead 
 labels are thrown aside, as having served their pur- 
 poses in the world. So there come to be many relig- 
 ions in human history, though all gp back to a 
 common root and an inmost identity. 
 
 Somehow the veil of priesthood is rent ; the divine 
 right of, special names, creeds, and persons, is ex- 
 ploded ; and the people make fresh way for themselves, 
 with new affirmation of what is human and universal. 
 Theology is converted into gospel. This third stage 
 is embodied in the S;piritual Reformer, whose inspi- 
 ration is not less real because it is not exclusively his, 
 but belorrgs also to his age. He is reformer of the 
 old paths, prophet of the new. This is the historic 
 law. 
 
 Such was the history of Judaism, and the passage 
 thence into Christianity : of Catholicism, and the escape 
 into Protestantism ; of each Protestant Church and the 
 churches that came out of it. Such is now the history 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 583 
 
 of Christianity itself and the universal religion that 
 supplants its distinctive claims ; as yet taking no name, 
 let us hope ; and, as identical with all true human life, 
 surely needing none. We are now to trace the anal- 
 ogous process in Brahmanism. 
 
 That contemplative religion began in a profound 
 sense of the mystery of existence. It was Brahman- 
 absorbed in the incessant recurrence of growth aspiration. 
 and decay, the endless transitions of life and death, 
 the solemn flow of all things into the unseen, till it 
 was possessed by a sense of unreality and dream. 
 But this weight forced up the opposite pole of thought ; 
 the very restlessness guaranteed rest; the doom of 
 change pressed home the sense of the eternal. So 
 sound is nature in man : he sees how all things pass 
 away ; he will live for what cannot pass away. This 
 the aspiration of Brahmanism, — an inspiration of 
 faith in the everlasting. 
 
 We found this even in early Vedic hymns which 
 taught the mystic unity of the gods ; in later thought- 
 ful musings 4)n the origin of the universe, and its 
 return into the bosom of the life whence it came ; in 
 the devout poet's philosophy that saw and felt all 
 things and all beings as for ever in God. It sent the 
 saints of Brahma to their aspiring penance and ascetic 
 triumphs under those shadowy banyans, whose in- 
 numerable descending boughs and ascending roots, 
 interlaced in one living whole, were a my^ic symbol 
 of spiritual being as masked by the manifold ties of 
 life and bonds of action ; and it held them there in 
 patient effort to lose definite desires and thoughts in 
 perfect union with the one infinite and eternal life 
 which these but veiled. Remote as its method was 
 from what now becomes us, it was an inspiration of 
 
584 BUDDHISM. 
 
 thought and sacrifice and prayer ; and so it has left to 
 the ages those sublime responses that make amends 
 for all extravagance and superstition in its devotees. 
 The seers to whom we owe the Upanishads were 
 none the less true believers in their vision, for the 
 Brahmanical absolutism that was growing up around 
 them. 
 
 We have seen that large freedom of discussion and 
 organiza- Speculation prevailed in the Hindu schools from 
 tion. ygj.y early times. And it is obvious from the 
 
 nature of thought that this mystical worship of the One 
 and Everlasting could hardly have embodied itself in 
 a sharply organized Church. Yet caste involved the 
 distinction of priestly and lay classes. The spiritual 
 relations of men became vicarious. The dogma grew 
 definite. The Hymns, preserved in official memory 
 as verbally inspired, were laden with comment and 
 ritual that swelled into new Veda as sacred as the 
 first. The ascetic rule became more systematic and 
 relentless : the original contempt of the saint for the 
 changing world grew into contempt of aU social rela- 
 tions. Caste, not organized by the priesthood, was 
 elaborated by that class, in its own interest; and the 
 uninitiated classes were rigidly excluded from reading 
 or teaching the Veda. The Brahmanical caste was 
 debarred by its limits as a hereditary body from any 
 effort to enlarge its own membership. * The fewer its 
 numbers, liie diviner would it seem ; and the higher 
 would be the prestige of unity. Like the priesthoods 
 of all religions, it cherished its spiritual light as too 
 precious to be trusted to the untaught mind ; holding 
 it in custody of a mediatorial authority, by whose 
 service its virtue was to be made effective for the 
 common salvation. The multitude was its footstool 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 585 
 
 on earth, and its dominion reached on through the life 
 to come. Brahmanism was not a system to recognize 
 the necessity of proselyting. It was the effort of the 
 individual to lift himself out of illusion into real life, and 
 its only associative principle was that of caste. Far 
 from having any idea of proselytism, it was aristocratic 
 and unsocial ; the climate suppressing practical energy 
 in the thinker ; and the contemplative spirit tending 
 to personal isolation. It had its fraternities and 
 schools, and numberless hermitages sprinkled the 
 forests of India ; but these schools were not founded to 
 share the light of Brahmanical wisdom with other 
 than the higher or " twice-born " classes, nor were 
 hermitages planted in the spiritual interest of the 
 aborigines, except in so far as, being admitted into 
 the body politic as Sudras, these lower races were to 
 be saved by the meritorious disciplines of its priestly 
 devotees. Its steady tide of monasticism, setting 
 southwards into the wilderness, measured the force 
 with which it repelled the social sympathies. Chris- 
 tianity, it is w^l known, had a similar monastic phase 
 in its history. There were elements of Brahmanism, 
 however, which helped to counteract or weaken this 
 tendency to isolation : some of these have already 
 been mentioned in our section on the Laws. Budd- 
 hism, notwithstanding its democratic spirit, used the 
 name of Brahman with respect, as representative of 
 purity and the true path of life ; ^ and defended it 
 from discredit at the hands of those who claimed 
 exclusive title to it. Many circumstances indicate 
 that the system had hardly reached the stage of strict 
 and effective organization, when it began to be checked 
 by the definite protest of Buddhism ; to which it 
 
 1 Dhammapada. See also Sykes, m Journal Roy. As. Soc, vi- p. 406. 
 
586 BUDDHISM. 
 
 yielded so readily that a few centuries seem to have 
 sufficed to give the latter religion the control of 
 Northern India. 
 
 The social sympathies cannot be abolished. Under 
 Reaction to whatever national or climatic conditions, prac- 
 universaiity. iIcq\ democratic instincts will make themselves 
 heard. No race nor religion has the monopoly of 
 forces so essential to the justification of human nature. 
 To some vigorous spirit the abstract truths of contem- 
 plation will become forces of his own active realism : 
 they will become hands and feet, and demand to be 
 used. Organized into his moral being, these medita- 
 tions, these divine dreams, carry him straightway out 
 of his spiritual cell, to say to the whole world : 
 What is mine is yours also : the great all-reconciling 
 light that shone down to me on the mountain-top, in 
 the desert stillness, in the night of self-abandonment 
 to the best, this was not for me, it was for all mankind. 
 Then the spiritual aristocracy has to learn that the 
 truths it was hoarding are greater than itself; that 
 they refuse its patronage and custody, and go home 
 to the universal heart. It has to deal as it best can, 
 even in these finer and subtler spheres of thought, 
 with democratic reform. 
 
 That a practical, humanitarian spirit has been the 
 natural outgrowth of mystical and pantheistic devo- 
 tion has been already noted in previous pages of this 
 volume. In Brahmanical history, this justification, so 
 early and rapid that it indicates the great strerfgth of 
 these elements in the Hindu mind, was Buddhism. 
 And Comparative Religion hardly affiDrds a more in- 
 teresting study than the process by which its health- 
 ful reaction struggled forth out of the abyss of abstract 
 ideas and ascetic disciplines. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 587 
 
 From what has now been said it will be readily in- 
 ferred that to define Buddhism or assign a date „ , , . 
 
 '-' Buddhism a 
 
 for its origin is far from easy. It is an ele- constant de- 
 ment, rather than a special movement ; and '"™'' 
 perhaps we should not greatly err if we used the 
 name to designate the ever-varying forms of a prot- 
 estant, democratic, humane quality in the Oriental 
 mind, as natural to it as the contemplative, and usually 
 interwoven therewith. Scholars are agreed in tracing 
 it, as a philosophy, back to Kapila and the Sankhya, 
 which may yet prove to have been the oldest of the 
 great Hindu systems. ■* Buddhist tradition itself refers 
 the birth of Gotama Buddha to Kapilavastu (the dwell- 
 ing of Kapila) , and throws the old rationalistic phi- 
 losopher back into a very remote era. We have 
 already seen that Kapila was, in all essential respects, 
 at variance with Brahmanical exclusiveness, with 
 idolatry of traditions and texts, if he did not abso- 
 lutely refuse all authority to the Vedas ; that he in- 
 sisted on the validity of individual being against 
 absorption into the universal ; and that he had a 
 democratic reliance on the adequac}'^ of the human 
 faculties to test and reveal truth. These are certainly 
 germs of the liberty and humanity of Buddhism, if 
 not of all its speculative tenets. The birth-time of the 
 Sankhya has never yet been found. We may reason- 
 ably trace it back to primitive qualities in the Aryan 
 race ; tcj the independence and. self-reliance conspicu- 
 ous both in the Rig Veda hymns, and in the self- 
 governing communities that have so firmly held their 
 own, as a necessity of Hindu life. This theory is con- 
 firmed by Buddhist tradition, which identifies Got- 
 ama, both as to descent and to the early scenes of hisi 
 
 1 Lassen^ Ind. Alt^-, II. 60: Weber, Vorlesungen., p. 248. 
 
588 BUDDHISM. 
 
 / 
 
 mission, with the heroic Kshattriya race of the Sakyas, 
 and with the localities of the epic wars. 
 
 The Vedanta, as well as the Sankhya, shows germs 
 of Buddhism. They appear in its devotion to abstract 
 speculation, and in its recognition that the soul needed 
 the Vedas but for a time, and could be satisfied only 
 by a life in the eternal, where all distinctions of rank 
 and caste would of course be lost for ever. And, more 
 than this, the Buddhists are even charged by the 
 Brahmans with plagiarizing the idea of universal 
 brotherhood from their sacred books, and then turn- 
 ing it against them.-' 
 
 The protest against ecclesiastical authority as em- 
 Anti-ecciesi- bodied in the priesthood, reappears at every 
 asticism. stage of Hindu history. The Vedic legend 
 of Visvamitra, or the people's Jriend, and his contest 
 with Vasishtha, or the best, a superlative which means 
 orthodox sainthood, has a development co-extensive 
 in time with the national religious literature. Many 
 other vestiges point to a struggle of some kind in 
 early times between the sacerdotal and secular classes. 
 This schism, of which some account has already been 
 given, was probably a continuous one, commencing 
 as soon as the two classes became distinctly organized 
 for political and religious ends ; and of this the war- 
 fare waged by Buddhism against the whole caste sys- 
 tem, in the interest of the humblest classes as well as 
 of woman, was but the extension. 
 
 Certain " atheists and scorners of the Veda," whom 
 Manu expels from the company of the righteous, as 
 addicted to heretical books, are supposed to have been 
 Buddhists by those who ascribe a comparatively late 
 origin to the code.^ With more probability they may be 
 
 ' MuUer, Sanks. Lit., p. 85. 2 Wheeler, I. 451 ; Manu, II. 11. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 589 
 
 said to prove that the rationalistic tendency was active 
 some centuries at least before Buddha. 
 
 Buddhism has a twofold aspect, practical and specu- 
 lative ; and great injustice has been done by Buddhism 
 judging it from one or the other point of view '™f°M- 
 exclusively. In its earliest definite form, it was mainly, 
 & moral d^nd. -J)ktlantkro^{c Y&2iCiion. Yet it had also 
 its spiritual aspiration and its metaphysical basis. The 
 Chinese Buddhists say of the two schools which, upon 
 the whole, have represented respectively the meta- 
 physical and the moral sides of this religion, that " as 
 the water is one though the vessels are different, and 
 as the illumination is one though the lamps be many, 
 so with the schools of the Great and Little Vehicles." 
 That Buddhism is thus consistent with itself will 
 clearly appear from the studies to which the reader is 
 now invited.^ We shall begin with its speculative 
 principles, which cannot well be separated from its 
 original impulse, since they grew naturally out of the 
 existing soil of Hindu thought. 
 
 It carried the belief of Brahmanism concerning true 
 and false being to its logical ultimates, reduc- speculative 
 ing it to negation by putting it through dialectic Buddhism. 
 processes which neither spiritual intuition, nor the 
 mystic sense of the infinite and eternal, is suited to 
 bear ; yet it was not its purpose to destroy either of 
 these. As it started from the same experience of in- 
 
 1 Of Ae Pitakas, or "baskets " of the Law, \hQ A l>kidkarina, or metaphysical portion, 
 must be later than the Vinaya (ethics) and the Sutras (discourses). Yet the terms and 
 phrases in which it expresses the substance of Buddhist experience are also found in these, 
 though in less developed forms. See passages in D'Alwis's Buddhist Nirvaiut. Sonte 
 of the older Sutras combine, with their simple counsels against opposite extremes of worldli- 
 ness and self-discipline, the whole philosophy of pain and release, tracing the one to the 
 five KhaTidas (mainly mental faculties) and the twelve nid&nas^ or special causes, and 
 definino- the other as the perfect wisdom and rest of nirvana. See Leon Feer's careful 
 Etudes Bouddiqttes in the Journal Asiatique for 1870. 
 
590 BUDDHISM. 
 
 constancy and illusion, so it sought the same end, the 
 real and eternal, as spiritual foothold and rest, by the 
 same process of thinking away those transitory phan- 
 tasmal elements. It employed logical dialectic as the 
 test of their destructibility, as a fire that should leave 
 nothing unconsumed, save what could not perish. 
 Utterly to abolish illusion and death down to their 
 subtlest disguise, it used similar mental weapons with 
 those afterwards employed by mediaeval schoolmen to 
 establish Christian dogma ; only that the method was 
 destructive of conceptions, as in the latter case it was 
 defensive and apologetic. A completer parallel is 
 found in the well-known negative dialectics of the 
 Eleatic and Megaric schools of Greece. Its three 
 steps were affirmation, denial, and abolition of both. 
 A thing may be proved to exist, yet it may also be 
 proved to have no existence ; finally, it neither exists 
 nor does not exist : hence all phenomena should' be 
 looked at from a state of pure detachment. ^ The 
 perpetual self-contradiction, which elusive, intangible 
 cognitions like time, space, matter, form, and motion, 
 can be put through, is familiar to logicians. Here 
 it but made part of an earnest application of every 
 method by which the fact of impermanence could be 
 shown, to the whole substance of experience,^ by the 
 moral and religious sentiments, intent on overcoming 
 the mystery of pain and death, and in the name of 
 humanity itself. 
 
 Whatever definite faith in the phenomenal world 
 The logical remained to Brahmanism after its own mys- 
 ordeai. tj^al renuuciation, was swept away by this 
 unsparing logical ordeal, which, for thoroughness, 
 
 ' See Burnouf., Introd. to Hist- of Buddhistn, p. 457-461. 
 2 See passages in WuttkCj Gesch- d. Heidejith.^ H. 536. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 5 pi 
 
 might be called the Calvinism of Brahmanical doctrine. 
 The postulate of all profound philosophy from Demo- 
 critus to Fichte, — that the highest knowledge is con- 
 ditioned by a conviction of ignorance, — it carried out 
 more thoroughly than the system it sought to supplant. 
 Brahmanism, having done its utmost to abolish all 
 pretence of reaching knowledge through transient 
 forms, or reality in phenomenal existence, had found 
 compensation and rest in its intuition, its fervor, its 
 poetic affirmativeness, its mystical awe, and its devout 
 self-surrender to the One. Regardless of these ele- 
 ments," Buddhism applied its rationalistic tests to the 
 definite conceptions they still protected, and confidently 
 struck out for an ideal goal, even beyond that silent 
 sea of Brahma. 
 
 How did it deal with the forms of belief which it 
 found in the way of its purpose? 
 
 We must recall the fact that Hindu consciousness 
 was pervaded by a sense of the unity of all ^he burden 
 life. Under this inspiration, it had conceived ^"^ '^^^^^ 
 the continuity of personal existence as transmigra- 
 tion through countless forms and changes of being. 
 It was an immeasurable pilgrimage for the soul to 
 contemplate, and saddened throughout by the same 
 doom of pain and death which made the present life 
 seem a burden and a dream. Gotama, besought by 
 his father to give up his purpose of renouncing his 
 throne and the world, with promises that he should 
 receive whatever he desired, answers: "O king! 
 grant me four things, and I will remain with you : to 
 be free from old age, from sickness, from decay, from 
 death ; and if you cannot give me these, then accord 
 me another not less needful, to be free from transmi- 
 gration when I die." ^ 
 
 ' St- Hilaire, Le Bouddka, p. n. 
 
592 BUDDHISM. 
 
 And here is his joyful cry of release at the moment 
 of becoming The Buddha, or Enlightened One : — 
 
 " Through many births have I run, 
 Seeking the maker of this tabernacle. 
 Painful is birth again and again ; 
 
 But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen. 
 Thou canst not build for me another house : 
 Thy rafters are broken, thy ridgepole destroyed ; 
 I have reached the extinction of desire." 
 
 The thought of endless duration, of immortal des- 
 tinies, brooded over these contemplative minds, just as 
 the idea of present material and social opportunity 
 possesses the modern world. With what weary sense 
 of bondage must the imagination, thus bound to the 
 one ever-recurring idea, have dwelt on these innum- 
 erable returns to birth; these inevitable and endless 
 "bonds of action," these consequences of conduct 
 transmitted from world to world and form to form ; 
 of which death was again and again only a fresh 
 resurrection, and every new phase of existence the 
 thrall ! It was this heavy burden of care and pain — 
 this monotone of thought, pursuing an endless coming 
 and going and coming again, a bondage to decay and 
 death, through immeasurable time — from which both 
 Brahmanism and Buddhism sought escape, and from 
 which each found deliverance in its own way. But it 
 is plain that the unity of all forms of existence, ad- 
 mitted by both, allowed of no escape, but to trans- 
 cend them all. Existence itself, in a certain sense, 
 must be overpassed. In other words, emancipation 
 could come only through a purely ideal conception, 
 illumination, absorption, the substance whereof must 
 be, — to think away from, to work out of, to disci- 
 pline, purify, exalt one's self from, existence in the 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 593 
 
 sense given the word by the doctrine of transmigra- 
 tion ; that is, existence in the sense of dream, of 
 bondage to decay, death, and return ; existence in all 
 conceivable forms of transient life, as being not really 
 life, not inalienable certainty, but obliged to point for 
 these beyond itself. To the Vedantists this transcend- 
 ent liberty from changing form, this ideal bliss over 
 which transmigration had no sway, was immortal life 
 in Brahma. To the Buddhist, who boldly refused to 
 except Brahma, as a form of existence, from his logic 
 of negation, it was nirvdna. 
 
 Transmigration was ;pravritti, a state of change : 
 freedom was nirvritti, no more change. The Buddha 
 represented intellectual essence, "perfect knowledge ;" 
 and the nirvritti at which he arrived was therefore 
 mind independent of matter ,i of embodied shape, of 
 the perceptive faculties in their conceivable relations 
 with the world, in which they are necessarily condi- 
 tional and finite. This was not essentially different from 
 the Sankhya idea of the "independence of Purusha," 
 though with an absoluteness of protest against the 
 mutable, which Kapila would not have allowed. It 
 means a witness-soul, which he also affirms ; but, so 
 absorbed in the fulness of its emancipation, that it 
 refuses to be defined by positive conceptions of exist- 
 ence, all of which would remand it to dependence on 
 what is transient. Hence the fascination of tracking 
 these fugitive conceptions through all phases, in the 
 confidence of a power beyond, to criticise and dissolve- 
 them. The most metaphysical form of Buddhism 
 makes the wisdom of the saint nearest nirvana to 
 consist in "^^ not seizing the form."** 
 
 • Hodgson, Trans. R. A. S., II. 249. 
 ' PrajnS. P&ramiti. See Burnouf's Introd., p. 470. 
 38 
 
594 BUDDHISM. 
 
 That a law of bondage forces man into a gospel of 
 From law freedom is the inspiring fact that continually 
 to gospel, appears in religious history. As in the Judaism 
 of Paul, so here, it was an overwhelming legalism that 
 enforced deliverance by its pressure. It was the " bonds 
 of action," those inexorable sequences of penalty, that 
 made the burden of transmigration intolerable. To 
 believe that the wrong deed bears only evil fruit, and 
 this for ever ; that its results pass over through an un- 
 ending succession of lives, — is absolute slavery and 
 despair of finding release ; unless there enters, to com- 
 plete the conception of spiritual laws, the assurance 
 that there is some divine chemistry, some fedeeming 
 leaven, to which that inexorable rule of like from like 
 is subordinate. How man shall thus find escape from 
 the moral burden of every imperfect action in his past, 
 and in the sum total of human life, which has gone to 
 make his present, — and which in this aspect may be 
 called his own ^'^ fast lives" — how he shall offset the 
 strict application of such moralism to the endless 
 detail of conduct, in works done wrongly or to be 
 done rightly, in sins of omission and commission, — 
 depends on his special ethnic constitution and the 
 peculiarities of the stage of civilization at which he 
 has arrived. But that he does find such emancipating 
 force, and hold it as one of the very deepest and surest 
 of forces, one of the substantial laws and facts of 
 spiritual being, is a truth of universal religion. Of 
 course a purely speculative ideal, such as a contem- 
 plative race must form, is of itself inadequate to this 
 end ; while the Christian dogma of salvation by the 
 merits of another person is not only inadequate, but, 
 to human reason at least, essentially irrational and 
 vicious. But it must not be forgotten that nirvana as 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 595 
 
 a speculative ideal does not represent the whole of 
 the Buddhist vision of emancipation, just as the dogma 
 of atonement does not cover the whole Christian 
 conception of " salvation," even in the great body of 
 believers who make it the central point of their creed. 
 The peculiar form under which Buddhism, at least 
 in its later forms, conceived the process of The new 
 transmigration, was an effort at once to recog- ^''"'■ 
 nize its moral values, and to step forth from the bond- 
 age of its stern legalism. Those fateful fetters of 
 endless sequence, penal issues from actions, " the 
 wombs of pain ; " those recurring births and deaths, 
 which expressed the continuity of moral law and life ; 
 that solemn ring of each stroke of conduct upon the 
 whole future, — it did not admit merely, but carried 
 out to their fullest requirement. The Buddhist karma 
 is the whole moral effect of one's (supposed) past lives, 
 concentrated in his individual organization ; a presid- 
 ing genius or destiny, determining the form personality 
 shall assume.^ Sooner or later the tree of conduct 
 thus transmitted from seed to seed bears its own full 
 fruit. Though, as Gotama is made to say in one of 
 the sutras, during the -process a man who has done 
 good may be brought into a place of punishment be- 
 cause of certain evil deeds, and one who has done 
 evil may be found in one of the heavens by reason of 
 certain good ones, yet sooner or later both the good 
 and the evil ripen in his experience.^ But, impossible 
 as it might seem, an escape was effected from this stern 
 legalism and this interminable bondage. For the 
 earlier Buddhists there was a form of release in the 
 assurance of nirvana, of which I shall speak farther 
 
 * Hardy, Manztal of Buddhism, 394, 445. Karjnan mea^s action or work. 
 2 Koeppen, Religion d. BudcUia^ I. 301. 
 
596 BUDDHISM. 
 
 on. But the later form to which reference is here 
 made was by a step which is to me incomprehensible, 
 except as what we may call a declaration of independ- 
 ence ; a bold counterstroke of the spirit in behalf of 
 its invaded and captured liberty ; a reprisal of spon- 
 taneity upon fate. It can hardly be other than a direct 
 severing of the logical knot, an appeal from the pro- 
 cesses of the understanding to that mystic realm of 
 ideal power in which all spiritual release is guar- 
 anteed. That step was to declare that the individual 
 thus invested by karma, thus positively constituted by 
 the moral order, was not the same as before, but a new 
 soul; its personality being a transmission indeed of 
 the old unpaid account with the moral laws, yet in 
 such wise as to be properly a new independent force, 
 and somehow distinct from the former product of the 
 good and bad habits in question, who is there only as 
 a new creation. 
 
 It is a strange and subtle thought, the meaning 
 
 whereof must be thoughtfully considered. 
 
 " Transmigration," it was well said, " here be- 
 comes transformation, and metempsychosis metamor- 
 phosis."^ But it cannot mean literally the release 
 of one individual from the consequences of conduct 
 by creation of another out of his cast-off bonds and 
 dues ; nor, on the other hand, can it mean that all per- 
 sonal existence perishes at death, which would contra- 
 dict the whole spirit of Buddhism and its theory of 
 the attainment of nirvana. It cannot mean to abolish 
 moral responsibility in the act of attaining spiritual 
 release, to contradict the very idea of moral order in 
 
 ^ Koeppen, Religion des Buddha, I. 302. A valuable and comprehensive work, unsur- 
 passed, if not unequalle(3, in the literature of the present subject. See also Bigandet's 
 Legend of the Burmese Buddha. (1866), pp. 21, 468. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 597 
 
 stating its process. The fact of responsibility is not 
 lost sight of through this apparent change of personal 
 identity ; and, if the former self-consciousness is in a 
 sense denied passage to the new form of being, the 
 moral identity at least is carried forward thither, and 
 enters its claims to represent the substance of personal- 
 ity itself. Indeed the Buddhist saints are constantly 
 spoken of as maintaining personal identity through all 
 stages of their progress through successive births. ^ 
 It must be remembered, in order to arrive at the mean- 
 ing Qi karma, that, as the whole sense of individuality 
 hovers vaguely in the Hindu mind, the same charac- 
 ter must be found in its sense of transition from one 
 form of life or world of forms to another. Terms ex- 
 pressive of this are in fact used with great mystical 
 freedom and breadth of meaning. The " new soul " 
 involved in this Buddhist karma can mean nothing 
 else than a new starting-point, a reaction of some sort 
 on the inevitable and indispensable bonds of former 
 conduct; some hint, perhaps a real instinct, that there 
 is more in man's spiritual experience than the con- 
 sciousness of past merit or demerit as his own; an 
 effort, in short, to affirm that spontaneity in his spirit- 
 ual essence which he must not press the fact of re- 
 sponsibility so far as to ignore ; the liberty that resides 
 in every moment to cast off the burden of the past, 
 and begin reconstruction of experience itself. 
 
 With this assertion of freedom, if I am right in in- 
 terpreting it as such, the Buddhist idea of kar- ^ 
 ma sought to combine full acceptance of the tionsof 
 facts of moral order. It is the inextinguish- ^"^' 
 able vitality of the moral seed, passing beyond the 
 harvests of a single lifetime, that is here insisted on, 
 
 ^ Hardy, Manual, p. 398. 
 
598 BUDDHISM. 
 
 as not negatived by the fact that we have no conscious- 
 ness of a -previous state of being. We are " new 
 souls," yet not the less are past lives now living on in 
 ours, and we in a sense take up their accounts with 
 moral and natural laws, where these left them. Kar- 
 ma means that the continuity of the race, the endless 
 succession of its births, is really a form of the perpetual 
 productivity of moral causes. We have here then an 
 instinctive Oriental presentiment or analogue of the 
 modern science of heredity ; except that the parentage 
 it deals with is primarily moral, not physical, and that 
 it pushes the truth that we are ignorant as to the past 
 grounds of our present organization to the point of 
 apparently making us the mere consequence of a series 
 of acts unknown, and by us unknowable. It even 
 presumes a creative power in them adequate to pro- 
 duce our consciousness itself. But this is the im- 
 aginative form in which a deep conviction of the 
 omnipotence of moral laws was expressed ; and we 
 have already noted how decisively the rights of spon- 
 taneity came in to counteract a too absolute deter- 
 minism. 
 
 " The practical tendency of the Krishna faith has its counter- 
 part in the Y4tnika school of Buddhism, which teaches that all 
 obstacles can be mastered. While the Sw4bhavika school yields 
 itself with resignation, in the faith that the Supreme Essence [Fate] 
 governs all, the Yitnika admonishes to energetic action, since, 
 though man cannot withdraw himself from karma, he can never- 
 theless influence its course. The ripened fruit of conduct must be 
 eaten ; but it depends on the will to sow such seeds, that a pleasant 
 fruit shall grow up, or such, as falling from the tree of hfe, shall 
 give assurance of immortality." ' 
 
 The reader will recall a very similar tone in the 
 proverbial philosophy of the Fable-books, which are 
 
 > Bastian, Remn in Chmi, P- 618. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 599 
 
 largely due to Buddhist influences, and show how 
 elastic to the demands of freedom are even this strong 
 sense of the transient and unreal, and this stringent 
 assertion of moral destinies. 
 
 It is not meant that this intuition of moral order, this 
 veneration for moral cause and consequence, j-reejom in 
 left full scope for human freedom. Destiny was determinism. 
 more or less master of the Oriental mind. But while 
 we recognize this, we must not forget to inquire what 
 elements of freedom lie in the very conception of des- 
 tiny, what power this master has to arouse and initiate 
 mastership in its subject. There is recognition of 
 divine necessity in every great step of protest, in all 
 philosophy of reform. Hero and saint are free only 
 through the inevitable, the predetermined, the irresist- 
 ible ; through the all-absorbing and supplanting Right. 
 Fate is the principle of progress in all religion ; and in 
 India as in Greece, in Buddha as in Prometheus, this, 
 as supreme Moral Order, calls the old forms of deity 
 to judgment, and leads forward to new fields of faith. 
 It is in and through a sense of destiny, a genius 
 neither to be ignored nor disobeyed, that the soul ever 
 and again substantiates its freedom afresh ; enforces 
 the right of its new vision to unmake the creeds and 
 masters that old wants had made for it ; affirms its lien 
 on the resources of the universe, its right of eminent 
 domain in its own household of worship and work. 
 And so the time came when all the divinities of Brah- 
 manism, even up to the " eternal Brahma " himself, had 
 to meet the unsparing logic of an idea, the very sub- 
 stance of which was necessary law. 
 
 Buddhism put the whole faith of the time through 
 this crucible of karma, or moral order and Omnipo- 
 destiny. This explains its later cosmogony ,^oraiorder 
 and mythology. The revolutions of matter, ""Kama. 
 
6oO BUDDHISM. 
 
 the destructions and renovations of the universe, with 
 which it marked the track of endless ages, were but 
 the play of this transcendent force, the product of 
 moral determinations.. Out of these imperishable 
 germs of essential right, these loyalties of time and 
 force to eternal law, comes the wind that breathes in 
 the spaces of desolation from all sides, to renew the' 
 worlds ; out of these the primitive energies which at 
 enormous kalfa intervals destroy the " worlds of form " 
 up to the very borders of "the formless," nearest nir- 
 vana the supreme abode ; and through the kal^a of 
 " emptiness " which intervenes between this destruction 
 and the new birth of things, these moral destinies 
 endure, the only germs of reconstruction.^ They are 
 like the Scandinavian " golden dice of destiny," found 
 again, and unharmed, after the "Twilight of the gods," 
 in the growing grass of a new-risen earth. 
 
 This is stupendous fatalism ; but how it clings to 
 
 , ., ,. those eternal distinctions by which the con- 
 its idealism. *' 
 
 science lives ! It is at least pure idealism : it 
 makes sense the outcome of spiritual fact and experi- 
 ence; and the energy of its protest, criticism, and 
 reconstructive power will show us that it was not such 
 a fatalism as must of itself abolish freedom. 
 
 The older Sutras speak of the gods as rejoicing at 
 „ . Buddha's revelation. Their heavens trembled. 
 
 Negation 
 
 for positive when the great light shone through them ; 
 ""^' yet Brahma told them the glad tidings of 
 release, which were for them also, and a cry arose, 
 "The might of the gods increases, the might of the 
 asuras (evil powers) fails." ^ The legend shows at 
 least the geniality with which Buddhism did its work. 
 
 ^ Koeppen, I. 268-284. 
 
 2 Dharmasastra Sutras^ in JoterncCl Asiaiique for 1870, p. 377. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 6oi 
 
 But its work was a radical one. Its pungent logic 
 invented even more destructive terms for the illuso- 
 riness of phenomenal life than Brahmanism. Its 
 founder himself, as a visible person, was made to 
 issue from the womb of the beautiful Mayadevi, the 
 " Perfection of Illusion." It exalted the dignity of 
 Buddhahood as the attainment of truth, far beyond the 
 recognized sainthood or what it adored. As Brahma 
 had supplanted the Vedic gods, so the stern logic of 
 time and death now supplanted Brahma. Accepting 
 without difficulty the whole series of divinities, popular 
 and speculative, as phenomena, Buddhism swept them 
 all into that common category of subjection to change 
 and death, from which Brahmanism had excepted the 
 world of Brahma alone. All names and forms with 
 which definite conceptions had become associated were 
 alike summoned to receive their sentence, and yield 
 to a greater than themselves. 
 
 For within this unsparing logic of negation there 
 was a positive faith : a sense of eternal being made 
 it bold to affirm wherein all these names and forms 
 failed to satisfy the highest demand. The Buddha, 
 the " illumined, awakened " man, alone could know, 
 in nirvdna beyond them all, the purpose and. goal of 
 life. 
 
 The Brahmans, it is true, soon came to regard the new 
 movement as atheism. And this was natural ; since 
 it does not appear that Gotama and his earliest follow- 
 ers spent their thought on defining or even conceiving 
 a new form of deity. It was precisely the absence of 
 such definite form that their religious sentiment itself 
 demanded ; and they preached their ideal good simply 
 as independence of the limits they criticised. It was 
 counted atheism in Kapila when he denied an Is'wara, 
 
602 BUDDHISM. 
 
 an external Lord and interfering Providence. And 
 here were others who dethroned all existing forms 
 under which deity was conceived ; who denied that 
 even Brahma could offer an asylum in his own nature 
 from the sorrowful doom of change and death that 
 swept through all existence. To every recognized 
 form of being ; to every conception which had become 
 fixed by usage or by instituted worship within definite 
 lines of meaning, they applied one test, and the an- 
 swer was always the same. They could admit no 
 definite idea of deity, therefore, and no Name. But 
 what was it, again let me ask, that could have a-p^lied 
 this test of transiency, but an ever-present sense of 
 the eternal? Of not less moment is the question: 
 Does belief in deity reside essentially in definite ideas 
 or names?-' 
 
 It does not yet appear that there is any just ground 
 No absolute either in historic fact or rational thought for 
 atheism, attributing absolute atheism to any people. 
 Behind the most positive assertions of it, even in 
 speculative philosophy, there seems to be very clear 
 indication, or else implication, of the necessity, in 
 every sane mind, to recognize a moral order, and an 
 eternal principle of Rightness in some form sovereign 
 in the universe, and competent to at least every result 
 
 ^ D'Alwis {Buddhist Nirv&na^ p. 13) thinks that tlie doctrine of Buddhism from the 
 outset was ^^point-blank Atheism.^'* Yet he admits that the belief in a First Cause is in- 
 eradicably "implanted in the soul ; " that the savage and the Buddhist thinl<er are alike 
 conscious of it : and that Buddha himself ''did not ignore it." This First Cause, how- 
 ever, is (p 60) "nothing. "{!) In otherwords, the representative of an ineradicable neces- 
 sity for believing in something is — nothing at all ; and that for a quarter of the human race. 
 I, of course, would neither misrepresent the views of this evidently accomplished scholar, 
 nor ascribe to them a manifest absurdity. The incongruity of the statements above 
 quoted arises, I presume, from limiting the idea of God, which is ineradicable, to that 
 of a definite creator (Iswara) or Beginner, at a first moment of time; an idea which 
 is as certainly quite outside the Buddhist line of vision, and is by no means ineradi- 
 cable. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 603 
 
 which we are wont in ordinary speech to ascribe to 
 intelligence, and to intelligence alone. 
 
 Koeppen, himself an important authority on the 
 history of Buddhism, gives a long list of co- Buddhist 
 authorities who affirm that it has "absolutely "atheism." 
 no trace of the idea of a God.''^ And this is the 
 prevailing opinion of the Christian world. But writers 
 who speak of a God will always be found to have 
 given a meaning to the idea of God which involves 
 more or less distinctly the Hebrew and Christian 
 theory of an original creation, proceeding at a given 
 time from a divine pre-existent Will. Buddhism, on 
 the other hand, recognizes no such beginning, either 
 to the chain of transient causes and eiFects, or to the 
 revolutions of the worlds; and is therefore, by the 
 theory in question, pure atheism.^ But we must reflect 
 that Mind considered in the former sense — as his- 
 torically pre-existent to manifestation, and choosing 
 it at a definite moment in its continuous life — is in 
 reality thereby represented as subject to the conditions 
 ofti-)ne. It is not eternal in a true sense, since eter- 
 nity knows no Before nor After. And such creative 
 act at a definite moment, as the aforesaid critics insist 
 on, would be, as Buddhism replies, but one of a series 
 of acts in time, itself requiring a previous act, and so 
 cannot reveal an original nor an eternal cause. And 
 Buddhism may go further still. It may maintain that 
 its own conception of a limitless -process of becoming^ 
 a manifestation of cause and effect without beginning 
 or end, — although excluding creation in the Semitic 
 
 ^ Koeppen, I. 228. See also Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters^ I. p. 229. 
 
 ^ Its attriburion of birth and form, as such, to avidyai or ignorance, does not seem to 
 be the admission of a first canse ; since this reasoning has relation only to the generation 
 of conceptions in the human mind. On the other hand, see D^A Iwis, p. 15. 
 
 » Koeppen, I. 230. 
 
604 BUDDHISM. 
 
 or the Christian sense, as well as an Iswara, or in- 
 dividual Lord, — does not in any sense exclude eter- 
 nal Being, which must, on the contrary, be assumed 
 as ground for the endlessness of the Becoming. So 
 much for the metaphysics of the question. 
 
 But, however other religions and civilizations may 
 interpret their speculation, the Buddhists as a whole 
 do somehow find their way to the satisfaction of an 
 instinct which we may properly call universal; of 
 which, at all events, we cannot, without the strongest 
 evidence, conceive whole races and generations to be 
 destitute. Koeppen has himself quoted passages in 
 which the Buddha is addressed as "God of Gods, 
 Brahma of Brahmas, Indra of Indras, Father of the 
 world. Almighty and All-knowing, Ruler and Re- 
 deemer of all." 1 
 
 The same writer asserts that the earliest Buddhists 
 offered no prayer, because Buddha had entered nir- 
 vana and could not hear ; and that their so-called 
 prayers were really only formulas of confession, 
 hymns of praise, pious ejaculations, blessings, and 
 uttered longings.^ But devout aspirations are the 
 proper substance of prayer, and are none the less 
 recognition of a source of strength higher than human, 
 for not consciously defining this in objective personal 
 form, nor even taking the shape of direct invocation or 
 address. There is more religion in one divine desire 
 than in manybeseechings. Later, as Koeppen himself 
 concedes, the " Thou " was added ; and the northern 
 Buddhists, especially, have abundant forms of prayer, 
 in Which either Gotama Buddha, or the divine Triad 
 of later ecclesiastical origin, or the earlier Buddhas 
 
 * Koeppen, I- 430. So Hardy, Manual, pp. 360, 384, 386. 
 
 > Koeppen, I. 554, 555 ; Wuttke, II. 544. Also ScUagintweit, Buddhism in Thibet. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 605 
 
 of this half a (age of the world), are addressed as 
 conscious hearers of their worshippers ; and it is 
 added that a very slight alteration would render these 
 effusions suitable for Christian worship.' In illustra- 
 tion, a Mongolian prayer is quoted,^ of which I give 
 a portion : — 
 
 " O Thou in whom all creatures trust, Buddha, perfected amidst 
 countless revolutions of worlds, compassionate towards all, and 
 their eternal salvation, bend down into this our sphere, with all thy 
 society of perfected ones. Thou law of all creatures, brighter than 
 the sun, in faith we humble ourselves before thee. Thou who com- 
 pletest all pilgrimage, who dwellest in the world of rest, before 
 whom all is but transient, descend by thy almighty power, and 
 bless us." 
 
 Every attribute of deity, the creative only excepted, 
 is freely ascribed to the Buddha by his worshippers : 
 omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect love and bliss. ^ 
 The modern schools of the south generally believe in 
 "absorption into the supreme and ipfinite Buddha."* 
 Ritter does not hesitate to affirm the essential feature 
 of Buddhism to be, that a man, freeing himself from 
 obstacles of nature by holiness, may save his fellow-man 
 from the corruption of the times and become supreme 
 God." ^ Here, just as in Christianity, the religious 
 sentiment, while concentrating itself on a human deity, 
 nevertheless really invested his humanity with an 
 infinite meaning. So far indeed as the concentration 
 is exclusive in either case, exacting worship as the 
 due of this one man, in absolute distinction from all 
 other actual or possible men, it indicates imperfect 
 recognition of that divineness of the human, on which 
 
 ' Koeppen, I. 554, sss; Wuttke, II. 544. ^ Pallas, II. 386. 
 
 " Franck, Etudes Orientates, p. 46. 
 
 * Bigandet, Legend of the Burnzese Buddha^ p. 320. 
 
 » Hist. Anc. Philos; I. 94-96. 
 
6o6 BUDDHISM. 
 
 it substantially rests; and this defect only freedoiTi 
 and intelligence can correct. But in none of these 
 crude forms of belief can the idealization which puts 
 a historical person in the place of the Infinite be 
 properly called atheism. To the Buddha of the East 
 as to the Christ of the West were really ascribed 
 those powers which made up the popular conception 
 of Deity. 
 
 It is to be observed, further, that Buddhahood itself 
 is held to be perpetual reproduction of an eternal fact. 
 An endless succession of Buddhas must associate the 
 idea itself with infinity, and lift Buddha- worship above 
 the evanescence^ that will attach to all these personal 
 forms in their individual capacity. The particular 
 Buddha must be to an extent lost, for the worshipper, 
 in the exhaustles's productivity of that Intelligence of 
 which he is but one expression. 
 
 This deeper logic of faith cannot, it is true, wholly 
 overcome the tendency to concentrate worship on 
 some one personage ; a tendency which ils found in 
 all positive religions, and is associated with natural 
 gratitude and love. Yet Buddhism has been fertile in 
 the production of new centres of worship, adapted to 
 different ages and races. Its later mythology in the 
 north is not wanting in names of ideal saints, Dhyani 
 Bodhisattvas, who have been venerated like Gotama. 
 The most important of these are Amiiabka, or Ever- 
 lasting Light ; Mandshusri, the mild Holy One ; and 
 Avalokite'swara, the " Lord who looks down on men : " 
 to whom it is believed the Thibetans address their 
 sacred formula, Om mani -padme hdm, — " C the 
 Jewel in the Lotus.'''' ^ 
 
 Avalokiteswara is the manifested deity in Thibetan 
 
 * Koeppen, II. 20-28. 60, 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 607 
 
 Buddhism ; who vows " to manifest himself to every 
 creature in the universe ; to deliver all men from the 
 consequences of sin, and never to arrive at Buddha- 
 hood till all are born into the divine rest, receiving 
 answer to their prayers." " He himself hears and 
 answers every prayer, and they who trust in him 
 are secure." ^ 
 
 It is interesting to notice how similar are the forms 
 which an immature theism has assumed in the Buddhist 
 efforts of very dissimilar races to fix the relig- '""Wes. 
 ious ideal in one personality, and develop its faith and 
 cultus around this centre. Thus a divine triad has 
 been adored by the Buddhists both of the North and 
 of the South, from comparatively early times. Just 
 as the first Christians combined their devotion to 
 Christ with veneration for his gospel and his apostles, 
 so Buddha was united with Dharma, the Law, and 
 Samgha, the teachers, or the Assembly.^ Out of 
 these elements was developed a metaphysical trinity : 
 Intelligence ; Law, as its manifestation ; and the unity 
 of the two in Holiness.^ Cosmological triads also are 
 found in northern Buddhism ; such as mind, matter, 
 and their unity.* In Nepal and Thibet the forms of 
 trinity become distinctly personal ; and some of them 
 startle the European traveller by their resemblance to the 
 ontological speculations of the later German schools,^ 
 as well as to forms of the Christian Trinitarian dogma. ^ 
 Koeppen calls these theories "Buddhistic but in name," 
 as derived from Sivaistic or other influences ; but they 
 
 1 BeaPs Catena of Buddhist Scripture^ pp- 376, 406. 
 
 * Lassen, II. 1084, Koeppen, I. 373: Hardy, Eastern Monackisvti p. 209; Bigan- 
 det, p. I. Most Buddhist works begin with invocation to these three. 
 
 3 Abel R^musat, Sur la Relig^ Samanienne. 
 
 * Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes.) p. 36. 
 
 5 Koeppen, I. 550-553. » Catena of Buddhist Scriptures, pp. 103, 104. 
 
6o8 BUDDHISM. 
 
 are certainly made up of Buddhist elements ; and, if 
 not found in the earlier phases of this religion, they 
 are none the less natural growths within it, accom- 
 panying its metaphysical canon, and tend to refute the 
 charge that it involves, of necessity, even speculative 
 atheism. 
 
 Indo-Scythian coins and the temples of NepM 
 Adibuddha. ^ffoi'd proof that the belief in a supreme, all- 
 seeing Buddha, represented by two Eyes as 
 symbols of intelligence, was current in those regions 
 at least as early as the beginning of the Christian era.^ 
 
 The Nepalese say that " Swayambhu, the self-exist- 
 ent, called Adibuddha, was when nothing else was. 
 He wished to become many, and produced the Budd- 
 has through union with his desi»re. Adibuddha was 
 never seen. He is pure light." ^ In the topes dedi- 
 cated to this deity, no deposits of relics have been 
 found ; but the symbolic Eyes were placed on the sides 
 or the crown of the edifice.^ Lassen even believes 
 that the recognition of supreme Mind can be traced 
 back by these vestiges alone to the earliest Budd- 
 hists.* The school which worships Adibuddha is 
 perhaps confined to regions where external influences 
 have been active.^ Bastian, however, in his recent 
 work on Central Asia, an immense collection of per- 
 sonal observations, tells us that the Buddhists generally, 
 in that part of the world, worship Abida, as the highest 
 God, to whom all perfections are ascribed. " Abida's 
 thought is almighty. All spirits of thought are subject 
 to his sway. He, the father of the gods, knows all, 
 past, present, and to come."" 
 
 » Lassen, II. 1084. 2 Hodgson in Transact. R.A. Soc.^ II. 232, 238. 
 
 » BkiUa Topes, p. 8. *• Ui supra. 
 
 » Koeppen, II. 28, 29, 366 ; Wilson's Relig. of Hindus, II. 361. 
 • Bastian, p. 567. See also, for theistic sects, Salisbury's Essay in Hist, irf Buddhism, 
 inAvter. Or. yourn. for 1849. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 609 
 
 That later Buddhist metaphysics sometimes, as in 
 the Prajnd Pdramitd, press the sense of tran- 
 science and illusion to the point of declaring 
 that " even the highest names are but words, not signs 
 of realities," is true.^ One school affirms Buddha's 
 personal appearance to have been illusion, as the 
 Docetists did that of Jesus. So their dialectic, as we 
 have seen, deals in the antinomies of the understand- 
 ing, and shows plainly enough that logical processes 
 cannot establish certitude. 
 
 These metaphysical portions of the canon are as 
 thoroughly nihilistic as words can make them. But 
 the words give a large margin for interpretation, and 
 we must read between their lines. Buddha says in the 
 Prajna Paramita : " I must conduct to Nirvana the in- 
 numerable creatures ; yet there exist neither creatures 
 to be conducted thither, nor creatures to conduct them." 
 " JSfot less," he adds, "are all these creatures to be 
 conducted there. How is this? Because an illusion 
 constitutes them as they are."^ In other words, the 
 illusory present existence, and the reality of nirvdna, 
 are alike to be recognized and acted on, as facts. 
 The same work says of the saint, who has risen above 
 " seizing the form," that he " has not attained nirvana 
 because he has not reached the eighteen distinct con- 
 ditions of a Buddha."^ Eighteen distinct conditions,, 
 after having laid aside the whole conception of 
 definite forms ! Is it not plain that this negative 
 phraseology has but little of that strictness of mean- 
 ing it would have with us? 
 
 But there is another element in the question- 
 Metaphysical or logical processes, however skeptical 
 
 1 See extracts collected by Wuttke, II. 536, and Wilson, II. 364. 
 ' Bumouf, p. 478. » Ibid., p. 470. 
 
 39 
 
6lO BUDDHISM. 
 
 or even nihilistic, do not necessarily imply positive 
 atheism ; since the protest of the moral nature against 
 that conclusion may be such as to transcend all specu- 
 lative objections to the idea of God, and is not to be set 
 aside in any case by arguments drawn from the under- 
 standing alone. Such negative processes in fact do 
 not imply even speculative atheism, but may become 
 the very ground on which deity is affirmed to be the 
 only essential reality. ^ 
 
 The Alexandrian philosophers, for instance, tracked 
 the phenomenal through every possible form of its 
 conception v^'ith their probe of metaphysical negation ; 
 yet only to reach beyond them all, beyond reasoning, 
 or the thinking faculty, beyond reason itself as an 
 active force {htiv,uva rov vdv^, one indivisible, eternal 
 Substance, whereof nothing real or perfect could be 
 depied.^ And for the attainment of real being they 
 affirmed the necessary condition to be a divine exal- 
 tation (exffTafftff) of the mind through this abdication 
 of the selfhood, this negation of all finiteness. The 
 Buddhist dhyanas, or stages of contemplation, and the 
 so-called "formless worlds" which are the nearest 
 stages to nirvdna, answer in many respects to this 
 ecstasy of Platonic mystics. The parallelism is re- 
 markable, and points to the conclusion that nihilistic 
 speculations should never be conceived as having sat- 
 isfied the whole spiritual demand of those who have 
 pursued them, never be made the gauge for testing 
 the possibilities of a religion to which they may be 
 referred. 
 
 " Take away nihilism," it has been said, " and you 
 
 ^ There isj however, no evidence that the statements of the Prajn& P&ramit& are 
 those of Buddha himselfl Burnouf, Jntrod. to Bjtddh.^ p. 483. 
 * See especially Flotinus, Enneadst V. iii, vi. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 6ll 
 
 take away the only remedy, to the Buddhist, for the 
 danger of existence." i This depends, of course, on 
 the meaning we give to terms. It is at least equally 
 true that if you allow nihilism, you take away all 
 motive in the Buddhist for seeking freedom from 
 existence. " Life," says the same writer, " arises 
 [in Buddhist belief] from absence of knowledge. 
 Call it ignorance, or what you will, it is noth- 
 ing." ^ But, here again, we may say: the "life" 
 that arises from absence of knowledge must be of that 
 nature which its presence would abolish ; and there- 
 fore cannot be life in an absolute sense, since the 
 presence of knowledge without life is a self-contra- 
 diction. 
 
 It is certain, whatever may be true of metaphysical 
 statements, that neither nihilism nor atheism character- 
 izes the mass of Buddhist literature, the rites of the 
 Buddhist Church, or, as a whole, the sects into which 
 it has become divided.^ It would indeed be fatal to 
 our hopes for human nature, if we could be forced to 
 believe that four hundred millions of at least partially 
 civilized people have made a religion out of the love 
 of nonentity, or indeed out of mere negation in any 
 form. The apparent atheism of the Buddhist is, in 
 substance, opposition to the idea of an external God, 
 limited and individual, acting in imperfect human 
 ways. This view is illustrated by a work, recently 
 translated from the Siamese, written in defence of 
 Buddhism against Christianity, by the minister of the 
 late king of Siam, and called " The Modern Budd- 
 
 1 D'Alwis, p. 21. 2 Ibid. 
 
 ' Bumouf {Inirod; p. 441) thinks the SvSih&mia School of Nepil deny a spiritual 
 principle. Babu RSjendralal Mitra says {Journ- Bengal As. Soc.j xxvii.) : " The Budd- 
 hists are theists, and believers in immortality." He even seeks to point out aiEnities 
 between Buddhist and Odinic trinities. 
 
6l2 BUDDHISM. 
 
 hist."^ "If God," he argues, "makes the rain, he 
 should make it fall equally all over the earth." " If 
 fever is a visitation of God, there would be no running 
 away from it." It is evidently the capricious God of 
 the Christian missionaries who is here disproved upon 
 their own ground. Again, his apparently antitheistic 
 statement — that "the divine Spirit is but the actual 
 spirit or disposition of man, good or evil" — refers to 
 the karma, or moral law, as sovereign in every human 
 soul, the expression of a divine unchangeable Order, 
 dealing with the characters of each. This statement 
 in reality emphasizes the inward unity of God with 
 man. And in inviting "comparison between the 
 idea of a divinity going about in all directions, and 
 Buddha's idea that the divine all-knowing Bestower 
 of rewards and punishments is merit and demerit 
 (karma) itself," the writer is but exalting the eternal 
 sway of justice, as against the arbitrary God of Chris- 
 tian dogma. 
 
 Miiller agrees with Burnouf and St. Hilaire, men 
 MuUer's nowise comparable with him in spiritual in- 
 "™- sight and recognition, in pronouncing Gotama 
 an atheist. Yet he admits that tradition is an unsafe 
 guide, and that the " atheism," whatever it might 
 mean, did not consist in any distinct denial of the 
 existence either of gods or of God.^ In his Introduc- 
 tion to the Dhammapada, however (p. xxxi.), this 
 eminent authority quotes from Spence Hardy's " Le- 
 gends of Buddhism," and Gogerly's translations of 
 the Sutras, in proof that such absolute denial can 
 hardly be doubted. Yet these passages are apparently 
 but affirmations of superiority to all the old deities, and 
 refutations of the claims of Brahma in special, placed 
 
 > Alabaster, Wheel of the Law. » Chips, I. 287. 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 613 
 
 in the mouth of Buddha by his disciples. At most 
 their negation seems but to cover the idea of a purely 
 external creator, a distinct and separate cause ; and 
 they are not inconsistent with a pantheistic recognition 
 of infinite Intelligence immanent in the worlds and 
 forms of being. It is singular that the excellence of 
 Gotama's moral doctrine and the purity and nobility 
 of his life, which forbade Miiller to believe that he 
 could have " thrown away so powerful a weapon in the 
 hands of a religious teacher" as the belief in immor- 
 tality, should not have seemed to him a sufficient 
 answer to the charge of atheism also.^ And the posi- 
 tiveness of Miiller's statement on this point is the more 
 surprising, from the fact that he finds no authority for 
 believing that Buddha really instituted the metaphys- 
 ical doctrines ascribed to him, or had other than a 
 verj' simple popular philosophy of life.^ 
 
 Just here is indeed the real answer to the indictment 
 brought by Christian theism against the faith of 
 more than a third of the human race. For all futes the 
 its penetrating sense of a doom of sorrow and "^ ^'^^' 
 death attached to every conceivable form of life, for 
 all its weariness of the endless recurrence of transmi- 
 grations and the " bonds of action," Buddhism did not 
 consign men over to the sensualist's " let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die." It drew a different 
 conclusion from its premise of pain. It said in sub- 
 stance : " So be it then. Yet shalt thou not despair, 
 but freely accept destiny, and abandon desire for 
 things that cannot satisfy because they cannot endure. 
 Release thyself from such desire : release others, 
 release all men ; and believe that thou canst do this, 
 
 1 See articles on Buddhism and Nirv&na, in Chips, &c., I. 234, 287. 
 • Ibid., p. 225. So also Weber, Vorlesungcn, p. 253, 267. 
 
6l4 BUDDHISM. 
 
 and that it is well worth thy while and theirs that it 
 be done. And do this by self-sacrifice, mercy, justice, 
 trust in each other ; b}'^ every form of moral discipline, 
 every possibility of love. Let the very burdens of the 
 common lot lift you to such high faith and purpose, 
 such energy of mutual help." 
 
 "What is the fruit of the Bodhisattva's thought? — Answer: 
 Higher morality, higher perception of truth, great love, great pity." 
 " A spirit exempt from anger ; a spirit of compassion for the wan- 
 dering ; a spirit which forbids falling away from wisdom ; a spirit 
 of perseverance to the end." 
 
 " What is his rule of duty ? — To attach himself with high de- 
 sire to all laws of virtue ; not to despise the ignorant ; to be a friend 
 to all men ; to expect no more from transmigration." 
 
 " What his bliss ? — The joy of having seen a Buddha ; of hav- 
 ing heard the law ; of not repenting in giving ; of having procured 
 the good of all creatures." 
 
 " What his health ? — The sound body ; the mind not drawn to 
 perishing things ; bringing all beings into right and equal condition ; 
 freedom from doubt, on every law." 
 
 " To what should he adhere ? — To meditation, to beneficence ; 
 to compassionate love ; to the disciplines of wisdom. 
 
 " Since consciousness, body, life, self, are illusion, therefore is 
 there perfection in morality, in ecstasy, in wisdom, in release." ' 
 
 Truth, justice, love, — these at least were real. 
 The sub- Through abysse,s of " nihilism '' itself, if so it 
 atanceof bc Called, certainly out of the dreary bondage 
 reigion. ^^ transmigration, man reached upward to grasp 
 these, undoubting ; nay, more, with ardor and zeal. 
 
 " The worlds may be blown away in a storm ; the sun and moon 
 may fall ; the rivers may turn back to their sources ; the sky may 
 be rent, the earth destroyed ; Maha Meru be broken to pieces; but 
 the Buddhas cannot utter an untruth." " 
 
 ' Doctrine of the Four Perfections, from Sutras of the Great Vehicle. See Feer, in 
 yournal Asiatigue for 1867, pp. 279-316. Yet writers of ability and a liberal spirit speak 
 of this faith as having its root in selfishness, and meaning only self-absorption 1 
 
 2 LegeTids of Buddha^ in Hardy's Manual., p. 332 I 
 
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 615 
 
 The eternal light of morality shone clear, rendering 
 an idea of destiny nobly productive, in which other re- 
 ligions read grounds for despair only. If such faith 
 is atheistic, then must we allow to one form of atheism, 
 at least, the meaning of worship. In the theoretic 
 denial, what practical affirmation of deity ! 
 
 It is indeed the truth of all time, and deep as human 
 experience, that he who holds fast to moral realities is 
 at one with the eternally real itself. One may disclaim 
 all knowledge of God, yet his adherence to these shall 
 preserve the loyalty which is absolute trust and faith, 
 and possess the substance of freedom and truth. Is it 
 not plain that deity may be verbally and intellectually 
 disavowed, simply because too intimate and familiar 
 to be outwardly observed; because, in fact, no other 
 than the seer's very eye itself, by which he sees? 
 
 The more absolute the theoretic negation of deity, 
 then, the more positive would become the 
 religious value of a moral idealism, associated Buddhist 
 with it, in some respects unsurpassed in hu- 
 man history. What if Buddhism be found to have 
 swept all conceivable objects of faith into an " abysmal 
 negation"? Yet so earnest, so believing, so devout 
 was it in the pursuit of this, that the very negation 
 flushed into life ; became a positive ground of faith, 
 an entity real and divine. This is perfectly conceiv- 
 able. And it is also certain as a matter of history. 
 Practically, the negation which the devout Buddhist 
 pronounced against existence was somehow resolved, 
 for hirh, into a best, a highest goal ; in a word, into 
 deity. For what else is that which men long for, 
 cherish, love, adore? What else shall we call that 
 which stirs them to generous conduct, to ideal aspira- 
 tion, and bears fruit in pure morality? 
 
6l6 BUDDHISM. 
 
 We come then to the word by which Buddhism 
 expressed the end of human striving, the issue of 
 all good. This " nirvdna," confidently supposed to 
 have been nothingness, — how can it have been so 
 to those who conceived it definitely as the eternal 
 fact of the universe ; and who affirmed positively all 
 their lives, "nirvdna is," striving with all their might 
 to reach it, and to help other men to do the same, 
 by all the love and sacrifice they could devote? I am 
 persuaded that this all-reconciling home — whose 
 depths, filled with the saints of innumerable ages, 
 invited all hearts to the fulfilment of their best desire — 
 better deserves the name of deity than of nonentity ; 
 of Life than of "the Void." Grant the passivity of 
 the Oriental ideal ; yet ideal it is, or it could never 
 have roused Oriental passivity to such a movement as 
 Buddhism. Ample testimony to the truth that man 
 loves to affirm more than to deny ; that in some form 
 he has ever kept his intuition of God.^ 
 
 1 Hints of this have not wholly failed to strike such writers as Hardwick, who, though 
 seeking for contrasts with what he regards as revelations peculiar to Christianity, admits 
 that northern Buddhism " has retained the lingering idea of some great Being, superior to 
 the highest created entities and the source of ultimate felicity. The very Buddha who 
 persisted in ignoring the Creator was sometimes raised to this dignity, while Nirvdna itself 
 was changed by popular imagination into a paradise." And Miiller, a more impartial 
 scholar, who believes that " the feeling of dependence, which is the life-spring of religion, 
 was completely numbed in the early Buddhist metaphysicians," grants that it " returned 
 with increased warmth." Hardwick, II, 95. MuUer's Cki^s, I. 284. 
 
n. 
 
 NIRVANA. 
 
NIRVANA. 
 
 TT 7"E may illustrate by this term the practical im- 
 
 '* possibility of pure negation. Etymology 
 at least fails to bear out the confident assurances positive 
 of Burnouf, Koeppen, Weber, and others, that ^^^' 
 its "extinction of the lamp of existence "means absolute 
 annihilation. Nirvana is from mr, separation from, 
 and vd, wind.^ The simplest and most natural mean-' 
 ing seems to be, not "blown out," but "no more wav- 
 ing," as from presence of wind, no more restlessness 
 and change. It is familiar to Brahmanical literature 
 as synonymous with words signifying release, emanci- 
 pation, the highest good.^ It is similarly defined by 
 the intense longings of devotees, who seek nirvana as 
 " the further shore ; " " the port beyond the ocean of 
 pain ; " " the medicine that cures all disease ; " " the 
 water that quenches all thirst ; " " complete fruition and 
 salvation ; " " the city reached by the path of universal 
 knowledge, blessedness, peace."' Every word that 
 can mean beatitude as a positive state comes to hand 
 
 1 Burnouf 's Sansk. Did. 
 
 2 Miiller, Chips, I. 282. He gives the word the- meaning blown (nU, following Hindu 
 lexicographers. Yet he does not find it used in the>sen5e of annihilation in the older parts 
 of the Buddhist scriptures. IiUrod. to Dhammapada, Colebrooke defines it as " profound 
 calm." Essays^ I. 402. 
 
 s Koeppen, I. 304; Burnouf, 442.' 
 
620 BUDDHISM. 
 
 in description of this apparent negation. Figurative 
 as they are, these expressions imply that what they 
 describe was an object of supreme desire. It has 
 inspired the imagination ; it has allured the affections ; 
 it has aroused the moral sense ; it has stimulated to 
 incessant watch over the passions. It has translated 
 itself into psalms ; it has flowed into mythology ; it 
 has planted, and builded, and civilized, in missions 
 that are miracles of zeal and toil. Philosophical 
 treatises distinctly aver that, " to him who attains it, 
 nirvdna exists." ^ Indubitably so, we should say, or 
 why should he sreh to attain it? Why are millions 
 travelling its " paths," that shine with the hope of 
 salvation? 
 
 But we can go back to more positive testimony. 
 Testimony The Dhammufada , or "Path of Virtue," is 
 ^*° perhaps the oldest record of Buddhist faith.* 
 pada. As such it is bclievcd to have come to the 
 hands of Buddhaghosha, a Brahman convert of great 
 learning, in the fifth century, in Ceylon. In his trans- 
 lation of the oldest commentaries on the law, out of 
 Singhalese into Pali, its sentences are referred directly 
 to Gotama Buddha himself; and the circumstances 
 under which they were uttered given in detail. They 
 formed part of an ancient collection, transmitted, it was 
 believed, by the son of the great Buddhist king, Asoka, 
 after being established as genuine by the famous coun- 
 cil held (B.C. 246) at Pataliputra. They are referred 
 to in the monumental inscriptions left by that monarch, 
 the most trustworthy data in Hindu history. The 
 style is plain and direct, the morality free from tech- 
 
 * Mtlinda Praitut, quoted by Muller, Chip, I. 289. 
 
 " D'Alwis (p. 29) regards it as a collection of sentences from the Pitakas, which are 
 compilations) in the main (page iz-'iS), of Gotama's discourses, by his disciples. 
 
NIRVANA. 621 
 
 nical or mythological accretions ; and the whole work 
 bears marks of having originated in the early ages of 
 the faith. It is not possible to assign its first appear- 
 ance in a written form to a later period than the first 
 century b.c.i The testimony of this best of witnesses 
 to the substance of primitive Buddhism establishes the 
 fact that nirvdna, far from meaning annihilation in an 
 absolute sense, was positive exaltation and blessed- 
 ness, expected to follow upon deliverance from special 
 forms and embodiments, through detachment from the 
 khandas, or elements of individuality, regarded as 
 grounds of successive births (^sansdra), from grief, 
 impurity, disease, selfishness, passion, sin ; in other 
 words, a reality, which nothing in all this fateful 
 sequence of transmigrative existence could express ; 
 an open door of freedom and release, into unknown 
 and unimagined good ; if a dream, certainly not a 
 dream of death, but of escape from death. 
 
 " Patience is the highest nirvdna : this the word of the 
 Buddhas." 
 
 " They who are of a thoughtful mind, constant, ever putting 
 forth a wise energy, attain this, the highest bliss." 
 
 " Health is utmost gain ; content, the best wealth ; trust, the best 
 friend ; nirvdna, the highest joy." , 
 
 " Tear away attachments (self-love) from thy being, as an autumn 
 lotus with thy hand ; and make thy way open to nirvdna, to rest." 
 
 " Hunger is the worst disease ; embodiment, the greatest pain ; 
 to know this is nirvdna, the highest joy." 
 
 " He who has thoughtfulness and insight dwells near to nirvdna" 
 
 1 This is the opinion of Dr. Weber, who has given a careful version of the work in 
 German {Ztsck. d. D- M. G; i860), compiled from the Pali text of three manuscripts, 
 aided by the commentary of Buddhaghosha. He attaches great value to the tradition of its 
 extreme antiquity : and regards it as " in the highest degree probable that a large portion 
 of these strophes are either verbally Gotama's, or contain his precepts put into metrical 
 form by his disciples." Similar views as to the date of the work are expressed byMiillerin 
 the introduction to his translation (1870), which I am glad to be able to compare with 
 Weber's before printing the extracts made from the latter, in preparing the present volume. 
 See also Lassen, IV. 283. 
 
622 BUDDHISM. 
 
 " If like a trumpet when it is broken, thou art not roused [to 
 ispeech], thou art near nirv&na : anger is not known in thee [or, 
 there is no noisy clamor to thee]." 
 
 "The true sage is he who knows his former abodes, who sees 
 heaven and hell, who has reached the end of births, and is perfect 
 in wisdom." 
 
 " He who pays homage to such as have found deliverance, and 
 know no fear, his merit cannot be measured." 
 
 "They who have given up attachments, and rejoice without 
 clinging to any thing, whose frailties have been conquered, and who 
 are full of light, are free, even in this world." 
 
 " He who has deep insight and wisdom, who knows the right 
 way and the wrong, he who has attained the highest goal, him call 
 I a Brahmana." 
 
 " He who has given up pleasure and pain, indifferent to both, who 
 is without ground {or germ) for new birth, who has overcome all 
 worlds, him call I a Brahmana." 
 
 " I have conquered all, I know all, in all conditions of life I am 
 free from taint ; I have left all, and through destruction of thirst I 
 am free : having learned myself, whom shall I teach ? " 
 
 " Reflection is the path of immortality : they who reflect do not 
 die." ' 
 
 Nirvana is "the uncreated, the ineffable, the im- 
 mortal ; " " the place of repose and bliss, where embodi- 
 ments cease ;" "the other shore, beyond the power of 
 death, where one is thoughtful, guileless, free from 
 doubt and from all desires, and content.'"' The 
 
 • Dhammapada, w. 184^3, 204, 285, 203, 372, 134, 423, 195, 196, 89, 403, 418, 353, 21. 
 
 ' Ibid., 383, 218, 21, 374, 114, 368, 423, 8s, 86, 384, 414. D'Alwis .translates these 
 phrases somewhat diflferently from Miiller and Weber, in accordance with his belief that 
 nirvana is nonentity. The differepce consists in turns of expression, which are more capa- 
 ble of negative meaning, yet without really requiring it. For " immortality " he substitutes 
 nonliability to death, as meaning escape from such liability into nothingness ; for " place " he 
 reads lot or state^ as more suitable to the metaphorical intention of the Pali term. It is not 
 very apparent how (v. 221) the forsaking of rupa and n^jna, " body and soul " (/i^., form and 
 name), involves the " distinct denial of a soul," in any absolute sense. Mr. D'Alwis's care- 
 ful enumeration of forty-six words descriptive of nirvana is of great value ; but their literal 
 meaning, even as he gives it, fails to convince me of the justice of his conclusion. Here 
 are some of them: "To shine;" " island, whence lot or state, of safety;" "destruction 
 of desire ; " " freedom from annoy ; " " the dreadless [state] ; " " the endless ; " " protec- 
 tion ; " " sleep ; " " the path ; " " the other shore." To some a negative sense is ascribed 
 by what seems to be a materialistic assumption. Thus " the formless " is further defined as 
 
NIRVANA. 623 
 
 Dhammapada is full of exhortations to detachment 
 from perishable things, and to the taming of passions 
 and selfish desires, as well as to practical goodness, 
 in order to attain its joy and peace and liberty. 
 
 It is observable that nirvdna is always coupled with 
 the active experiences of virtues, and powers Relations of 
 over sense. the word. 
 
 " He who has entered the void (or, who knows the uncreated), 
 and has renounced all desires.'' 
 
 " He who has attained the end, and who is fearless, having de- 
 molished the thorns of existence." ' 
 
 To similar effect is a passage from the Vinaya, 
 which D'Alwis (p. 35) translates thus: — 
 
 " He who has cut off the roots has made himself nonentity, and 
 has acquired the nature of freedom from regeneration." 
 
 The same critic quotes this passage also as proving 
 nirvdna to be pure negation : — 
 
 " In nirvina, of which the mind, alone can form a conception, 
 which the eye cannot see, which is endless and every way glorious, 
 there is neither earth, water, fire, nor air, small nor great, good 
 nor evil ; and vijnSnsi (consciousness) is extinguished." 
 
 It is obvious that extinction and negation are here 
 conceived in a sense not inconsistent with invisible spir- 
 itual life, real enough to be " endless ^and glorious." 
 
 " that which is invisible to the senses, — a noneitiUy ;'''* "not well brought together*' as 
 " nOTi^eing ; " and " the unseen " as " that which has no example and no existence ; " a 
 synonymy which the authority of the most capable scholar could not induce us to accept. 
 Nirvana is promised in tkis\\i<i\ whence Mr. D'Alwis infers that there must have been an 
 imperfect form of nirvana. The promise would seem at least as competent to prove that 
 true nirvSna was believed to be consistent with life. The use of phrases implying a posi- 
 tive state he explains by the necessity of metaphorical language for all deiinition. But 
 unfortunately the metaphors do not even suggest nonentity. Childers also {Notes on 
 Dhammap., Journ. R. A. 6"., 1871) argues that there were two forms of nirv^Tia, a par- 
 tial and a complete ; and that the word is used in both these senses : which may be quite 
 true, yet does not maJce it probable that the complete form was something diametrically 
 contrary, in its very essence, to the incomplete. 
 1 yjid., 97, 351. 
 
624 BUDDHISM. 
 
 We should naturally expect a greater emphasis on 
 Other testi- the negative side, a deeper sense of the perish- 
 monies. ablencss of forms, in the beginning of this 
 great protest against them, than when later familiarity 
 with the thought should bring in the natural longing 
 for positive issues of life, and results of moral en- 
 deavor. It is therefore especially significant that 
 even in this earliest record of Buddhism we find such 
 intense aspiration after reality through whatsoever 
 sacrifice of phenomenal existence. Later stages of 
 the faith are believed to show nirvana still more defi- 
 nitely as a positive state. The " Lotus of the Good 
 Law " tells of saints who have not only entered it in 
 the present life, but reappeared in after ages to listen 
 to the preaching of its tidings ; ^ and the legends rep- 
 resent the Buddha himself as rejoicing at having 
 attained this extinction of desire, and afterwards 
 travelling from place to place, needing no other food 
 than " the fruition of nirvana." ^ In his youth he says : 
 " When I have reached supreme wisdom, I will assem- 
 ble all living beings, and show them the fath of im- 
 mortality ; withdrawing them from the ocean of 
 creation, I will establish them in patience, and give 
 them the pure eye of the law." ^ And before his 
 death, he promises to reveal to his followers his shin- 
 ing form, after having passed from them into final 
 beatitude.* Even centuries afterwards, he is still 
 looked to as worker of miracles, and addressed as 
 beholder and guide of human affairs. St. Hilaire's 
 explanation, that there are two forms of nirvana, a 
 complete and an incomplete, does not meet these 
 
 ' Lotus, ch. xi. See also the legend of Kisyapa, Journ. R. A. S., XX. 203. 
 " Hardy, Manual., pp. 179-182. MuUer, Chip, I. 233. The meaning of these refer- 
 ences, however, does not seem to be very c;lear. 
 
 ' St. Hilaire, p. 11. « Lotw, ch. x. 
 
NIRVANA. 625 
 
 instances, where the supreme end of sainthood is 
 represented as positive and active existence. 
 
 " In nirvana" [with the northern Buddhists] , sa3's 
 Bastian, " is no longer either birth or death : only the 
 essence of life remains. Nirvana is nowhere (in no 
 special place), only because it is all-embracing and 
 all-pervading."^ "Far from being annihilation, as 
 such, it is in fact annihilation of delusion, and therefore 
 the real itself." ^ Baur gives a similar interpretation : 
 " Nirvana is the purely immaterial and absolute ; the 
 state to which the soul attains, when it has freed 
 itself from all relation to material forms." ^ 
 
 " No one," says Bigandet, of the Burmese, " openly 
 admits in practice that neibban and annihilation are 
 synonymous terms : the perfected being is believed to 
 retain his individuality, but is merged, as it were, in 
 the abstract truth, in which he lives and rests for ever." 
 The same writer, however, thinks that annihilation is 
 plainly taught in the philosophical works.* 
 
 Sangermano gives an account of the laws of 
 Gotama, drawn up by a Burmese talapoin in 1763, 
 in which nirvana is defined as " a state exempt from 
 birth, old age, sickness, and death. Nothing can give 
 an idea of it ; but exemption from these and a perfect 
 security are the things in which it consists."^ 
 
 "The Siamese," says Alabaster," " always refer to 
 nirvdna as to something existing. It is a place of 
 comfort, where there is no care." " Lovely is the 
 glorious realm of nirvdna, the jewelled realm of 
 happiness." But the ordinary Siamese do not trouble 
 
 1 Reisen in ChiTta, p. 490. He mentions also works which specify two kinds of nirvana. 
 
 2 Die Weltauffassting der Buddhisten (Berlin, 1870), p. 22. 
 
 8 Die Christliche Gnosis, p. 58. * Bigandet, p. 321. 
 
 » Descrift. of the Burm- Emp., p. 80. « IVheel of the Law, p- 165 
 
 40 
 
626 
 
 BUDDHISM. 
 
 themselves about it: they believe virtue will be re- 
 warded by going to heaven.^ 
 
 Chinese works describe this "condition in which 
 is neither birth nor death." "Nirv&na is not like the 
 pitcher not yet made, nor like the pitcher's nothingness 
 when it is broken; nor like the hair of a tortoise, 
 something imaginary. It is nothingness defined as 
 absence of something different from itself; of covet- 
 ousness, aversion, delusion."^ The Chinese Budd- 
 hists translate nirvana by a word that means absolute 
 stillness and rest? The Thibetans all interpret it as 
 " emancipation." * 
 
 Gotama is recorded in the Lalitavistara to have 
 learned from a Brahman the way to " the place where 
 there are neither ideas nor the absence of ideas ; " 
 and the Brahmanical descriptions of " deliverance " 
 deal in similar negations of all possible forms of cog- 
 nition. In view of all this, it is but reasonable to 
 believe that we have, as the ideal of this Buddhist 
 extinction, more or less clearly conceived, a complete 
 absorption into freedom, from which all definite form 
 was excluded more rigidly than in the Brahmanical, 
 as possibility of bondage to death ; a state of abso- 
 lute security from renewal of a life subject to fatal 
 changes ; an escape from the limitations of conscious- 
 ness and the illusions of separate existence into that 
 ineffable life in the eternal, which to mystic faith in all 
 ages waits beyond such death.^ It is certain that " ex- 
 tinction'' and "absorption" were left equally undefined 
 in Hindu faith, and the distinction between them may 
 have consisted in an intenser sense of the facts of 
 
 • Wheel of the Law, T=£xmn. ' Beal, CaieTia of Buddhist Scriptures^ p. 174. 
 
 8 Neumanni Catechism of the Shatnans, p. 40. * Burnouf, p. ig. 
 
 " Franck, Etudes Oriefitates, p. 49. 
 
NIRVANA. 627 
 
 sorrow, pain, and death on the part of the Buddhists 
 than of the Brahmans ; prompting them to stronger 
 emphasis on the negative aspect of deliverance from 
 these woes, on the hope that these should be no more, 
 and at the same time to more earnest philanthropy 
 in proclaiming the deliverance to mankind. 
 
 What «?>»«««, his divine relief, was, Gotama himself 
 does not seem to have attempted to explain.^ How 
 was it possible, save in the general way of absolute 
 trust in its all-sufficiency, as shown in the sentences 
 of the Dhammapada? And all the negations of his 
 speculative followers do but serve to point us back to 
 some deeper sense of infinite reality which no forms 
 could satisfy and no terms define. It is but the old 
 inevitable cry of renunciation, and its answering 
 prophecy and release. 
 
 " Stop the stream valiantly, drive away the desires, O Brahmana ! 
 When you have understood the destruction of all that was made, 
 you will understand that which was not made." ^ 
 
 The steps by which, in later developments of the 
 contemplative life, nirvdna was to be attained. Testimony 
 indicate that these negations were very far °nal.° ^ 
 from being conceived in an absolute sense. In his 
 spiritual progress, the ascetic passes through the four 
 dhydnas, or " powers of abstraction," which correspond 
 with the gnosis of the Greeks, and may be defined 
 somewhat as follows : (i) satisfaction in processes of 
 reasoning; (2) withdrawal from these into the peace 
 and joy of contemplation ; (3) gradual release from def- 
 inite forms of self-consciousness and from limitations of 
 memory, through indifference to them, into the infinite 
 illuminating power of the faculties, still accompanied 
 
 1 St Hilaire, p. 132. ^ Dhammapada^ t. 383. 
 
628 BUDDHISM. 
 
 by enjoyment of the soul's relations to the senses; 
 (4) perfect fulfilment of these energies, with escape 
 from all dependence on the senses. — So far, we have 
 steps in the " world of forms." After these follow the 
 " formless worlds," through which the ecstatic con- 
 templation of the saint leads him upward, in succes- 
 sion : (i) The infinity of space ; (2) of intelligence ; 
 (3) non-existence; (4) non-existence of ideas, and 
 the nothingness even of that fact; (5) the hindrance; 
 (6) " nirvana." ^ Impossible as it is to follow Orien- 
 tal reverie through these regions of its flight, it is yet 
 certain that the saint passes through " nonentity " again 
 and again, yet is in a state of contemplation still. 
 What can the "extinction" be to which such "non- 
 existence" can lead? The shadowy word-play can 
 prove only that entity and nonentity had no such 
 strictness of meaning in this contemplative devotion 
 as they have in the analytic mind of the West. 
 
 The endless repetitions and recurrences of numbers 
 „ . , in Buddhist mythology are not to be taken in 
 
 Meaning of '* *-'*' 
 
 these stages a literal sense : they indicate simply the per- 
 °™'™'petual wt'wo^oMe by which the dreamer's imagi- 
 nation is limited, and to which it perpetually returns. 
 So these successive stages in the path of liberation, 
 ever returning to some new formula of the same 
 constant idea of " nonentity," and again and again 
 attempting closer approximation to the statement of it, 
 can hardly be supposed to indicate real processes of 
 transition, a definite order and series of experiences. 
 They seem to mean that the dreamer's soul was for 
 ever haunted by boundless discontent with all defi- 
 nite forms under which life could present itself to 
 
 ' For these stages, see account given in Koeppen, I. 587-592. Bumouf 's Lotus, 8i4, 
 543, S24. St. HUaire (p. 158) omits the fifth stage. 
 
NIRVANA. 629 
 
 minds without practical knowledge of the laws of 
 nature, in their dealing with hereditary belief in end- 
 less transmigration and "bonds of action." They 
 mean the inevitable, ever-recurring aspiration for 
 release from this sad cadence which marred every 
 utterance of the past, present, or future. In everyone 
 of these stages, in the last as well as the first, in the 
 innermost ultimate forms to which the " nothingness " of 
 ideas and of worlds could be traced, there still remained 
 the soul itself: contemplation was still the fact of 
 facts ; and " deliverance " was a living hope till it 
 became a full fruition. 
 
 But we have other evidence to the same eflfect. 
 The nearly perfect saint, on reaching " the 
 
 •> '^ _ ° Return from 
 
 hindrance," may be impelled by his own the verge of 
 nobler desires — then more than ever active 
 and inspired, as it would seem, with the love of life's 
 uses and opportunities — to return into new paths of 
 discipline ; and this after passing through so many 
 forms of " nonentity " ! Beyond him are other classes 
 of saints, some of whom have delivered themselves 
 from the " bonds of existence," and others have 
 freed multitudes of their fellow-men. Yet whoever 
 has reached the brink of fruition can, if he will, 
 forego it for the benefit of mankind, and pass again 
 through the sorrowful bondage with his brethren, to 
 share with them the sure release. Now these Bod- 
 hisattvas (essential saints), thus able, at their own 
 will, did they but choose to exert it, to pass into ex- 
 tinction at a step, after all these stages, of approximate 
 " nonentity," are found possessed of what qualities ? 
 " Morality, contemplation, wisdom, patience, com- 
 passion, energy!"^ If this is an approach to"ex- 
 
 • Koeppen, I. 424. These are the " piramitfe," or six " transcendent virtues." 
 
630 BUDDHISM. 
 
 tinction," it is manifest that the word must take quite 
 other than its current meaning in our modern speech. 
 Does it not refer us rather, once more, to the " beati- 
 tude " of the old Christian mystics, who loved to say, 
 " In nothingness is all " ? 
 
 The intense, unqualified language of contemplative 
 Intelligence pi^ty, which kuows no shades of degree or 
 of thearhat. ]jjjjj^ jgscribes the ar^fl^ (advanced saint) as 
 one " whose virtues have lifted him above all the 
 worlds ; " as " looking over, at death, into nirvana, 
 free from all attachment ; regarding gold and dust as 
 alike ; knowing no difference of great and small ; 
 turned away from existence, from honor, pleasure, 
 gain, yet worshipped and blessed by all divine 
 beings." 1 How does he indicate that the " lamp of 
 existence and intelligence " is about to be " extin- 
 guished," after all these preparatory steps to that end? 
 By the ebbing away of the last waves of dying 
 mind? The very opposite. He is " acquainted with 
 all science, and possessed of perfect insight." Here 
 are his gifts. The science of transformations, or 
 occult powers ; the divine eye, beholding all beings 
 and worlds at a glance ; the divine ear, hearing all 
 sounds in all worlds ; knowledge of the thoughts of 
 all creatures ; remembrance of all earlier forms of 
 existence ; foresight of all future births. ^ And these 
 powers are acquired by the combination of " indifier- 
 ence with intense attention ! " ^ All this may be a 
 child's dream of omnipotence, or a glimpse of man's 
 infinite relations, or a hyperbole of man-worship 
 which only Oriental habits of thought can explain. 
 But it cannot be believed that a path which culminated 
 in this could have been believed to lead on, with o^e 
 
 > Hardy, Mamtal, p. 38 ; Koeppen, I. 406. ' Ibid. ' Lotus, 819. 
 
NIRVANA. 631 
 
 stef more, into the nirvdna of Burnouf and St. 
 Hilaire. 
 
 In fine, I must say that Bunsen seems to me to come 
 much nearer the satisfactory solution of the ^^^j^^,^. 
 ideal goal of Buddhist faith , when he calls nir- pressiwe 
 vana"/;2warrf^eace," and even maintains that no ^°° ' 
 thought can be farther from it than that of annihilation 
 of being, as we should understand this. The author 
 of the " Catena of Buddhist Scriptures " admits that 
 "the idea of nirvana as annihilation must be confined 
 to one period in the history of the system, during 
 which scholastic refinement sought to define the con- 
 dition of the Infinite." The schools have certainly 
 pursued the negation of forms, qualities, experiences, 
 through every path accessible to thought ; a boundless 
 dissatisfaction with their limits, often reaching out 
 into mere gratification of the logical faculty in this 
 direction by giving it free play to net the worlds 
 through and through with its threads and webs of 
 denial. Yet no religious mythology has so peopled 
 them with swarming life, nor piled them in such 
 endless series through infinite space. The earliest 
 nirvdna is the " place of the freed soul : " the latest is 
 the "paradise of imagination." 
 
 It is plain that our language cannot convey to us 
 the actual sense of the conception, as it shone in the 
 Oriental mind : a divine antidote, compensation, refuge, 
 release ; the redemption from those oppressive dreams 
 of human destiny, which more energetic and practical 
 races have escaped. This, however, is to me quite 
 certain. The beatific crowning vision, which lay 
 spread before the Buddhist like a waveless sea, was 
 
 . ^ God in History^ p. 348 A very appreciative view of Buddhism is also given in: 
 Alger's Hut. 0/ the Dact. 0/ Put. Life (Part II. ch. vi.). 
 
632 BUDDHISM. 
 
 positive, not negative. The devotee might liken nir- 
 vana to the "blowing out of a lamp," or insist on its 
 vacuity and its pure nullity ever so strongly. His 
 very delight in the process of freeing himself from 
 recognizing the reality of conceptions which imposed 
 the " bonds of action and transmigration " -was itself a 
 reality, and refilled every vacuum which he created by 
 that process in the very instant of its creation. It is 
 but a little way that metaphysical terms can go towards 
 fathoming the experience or stating the necessities of 
 the spirit. Not " extinction," not even a dreamless 
 " rest," can define a highest good, that had only to be 
 presented to millions to be hailed and accepted. For- 
 ever true is it that men do not spend their lives in 
 preaching, laboring, proselyting, in love and sacrifice, 
 — in behalf of what has no positive substantial being 
 for them to lay hold on. Despair of existence and 
 longing for torpidity cannot inspire them with the love 
 of uses and the ardor to help and deliver mankind. 
 That for which they invent a name, to be glorified, 
 even as it is elsewhere a praise to glorify the name of 
 God, must not be thought "the horrible faith that wor- 
 ships nonentity." ^ Let us do better justice to a spir- 
 itual phase, which modern habits of thought are but 
 too likely to misjudge. 
 
 But why this discontent with the conditions of exislr 
 Outward ence, this rejection of all its relations, this 
 Buddtot^ insistence on misery as universal? It is easy 
 negation, to see what made the Hindu conception of life 
 a burden. Transmigration, that endless monotone ; 
 
 1 St. Hilaire, Buddha et sa Relig., p. 140. It must appear singular, on this hypothesis, 
 that such elaborate corapends as the Pratimoksha (Ritual of Chinese Buddhists, 
 S. A. S; vol. xix.) should not have one word expressive of the blessings of being 
 annihilated. 
 
NIRVANA. 633 
 
 transmission of moral consequence through an inter- 
 minable future, not lighted by the hopes that social 
 progress inspires ; caste and superstition, overshadow- 
 ing all thought, motive, and labor, dominating this 
 life and the future ; the barbarities of law and of sac- 
 rifice, cheapening the estimate of life ; absence of 
 personal liberty and social opportunity ; no scientific 
 comprehension of those benignities of natural law, 
 which alleviate the common lot of disease, decay, and 
 death ; depressing languors of a tropical climate ; its 
 incidents of cheap food and rapidly multiplying popu- 
 lation, and the results in enormous rents and interest 
 rates, and the lowest possible wages ; crises of famine ; 
 extremes of social condition ; the accumulated social 
 oppression and misery that weighed upon the life of 
 India for centuries, — these surely were adequate out- 
 ward motive for the mighty protest of Buddhism against 
 the conditions of human existence. It was the in- 
 stinctive reaction of the soul against these issues of 
 ignorance, inactivity, and wrong ; its unconscious cry 
 for science ; its appeal to the ideal, the infinite, the 
 inconceivable even, for the liberty denied it in every 
 attainable form of actual life. It was, further, the 
 nemesis of an inveterate contempt for things visible 
 and concrete ; the old Brahmanical notion of their 
 unreality brought to its ultimate terms ; driving man's 
 ideals of contemplation from a world they had no 
 power nor will to use ; pronouncing a world on these 
 conditions to be, as a form of cognition, thoroughly 
 null and void ; yet only to reinstate it in a new form ; 
 to justify it on another plane ; to make it real as a 
 field of uses, through the power of humane sentiment 
 and the might of moral purpose. The unity of all 
 
634 BUDDHISM. 
 
 being, which had bcfore«meant the common insignifi- 
 cance of each and all, now meant the one appeal that 
 came to every heart from a universal sorrow and 
 need. What contemplation had to surrender, pity 
 saved. 
 
 This reaction from overwhelming social misery to 
 . a spirit of humanity, to pity, forgiveness, and 
 moral consecration, has a counterpart six 
 centuries afterwards in the birth of Christianity, and 
 its call to brotherhood amidst the political and spiritual 
 miseries of the Roman Empire. Other points of rela- 
 tion are no less impressive. Both religions had their 
 rejection of " this world," turning from hopeless con- 
 ditions (as they seemed) to an invisible ideal refuge, 
 "the other shore." In Christianity the call to forsake 
 all and follow the Master grew into an asceticism as 
 thorough as the Buddhist. As a goal of human 
 destiny, nirvana in its utmost supposed negation is 
 not the saddest conceivable. Annihilation is a bless- 
 ing compared with everlasting penalties and pains ; 
 and the " atheism " of Buddhism, were it as abso- 
 lute as it has been supposed, would be piety com- 
 pared with the worship of a God who could inflict 
 them. 
 
 As refuge from the vanities and miseries that in 
 all ages have turned so much of human life into 
 weariness and utter failure, whirling it away like 
 chaff, all great religions have pointed to some form 
 of spiritual rest. Nor can I think the nirvana of 
 the compassionate Buddha all unrelated to that in- 
 ward calm, that divine release, which the voice of a 
 noble woman has made so real and so genial for 
 all of us : — 
 
NIRVANA. 635 
 
 " O earth so full of dreary noises, 
 O men with wailing in your voices, 
 O delv&d gold the wailers heap, 
 O strife, O curse that o'er it fall ! — 
 God makes a silence through you all ; 
 He giveth his beloved sleep." 
 
 Pourna, the son of a freedman, become a disciple 
 of Buddha, determines to convert a wild tribe The affirma- 
 to the law of peace and love. Buddha, having''™- 
 suggested to him the perils in this enterprise, and 
 finding him prepared to meet them in the spirit of 
 absolute self-sacrifice, dismisses him with these words : 
 "It is well, Pourna, thou art worthy of this work. 
 Go then ; having delivered thyself, deliver others ; 
 having reached the other shore, bring others thither ; 
 arrived at complete nirvdna, cause others to arrive 
 there like thyself."'^ 
 
 No dreamless sleep in this ideal of duty ; but per- 
 petual return from the brink of fruition to the sacrifice 
 and service, whereof none can see the completion; 
 constant obedience to the impulse to teach and share 
 and save, through worlds on worlds. Wearisome it 
 may be to think, even, of this eternal sense of tasks 
 unaccomplished, of this endless didactic function, this 
 unremitting manipulation of the moral element in all 
 mankind ; but it is at least vital and positive, and fills 
 immortality with meaning and demand. It gives, I 
 think, adequate answer, in its very definition, to the 
 judgment of Miiller, that nirvdna, in Buddha's mind, 
 "if not annihilation, was yet nothing but metaphysical 
 selfishness ; a relapse into that being which is nothing 
 but itself." 2 
 
 > St. Hil^e, p. 97. ' Chip, &c., I. 2S7. 
 
636 BUDDHISM. 
 
 And even the dAyanas — which, like the "gnosis" of 
 certain Christian heretical sects, claim to be paths for 
 the liberation of the soul through interior vision — 
 become, in the light of this practical earnestness and 
 ardor, enduring gates, not into " nonentity," but into 
 wisdom ; though it be of the Oriental, not of the Saxon 
 nor the Hebrew kind. 
 
III. 
 
 ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 
 
 TT TE pass from the speculative to the practical 
 
 * " aspect of Buddhism. 
 
 "The Four Supreme Truths are Pain, the Cause 
 of Pain, the Extinction of Pain, and the Way -phe tragedy 
 to the Extinction of Pain.''^ To "turn the "'' '■^"'• 
 wheel of these four truths " is the sum of virtue and 
 power, of the Buddha's word and work.^ 
 
 " Birth is pain ; sickness, sorrow, death, are pain ; union with 
 the hated, separation from the loved, not to reach what one desires, 
 all that malces perception, is pain ; the passing away of all that is 
 born is pain." ^ 
 
 Pain the very substance of life ! Absolute renun- 
 ciation of attachment (^updddna) to forms of exist- 
 ence, the only path of release ! Release itself 
 definable by no definite form of human joy I Was 
 not the salvation sadder than the doom from which 
 it freed? Had not this Hindu dream-work ended 
 logically in practical despair? It has seemed so to 
 most observation from Christian points of view. But 
 let us look further. 
 
 1 Bumouf, p. 629. 
 
 2 This phrase was probably used in contrast to the " wheel of transmigration," whose 
 endless revolution of births the counter-movement of the law of Buddha should arrest. 
 Leon Feer in jfmrn. Asiat. for 1870, p. 438. 
 
 * Ibid. (p. 367), from Dharmasakramiras, So Wuttke, II. 537, 
 
640 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Buddhism has well been called the most tragical 
 of human faiths. It accepted the brooding sense of 
 change and death, into which science and social en- 
 ergy had not yet entered, to give foothold for ideals 
 of progress. It would not evade the facts. Is the 
 world then nought ? Is " the body like foam ; sense a 
 bubble ; consciousness a circle on a stream ; action 
 the shadow that falls on it ; knowledge the play of 
 illusions"? Let us accept the consequences of that 
 truth, though all the old landmarks of faith be swept 
 away, and the gods above, with their heavens, turn to 
 mortalities like the rest. Transmigration shall go to 
 the tests of moral order, and end in a truth deeper 
 than itself. That test at least shall abide, though the 
 interests of personality disappear, and not a chink be 
 left open for freedom. If there is no smile in the uni- 
 verse, let us make the most of the frown, nor fear but 
 good ending shall come of that; nay, turn the frown 
 itself into a dream, and so overcome the world. 
 
 This is tragedy ; and it is heroism also, which is 
 an essential part of tragedy. Out of an unfathomable 
 loss, an absolute renunciation, to win not stoical resig- 
 nation only, but a purpose that should fill life with 
 present good, and so disprove the premise of despair ! 
 
 " Let us live happily then, not hating those who hate us : let us 
 dwell free from hatred among men who hate." 
 
 " Let us live happily, free from greed among the greedy." 
 
 " Let us live happily, though we call nothing our own. We 
 shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness." 
 
 " He who has given up both victory and defeat, — he, the con- 
 tented, is happy." 
 
 " He who applies himself to the doctrine of Buddha brightens 
 this world, like the moon when free from clouds." ' 
 
 * Dhammap^y w. 197-301, 382. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 64I 
 
 But life meant more than happiness. It was not 
 enough for the Buddhist to emancipate himself from 
 pain. The universal doom of sorrow must touch his 
 heart with a sympathy as universal. He could not 
 rest till he had taught the whole world the secret of 
 reconciliation with destiny. Suflering, in that early 
 day also, led out into a gospel of universal love. 
 And so the substance of what seemed lost — of per- 
 sonality, of freedom, of faith — was, in one sense at 
 least, saved. 
 
 For the Buddha came, as all Buddhas had come, 
 "to save the human race " from -its miseries ; The gospel 
 and Buddhahood itself lay open to every one. °^ '°™- 
 Gotama, it is constantly affirmed, knew but one human 
 nature, and all men as brothers. 
 
 " My law is a law of mercy for all." ' 
 
 "Proclaim it freely to all men: it shall cleanse good and evil, 
 rich and poor alike ; it is large as the spaces of heaven, that ex- 
 clude none."' 
 
 "Whoever loves will feel the longing to save not himself 
 alone, but all others. Let him say to himself: When others are 
 learning the truth, I will rejoice at it, as if it were myself. When 
 others are without it, I will mourn the loss as my own. We shall 
 do much, if we deliver many ; but more, if we cause them to deliver 
 others, and so on without end. So shall the healing word embrace 
 the world, and all who are sunk in the ocean of misery be saved." ' 
 
 All ; for the Buddhist scriptures teach that even 
 in the hells there are " heavens of refuge " for souls 
 that are expiating their sins, in which they are pre- 
 served from catastrophes that befall the world as a 
 whole, at the end of a kalpa-period. There is ever a 
 Brahma in the universe, even though a Buddha be not 
 living in the kalpa ; and " he protects his abode." * 
 
 1 Bumouf, pp. 198, 205-211. * Koeppen, p. 130, from Thibetan collection. 
 
 » Tsing-tu-uen in Wuttke, II. 563. • Mahiimma (Upham), note to ch. xix. 
 
 41 
 
642 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Gotama compares himself to "a father, who rescues 
 his children from a burning house ; " to " a guide who 
 leads a caravan to fortunate lands ; " to " a physician 
 who cures the blind with herbs brought from the holy 
 Himalayas ; " to " the friendly cloud, that brings rain 
 to thirsty plants." ^ 
 
 It was pure democracy.^ The veil of the Hindu 
 Religious temple was rent. Eternal principles brought 
 democracy, dass privilege to judgment ; and the unity of 
 an idea swept the field clear of all exclusive claims. 
 Gotama took his disciples from the lowest, as readily 
 as from the highest class. This prince came down 
 from his throne, and walked with poor and outcast 
 people ; joined the hands which caste forbade to touch 
 each other ; reached out his own to the pariah, who 
 forthwith arose out of the dust, the equal of kings. 
 Did not Sudra and Brahman stand under one destiny, 
 one law of right and wrong, one reward and one 
 penalty? For all one path of duty, — "to live poor 
 and pure." 
 
 " Look closely, and you shall see no difference between the body 
 of a prince and the body of a slave. What is essential is that 
 which may dwell in the most miserable frame, and which the wisest 
 have saluted and honored. The Brahman like the Chandala is 
 born of woman : where see you the difference, that one should be 
 noble and the other vile ? " ^ 
 
 Moral distinctions effaced all others. All tests 
 merged in the test of character : all words found 
 hondr or shame in this ordeal alone.* 
 
 " The talk of ' high and low castes,' of ' the pure Brahmans, 
 the only sons of Brahmi,' is nothing but sound : the four castes 
 are equal." ^ 
 
 * Lottis of ike Good Law^ ch. iii. v. vii. 2 Lassen, II. 440. 
 
 » Bumouf; p. 209, 376. 4 See Dhammaf., ch. jdx. 
 
 * Sutras, quoted in Hardy's Manual, pp. 80, 81. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 643 
 
 " It has been said that it is better to give alms to a Brahman 
 than to a man of mean birth. But Gotama denies this, saying, 
 ' As the husbandman sows in wet weather on the hills, and in dry 
 weather in the valleys, and at all times in the ground that can be 
 at all times watered, so the man who would be blessed in both 
 worlds will give alms to all ; nor do birth and eminence make the 
 right to be honored." ' 
 
 " He is vasala [a low person], who cherishes hatred, torments 
 living beings, steals or kills or commits impurity ; who does riot 
 pay his debts, maltreats aged parents, or fails to support them ; 
 who gives evil counsel, hides truth, does not return hospitality nor 
 render it, exalts himself and debases others, ignores their virtues, 
 is impatient of their success. Not by birth, but by conduct, is one 
 a vasala." 
 
 " A chandala, by his virtues, was born in a Brahma world ; but 
 the Brahman who is vicious is in shame now, and suffers hereafter ; 
 and his caste shall not release him." '^ 
 
 " Ananda, one of the earliest disciples [and a very noble char- 
 acter], sitting once beside a well, asked a drink of water from a 
 Chandala woman, who was drawing from the well. She answered, 
 ' How dost thou ask water of me, an outcast, who may not touch 
 thee without offence ?' Ananda answered : ' My sister, I ask not 
 of thy caste : I ask thee water to drink.' And Buddha took her 
 among his disciples."' 
 
 The equality of the sexes in Buddhism * is ascribed 
 to the influence of Ananda over his master, who is 
 said to have conceded to women the right to enter 
 the religious profession in the twenty-fifth year of his 
 teaching.^ But it is not easy to see how, upon his 
 principles, he could have opposed i^ in the first. No 
 distinction of sex more than of castes could have been 
 valid, for such a gospel.^ The following legend is 
 from the Singhalese Sutras : — 
 
 1 Hardy, p. 80. 
 
 = Sutra, quoted by D'Alwis, pp. 123-125. ' Bumouf, p. 205. 
 
 ♦ With the one exception of the . Buddhaship itself, which is a privilege of males. 
 Christianity, too, allows pure Christhood only to a man. Hardy's Manual, p. 104. 
 5 Bumouf, p. 278 ; Koeppen, I. 104. 
 « Franck, Etudes OrientaUs, p. 39. 
 
644 BUDDHISM. 
 
 " The wives of five hundred princes, whose husbands had 
 become disciples, desired to follow their example ; and the mother 
 of Buddha requested of him their admission. It was clearly seen 
 by him that former Buddhas had admitted women ; but he feared 
 it would give occasion for speaking against his institutions [so his 
 disciples interpreted him], and did not at once accede to the request. 
 Then Praj4pati (his mother) said to them : ' Children, Buddha has 
 thrice refused to " admit us to profession : " let us take it on our- 
 selves, and then go to him ; and he cannot but receive us.' So 
 they cut off their hair, put on the proper robe, and taking earthen 
 bowls journeyed with painful feet to Buddha. And Ananda, seeing 
 them, was filled with sorrow, and again brought their petition to 
 Buddha, who said : ' Are the Buddhas born only for the benefit of 
 men ? Have not Wisakha, and many others, entered the paths ? 
 The entrance is open for women as well as for men.' " ' 
 
 In the " Lotus," the Buddha appears on his holy- 
 mountain, surrounded by muUitudes of deities and 
 disciples ; and among them are six thoiisand female 
 saints. In the legends generally, he admits men 
 and women alike to the bliss of nirvana.^ Although, 
 in one or two of these, a female becomes a male in 
 order to obtain sainthood, such individual case must 
 not be taken as representing the Buddhist idea of 
 equality.^ 
 
 There are rules in the Sutras commanding kindness 
 to servants, and even the emancipation of slaves after 
 they shall have labored a given time.* The Maha- 
 vansa describes a damsel of supernatural beauty, who, 
 though born of the lowest grade of outcasts, was 
 loved and espoused by a prince, and who had acquired 
 her charms by such good works as sweeping and 
 cleaning the floor at the foot of a banyan, for the sake 
 of worship.^ 
 
 » Hardy's Manual, p. 310. > Ibid., 314 ; Lotus, ch. xi. 
 
 » See Bastian, Reiien in Chitiq, &c., p. 586. Beal's Buddhist Pilgrims, ch. xvii. 
 
 * Hardy, 482. 5 MahAv., ch. xxxiu. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 645 
 
 What possibility of exclusive distinctions in a creed 
 which affirms that the most degraded person may one 
 day become ruler of the highest heavens ; that the 
 loftiest king may sink below the least of his subjects ; 
 and that more than thirty saints have transmitted the 
 true doctrine from the time of the Buddha, belonging 
 indifferently to all the castes? 
 
 Like other religious reformers, Gotama appealed to 
 the poor, both from sympathy and tenderness and as 
 finding them more open to his word. 
 
 " Hard it is for a rich man to know the way, easy for a poor one." 
 " A poor man filled his scrip with a handful of flowers ; but the 
 
 rich poured in thousands of bushels in vain." 
 
 " Of all the lamps lighted in his honor, one only, brought by a 
 
 poor woman, lasted through the night." ' 
 
 It would appear from the study of the earliest 
 Buddhist writings, that, while the philosophical teach- 
 ings of the school were delivered, as we should sup- 
 pose them likely to be, in the sacred language of the 
 Brahmans, whenever specially addressed to them, — 
 the people were taught the moral and spifitual sub- 
 stance of the faith of the reformers in their own 
 different dialects, and in a thoroughly popular style. *^ 
 And we may be sure that this gospel had its pente- 
 costal gift of tongues for all the waiting tribes of 
 northern India. This assumption of the people's 
 cause, this direct appeal to their mind and heart, 
 which constitutes an essential part of the prophet's 
 inspiration in all religions. Was probably the main 
 element of Gotama's personal work. Fifteen hun- 
 dred years afterwards Dante wrote his great poem, — 
 
 1 Koeppen, 131. 
 
 » Lassen, II. 492; Duncker, II. 194; Weber's Vorlemngen, 258; llL\i\!,Samk. Texit, 
 II. 
 
646 BUDDHISM. 
 
 wherein day broke on the ecclesiastical slavery of the 
 Middle Ages, as it rose in Gotama's gospel on that of 
 the East, — in the people's own Italian, not in the 
 learned tongue. The preachers whom Buddha sent 
 out to lay open a long sealed life and hope to the 
 people, and to rebuke the indolence and exclusiveness 
 of the clergy, remind us of Wiclif 's itinerant " poor 
 priests," sent out for a like purpose in England when 
 two thousand years had gone by. And this was the 
 burden of their prophecy : — 
 
 "Forsake all evil, bring forth good, master thy own thought: 
 such is Buddha's path to end all pain." ' 
 
 There is an old ballad literature of Buddhism, called 
 the gdihds, — fragments of which appear through- 
 out the great Sutras of the faith.' They are in an 
 obsolete language of mixed dialects, and are believed 
 to be the production of ancient bards, probably suc- 
 cessors of Buddha, who went about singing the new 
 gospel iq these simple strains, which must have come 
 from the heart of the people and gone straightway to 
 it. They" are always quoted with great respect, in 
 later writings.^ So natural and so genial the impulse 
 of Buddhism that it flowed at once into song ; and in 
 the earlier works, like the Lotus and the Lalitavistara, 
 the doctrine first stated in prose is always repeated in 
 poetic form. 
 
 It was an impulse to convert the whole world to a 
 Universal philosophy and a faith that should bring de- 
 love. liverance from the woes of life. The Lotus 
 
 says : " it is much less criminal to do injury to a Budd- 
 ha for ages, than to say an unkind word to a simple 
 
 * Koeppen, I. p. 224; Dhammapaday ch. xiv. 
 
 * See Muir, II. 125. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 6^7 
 
 teacher who is instructing any one in the law." 
 There is no parallel to this missionary zeal, this bound- 
 less pity and love, but in Christianity; nor yet in 
 Christianity in its earliest form ; but only when Paul's 
 protest of ethnic sympathy broke down the wall be- 
 tween Jew and Gentile, bond and free. In Buddha 
 was neither Chinese nor Mongol nor Hindu : neither 
 Brahman nor Chandala, prince nor slave. What 
 injustice we shall do to this immense purpose which 
 swept over all Eastern Asia, if we imagine it was 
 only a gospel of self-annihilation and miserable de- 
 spair, after all, that these apostles had to offer ! Do not 
 tell us that mere love of self-destruction, or despair 
 of life, will make men take the whole world into their 
 hearts, and forsake the meditations in which they place 
 their own salvation, to share their truth with all other 
 men. A similar ardor has been held to be sufficient 
 evidence to prove that the early Christians were sus- 
 tained. by a glorious hope. The Brahmans charge 
 Buddha with saying, " Let all the sins ever committed 
 fall on me, that the world may be saved." ^ 
 
 " As a mother, so long as she lives, watches over her child, her 
 only child, so among all beings let boundless good-will prevail. If 
 a man be of this mind, as long as he is awake, whether standing or 
 walking, or sitting or lying, there comes to pass the saying : ' This 
 place is the abode of holiness.' " " 
 
 The four virtuous inclinations, according to the 
 Siamese Buddhists, are: (i) seeking for others the 
 happiness one desires for himself; (2) compassionate 
 interest in all creatures ; (3) love for, and pleasure 
 in, all beings ; (4) impartiality.^ 
 
 * KumArila^ quoted by Miiller, S. Lii.-, p. 80. 
 
 • Kuddaka^at/ia, in yourn. R. A.S. {1868). 
 3 Alabaster's Wheel of the Law., p. 198. 
 
648 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Buddhism and Christianity originated in ages of 
 despondency, when men, having few recognized civil 
 and political interests, turned naturally to personal 
 sympathy with each other, and the desire of render- 
 ing moral and spiritual help. In both cases, such 
 circumstances tended to produce contempt for the 
 outward world, and a certain subjection to the darker 
 side of life ; an eye for destructive, or saddening 
 destinies ; for the one religion, centering in a sense of 
 transiency in every form of being ; for the other, in 
 a sense of moral evil, of "sin" at the root of every 
 soul. The history of these two great gospels of love 
 has, of course, revealed the effect of such excessive 
 forms of discouragement, on the quality of spiritual 
 methods and promises of deliverance. 
 
 That the Buddhists preached sad tidings instead 
 of glad ones, universal pain and utter self-abnegation, 
 must not cover the fact that they preached liberty and 
 humanity : we must, on the contrary, derive from this 
 latter fact some happier interpretation of what seems 
 enfeebling and even heart-crushing in their theory 
 of life. 
 
 If this belief was indeed so hopeless, then it is only 
 the more creditable to human nature that the sympa- 
 thies should not have been paralyzed by it, but softened 
 and expanded with tenderest pity. Let Christendom 
 ask itself what would be likely to become of those af- 
 fections which it claims to have unfolded and set free, 
 but which its religious education makes so largely 
 dependent on faith in a future heaven, if its confessors 
 should be compelled to accept what they hold to be the 
 nirvdna of Buddhist hope in place of these agreeable 
 expectations. Yet nirvana has given to millions of 
 those heathen souls a peace which " heaven " fails to 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 649 
 
 supply for millions of these Christian ones. The less 
 it promises of happiness, the more it throws love back 
 on its own nobility for support. If "cold speculation," 
 "lifeless negation," "atheism," "nihilism," can stir 
 such vital warmth as Buddhism can show, is it not a 
 stronger evidence of the upward pressure of the soul, 
 than for faith in a personal Father, who watches over 
 all his children, to stir much more? "I do not hesi- 
 tate," says Burnouf, " to translate the Buddhist mditri 
 by the term 'universal love.'"^ 
 
 Yes : we will call it tragedy, and of no mean sort. 
 I know of nothing in the history of religion , . 
 
 o ./ o Inspires re- 
 
 more pathetic ; yet there are few things that spect for 
 should suggest such respect for the soul. This *^^°'^- 
 darkness of a dreamer's thought of change and death, 
 what a pall it spread over life ! " Once," says the 
 legend, " Buddha smiled, and the beam of that smile 
 irradiated the universe ; but instantly came forth a voice 
 saying. It is vain, it cannot stay." Religion indeed 
 has not been wont to recognize pleasure as compatible 
 with sainthood ; and yet the smile is even further from 
 the Buddha than from the Christ. But in this shadow 
 of contemplation what unquenchable light shines ! 
 
 "Than Buddha," says even St. Hilaire, who believes 
 it possible to construct his biography histori- 
 
 ^ o A ./ Testimonies 
 
 cally, and has attempted to do so, "there is, of oppo- 
 with the sole exception of the Christ, no purer ''™'^' 
 nor more touching figure among the founders of re- 
 ligions. His life is without blemish : he is the finished 
 model of the heroism, the self-renunciation, the love, 
 the sweetness he commands."^ Abel Remusat grants 
 that to call Buddhism the Christianity of the East is to 
 give, on the whole, a good idea of the importance of 
 
 1 Lotus, p. 300. ^ Le Bouddha, Introd.^ p. v. 
 
650 BUDDHISM. 
 
 the services rendered by this form of religion to man- 
 kind.^ Cunningham, who loosely styles it "an im- 
 posture," yet defines it as "an enthusiasm and a 
 benevolence " [strange qualities for imposture] ; and 
 describes its "peaceful progress, illuminated by the 
 cheerful faces of the sick, the crippled, and the poor, 
 in monastic hospitals, and by the smiles of travellers 
 reposing in Dharmasalas by the waysides." ^ "The 
 Buddhists," says Wuttke, " are the only heathen peo- 
 ple who have conceived of peacefully converting all 
 mankind to one belief: theirs alone in heathen history 
 is a religion, not of one people, but of humanity." ^ 
 "The ow/y heathen people;" yet, as he allows, appar- 
 ently without noticing what the fact involves, a people 
 far outnumbering any other body of heathen ; and, 
 he might have added, rivalling Christianity in the 
 count of its disciples and its sects. 
 
 This love of all beings, which Buddhism, like 
 Its active Christianity, declares to be the sum of its mo- 
 eiements. tivcs, is ttot the merc dreamy passive sentiment 
 its 'aim at detachment from the world and life would, 
 for our modes of thought, imply. It has been said 
 to " reach beyond Christianity," at least theoretically, 
 "since it embraces not men only, but all the creat- 
 ures."* Its earliest commands, the first lesson to the 
 convert, were indeed prohibitions only : not to kill, 
 nor steal, nor commit unchaste actions, nor lie, nor be 
 drunken. But these were initiatory to more positive 
 duty. Its six cardinal virtues (paramitas) are com- 
 passion, morality, patience, energy, contemplation, 
 wisdom.^ And its moral disciplines were as positive 
 as possible. 
 
 ^ Melanges Posihumes, p. 237. 2 Bkilsa To^es, p. 54. 
 
 » Geschickte d. Heidenihitms, II. 563. * Koeppen, I. 313. * Ibid., 450. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 65 1 
 
 " Never is wrath stilled by wrath,' only by reconciliation : this is 
 an everlasting law." 
 
 " Overcome evil with good, the avaricious with generosity, the 
 false with truth." 
 
 "Thoughtful heed is the way of immortality: indolence of 
 death." 
 
 " Attack vigorously what is to be done : a careless pilgrim only 
 scatters the dust of his passions more widely." 
 
 " As the plant sheds its withered flowers, so men should shed 
 passions and hates." 
 
 " One day of endeavor is better than a hundred years of sloth." 
 " Thy self is its own defence, its own refuge ; it atones for its 
 own sins ; none can purify another." 
 
 " Watch thyself with all diligence, and hold thyself in as the 
 spirited steed is held by its owner." 
 
 " Well-makers lead the water ; fletchers bend the arrow ; carpen- 
 ters break the wood,; and the wise fashion themselves." 
 
 "Master thyself: so mayest thou teach others, and easily tame 
 them, after having tamed thyself; for self is hardest to tame." 
 
 " Never forget thy own duty for the sake of another's, however 
 great." 
 
 " Give, if thou art asked, from the little thou hast, and thou shalt 
 go near the gods." 
 
 " Haste to do good : the slothful in virtue learns to love evil." 
 " Rouse thyself: be not idle. Follow the law of virtue." 
 " Think not lightly of evil ; drop by drop the jar is filled : think 
 not lightly of good ; the wise is filled with purity, gathering it drop 
 by drop." ' 
 
 These are sentences from one of the oldest of 
 the sacred books of Buddhism, the Dhamma- ^he Dham- 
 pada. Its earnest dealing with life and duty mapada. 
 jnay be noted in the titles of some of its chapters : 
 "Reflection;" "the Fool;" "the Wise;" "Evil;" 
 " Punishment ; " "Old Age ; " " Self; " " The World ; " 
 "the Awakened;" "Pleasure;" "Anger;" "Impu- 
 rity;" "the Downward Course;" "Thirst;" "the 
 
 ' Dhammapada^ w. 5, 223, 21, 313, 112, 377, i6Si 379-380, 14s, 157-159, 166, 224, 116, 
 168, 121. 
 
652 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Way." It rouses the moral sense to note the essential 
 qualities and consequences of conduct. It tells those 
 who are inclined to detraction that, " while they look 
 after the faults of others, their own are growing ; " that 
 "body, tongue, and mind must be controlled." It tells 
 the slayer, the liar, the drunkard, the thief, the man 
 who covets his neighbor's wife, that they "pull up 
 their own life by the root." It reminds the thoughtless 
 that " his sin will come back upon him, like fine dust 
 thrown against the wind ; that the universe has no 
 place where it will not find him out." It warns the 
 self-indulgent that "what is good and wholesome for 
 the life is hard to win ; " that " the body and the royal 
 chariot alike decay, but the virtue of the righteous, 
 which makes us to know what is good, never grows 
 old." 
 
 " Mean is the scent of sandal-wood : best to the gods is the 
 fragrance that rises from the good." ' 
 
 This " way of release " is indeed in detachment of 
 the soul from all finite relations. The burden of its 
 teaching is : — whoso loveth father or mother more 
 than me, and leaveth not all desires to follow me, is 
 not worthy of me. In its repulsion of the pleasures 
 of sense, it goes so far as to say, "Love nothing, if 
 thou wouldst be free from bonds." ^ Yet it can speak 
 tenderly of human relations when it would enforce the 
 immortality of virtue. 
 
 " As friends and kindred hail the long absent at his return in 
 health, so when the just man goes from this yjorld to another, his 
 good deeds receive him, as friend greets friend." ' 
 
 > Dhammapada, 253, 246-7, 125-7, >63. iji, 56. 
 ' Ibid., 211. ' Ibid., 219, 220. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 653 
 
 Nor in the humanities which it inculcates does 
 Buddhism fail to recognize either the full de- Buddhist 
 mands of all human ties, whether of kindred- i»™>='n'''es. 
 ship or sympathy, or the delight that comes with their 
 service. 
 
 " As the bee, without destroying the color or perfume of the 
 flower, gathers the sweetness with his mouth and wings, so the 
 riches of the true friend gradually accumulate; and the increase is 
 constant, like the growth of the hillock which the white ant steadily 
 builds." 
 
 " The wise man searches for the friend thus gifted, as the child 
 seeks its mother." ' 
 
 The domestic virtues are far from being disparaged 
 in Buddhist writings, or in the practice of xhe domes- 
 Buddhist communities. On the contrary, they ''"= virtues. 
 are strictly enjoined and enforced. Notwithstanding 
 the sanctity of celibacy in his law, the great impor- 
 tance believed to have been ascribed by Gotama to 
 filial sentiment, and indeed to every domestic duty, 
 has been of great service in maintaining the moral 
 inviolability of the family. He refused to receive into 
 the ministry those who had not the consent of their 
 parents.^ The legends record his tenderness to his 
 mother's memory ; and his visit to the heaven where 
 she dwelt, to teach her the "law of salvation;" and I 
 his declarations, that, "next to that law, the father and' 
 mother are, for a son, deity itself," — that " it is better , 
 for him to honor them than the gods of heaven and 
 earth," — and that, "if he should carry them on his 
 shoulders for a hundred years, he could not repay 
 them for their care."^ Buddhism discourages polyg- 
 amy : so that throughout its dominions this custom 
 
 * Hardy, p. 4S4. 
 
 * Bennett's Life of Gandatna, from the Burmese {Am. Or. Journ.., IH.). 
 > Koeppen, I. 473 ; St. Hilaire, p. 92. 
 
654 BUDDHISM. 
 
 is exceptional, endured rather than allowed, even in 
 the rich and powerful ; and in Ceylon, Siam, and else- 
 where, monogamy only is legal. ^ 
 
 It makes the wife the companion of the husband, 
 assigning her a freedom unknown to other Oriental re- 
 ligions, and she shares his public and private activity.^ 
 There is significance in the legend already mentioned, 
 that Gopa, the wife of Gotama, renounced the use of 
 the veil as soon as married, on the ground that it was 
 unworthy of a woman, who knew her modesty and 
 virtue to be open to the gods, to hide her face from the 
 world. ^ "Women in Burmah have the custody of 
 their husbands' cash, and do the chief part of all 
 ' buying and selling ; and their intercourse with foreign- 
 ers as well as countrymen is open and unrestricted. 
 Private schools for girls are not uncommon, and no 
 obstacle is placed in the way of female education. 
 Females of the higher classes do not contemn in- 
 dustry, nor affect the listlessness of some Orientals."^ 
 In Siam, men of all ranks are greatly aided by the 
 energy of their wives, especially in public affairs. 
 Women retail goods and make trading voyages on 
 their own account, and are as free in their movements 
 as men.* 
 
 The folyandry of the Thibetan tribes is not a Budd- 
 hist institution : it is ascribed to the poverty of the 
 steppes, which renders it difficult for. one man to sup- 
 port a family ; to the necessity of protection to the wife 
 during the long absence of the husband on trading 
 journeys, and to the inferiority of females to males in 
 point of numbers." 
 
 » See authorities in Koeppen, I. 474. 2 St. Hilaire, Le Bouddha., p. 9. 
 
 8 Malcom's Travels in Bur-man Empire: Notes, ch. iii. 
 * Journal of Indian Archipelago {1847). 
 " Lloyd's Himalayas, Koeppen, 476. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 655 
 
 No teacher ever accorded a higher place to modesty 
 and to chastity than Gotama. His monks, in the Modesty 
 extravagance of ascetic discipline, were even ^ndchastity. 
 forbidden to look upon a woman, and, if they spoke 
 to one, were to say inwardly, "In a corrupt world, I 
 ought to be a lotus without spot." The Dhammapada 
 declares that "so long as the love of man towards 
 woman is not destroyed, so long is his mind in bond- 
 age." Yet, by a turn not uncommon in this Oriental 
 preaching of superlatives and absolutes, these same 
 monks are bidden to "treat older women as their 
 mothers, those but a little older than themselves as 
 elder sisters, and those a little younger as their younger 
 sisters." 
 
 The excessive care with which the relations of the 
 sexes were guarded was indeed a part of the moral 
 reaction of Buddhism on a social condition, the char- 
 acter of which may be inferred from the habit of the 
 Brahmanical ascetics to go naked. Against this cus- 
 tom, Gotama protested with special energy. His 
 ■ mendicants must be clothed, however starved or desti- 
 tute ; and there are legends of very early date expres- 
 sive of his indignation at the opposite custom.^ There 
 is a tone of satire in the language of the Dhammapada 
 on these uncivilized ways of attaining sainthood. " Not 
 nakedness, nor dirt, nor fasting, nor lying on the 
 ground, nor rubbing with dust, nor sitting in one 
 posture, can purify a mortal who has not overcome 
 his desires."® In an old Buddhist legend, a damsel, 
 seeing some of these offensive ascetics, cries out, "O 
 mother ! if these are saints, what must sniners be 
 like?" 
 
 ^ Bumou^ p. 3x2. ^ Dhamvutfadat v. i4i> 
 
656 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Its admission of women into the religious life ^en- 
 abled Buddhism to enforce these better ideas of social 
 decency. It may here be observed that the very 
 earliest notices we have of Buddhism — those of Me- 
 gasthenes, and Clement of Alexandria — mention the 
 devotees and philosophers of this faith as consisting 
 of women as well as men.^ 
 
 The Buddhist idea oi friendship is thus given in 
 Friendship. Singhalese Sutras : — 
 
 " The true friend is he who is faithful in prosperity and adversity, 
 a friend who brings his sympathy. He prevents you from doing 
 wrong, urges you to do well ; tells you what you did not know, and 
 teaches you to enter the true paths ; defends you when he hears 
 you disparaged ; saves you from low habits ; soothes your fears ; 
 divides his substance with you." ' 
 
 " When any one tells what he heard here or there, to put friends 
 at enmity or sow dissension, or by insinuation leads friends to ques- 
 tion each other's sihcerity, it is slander, and will be punished in 
 future births." ■" 
 
 As in Stoicism, so here, personal independence is 
 made to teach the finer uses of companionship, and 
 the real substance of mutual help. 
 
 " If a traveller does not meet with one who is his better or his 
 equal, who is wise and sober, let him walk alone, like a lonely ele- 
 phant, like a king." 
 
 " If one wise man be associated with another, he will at once 
 perceive the truth, as the tongue a taste." 
 
 " He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquiUity is 
 free from fear. Trust is the best of relatives. [Yet] if he find a 
 prudent companion, he may walk with him, overcoming all dangers." 
 
 " Friends are pleasant ; pleasant is mutual enjoyment ; a good 
 work is pleasant in the hour of death ; pleasant the state of a 
 father, pleasant the state of a mother." 
 
 1 See Hardy, Manual, 39, 311. s Kruse's IndUm Alte Geschichte, p. 134. 
 
 8 Hardy, Manual, D. 484. * Ibid., p. 471. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 657 
 
 " If you see a wise man who shows what is to be avoided, and 
 who administers reproofs, follow that wise man." 
 
 " Have for friends the best of men, — men of pure life, who are 
 not slothful." ' 
 
 Gotama in the legends is perpetually serving others, 
 in every kind of emergency ; not tlie least Buddha's 
 frequent form of his service being the recon- humanity 
 ciliation of enemies, in accordance with the precept 
 ascribed to him from the beginning, " Hatred does 
 not cease by hatred at any time : hatred ceases by 
 love."*^ He is indeed believed to have voluntarily 
 endured infinite trials, through numberless ages and 
 births, that he might deliver mankind ; foregoing the 
 right to enter nirvdna, and casting himself again and 
 again into the stream of human life and destiny, for 
 , this purpdse alone, — of teaching the one way of de- 
 liverance from pain into freedom.^ 
 
 " This way was preached by me, when I had understood the 
 removal of the thorns.'' 
 
 "And you yourself must make effort. The Buddhas are but 
 preachers. It is the thoughtful that are freed from the bondage of 
 Mara (the tempter)." ■* 
 
 This persistent moral energy is the ideal held before 
 the Buddhist devotee. Positive helpfulness, through 
 real sacrifice and lowly service, is the core of the 
 doctrine. 
 
 "One does not belong to himself: how much less do his sons 
 and wealth belong to him ! " 
 
 " The good delights in this world and the next ; he delights in' 
 his own work ; happy when he thinks of that which he does ;. 
 happier still when going on the good path." 
 
 1 Dhammap., 61, 329, 65, 204, 205, 331, 332, 76, 78, 375. 
 ^ Ibid., 5. See Utirdyf passim ; Buddhaghosha's, Parables, &c. 
 ^ Hardy, Manuai, p. 98. * DhamTnap; 275, 276. 
 
 42 
 
658 BUDDHISM. 
 
 " Like a well-trained steed, touched by the whip, be active ; and 
 by faith, virtue, energy, meditation, and discernment, you will over- 
 come; perfected in knowledge and in conduct." ' 
 
 It has been thought that earlier Buddhism shows no 
 traces of a definite belief in future places of punish- 
 ment for the wicked ; that this dogma grew up with 
 the growth of a hierarchy. ^ If such was the fact, it 
 must have been so for the reason that the. first apostles 
 of th;s faith were too much absorbed in the zeal of 
 pity to find room for prophesying wrath. But, while 
 even the later forms of Buddhism do not assert the 
 dogma of eternal punishment,^ the opinion just stated 
 is hardly confirmed by the documents of the earlier 
 time which are within our reach. Buddhism found 
 the transmigration-hells in full currency, in Brahmani- 
 cal faith. The Dhammapada consigns the wicked , 
 thither after death with great directness of speech.* 
 Yet, in all description of moral penalty, it refers the 
 evil-doer to the essential 'quality and present effects of 
 vice, not tc^ an arbitrary punishment in the future. 
 
 " The evil-doef burns by his own deeds, as if burnt by fire." 
 
 " All that we are is the result of what we have thought : it is 
 founded on our thoughts, made up of our thoughts. If a man 
 speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows, as the wheel the foot 
 of him who draws the carriage." 
 
 " Him who lives seeking pleasure and uncontrolled, the tempter 
 will overcome, as the wind throws down a weak tree." 
 
 "The evil-doer mourns when he sees the evil -of his own work. 
 He suffers when he thinks of the evil he has done : he suffers more 
 when going on the evil path." 
 
 " Thoughtlessness is the path of death. They who are thought- 
 less are dead already. An evil deed follows the fool, smouldering 
 like fire covered by ashes." 
 
 1 Dhamnta^., 62, 16, 18, 144. 2 Koeppen, I. 239. 
 
 s Bastian, tVeUauff, d. Buddh., p. 18 ; Muller's Dhammap., p. xciv. 
 
 * Ibid., V. 140. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 659 
 
 " It crushes the wicked, as a diamond brealcs a, stone : it brings 
 him down, as a creeper the tree it surrounds." ' 
 
 " The wrong-doer, thinking on his conduct, is constantly in fear. 
 Even crimes committed long ago trouble him ; as the shadow of a 
 great rock reaches far into the distance at the setting of the sun." ' 
 
 The extravagant strain in which the Master's self- 
 sacrifice and humanity are described in later ^j exagger- 
 mythology must weaken the practical influence """^ '™'- 
 of the moral law on the lives of his followers ; just as 
 those elements in the New Testament representation of 
 Jesus, which take him outside humati experience and 
 sympathy, have issued in much sentimental worship 
 of a far-off preternatural ideal, in place of respect for 
 the real laws of human character. Yet it is to be 
 remembered that for Buddhism this exaggerated tone 
 is not, as it is for Western civilization, out of keeping 
 with ordinary, habitual thought, with common sense 
 and real intercourse ; and therefore creates no re- 
 action of indifference, irresponsibility, skepticism, or 
 contempt. 
 
 The Dhammapada emphasizes moral personality as 
 stlrongly as Stoicism or Platonism ; insisting ^^ 
 
 o J » t> Character. 
 
 on its independence and self-sustainment, on 
 
 its authority as source of all other values, and on the 
 
 bliss of its inward life. 
 
 "All that we are is the issue of our thought." 
 
 " Poison affects not one who has no wound ; nor is there evil for 
 
 one who does no evil." 
 
 " Not even a god, not M4ra, nor Brahma, could change into defeat 
 
 the victory of a man over himself." 
 
 " Self is the lord of self: who else could be the lord ? " 
 
 " Let no one forget his own duty for the sake of another's." 
 
 " Better than ruHng the world, better than going to heaven, than 
 
 lordship over all, is the reward of the first step in virtue." 
 
 1 Dhamnuip'y w. 136, i, 7, 15, 17, 21, 71, 123, 161, 162. 
 ' Sing/uUese Sutra, Hardy, 48s. 
 
66o BUDDHISfl. 
 
 " The fields are damaged by weeds, and man by wishing." 
 
 " From greed comes grief, from greed comes fear." 
 
 "As a rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise falter not in 
 
 praise or blame : they are serene like a deep lake." 
 
 "The just man, who speaks truly, and does his own work, the 
 
 world will love." 
 
 "The gift of the law excels all other gifts, its sweetness all 
 
 sweetness, its joy all joys." ' 
 
 It declares personality the substance of power also. 
 
 " The scent of flowers travels not against the wind ; but the 
 fragrance of goodness travels even against the wind. A good man 
 pervades every place. 
 
 " The good, like snowy mountains, shine from afar : the bad, like 
 arrrows shot by night, are not seen." " 
 
 The motive power of love, which depends on its 
 sense of opportunity, is most impaired by disparage- 
 ment of man's moral capacity. But Buddhism said 
 with Plato, — Only open the eyes, the will cannot re- 
 fuse to follow the light. 
 
 " The taint, worse than all others, is ignorance." ^ 
 
 Nor has any religion more clearly separated mo- 
 rality from ritual, or more firmly emphasized the spirit 
 of conduct, as compared with the form. 
 
 " He who would put on the yellow robe without cleansing himself 
 from sin, disregarding temperance and truth, is unworthy to wear it. 
 
 " Better a moment's homage to a man of wise spirit than sacrifice 
 for a hundred years." * 
 
 " It is not platted hair, nor family, nor birth, that consecrates 
 thee a Brahmana. He in whom there is truth and right-doing, he is 
 the blessed Brahmana. 
 
 "What will platted hair profit thee, O foolish one ! or the raiment 
 of goatskins ? Within thee is the abyss, while thoU art making 
 clean the outside." 
 
 1 Dhammap., w. t, ia4, 105, 160, 166, 178, 339, 216, 81-82, 217, 354, « Ibid., 54, 304. 
 » Ibid., 243. » Ibid., 9, 106. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 66l 
 
 " Whoso has burst all fetters and is without fear ; who guiltless 
 suffers shame and smiting in silence ; from whom desire and hatred, 
 pride and envy, have dropped ; who strives not for his own gain, and 
 who doubts not when he has seen the truth ; who has risen above all 
 bondage to the gods, whose even spirit nought can ruffle ; who has 
 come to know the way that is without death ; the manly, the hero, 
 the conqueror, the pure, the awakened, him call I indeed a Brah- 
 mana." ' 
 
 Among the parables ascribed to Gotama in the 
 "Lotus" is one which teaches that spiritual light is 
 better than miracle : — 
 
 " A man blind from birth denied the existence of the world which 
 he could not see, until miraculously cured ; when he went to the 
 opposite extreme, and boasted that he knew every thing, despising 
 all other men as blind. Thereupon he was rebuked by wiser persons, 
 who proved to him that with all his outward seeing he as yet knew 
 nothing, since no outward miracle wrought on his eyes could give 
 him power to discern truth from error, or to dissipate the greater 
 darkness within him. Ashamed of his vanity, the man desired to 
 know the way of life, and obtained spiritual wisdom." 
 
 Gotama, charged by a Brahman with idling away 
 his time instead of ploughing and sowing, replied : 
 " I do plough and sow, reaping thence fruit that is im- 
 mortal." — "Where are your implements, O Gotama !" 
 — " My field is the law ; the weeds I clear away are 
 the cleaving to life ; my plough is wisdoni ; the seed I 
 sow is purity ; my work, attention to the precepts ; 
 my harvest, nirvana."^ 
 
 The reader may judge from these illustrations 
 whether it is just to call the morality of Budd- christian 
 hism merely negative or merely passive ; and "''''^• 
 what to think of comparisons, common among Chris- 
 tian writers in treating this subject, of a character like 
 the following : — 
 
 ^ Dhamma^.t The Brahmana Cka^ter^ * MUinda Prasna. 
 
662 BUDDHISM. 
 
 " The Christian does wrong to no one, because he 
 loves the neighbor ; the Buddhist, because he commis- 
 erates the man. True morality seeks to create some- 
 what ; but Buddhistic morality is mere renunciation 
 and inaction : its virtue is in leaving undone." ' 
 "Vice had no intrinsic hideousness, and virtue was 
 but another name for calculating prudence ; while love 
 was little more than animal sympathy. The Budd- 
 hist could only say, ' I must : ' he could not say, ' I 
 ought."'(!)2 
 
 So St. Hilaire knows no end of charges against this 
 faith of three hundred millions of souls. It is " skep- 
 ticism, nihilism, atheism, materialism, fatalism; un- 
 belief in the good in man, in the world ; without notion 
 of duty, or distinction of man from vilest matter."^ 
 Yet he is constrained to add, after all, concerning it: 
 " By the way of pain, as by every other, man may 
 arrive at God. The way is more grievous for our 
 weakness, but it is no less sure."* How much wiser 
 this word than those sweeping condemnations, without 
 insight, sympathy, or faith ! 
 
 Buddhism, on its side, may have something to say 
 in regard to the morality of Christian and Jewish the- 
 ology. And the conversations of the " Modern Budd- 
 hist," before referred to, with Dr. Gutzlaff and other 
 missionaries, afford a good idea of the impression made 
 by much of it on his simple rationalism. 
 
 " How," asks this modern Buddhist, " can we assent 
 to the doctrine that a man can be received into heaven 
 while his nature is yet full of impurity, by virtue of 
 sprinkling his head with water, or cutting off by cir- 
 
 1 Wmtke, Gesck. d. Heidenth.y II. 576-7. 
 
 2 Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters^ I. 239. 
 
 > Du Bouddhisme (Paris, 185s). « Du Bauddhismt, p. 236. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 663 
 
 cumcision a small piece of his skin? I do not see 
 that any one who is baptized nowadajs is free from 
 the 'curse of Adam,' or escapes toil and grief, and 
 sickness and death, more than those who are not bap- 
 tized. So far as I see, the unconverted flourish ; but 
 the converted are continually in debt and bondage. 
 They continually pray to God ; but it seems nothing 
 happens according to their prayer." He combats 
 eternal damnation on the ground that " there is no 
 being who has not done something good ; and that it 
 would be to deny to good works the same power of 
 producing fruit that is ascribed to evil works." 
 
 " How," he asks further, " can we believe that God 
 made this inconceivable multitude of immense stars in 
 one day, yet required five days to make this little 
 world, this mere drop in the great ocean ? " " And 
 why does your scriptural account of the creation differ 
 from the teaching of philosophers who show that the 
 world is a revolving globe ? " 
 
 " The Lord Buddha taught, saying : ' All you who are in doubt 
 whether there be a future life had better believe there is one.' 
 
 " ' Do not believe merely because you have heard, but, when of 
 your own conscience you know a thing to be evil, abstain from it. 
 Do not believe because the written statement of some old sage is 
 produced : nor, in what you have fancied, think that because an 
 idea is extraordinary it must have been implanted by a divine 
 being. You must know of yourselves.' " ' 
 
 The proselyting energy of Buddhism is sufficient 
 evidence that its moral ideal was far from „ , ^. 
 
 Froselytism. 
 
 being a merely passive one. Unquestionably 
 its purpose was the taming of wild races by gentle- 
 ness and endurance, and the deliverance of the masses 
 in India from a social tyranny which violent resistance 
 
 . » Mod. Buddhist, in Tlie Wheel of the Law. 
 
664 BUDDHISM. 
 
 would have only made more cruel. In these respects, 
 certainly, its passive qualities were not without their 
 uses. All religions depend in large measure for th^ir 
 special elements on local and temporary circum- 
 stances. One of these conditions determinative of 
 the tone of Buddhism deserves special study. 
 
 Its love, we must remember, has a vast background 
 Inspiration ^f pain. Pity was the inspiration of these [ 
 of pity. early philanthropists. Buddha is filled with] 
 pity for, the multitudes sunk in perplexity and pain ; 
 and it is this feeling of compassion which conquers 
 his own fears, and even decides him to accept his 
 mission.! That " helpfulness towards the neighbor, 
 hospitality to the stranger, reverence before age, 
 gentleness towards servants, forbearance towards 
 conquered enemies," which made the burden of his 
 teaching, flowed from a keen sense of the wants and 
 miseries of human destiny. Hence the stress laid on 
 kindness as due to the fallen and weak. " Of the 
 whole two hundred and fifty virtuous deeds, the high- 
 est is to spare a living being."'' Hence the legends 
 of Gotama, as well as the Buddhist fable-books, which 
 push this perception of the possibilities of suff'ering so 
 far as to make light of all actual forms of it in one's 
 own person. Their Oriental extravagance is not with- 
 out a symbolic basis of dignity, absurd as it may look 
 to us. Thus he is related to have met a tigress, too 
 weak with hunger to attack him : whereat he tore off 
 his own skin, and suffered her to lick the blood from 
 it, and then put himself into her claws to be torn in 
 pieces. 
 
 " When a good man is reproached, he is to think witliin himself: 
 ' These are certainly good people since they do not beat me.' If 
 
 1 St. Hilaire, p. 33. > Wuttke, II. 581. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 665 
 
 they begin to beat him with fists, he will say, ' They are mild and 
 good, because they do not beat me with clubs.' If they proceed to 
 this, he says, ' They are excellent, for they do not strike me dead.' 
 If they kill him, he dies saying, ' How good they are in freeing me 
 from this miserable body ! ' " 
 
 Certainly persecution was wasted on resistance like 
 this. " The Cynic," says Epictetus, also no senti- 
 mentalist, " must love those who beat him, as the 
 father, as the brother of all." 
 
 We can easily pardon excesses in the mythologic play 
 of this instinct of forgiveness, when we find xhe nobility 
 that the spirit of love is really the one creative "^ '°™- 
 force of Buddhist literature. The legends of Buddha, 
 in all their extravagance, are filled with a certain di- 
 vine innocence, and a childlike love that seems to 
 have no conception*, of any limit to its own power. 
 We can afford to let childish fancy run its wild way, 
 for the sake of the many refreshing stories of Budd- 
 ha's mildness towards his enemies ; overcoming evil 
 with good, and reconciling hostile armies and divided 
 friends.^ 
 
 " When surrounded by all his retinue of followers, and glorified 
 by the whole world, he never thought, ' These privileges are mine ; ' 
 but did good, just as the shower brings gladness, yet reflects, not on 
 its work." ' 
 
 What delicacy of sentiment is in these proverbs, 
 ascribed to him ! — 
 
 " The true sage dwells on earth as the bee that gathers sweetness 
 with his mouth and wings, without harming the color and perfume 
 of the flower. "» 
 
 " The swans [wild fowl ?] go on the path of the sun : they go 
 through the ether, by their miraculous power [instinct]. So are the 
 
 * 
 
 * Hardy, /asiim. ' Ibid., 374. • Ohammapada, 49. 
 
666 BUDDHISM. 
 
 wise led out of this world, when they have conquered Mira (the 
 tempter) and his train." ' 
 
 " The heart of love and faith accompanying good actions spreads 
 a beneficent shade through all the worlds." " 
 
 Fahian relates that Buddha, fleeing his Brahmanical 
 enemies, met a poor Brahman asking alms. Having 
 nothing to give, he had himself bound and delivered 
 over to his enemies, that his ransom might serve as alms 
 for this member of a class who were persecutors of his 
 faith. The Burmese relate that, hearing all living 
 beings singing his praises, Gotama called Ananda, 
 and said : " All this is unworthy of me : no such vain 
 homage can accomplish the commands of the law. 
 They who do righteously pay me most honor, and 
 please me most."^ 
 
 Passing into his nirvdna, thi^ Master leaves his 
 The endless ^^^^ciplcs assurance that there is a divinity in 
 prucess of man that for ever works for universal and 
 remedial ends. " When I am gone, O Ananda ! 
 you must not think there is no Buddha. For my 
 words shall be your Buddha." 
 
 He has uttered his song of triumph over the 
 senses : — 
 
 " Painful are repeated transmigrations ; 
 But now have I beheld the architect. 
 Thou shalt not build me another house : 
 Thy rafters are broken, thy roof-timbers scattered. 
 My mind is detached from all. 
 I have attained the extinction of desire." * 
 
 His accumulated merits, the karma, or embodied 
 powers of his past moral attainments, flow forth, as 
 
 » Dliamm., 175. 2 Buddluigosha> s Parables, p. 16. » Bigandet, p. 299. 
 
 « Hardy's ManM, p. 180. "The architect" here is simply a poetic expression &r 
 the causes of successive birtlis. Muller's DJmmnui^., p. ciii. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 667 
 
 if set free from private limits, into the worlds, and 
 renew all living creatures. 
 
 He passes away, and there is no return in the flesh. 
 
 " Freed from illusions of joy and of pain, 
 He comes not and goes not, He comes not again." 
 
 But not for that reason is the eternal law of release 
 by love to fail. " Its substance exists for ever without 
 change." Nirvana cannot touch this essentially human 
 and inevitable force. The process is repeated, after 
 his assumption of it, as it had been again and again 
 before his day. "One lamp is extinguished," say the 
 Chinese Buddhists, " but the light is not put out ; for 
 the flame is imparted to another." Men press by 
 myriads towards the goal of power, to the verge of 
 Buddhahood, v/ith li'ie stress of redeeming sacrifice.^ 
 " Genuine Buddhism has no priesthood : the saint 
 despises the priest, and scorns the aid of mediators."^ 
 Another and another Buddha comes, with the old 
 blessing and promise. It is the prolific virtue of 
 human nature that is here aflirmed, the endless har- 
 vest of the heart. The millions of incomparable 
 Buddhas are the throbs of its eternal love. So it was 
 that the East conceived this love ; and men rejoiced 
 in it, dreamed of it, lived, toiled, and died, by faith 
 in it. 
 
 Finally, incarnation itself, in the Buddhist system, 
 is conceived as moral incentive, not as theo- , 
 
 Incarnation 
 
 logical dogma. Gotama, like all the Buddhas moral and 
 before him, is originally a man. And in viola- 
 tion of all theories of mere outward fatalism, having 
 attained deity, he chooses to throw himself anew into 
 the chain of causes and effects, for the deliverance 
 
 * See Wilson's Essays on Religion of the Hindus^ II. 361. ^ Hodgson. 
 
668 BUDDHISM. 
 
 of mankind from pain. Love here pronounces itself 
 lord of Fate. Buddha assumes human suffering and 
 death with moral freedom, and from inward spiritual 
 energy. The Man becomes God again, through self- 
 devoting will. And this is not regarded as miracu- 
 lous nor exceptional ; but as natural power and law 
 of life, since all other men may do the same.^ 
 
 "There is no difference between the true saints and Buddha 
 himself. All are Buddhas." * 
 
 Nor is this faith without its forward look. One future 
 The coming Buddha is already foreknown, and all the sects 
 •good. have, honored this hope of the ages. After 
 five thousand years, Gotamawill be followed by Mait- 
 reya, the Compassionate One,^ who will restore all 
 that is lost in these sad deeps of illusion and vanity, 
 and rehabiHtate virtue and bliss. ^ Fahian found 
 Maitreya honored in India in the fourth century of 
 our era ; and Hiouen Tshang's prayer was that he 
 might dwell in this redeemer's bosom, and love and 
 serve him for ever.^ 
 
 In fine, where we had been led to expect suppres- 
 compensa- sion of all moral energy, we find a heroic 
 '■™- spirit of universal love. Must we not recog- 
 
 nize that one and the same law of providential educa- 
 tion covers all races and religions, when we see the 
 crushing moral discouragements that are so commonly 
 believed inherent in the Buddhist doctrines of fate and 
 of merit thus counteracted and compensated, and the 
 nobler powers saved? 
 
 As in previous reactions against the priesthood, 
 
 » Wuttke, II. 567. 
 
 » Hodgson, Sketch 0/ Buddhism ( Transact. R.A.S., II. 243). 
 
 » Compare Persian Mitra (mercy). • Koeppen, I. 327. « St. Hilaire, p. 293. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 669 
 
 recorded in the Brahmanas, the protestants had be- 
 longed to the Kshattriya race,^ so Gotama also Relation to 
 was a prince. We should infer from the''*'"''"'"'^- 
 earlier Sutras that he did not undertake the definite 
 abolition of caste, which indeed does not seem to have 
 been strictly organized in Magadha, where his preach- 
 ing first found success.^ But he ignored it in the 
 choice of a wife and of disciples : he rejected its prin- 
 ciple in the whole substance of his gospel ; and the 
 first compiler of his precepts, UpaH, was a Sudra. 
 Caste, for Gotama, could have no meaning. It was 
 simply not worth his recognition : it faded before the 
 common destiny, the common need, the common hope. 
 He aimed at no political revolution. His very phil- 
 osophy was rooted, like the mystical banyan, in the 
 natural soil of Hindu thought.'' It developed this so 
 as to show that the only solution of its dark and deep 
 riddles was in love and labor. His protest proved 
 that the severest social constraints must bring reaction 
 to liberty and brotherhood in some form ; that the 
 brain cannot be kept from asserting its need of the 
 heart. Thus, although a natural result of Hindu in- 
 tellect, Buddha's gospel struck at all aristocratic • foun- 
 dations in Hindu society. So far as the latter, had 
 become organized in the form we find in Manu, it 
 must have been speedily shorn, in large measure, of 
 many despotic elements, by the immense energy 
 of this levelling and humanizing force ; and the state 
 of India, as described by later authorities, Greek and 
 Chinese, aflfords striking evidence of the fact. This 
 thorough democracy fully rejected the theoretic basis 
 on which castes were founded, and substituted others, 
 which could allow them at best only a temporary 
 
 > MuUer, Samk. Lit., p. 80. ' Weber, Varies.., p 250. » Ibid., pp. 248-2SO. 
 
670 BUDDHISM. 
 
 authority. They were declared to have grown up 
 accidentally, or else by free suffrage, setting individ- 
 uals to special functions for the common good ; all 
 men being originally of one race, " all brahmas," and 
 equally pure, — Sudras, for instance, being simply 
 persons who chose to live by the chase, — and the 
 later subordinations having no warrant in divine or 
 human law.^ They were also closely associated with 
 a supposed fall of man from primal purity. ^ From 
 the very beginning of Buddhism, the Sudra had equal 
 honor, as a convert, with the Kshattriya or Brahman. 
 All that the pride of thought had hoarded should go 
 to the most despised. The more heavily an exclusive 
 tradition presses, the more radical will be the remedy. 
 The whole Brahmanical system was put to the test of 
 practical service. Buddhism, as we have said, made 
 democratic application of every product of Hindu 
 thought.^ It insisted that this demand of mankind 
 and the age should be heard, and that the dead Veda 
 should bury its dead. Buddha, musing in the shadow 
 of his fig-tree, under vow " not to rise till he had found 
 the way to end the misery of the world," learned that 
 more was to be done than muse. 
 
 The celestial dream of strife subdued and hatred 
 abolished, and the joyless return of the "bonds of ac- 
 tion" brought, to an end, and pain and death con- 
 quered for ever, should not come to a few dreamers, 
 reposing under the banyans till moss grew over them, 
 but was also for the miserable Sudras and Chandala 
 outcasts, who, hopeless of any release from their social 
 destiny, came to gaze in awe at these absorbed saints 
 and bring them fruits and herbs. So he arose, and 
 
 1 See Joum. R. A . S., vol. vi. p. 361. Hardy, Minual, ch. iii. 
 
 2 Wuttke, II. 534. » Lassen, II. 440. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 67 1 
 
 went out to preach his " mercy to all ; " ^ and bade all 
 idle saints get up and come out of their ascetic seclu- 
 sion, and do likewise. What a tocsin to ring in the 
 old slumbering woods of India ! The idle saints got 
 up in dismay and came out, but it was for the most 
 partj if the Buddhist Sutras and traditions report truly, 
 not to preach a gospel, but to silence the bold reformer, 
 by force of words, if not of arms. Doubtless there was 
 effort, as there always is under such temptation for 
 the functionaries of an old religious system, to excite 
 the ignorant and fanatical against him, and to cast 
 him forth, root and branch. And yet we must be- 
 ware of ascribing too much of the spirit of violence 
 and persecution to the Brahmanical priesthood. It 
 would appear that, on the whole, the revolution was 
 peaceful ; its progress was extremely rapid, as if the 
 soil favored it ; in a few centuries it had mastered 
 most of the Hindu states ; and more than a thousand 
 years elapse from the time of Buddha, before the 
 persecution arises which expels his followers from 
 India. 
 
 In truth this radicalism was a powerful appeal to all 
 that was earnest and real in the old belief Brahmanical 
 itself, and naturally found a deep response. sympathies- 
 All the Buddhist books significantly record that Brah- 
 ma himself sustained and encouraged Gotama when 
 oppressed by the magnitude of the work before him, 
 and urged him to open the door of nirvana to the 
 people of Magadha, who were benighted and despond- 
 ent, expecting all things to go to ruin and nature itself 
 to fail.^ The new interpretation schooled the Brahman 
 in principles which he had been alBrming without com- 
 
 * Bumouf, p. 198. 
 
 » Feer in Journ. Asiat. (1866), p. 95 ; Bigandet, p. loj ; Lalitav., &c. 
 
672 BUDDHISM. 
 
 prehending them. The root of his own religion was 
 in this democratic Buddha, after all ; for eternal truths 
 belong to human nature and must go to the people, 
 and pantheism knows no essential distinction of souls. 
 The brave preacher plainly convicted the Brahmah- 
 ical fraternity of abusing their own doctrine : perhaps 
 he reproved their leaders for hypocrisy and charla- 
 tanry,^ with salutary effect upon the single-minded. 
 He was a better Hindu than the Tsest of them ; for he 
 saw that the principle oit all Hindu philosophy — 
 " knowing truth is in becoming it " — forbade mo- 
 nopoly, and honored mind everywhere. He was a 
 better Aryan than the best of them ; for he understood 
 that right of mind to test the traditional gods which 
 was hinted so simply when the Vedic herdsman called 
 on Indra and Agni, in the olden time, to come down 
 and sit beside him on. the sacrificial grass. 
 
 The hardest saying for functionaries of the Veda 
 Protest ^^^ °^ caste to accept, was doubtless his warn- 
 against au- ing that the world did not want their exclusive 
 * ""'''■ mediation with eternal truth. Yet this also had 
 been heard from Kapila and others, and rationalism 
 has always found an echo in Hindu society. Buddha 
 was clear and unmistakable on such points. " The Ve- 
 das," he nmst have said, " are no absolute authority for 
 me ; my truth is of my own experience ; the old rishis 
 cannot enlighten me much about my duties to this 
 living, suffering world. I have probed their dogmas 
 and disciplines, and find them inadequate. To every 
 soul, not to the ' twice-born ' only, its own burden ; and 
 through its own wisdom and virtue, its release.^ Your 
 laws forbid the people to read the Vedas ; but better 
 than all that books can teach is it to see that there is no 
 
 » St. Hilaire, p. 43. s Dhammapada, w. 165, 169, 380. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 673 
 
 distinction of persons in the sorrow that besets human 
 life ; and this misery both you, and those you bar out 
 from sacred things, must be taught to dispel. Come 
 all who will, the saving truth is free. Your Brah- 
 manical hermitages are not the best asylums : the 
 truth that delivers men from evil, that is the best 
 asylum.^ Gather others to hear of the way to liber- 
 ation ; gather them into schools, fraternities, monas- 
 teries ; gather them in the city and the country : let 
 ever}' soul be fed. Your fastings, sacri^pes, repe- 
 titions of sacred texts, will not open your eyes nor 
 loose your bonds : they are vain without love. Your 
 animal sacrifices are against your own theory of mercy 
 to all creatures, and the sacredness of the One Life in 
 all life. You rank by caste : I proclaim the natural 
 order, the oldest and best first. You are seeking 
 your own deliverance : I demand the deliverance of 
 mankind." 
 
 Burnouf has translated an old Pali-Sutra, in which 
 the reformer condemns the habits of luxury and the 
 superstitious divinations for gain into which the Brah- 
 manic priesthood had fallen, as well as the passion 
 for the theatre and for games of chance ; a very 
 Puritan reaction it would seem.® His protest against 
 intemperance and sensuality was uncompromising. 
 
 Such the substance of Buddha's criticism, according 
 to the oldest Sutras, which go back, in written form, 
 no further than to the time of king Asoka, 250 b.c; 
 but which were then, according to universal tradition, 
 formed out of earlier materials by the Buddhist teach- 
 ers, and unquestionably represent the purport of the' 
 teacher's gospel.* 
 
 1 Burnouf, i86. ' Lotus, p. 464. 
 
 "8 See Koeppen, I. 184; Weber, ViyrUs., 2S3; Lassen, II. 8; Miiller, Samk. Lit.,. 
 260-301. 
 
 43 
 
674 BUDDHISM. 
 
 If this aroused opposition, it must also have stirred 
 much profound sympathy in the best of the Brahman- 
 ical schools. But that so searching a reform could 
 have found foothold at once, and marched on to the 
 ascendency it seems to have won within a few centu- 
 ries in the greater part of India, is proof that Brah- 
 fnanical ecclesiasticism in no wise shaded the deeper 
 currents of Hindu feeling and life. The scope 
 of its work can hardly be better given than in the 
 language tf)f Koeppen, to whose admirable volumes all 
 future research on the subject must be incalculably 
 indebted : — 
 
 " It put spiritual brotherhood in place of hereditary priesthood ; 
 personal merit in place of distinctions of birth ; human intelli- 
 gence in place of authoritative Vedas j the self-perfected sage in 
 place of the gods of the old theology ; morality in place of ritual- 
 ism ; a popular doctrine of righteousness in place of scholasticism j 
 a monastic rule in place of isolated anchoret life ; and a cosmopol- 
 itan spirit in place of the old national exclusiveness.'' 
 
 That the strife of ecclesiastical Brahmanism against 
 Signs of Buddhist reform must have been the main fact 
 peaceful dis- of Hindu history after the sixth century b.c. 
 would seem to be obvious. Yet there is no 
 positive record of its being stained with bloodshed ; 
 and what little we do know of the far-away thousand 
 years of Buddhist history in India but confirms our 
 faith that these preachers of peace and love knew how 
 to master the world by fulfilHng their own precepts ; 
 while, on the other hand, if the Brahmanical party 
 appealed to violence to put down^the heretical sect, 
 they have destroyed all evidences of the fact. The 
 Greek writers, who are our main authorities for the 
 state of Indian society from the time of Alexander 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 675 
 
 down to the Christian era, give no hint of strife be- 
 tween the two forms of faith. 
 
 Their descriptions of the rehgious caste, or class, 
 apply to the Buddhists as fairly as to the Brahmans; 
 in some respects, even better. Arrian, for instance, 
 reports that it was open to all who chose to enter it ; ^ 
 which would lead us to suppose that Brahmanical ex- 
 clusiveness had quite given way to Buddhistic liberty. 
 Nearchus, a companion of Alexander, relates that 
 women took part. in the philosophical discussions of 
 the Brahmans ; and this fact again would seem to 
 bring the two religions upon comnxjn ground. Strabo 
 simply speaks of the PramncB, a " disputatious [ration- 
 alistic] " sect opposed to the Brahmans.^ Clement of 
 Alexandria, in the sepond century, describes both by 
 name, but, again, without intimation of hostility be- 
 tween them.^ Coming down to the fifth century after 
 Christ, we have the testimony of the "Chinese Pilgrim," 
 Fahian,* followed by that of Hiouen Thsang in the 
 
 1 Hist. Itid., xir. 
 
 2 De Situ Orbis^t XV. Pr&m&nam is logical proof, as opposed to revelation. 
 
 3 Stromata, I. c. XV. 
 
 * Three Chinese Buddhists, Fahian, Soungyun, and Hiouen Thsang, traversed India at 
 intervals of about one hundred years ; and the information they afford us of the religious 
 condition of that country from the fifth to the seventh century is of the highest value. The 
 destruction of Buddhist works in the Chinese civil wars led to the minion of Fahian, which 
 lasted fifteen years, and covered thirty kingdoms (including a visit to Ceylon), all of which 
 he describes with great simplicity and fidelity, especially whatever was consecrated by 
 Buddhist tradition. His great work, the Fakoueki^ is of the highest reputation in China ; 
 md the pious zeal that sustained him through great and continual perils places him beside 
 the most devoted apostles of other faiths. His wonderfijl record has been brought before 
 the western world by the labors of Rdmusat, Landresse, and Beal, and is of inestimable 
 value as a source of light on the progress of Buddhism, and as an epoch in Hindu history 
 otherwise wholly in the dark. Of equal importance is the pilgrimage of Hiouen Thsang^ 
 whom similar Buddhistic needs in China sent forth in like manner, to the holy places of his 
 faith, to obtain its sacred books and learn its fortunes. The result was a more detailed, as 
 well as a more extended, description than Fahian's; comprehaiding the whole of India, 
 covering nearly twenty years of time (a.c. 630-650), and more than a hundred distinct states, 
 of which he sought to give a full account, geographical, social, political, historical, and re- 
 ligious. His zeal in collecting sacred writings was prodigious. He is said to have returned 
 to China with no less than sbc hundred books, translations of which were carefully made 
 
676 BUDDHISM. 
 
 seventh ; between which two epochs Brahmanism 
 seems to have been gradually advancing, though in 
 no wise gaining the day over Buddhism. But Fahian 
 does not speak of any thing like open collision be- 
 tween these religions. He finds the worship of Budd- 
 ha everywhere flourishing ; nearly all the kings of 
 northern India honoring his priests, whose temples 
 were magnificent, and whose numbers were, as Soung- 
 yun afterwards describes them, like "the gathering of 
 clouds." The Brahmans were " heretics," but, except 
 in Java, not, as a whole, offering serious resistance to the 
 true faith. He even mentions the adoration of Buddha 
 by Brahmans of "great wisdom and purity," in the 
 old time, and ascribes to them zeal in the preservation 
 of his relics ; nowhere speaking of their heresy with 
 bitterness or hatred. Soungyun did not hesitate to go 
 to the Brahmans to obtain charms for the relief of his 
 mind. And, in Hiouen Thsang's time, the two re- 
 ligions were side by side in all northern India, that of 
 Gotama greatly in the ascendent. Still no report is 
 given of any thing like physical strife ; though the 
 zealous apostle, upheld by Buddhist kings, found 
 plenty of opponents, and gained great glory in refut- 
 ing them. These opponents were in fact for the most 
 'part not Brahmans at all, but Buddhists like himself, 
 though of a different school. And it is on their heresy 
 
 and preserved by imperial command. No reader of his life and labors can withhold admira- 
 tion of the singleness and purity of their purpose, however clouded by superstition, and the 
 beauty of the spirit in which he investigates the beliefs of others. He was as familiar with 
 the writings of the Brahmans as with those of his own faith, and as carefully collected them 
 for the enlightenment of his cduntrymen. St. Hilaire calls him one of the "elect souls in 
 history, few of whom have^ been able to carry disinterestedness so far towards that limit 
 where nothing is known but the pure idea of goodness." The substance of his record has 
 recently been translated by Stanislas Julien. These " Chinese Pilgrims " must hereafter be 
 the main authorities, as regards both mythology and history, for the period just preced- 
 ing the revival of Brahmanism and the expulsion of the Buddhists from India. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 677 
 
 that he lays most emphasis, apparently holding the 
 Brahmans as oC smaller account. 
 
 But. the most noticeable feature of the relations of 
 these different faiths in the time of Hiouen Thsang is 
 the absolute toleration and even mul^ial respect with 
 which their controversies were conducted. They were 
 in no sense a war of passions, but a sober and peace- 
 ful discussion, and bear the marks of an enlightened 
 love of free inquiry and faith in its results. A "king 
 of kings," we are, told, assembles the rulers who paid 
 him tribute, and representatives of all the different 
 religions in his dominions, together with the orphans 
 and the poor, upon a "Great Field of Alms." There 
 he celebrates a high festival, at which vast treasures 
 were distributed, according to Buddhist custom, among 
 the needy. First the various forms of worship were 
 solemnly inaugurated in due order, by their respective 
 disciples, on successive days, with equal respect from 
 all. Next came distribution of gifts to the poor of 
 each, in proportion to their numbers, — to the Budd- 
 hists, the Brahmans, the heretics, the mendicants of far 
 countries. This prodigal charity is described as last- 
 ing for weeks ; its care for the most indigent and 
 friendless classes, alone, occupying a full month. The 
 same monarch, Siladitya, holds a grand religious con- ^ 
 ference at which two thousand Brahmans are' present, 
 and free opportunity is given to all advocates. At this 
 the ardent Hiouen Thsang himself presides, is pro- 
 tected against personal enemies by the determination 
 of the king to see fair play, and makes many converts 
 to his own belief. The Brahmans', however, do not 
 seem to have entered the lists, to any 'great extent, in 
 these controversies. Their religion, we should infer 
 from Hiouen Thsang, had but little hold on the people ; 
 
6y8 BUDDHISM. 
 
 and Buddhism was still in the full confidence of a fixed 
 supremacy, which its principles forbade it to use in a 
 spirit of persecution. This real mastery of the Hindu 
 mind it had maintained, according to these excellent 
 Chinese apostlel!! for the whole ten or twelve centu- 
 ries since the ascension of Buddha into nirvdna. And, 
 during all this period, we have, in fact, no record of 
 hostile relations with Brahmanism. Yet within a 
 very short period of Hiouen Thsang's mission, certainly 
 not more than, two or three centuries, Buddhism, as a 
 distinctive faith, appears to have been expelled from 
 India, and its followers dispersed into such other lands 
 as had proved accessible to their principles.^ How far 
 this was owing to a revival of Brahmanism in the 
 ninth century by its great leader, Sankara Acharya, 
 and how far to differences between Buddhism and 
 other sects like the Jainas, into whom its free spirit 
 had passed, is not easy to determine. But it is a 
 singular phenomenon, in view of our Chinese account 
 of the firm position of the faith but a few centuries 
 before, and of the peaceful hold it had maintained 
 from the beginning. 
 
 This remarkable record of an almost undisputed 
 Doubtfiii in- ascendency has led to the inference that 
 ferences. Buddhism was in fact the older religion of the 
 two ; and that the strict Brahmanical church is but of 
 recent growth, originating mainly in the movement of 
 Sankara Acharya.^ There are evidences that caste at 
 least did not stand organized on strict Brahmanical 
 principles during many centuries subsequent to Buddha. 
 Thus Arrian's account of the classes does not at all 
 correspond with these principles. Fahian describes 
 
 * Lassen, IV. 708. 
 
 • Sykes, It. A. Jmrtua, vdl. vi. AlFilsOn, iTUrod. to Vishnu Pur&Ma. 
 
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 6,7'9 
 
 the four classes ^ in Ceylon as gathering to hear the law 
 of Buddha three times a month. He found countries 
 whose kings were Sudras. The oldest inscriptions 
 in India are Buddhist, and the oldest coins too are 
 marked with Buddhist symbols. Prinsep satisfied; 
 himself that the earliest monarchs of India are not 
 associated with Brahmanical creeds or dynasties. 
 Finally, to justify the inference that Brahmanism was 
 of late origin, the Laws of Manu have been, though 
 on insufficient evidence, brought down to a recent date, 
 or, perhaps more correctly, referred to a small tract of 
 country inhabited by an isolated body of priests. 
 
 Although this reasoning would seem to carry us too 
 far, it must at least be allowed that Buddhistic „ , 
 
 Results. 
 
 liberty is traceable far back in Hindu history, 
 beyond the era of Buddha ; though not distinctly visi- 
 ble as a s-pecial religious movement till after Brah- 
 manical ideas and even institutions had been developed 
 out of the study of the Vedas in the hands of a priest- 
 hood. As for the four castes of the orthodox system, 
 we have seen that it is doubtful if they ever had posi- 
 tive and permanent reality as a social organization, in 
 the strict form in which they stand in the ancient 
 codes ; and that from the beginning they were subject 
 to continual interference and modification from im- 
 pulses of freedom and humanity. 
 
 It is to be observed also that the word "Buddha" must 
 be as old as "Brahman." Both are primeval, Buddha an^ 
 and grew up together, I am inclined to be- Brahman. 
 lieve, as expressions respectively for the rational, or 
 human side of religion, and for the supernal, or divine. 
 The one stands for knowledge, the other for prayer. 
 Both these tendencies of course entered into the 
 
 ^ Beal iXraiulation^ p. 155) supposes that classes of helievers axe here meant. 
 
68o BUDDHISM. 
 
 substance of the faith which preceded Gotama ; and, 
 at whatever special epochs the one or the other may- 
 have ripened into a definite system, the elements of 
 the two great religions of India are united by mutual 
 interaction at every step in the history of the national 
 mind. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 
 
 "I "HE name " Buddha " is derived from the root 
 -^ budh, to know, and means "enlightened," Name and 
 " wakened out of dreams into certainty." Its ^^^ 
 wide currency, both in history and mythology, ^ indi- 
 cates great energy of spiritual reaction amidst the 
 inertia of Oriental faith. It was the name for mind 
 in all Hindu philosophy, and the title of honor given 
 to the sage. In the Brahmanical as well as the Budd- 
 histic writings, this is a common term for sainthood.^ 
 " The Buddha," like " the Christ," is thus not a per- 
 sonal name, but an official title ; yet conveying a less 
 exclusive sense than the latter word has received from 
 Christendom, being applied to innumerable ideal per- 
 sonages, a series reaching through incalculable time. 
 This latitude in the use of the name is one cause of 
 the differences among Buddhists themselves, as to the 
 epoch of the special Buddha to whom the Hindu relig- 
 ious reformation is referred. The Thibetans have as 
 many as fourteen accounts of the time of his death, 
 ranging between 2422 B.C. and '546 B.C. The Chi- 
 nese and Japanese insist on the tenth century, and the 
 Singhalese on the sixth. This last date (543 b.c.) 
 substantiated by an agreement among the southern 
 
 ' Pococke, India in Greeee> ^ Weber, Varies., pp. 27, 161, 
 
684 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Buddhists, has been generally accepted by European 
 scholars as approximately correct.^ Yet Miiller and 
 Lassen have shown that dogmatic requirements, re- 
 puted prophecies, and other errors, have had much to 
 do with fixing the recognized dates, after all. 
 
 His Sutras (sentences or discourses) were collected 
 Written after his death by the earliest synod of his fol- 
 records. lowers.^ But these have been to an extent 
 recast by somewhat later hands, and Muller believes 
 that the story of Buddhism down to its foUtical 
 triumph, in the third century B.C., was supplied out 
 of the heads of its disciples in that epoch, rather 
 than from authentic records.^ Yet, in common with 
 other scholars, he regards the substance of the oldest 
 Sutras as good material for history, accepting the 
 main features of their report of Gotama, notwith- 
 standing Professor Wilson's skepticism even as to his 
 existence.* St. Hilaire, following the Lalitavistara, 
 one of the earliest works of the canon,^ for the period 
 of his youth, and combining various Sutras with the 
 reports of the "Chinese Pilgrims" for that of his 
 ministry, has endeavored to separate truth from fiction, 
 and to present a life of the reformer free from mytho- . 
 logical additions, — just as Baur, Renan, Schenkel, 
 and others, have sought to eliminate similar tributes of 
 the religious imagination from the records of the lifd 
 of Jesus. It is manifest, however, that there are even 
 greater difficulties in the way of this effort than in that 
 of extracting pure bistory from the Christian gospels. 
 
 1 Lassen, II. sj-ba ; St. Hilaire ; Bumouf ; Weber, Varies., p. 251. Miiller says 477 
 B.C. See Sansk' Lit., pp. 260-301. 
 
 ' Koeppen, II. 10 ; Lassen, II. 8. » Sansk. Lit., p. 260. 
 
 • Sansk. Lit., 79, 82 : Chifis, I. 217, 219. 
 
 1 Dating beyond all question earlier than the Christian era (St. HW., Introd.,yav.; Miiller, 
 Chips, I. 205), and translated out of Sanskrit into Chinese in the first century of our era. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 68$ 
 
 Of the use of writing for religious purposes in the 
 earliest ages of Buddhism, we have no evi- ,„.. 
 
 =" , . Writing. 
 
 dence. The traditions' of the first three coun- 
 cils do not mention it, and the monumental edicts of 
 Asoka, which belong to the third century B.C., are the 
 oldest inscriptions as yet found in India. "The Tri- 
 ■pitaka, or Tliree Baskets" (the Buddhist Gospels) — 
 comprising Sutras (discourses), Vinaya (discipline), 
 and Abhidharma (metaphysics) — current in the Pali 
 language in Ceylon, contains much of the oral tra- 
 dition of the oldest times ; but it cannot be referred as 
 a whole to a period previous to the time of Asoka. 
 Of more marked originality is the Nepalese collection, 
 written in Sanskrit, and in corresponding though not 
 identical divisions. Much of this also shows signs 
 of elaboration, only possible in an advanced stage of 
 monastic life.^ The Pali history of Ceylon refers the 
 Tripitaka to the close of the " period of inspiration " 
 (106-^4, B.C.). The Dhammapada bears stronger 
 marks of originality, and its sentences are evidently 
 collected frorn primitive sources. They answer to the 
 logia, which Matthew is reported in early Christian 
 traditions to have preserved, and which, so far as they 
 are discoverable in the gospel now bearing his name, 
 must form our earliest data for the life of Jesus. 
 
 That other enlightened persons received the ven- 
 erated name of " Buddha " in earlier times, and in 
 regions north of India, is very probable. The theory 
 of Buddhism affirms an "apostolic succession," de- 
 scending from remotest ages ; and Gotama himself is 
 quoted in proof of it. The name Tathdgata con- 
 
 » Bumouf, p. 125: Wassiljew, Le Bimddhisfne, p. 19: Pillon, in V Annie Philoso- 
 fhigut for 1868, p. 378-382 ; Miiller, Chips, I. 196 ; Sanks. Lit., p. 520 j Feer in jfounuU 
 Atiaiigue for 1867 and 1870. 
 
686 
 
 BUDDHISM. 
 
 stantly given him signifies " he who has pursued the 
 path of his predecessors." Fahian reports three earlier 
 Buddhas, describes a tower in Oude, where the relics 
 of one of them were preserved, and even quotas here- 
 tics who rejected Gotama in the name of these earlier 
 saints. He was supposed to have chosen the special 
 scene of his labors in accordance with a proverb that 
 " a Buddha must always be turning the wheel of the 
 law at Benares." 1 
 
 Whatever becomes of the claims of Buddhism to 
 an ancient " apostolic succession," there can be no 
 doubt that the distinctive revolution in Hindu thought, 
 we are now describing, was embodied in a real re- 
 former; and that his moral traits, if not his words 
 and actions, haye been, on the whole, truly handed 
 down by his earliest disciples, whose testimonies on 
 this point substantially agree.® 
 
 They report him a prince of the royal race of the 
 Personal Sakyas, and the great solar race of the Go- 
 traditions. tamas J — a truly "Messianic" origin. He is 
 born at Kapilavastu, a city of Magadha, the centre of 
 heroic and sacred legend. His true name is said to 
 have been Siddhdrta, '' the victorious ; " but this is 
 more probably a later title of honor, like Buddha, 
 given him by disciples. At the age of thirty, oppressed 
 by the sense of human misery from disease, old age, and 
 death, and the transiency of all things, and absorbed 
 by the longing to deliver mankind from these evils 
 and the successive future births which involved their 
 return, he abdicates all his royal rights, escapes with 
 difficulty from his father's court, exchanges his robes 
 
 ' Accessible authorities are, for northern Buddhism, Seal's Buddhist Pilgrims, Bur- 
 noufs Lotus de la Bomte Lot, and Foucaux's Lalitavist&ra ; and for southern, Tumoui's 
 MahavafUa. 
 
 ' Lassen, II. 65-75; St. Hilaire, ch. i; Duncker, II. 180. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 687 
 
 for the dress of a woodsman, and gives himself up to 
 meditation. He studies at the feet of renowned Brah- 
 mans, but soon exhausts the wisdom of their Brah- 
 manas and Upanishads ; yet consents to try the ascetic 
 path, and pursues its disciplines for six years, attended 
 by five Brahman disciples. But, after confounding 
 all teachers and overcoming all temptations, he is 
 no nearer content : the way is not found. Not so is 
 human misery to be met, not so to be followed to its 
 root. To waste the body does not enlighten the 
 mind. He abandons fasting and penance, to the horror 
 of his Brahman followers;, who flee from his blooming 
 countenance, as if it proved him possessed by an evil 
 spirit. Refreshed by food, he reclines on a carpet 
 of grass-blades under one of those mystical fig-trees, 
 or ^ifpalas, whose heart-shaped leaves, attached to 
 slender stalks, and shivering in the lightest breeze, 
 seem to have been suggestive to the Hindu of the 
 fluctuation of all outward things ; resolved never to 
 rise again till the way of emancipation shall have be- 
 come plain ; and there, motionless for a day and a 
 night, a silent, waiting mind, he receives at daybreak 
 the illumination which makes him the "Awakened 
 One." He is now not only "Sakyamuni," the Her- 
 mit-prince, but a "Buddha" of salvation. 
 
 Yet he is overwhelmed at the thought of the great- 
 ness of the task before him. To teach thoughtless 
 and ignorant multitudes that ignorance and thought- 
 lessness were the root of all evil ; to lead their minds 
 through the long chain-work of causes and effects, be- 
 ginning with " ignorance" and ending in the woes of 
 existence, — by appreciation of which they could free 
 themselves into the path oi nirvdna, seems impossible ; 
 and he despairs. But all nature and soul hasten to 
 
688 BUDDHISM. 
 
 animate and urge forward the redeeming power for 
 which they long. The very gods, Brahma and Indra, 
 all that men have trusted in, confess their own defect, 
 and entreat him to take courage and reveal the mighty 
 secret of release. 
 
 His early preaching in Magadha is a failure. The 
 Sutras tell of sixty days of doubts, temptations, exalta- 
 tions, discouragements ; of the celebrated doctors to 
 whom he appealed in vain ; of the outcry of heresy, 
 and even insanity, that arose against him ; of the ne- 
 cessity to leave his own country, where he had no 
 honor, and "turn the wheel of the law" at the holy 
 city of V^ranasi" (Benares) . 
 
 From this moment all is victory : all things are pre- 
 pared for him. Kings greet him with honor, and 
 provide structures for the propagation of the faith ; 
 and the people rejoice in the waters of life at last 
 dispensed freely. 
 
 The world is renewed by this gospel revealed in the 
 stillness of meditation, this solution of the problem of 
 human misery by freedom, thoughtfulness, and love. 
 We see the man who has dethroned the gods, for forty 
 years journeying through northern India, preaching 
 and reforming, clearing men's minds and opening their 
 hearts and doing wonderful works ; converting kings, 
 saints, and scholars, and drawing the multitudes by the 
 charm of his personal appearance and intercourse, his 
 eloquence and his matchless virtues. 
 
 In his eightieth year he remembers that it is the 
 time appointed for him to enter into nirvdna; predicts 
 to his disciples that in three months he shall be taken 
 from them; consoles their sorrow; admonishes them 
 to fresh zeal, and bids them gather up his precepts 
 when he is gone, and proclaim them to the whole 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 689 
 
 world. At the appointed time and place, he dies in a 
 holy grove, surrounded by his chosen apostles,-exhort- 
 ing them " to remember that all things are passing 
 away, and to prepare themselves quickly for what is 
 imperishable." They in turn promise that they will 
 preach his word fearlessly, enduring to the end.^ 
 After the burning of his body, the strife of eight 
 kings for his relics is appeased only b}' Ananda's ad- 
 monition to remember the spirit of the master, and by 
 their distribution among the whole. 
 
 The legend of Gotama follows the great common 
 track of Oriental inspiration, familiar in its Analogies 
 general features to all students of Comparative °^f chril" 
 Religion ; though in his case, profusely heaped tian legend, 
 with the flowers of a tropical fancy. Its resemblance 
 to the New Testament mythology, limited of course 
 by contrasts of style and detail growing out of the dif- 
 ference of race, is yet sufficient to show decisively 
 that the elements available for the mythopoeic faculty 
 in different religions are substantially the same. We 
 have the story^ of the Buddha's celestial choice to enter 
 the world for its salvation ; of his strict fulfilment of all 
 the fore-ordained conditions necessary to meet the ideal 
 of Buddhahood, as to nationality,' family, times and 
 places of birth, and ministry; of his mother's vir- 
 ginity, and the descent of the divine child into her 
 bosom, approaching her in the form of a white ele- 
 phant bearing a lily, thus taking up into this nativity 
 consecration the life of the beasts and the flowers, — 
 and of his birth amidst joyful adoration b}' all divine 
 pO'Wers and the transfiguration of nature to welcome 
 redeeming soul ; of the saint who discerns upon him 
 the manifold marks of incarnation, and rejoices and. 
 
 ' Lobes, p. i6s- ' See Bumouf, St. Hilaire, and Hardy. 
 
 44 
 
690 BUDDHISM. 
 
 weeps by turns as he describes the long-looked-for 
 glory he has been privileged, so far, to behold ; of the 
 perfections of his childhood ; of his six years' fasting 
 in the wilderness ; of his conflicts with the spirit of 
 evil, Mara, who comes to test his pretensions, and 
 dissuade him from his purpose by bribes and terrors, 
 and even by armed hosts, whose weapons, as they 
 rain upon the firm heart and will, are turned to flow- 
 ers ; of his miraculous gifts, used always for beneficent 
 ends ; of his controversies with the Brahmans, who 
 sought in all ways to overreach, or silence, and even 
 in some cases to destroy him ; of his predictions and 
 exhortations, relative to his own death and its conse- 
 quences for mankind ; of the wonders that attended 
 the burning of his body, on earth and through all the 
 worlds. 
 
 The seclusion of the Buddhist monasteries gave 
 opportunity for the growth of a luxuriant mythology 
 about his person, greatly enlarged and enriched by 
 the wide geographical expansion of the faith, and the 
 .division of the believers into a multitude of sects. 
 Similar influences have produced analogous results on 
 the person of " the Christ " in the Western world, but 
 with a diflference that should be carefully noted. The 
 growth of legend about the earthly life of Jesus has 
 been checked by the historic sense peculiar to West- 
 ern civilization, and by the circulation of a written 
 record. The mythopceic current, thus diverted froni 
 the ground of his actual life, has poured itself, in an 
 almost Oriental flood, in the generation of an ideal, all- 
 pervading " Christ," or rather a forever-changing ideal 
 of perfection ; bound somehow to get itself reconciled, 
 however, with the record of Jesus as its norm and 
 source, and to remain so, constructing all spiritual 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 69I 
 
 symbolism to conform to this record, in order that the 
 historical Jesus may be retained as indwelling life of 
 his Church. To this personal ideal, thus constructed, 
 which is put, like that of Buddha, in the place of 
 deity, the Christian imagination ascribes all past, all 
 actual, and all hoped-for good. The defect of the 
 Buddhist mythology is thus of a very different char- 
 acter from that of the Christian ; the one consisting in 
 the absence of restraint by the laws of historical ex- 
 perience, and the other in arrest and custody of the 
 spiritual sense by artificial historic limits. The value 
 of both is in claiming, up to a certain point, spiritual 
 and moral significance for the natural world. 
 
 And here the Buddhist ideal maintains, through all 
 the wild, rank license of its fanc}', a severe ethical 
 purity, more surprising under such circumstances, 
 than that which has been secured to the Christian 
 by the far greater sobriety of Semitic and European 
 imagination. 
 
 The analogy in method between the two mythologies 
 holds, as far back as the records of either allow us 
 to go. The pre-existing type of the Buddha life lay 
 in the consciousness of the early Buddhist Church, 
 just as the Messianic idea lay in that Hebrew con- 
 sciousness to which we owe so much of the earliest 
 biography of Jesus. " The Buddha must perform 
 certain acts, visit certain places at certain times, work 
 certain prescribed miracles ; " ^ and it was but the 
 natural tribute of faith to make his biography accord 
 with these conditions. In all mythological construc- 
 tion, the soul has made good its own prophetic desire, 
 more or less freely, by the creative word, "This was 
 done that it might be fulfilled." First, a few general 
 
 1 Sec Koeppen, I. 95 ; St. Hilaire, ch. ii. j BeaPs Buddhist Pilgrims, ch. xxii. 
 
692 BUDDHISM. 
 
 typical features or moulds were supplied by the living 
 hope of the age ; then these, having found some 
 personal centre round which they could gather, were 
 wrought out by later demands in the desired variety 
 and prodigality of product.^ 
 
 To what extent the Founder of a faith himself has 
 contributed to the development of the pre-existent 
 ideal through sharing its hope, and believing him- 
 self appointed to fulfil it, is in all cases difficult to 
 determine. The remote life of Gotama of course 
 affords no exception to the rule. 
 
 The eight}'^ apostles he is believed to have sent forth 
 The hour to prcach his gospel of "mercy to all" are 
 andtheman. probably but a mythical expression of the 
 fact that the age awaited it. The voice of a com- 
 mon aspiration must have been heard in his appeal, 
 as in all gospels that have survived in the faith of 
 generations. Buddha represented, as did Jesus after- 
 wards, a great demand of his time ; partly by his 
 actual personality, and still more as the centre of 
 that idealizing process by which the demands of a 
 religious crisis know how to create their own satis- 
 faction out of a few ill-defined and therefore plastic 
 materials. Before describing this demand in the in- 
 stance of Buddhism, there is a word to be said about 
 the significance of this relation between the Hour and 
 the Man. 
 
 All the historical religions, even Mohammedanism 
 Significance and Christianity, run back to comparatively 
 °^,^gP^'^^unhistorical ages and obscure personal rela- 
 mand. tions. To say that the more this veil is re- 
 
 » Thus the legend associates with Buddha's life all the holy places of northern India. 
 " He is bom at Kapilavaslu ; reaches perfection at Magadha ; turns the wheel of the 
 Law at VSranSsi (lienarte) ; and is freed from pain at Kaci." 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 693 
 
 moved from the age of the Hindu reformer, the 
 less of that universal element in Buddhism that 
 makes it a religion will be found traceable to his ex- 
 clusive influence, and the more to profound tendencies 
 and necessities in the life of his epoch and his race, — 
 is but to apply a universal law. The further we pene- 
 trate towards the apparent sources of any great relig- 
 ious movement, the more strongly the disposition to 
 ascribe it, as a whole, to the personal power of the 
 so-called "Founder," will be reproved. And this not 
 because the initial impulses of great reformations 
 were not really felt in the depths of elect souls, nor 
 because personal force is of less moment than we are 
 wont to suppose ; but because the tendenc}'' of a relig- 
 ious Veneration which lasts for ages is to overlook or 
 depreciate the manifold personal forces of which a 
 great religious transition is made up, in the exclusive 
 interest of one. All universal results must come from 
 universal elements, and such elements could only have 
 been expressed in the infinite variety of characters 
 and aims that made up the spirit of an age. History 
 brings round this needed lesson in the democracy of 
 the soul, at last. It will not suffer the honor due to 
 human nature to be for ever absorbed or monopolized 
 by a few. The progress of inquiry dissipates these 
 illusions of distance ; but it is only to substitute better 
 knowledge of the providential laws. 
 
 This is illustrated in the study of the origin of 
 Christianity. What have been loosely called origin of 
 mere " preparations for the coming of the Christianity. 
 Lord" ^ are found to have been grand creative instincts 
 
 1 Even MUller occasionally expresses such partiaUsm, which seems out of accord with 
 his large culture and spiritual as well as philosophical insight. See Sansk. Lit., p. 32 i 
 outs-, I. p. 373- 
 
694 BUDDHISM. 
 
 in the depths of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman civiliza- 
 tion, moving millions more or less definitely in one 
 and the same direction, and shaping an ideal, ready 
 to crown the head which should be conspicuous enough 
 to attract its attention, yet obscure enough to baffle 
 criticism, — these spiritual tendencies of the age se- 
 cretly moving the teacher and his apostles, and de- 
 veloping his religious genius for its work. Not only 
 are the moral and spiritual truths he was believed 
 to have imported into the time, and even into human 
 nature, found to have been fermenting in the society 
 into which he was born, but that all-controlling func- 
 tion in opening the new moral era which has been 
 ascribed to his personal life fails of historical evidence. 
 His nobility and sweetness are seen to have followed 
 the natural laws of human influence.^ All the more 
 evident becomes the divine impulse that was moving 
 that whole wonderful age.^ 
 
 Thus inevitably are exacted all dues that have been 
 , ,. ., , withheld from the common nature, whereof all 
 
 Individual 
 
 anduiiiver- religions and their founders are outgrowths. 
 Yet heroism and sainthood are none the less 
 spontaneous ; nor has genius the less of individuality 
 and original power. And this inevitable absorption 
 of the personal centres of religious tradition into the 
 humanity of their times, at the touch of historical in- 
 quiry, can no longer surprise us when we remember 
 that every exclusive claim has defrauded personality 
 itself, by setting aside that ideal value which belongs 
 to it in each and every efficient human life. 
 
 1 See, for further illustration of these points, the author's work on The Worship of 
 yc«« (Boston, j868). 
 
 ' See Denis, Thlaries ei Idies Morales de VAntiquiti; and Lecky's European 
 Morals. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 695 
 
 Buddhism may have found foothold in some strong 
 civil or political reaction against the authority „ 
 
 r . Foothold of 
 
 of a priestly caste. Of this we have no a c- Buddhism 
 count. But we know that the civil power " "'"^°' 
 sustained the movement, and that princes bore as 
 important a part in propagating it as they did in the 
 growth of the Christian Church eight hundred years, 
 and in that of Protestantism two thousand years, after- 
 wards. We know of Kandragupta,^ the great Hindu 
 chief, who expelled the Greeks from India in the third 
 century b.c, and conquered an empire which included 
 the whole of Aryavarta, the Holy Land of Hindu 
 tradition, and the birthplace of Gotama himself, and 
 founded the famous dynasty of the Mauryas with 
 which the latter was connected by subsequent legend 
 as Sakyamuni ; that he was of low caste, probably 
 a Sudra, and that his accession must have given great 
 impulse to the preaching of social equality in the name 
 of religion. And we find in his grandson, Asoka, 
 the Constantine of the Buddhist church. All ac- 
 counts agree in reporting some of Gotama's earliest 
 converts to have been men of the highest rank and 
 distinction. Kings were his champions and almoners. 
 Hiouen Thsang saw the ruins of a hall of conference 
 at Sravasti, which had been built for him by the 
 king of Kosala, and tells of other structures in 
 the midst of beautiful gardens erected for his public 
 preaching by men of great wealth and benevolence in 
 different parts of northern India. The secular ele- 
 ment could indeed hardly have been attracted by the 
 speculative principles of Buddhism, which do but 
 follow the Brahmanical track into depths where the 
 common mind could not easily find food. But these 
 
 ^ Lassen, II. 196. 
 
696 BUDDHISM. 
 
 fine-spun metaphysics were largely of later growth : 
 they did not constitute its motive force. The practical 
 democratic tone of its new preaching, on the other 
 hand, must have been welcomed, both by the masses 
 who saw mutual love and service substituted for 
 priestly mediation as the path to beatitude, and by 
 the secular powers, which would greet a religion so 
 antagonistic to the rival caste. But we must not 
 underestimate the capacity of the people to become 
 interested even in speculative reforms. Miiller does 
 not hesitate to say that " in India less than in any other 
 country would people submit to a monopoly of truth ; 
 and the same millions who were patiently bearing the 
 yoke of a political despotism threw off the fetters of 
 an intellectual tyranny." We have already seen that 
 the political despotism itself was not so complete as 
 has commonly been thought. 
 
 The old religious institutions had doubtless lost 
 much of their power. ^ Brahmanism was no 
 
 Roots of ^ ^ ^ 
 
 Buddhism longer the profound faith it had been ; or 
 int epast. j-^^j^gj. jj. ^^g passing iuto the freer spirit of the 
 Upanishad, an ever open "sitting" for new reve- 
 lations. It had already gone through many phases, 
 and its pantheistic spirit left it open in many directions 
 to great freedom of speculation. Its Brahmanas and 
 Upanishads abound in Buddhistic terms and doctrines.^ 
 It is certain that the reformers held its spiritual essence 
 in respect. There is good evidence that, as late as the 
 time of As'oka, Buddha was still associated with it, 
 and regarded as in some sort its pupil. He was a 
 sitter at the feet of Brahmans, and his earliest follow- 
 ers were of that class. Famous Brahman teachers 
 are associated with him in both these ways.* The 
 
 » Lassen, II. 462. » Weber, Varies., p. 249. ' Ibid. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 697 
 
 oldest Sutras seek to ennoble the name of Brahman. 
 The Dhammapada, describing the true Buddhist saint 
 says, " Him call I the true Brahmana." Our amiable 
 Chinese pilgrims bear no malice towards believers 
 in the older faith. Fahian praises a great Brah- 
 manical teacher. Hiouen Thsang describes the 
 Brahmans as " men of spotless life, who make purity 
 the basis of their doctrine ; " and has other good 
 words for them whenever he speaks of them as a 
 whole.' The Sutras represent Gotama as seeking 
 to purify the lives of many, whose doctrine he does 
 not assail. The Buddhists seem indeed to have used 
 this ancient word to convey the sense of pure relig- 
 ion ; objecting to the pretence of a technical Brah- 
 manic priesthood to appropriate it. It has on their 
 lips a certain ancestral sanctity, in view of which such 
 ecclesiastical pretensions were childish : so that one 
 cannot well avoid the belief that we are here dealing 
 with one of those simplest and most natural terms for 
 the inward life, which, like our own words, God and 
 Nature, overpass special creeds, and associate the 
 speaker with the whole religious experience of his 
 people. Even while deposing Brahma himself as 
 special deity, the Buddhist would seem to have held 
 fast to the old significance of this root-word of re- 
 ligion. "Buddhism," says Max Miiller, "was origi- 
 nally but. a modification of Brahmanism, and grew 
 slowly up to the position of a rival and opposing sys- 
 tem." ^ The statement may easily be strengthened by 
 the analogies of history. Christianity was, in its ori- 
 gin, a form of Judaism. The continuity of religious 
 life is steadily maintained through all transitions. 
 
 1 MSm. des Voy. de Hiouen Thsang, I. 76, So. 
 ' Sansk. Lit., p. 262. 
 
698 BUDDHISM. 
 
 There is no " supernatural " violation of this sacred 
 sanity of growth. 
 
 But there was other soil than that of distinctive 
 Brahmanism to quicken the new tree. We have seen 
 that rationalistic reactions had already, before the 
 time of Buddha, combined with the introspective 
 tendencies of Hindu thought, as in Kapila. Budd- 
 hism inherited largely from the Santhya, and was, in 
 the main, a democratic use of its speculative belief.^ 
 The rise of new divinities in the faith of the people, 
 such as the worship of Krishna Vishnu,^ and the re- 
 action of aboriginal beliefs, on the language, social 
 habits, and religious sentiment of the Aryan con- 
 querors, — must have weakened the hold of Brahma, 
 as an exclusive conception of deity. The practical faith 
 of the people has at all times exerted an influence 
 on contemporaneous forms of philosophy; and even 
 Hindu abstractions were not free from this social 
 accountability. 
 
 The most impressive fact in Indian Buddhism is 
 And in ^ complete dethronement of the old deities in 
 Aryan char- the uamc of (buddki) human intelligence. 
 The legend shows these elder gcfcs kneeling 
 around the mother of Gotama, at his birth, in homage 
 to a Human Life that brought with it a profounder 
 insight than their own. This secularist courage of the 
 Buddhist lay in his ethnic descent. To hold special 
 conceptions and names of deity in abeyance to the 
 energies of mmd was but a phase of that self-reliance 
 which determines all forms of activity in Aryan races. 
 Not only has there been in them all a heroic element 
 that dared to lift itself to the level of recognized divin- 
 ities ; not only do all their epics delight to exalt the 
 
 ' Weber, Ind. Stud., I. 434. s Lassen, II. 464. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 699 
 
 interest of human strife by bringing in the immortals 
 to share the perils and bear the fortunes of the day : 
 this challenge to the Pantheon in the clash of Aryan 
 arms was natural for bold and ardent races ; the gods 
 of the hero 'are ever provisional. But there was a 
 like instinct of self-afBrmation in the religious element 
 also. It divinized the authority of truth, as Thought; 
 and this, for the more introversive qualities of Aryan 
 mind, would mean truth as contemplation, or devotion. 
 And so the unsteadily seated Vedic and Brahmanical 
 deities were amenable to a force more potent than 
 the Kshattriya's sword. It was the very force by 
 which they had earned their thrones. That concen- 
 tration of mind on the eternal by reaction from the 
 transient, which, as represented in them, constituted 
 their deity, continued to hold them responsible to itself. 
 It was an idea, a universal fact for ever seeking fresh 
 expression and more perfect embodiment. In other 
 words, devotion made them : an intenser devotion 
 could unmake, could supplant them. 
 
 It is not meant by this statement that the ascetic 
 mental disciplines themselves, which consti- „ ^ 
 
 ■j ^ Dethrone- 
 
 tuted the "devotion" of the Hindu saint, were mentofthe 
 themselves regarded as the highest object of" "S" s. 
 worship. These subjective processes of the individ- 
 ual were doubtless, as profound aspirations always 
 are, lost to the consciousness by absorption in the 
 universal idea which they pursued. Thought in 
 itself, as spiritual contemplation, was true deity, was 
 creative essence ; and the more there was of this, the 
 more of real being and sovereignty, which all special 
 forms of existence must obey. 
 
 The rishi who shall surpass one of these deities in 
 devotion, who shall reach a completer sacrifice of im- 
 
tjOO BUDDHISM. 
 
 perfect desires and aims, shall dispossess him of the 
 divinity claimed for him ; and this of course is purely 
 by virtue of the divine itself, as always greater than 
 any of its manifestations. Thus all special forms of 
 deity were subject to the instinct of frogress, in this 
 pantheistic worship of contemplation, this faith in the 
 endless productivity of devotion. The old myth of the 
 fitris, or fathers, curiously illustrates what is here 
 meant. This class of divine human beings were 
 believed to be the sons of the gods ; but placed above 
 them by Brahma, as having proved holier than they. 
 Thenceforward they were acknowledged as fathers by 
 their own parents. Being more divine, they were 
 essentially older. Does not the long procession of 
 religions, the line of special names and forms by 
 which ' man has sought to express his changing 
 thought of deity, present the same law on a majestic 
 scale? Ever the child takes the father's place. The 
 newest authority stands for the root of being and of 
 history : its very birth and parentage are held to have 
 been its own work. Man affirms, in every fresh en- 
 largement of his religious ideal, somewhat ancestral 
 and primeval ; because it is in its adequacy that the 
 problem of existence is solved for him, and the essence 
 of creative power revealed. So the older God gives 
 way to the new light from Man. And deity may be 
 said to judge its own past, as the Idea of the Holy 
 advances in human consciousness. 
 
 This is the process of spiritual freedom. In difFer- 
 Theiawof S"* Stages of development, its forms are difFer- 
 uberty. gjjt, its intelligence less or greater. But the 
 soul's mastership of its homestead is constantly as- 
 serted in one or another way ; whether it be (to 
 apply a distinction that has been well drawn) through 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 70I 
 
 the illusive aim of primitive speculation to coerce 
 the supernatural powers which an imaginative faith 
 created, or through that " command of nature by 
 obeying her laws which is the practical issue of 
 modern science." ' 
 
 Every step in religious progress is a reaffirmation of 
 the authority of the ideal element in man, as represen- 
 tative of deity, to judge and reshape its conceptions of 
 the divine. And, however partial these conceptions 
 may be, it is through their changes that we are lifted 
 beyond them, and know that the Infinite itself is 
 objectively real. 
 
 Its inspiration of the human faculties, as the Idea 
 of the Divine, advances in all Aryan civilizations with 
 special freedom, boldly substituting fresh forms and 
 names of deity for older ones, from time to time found 
 inadequate. The speciality of the Hindu process is 
 that the idea thus exercising eminent domain in wor- 
 ship is contemplative. From contemplation and its 
 energies there was in Indian faith no appeal. My- 
 thology and ritual were constantly destroyed and 
 reconstructed by its breath. Ever dissatisfied with 
 its own forms, it pressed on to abstraction more thor- 
 ough and more intense ; as we see not only in the 
 diflference between Brahmanical and Buddhistic specu- 
 lation, but in the constant liability of the deities to be 
 supplanted by a more perfect sainthood. Yet it must 
 be recognized that the abstraction was thoroughly 
 competent to creation not only of positive belief, but 
 of moral aspiration and endeavor. These new masters 
 of faith and heaven are held with singular strictness to 
 the validit)'- of moral authority. Devotees enter deity by 
 prayer, discipline, and service ; and saints alarm the 
 
 * WesimUtster Review on " Magic and Astrology" (January, 1864). 
 
702 BUDDHISM. 
 
 gods by their virtues, as well as their penances, into 
 sending seductions and dissuasives, such as nymphs, 
 called the weapons of Indra, to bend them from their 
 victorious march. Their imprecations sway the course 
 of nature and human life.^ In the Ramayana, the poet 
 does not hesitate to make the older gods contempt- 
 ible through their immoralities ; while Vishnu only, the 
 later deity who had supplanted them, is exalted as the 
 perfect moral ideal, and thereby commended to wor- 
 ship. The antagonism involved, in this possibility of 
 supplanting the old divinity by new human energies, 
 and the arduousness of the test, has its representative 
 victim in the mythologic king Trisanku, whose ambi- 
 tious virtue, offending the gods, caused him to be flung 
 back from heaven, whither he had ascended, towards 
 the earth ; but, being caught on his way by the power- 
 ful Visvamitra, he remained suspended in space, form- 
 ing a constellation in the southern sky. 
 
 Such being the recognized authority of the contem- 
 Buddhism plative and moral ideals, to supplant their own 
 the ultimate past forms with higher ones, it was natural 
 
 of Hindu ^ , ^ . . 
 
 contempia- that a dehnite negative should come at last, to 
 ''°°- sweep away every claim of everlastingness in 
 
 the existent objects of Hindu faith ; to disparage the 
 old divinities more than the boldest war-chiefs had 
 done, and to give law even to Brahma, through a 
 force of abstraction profounder than that which his 
 name had signified or his perfection involved. It was 
 natural that contemplation itself, pressing freely to its 
 utmost limit, should find its own nirvana, and be, as it 
 were, set free of its distinctive self, into universality, 
 both speculative and moral ; so that out of the depths 
 
 ' See the whole plot of Sakuntald, which is founded on an event of this sort. Also 
 the story of Sunda and Upasunda in the Mah&hk&rata, 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 703 
 
 of philosophical pantheivSm, out of utmost isolation 
 and abstraction, should arise this wonderful Budd- 
 hism, this " awakening," this " illumination " of idea 
 and purpose, with the grand sweep of its affirmation : 
 " All that lives and breathes shall become Buddha ; " 
 with its faith that whenever a Buddha passes into 
 nirvana, his karma is poured through the worlds as 
 a fulness of living moral energies ; ^ its summons to 
 every one to master evil and make his own destiny ; 
 and its tender and earnest impulse to save all men, its 
 world-wide gospel to the poor. 
 
 Can we wonder that a gospel whose essence lay in 
 the experience that thought can reach its final purpose, 
 and existence its solution, only in service of mankind, 
 should have been heard so gladly by the teeming 
 populations of the East? Sublime demonstration that 
 the soul, even in its dreams, finds a path to universal- 
 ity, both in sympathy and faith. 
 
 Most naturally too, as we have seen, arose this 
 radical self-affirmation of the human, through s^f.j^j^. 
 all negation towards special objects of faith, tion of the 
 As Brahmanical piety was absorbed in the "™^' 
 idea of God, so there seems to have always existed 
 by the side of it, in India, some form of protest and 
 reaction in the name of man. Its earnestness and 
 courage are seen in such proverbs as these from the 
 Dhammapada : — 
 
 " Neither God nor Gandharva, nor Mira (the spirit of evil), with 
 Brahma combined, can make that man's victory a defeat, who has 
 constantly ruled himself." 
 
 " Even the gods envy the thoughtful, calm, awakened ones." 
 " Better than lordship over all worlds is to take the first step in 
 virtue." 
 
 1 Bastian, Die Weltauffassung der Buddhisten (Berlin, 1870), p. 23. 
 
704 BUDDHISM. 
 
 The Buddha is in origin purely human ; yet contem- 
 plation exalts him above all gods. His human energy 
 masters all special forms of being and power in all 
 worlds. His personal will chooses to postpone his 
 hard-earned ntrvdna, that he maj' share it with all 
 mankind ; that he may teach the whole world the way 
 to its blessedness. This is like the divine love as- 
 cribed to Jesus in Christian creeds. But between the 
 two religions that correspond to these two ideals there 
 is this difference. In Buddhism the moral grandeur 
 redounds purely and unmistakably to the honor of 
 human nature, since it has always been maintained 
 that Gotama was essentially human. ^ Christianity, on 
 the other hand, has not rested the virtue of Jesus on the 
 natural capacity of man ; however it may imply, in 
 holding him to be the manifestation of deity, that a 
 human form may, for once, be transfigured by special 
 divine influx. 
 
 This coming of the human to positive self-assertion 
 Earlier ^" Buddhism was, as I have said, in part a 
 germs of protcst agaiust disparaging man in the name ot 
 God. But we must not carry this explanation 
 of it too far. We should, for instance, be quite wrong 
 in regarding it as the extreme reaction from an absolute 
 denial of the Human in Brahmanism to an absolute de- 
 nial of the Divine. This would be to overstate both sides 
 as forms of negation. We have already seen that Budd- 
 hism was not atheistic ; and it is equally true that its 
 claim for man was not an absolute revolution in Hindu 
 philosophy. It was indeed adequate to give fresh 
 direction to the thought and life of the people. It was 
 
 1 See Hardy, Manual, p. 363. " To remove tlie doubts of all beings, to show that 
 what he does is not by the power of irdhi, or miraculous gift, he receives Buddhaship as a 
 man, bom from the womb.*' 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 705 
 
 a new expansive force, a stimulus to zeal and sacrifice. 
 The soul always seeks a true balance of its activities ; 
 and so contemplative devotion enforced a demand for 
 enthusiasm and the inspiration of work. Hence the 
 Buddhist's appeal to the masses, his fearless rejection 
 of the old divinities that slumbered in the bosom of 
 caste. But there was in that older contemplative piety 
 itself, it must be remembered, the germ of a profound 
 recognition of the Human. Spiritual Pantheism, ip its 
 substantial meaning, exalts and reveres soul, as soul. 
 Its logic can never quite escape a democratic, universal 
 form. Its God in India was not this Brahman nor that 
 rishi, but " All in all." Therefore, as we have seen, its 
 development naturally brought rationalistic and free 
 mystical tendencies, caste-disintegration, and, in a 
 word. Buddhism itself, in definite, constructive form, 
 as the concurrence of all these, notwithstanding every 
 thing that ecclesiasticism could do to prevent them. 
 
 We must note that it was only as special divinities 
 that the elder gods were liable to be supplanted . 
 by the spiritual disciplines of special saints. It this claim of 
 was only as a god that Brahma was dethroned ' ° '™™" 
 by the Buddhist test of transiency, not as God. It is 
 not to be inferred therefore that the attitude of censor- 
 ship we have described involved ignorance or rejection 
 of an eternal essence beyond the power of human 
 criticism to change, or of human achievement to sup- 
 plant. Only the pursuit of such transcendent moral 
 reality could have enforced the criticism of specific 
 objects of worship, and the effort to achieve their sub- 
 jection by a higher truth and virtue than their own. 
 
 It is true that the gods, thus declared to be merely 
 temporary, were also held to be actual beings and 
 powers in the universe : so that in the treatment of all 
 
 45 
 
706 BUDDHISM. 
 
 such definite forms of deity as provisional there lay the 
 danger of dissolving objective truth in the self-asser- 
 tion of the critical faculty ; and of claiming not only 
 that man makes and unmakes his special conception 
 of God, but that God, as God, is nothing else than a 
 human conception. But these perils of negation were 
 held in check by a profound veneration in the Oriental 
 mind for the independence of the eternal, absolute, 
 andninfinite. It was but as forms of personal will that 
 the gods were held to be thus provisional, and subject to 
 the demand for more perfect fulfilment of the religious 
 ideal. 
 
 The Buddhist has yot therefore committed the weak- 
 ness of holding BrahmS. or Vishnu to be true 
 
 Imperfect ^ 
 
 sense of and perfect Deity, while at the same time 
 ""'■ subjecting him to human criticism and even 
 mastership. Yet, when Buddha himself came to be 
 the centre of religious faith and mythologic creation, 
 he was regarded as subject to human influence and 
 even control, with little respect for the self-adequacy 
 of the divine. So Vishnu is described by Kalidasa as 
 "greater than the self-existent," when choosing a mortal 
 shape, to save mankind. ^ To this imperfect sense of 
 the meaning of deity all religions are subject, in con- 
 centrating worship on a definite personal will. In the 
 same way, the Christ practically supplants the Father 
 in the faith and service of Christians ; and God be- 
 comes only an "impalpable effluence," from.the person 
 of his own Son ! It hardly becomes Christendom to 
 rebuke Buddhism for putting a man in place of God. 
 Luther said that God had "tied himself to man by 
 bonds of prayer ;" Montalembert, that "prayer equals, 
 sometimes surpasses, the power of God, triumphing 
 
 ' SaktrntalU, Act. VII. 
 
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 707 
 
 over His will, His wrath, and even over His justice." 
 "God," says Ruskin, "is a Being who can be reasoned 
 with, moved by entreaties, angered by our rebellion, 
 alienated by our coldness, pleased by our love, and 
 glorified by our labor." All this is certainly to 
 worship the conditional and finite. It would sub- 
 ject the tnoral order of the universe to the infirmi- 
 ties of human desire. It is also, on the other hand, 
 however unconscious and perverted, a kind of claim 
 justly entered by the human to determine the paths of 
 freedom and progress. Both these forces manifestly 
 involve criticism and even supersedure of what has 
 been held the adequate object of worship. But they 
 are perverted, if not suppressed, in so far as the claim 
 amounts to a pretension of moving and changing deity 
 itself; in so far as it is assumed that one who can 
 be thus criticised, changed, convinced, improved, and 
 even supplanted, has in very fact exhausted the idea 
 of infinite, absolute Being. Such, however, is the per- 
 verted form under which the claim of the human to 
 shape its religious ideal appears, not in the distin- 
 guished ' instances only that have just "been given, 
 but in the general tenor of Christian praying and 
 preaching. 
 
 And the sincerity and devoutness, which is found to 
 be compatible therewith in the Christian world, should 
 prepare us to believe that a similar failing in later 
 Buddhism is not without its aspirations to freedom 
 and its sentiment of reverence and faith. 
 
V. 
 
 AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA. 
 
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA. 
 
 TTARDLY any thing in the history of religion is 
 -'- ^ more impressive than the energy with Exte-sionof 
 which Buddhism was propagated for centuries BuddWsm. 
 after the time of Sakyamuni, and its success in revo- 
 lutionizing the religious life of the great and little 
 states into which northern India was divided. All 
 the oldest inscriptions on Hindu monuments are not 
 only written in dialects of popular language, but are 
 shown to -be Buddhist by their spirit also, as well as 
 by the emblems which in many cases are associated 
 with them : the chaitya, or relic temple, the tree, the 
 wheel, the cross, the seated Buddha. And the same 
 conclusion holds of the old coins of India, so far as 
 they have been brought to light. Fahian speaks of 
 Buddhism as "the law of India;" and the immense 
 treasures of sacred literature with which Hiouen 
 Thsang returned to China prove that the resources of 
 the faith were in his time almost unlimited. Yet the 
 practical missionary zeal which it demanded of its 
 converts could not be contented with the passive spirit 
 of Hindu civilization. That restless ardor to deliver 
 all mankind drove them to expend most of their force 
 on distant regions. Gradually, too, after many cen- 
 turies of depression, there came a revival of Brahman- 
 
7 12 BUDDHISM. 
 
 ism, of which we have no very clear explanation. 
 Doubtless the hold it had at the earlier period in 
 the inertia of established system was not wholly lost 
 through the palmy days of Buddhist ascendency. 
 Doubtless it learned to quote the radical metaphysics 
 and thorough rationalism of its rival with disparaging 
 effect before a people naturally reverent towards tra- 
 dition, profoundly mystical, and open to recognize 
 somewhat authoritative in an ancient title to the Vedas, 
 those fountains of national faith. But the disappear- 
 ance of Buddhism from the soil of India is a conse- 
 quence not so much of this revival of Brahmanism — 
 which has, after all, never been very effectual — as of 
 its own absorption into numerous sects, which have 
 transferred much of its spirit into new forms of popular 
 faith. It is not easy to say how much of the disinte- 
 gration of caste described in an earlier part of this 
 work as going on in later times, and which is manifest 
 in nearly all important sects of recent formation, is 
 due to the direct influence of distinctive Buddhism. 
 Though it has failed to eradicate the idea of caste- 
 subordination from the Hindu mind, so that even in 
 Ceylon, where its effect on manners and life has been 
 very great, the lowest, or Chandala caste, still re- 
 mains ;^ yet the separation of that idea from religious 
 faith and institution has been a marked result of the 
 forces which it set in motion. 
 
 Buddhism was still more effectual in its reaction 
 Influence on agiiiiist the Sacrifices of animals, which had 
 sacrifices, succeeded those simple Vedic rites, so seldom 
 stained with blood. Even the cakes, butter, and soma- 
 juice of those early days were abjured by these 
 thorough Puritans, who allowed no rite but the offer- 
 
 * Tennent's Ceylon* 
 
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA. 713 
 
 ing of flowers to their perfected Buddhas. And even 
 the great Brahmanical revival has not restored the ani- 
 mal sacrifices thus interrupted, except in rare instances, 
 and, as some affirm, in a single province. The Hindus 
 have, as a people, returned to the old Vedic ways, and 
 bring their offerings from the dairy and the field. ^ 
 
 The inspiration of Buddhism was, moreover, in its 
 practical energy, its faith in liberty and in 1,51,014 
 active work; and with these the climate of™'""*'^- 
 India was less congenial than that of regions to the 
 north and west. Its apostles were attracted by the 
 rude and unsettled condition of the tribes of middle 
 Asia, as strongly as they were repelled from Hindustan 
 by fixed ideas and systems. Yet the influences of cli- 
 mate, tradition, and organization combined, failed for 
 twelve centuries to dislodge Buddhism from the coun- 
 try of its birth. The special causes of its disappear- 
 ance from India, in or about the ninth century, are 
 still unknown. This epoch is the dark' age of Hindu 
 history. Its scanty traditions hint of merciless relig- 
 ious persecutions ; but of these, if they really occurred, 
 all definite record has been effaced.** Of crusades 
 against Buddhism by teachers like Sankara and Ku- 
 marila Bhatta, and of quarrels with the kindred school 
 of the Jainas, we have little more than vague rumors. 
 These Dark Ages were times of intestine strife among 
 the principalities of India. They were followed by the 
 all-commingling flood of Mohammedan invasion ; and, 
 when the old sects and schools reappeared, it was under 
 new names, and as results of a ferment and fusion 
 not now to be traced. Buddhism has but been exiled 
 in name : the substance remained, and told decisively 
 on the theology, literature, and life of the Hindu race. 
 
 > See Wheeler, I. 159. = Lassen, IV. 708. 
 
714 BUDDHISM. 
 
 The Bhagavadgita is an evidence of this influence, 
 for the period previous to the expulsion. It 
 
 Shown in . . 
 
 the Bhaga- is BrahmanisHi making such concessions to 
 vadgiti Buddhism as were necessary to save its own 
 life ; recognizing the duty of eclectic liberality, and 
 yielding a surprising amount of moral consideration 
 and respect to the, lower castes. The Yoga system of 
 Patanjali, probably one of the outgrowths of Budd- 
 hism, or at least a successor in the same line, had, in 
 one sense equalized men, by exalting ascetic life as 
 such above the distinctive functions assigned by the 
 older faith to the several castes. The Bhagavadgita, 
 while it disparaged these exclusive claims of ascetic 
 discipline, yet obeyed the democratic impulse of 
 Buddhism in another way ; emphasizing the duty of 
 action and the demands of society on the individual. 
 It reduced the whole mythological world to unity ; 
 and, with Buddhistic thoroughness, absorbed the whole 
 universe of gods and men into the abyss of apparent 
 annihilation. "As torrents rush into the ocean, so the 
 heroes of the human race enter the flaming mouths, 
 the fire of death." ^ Brahma could never have appeared 
 under so terrible a form, — that eremite God of eternal 
 rest. The thought of evanescence must have been 
 deepened by some powerful educational force. The 
 universal energy of death is even declared in plain 
 words to be greater than Brahma himself.^ And we 
 have here, without doubt, the gigantic shadow cast 
 upon Brahmanism by the Buddhist JVtrvdna, as well as 
 by the terrors of the popular theology, which were 
 not to be wholly escaped. But when that abysmal 
 deity changes his form, and appears at once as Krishna, 
 incarnation of Vishnu, the preserving Spirit, bidding 
 
 1 B/Mff. G., ch. xi. ! Ibid. 
 
AFTER-tlFE IN INDIA. ^IJ 
 
 Arjuna look on him "free from fear, with happy 
 heart," — it is impossible not to recognize in this no- 
 blest avatdra, counselling to manly human service,^ 
 to absolute disinterestedness, to liberation from the 
 Vedas, to the worship of eternal truth,® an effort of 
 Brahmanism to combine with its aspirations toward 
 an immortal life the practical love and freedom en- 
 forced by the Buddhist gospel. 
 
 " Without action you cannot reach freedom from action : whoso 
 restrains the senses and acts unselfishly, without interest in the 
 fruits, yet who acts, seeking the good of mankind, attains peace. 
 His path leads to nirvAna in the Supreme Spirit.'" 
 
 This is certainly as near Buddhism as Brahmanism 
 could be expected to arrive. Krishna says further : — 
 
 " It is the mind liberated from the Vedas that reaches true con- 
 templation. Seek refuge in thy mind." ■■ 
 
 " Even Vaisyas and Sudras take the highest path, if they turn 
 to me. How much more, then, Brahmans and Kshattriyas ! " * 
 
 It is Arjuna, the Kshcittriya king, who is prom- 
 ised the highest unity with deity, and admitted to 
 visions hidden from all other men.^ Such conces- 
 sions to the lower castes, however imperfect, indicate 
 democratic influences which the hereditary priesthood 
 had been unable to resist. 
 
 All this is none the less true because the caste sys- 
 tem is still maintained in the Bhagavadgita, the whole 
 theory of action qualified thereby, and the duty of 
 the warrior to his caste asserted, and emphatically 
 urged. Nor is it the less true because the poem indi- 
 cates none of that aversion to bloodshed which was 
 characteristic of Buddhism. The other points that 
 
 > Bhag. G., ch. iii. »i. ^ Ib!d., ch. ii. ' Ibid., ch. Ki. ii. 
 
 * Ibid., ch. ii. « Ibid , ch. ix. « Ibid., ch. xi. 
 
'Jl6 BUDDHISM. 
 
 have been noted amply suffice to show a profound 
 influence proceeding from this religion, in the phi- 
 losophy and ethics of an age five centuries after its 
 birth. 
 
 Some have supposed that the R&mayaria originated 
 intheRS- in a Brahmanical reaction against Buddhism. ^ 
 mSyana. Qn this theory, Rama's war with the Rak- 
 shasas, and his triumphant invasion of Ceylon, aided 
 by supernatural apes and bears, was a poetic version \ 
 of the expulsion of the Buddhists out of southern 
 India, by a religious crusade, assisted by aboriginal 
 tribes of the Dekkan. The old .gods of the Rig Veda, 
 and those of the native races, as well as the tradi- 
 tional heroes of the warrior caste, were all brought 
 in to effect the restoration of the older faith ; all these 
 popular religious associations being wrought up with 
 dramatic effect in the beautiful tale of Rama's re- 
 covery of his lost Sita from the ravisher Ravana, 
 which forms'the second half of the epic. The proofs 
 of such a connection, however, do not seem at all 
 satisfactory. The harpy-like, blood-thirsty Raksha- 
 sas, especially, could hardly have been suggested by 
 Buddhism. Yet the Ramayana bears striking marks 
 of the influence of. this faith on the Brahmanical sys- 
 tem. The concessions to popular mythology in which 
 it abounds, though written in the interest of the priest- 
 hood ; the recognition of older and later incarnations ; 
 the democratic spirit shown by the people's taking 
 an active interest in affairs of state, giving advice to 
 the king, urging their desires on his ministers, and 
 even jeering and reproaching him; the introduction 
 of Sudras into public ceremonies, and the pouring of 
 water on the heads of princes at their inauguration, 
 
 > Wheeler's History of India, II., Introd., p. Ixxvii. 
 
AFTfeR-LIFE IN INDIA. 717 
 
 by all the castes, — show that Brahmanism had been 
 reduced to recognizing equalities that had no place in 
 its system ; a change that must be due to Buddhism. 
 
 After this, too, we hear more about gods of the 
 ■people} They were in many respects such asi„,hepopu- 
 might be expected frorn the many causes of'""'^°'°sy- 
 demoralization in India during modern times ; yet 
 their number and their -prominence alike indicate that 
 the exclusiveness of Brahmanism had to give way to 
 the demand of the popular mind for freedom. The 
 people transformed the old deities of the Veda ; and 
 even the later ones, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, were 
 merged in Krishna and Rama. The priesthood were 
 obliged to elaborate the popular deities in combination 
 with their Brahma iiito a form of trinity ; and even to 
 subordinate Brahma to Vishnu and Siva. In the com- 
 mon mind they remained separate, and each had his 
 sect of worshippers. Vishnu, a Vedic god, who had 
 come to represent the bounty and serenity of nature, 
 grew into the beneficent divinity of the Ganges popu- 
 lation,^ embodying in his avatdras the noble faith 
 that God descends to save the world, whenever evil 
 wins the upper hand. The worship of Vishnu-Jagan- 
 nath, "protest of the equality of men before God," — 
 making all castes eat together, celebrating traditions 
 of the most hutnane and democratic spirit, — whose 
 very breadth has opened it to excesses by a few minor 
 sects, which all classes condemn, — is now shown to 
 be largely the result of Buddhism, and associated with, 
 its ekrliest struggles.' 
 
 » Lassen, IV. 594. ' Duncker, II. 232. 
 
 ' Mr. Hunter, from whose interesting work on Orissa these statements are drawn, speaks- 
 in the highest terms of the behavior of the pilgrims of Jaganntth, and of the influence of 
 his worship on the customs of the people. The lines of research, so ably opened by Mr. 
 Hunter, promise real light on the darkest periods in the history of Buddhism in India. 
 
7l8 BUDDHISM. ■ 
 
 It is in coming down. to these later times that we 
 The modem I'ca^ize how immense a variety of tendencies 
 sects. jg covered b}' the common name Hinduism, 
 and how large and free has been the growth of this 
 tropical religious nature. Wilson's enumeration of 
 the principal sects alone runs up to nearly sixty. 
 
 Scarcely one of the dogmas of older schools has 
 Theirfree escapcd denial. Freedom of thought and spec- 
 criticism, ulation has. been as perfect as ever in the 
 world. 
 
 There are Vaishnava sects, as well as others, that 
 deny the absolute unity of deity, and repudiate mok- 
 sha, or absorption into the One, carrying the Sank- 
 hyan principle of individuality to its furthest extreme ;^ 
 others that reject asceticism, passing over to the op- 
 posite pole, and in some instances, we must add, into 
 sensuality under religious sanctions ; ^ others that hold 
 themselves bound, in view of the dogma of incarnation, 
 to reverence the guru, or spiritual guide, as not only 
 one with God, but greater even than Krishna him- 
 self;^ others that consider ascetics as persons who are 
 suffering the penalties of sins comrnitted in former 
 lives, and deny the possibility of avatdras, since God 
 can neither be subject to transmigration nor to union.* 
 
 There are sectaries who say jokingly, when they 
 hear the Vedas recited, "These are Sick people, in a 
 painful fit, or hired journeymen in an uproar ; " and 
 when they see the sacred thread on the neck of a 
 Brahman, "A cow will not be without a rope."^ 
 There are others who " recognize the being of Gbd in 
 mankind, know no being more perfect than man- 
 
 1 Midhwas. 2 VallabMchSryas and SSktas. 
 
 " Chaitanyas, Kartabhajai. ♦ School of Piranah {DabUtAn, II. viH.). 
 
 » ChSrviks (DabkiAn, II. ix.). 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 'Jig 
 
 kind, and think that it contains nothing of a bad 
 nature." 1 
 
 Nor is the disintegration of traditions less mani- 
 fest in the sphere of sentiment than in that inmythoi- 
 of dogma. 
 
 One issue of the old democratic movement of Budd- 
 hism is to be traced in the chaos of the later mythol- 
 ogy, which awaits some centralizing and spiritualizing 
 power. 
 
 This very luxuriance proyes the richness of the 
 native soil. We may therefore be sure that „ , 
 
 .... . Native spii^ 
 
 the reconciling principle, after all this disinte- ituai resour- 
 gration, will spring from Hindu, not foreign, '^' 
 associations. The total failure of distinctively Chris- 
 tian propagandism was to be expected. How should 
 this rich and free symbolism be supplanted by exclu- 
 siveness in type and form? Morality, science, free- 
 dom, humanity, will speak to the Hindus in those 
 universal aspects which belong to the age ; but it must 
 be through their own native experience. The foot- 
 hold must be found in their natural associations and 
 descent. 
 
 This free spirit is illustrated by the Sikhs, or dis- 
 ciples, at first a religious sect, then roused by ^j,^g;^^g 
 persecution into a nation of soldiers, fight- 
 ing for liberty of conscience, and establishing a free 
 state in the Panjab, which they held for centuries, 
 until it passed under English rule. No race in India 
 has shown a braver or more independent spirit, in 
 thought or in conduct, than the Sikhs. They date 
 their history from Nanak, a native Hindu teacher of 
 the fifteenth century, a grain factor by trade, who 
 threw aside Vedas and Koran, denounced caste, sati^ 
 
 1 Manushya Bhikta (Ibid., xii.). 
 
720 BUDDHISM. 
 
 and all other degrading customs and institutions, and 
 preached pure Theism, broad humanity, and a code 
 of morals nowhere surpassed. Renouncing the ascet- 
 ic garb, he spent his life in domestic relations, and 
 after a long ministry, in the cause of right and noble 
 living, of large tolerance, and devout aspiration, died, 
 Hke Buddha, surrounded by devoted disciples, the 
 founder of a new religion. Rebuked for sleeping 
 with his feet towards a temple, this teacher asked : 
 " Whither shall I turn my feet, if I would point them 
 where God's house is not?" Like Buddha, he is 
 believed to have had previous lives on earth: The 
 following story from the Dabistan.^ is thoroughly 
 Buddhistic : — 
 
 " When Nanak died, he saw two roads, the one to heaven, the 
 other to hell. He chose the latter, and descending thither brought 
 all the inhabitants out. But God said, ' These sinners cannot enter 
 heaven : you must return into the world, and liberate them. There- 
 fore Nanak came into this world, and his followers are those former 
 inhabitants of hell : the guru (teacher) comes and goes, until that 
 multitude shall have found their salvation." 
 
 The Sikh Bible, Adi Grmith, compiled by Arjuna, 
 a subsequent guru, in the next century, and written 
 in a now obsolete tongue,® contains contributions from 
 the teachings of twenty-five persons, of all orders 
 and pursuits ; among them a leather-dresser, a cloth- 
 printer, a barber, a butcher, and a" musician ; also a 
 woman. It teaches the unity of God, the moral laws, 
 and liberty of thought and worship ; forbids all vices, 
 and commands the practical virtues and universal 
 love.^ 
 
 This Bible speaks of God as "one, sole, self-exist- 
 
 » Dot; II. p. 269. 
 
 2 Trumpp, in yournal of Royal As. Sec. for 1871, p. 198. 
 * Asiatic Researches, I. 292. 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 72 1 
 
 ent, the meaning and the cause of all, who. has seen 
 numberless creeds and names come and go." 
 Nanak says : — 
 
 " The true name is the Creator, the Being without fear, without 
 enmity, the everlasting (timeless) One, the Self-existing." 
 
 " From his beneficence comes clothing ; from his merciful 
 glance, the gate of salvation. If He be praised, heard, and revered 
 in the heart, He will take away pain and bring comfort." 
 
 " His worshippers rejoice always : to hear him is the end of sin 
 and pain." 
 
 " He is not found in names, readings, austerities. If I knew 
 Him, I would speak it ; but the story cannot be told. What his 
 power, what his thought ? I cannot come up to it." 
 
 " What pleases Thee, that is a good work. If the heart is de- 
 filed by sin, it is washed in the dye of God's name. They who have 
 done a deed, themselves have set it down. They sow themselves 
 and reap themselves." 
 
 " What word may be spoken by the mouth, which having heard 
 He may bestow love ? " 
 
 " Early reflect on the greatness of the true Name." 
 
 " Remember the truth that is from the beginning of the world, — 
 the truth that is and will be for ever : not by meditation can truth 
 be reached, nor by silence, though I keep up continual devotion. 
 The wall of falsehoods is broken by walking in the commandments 
 of God." 
 
 " They say there are four races ; yet all are of the seed of Brah- 
 m4. The four races shall be one, and all shall call on the 
 Teacher. Think not of thy caste, but abase thyself, and be 
 saved." 
 
 " Fight with no weapon but the word of God ; use no means but 
 a pure faith." 
 
 " Devotion is not in ragged garments, nor staff, nor ashes, nor 
 shaven head, nor sounding horns." 
 
 " He is pure who does no evil, is intent on good, and ever giveth 
 to the poor." 
 
 " Be true, and thou shalt be free : to be true belongs to thee ; 
 thy success, to the Creator." ' 
 
 * Cunningham's History of the Sikhs; iMS^ovi^s Briiish India^ vol. i. ; Trumpp, w/ 
 
 supra. 
 
 46 
 
722 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Other Sikh gurus have left these sayings : — 
 
 " My mind dwells on One, who gave the body and soul." 
 
 " Many Brahmans have wearied themselves with studying the 
 
 Veds, but found not the value of an oil-seed." 
 
 "With slayers of their daughters, whoever has intercourse, him 
 
 I hold accursed." 
 
 " Not they are sati who perish in the flames, but they, O Nanak ! 
 
 who die of broken hearts." 
 
 " Fall at God's feet : in senseless stone God is not." 
 
 "God heard the cry of virtue, and Nanak was sent into the 
 
 world : the four castes became one, the high and the low equal." 
 " The Sikh should set his heart on charity and purity." 
 " He who takes the goods of sister or daughter, who oppresses 
 
 the poor, is punished. He who gives not to the needy shall not 
 
 see God." 
 
 " He is of the faithful who protects the poor, combats evil, re- 
 members God ; who is wholly unfettered, who ever wages battle, 
 
 who slays the Turk, and extends the faith." ' 
 
 The last sentence is from Govinda, a warlike guru, 
 "who wore two swords in his girdle, the one to avenge 
 his father, the other to destroy the miracles of Mo- 
 hammed."^ The peaceful Nanak brought, after all, 
 " not peace, but a sword ; " and Govinda, the tenth 
 teacher, must change the name Sikhs (disciples) to 
 Singhs (lions) , and organize his people to defend the 
 faith. Nanak has also, like Buddha and Jesus, been 
 transformed in the faith of his later followers from the 
 simply philanthropic reformer into the chief of divine 
 emanations, and the way ordained for the redemption 
 of the world. 
 
 But Govinda was theologically free and thoroughly 
 in earnest. 
 
 " Since he fell at God's feet, no one has appeared great in his 
 eyes : Rim and Ruheen, Purins and Koran, have many votaries ; 
 but neither does he regard." 
 
 1 Cunningham ; Ludlow ; ut supra. * DalUi&ity II. 273. 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 723 
 
 " Smritis, Shastras, and Veds differ in many things : not one 
 does he heed." 
 
 " O God ! under thy power all has been done : nought is of 
 myself." 
 
 Not less sincere and fervent is the faith of the mod- 
 ern Sikhs, whose religious services have been de- 
 scribed as pervaded by a peculiar enthusiastic joy, 
 and their prayers by a spirit of self-examination, 
 moral discipline, and universal love.^ 
 
 The strict monotheism of the Sikhs has a strongly 
 Mohammedan tone ; but their freedom of spec- 
 
 ^ Seed in 
 
 ulation and protest, as regards Hindu tradition, BuddUst 
 points plainly to that element in the national ^^'^ 
 character of which Kapila and Gotama were earlier 
 exponents. The Hindu sects of the last six centuries 
 are marked by a democratic spirit, which may rightly 
 be called the after-life of Buddhism in a people who 
 had rejected its form and its name. Has this harvest 
 sprung from the ashes of a martyred Church? Is this 
 the meaning of that prescience of " a further shore " 
 beyond the ocean of death? 
 
 All the important forms of Vishnu-worship ^ continue 
 the Impulse of these early reformers, who came to be 
 themselves regarded as his incarnations. Rdmd- 
 nanda, in the fifteenth century, followed their example 
 in renouncing caste. His disciples form the largest 
 sect in Gangetic India. ^ The numerous followers of 
 Kabh- reject polytheisn^ and the service of images, 
 and ridicule the honors paid to pandits and Vedas. 
 The 'Jainas, whose special relations with Buddhism 
 have not been clearly made out, certainly combined 
 
 » Wilkins, As. Res^ I. 289. 
 
 ' Lassen, IV. 608-616; Stevenson, ymtrn. R- A, S., vii. pp. 64-73; Wilson's Essays 
 on Religion 0/ the Hindus^ vol. i. 
 " Wilson, p. 67. 
 
724 -BUDDHISM. 
 
 with Sankhya categories and formulas many Buddhis- 
 tic elements ; such as deliverance of the soul through 
 pure knowledge alone, rejection of the Vedas, sup- 
 pression of the Brahmanical _gods, and substitutibn 
 of a series o{ jinas or sages \_jma is itself a title of 
 Buddha], in their place.^ Admission to their body 
 was independent of caste. ^ Their moral code is con- 
 tained in five great duties, — truth, chastity, abstinence 
 from destroying life, honesty, mastery of desires ; in 
 four dharmas, or forms of good work, — liberality, 
 gentleness, penance, and piety ; and in three forms 
 of restraint, — government of the mind, of the tongue, 
 and of the person.^ All these are wholly Buddhistic, 
 and make the admitted hostility of the Jainas to tech- 
 nical Buddhism the more remarkable. It is perhaps 
 simply the sign that no ecclesiastical bonds could con- 
 fine these elements of moral and spiritual universality. 
 The revival of Brahmanism itself, which seems to have 
 represented a general movement towards more positive 
 theism than the Buddhist affirmed, caught his demo- 
 cratic impulse ; and Sankara, the great Vedantist 
 leader, is said to have broken up the four original 
 castes in Malabar into seventy-two, which was a 
 great step towards destroying the principle itself. 
 
 Lassen sums up the more favorable features of later 
 Liberties of ^''^'^^^ sects Under three heads. They lay 
 the later greater stress on piety and morality than on 
 outward forms of worship, and make protest 
 against ritualism. They undermine the system of 
 caste by admitting persons of all classes to religious 
 communion. Their founders and teachers make use 
 of the popular dialects, in writing and in speech.* 
 
 » Lassen, IV. 735-787- " Wilson, p. 335. 
 
 " Wilson, pp. 317, 335. * Lassen, IV. 643. 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 725 
 
 These later schools resume the many elements 
 which have preceded them ; freely intermingling 
 pantheistic, rationalistic, and skeptical forms of Hin- 
 duism with the monotheism of the old Mohammedans 
 and the devout mysticism of the Sufis. 
 
 Great numbers of maths, or monasteries of the 
 Vaishnava sects, are scattered over India, gov- The vaish- 
 erned and supported very much in the same "='™' 
 way as similar Catholic institutions in the Middle Ages. 
 But they are open to all travellers or mendicants ; and, 
 for the members, ingress and egress are perfectly free 
 at all times, "anything like restraint upon personal 
 liberty seeming never to have entered into the concep- 
 tion of any of the religious legislators of the Hindus." 
 " Their tenants are most commonly of a quiet, inoffen- 
 sive character ; and the mahants, or superiors, espec- 
 ially, are men of talents and respectability.'' ' 
 
 The Saivas, or Sivaite sects, for the most part rep- 
 resent more exclusive interests, being a fruit ^ > . 
 
 f . -^"^ Saivas- 
 
 of Sankara's great Brahmanical revival in the 
 eighth century.- With few exceptions, their writings 
 are not in the popular tongue ; and they avoid proselyt- 
 ing among the masses. In such works as the Tamil 
 " Gnan-Potham"^ all the mystical philosophy of Brah- 
 ma-worship is transferred to Siva, yet not without 
 Buddhist elements to which the change of deity is, after 
 all, not improbably due. The least exclusive sect of 
 Saivas is that which worships Siva under the emblem 
 of the linga, a very old cult, and, in general, by no 
 means the immoral one it has been represented. 
 
 But the Vaishnava sects have always been demo- 
 cratic. They have made their ideas free to The vaish. 
 the people by rejecting a specially sacred and °''™^- 
 
 > Wilson, p. 50-53. ^ Lassen, IV. 61S. * See A mer. Or. jfmrft., vol. iv. 
 
726 BUDDHISM. 
 
 learned tongue, and opening the function of teacher to 
 all persons. A large part of the literature of the 
 Mahrattas, who have proved the manly qualities of 
 a Hindu race, is written in vernacular Prakrit, and 
 almost all this portion is due to the Vaishnavas. 
 One of these democratic poets wrote a commentary on 
 the Bhagavadgita. Another was famous for his satires 
 on caste and ceremonial forms ; while a third was him- 
 self from the lowest of the outcast?, and a fourth was 
 a slave girl. The influence of the ethical and relig- 
 ious teachings of these Mahratta poets on the middle 
 and lower strata of society in central India is said 
 to have been very important.-^ 
 
 The Bauddha-Vaishnavas believe that all castes 
 should eat together on religious occasions. " At the 
 temple door all the castes become one." They have a 
 legend of Vishnu, that he brought saints from heaven, 
 who had been low-caste laborers, and placed them at 
 a banquet beside the Brahmans, himself sitting at the 
 head, and even eating the particles of rice that they 
 let fall. Another story is of a householder who made 
 a feast in honor of his ancestors, and gave part of their 
 portion to a poor fariah at his gate : whereat the 
 Brahmans present departed from the feast in contempt ; 
 but the ancestors themselves came down to take their 
 places, and the table was filled. — Idolatrous rites are 
 very sternly reproved by these sects. 
 
 " There are priests who command you to cut down a living plant 
 to crown a lifeless stone. They call every thing deity, yet cut down 
 trees for oblation. They have girdles for their loins with jingling 
 bells, but they are dumb in divine knowledge. Ceremonies, aus- 
 terities, and holy places are trifles coinpared with the praise of 
 God." 
 
 ' Stevenson, on Maratha Literature in y<mm. of the Bomb. Branch ijf R. A. S., 
 vol. i. 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 727 
 
 One of the Vaishnava sages is represented as not 
 only forgiving men who had robbed and maimed him, 
 but as pleading with Vishnu to release them from the 
 penalty, and give them a place in heaven.^ 
 
 The chief disciples of Raminanda were twelve in 
 number, and for the most part men of the „ , . 
 
 ^ Kabir. 
 
 lower and most laborious castes : among them 
 were a weaver, a currier, a barber, and a basket- 
 maker. The most "'famous of all was Kabir, per- 
 haps the most radical reformer in Hindu history ; 
 though it is possible his name, which is an appellative 
 of respect, may be mythical, and simply representative 
 of a great movement of democratic reaction.^ 
 
 The Dabistan relates the following stories of 
 Kabir : — 
 
 " Hearing some learned Brahmans, who had been praising the 
 miraculous power of the Ganges water to wash away all sins, call 
 for some of this water for themselves, he ran to the river, and 
 brought back his own wooden cup filled with this sacred element, 
 which he offered to the Brahman. But being of a caste from whose 
 hands a Brahman cannot take either food or drink, his gift was re- 
 fused, upon which he observed : ' You have just now declared that 
 this water purifies body and soul, and makes all foulness of evil 
 disappear ; but if it cannot render pure this wooden vase, it cer- 
 tainly does not deserve your praises.' " 
 
 " Seeing once a gardener's wife collecting flowers for the image 
 of a deity, he said to her : ' In the leaves of the flower lives the 
 soul of vegetation, and the idol to whom thou offerest flowers is 
 without feeling and dead : the vegetable is superior to the mineral. 
 If the idol possessed a soul, it would chastise the cutter, who, when 
 dividing its substance, placed his foot on the idol's breast. Go, 
 and venerate a wise and perfect man, who is a manifestation of 
 Vishnu.' " ^ 
 
 The following sentences* from Kabir and hi* 
 
 • These Ulustrations are from Stevenson, and taken from the Bhakta Vijaya. 
 
 ! Wilson, pp. 55, 68. " Bahistlin, ch. II. viii. 
 
 « Taken from Wilson's selections in Essays, &c., ut supra, pp. 79-90. 
 
>J28 BUDDHISM. 
 
 immediate followers will convey an idea of his 
 teaching : — 
 
 " My word is from the beginning ; it has been deposited in life ; 
 there is provided a basket for the flowers." 
 
 " He who Icnows what life is will seize the essence of his own : 
 such as it is now, he will not possess it again. The travellers are 
 hurrying on, expecting to purchase where there will be neither trade 
 nor market." 
 
 " Man wanders astray till he finds the gateway of the word. But 
 he who has made himself acquainted with the word has done his 
 work.'' 
 
 " Live according to your knowledge : fetch water for your own 
 drinking, nor demand it from others." 
 
 " Life (the world) sells pearls; but with him who knows not their 
 value, what can be done ? " 
 
 " The goose (man) abandons the lake, and would lodge in a water- 
 jar ! , Kabir has called aloud, ' Repair to your own place, nor destroy 
 your habitation.' " 
 
 " The dwelling of Kabir is on a mountain peak, and a narrow 
 path leads up to it : an ant cannot put his foot on it, but a pious man 
 may drive up an ox." 
 
 " He who sows Rima never puts forth the buds of wrath. He 
 values not the worthless, and he knows not pleasure nor pain." 
 
 " That a drop falls in the ocean, all can perceive ; but that the 
 drop and the ocean are one, few can comprehend. You and I are 
 of one- blood ; one life animates us both ; from one mother is the 
 world born : what knowledge is this that makes us separate ? Kabir 
 has said, ' I have cried aloud froni friendship to mankind : from not 
 knowing the name of R4ma, the world has been swallowed up in 
 death.' " 
 
 " Of what avail is it to shave your head, prostrate your body on 
 the ground, or immerse your body in the stream ? Whilst you shed 
 blood, you call yourself pure, and boast of virtues you never display. 
 Of what benefit is cleaning your mouth, counting your beads, and 
 bowing yourself in temples, when, whilst you mutter your prayers, 
 or journey to Mecca, deceitfulness is in your heart ? The Hindu 
 fasts every eleventh day ; the Mussulman during the Ramazan. 
 Who formed the remaining months, that you should venerate but 
 one ? If the Creator dwell in tabernacles, whose residence is the 
 universe ? Who has beheld Rama seated amongst images, or found 
 
THE LATER SECTS. ^Sp 
 
 him at the shrine to which the pilgrim has directed his steps ? The 
 city of Hari is to the east, that of Ali to the west ; but explore 
 your own heart; for there are both Rama and Karim." 
 
 "Who talks of the lies of the Veds and Tebs? Those who 
 understand not their essence. Behold but One in all things : it is 
 the second that leads you astray. Every one is of the same nature 
 with yourself He whose is the world, and whose are the children 
 of Ali and Ram, — He is my teacher." 
 
 " Poison still remains in the soil, though ambrosia be sprinkled 
 a hundred times : man quits not his evil habits." 
 
 " If you are a true dealer, open the market of veracity : keep 
 clean your inward man, and repel oppression afar off." 
 
 " Many there are that talk, but few that take care to be found : 
 let him pass on without regard, who practises not what he pro- 
 fesses." 
 
 " Check the tongue, associate with the wise, investigate the 
 teacher's words." 
 
 " Affection is the garment in which man dresses for the dance : 
 consign yourself, hand and foot, to him whose body and soul are 
 truth." 
 
 " Let truth be your rate of interest, and fix it in your heart." 
 
 " A real diamond should be purchased : the mock gem is waste 
 of capital." 
 
 " Pride of intellect is manifold : now a thief, now a liar, now a 
 murderer ; men, sages, gods, have run after it in vain. Its mansion 
 has a hundred gates." 
 
 " When the bhnd lead the blind, both fall into the well." 
 
 "Yet the master is helpless when the scholar is inapt. It is 
 blowing through a bamboo to teach wisdom to the dull." 
 
 " The tree bears not fruit for itself, nor for itself does the stream 
 collect its waters : for the good of others only does the sage assume 
 a bodily shape." 
 
 " I have wept for mankind, but no one has wept with me : he will 
 join in my tears, who comprehends the word." 
 
 " Kabir cries aloud to his fellows : ' Ascend the sandal ridge ; 
 whether there be a road prepared or not, what matters it to me ? ' " 
 
 "All have exclaimed, 'Master, master,' but to me this doubt 
 arises : how can they sit down with the master whom they do not 
 know .? " 
 
 It is noteworthy that while the disciple of this sect 
 is bound to devote himself to his spiritual guru or 
 
730 BUDDHISM. 
 
 teacher, with implicit obedience, he is warned not to do 
 so till he has thoroughly investigated his character and 
 doctrine : to act blindly and slavishly is the highest 
 wrong. 
 
 Another sect of Rama worshippers is that of Dadu, 
 
 the cotton-cleaner, also a disciple of Kabir. 
 
 Here are a few of his sentences : ^ — 
 
 " He is my God, who maketh all things perfect. Meditate on 
 Him in whose hands are life and death. He provideth for all. He 
 is my friend." 
 
 " In all your thoughts, words, and actions, let there be faith in 
 God. O foolish one ! God is not far from you. You are ignorant ; 
 but he knoweth every thing, and is careful in bestowing." 
 
 " Care can avail nothing : it devoureth life ; for those things shall 
 happen which God shall direct." 
 
 "He who causes all living things to be giveth milk to their 
 mouths, while yet in the womb." 
 
 " Oh, forget not, my brother, that God's power is always with you : 
 there is a formidable pass within you, and crowds of evil passions 
 flock to it ; therefore comprehend God." 
 
 " He who hath but one grain of the love of God shall be re- 
 leased from all his sinful doubts and actions. Who need cook or 
 grind ? Wherever you cast your eyes, ye may see provisions." 
 
 " I take for my spiritual food the water and the leaf of Ram : for 
 the world I care not, but God's love is unfathomable." 
 
 " Whatever is God's will shall surely happen : therefore do not 
 destroy yourselves by anxiety, but listen." 
 
 " Fix your heart on God, and be humble as though you were 
 dead." 
 
 " Have no desires, but accept what circumstances may bring you : 
 whatever God pleaseth to direct can never be wrong. Go not 
 about, tearing from the tree which is invisible." 
 
 " Dadu saith, ' Do unto me, O God ! as thou thinkest best : I am 
 obedient unto thee. My disciples, behold no other God, go no- 
 where but to Him.' " 
 
 " Condemn nothing the Creator hath made. We are not creators. 
 He can make what He will : we can make nothing." 
 
 ' Wilson, Kt su^a, pp. 106-113. From Siddons's translation in the youmal 0/ the 
 Bengal Society. 
 
THE LATER SECTS. 73 1 
 
 " Meditate on the mysterious afEnity between God and tlie soul." 
 
 " Even as you see your countenance reflected in a mirror, or 
 your shadow in still water, so behold Ram in your minds, because 
 He is with all." 
 
 " He that formed the mind made it as it were a temple for him- 
 self to dwell in. Receive that which is perfect into your hearts : 
 abandon all things for the love of God." 
 
 " God ever fostereth his creatures ; even as a mother serves her 
 offspring, and keepeth it from harm." 
 
 " O God who art the truth ! grant me contentment, love, devotion, 
 faith. Thy servant Dadu prayeth for true patience, and that he 
 may be devoted to thee. 
 
 " Dsldu saith, ' My earnings are God. He is my food and my 
 supporter. God is my clothing and my dwelling. He is my ruler, 
 my body, and my soul.' " 
 
 " Listen to God's admonitions, and you will care not for hunger 
 nor thirst, for heat nor cold. If ye subdue the imperfections of 
 your flesh, you will think only of God. When you cease to call on 
 Him, they will return to you." 
 
 " D&du loved Rima without ceasing : he partook of his spiritual 
 essence, and constantly examined the mirror within him ; he over- 
 came all evil inclinations : wherefore the light of Rslma will shine 
 upon him." 
 
 " Sit humbly at the foot of God, and rid yourselves of bodily 
 impurity." 
 
 "Be fearless and guide yourselves towards the light of God: 
 there neither sword nor poison have power to destroy, and sin 
 cannot enter." 
 
 " Afford help also to the poor stranger." 
 
 " Meditate on Him by whom all things were made. Pundits and 
 Qazis are fools : of what avail are the heaps of books they have 
 compiled ? " 
 
 " Wear not away your lives by studying the Vedas. Meditate on 
 God, the beginning and the end." 
 
 " Do nothing, O man ! till thou hast thoroughly sifted thy inten- 
 tions : acquaint thyself thoroughly with the purity of thy wishes, 
 that thou mayest be absorbed in God. Endeavor to gain Him : nor 
 hesitate to restore your soul, when required, to that abode from 
 whence it came." 
 
 The belief of the followers of Bdhd-ldl is a combina- 
 
732 BUDDHISM. 
 
 tion of the Vedanta and Sufi tenets. It illustrates in 
 like manner that union of speculative mys- 
 ticism with practical benevolence, of which 
 Buddhism was the earliest expression. This teacher, 
 when asked which is the best religion, replied : — 
 
 " The creed of the lover differs from other creeds. God is the 
 faith and creed of those who love him. To do good is the best for 
 the follower of every faith. And, as Hafiz says, — The object of 
 all religions is alike : all men seek their beloved. What is the 
 difference between prudent and wild ? All the world is love's dwell- 
 ing : why talk of a mosque or a church ? " 
 
 The following sentences ^ illustrate his teaching : — 
 
 " With whom should the fakir cultivate intimacy ? With the 
 lord of loveliness. To whom be a stranger ? To covetousness, 
 anger, envy, falsehood, malice. Should he wear garments or go 
 naked ? Nudity is excusable only in the insane. The love of God 
 does not depend on a cap or a coat. How conduct himself.? He 
 should perform what he promises, and not promise what he cannot 
 perform." 
 
 " Should evil be done to evil-doers ? He should do evil to none. 
 Hafiz says, ' The repose of the two worlds depends on two rules, 
 kindness to friends and gentleness to foes.'" 
 
 " Is it necessary for a fakir to withdraw from the world ? What 
 is the world ? Forgetfulness of God, not clothes, nor wealth, nor 
 wife, nor offspring." 
 
 " What is the fakir's passion ? Knowledge of God. What his 
 power ? Impotence. What his wisdom ? Devotion of the heart 
 to the heart's Lord. What is the fakir's dwelling ? God's creatures. 
 His kingdom ? God." 
 
 " How do the supreme soul and the living [individual] soul differ ? 
 The supreme soul is beyond accident, but the living soul is afflicted 
 by sense and passion. Happiness is attained only in reunion with 
 the One, when the dispersed portions combine again with it, as the 
 drops of water with the parent stream." 
 
 " The body only separates from God. Blessed be the moment 
 when I shall lift the veil from off that face. The veil of the face 
 of my beloved is the dust of my body." 
 
 ' Wilson, I. 349, 350. 
 
vr. 
 
 BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 
 
 A S a distinctive religion, Buddhism has vanished 
 from its native soil ; surviving only in ^^ ^^^.^^ 
 those qualities of thought and sentiment out of 
 which it grew, and to which, in their Hindu forms, it 
 gave fresh vigor. But, in the view of universal relig- 
 ion, this is its real triumph. Positive religions aflirm 
 their own substance to be sacrifice, — of the lower to 
 the higher, of the special to the ideal. Nature takes 
 them at their word. Their formulas, that seemed 
 final, pass ; their sacred names are no longer pro- 
 nounced with awe ; their proscriptive masterships are 
 set aside ; their body perishes, and they are changed. 
 But their after-life is their best. The shell of symbol 
 thrown aside, the immortal essence escapes, to work 
 freely as a universal force, and in the whole move- 
 ment of human life. 
 
 So with Buddhism in India. Its karma passed into 
 a new soul. Its sainthood returned from the gates of 
 nirvdna, to assume fresh forms ; veiled by new names 
 and relations, wherein the closer eye may discern its 
 life-beyond-death. But its distinctive triumphs have 
 been without the limits of India. It justified itself also 
 by its expansive power. In the seventh century Hiouen 
 Thsang found, even in the most flourishing Buddhist 
 
736 BUDDHISM. 
 
 states, many signs of its approaching decay, — power- 
 ful heresies, deserted monasteries, and fallen shrines. 
 Two more centuries, and the faith of fifteen hundred 
 years is cast out : the name of Gotama Buddha, in 
 India, has had its day. The peaceful debates of its 
 schools, that had divided every great Hindu state, 
 the polemics of its moral and metaphysical sects, the 
 Great and Little Vehicles, shall no more be heard. 
 The first act of a darker drama has swept away the 
 preachers of peace : the second is at hand ; for the 
 conquering Moslem approaches from the north. The 
 persecution of the Buddhists is the natural precursor 
 of a social disunity which lays this magnificent em- 
 pire at the mercy of a horde of invaders. 
 
 Persecution only roused the zeal of those messen- 
 gers of mercy and release. They flocked north, south, 
 east, and west ; bearing the relics of their saints, and 
 the writings of their schools, and planting their seats 
 of culture in the desert and the populous place. But 
 they had not waited for persecution. For two centu- 
 ries or more from the death of Gotama, there are no 
 records of Buddhist expansion, nor signs of the use 
 of written memorials by the new faith.-' Yet at the 
 end of that time it had become the state religion of 
 northern India. At the close of the first Christian 
 century it had gone far towards converting Ceylon, 
 Kashmir, Kabulistan, and southern Tartary. Even 
 in China, princes had adopted it, and translations of 
 Buddhist writings overflowed this empire of rational- 
 ists.^ The earliest missionaries had appeared in the 
 third century B.C. Six centuries afterwards India was 
 a holy land of Chinese pilgrimage. From Ceylon 
 this living and welcome belief spread on to further 
 
 * Koeppen, I. 184. ' Lassen, II. 1078. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 737 
 
 India, Burmah, Siam, and the Eastern Archipelago. 
 From northern India it reached away over the Thi- 
 betan steppes ; from China to Korea and Japan. ' 
 Certain Chinese records of the fifth century, combined 
 with a few slight analogies, mythological and other, 
 have been held sufficient, with not a few scholars, to 
 prove that it must have penetrated even to Mexico.^ 
 As it would be difficult to find a civilization more in 
 contrast with Buddhishi than the Mexican, such theo- 
 ries can only be regarded as signs of the impression 
 made by the expansive energy of this religion on the 
 European mind.^ They are quite unimportant beside 
 the marvellous record of history, that, after twenty-five 
 centuries of life, Buddhism is, with all its gospel of sor- 
 row, at present the most widely spread religion of the 
 East ; that its adherents outnumber those of Brahma 
 three to one ; and that they constitute at the lowest 
 estimate a quarter of the human race. 
 
 How impressive is Father Hue's account of the 
 wandering Lamas, a body of men whose vocation is 
 not indeed that of preaching, but who carry with them 
 their opinions and ceremonies, and are doubtless the 
 practical propagators of the faith ! " They visit all 
 accessible countries. There is not a river they have 
 not crossed, a mountain they have not ascended, a 
 people among whom they have not lived, and of 
 whom they do not know the manners and the lan- 
 guage. One would say they are under the influence 
 of some mysterious power which drives them on- 
 
 » Lassen, IV. 710 ; Muller, Sc. of Lang., I. 147 i ymrn. R. A. S.,Vl. 27S. 
 
 2 This theory, for which see Lassen (IV. 7S4) and Wuttke (I. 348), has been fully dis- 
 posed of by J. G. Muller, Gesch. d. Amir. Vrreligionen (Basel, 1867), pp. 9, 490. 
 
 8 So Pococke (India in Greece, London, 1852) displayed great ingenuity in an attempt 
 to trace every name in Greek mythology, geography, and history to a Buddhist origin, on' 
 linguistic grounds alone, 
 
 47 
 
738 BUDDHISM. 
 
 wards ; and it seems as if God had caused to flow 
 in their veins something of that motive force which 
 moves worlds forwards in their course." ^ This mys- 
 terious instinct has possessed Buddhism from the 
 beginning. It must spring in part from a sense of 
 universality, — of duties, needs, sympathies, and hopes, 
 felt as common to all mankind. It is the thirst for com- 
 munion, a democratic religious faith that knows no 
 bounds of country, creed, nor name. Even that vaga- 
 bond life, that vague, restless roving which reminded 
 this Christian missionary of "The Wandering Jew," 
 is evidently a relic of the 'primitive ardor of Buddhism 
 to emancipate the world. What motive power it must 
 have had in the day of its definite and conscious 
 aims ! 
 
 The direct effects of Gotama's practical, peaceful, 
 philanthropic gospel are to be studied in the 
 edicts of king Asoka, inscribed on monumental 
 rocks and pillars in various parts of northern India.^ 
 These inscriptions record at once the legislation of 
 this Buddhist ruler, and his convictions and motives. 
 They announce themselves as his own words, cut in 
 the stone at his command, and their authenticity is 
 beyond question. The history of Asoka, as derived 
 from Singhalese records and from these monuments, 
 is a wonderful one. About the middle of the third 
 
 * Hue's yourtiey, &c, I. 117. 
 
 ' For the substance of these remarkable records, and the evidences of their antiquity 
 and authorship, see Lassen, 11. 214-270; Muir's Sansh. Texi^-, vol.'ii. ; and Koeppen, I, 
 J73-178. Consult also Sykes's Nates, &c., in Journ. R. A. S., vol vi. Professor Wilson 
 reviewed Prinsep's translation of them, in Jintrn. K- A- 5., vol. xii. In a later review 
 (vol. XVI.) he withdraws his doubts as to their Buddhistic origin. Buddhism is not men- 
 tioned by name, but the emblems are unmistakable. The inscriptions are written in a 
 " corrupt Sanskrit," closely resembling Pali, the language in which the oldest works of 
 Buddhism are written, and which was vernacular in northern India when it arose (Muir, 
 II. 72, 104). The name they give the king is Piyak(ui (the benevolent), a term applied 
 to Asoka, in Buddhist writings. Lassen, II. 223. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 739 
 
 century b.c- a prince succeeded to the crown of 
 P^taliputra, whose passions earned him the title of 
 ^' the wrathful'' He was a devoted follower of the 
 Brahmans, but stained, according to tradition, with 
 the blood of a brother, who stood in the way of 
 his succession to the throne. In four years he had 
 become a Buddhist disciple. His character changed 
 with his faith. Instead of "the wrathful" he was 
 called "the just." "Every good man," he said, "will 
 I hold as my own child." He caused inns to be built, 
 and wells opened, and trees planted along the public 
 roads, to give shelter and refreshment for man and 
 beast. He regulated the treatment of animals through- 
 out his dominions according to Buddhist precepts, and 
 forbade their slaughter for sacrificial purposes. It is 
 probable that he abolished the death penalty, and 
 certain that he gradually narrowed its use, until 
 it became almost, if not quite, obsolete. His treat- 
 ment of prisoners taken in war was of the most hu- 
 , mane nature. He recognized freedom of thought and 
 established universal toleration. 
 The inscriptions say : — 
 
 " The king, beloved of the gods, honors every form of religious 
 faith ; but considers no gift nor honor so much as the increase of 
 the substance of religion ; whereof this is the root, — to reverence 
 one's own faith, and never to revile that of others. Whoever acts 
 differently injures his own religion, while he wrongs another's. The 
 texts of all forms of religion shall be followed, under my protection. 
 Duty is in respect and service. Alms and pious demonstrations 
 are of no worth compared with the loving-kindness of religion. 
 The festival that bears great fruit is the festival of duty. The 
 king's purpose is to increase the mercy, charity, truth, kindness, 
 and piety of all mankind. There is no gift like the gift of virtue. 
 Good is Uberality ; good it is to harm no living creature ; good to 
 abstain from slander ; good is the care of one's parents, kindness 
 to relatives, children, friends, slaves. — That these good things may 
 
740 BUDDHISM. 
 
 increase, the king and his descendants shall maintain the law. 
 Ministers of morals shall everywhere aid the charitable and good. 
 I will always hear my people's voice. I distribute my wealth for 
 the good of all mankind, for which I am ever laboring." ' 
 
 To the Brahmans, whose disciplines he had re- 
 nounced, he paid respect, and gave substantial favors 
 to such of them as he thought sincere and liberal in 
 their spirit. He built monasteries for the Buddhists ; 
 regulated their cultus ; held their most important 
 synod, to whose labors the oldest sutras are probably 
 due ; and spared no effort to make their preaching 
 effectual. He is believed to have erected eighty-four 
 thousand topes, or relic shrines ; probably a mystical 
 number. He sent friendly embassies to foreign lands, 
 to propagate the faith. His civil regulations showed 
 the highest regard for justice and humanity. He 
 appointed a corps, of officers to keep him informed, at 
 all times, of every thing in the condition of his people 
 that required his attention, fearing only lest any pri- 
 vate pleasure should distract his mind from the care 
 of their peace. He instituted another class of officers 
 for the purpose of preventing crime; placing them 
 at the outskirts of towns where crowds were wont 
 to assemble, commissioned to dissuade people from 
 wrong-doing without resorting to violence. Finally, 
 he declared that he could not, with all these endeavors, 
 satisfy his sense of responsibility, as a king, for his 
 people's moral and social condition, nor his inmost 
 desire for their good. " There is no higher duty than 
 to work for the good of the whole world." 
 
 Such are the earliest products of Buddhism in 
 personal life, which at this distance of time can be 
 
 ^ These extracts are from Wilson's revision of Frinsep's translation, and from Lassen's 
 full account of Asoka. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 74I 
 
 clearly discerned. Asoka has been called "the Budd- 
 hist Constantine " from his temporal services to this 
 gospel of the East ; but, as a ruler, he seems to re- 
 semble the great heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius, 
 far more than that most unscrupulous patron of Chris- 
 tianity. And even if the records of his life and 
 government were less fully accredited than, as a 
 whole, they really are, the conception of such a mon- 
 arch, at that epoch and in that quarter of the world, 
 would be a fact quite as interesting as the actual 
 man. 
 
 The story of his son, Kunala (so called from the 
 beauty of his eyes), who, after being deprived ^^^ 
 of these organs in consequence of the false 
 testimony of an unprincipled and cruel woman, inter- 
 cedes to save her from the consequences of her crimes, 
 may or may not be historical, but has a like value as 
 testimony to a moral ideal. 
 
 The account given in the Mahavansa, of Dushta- 
 gamini, who reigned in Ceylon in the second Dushtaga- 
 century B.c.,is involved, as indeed is this ™'"' 
 whole sacred chronicle, in a mass of mythical legend ; 
 but it bears witness none the less positively to the 
 practical excellence of Buddhism.' This monarch, 
 also, is reported to have been a model of devotion to 
 the interests of his people, moral, industrial, social, 
 and Eesthetic. He especially furthered agriculture, 
 and opened roads through his dominions. Like 
 As'oka, he built hospitals, and endowed monasteries 
 with the greatest zeal. Both these kings seem to 
 have contributed to the improvement of Hindu archi- 
 tecture, by erecting religious edifices on a magnificent 
 
 > See Lassen, II. 421-430 ; Mah&vam'a (Tumour), ch. xidv.-xxxui. 
 
742 BUDDHISM. 
 
 scale. The description of Dushtagamini's pious la- 
 bors in erecting the stupendous dagop of Ruanvelli, to 
 fulfil the prediction of his ancestors regarding his 
 own reign, renxinds us in many ways of the building 
 of Solomon's Temple to Jehovah ; but the mythical 
 splendors that invest the Buddhist work are nowise 
 paralleled by Hebrew tradition. The noble edict is 
 recorded of this king, that no part of his great work 
 should be accomplished by unpaid labor. ^ When, at 
 the close of life, his good deeds to the poor and in fur- 
 therance of his faith, are enumerated in his presence, in 
 order to overcome his natural shrinking from death,. — 
 he replies : "With these works I am not satisfied: the 
 two alms-deeds which I did while I was in want, and 
 which I performed without regarding my life, I prefer 
 to the whole." Then, calling his brother, who is to 
 be his successor, he charges him not only to complete 
 the religious works thus begun, failing in no form of 
 benevolence or of care for the faith, but to "do no 
 harm to the people, and to rule the kingdom with jus- 
 tice ; " and then lies silently down to die, facing the 
 dagof he had made, while the devatas (celestial 
 beings) invite him in the air, saying, " Our lord is 
 glorious and possesses longer life : come then hither, 
 come then hither." Beseeching them to suffer him, 
 as long as he lives, to hear the teaching of the faith, 
 he raises his hand. The movement is mistaken by 
 the priests for a gesture of fear, and they say to one 
 another: "There is no one that does not fear death." 
 But the king, having expired, is borne away in a 
 chariot, like a man awakened out of a deep sleep ; 
 and then, to show his glory to the people, he reappears 
 in splendor, driving thrice around the sacred pile, 
 
 ^ MakB.v..^ ch. XXX. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 743 
 
 that they may see the heavenly glory he has at- 
 tained.^ 
 
 It is an unreliable version which ascribes to this 
 king a harem of Solomonic proportions : there is not, 
 in the whole story of his reign, the faintest sign of sen- 
 suality nor of any other personal vice. 
 
 A similar record is given of several other Buddhist 
 rulers of Ceylon in the continuation of the ceyionese 
 Mahavansa. Some of these were scholars '^sends. 
 and writers, and all were patrons of literature and 
 art .2 Traditions of the same moral tone celebrate 
 the virtues of the earliest Buddhist rulers of Thibet.* 
 One of the Singhalese kings is described as having, 
 among other marvellous powers, such as bringing on 
 rain by his piety, a much better one ; namely, that of 
 converting rogues by good counsel. He thus puts a stop 
 to the bad practices of great numbers of thieves, while 
 satisfying his people, who insist on their punishment, 
 by showing dead bodies, on which those penalties 
 had been inflicted which the law would have visited 
 on the living offenders.'* Another king, of very bar- 
 barous tendencies, dissuaded from war by Buddhist 
 priests, who teach him the superior virtue of peace and 
 harmony, thereupon gives up th6 country he has won, 
 and returns to his own.* 
 
 Leaving these old traditions, we turn to the present 
 Buddhists of Thibet. All travellers testify to Buddhism 
 their simplicity, gentleness, and freedom from ™Ti»bet. 
 sensual excesses. Hue tells us their theory is that 
 "all men are brothers."^ "The i-egent of Lha-Ssa," 
 he says, "did not appear surprised at any thing 
 
 1 Mah&vama, ch. xxxii- * See abstract in Lassen, IV. 279-350. 
 
 3 Koeppen, II. 65, 73. * Mahav.^ ch. xxxvi. ^ Ibid. (Upham), ch. Ixx. 
 
 ' Travels through Thibet, I. 43, 170, II. 40, 107. 
 
744 BUDDHISM. 
 
 in Christian teaching, but incessantly repeated, ' Your 
 religion is like our own : the truths are the same, we 
 only differ in the explanation.' " The good mission- 
 ary indeed found it not easy to understand the panthe- 
 ism into which this liberal and hospitable faith resolved 
 itself. Yet nothing could be finer, even as manners 
 only, than the cordiality and courage with which the 
 Buddhist ruler entered into free inquiry as to the 
 respective merits of his own and the foreign belief, 
 promising to adopt the latter, if it should appear to be 
 the better one.^ The Thibetans exhibit none of that ex- 
 clusiyeness towards foreigners which the Chinese and 
 other Asiatic nations have been driven into adopting. 
 They seem to have even a careful interest in strangers, 
 and lose no opportunity of kindly service. The mis- 
 sionaries, near to perishing of hunger and wet in the 
 desert, for lack of fire and fuel, were accosted by a 
 band of Tartars, leading a laden camel : " My lords 
 Lamas, the sky has fallen to-day : doubtless you have 
 not been able to light your fire ; but men are all brothers 
 and belong to one another, and the lay should serve 
 the holy ; so we are come to light your fire for you." ^ 
 When the animals of a caravan go astray, whoever 
 is in the neighborhood must go seek them ; and, if they 
 cannot be found, give others in their place.^ " We 
 will search for your horses," said the Tartar chief to 
 Hue, " and, if they are not found, you shall choose 
 at pleasure from all our herds. We wish you to leave 
 us in peace as you came." Contrast these civil tribes 
 with their ancestors, the barbarian hordes of Tschingis- 
 khan, following the wolf's head on their banners to 
 incessant ravin, piling pyramids of human heads 
 along their path, merciless alike to the weak and the 
 
 • Travek thrmgh Thibet, II. 203. » Ibid., I. 43. ' Ibid., I. 64. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 745 
 
 strong.^ Security of life and property reigns among 
 them to a degree undreamed of in Europe during the 
 Middle Ages ; and the change is almost entirely the 
 work of Lamaism.^ "The humane doctrine of 
 Buddha has greatly softened, if it has not eradicated 
 their old savage traits.^ Thus women in Tartary are 
 ill a more independent position than is usual in the 
 East. They come and go as they please, are active, 
 cheerful, and of free bearing, notwithstanding the old 
 marriage regulations which still oppress the sex.* 
 Hue says that all but the highest classes are in a mild 
 form of slavery ; but it is hard to understand in what 
 sense this is true, since their mode of life is precisely 
 that of their masters, and, if they enter the tents of 
 the latter, they are always oflFered the customary 
 courtesies. 
 
 It was through Buddhism that literature and law 
 were introduced among the rude tribes of Thi- ^y^^,^ 
 bet. The traditions tell us of a hundred Kterature 
 translators and teachers of the sacred books ™ 
 invited from India in the ninth century, who at last 
 completed this new gospel in a hundred folio vol- 
 umes,^ to be revised and retranslated five centuries 
 late»under the auspices of the great Buddhist monarch, 
 Kublai Khan. Previous to this time, Buddhist scholars 
 had constructed a new alphabet for the Mongolian 
 tribes.^ 
 
 The superstitious and savage Mongols who mas- 
 tered these highlands in the thirteenth century were 
 met and controlled by the devotion of a Buddhist 
 monk, Thsong-kha-pa, who revived the best elements 
 
 ' Wuttke, I. 244-248. ' Koeppen, I. 482. ' Ibid., from Neumann. 
 
 * Hue, I. 185. A simOar position is accorded to women in Siam. youmcd of Indian 
 Archipelago, 1847. 
 
 6 Lassen, IV. 716. ' Koeppen, II. 99-101. 
 
74,6 BUDDHISM. 
 
 of primitive Buddhism, then rapidly yielding to the 
 superstitions of a degraded form of Siva-worship. 
 This earnest preacher of devout meditation and social 
 order and harmony, setting bounds to the coarse feti- 
 chism of the nomads, directed the religious sentiment 
 'to ideas, and to the broader forms and disciplines that 
 ideas demand. He was in fact the father of the real 
 Catholic Church of Central Asia. The true Thibetan 
 papacy of the " yellow hat " Lamas, as distinguished 
 from the older and ruder "red hat" priests, goes back 
 to Thsong-kha-pa. He came to be venerated as first 
 incarnation of the phenomenal portion of the Buddha, 
 which perpetually renews itself by transmigration, to 
 preserve the unity of his Church, in an endless suc- 
 cession of Dalai Lamas, or " Oceans of Sanctity."^ 
 
 It is not easy to overestimate the benefits of that 
 civUizin incessant emphasis on benevolent, and even 
 power of tender and - compassionate sentiments, which 
 "^- everywhere accompanied the effort to unite 
 these tribes in a universal church. Through all the 
 grossness into which Buddhism has degenerated, we 
 can trace the invincible leaven of practical humanity, 
 everywhere neutralizing ignorance, inertia, and de- 
 spair. An ample collection of testimonies to ^ this 
 effect may be read in Koeppen's masterly work, from 
 which I select a few examples. Such are the reports 
 given by Symes and others, of the manners of the 
 Burmese, as in some respects wild and barbarous, but 
 in others exhibiting the delicate sensibilities of a culti- 
 vated people,^ — thoughtful for the sick, the weak, and 
 the old, placable towards enemies and hospitable to 
 
 ' Lasseo, IV. 725 j Koeppen, II. 70, 112. 
 
 * Malcom {Travels in BurmaK) says : *' During my whole residence in this conntxy, I 
 never saw an immodest act or gesture in man or woman." 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 747 
 
 Strangers; — by Crawford, of the kindness of the 
 Siamese and Burmese to the shipwrecked, now re- 
 garded as a religious duty towards those whom they 
 were used to despoil; — by Pallegoix, of the custom 
 with private persons in Siam of placing hospitals and 
 night-lodgings along the roadsides and rivers, for the 
 use of wayfarers, while large vessels are daily filled 
 with water, by the peasant women, for their refresh- 
 ment; — and by travellers generally, of the condem- 
 nation of crimes like theft ahd murder, by the Siamese 
 as a people, notwithstanding the great number of 
 rogues and vagabonds that infest the country.^ "Vast 
 numbers of the poor in Christian countries," says a 
 competent witness,^ "may well envy the correspond- 
 ing class in Siam." 
 
 Wherever Buddhism has extended, even where it 
 has fallen from the simplicity of its earliest , 
 
 ■^ *' Its vestiges. 
 
 inspirations into manifold mummeries and 
 fanaticisms, there still remains this redeeming pres- 
 ence of the spirit of brotherhood. "Popular educa- 
 tion has reached a considerable degree of advancement 
 in all Buddhist countries. Every town, almost every 
 secluded village, has its monastery occupied by monks, 
 who, either with or without pay, give instruction to 
 children, affording to all the means of acquiring ele- 
 mentary knowledge ; so that it is really rare to find 
 persons who can neither read nor write." ^ There are 
 institutions everywhere for the sick, orphaned, and 
 poor ; wells in every desert ; shady groves along every 
 dusty road ; everywhere missionaries of comfort and 
 relief; everywhere tender mercies towards the lower 
 
 1 Koeppen, I. 455-486. See also Nevins's China, pp. 214-228. 
 
 2 Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, p. Ivi. 
 
 » Bastian, Weltmff. d. Buddh. (Berlin, 1870), p. 37. St. Hilaire, p. 400. 
 
748 BUDDHISM. 
 
 creatures ; and this not confined to regulations in re- 
 straint of their wanton abuse and destruction, but car- 
 ried even to that extravagance of care and protection 
 v(rhich naturally belongs to an idealism without sense 
 of practical limits. Buddhism has everywhere sought 
 to abolish bloody sacrifices, and in most Asiatic coun- 
 tries with success ; bringing, in place of these barbar- 
 ities of religious service, mystical and fragrant incense, 
 and the tender beauty of flowers. And with the same 
 endeavor to refer sacrifice to its true conception, as a 
 consecration by love, the believers, from the first, con- 
 tributed alms to the priests ; gifts for the support of the 
 temples ; milk, butter, cheese, and various kinds of 
 drink, according to their occupations and means. But 
 these gifts were never to be burned, nor poured out as 
 libations, nor given with any idolatrous notion that they 
 were eaten or drunk by the Buddhas, as the older Sem- 
 ites believed their blood oflferings were by Baal and 
 Jehovah. If animals are sometimes offered in Budd- 
 hist countries, it is never to the Buddha.^ Deity in- 
 deed, to accord with the conception of nirvana, must 
 b^ as profoundly independent of outward tributes as, 
 for the Semitic idea, it is dependent on them : and, if 
 allowing slighter hold than this idea for personal rela- 
 tions with the worshipper, it at least did not force the 
 imagination to divine the unknown and indefinite de- 
 mands of a jealous master ; a demoralization by fear 
 in which the most degrading forms of sacrifice have 
 originated. The instincts of love and devotion were 
 left to find their own spontaneous expression. 
 
 " The worship of the Hindu deities in Ceylon," says 
 Tennent, " is devoid of the obscenities and cruelty by 
 which it is characterized on the continent of India 
 
 * Koeppen, I. 561. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 749 
 
 and it would almost appear as if these had been 
 discontinued by the Brahmans in compliment to the 
 superior purity of the worship with which their own 
 had been fortuitously connected."^ Slaves have been 
 received even by Buddhist monasteries in this island, 
 where caste has not wholly yielded to the civilizing 
 influences of that humane faith ; but Singhalese slav- 
 ery, according to the same observer, "is domestic, 
 not predial. It was so mild that, when, in 1845, Lord 
 Stanley abolished it, no claim was made by masters 
 for compensation." ** 
 
 Wherever Buddhism has penetrated, it has abolished 
 human sacrifice, which still prevails in portions of 
 India never yet subjected to its influence. It has con- 
 stantly discouraged capital punishment ; and in many 
 parts of Asia it has 'succeeded, at various times and 
 for longer or shorter periods, in setting the death 
 penalty aside. 
 
 " Buddhism has been violently persecuted at various 
 times and in various countries. It appears ^^^^^^^^ 
 never to have dreamed of revenge."^ It has and tolerant 
 been faithful to its principle that truth is not to ^^'"'' 
 be imposed by violence ; that opinion must be free. Its 
 rejection of bloodshed has been absolute. Beside the 
 history of its peaceful progress, the records of Islam 
 and Christianity are black with tyranny and hate. If 
 it has not prevented civil wars in acolossal empire like 
 China, we must remember that its essential ideas have 
 been a constant restraint on them, and probably con- 
 tributed, as much as any thing, to that social order and 
 national unity through nearly four thousand years, 
 which has been in many respects the most marvellous 
 fact in the political history of mankind. 
 
 1 Tennent's C<^l<m, 1. 536- ' Ibid., ch. i. " St. HUaire, p. 400. 
 
750 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Buddhism reached the conception that all religions 
 have been apprehensions, with greater or less 
 
 Recognition '^ ^ *=■ i • i_ 
 
 of universal distinctness, of one eternal faith ; so that it has 
 religion. ^^j^ ^ kindly yearning towards all of them, 
 sought to find their common good elements, and 
 to give each a place in the theory of its dharma or 
 Law. It assigns one of its highest heavens to the 
 virtuous of other religions. It knows no heathen 
 hated of God, only a common humanity seeking for 
 eternal life. "When Sakyamuni came to earth," 
 say the Lamaists, " he found that all peoples were not 
 equally capable of receiving his whole law. He 
 therefore gave to each what truths it was able to 
 apprehend, and so spread his blessing over all. And 
 of all these, not one that follows its own light, shall 
 be lost."^ The Mah&.vansa relates of Dushtagamini, 
 that, among the images of deities in act of homage to 
 Buddha, which he made to adorn his great dagop, 
 was that of the Buddhist Satan, ascending humbly, 
 with his host of followers, to praise with the rest the 
 power of goodness he had vainly striven to overturn.^ 
 The legend of the conversion of Kashmir makes the 
 Nagas (water serpents) oppose the civilizing gospel 
 and attempt to destroy its apostles. Not only are 
 their stones and arrows turned to flowers as they fall, 
 but their chiefs, instead of being annihilated, are con- 
 verted, to rejoice in a land which from a desert has 
 been transformed into a garden.^ 
 
 Towards Christians Buddhism has always shown 
 
 1 Bergmann, in Koeppen, I. 462 ; Bastlan^ ui supra, p. 26. 
 
 =* Mah&vansa, ch. xxx. The reply of the priests to the scruples of this Idng at having 
 destroyed thousands of lives in war, that "heretics" were "no better than wild beasts" 
 {Mah&v. ch. xxv.), is at once condemned by the chronicler: a fact not mentioned' by 
 Hardy, who quotes the saying to discredit Buddhism. {Eastern Monackism, p. 415.) 
 
 3 '^ourn. Asiaiiqtie^iox 1865, pp. 490, 505. In Indian mythology, serpents stand for 
 rude primitive powers, whether of man or nature ; while the eagle, ^(tr«<^, represents the 
 divine forces that subdue them. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 75 1 
 
 this broad hospitality. It was among the Mongolian 
 tribes of Central Asia that they found readiest access ; 
 with Tschingis-Khan and his successors, who gloried 
 in acknowledging one God, and the many ways in 
 which men might serve Him. Marco Polo records 
 the declaration of Kublai-Khan, that he " reverenced 
 the four great Prophets, — Jesus, Mahomet, Moses, 
 and Buddha." 
 
 Ruysbrock relates that Kublai-Khan, after witness- 
 ing a long discussion between disciples of different 
 faiths, said to a Franciscan, holding up his hand : 
 " How many jSngers here ? " Answer: "Five." "Yet 
 'tis the same hand, for all. So with your religions." 
 A Buddhist priest in Ceylon, we are told by Tennent,^ 
 not long since wrote a book about Jesus, in which he 
 expressed the belief that he had pre-existed, after the 
 Buddhist way, as a God, and had dwelt in six heavens ; 
 then taken flesh, through his good-will to man, and 
 taught the truth, as far as it was given him ; in short, 
 that he was, in some sense, a Buddha. The same 
 writer records the remark of a Ceylonese chief to a 
 missionary, upon entering his son at the mission- 
 school : " I would add ■ your religion to steady my 
 own, holding Christianity to be a very safe outrigger 
 to Buddhism." The edict of Asoka, proclaiming 
 universal toleration and affirming^ his preference of 
 conduct that should bring any religion into good 
 repute, to all alms-giving and all personal homage, 
 has its modern counterpart in the entire religious 
 freedom established by the late King of Siam in all 
 his dominions ; in his special regulations to secure 
 Christian churches from interference, and his en- 
 deavors to acquaint himself with the languages and 
 
 1 Ceylon, I. S3°- 
 
752 BUDDHISM. 
 
 science of the West, in furtherance of plans for puri- 
 fying Buddhism from superstitions, and placing it 
 on a basis of pure natural religion. ^ Sir John Bow- 
 ring quotes a letter from this liberal prince, in which 
 he says : " In inquiries into the nature of God, we 
 cannot tell who is right and who is wrong ; but I will 
 pray my God to give you his blessing, and you must 
 pray yours to bless me : thus blessings may fall on 
 both of us."^ But he told the missionaries plainly: 
 " You must not expect any of us to become Christians. 
 We shall not embrace what we think a' foolish re- 
 ligion."^ Becoming acquainted with European navi- 
 gation, he at once decreed that the holy Mount Meru, 
 with all its heavens and hells, must be given up, 
 voyages round the world having disproved its exist- 
 ence.* So thoroughly is the Buddhist transmigration-- 
 system identified with this old religious geography, 
 that this summary dealing with the one must, it would 
 seem, be the death-knell of the other. The courage- 
 ous honesty of the King of Siam is but a natural result 
 of Buddhist faith in reason and in man. 
 
 The Siamese believe that the different confessions 
 are but diverse forms of one true faith ; and the 
 practical consequence is the growth of the Free Budd- 
 hist churches, now for many years existing in Siam, 
 which reject the miraculous in their ancestral religion, 
 and adhere to its moral teachings only.^ In China 
 sayings like these are common proverbs : " Religions 
 are many, reason is one : we are all brothers. The 
 three religions have a common standpoint : they insist 
 
 ^ Pallegoix and Bowring. See Koeppen, I. 467. 
 
 ' Bowring's Narrative of the Mission to Siam, I. 349. His very intelligent co> 
 respondence with Bowring (in English) is printed in the appendix to the same work. 
 ' The Modern Buddhist (Alabaster), p. 73. * Bastian, IVeltauff., &c., p. 34. 
 
 B Koeppen, I. 468. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 753 
 
 on the banishment of wrong desires." And this is not 
 merely the commonplace of a formalism which M: 
 Hue rather contemptuously calls " Chinese politeness " 
 in religion, but the practical principle and policy of 
 the empire ; made, so far as foreign interference will 
 permit, the basis of the relation between Church and 
 State. The frank liberality of the regent of Thibet 
 to the Catholic missionaries, and his readiness to dis- 
 cover that, on the whole, there was no serious differ- 
 ence of faith between him and them, is of the same 
 quality, and truly Buddhist. Spence Hardy speaks of 
 Brahmanical ceremonies as side by side with Buddhist 
 in Ceylon, and of the ease with which native temples 
 can be obtained, if desired, for Christian worship. 
 
 Persecution, in Buddhist countries, has in fact al- 
 ways been the result of wrongful interference from with- 
 out. The Chinese have expelled European mission- 
 aries only when they began to plot for overthrowing 
 the government. It was the piracy of the Portuguese 
 that caused their expulsion from Japan, not their re- 
 ligious belief. Recent attempts of Catholic priests in 
 Siam to destroy the native temples have been met by 
 a forbearance unknown in the Christian world. The 
 large-hearted king actually counselled his people to 
 ignore the injuries done them by Christians who were 
 the pensioners of his bounty. ^ 
 
 This spirit is no less apparent in the sectarian dis- 
 cussions, which have abounded at every period Thecomro- 
 of Buddhist history. They exhausted every ment. 
 form of Oriental metaphysics, every question of eccle- 
 siastical discipline and practical duty. Yet they were 
 conducted with a mutual toleration that has probably 
 
 1 Bastian, ui sjtpra, p. 26. The virtues and failings of this king are described in Mrs. 
 Leonowens's work, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), 
 
754 BUDDHISM. 
 
 never been equalled in the history of religious contro- 
 versy. " Though the vessels differ, the water is the 
 same," say the Chinese sutras. "Though the flame 
 be of various lamps, the illumination is one : so with 
 the difference of the two Vehicles." Tennent says of 
 Singhalese Buddhism, that "its toleration of heresy is 
 intolerance of schism." But he admits that the quar- 
 rels of Christian sects have repelled the Singhalese 
 from their teachings.^ ttibuen Thsang found all the 
 kingdoms of India agitated by the strife between the 
 schools of the Great and Little Vehicles, the former 
 advancing to the metaphysical basis of Buddhism, the 
 latter confined to its moral, ecclesiastical, and mythic 
 elements. Notwithstanding the extent of the diffbr- 
 ence, and the spread of this schism through the whole 
 Buddhist church, these cohtending sects were living, 
 upon the whole, at peace, without attempting to oppress 
 or exclude each other ; and Hiouen Thsang hardly 
 mentions a single act of fanatical violence. On his 
 return to China, though a devoted follower of the 
 Great Vehicle, he ti-arislated the books of his oppo- 
 nents with entire iihpartiality.^ Throughout the his- 
 tory of this Church of Humanity, a commandment 
 which has been the prolific seed of Catholic and 
 Protestant intolerance, the " compelle intrare," is 
 wholly unknown. 
 
 In all forms of Buddhism, rationalistic, ethical, phil- 
 Buddhist osophical, the principle of religious freedom 
 lofbd^er- stands, a constant factor. It belongs to the 
 ence. esseuce of the faith. 
 
 According to most Christian writers, this is be- 
 cause the essence of Buddhisrh is "indifference iti 
 religion." The injustice of such a charge against the 
 
 > Tennent's Ceylon, II. 545. « St, Hilaire, p. 361-306. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 755 
 
 most ardent missionaries in the ancient world is too 
 evident to be discussed. Others find the explanation 
 in the " negative " spirit of this religion. " How should 
 they who believe the highest truth is in knowing" noth- 
 i'^gj persecute others for knowing less than them- 
 selves? Intolerance grows out of the necessities of 
 an actual Church and an actual State. How should 
 they persecute, to whom both Church and State are 
 unreal ? " i But the supposed " nihilism " of the Budd- 
 hists has already received our attention. Even were 
 there more justice in the imputation than there is, the 
 fact remains to be explained that they who are so in- 
 tensely devoted to the propagation of nihilism should 
 exhibit such liberality towards the intensest opponents 
 thereof If knowing nothing is the highest good, then 
 the pretence of knowing any thing is the utmost mis- 
 chief; and it is hard to say why he who finds motive 
 for zeal in love of the one should not find motive for 
 severity in hatred of the other. However unreal in 
 essence Church and State may be for the Buddhist 
 mind, it is to the extension of the Church and the 
 conversion of the State that it has been devoted for 
 more than a thousand years, and there must be some- 
 thing more positive and potent than mere insensibility 
 to the worth of right knowledge, which has kept it 
 broad and sweet, hospitable and tolerant to all oppos- 
 ing creeds. An attitude of negation is essentially an 
 attitude of opposition ; and the path of opposition is 
 the path to enmity just in proportion to the degree in 
 which the affirmative and receptive spirit is excluded 
 from it. How, then, is the tolerance of Buddhism to 
 be explained as a fruit of its negative qualities? How 
 is it we have not here a set of morose and bitter misan- 
 thropes, skeptical of all good in their fellow-men? 
 
 » See Wuttkej II. s86. 
 
756 BUDDHISM. 
 
 St. Hilaire, who believes these millions to be pure 
 nihilists, utterly "without one trace of the idea of a 
 God," is very naturally unable to explain the fact that 
 " so much ignorance should be accompanied by a vir- 
 tue that seems to demand so much light and so rare 
 a sense of justice." And he contents himself with 
 recognizing the fact without attempting to solve it, 
 except by stating it to have been in part " an imitation 
 of the tolerant spirit of Brahmanism."^ 
 
 Some, again, have ascribed this liberal tone of 
 Other Buddhism to an inability to appreciate the 
 theories, "sinfulness of sin ; '' which might indeed be a 
 sufficient reason for expecting men to manifest such 
 easily besetting sins as uncharitableness, but hardly 
 explains the victory over it, especially when, as here, 
 this result is attended by a painful perception of moral 
 penalties and a rigid moral discipline. • 
 
 Others, more rationally, refer us to the peculiar cir- 
 cumstances under which Buddhism was compelled to 
 struggle into life ; to a resistance in ancestral institu- 
 tions which it could not hope to overcome by any out- 
 zvardforce at its command. 
 
 More significant, however, is the truth that is now 
 Freedom beginning to be recognized by students of 
 iouTmon- Comparative Religion, that intolerance is an 
 archUm. incident of distinctive monotheism or monarch- 
 ism. The belief that the law of duty is the imposed 
 will of a Being external to man and the world, having 
 its authority in his right and power to send down his 
 special edicts to a separate and subject race, and to 
 secure recognition and obedience to his exclusive 
 messengers, — this belief, standing as the substance 
 of religious obligation, is the inevitable parent of per- 
 
 ^ Le Stmddha, p. 286. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 757 
 
 secution. With whatever good elements it may be 
 combined, the right of an imposed, external divine Will 
 issues in human Inquisitions, and the comfelle intrare 
 of the Church. It is the energetic infusion of this 
 monarchism in Judaism and Christianity, which has 
 made intolerance their perpetual vice or their subtle 
 tendency. On the other hand, and by reason of the 
 total absence of this monarchical interest, whatever 
 the perils that attend pantheism, or any other form of 
 belief which tends to identify the substance of the 
 human and thfe divine, this of attempting forcible 
 entrance on the domain of reason and conscience, in 
 the name of sovereign will, is not one of them. Now 
 if Buddhism is not strictly pantheistic, if it does not in 
 terms identify the substance of the human with the 
 divine, it in fact assumes their vnity to be essential, 
 and not arbitrary nor imposed. It seeks the divine 
 through the human, and makes the self-abnegation 
 through which it is attained a strictly human volition. 
 Nirvana, whatever be its peculiar meaning, certainly 
 'expresses the free choice and fulfilled capacity of the 
 Buddha. In other words, it is Man '^awakened" to 
 his real being. Buddhism, therefore, appeals to no 
 monarchical will absolutely external to human nature. 
 And, when it denies validity to every definite form of 
 human thought and being, this is not that it may 
 affirm the infinite to t^e altogether af art from man; 
 but that it may find the infinite, somehow, involved in 
 his -process of emancipation from all dreams and illu- 
 sions into the reality of his essential Buddhahood. 
 And no exclusive messenger to human nature is here 
 possible, since humanity is itself defined as having no 
 real being apart from this process and result. For 
 these reasons, if for no other. Buddhism can assert no 
 
758 ' BUDDHISM. 
 
 authority but such as is awarded it by the free con- 
 sciousness of man : its doctrines must rest on their 
 own intrinsic merits, and their appeal must be to 
 reason, not to force. Its starting point is not in an 
 external command, but in an inward free aspiration. 
 
 And this was indeed historically its origin. It was 
 Origin in a spontaneous protest, metaphysical and practi- 
 MdL^I^' cal, against the twofold tyranny of transmigra- 
 tion, tion and caste. It was the reaction of the human 
 against an idea of deity crystallized in texts, in institu- 
 tions, in endless minute legislation for thought and life. 
 It was an appeal from authoritj'' clairhing to descend 
 upon man to the force of aspiration in man. 
 
 But it was not merely the assertion of a human 
 A d • right. It was the cry of human sympathy ; 
 brotherly the summouf of compassion to the rescue of 
 °™' mankind from pain that seemed as wide and 
 
 deep as life itself. Surely intolerance would be a 
 strange fruit to come from such seed. Surely it would 
 be unaccountable if they, who go out solely to heal 
 suffering and to break bonds, should take with them 
 the crudest scourge of body and mind. We may 
 easily believe that such instincts of brotherhood as im- 
 pelled the Buddhist, — being wholly free from that 
 sense of a commissibn to maintain the exclusive claims 
 of a mediator and a monarchical dogma, which has so 
 often darkened Christianity and Islam with its per- 
 secuting spirit — could not fail, however otherwise 
 enfeebled, to reap the benefit of this indemnity in a 
 broader and sweeter flow. 
 
 The tolerant attitude of Buddhism requires no other 
 Result explanation, apart from the natural tendency of 
 the Hindu mind as shown also in Brahman- 
 ism, than the essential quality and aim of the Budd- 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 759 
 
 hist movement itself. It is but a part of that humane 
 impulse, which must be fully recognized as substan- 
 tially its motive power, before either its metaphysical 
 negations or its positive moral ardor can be fairly 
 understood. 
 
 As inclusive of all other practical benefits from the 
 propagation of Buddhism, we must add the unifying 
 fact, that it has been a vast force of associa- '^°''"' 
 tion ; an ideal centre of unity among the rude and 
 isolated races of Asia. With all its pliancy to local 
 peculiarities, and through all diversities of phase, it 
 has given them a common starting-point of religious 
 interest, in place, in time, and in personal homage ; 
 and, to no slight extent, a common dogma, a common 
 tradition, and a common literature. It has thus done 
 much in accomplishing that -preliininary stage in re- 
 ligious growth for the Eastern world which Christianity 
 has so well effected for the West. It has brought 
 the tribes together by missions, explorations, and pil- 
 grimages to distant and widely separated shrines. It 
 has taught them orderly routines, patient disciplines, 
 permanent friendly relations between classes, and, 
 in such defective ways indeed as Oriental genius 
 conditioned and an undeveloped perception of nat- 
 ural laws required, aided them to distinct social and 
 political aims.^ It is not true that its call to forsake 
 the world as vanity, and to immure life in the con- 
 vent or the cell, has made it a mere force of social 
 disintegration. The conventual life was a step to- 
 wards definite and constructive communion. A large 
 proportion of the Buddhist priests lived in the towns- 
 
 1 The crude and coarse material, which was to be leavened, explains that strange mixt- 
 ure of moral elevation with trivial and even repulsive details of special prescription, which 1 
 characterizes such Buddhist works as the Catechism of the Chinese ShamanS' 
 
760 BUDDHISM. 
 
 and cities, were not eremites but cenobites, avoiding 
 the old isolation of the Brahmanical ascetics ; ^ and 
 whether as mendicants, or as private teachers, or as 
 employed in other professional services, everywhere 
 formed a real centre for the interests of the people. 
 They are to this day the instructors of the children 
 of the poor in all towns and villages in Buddhist 
 countries.^ Their preaching of the vanity of life was 
 at least j^reaching, and gathered the multitudes as they 
 had never been gathered before, to breathe the mag- 
 netic atmosphere of a common purpose, and feel the 
 thrill of democratic appeal. The degree to which 
 this sense of social equality, this democratic element, 
 exists in China, in India, and even in Central Asia, is 
 yet to be appreciated by the Western nations ; and 
 Buddhism has been, to an extent which is equally un- 
 recognized, at once its expression and its education. 
 
 " Nipal is covered with vihdras (monasteries) ; but these ample 
 abodes have long resounded with the hum of industry and the 
 pleasant voices of women and children! The convents are always 
 open to new-comers, and for the departure of those who are tired 
 of their vows. Women are regarded as equally worthy of admis- 
 sion with men." ' 
 
 The Nepalese priests have abandoned ascetic prac- 
 tices, and have exclusive inheritance of the pro- 
 fessions and trades. The chief maintenance of the 
 lamas of Thibet is their own industry. They are 
 artists, schoolmasters, artisans, and laborers in every 
 kind.* The dependent condition involved in the men- 
 dicancy of the Buddhist priesthood exposes this class 
 to popular contempt, which is to a great degree offset 
 
 ^ Koeppeti, II. 262. 
 
 2 Bastian, Weltauff. d- Buddlt.^ p. 37: St. Hilaire, p. 401. 
 
 ^ Hodgson, Transact, of Royal As- Soc, II. 256. 
 
 ♦ Wilson, Essays, II. 374 ; Koeppen, II. 275 ; Hue, II. 90. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 761 
 
 by the many ways in which they make themselves 
 of general service. In most Buddhist countries, the 
 Festival of the Plough is held annually with great 
 honor, all classes, from the monarch down, paying rev- 
 erence to this symbol of the dignity of labor. In 
 Siam, on these occasions, a "king of the husband- 
 men" is chosen, who represents the highest authority, 
 and is made the centre of various singular rites. 
 During -his brief sovereignty, he receives as his per- 
 quisite all fines paid for violating the law against 
 doing work on this festal day.^ 
 
 These bold pioneers, these active colonizers, these 
 sturdy democrats, making the far expanses of „. ., 
 
 *-' ^ Significance 
 
 a continent vocal even with their tidings of a ofBuddhist 
 silent world, and alive and prolific by a gospel '^^^'^ ^^' 
 which actually proclaimed them empty and dead, — 
 what a rebuke they are to all narrow, negative form- 
 ulas for interpreting the facts • of religious history ! 
 That they preached absolute renunciation of life, en- 
 forced thereto by the absence of science and practical 
 freedom, was really the sign that these two elements 
 were indispensable to the dignity and desirability of 
 life, and that man's ideal nature refused to honor even 
 existence itself on the conditions it then and there 
 presented. And was the instinctive protest wholly 
 blind to this, its own inner meaning? Mark what 
 these idealists did. 
 
 They struck out a new doctrine and discipline, be- 
 cause the old was stiff and unsocial. They Achieve- 
 proselyted for it with an energy never equalled "™'^- 
 before or since, save by that of Catholic Rome. They 
 preached tidings of salvation to the low-caste arti- 
 sans and laborers ; encouraged agriculture, and taught 
 
 * Crawford's Mission to Siam. 
 
762 BUDDHISM. 
 
 writing and humane manners to the rude rovers of 
 the north. 1 They planted peaceful monasteries for 
 study and contemplation, gathered colossal libraries, 
 created immense bodies of literature, in India, in 
 Nepal, in Thibet, in Ceylon, in China ; and they re- 
 freshed with tides of positive enterprise and emigra- 
 tion, in the interest of an ideal aim, all Eastern Asia 
 from Korea to Siam. Architecture and sculpture in 
 central and southern Asia are mainly of their crea- 
 tion. The indications of writing in India commence 
 with their revolution in the interest of the masses.^ 
 Their recognition of the value of letters is illustrated 
 in their mythical genesis of "the sacred syllable." 
 "First the world was void. The first light was aum; 
 thence the alphabet, the seeds of the universe."^ 
 They may even be said to have created history in 
 India by the civil, social, and political agitations 
 which they produced. 
 
 Their uninterrupted chronicle of Ceylon, covering 
 nearly the whole period of Buddhist sway in that island, 
 with its valuable chronological data, is, notwithstand- 
 ing its mythical elements, one of the most important 
 historical documents in Oriental literature. The 
 Buddhist canon in China is seven hundred times as 
 large as the New Testament. Hiouen Thsang's trans- 
 lation of a single set of Sutras is twenty-five times the 
 amount of the Christian Bible. The canonical books 
 of the Thibetans are of dimensions beside which those 
 of other races and religions are insignificant.* They 
 number thousands of works, gathered into hundreds 
 of volumes ; and the Bible of the southern Buddhists 
 
 1 See St. Hilaire, 370; Koeppen, I. 186, 481 ; Wuttke, I. 248, II. 559. 
 » MUller's Samk. Lit-, p. 519. » Hodgson, Trans. R. A. S., II. 232. 
 
 * A summary of the hundred volumes of the Kah-gyur is given by Csoma Koro^ in 
 Asiat. Researches, vol. xx. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 763 
 
 is equally enormous.^ Both treat of all forms of 
 Oriental speculation, science, and art.^ In the sixth 
 century two thousand Buddhist works had been trans- 
 lated into Chinese.'* The literary industry of these 
 (theoretic) unbelievers in work was immeasurable. 
 
 It was the necessity of agricultural development, to 
 meet the practical requirements of a religion which 
 prohibited the taking of life, that stimulated manual 
 toil, and covered Ceylon with reservoirs and conse- 
 crated lakes for the irrigation of the country. It was 
 this that measured the praise of the Buddhist kings 
 by the number of tanks and canals, sometimes amount- 
 ing to thousands, which they had constructed for the 
 "benefit of the country," or "out of compassion for 
 living creatures," or to enrich the Church and main- 
 tain its priesthood. Here was a theoretic indolence, 
 that taught kings to plant gardens and reclaim lands ; 
 to provide by S3'stematic cultivation the means for 
 gratuitously supplying food to travellers in their 
 dominions ; to organize the democratic village com- 
 munities, with their simple and regular administration 
 of justice ; and even to labor in the rice fields with 
 their own hands, "to make their gifts more meritori- 
 ous ! " * Here was a contempt for nature and all 
 fleeting forms, that could surround cities with gardens, 
 and bury lofty temples to their summits under votive 
 heaps of flowers, and make every day's especial at- 
 mosphere of prayer and praise refresh the worshippers 
 with a new and distinct ai-oma, from the wealth of 
 their floral world ! * Here was a metaphysical nega- 
 
 » The Singhalese TripUcika (Three Baskets) contains 350,000 verses. St. Hilaire, 
 p. 380. 
 
 s Weber's Vorlesungen, p. 194 ; Koeppen, II. 27S-280. 
 
 » Seal's Buddhist Pilgrims, p. xxxiii. 
 
 » MakSmansa, ch. xxxiv. ' Tennent. 
 
764 BUDDHISM. 
 
 tion of all light and joy, that could come out into 
 recognition of these very things as elements of relig- 
 ious architecture and ritual, far transcending that ac- 
 corded them by the Christian world ; lifting its airy 
 pagodas in the pleasantest sites, enclosed with cheerful 
 galleries and luxuriant gardens and groves ; enliven- 
 ing its vihdras, and even the gloom of its rock' exca- 
 vations, with endless carving and painting of symbolic 
 imagery drawn from nature, the animal world, and 
 the arts of social life ; performing its sacred rites to the 
 sound of inspiring music, and celebrating periodical 
 feasts of lamps, of images, of birthdays, and of the 
 opening spring ! ^ 
 
 There is scarcely any movement in the history of 
 Historic religious enterprise that can be compared to 
 paraUeis. jj^jg^ except the labors of the Benedictine 
 monks, whose rise made the sixth century of the 
 Christian era memorable, just as the first preaching 
 of Buddhism signalized the sixth century before it. 
 That band of devoted missionaries, who carried Chris- 
 tianity into the wilds of northern Europe, raised wo- 
 man to equality of ecclesiastical position with man, 
 and opened asylums to outcasts and serfs ; who tran- 
 scribed and diffused copies of their own Scriptures with 
 prodigious industry ; who founded schools of music, 
 painting, and architecture ; who preserved art and 
 science through the medizeval night, and organized 
 agriculture on a gigantic scale, as acceptable service 
 of God and ennobling work of man, — are the near- 
 est western analogue to these oriental enthusiasts ; 
 and not without special resemblance in the proof they 
 afford that man cannot help relucting with vigor 
 
 > Koeppen, I. 560-585, II. 300 ; Lassen, II. 1170. Wilson, Jmrn. R.A.S. (Bom- 
 bay Branch), vol. iv. Oil the growth of Buddhist art in Orissa, from mere holes in rocks 
 to temples covered with beautiful imagery, see Hunter, vol. i. 
 
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 765 
 
 against all his own theoretic postulates of the " vanity 
 of hfe." 
 
 We should mention also the Moravian brethren, a 
 more recent instance of practical zeal in the service 
 of an ideal that apparently disparaged the present 
 world ; — penetrating the remotest regions of barbar- 
 ism, and piercing Himalayan . solitudes, to surmount 
 those colossal heights, and stand side by side with 
 Buddhism on the sacred plateaux of Central Asia. 
 
VII. 
 ECCLESIASTICISM. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. 
 
 " I ''HE practical energy and humanity of Buddhism in 
 its early days, and these later vestiges of 
 
 ^ Degeneracy. 
 
 a civilizing power which even its degeneracy 
 cannot hide, thoroughly refute the charge that its in- 
 tellectual skepticism was spiritual despair. They are 
 the cheering signs of a healthful effort of nature to 
 counteract the inertia of the Eastern races ; to over- 
 come the physical conditions that held them apart ; 
 to compensate for the absence of scientific and social 
 opportunity, and for the inveteracy of institutions ; to 
 relieve the monotony of contemplation, endlessly re- 
 volving fixed forms of thought, and cycles of destiny. 
 It was from these invincible conditions of race, cli- 
 mate, experience, identified with life itself, that men 
 sought refuge in negations, whose very thoroughness 
 was a path of emancipation, and led out into the gran- 
 deur of compassion, sacrifice, love. Yet without 
 science, without friction of races, without the stir of 
 a more ardent life, these conditions zvere invincible.. 
 The social status could not supply material for forms- 
 of permanent culture which would justify life, as life,. 
 to man's ideal sense. So this negation penetrated' 
 even the humane instincts, and made them subser- 
 vient to ascetic aims. The Buddhist priesthood be^ 
 
 #9 
 
ij>jO BUDDHISM. 
 
 came, after an Oriental way, men- of action, and 
 constructive forces in the living world ; but it was to 
 persuade others to abandon action and renounce the 
 world. 1 The salvation they preached was escape from 
 life, not discovery of its inherent practical values, out- 
 ward or inward. It was the same in a very large 
 degree with Christianity ; but the ethnic connections 
 and opportunities of Christianity, unlike those of Budd- 
 hism, have been capable of counteracting the other- 
 worldliness of its own prescribed ideal. The Buddhist 
 priesthood, on the other hand, are still children of the 
 jungle and the steppe, of the brooding Oriental fate. 
 Their active enterprise, their organized efficiency, 
 their democratic zeal, trail with the old languor of the 
 Yogi life in its endless strain against an endless con- 
 sciousness, moving through nature in a somnambulic 
 way, like the anchoret pacing under his banyan 
 shades. They fail of our Western magnetic sense 
 of the outward capabilities of the actual world, so 
 needful to the evolution of its spiritual uses. 
 
 Against these disadvantages, they have put a per- 
 sistent adherence to their traditions of benevolence as 
 the purpose of life. But even this has proved but an 
 imperfect defence against the inevitable degeneracy 
 of a positive religion, in its passage through definite 
 cultus into the form of authoritative institution ; while 
 on the other hand they have lacked the energy in 
 secular aims which Western races have known how 
 to oppose to this process, and to make available for 
 a continual reconstruction of the religious ideal. They 
 are monks, mendicants, dreamers still, but without 
 
 ^ " Leaving all pleasures behind, calling nothing his own, gomg from his home to a 
 homeless state, and no longer dinging to any thing, the wise will set himself free." — 
 Dhammap.j vv. 87-89, Yet the Pr&timoksha forbids disparagement of life or commen- 
 dation of death, however common suicide may have been in later Buddhism, See Beal, 
 Budd. Pilgrims^ p. xlii. 
 
DEGENERACY. >]*J1 
 
 the enthusiasm of the founders of their faith; still 
 apostles of negation, but not now in the old way 
 of earnest protest and quickening demand. Their 
 metaphysics are not so much the keeti sense that per- 
 ception is of the unreal, as a traditional acquiescence 
 in that conclusion and its results. For the swarming 
 functionaries of a Church two thousand years old, 
 and the hundreds of millions who perform its rites, 
 the dogma of the nothingness of things visible, how- 
 ever conceived, has indeed come to its own self-con- 
 tradiction both in faith and practice ; though certainly 
 not, thus far, in the interest of their proper reality. 
 
 The world, pronounced a phantom because it is so 
 transient, has become a flood-tide of minute Nature's 
 and busy ceremonial observances ; it pours '"°"^' 
 upon these preachers of the Void immeasurable de- 
 tails of mythologic and symbolic imagery ; it buries 
 them under a tropical rankness of legend, to be com- 
 pared only with the colossal flora of the carboniferous 
 epoch of the planet. What irony ! A God in nir- 
 vana blooming into a tropic summer of resplendent 
 fable, flowering inexhaustibly in personal portrait- 
 ure, miracle, metamorphosis ! The human body 
 renounced as worthless, vindicating itself in a stu- 
 pendous veneration of statues and relics ! The long- 
 ing for absolute rest as the crown of virtue, issuing in 
 unbounded devotion to miraculous energies, supposed 
 to flow from saints who have departed for such a rest ! 
 Believers in the emptiness of all forms, and even 
 actions, driven by an insatiable passion for multiplying 
 prayers, to actual mechanical contrivances for work- 
 ing off" the greatest number of them in the shortest 
 time by movements of the lips, or strings of beads, or 
 the many-colored prayer-cylinder {kurdu) stuffed with 
 
772 BUDDHISM. 
 
 formulas on paper slips, or with the books of the law, 
 and turned by hand ! These are nature's own reven- 
 dications, enforcements of rights suppressed or disal- 
 lowed, in such ways as remain possible ; proving at 
 least that the balance of spiritual forces cannot be 
 destroyed. In the very extravagance of such self- 
 contradictions and perversions there is a blind pres- 
 sure of the instincts towards immeasurableness, which 
 affirms man's innate relation to the infinite. 
 
 Swarms of images standing above millions of pros- 
 . trate men, or heaps of bones, ashes, jewels, 
 of relics and vases, coins, devoutly laid up in tofes, those 
 ™^^°^' bubble-shapes that deny the validity of what 
 they hold, are but illustrations of the spectacle that every 
 distinctive religion has presented in degenerating from 
 its first inspiration. Neither Buddhism nor Catholi- 
 cism, however, must be supposed to teach mere idolatry 
 of dead objects. Pure fetichism belongs only to the 
 lowest stages of the religious sentiment ; and every 
 historical faith carries with it traditional idealism 
 enough to forbid recurrence to the mere dread of 
 volitions inherent in the dead wood and stone. The 
 worship rendered these images and relics looks 
 through them to their consecration by some superior 
 presence, some subtle guardianship, some association 
 that holds them to what was once a personal relation. 
 It differs far less than is wont to be supposed from 
 sentiments familiar to all civilized people. The ex- 
 treme demonstrativeness in these rituals, which seems 
 to indicate no less than real adoration of the statues 
 and reHcs themselves, is in fact habitual to the Oriental 
 mind, and does not by any means imply that the merely 
 symbohc meaning of the object is lost in sheer idolatry. 
 " The intelligent Burman," says Malcom, " claims that 
 
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 773 
 
 he regards images as papists do a crucifix : he places 
 no trust in them, but uses them to remind him of Got- 
 ama, and in compliance with his commands." ^ 
 
 Buddhism, in fact, subjects this form of service to 
 special restraints. Its devotion was centered itsiimita- 
 in love and gratitude to a man. Its oldest 'i™'". 
 
 °^ ^ ^ Buddhist 
 
 temples are without visible objects, even of an. 
 this form of piety.^ But an old legend describes 
 the Buddha as directing his picture, inscribed with 
 the precepts of the law, to be sent by one king to 
 another, as the best of gifts, and as a means of 
 conversion, causing his shadow to be cast on a 
 surface for the purpose.^ The earliest images to 
 which the tributes of this faith in human forces 
 were naturally directed were in human form : far 
 from such monstrous combinations as Hinduism has 
 allowed its later sects, they were confined to the 
 Buddha preaching, meditating, resting ; to the figures 
 of his saints, and to human representations of his 
 church and his law. The Sutras abound in praises 
 of his personal beauties ; reckoning them by hundreds, 
 defining and classifying them ; covering his ideal image 
 with every conceivable symbol of supernatural strength 
 and grace and sweetness ; * yet a wonderful soberness, 
 suggestive of heartfelt respect for the human and the 
 real, reigns throughout the world of actual Buddhist 
 statuary. The earnestness of that profound sense of 
 the limits of outward perception and possession, of that 
 call to an unseen path of release and rest, which gave 
 meaning to the teacher's life and word, would seem to 
 have made these colossal forms, ^ lifted above the gath- 
 
 1 J/ates on the Burman Empire, ch. vi. " gee ynirn. R. A. J'., vol. viii. p. 43. 
 
 » Buniouf, p. 340-344. * Hardy, Manual, p. 367. 
 
 » Great numbers of these statues, in all Buddhist countries, are from twenty to forty 
 feet high, and many are far larger : they will ordinarily measure irom twelve to twenty. 
 Koeppen, I. 509. 
 
^74 BUDDHISM. 
 
 ered relics of the mortal part, its enduring home. 
 Contrast this absence of pretension and display, this 
 calm reliance on the bare truth of inward thought and 
 purpose, these quiet gestures of teaching, these folded 
 hands of meditation, with the boundless license of 
 symbolic expression in the popular statues of Brahma, 
 Vishnu, and Siva. The lifted finger commends to 
 silence ; the half-closed eyes recall to self-discipline 
 and self-restraint ; the sitting posture, a restfulness not 
 of death nor sleep, but of Hfe, affirms the still patience 
 of law that abides in the depths of all existence ; the 
 benign aspect pervades them with human love.^ This 
 limitation has its moral value ; holds religious feeling 
 and fancy to a certain realistic interest. Art in Budd- 
 hist countries, especially in Japan, shows rare fidelity 
 to nature, and surprising sense of all vital energies ; 
 and its tender patience in elaboration is referable in 
 part, one cannot help thinking, to the influence of a 
 religious sentiment which constantly insists on cor- 
 responding moral qualities and disciplines.^ 
 
 Veneration of relics is here combined, as in Catholic 
 , . , Christianity, with prayers for the dead, inter- 
 
 Meaning of *' ^ .^ 
 
 relic wor- cessiou of saiuts, and other related forms of 
 ^'"''' devotion to personal ties. It is, in reality, 
 
 to be explained as the natural cling of private affec- 
 tions, unenlightened by science, to the senses ; as their 
 protest against being severed by death from the out- 
 ward objects with which they have been associated. 
 Escape from supernaturalism does not destroy this 
 interest, but simply frees it from extravagance : it is 
 changed from a superstition to a sentiment, and its 
 
 1 The Buddhist sculptor is required to give the Teacher such a countenance as becomes 
 the " Father of all creatures." Koeppen, p. 505. The elaborate symbolism of later figures 
 indicates Sivaite influences. Schlagintweit shows that the figures of Buddha and his saints, 
 in Thibet, are of high Aryan type. ' 
 
 * On the realism of Japanese art, see Jarves's Art ThoughtSt ch. ix. 
 
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 775 
 
 object from a miracle to a memento. This result is 
 simply due to the fact that science renders tlie required 
 justice to the senses from the side of reason, releasing 
 the emotional nature from that anxious watch over 
 their interests which it could not otherwise abandon. 
 I do not wonder, therefore, at the dimensions attained 
 by relic-worship, under the influence of a religion like 
 Buddhism, which theoretically rejects the claims of the 
 senses, at the same time giving a prominent place to the 
 distinctively human and personal ; in other words, to 
 sensibilities and affections which inevitably adhere to 
 these claims. It is the struggle of the sentiments 
 to hold their own ; their cling to associations threat- 
 ened with destruction by the sense of the transiency 
 and unreality of phenomena. 
 
 I do not think we need carry this thought so far as 
 to suppose with Burnouf, that the intense attach- 
 ment of the Buddhists to the relics of their saints 
 grew out of the feeling that these dead bones were 
 all that remained of the beings they had loved ; thus 
 making it an argument to prove that nirvana was an- 
 nihilation. Would not belief in such a nirvana have 
 abolished interest in these mere mementos of decay, 
 in place of stimulating it? That, on the other hand, 
 relics were piously gathered up, to the last fragment, 
 and abundantly supplied by the imagination where 
 they were wanting, would seem to demonstrate that 
 those whom they represented were still cherished as 
 individuals whose life was bound up with the hopes 
 and desires of their followers. It would thus come in 
 evidence against Burnouf's theory, rather than for it. 
 It is also to be noted that the relics of kings, who cer- 
 tainly could not have been thought to have passed into 
 nirvdna, were honored in the same way. The con- 
 
776 BUDDHISM. 
 
 servation of relics was not wholly unknown to Brah- 
 manism ; but it became from the first the special 
 characteristic of Buddhism, measuring the intensity 
 of its sense of change, decay, and death, as a sorrow- 
 ful destiny, to be in every way, symbolically and spirit- 
 ually, mastered and set aside. i 
 So the dead body of the loved Buddha, who had I 
 passed into nirvdna, was idealized beyond measure :'j 
 Its extent in the fears and hopes of millions gave enor- 
 Buddhism. mous proportions to the mythopoetic faculty 
 in this direction, and scattered his members, like 
 those of Egyptian Osiris, over the world. ^ Every 
 organ, feature, atom of his body, alive or dead, is 
 sacred. He throws up his beautiful locks and his 
 royal garments into the air when abandoning the 
 world ; and they are caught devoutly as they ascend, 
 by a Brahma, and borne away to a grand relic shrine 
 in the Brahmi heavens where all the angels can adore 
 them.® He distributes every thing he can detach 
 from his person to his disciples during his life. At 
 his death, whatever has passed through the funeral 
 fires is divided into eight portions, to satisfy as many 
 contending nations ; then follow the miraculous resto- 
 rations and multiplications which assure his presence 
 wherever his name is praised. His skull is in India ; 
 his shoulder-blade, in Ceylon ; the apples of his eyes 
 are in a cloister in Nagara ; his hairs, nails, fingers, in 
 various cities of the East ; his very shadow is shown 
 in several caves of Western China ; and his foot-prints 
 are visited by crowds of pilgrims on the highest peaks 
 of Asia accessible to devotion. His water-jar is 
 laid up to work miracles at the Singhalese capital ; 
 his wash-bowl, staff, and mantle are scattered in mani- 
 
 1 St. Hilaire, 294. ' s Wheel of the Law, p. 103. 
 
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 777 
 
 fold shapes over vast empires. His left eye-tooth in 
 early times converted an army. A Brahman king 
 tried to destroy it ; burnt, beat, buried, stamped it out 
 under the feet of elephants ; but in yain. It would 
 reappear, on some lotus-leaf, no mere perishable eye- 
 tooth, but an indestructible element of the ascended 
 Buddha. Finally, wearied and overpowered, the im- 
 perial enemy gave in and built it a splendid temple, 
 where it wrought indescribable miracles. Bloody wars 
 were fought for that eye-tooth of the Buddha. In the 
 fifth century, Fahian, the Chinese pilgrim, sa\^Mt car- 
 ried about in pomp ; long lines of elephan^fwere 
 taught to kneel when it passed by, and flowers were 
 strewn by the people along the ways. At last it fell 
 to the British, who tried to destroy it, but failed like 
 the rest ; and so it is still honored with magnificent 
 ceremonies, in Mahd-Nuwara, or the Great City, in 
 Ceylon,^ where it was displayed, in 1858, amidst pros- 
 trate crowds, to Burmese priests sent to compare it 
 with a rival tooth preserved at Ava.^ 
 
 All this has its analbgies in Christian history. And 
 though a mystery rested on the disposal of the actual 
 body of Jesus, which protected it from this kind of 
 mythology, till veneration for his person had changed 
 it, in popular faith, into the very substance of deity, 
 yet the worship of relics has approached as nearly as 
 possible to the same point, in the wonder-working of 
 his sepulchre, his manger, and his cross ; even of his 
 foot-prints on the Mount of Olives, in the houses of 
 Jerusalem, and in various Catholic Churches of 
 France.^ At the close of the fourteenth century, 
 
 •■ See the account of the deposition of Gotama's relics in the great dagop of RuanyeUi, 
 by Dushtagamini, and of the accompanying miracles, in the thirty-first chapter of the 
 
 Mah&vansa. 
 
 ' St. HUaire, p. 417. ° Maury, Ligendes Puuses, p. 214. 
 
tjljS BUDDHISM. 
 
 the Abbey of St. Denis presented a piece of the head 
 of St. Hilary to the city of Poitiers : the chin had 
 already been obtained. St. Andrew's head was wor- 
 shipped for centuries at Patros. " Kings died for the 
 purchase of it. It was carried in procession to Rome. 
 The heads of Peter and Paul would have been borne 
 forth to meet it, but the gold and iron which enshrined 
 them were too heavy. At the Milvian Bridge, the 
 Pope made an eloquent address to the Head, entreat- 
 ing its aid in overcoming the Turks. It was conveyed 
 in sD^ador to St. Peter's, and deposited under the high 
 altaf^lr No Vigilantius has arisen in the East to 
 rebuke the " rag and dust worship " of Buddhist Je- 
 romes ; no Luther to thunder against the venders of 
 sacred images that swarm in all Buddhist states. But 
 even the freer and more practical understanding of 
 the European races did not save them from an almost 
 Oriental mania for this kind of traffic and this form of 
 
 m 
 
 devotion ; and in the ninth century the sale of relics 
 had become the main part of the trade of Rome. 
 It is probable that far more of conscious imposture 
 has mingled with these operations of the Cath- 
 olic Church than with those of Buddhism in 
 the same direction. It is a desire for the preservation, 
 rather than for the sale, of relics, that has covered 
 southern Asia with tofes, or dagofs? from Samarkand 
 and Cabul to the extremities of China and further 
 India. The oldest topes are in the form of a bubble, 
 surmounted by an umbrella, symbolical of sovereignty. 
 In later times several figures of the latter kind were 
 placed one above another, in a series typical of the 
 several stages of the religious life, or of the triple 
 
 ^ Milman's Z^^z« Christianity^ VIII. 221. 
 
 2 Topes, or stupas (heaps) are tumuli.: dagobtu are relic-shrines. The one term is PAli, 
 the other Singlialese : but their meaning is substantially the same. 
 
MYTHOLOGY. 779 
 
 form under which the religious ideal was conceived, 
 as person, as law, as church. In this way the Chinese 
 pagoda grew up out of the Indian dagof or stufa, 
 which contains its elements, but whose emblematic 
 bubble is not adapted to the realistic taste of the Chi- 
 nese. Between these styles is the pyramidal, which 
 is less common. The dagofs are in grottoes or in 
 the open air, near the vihdras, or places of assembly 
 and temporary sojourn ; and these last also, although 
 built for convenience in the form of a parallelogram 
 or square, exhibit the bubble-shape in the most sacred 
 portion, the apse. Under these singular monuments, 
 significant at once of utter weakness and sovereign 
 power, of the transient and the eternal, the relics were 
 buried in cells, with the prayer that they might remain 
 for ever closed ; probably in the hope that they might 
 be undisturbed till the coming of the next Buddha, 
 thousands of years in the future.^ 
 
 The mythology of Buddhism presents the same 
 boundless yearning for the infinite and eternal g. .^.^^^^ 
 amidst the fleeting of phenomenal forms, of Buddhist 
 Mythology is always prophetic: it is the™^"°°^' 
 child's play of intuition and imagination, and dimly 
 divines those essential relations of man and nature, 
 which science afterwards reaches slowly and presents 
 clearly in detail; so that, as we look backward, man 
 seems to have been predicting them all through the 
 ages. Even in this, the most extravagant imagery 
 of religious faith that ever grew, such instinctive pre- 
 sentiment of the latest facts and the broadest laws is 
 too plain to be mistaken. This revel of the imagina- 
 tion in pathless and endless wastes of number was 
 astronomy and microscopy in ideal dream. " The 
 
 ' On Buddhist relics, statuary, &c., see Bastiaa's Siam, pp. 1 19-163. 
 
780 BUDDHISM. 
 
 world," it said, " rests on a lotus-leaf, which carries 
 also innumerable worlds beside it. So with every 
 other leaf of the flower. Out of the atmospheric deep 
 in which this lotus floats, arise so many similar flow- 
 ers, that it requires unity followed by four millions of 
 ciphers to designate their number. And every leaf 
 of every one of these flowers bears as many worlds as 
 the first. But this one atmosphere is but an atom to 
 the whole. There are as many more as there are 
 flowers in this, and each is as full of worlds." When 
 science would refute the theological fictions of a begin- 
 ning of time, and of a creation a few thousand years 
 ago, it points to the ancient geological layers, count- 
 ing these backwards till the definite sense of num- 
 bers is lost. The Buddhist imagination, not obliged, 
 like science, to fill out its spaces with historical facts 
 and conditions, goes further; it strikes away the no- 
 tion of a beginning, at one sweep, and marks immeas- 
 urableness as inherent in time itself. It recalls, as 
 if it were no earlier than yesterday, an event declared 
 to have occurred ten quadrillion times a hundred 
 quadrillions of kalpas ago, each kalpa being thirteen 
 hundred and forty-four millions of years ! So of the 
 prolific power of virtue in every atom of its own sub- 
 stance. " Buddha caused a beam of light to go forth 
 out of every one of the eighty thousand pores of his 
 body, and on the top of each beam was a flower, 
 in which sat a Buddha teaching his disciples." " Four 
 things are immeasurable : space ; the number of 
 worlds therein ; the number of sentient creatures ; 
 and the wisdom of the Holy One." 
 
 The miracles of Buddha are colossal, penetrate all 
 Its pure worlds, supplant all physical laws and pow- 
 moraiity. gj-s ; yet they never violate the eternal laws of 
 
MYTHOLOGY. y8l 
 
 morality, but in all possible forms affirm their authority 
 and all-sufficiency. The freedom which love and 
 wisdom claim in the universe, their power to make the 
 little great, the distant near, the atom reveal infinity, 
 shines through all this delirium of fable ; a deeper 
 sanity that binds it to the heart and conscience of 
 more sober races, and to forms of imagination more 
 ripe and calm with the experience of natural law. 
 
 It is all concentrated in Gotama Buddha ; but its 
 very fertility and plasticity save it frorh crystal- its„„iver. 
 lizing definitely and exclusively, as a closed ^^^^y- 
 series of prodigies, around this earlier human divinity, 
 as Protestant supernaturalism centered and confined the 
 miracle in its Christ. The love and wisdom of Gotama 
 are one and the same thing with love and wisdom in all 
 arhats and bodhisattvas ; in all the saints who walk 
 in the great " Way of Release ; " one and the same 
 thing for all, in its power over the elements, and in the 
 gift of transforming itself into all forms and forces for 
 the good of man. It is through the merit of all beings 
 in these higher stages of attainment that the " worlds 
 are renewed ; " as it is through the vice of all degraded 
 beings that they are destroyed. The heavens and hells 
 of Buddhism, with their tremendous imagery, go be- 
 hind all Buddhas ; for they rest on the essential nature 
 of virtue and vice. 
 
 The miraculous legends of Gotama's birth and in- 
 fancy indeed, like corresponding forms of the myth 
 in relation to other Eastern saviours, isolate him in 
 celestial splendor above all beings ; yet only as cele- 
 brating, in this as in other religions, the divine right of 
 holiness and love, and the loyalty of the visible uni- 
 verse to their redeeming power. Thus at his birth ten 
 thousand worlds are moved. He takes seven steps, as a 
 
782 BUDDHISM. 
 
 sign that he would have the seven constituents of the 
 highest knowledge ; and Brahma holds over his head 
 the white parasol of kingly power, to show that he 
 would arrive at the perfection of all saintly fruits of 
 emancipation.! The older gods — magi, bringing 
 their tribute to the child who shall supplant them — 
 lay the powers of a rejoicing universe at his feet. We 
 have already noticed the similarity of these legends to 
 those of the birth and infancy of Jesus. We have 
 only to allow for the difference between the redun- 
 dance of Oriental fancy and the sobriety of Hebrew 
 and Greek, and the points of resemblance certainly 
 appear remarkable : the royal genealogy of Gotama ; 
 the supernatural conception without sexual passion ; 
 the salutation of the mother by guardian devas; the 
 worship of the new-born babe by all the powers and 
 elements of nature. In this moment of rapture at the 
 birth of nature's lord was concentrated by Buddhism 
 all that Christian mythology scattered more slowly 
 along the life of Jesus, and infinitely more to a similar 
 purpose. The material body of the holy mother be- 
 came transparent, and disclosed him, fair as a flower, 
 leaning on his hands within it. At his birth prisoners 
 were released, the fires of hell put out, the living creat- 
 ures forgot their hates, and sea and land were strewn 
 with flowers. To explain thes? messianic correspond- 
 ences, we need only remember that the religious 
 imagination in both cases had to deal with the same 
 faith in the authority of holiness and love, the same 
 wonderful and prophetic fact of their entrance into 
 humanity, and the same ignorance of natural laws. 
 
 Oriental worship of miracle has remained colossal 
 Whence its in comparisou with Christian mythology, be- 
 extent. cause it is a more profoundly real sentiment ; 
 
 ^ Wheel of the Law, p. 103. 
 
MYTHOLOGY. 783 
 
 not weakened by that sense of divided allegiance to 
 which the latter is subjected by the increasing percep- 
 tion of positive law. Its mythology does not inti- 
 mate a divine interference with the universe by reason 
 of evil, nor convey any implication against nature, 
 either as of break in its order, or of supplement to its 
 imperfection ; but is co-extensive and even identical 
 with nature. It is not evidence of dogma nor com- 
 pulsion to belief, so much as spontaneous faith in the 
 power of mind to change the appearances of things, 
 the ideality of wonder and delight. "Miracles," says 
 Gobineau, "being regarded in the East simply as ever- 
 possible manifestation of power acquired by men over 
 the changeable methods of nature, are not regarded as 
 proving any thing in behalf of the religious belief of the 
 performer." ^ So that nature may well be a free play- 
 ground for the gigantic transformations of mythology. 
 Asoka cuts a slip from the Buddha's holy Tree, 
 surrounded by a thousand kings. With golden 
 pencil he draws a vermilion stripe around a bough, 
 and it separates from the tree by the virtue of 
 prayer and the predestination of Buddha's law. 
 Planted in a golden vessel, it instantly takes root, at 
 which miracle all gods, men, and beasts, and the very 
 earth itself, utter a shout of praise. Then proceeds 
 the sacred bough, emitting many-colored rays, under 
 convoy of persons of every caste, to Ceylon, on a ship, 
 safely guided by the divine powers of a chief priestess, 
 entrusted with this charge. Placed on the sacred earth 
 prepared for it, the tree ascends into the sky, sending 
 rays to the highest heavens of the gods, and there 
 stands till sunset, converting ten thousand souls at a 
 time.'-* Other relics ascend in the same way to shine 
 
 1 Relig. de V AsieJCenirale, p. 298. « Tumour's Mak&vama, ch. xviii.-xii. 
 
784 BUDDHISM. 
 
 like the sun for a while ; after which the earth heaves 
 itself up to receive them with tumultuous 'joy. When 
 the great temple of Ruanwelli is to be dedicated, the 
 relics of Buddha are adored amidst celestial flowers 
 and perfumes by gods and men, with music that fills 
 the sky ; they ascend into the atmosphere and are 
 transformed into the natural shape of the Buddha, 
 whose multitudinous qualities form themselves around 
 him in a nimbus of glory, the mere sight of which 
 converts innumerable beings into saints.-^ Palaces in 
 the heavens are described as seen by the eyes of saints, 
 of dimensions and splendors that strangely contrast 
 with that service of dead bones by which they are 
 attained. Yet what associates such relics with the 
 joys of paradise is hinted in the tale of Bhirani, a 
 slave girl, who for her benevolence to the -poor was 
 born again in a heaven of delight, the queen of one 
 of these divine mansions, described as forty-eight 
 leagues in circumference.^ 
 
 Shall we wonder more at such idealization of the 
 relics of mortality, or at such absolute faith in the 
 supremacy of love? In either way, this infantile im- 
 agination plays with nature as a child with the blocks 
 which he builds into structures that grow colossal in 
 his dream. 
 
 But the mythology of Buddhism, like its worship 
 The fall into °^ images and relics, grew up under other 
 ecdesiasti- influences besides its original motive. Like 
 Brahmanism it fell from its stage of prophecy 
 to its stage of priesthood, from inspiration to ritualism ; 
 and what was at first the spontaneous play of earnest 
 instincts, however blind, crystallized into the polity of 
 
 ' Tumour's Mah&vania, ch. xxxi. 2 Ibid., ch. xxvii. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. 785 
 
 a church. In tracing the process, we detect in its 
 insidious steps the perils of ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion, and the necessity for constant reconstruction of 
 religion from free inward centres of personal life. 
 
 Gotama, so far as is known, instituted no cultus. 
 His main work must have been itinerant steps of the 
 preaching of his practical ethics and his phil- process. 
 osophy of life to whomsoever he found prepared to 
 hear ; and this novel function in India must have freely 
 chosen such methods as occasions prompted or allowed. 
 Special religious rites were a small matter to one who 
 so strongly emphasized every moral duty. So far as 
 they entered into his public ministry at all, they must 
 have borrowed the prevailing terms and symbols of 
 Brahmanism ; and how much ritualism he was likely to 
 have taken from these may be inferred from the sentence 
 ascribed to him from earliest times : " Brahma dwells 
 in the koines where children honor their parents."^ 
 The offerings of flowers and perfumes, the sound of 
 music and the utterance of devout ejaculations, which 
 have always been main features of the Buddhist ser- 
 vice, are precisely such forms as might have grown 
 up spontaneously in those earliest popular gatherings 
 around the beloved teachers of a gospel like this. 
 Yet with the increase of his disciples, and the growth 
 of a definite purpose in their minds, Gotama may have 
 established some kind of arrangement among them, 
 which developed itself into later distinctions of a more 
 positive character. We find his assembly consisting of 
 bhixus (mendicants), called also sramanas (ascetics),, 
 all of whom, men or women, are received on equal 
 terms. 2 Yet it is said that " some comprehended more. 
 
 * Bumouf, p. 338. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 278. From sraman (diligent) is derived the Chinese " shaman'" or priest. 
 
 SO 
 
786 BUDDHISM. 
 
 of the doctrine, others less, though al^ were absorbed 
 alike in the Buddha and his law." ^ Here was already 
 ground for distinctions. His furthest step in that 
 direction seems to have been classification of his 
 followers according to age and worth. ^ We find 
 sthaviras, or elders, distinguished by these qualifica- 
 tions, teaching in the earliest schools and presiding at 
 the assemblies.^ From the whole body of srdvakas, or 
 hearers, there soon comes to be set off an elect class, 
 called arhats; but this was also a distinction founded 
 on wisdom and its supposed power over nature, — the 
 word itself signifying merits The earliest schism, 
 however, resulting in the exodus of a body of sthaviras 
 and the conversion of Kashmir to the faith, is believed 
 to have originated in the rebellion of the younger 
 disciples against tne growing authority of these 
 "elders." 5 Veneration for "the master" was another 
 path towards ecclesiasticism. It was natural to gather 
 up his relics, to divide them as a common legacy 
 among as many as possible ; to- multiply them for the 
 same purpose ; to proselyte with images and pictures ; 
 to add the relics of early apostles of the faith to his ; 
 to locate them in shrines ; and to develop out of all 
 this a prescribed system of pilgrimages and a mass of 
 mythical traditions. It was natural that converts 
 should divide into monks and laity ; ® that they should 
 gather into small fraternities, choose abbots or spiritual 
 fathers, and classify men according to their progress 
 in the faith, as "the unsanctified" and "the holy;"'' 
 that they should meet yearly in larger conclave, and 
 
 ' Bumouf, p. 2go. ' Lassen, II. 456 ; Weber, Varies., p. 265. ' Koeppen, I. 383. 
 
 * Bumouf, p. 297. The MaJi&vama (ch. iii.) speaks of the first council held immedi- 
 ately after Gotama's death, as an assembly oi arhats; but its whole account is mani- 
 festly legendary. 
 
 ^ See Joum. Asiatigtce, for 1870, p. 465. « Bhixus and UpSsakas. 
 
 ' Prithagdjanas and Aryas. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. 787 
 
 hold periodical "assemblies of liberation," to discuss 
 questions of policy in the conduct of this great mission- 
 ary movement, and to gather up contributions for the 
 same ; an aim that proved so successful as in after 
 times to give the institution the title of "the Field of 
 Alms." It was natural that monasteries and nunneries 
 should multiply, and prove stiff defenders of ortho- 
 doxy ; and legislative synods try to make ecclesi- 
 asticism complete. Three of these were held within 
 two hundred and fifty years after Buddha's death, to 
 define errors in discipline, custom, and faith, and 
 affirm the true Buddhist Law. In the absence of 
 written documents relative to the original faith, heresies 
 could not be wanting. In less than two centuries, 
 seventeen different sects had appeared. ^ There were 
 schools of strict and schools of lax discipline ; schools 
 holding to the oldest Sutras only, and schools accept- 
 ing also the later metaphysics ; ^ schools of speculation, 
 and schools resting on faith alone. ^ Quite as inevit- 
 able it was that there should come a Grand Council, 
 somewhat of the Nicene Christian type, to settle finally 
 what was orthodox, who were to be encouraged, and 
 who to be held heretical, though not, as in Western 
 dogmatic differences, to be suppressed by force. 
 Buddhism was the Protestantism of India, and a mul- 
 tiplication of heresies followed its larger liberty ; but 
 not less disdnctly did all profess to hold the original 
 faith, and appeal to the name of the Buddha. These 
 were natural tendencies to consolidation : doubtless 
 they were strengthened by a common opposition on 
 the part of all Buddhist sects to Brahmanism. Of 
 the synods, to which all the traditions testify, the 
 
 > Tumour's MaUvania, a. ' SSutrtntikas and VaibhSshikas. 
 
 » Koeppen, I. iS7> is8. 
 
788 BUDDrasM. 
 
 natural result must have been some kind of hierarchy. 
 That it did not develop into a great Hindu Church 
 is one of the most wonderful things in the history 
 of this wonderful movement. Outside of India, 
 wherever a state embraced Buddhism, a patriarch 
 established himself at the court.' The argument of 
 convenience and expedition in the machinery of 
 missionary work must have combined with personal 
 ambition, to produce elements of official despotism out 
 of grades of authority, that had begun in the natural 
 gravitation of respect to age, worth, eloquence, and 
 devotion.*^ All this was of course contrary to the 
 democratic spirit of the early faith, to its philosophy 
 and its morality ; and the history of Buddhism in 
 India shows how powerfully those elements of free- 
 dom could work in counteraction of the ecclesiastical 
 process. 
 
 During the thousand years of Buddhist ascendency 
 „ . in India, that -process -was never develo-ped. In 
 
 Resistance •*• -^ 
 
 tocoiisoii- the time of Hiouen Thsang, the early democ- 
 ^'^°^' racy of the faith was still vigorous. Thirteen 
 centuries had elapsed since the first preaching of this 
 word, and yet there was scarcely a sign of consolida- 
 tion ; there was no national church, no hierarchy, no 
 ecclesiastical centre or headship.^ The only unity 
 was spiritual, the only authority was unseen. Every 
 vihdra was a free centre of religion, like those free 
 ■political -amis, the "village communities." And, with 
 all this independent local life, the peninsula shone with 
 flourishing Buddhist institutions of culture and human- 
 ity. Could ecclesiasticism have come and gone again? 
 We can hardly believe it. We read the record with 
 
 1 R^musat, Milan^es Posihumes. ^ Koeppen, I. 382. 
 
 » St. Hilaire, p. 298. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. ^89 
 
 admiration, and ask ourselves if the history of any 
 religion affords its parallel. 
 
 But in Thibet the process of organization was 
 furthered by a traditional respect for patri- 
 archal institutions.! It was therefore inevit- asticis^or 
 able that a succession of infallible pontiffs™''"- 
 should at last be set up in proof of the antiquity and 
 dignity of the faith. Further combinations with the 
 old beliefs in transmigration and incarnation issued in 
 the Dalai-Lama of this eastern papacy, and his equal, 
 if not superior, the Bogdo of southern Thibet : ever 
 renewed and propagated by miraculous tokens and 
 special inspirations of his college of priests, a hier- 
 archy of no less than nine distinct orders. ^ The par- 
 allel with Christian history may be pursued further : — 
 to the rivalries of different Buddhist popes ; to their 
 political intrigues for building up a vast temporal 
 power ; to the contentions of Red and Yellow Lamas ; 
 and to the ambition of every important convent to pos- 
 sess an authoritative Lama (^Chubilgkan) of its own.^ 
 We may add to this series of analogues with Western 
 Catholicism the fall of the Lamaist Church under the 
 dominion of a foreign power, namely, the Chinese 
 Imperial Master who now "protects" Lha Ssa, that 
 Oriental Rome; and the. idle dream of its present 
 pontiff' that supernatural aid is at hand to subject civ- 
 ilization to his sway.* 
 
 Thus Buddhist organization in Thibet ends, like 
 Brahmanical caste in India, in disintegrative ^^^.^^^^^^ 
 forces. They are found, after all the phases of ecciesias- 
 of consolidation, all-powerful in this as in""^"' 
 
 1 Bastian, Reiseti in Chitia, p. 619. '' Ibid., p. 572- 
 
 » yoarn. Asiat. Sac, XVI. 254- 
 
 * See the interesting account of Modem Lamaism in Koeppen, II. 105-242. Also 
 Bastian, Reisert in China, pp. 57i-58o> and Sclilagintweit's B-uddhism in Thibet. 
 
790 BUDDHISM. 
 
 other distinctive communions, showing how vain is 
 that assumption of finality which is always made by 
 Institutional Religion. 
 
 The steps of degeneracy involved in this process 
 were the same which every effort to organize a re- 
 ligious faith on a great scale and in permanent form 
 has inevitably pursued. The first simple precepts of 
 the teacher multiplied into a mass of ritualism and 
 petty discipline, filling fifteen volumes of the enormous 
 Thibetan canon, which amounts in all to three hun- 
 dred and sixty books. ^ This scripture, outside Thibet, 
 is no longer read to the nations in their own tongues.^ 
 The representatives of the non-resistant Sakyamuni 
 now inflict cruel punishments on their subjects.^ The 
 perfect democracy of the earlier time was slowly yet 
 steadily modified, till slaves could not be admitted to 
 the Church without consent of their masters ; and the 
 doors were fast closed to a diseased person, or one of 
 uncertain origin, or one who had slain a priest, or 
 made trouble in the priesthood.* Recruited in perpe- 
 tuity, by the custom that one lama shall come out of 
 every family which has more than one son, the priest- 
 hood at last directs the whole private life of the people, 
 officiating on all domestic occasions, performing the 
 part of physicians, astrologers, conjurers, intercessors 
 for the dead. And the profligacy which is inherent 
 in the unnatural relations of monasticism is not want- 
 ing, though prevented in great measure by the ease 
 with which, under Buddhist rules,^ a discontented 
 monk or nun can return into the world. The sim- 
 plicity of the early faith is moreover corrupted by 
 intermixture with the popular polytheism, whose dei- 
 
 1 Bastian, p. 575. ' Keeppen, II. 288. s Ibid., p. 331. 
 
 * Hardy, Eastern Mtmachism^ p. 210. 6 Koeppen, I. 584, 354. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. 
 
 791 
 
 ties have been referred to spheres below the Buddhas 
 and Bodhisattvas, yet receive a modified form of wor- 
 ship. Buddhism has, however, its rationalistic develop- 
 ment also, as in China ; where the hierarchical system 
 has never been developed, and the theoretic elements 
 it depended on, such as incarnation and transmigra- 
 tion, have never taken root. Although China as a 
 political master is believed to dictate the succession to 
 the Dalai Lamaship and to control the priesthood of 
 Thibet, the actual relations of the people of the "Mid- 
 dle Kingdom " with this spiritual centre are in fact 
 very remote. As a natural result, many of the oppres- 
 sive rules and personal vices of the mendicant and 
 monkish class just mentioned are, in China, to a con- 
 siderable extent, escaped. The mendicancy of the 
 Buddhist priesthood, of course a mark of dependence, 
 will greatly tend to their downfall in the present age : 
 they however, especially in Ceylon, compare favor^ 
 ably in morals v^^ith the clergy of other religions, not- 
 withstanding the peculiar perils to which their celibacy 
 and their mendicancy alike expose them.^ 
 
 The old and constant record of distinctive religions is 
 their passage from Inspiration to Ritualism and Buddhist 
 thence to Ecclesiastical Despotism. Yet the ^"^^^„''^t- 
 resemblance of Thibetan Buddhism to Roman gies. 
 Catholicism has often been supposed to prove a direct 
 influence of the latter, on the former, of these religions. 
 There is no more need of such an explanation than 
 there is evidence of its truth. Such evidence is wholly 
 wanting. The cross, the mitre, the rosary, censers, 
 bells at the altar, tonsure, exorcism, celibacy, fasts, 
 holy water, baptism, confession, benediction by laying 
 on of hands, are thoroughly Oriental symbols, indige- 
 nous to the soil. So the custom of going on pilgrim- 
 
 ' St. Hilaire, p. 403. 
 
792 BUDDHISM. 
 
 ages is much older than Christianity. In the third 
 century India was and had long been the resort of 
 Buddhist pilgrims from all northern Asia. The idea 
 of prayer to saints, as well as that of compelling their 
 aid, is familiar to Hindu faith from earliest times. ; 
 Confession in the Buddhist Church is very well de- 
 scribed as growing out of the maxim, " Live hiding j 
 your good works, and proclaiming your evil ones ; " 
 which is certainly in the true spirit of the sutras. 
 Confession is spoken of as a custom in the oldest 
 legends of Buddhism, and even represented as made 
 before the whole assembly, at certain seasons, and 
 under the direction of Buddha himself. 
 
 That mediaeval Christianity originated these and other 
 forms of Thibetan Lamaism, through the teaching of 
 Nestorian monks, is asserted upon no other evidence 
 than conjecture.^ It is much less improbable that the 
 facts are the other way, — that Christian symbolism 
 is very largely of Oriental origin.^ Buddhism is, as 
 our whole account has shown, genuinely Indian.^ It 
 made its way into Western Asia some time previous 
 to the Christian era. Its influence in moulding 
 Gnostic, Manicha2an, and Neo-Platonic teachers is 
 unquestionable.* 
 
 We may observe also, in passing, that the re- 
 semblances between Gnostic systems on the one 
 
 1 Tennent gives many legends from the Mah&vafUa strikingly resembling those of the 
 Old and New Testaments, which he ascribes to the influence of Malabar Jews and Nes- 
 torian Christians. But why may not this resemblance have grown out of that common 
 movement of tlie religious sentiment in man, which must explain the analogies of Thibetan 
 Buddhism with Romanism in dogma and ritual? On the other hand, Ferguson (Awdfe 
 Sione Monuments^ p. 499) thinks that nine-tenths the changes introduced into Christianity 
 in the Middle Ages were of Buddhist origin ! It is very easy to go much too far in the 
 direction of historic derivation. 
 
 2 Lassen ; Prinsep ; Koeppen ; Thomson's Introd. to Bkag. Git&. 
 ^ Bumouf; Colebrooke; St. Hilaire. 
 
 * Lassen, III. 354-405, 440. Baur's Ckrisiliche Gnosis (1835), pp. 54-60. 
 
ECCLESIASTICISM. 793 
 
 hand, and the Buddhist and Sankhya on the other, 
 are of a very profound character. Among 
 
 , , ^ Influence on 
 
 these are their common opposition to the christian 
 material and changing world; their suc-"^'""^' 
 cessive potencies emanating in descending series ; the 
 idea of creation as originating in the fall of a beam 
 from the world of light ; the recognition of justice as 
 ruling the processes of existence ; the threefold division 
 of qualities ; the faith in liberation through knowledge ; 
 and the separation of the soul from ' nature ' into its 
 own self-subsistence. Then the very point of contact 
 for the Oriental with the Greek mind was provided in 
 the great trade-emporium of Alexandria, where Gnos- 
 ticism arose contemporaneously with the recorded em- 
 bassies of the Hindus, commercial and other, to the 
 West.i It is matter of history also that Buddhism 
 was well known in Babylon, just before the appear- 
 ance of Mani and his dualistic faith ; ^ and that the 
 Neo-Platonists sought very earnestly and successfully 
 to acquaint themselves with Oriental systems.^ 
 
 The whole process of .reasoning from moral and 
 spiritual resemblances in different religions, to a his- 
 torical connection between them, is, however, to be 
 handled with great caution. When used, as it so 
 frequently is, in the interest of a special faith, it has 
 been very apt to turn its sharpest edge against the 
 user. But why should it be ignored, in religious 
 history alone, that like causes must breed like effects? 
 The similarity may well run into minute details even, 
 since the great shaping moulds of human nature and 
 religious relation are alike in all races. 
 
 Thus, in the East and in the West, ecclesiastical 
 
 1 Strabo, Pliny, and others, quoted in Lassen, III- S7-73- 
 
 i Lassen, III. p. 407. ' Matter's Ecok d'AUxandrit, II- 368. 
 
794 BUDDHISM. 
 
 organization naturally enough presents the same es- 
 
 . sential features and processes of degeneracy. 
 
 andBudd- Comparative religion shows us a similar pict- 
 
 ''"■ ure in the history of Christianity to that which 
 
 we have been studying. 
 
 Jesus apparently organized no religious machinery, 
 no positive cultus. On the contrary, he preached and 
 worked in a personal, prophetic way ; announcing an 
 approaching end of this world and the coming of a 
 kingdom that was not of it ; and calling on men to 
 accept his claim as Messiah to judge between the just 
 and the unjust, in that day. Of the institutional meaning 
 of the approaching change, and of the special ways 
 in which his own name would be exalted therein, his 
 record gives no sign that he had the least presentiment. 
 How could he or his immediate disciples anticipate its 
 grand hierarchy, ecclesiastical councils, machinery of 
 association for the coercion of private judgment? It 
 lay involved, indeed, in his original claim of authority 
 vested in one exclusive Lord and Master of salvation, 
 just as Buddhistic ecclesiasticism, in its peculiar form, 
 grew out of the concentration of Buddhism around 
 one personal name. If there be but one church and 
 One Head thereof, it naturally follows that there 
 should always be a representative of this Head, visible 
 as the church itself. On this there further follows an 
 all-controlling mechanism to perpetuate the idea. But 
 at first Christianity knew simply the congregation, 
 choosing its own teachers, and managing its own con- 
 cer'ns ; under apostolic advice, it is true, and perhaps, to 
 a certain extent, dictation. A few simple forms ; some 
 slight conditions of membership, deemed necessary 
 in days of weakness and peril from false brethren ; 
 the Jew-Christians indeed insisting on circumcision. 
 
ECCLKSIASTICISM . 
 
 795 
 
 yet unable to impose it on the Gentile world ; friendly 
 or admonitory letters passing from church to church, 
 with contributions from the strong in aid of the weak ; 
 — this was all the machinery in its age of inspiration 
 by the original motive. But contentions began early, 
 over what Jesus was and what he willed. Churches 
 multiplied. Bishops meddled with each other's flocks. 
 Councils were necessary to settle the faith, and, after 
 quarrelling their utmost, imposed their decisions on 
 the people. Metropolitans managed or browbeat the 
 country pastors, setthng and unsettling ministers, 
 lobbying and levying, _^rescribing^ and proscribing. 
 Gradually the political prestige of the Metropolitan 
 of Rome made him Head of the Church visible, 
 representative of the One Invisible Head. Strong 
 men like Victor and Gregory .sat in the imaginary 
 Peter's-seat, mastered the councils and the state, fulmi- 
 nated decrees and settled points of ritual, till the 
 Roman Catholic Church, with its strange mixture of 
 mummery and devotion, of pomp and humility, be- 
 came for its season a sovereign in the. religious world. 
 All the passions and follies, as well as the nobilities of 
 thought and conduct, by which it was brought to its 
 throne, were steps in the evolution of the idea of eccle- 
 siastical organization, which had gathered around the 
 conception of a Christ. The second stage of Christi- 
 anity, the age of Priesthood and Ritualism, was to have 
 its day. It compelled the third, which was fresh In- 
 spiration. Luther, preceded by the medieval mystics, 
 came ; and there was recurrence to the free pergonal 
 life, the root of religion. But the recognition of this 
 root was still imperfect, and again came organization 
 about the name and the church of Christ. Calvin soon 
 turns the prayer and the protest to rigid dogma and 
 
79<3 BUDDHISM. 
 
 merciless discipline ; and the Protestant sects build up 
 new limbos, as like as may be, under the new condi- 
 tions of civilization, to those they had spurned. Again 
 therefore comes reaction to the inspiration of a new 
 ideal ; and the free personal religion that becomes the 
 Free State is laying its foundations, not now in ecclesi- 
 astical construction around a historical name or person, 
 but in the moral laws and natural forces, in unity of 
 practical brotherhood, integrity of culture, and worship 
 of the infinite in the whole movement of life and 
 growth. 
 
 Why has Buddhism lacked this vigor and stir of 
 wh Budd V^ogrtiss? Doubtless because, with all its 
 hUm is un- reaction upon Hindu belief and institutions, 
 progressive, jj. j-g,^ajjig(j within the old Hindu circle, and 
 made contemplation the chief end of man. Still the 
 dreaming brain supplanted spiritual muscle and nerve. 
 Still it so brooded over the idea, as to lose the form of 
 action. "My religion," said Chinese Laotseu, in the 
 true Buddhist spirit, " consists in thinking the incon- 
 ceivable thought, in going the impassable way, in 
 speaking the ineffable word, in doing the impossible 
 thing." We may smile, but the old dreamer meant 
 an ideal faith. As abstraction and meditation, all 
 great thought works in this way. Yet in action it 
 must conform to conditions ; and in the mutual contact 
 of these two is struck out the fire of progress. 
 
 How inveterate the cerebral element in the Hindu 
 The Hinda '^^'^'^ ' Even ill its protcst against an isolated 
 type in ' saiuthood in the name of love and pity, it could 
 '^'°' forbid the perception of those social and phys- 
 ical laws which provide the affections their natural op- 
 portunity. Greek, Afghan, Mogul, British, Dutch, 
 American, have thus far done little to counteract the 
 
THE HINDU TYPE. ^97 
 
 gravitation of the native Flindus to reverie. Abstract 
 thinking has held dominion in their works and ways. 
 As it came ofF triumphant within India from the Budd- 
 hist reaction towards practical work, so it has been com- 
 municated, in some measure, through the expansion of 
 Buddhism itself, to other races of a less speculative cast. 
 
 The practical side of Buddhism prompted, of course, 
 to the use of natural symbolism. But the svm- 
 bols were chosen by the same absorbing sense ism of 
 of the transient and unreal in all positive forms. '''■'™^- 
 The Lotus, hovering on the heave of the sea, a deli- 
 cate bloom just mantling for a moment a restless, all- 
 engulfing deep ; the Wheel, that symbol of a life that 
 revolves for ever around itself, in perpetual change 
 without progress, — these are the two select types of 
 Buddhist thought and art. The wheel stands whirling 
 before the door, to greet the stranger with its admoni- 
 tion. It whirls on the house-tops, a sign that even 
 the routines of domestic life are a swift motion that 
 escapes us while we seek to grasp and to hold it fast. 
 It whirls on the hearth by the draft of the fire ; and it 
 whirls in the running stream by force of water : and 
 men carry it whirling as they walk. It whirls as 
 vicarious religious machinery, adopted into the formal- 
 ism of meritorious works ; and, as with symbolism in 
 general, other .superstitions have doubtless very much ^ 
 obscured its primary meaning. For even so does man 
 relieve himself from the vanity of for ever contemplat- 
 ing a restless whirl of vicissitude, where nothing abides 
 but change itself. 
 
 Yet what is this symbol, after all, but admonition to 
 seek the eternal, and to trust in the law that xhe Budd- 
 rounds all change with preserving renewal hkt wheel. 
 and return? Nor can we doubt that such deeper 
 
798 BUDDHISM. 
 
 meanings have given rest and courage to thousands 
 of meditative watchers of the Buddhist Wheel. 
 
 The Wheel was in fact not only the accepted em- 
 blem of transmigration and its returns to birth, but 
 also, as associated with the Dish (which indicates the 
 strength of the arm that sets it rolling, perhaps also 
 the orb of the sun) , an emblem of universal dominion. 
 It was the sacred mark seen on the hands and feet 
 of the infant Buddha, by which the sages were able 
 to predict his divine destiny to " roll the wheel " of 
 unlimited sway.^ Rama also is called " the Wheel." 
 Thus the symbol of the transiency of all things be- 
 comes itself representative of the one only life that 
 can overcome it; that is, of the almighty and ever- 
 lasting. The very " prayer cylinder " represents the 
 universe ; and on its turning axle, bringing many sides 
 successively to view, the types of all living creatures 
 impartially revolve.^ " A hundred and eight sacred 
 figures are the guard of honor around the holy wheel." 
 " The wheel has ignorance and desire for its axis, 
 predisposition for its spokes, decrepitude and death for 
 its tire."' To be master of their revolutions was to be 
 a lord of life. 
 
 There was also a favorite architectural symbol for 
 this worship of the duty that is rounded with a dream. 
 That dome-like shape, — now sunk like a cushion for 
 slumber, as on the Buddhist pillars ; now swelling, as 
 on the stufas, into a definite sphere ; now active, now 
 at rest ; mobile in assuming either attitude, and long- 
 ing, apparently, for both, — what an emblem it is of 
 this mystical faith, so strangely combining practical 
 
 • See Sykes on the Political State of A ttcimt India. y<mrnal R. A . S., vol. vi. 
 ^ Bastian, Reisen in Chinat p. 565. 
 " Wheel qf the Law^ pp. 1 13, 241. 
 
UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 799 
 
 energy and contemplative calm! It is the Bubble, 
 purest type of the transient and unreal ; yet this mere 
 evanescence, this very emptiness, this nothing, if it but 
 breaks, — is in fact held from breaking, fixed in en- 
 during forms of art and use.i Such the lesson that 
 comes to us from vihdra and dagof, where the hearts 
 of millions find impulse, and their longings and sor- 
 rows, rest. 
 
 The Brahmanic symbol, on the other hand, was the 
 Banyan, whose vast shadow expands and The Ban- 
 deepens with the multiplication of stems that y^"- 
 shoot downward to refasten themselves in the earth. 
 Hindu thought perpetually recurs to the inward 
 shadows of that self-renewing mystery of change, 
 which grows with the multiplication of visible forms 
 and finite desires. Hew down these banyans of 
 the mind, it says, and reach the eternal life they veil. 
 
 Banyan and Bubble ! Such the symbolism of a 
 philosophy too deeply immersed in contempla- 
 tion to find the full validity of the world and audthe 
 life. But we have seen that the forward look ^"'' 
 is not wanting ; we have traced the disintegration of 
 old social and religious systems, and the living germs 
 of freedom in pantheistic belief; we have noted the 
 force of Buddhist expansion, and its faith in a future 
 that shall bring on earth the fulness of that peace and 
 love which is the Buddhist heaven. The earnestness 
 of this faith is illustrated by the abolition of slavery by 
 the present king of Siam. The contact of the practi- 
 cal West with the introversive East must bring mutual 
 impulse, and help to balance the human globe, as 
 the continents the physical. 
 
 > It is even made emblematic, in the three hemispheres that constitute the ciaityai, or 
 reUc-temples, of the triple form of deity, Buddha, the Law, and the Church. 
 
800 BUDDHISM. 
 
 Bubble and Banyan mean more than dream. Is not 
 that spheric form the emblem of a world-wide 
 
 Practical ^ 
 
 and contera- Unity of life and purpose ? That dim pillared 
 piativeraces. ^^^ggj. j^ ^^^^ ^ single root ; and, as it grows, 
 
 do not its airy branches turn back incessantly to the 
 soil it loves, as if to hold earth and heaven united by 
 imperishable ties? So with the faith which these 
 natural symbols subserved. — The reaction of Brah- 
 manism to Buddhism demonstrated that there were 
 germs of democratic energy in the nature of contem- 
 plation itself. The Buddhist fiffala, or Bo-tree, 
 symbolizes the power of human nature to burst every 
 bond of apathy. " Its vitality is extraordinary ; its 
 roots will crack and rend buildings, and only preserve 
 their memory by the huge fragments which they 
 retain for centuries clasped in their embrace." So the 
 abstract idea fled into interior deeps only to find the 
 need of social communion, to learn that man cannot 
 live by meditation only, and to rend and burst its own 
 ancient structures with the invincible energy of noble 
 purpose. That mystical instinct of the Unity of Life, 
 which formed the constant matrix of Hindu thought, 
 — unconscious of its own inevitable relations, un- 
 aware that science should one day fulfil its substantial 
 meaning in endless practical correlations and uses, — 
 ruled life with an exclusiveness that depressed energy 
 and threatened morality. Yet even then its very 
 sense of a common bondage and misery in all living 
 beings became a sympathetic impulse that reached 
 throughout existence ; an ardor of love and pity, that 
 knew no limit, and no repose. 
 
 The wide extension of Buddhism, as compared with 
 Signs rf Brahmanical aristocracy and caste, indicates 
 promise, j-j^^at in Eastern civilization itself these oppres- 
 
UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 8oi 
 
 sive elements are less natural to man than the instincts 
 of fellowship and equality. Malcom tells us of a numer- 
 ous and growing sect of reformers in Burmah, whose 
 founder, Kolan, revised the Buddhist law, about 
 seventy years ago, and taught the " worship of wis- 
 dom." "This sect discard the use of images, and 
 have neither priests nor sacred books. Their teachers 
 rise from time to time, always from among the laity, 
 and gain many followers."^ St. Hilaire describes a 
 powerful reaction in Ceylon, from later superstitions 
 to the simplicity of early Buddhism ; a democratic 
 revolution arising from the effort of the state, nearly a 
 hundred years since, to confine the right of entrance to 
 the priesthood within a single powerful caste. One of 
 the lower castes, the Tchaliyas, had the spirit and 
 intelligence to rebel against this innovation, and, being 
 well provided with means, made an effective stand for 
 puritan principles. About the end of the last cen- 
 tury, these reformers imported from Burmah a body 
 of priests, devoted, like themselves, to the simplicity 
 of primitive Buddhism ; and the movement received 
 fresh impulse. Special changes insisted on by the 
 reformers were these : — an open door into the minis- 
 try for all classes ; freedom from state interference 
 with religion ; abandonment of astrology ; reading 
 of the books of the faith freely to all. This " sect 
 of Amarapura," so called from the Burmese city 
 whence it received its teachers, has been very suc- 
 cessful in its efforts to purify Buddhism from polythe- 
 ism and caste, and made numerous converts in different 
 provinces of the kingdom. Other sects make other 
 demands, and Ceylonese Buddhism seems to be alive 
 with religious discussion and heretical zeal.^ Another 
 
 > Notes on Burmese Empire, ch. vi. ' St. Hilaire, p. 407- 
 
 SI 
 
802 BUDDHISM. 
 
 impressive illustration has recently appeared in Siam. 
 Large numbers of Buddhists in that country have 
 thrown aside negative speculation and ecclesiastical 
 authority, and the whole miraculous element in their 
 traditions. They have not been content with this 
 individual emancipation, but have proceeded to found 
 free churches on the moral teachings of Buddha, and 
 the practical brotherhood which they require.^ Surely 
 these brave steps, apparently due to native impulses, — 
 and, if furthered by contact with Christianity, yet 
 showing no sign of conversion to that special faith, — 
 point directly towards the free communion of Universal 
 Religion. 
 
 ' Weber's ItuHscJk Studien, II. 320 ; Koeppen, I. 468. The efforts of the late king 
 in this direction, and the writings of his minister, (The Modern Buddhist) have already 
 been noticed. 
 
 Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son. 
 
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