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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 
 LANGUAGE AND RELIGIONS 
 
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 PROF. H. OLDENBERG 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 (LONDON: 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., E. C.) 
 189a 
 
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Translations of the articles "Religion of the Veda" and 
 "Buddhism" copyrighted by The Open Court Publishing Com- 
 pany, 1896. ,^ ,^ ,. 
 
 H^ 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Study of Sanskrit> i 
 
 The Religion of the Veda 43 
 
 Buddhism 78 
 
PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 THE THREE essays forming this little volume originally 
 appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau of Berlin and are 
 now published in English by virtue of a special arrangement 
 with their distinguished author. The first was translated by Prof. 
 A. H. Gunlogsen of Tacoma, Washington, and the second and 
 third by Dr. Otto W. Weyer of Eimira, N. Y. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 
 
 THE study of Sanskrit, the science of the antiqui- 
 ties of India, is about a century 0I4. It was in 
 the year 1784 that a number of men acting in Calcutta 
 as judges or administrative officers of the East India 
 Company, formed themselves into a scientific society, 
 the Asiatic Society. We may say that the founding 
 of the Asiatic Society was contemporaneous with the 
 rise of a new branch of historical inquiry, the possi- 
 bility of which preceding generations had barely or 
 never thought of. 
 
 Englishmen began the work ; soon it was taken up 
 by other nations ; and in the course of time, in a 
 much greater degree than is the case with the study 
 of hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, it has be- 
 come ever more distinctly a branch of inquiry pecu- 
 liarly German. 
 
 The little band of workers who are busy in the 
 workshops of this department of science, have not 
 been accustomed to have the eyes of other men turned 
 upon their doings — their successes and failures. But, 
 in spite, nay, rather in consequence of this, it is right 
 that an attempt should be made to invite even the 
 most disinterested to an inspection of these places of 
 industry, and to point out, piece by piece, the work, 
 or at least part of the work, that has been done 
 there. 
 
2 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 There still lies formless in the workshops of this 
 department of inquiry many a block of unhewn stone, 
 which perhaps will forever resist the shaping hand. 
 But still, under the active chisel, many a form has be- 
 come visible, from whose features distant times and 
 the past life of a strange people look down upon us — 
 a people who are related to us, yet whose ways are so 
 far removed in every respect from our ways. 
 
 We shall first cast a glance at the beginning of In- 
 dian research toward the close of the last century. 
 We shall trace the way in which the new science, after 
 the first hasty survey of its territory, at once concen- 
 trated its efforts to a more profound investigation of 
 its subject and advanced to an incomparably broader 
 plane of study. We shall, above all, follow the diffi- 
 cult course pursued in the study of the Veda, the most 
 important of the literary remains of ancient India, a 
 production with which even the works of the oldest 
 Buddhism are not to be compared in point of histor- 
 ical importance. Of the problems that this science 
 encountered, its aspirations, and of the successes that 
 attended its efforts in solving difficult questions, we 
 may venture to give a description, or at least an 
 outline. 
 
 T. 
 
 The first effective impulse to the study of Sanskrit 
 and Sanskrit literature was given by Sir William Jones, 
 who, in 1783, embarked for India to assume the post 
 of Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort 
 William. The honor of having inaugurated a new 
 era of philological inquiry, was heightened, by the lus- 
 tre and charm of personal character which this gifted 
 and versatile man exerted upon his contempora- 
 ries. In prose and in verse Jones is extolled by his 
 
The study of Sanskrit. 3 
 
 friends of both sexes as the phoenix of his time, " the 
 most enHf^htened of the sons of men " — encomiums 
 many of which a calmer and more distant observer 
 would be inclined to modify. The correspondence 
 and other memoranda of Jones, which exist in great 
 abundance,* furnish the reader of to-day rather the 
 picture of an indefatigable and euphuistic dilettante, 
 than that of an earnest investigator, — apart from the 
 fact that he was alike greatly deficient in discernment 
 and zeal. 
 
 As a young man we find Jones engaged in reading 
 and reproducing in English verse, the works of Per- 
 sian and Arabian poets; occasionally also with glimpses 
 into Chinese literature. Then, again, a project of his 
 own, an heroic epic — a sort of new ^neid, for which, 
 and certainly with ingenuity enough, the Phoenician 
 mythological deities were impressed into service — 
 was to celebrate the perfections of the English con- 
 stitution. On the journey to India this man of thirty- 
 seven sketched a catalogue of the works, which, God 
 granting him life, he hoped to write after celebrated 
 models. These models were carefully designated op- 
 posite the separate projects of the outline. By the 
 side of this heroic epic (after the pattern of Homer), 
 we find a history of the war with America (after the 
 patterns of Thucydides and Polybius), a philosophical 
 and historical dialogue (after the pattern of Plato), 
 and other plans of similar works. 
 
 With this feeling of omnipotent self-assurance, 
 wholly untroubled with doubts, Jones was placed in 
 India before the task of opening a way into the gigan- 
 
 * Edited by his biographer, Lord Teignmouth, and often given with more 
 completeness than appears advisable considering the panegyrical charac- 
 ter of the biography. 
 
4 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 tic masses of an unknown literature, of a strange and 
 beautiful poetry. He was as well qualified for the pur- 
 pose (perhaps in a higher degree so) as many a more 
 earnest and gifted scholar might have been. 
 
 The situation of affairs which he found in India 
 forced it upon the European rulers of the land as a 
 duty, to acquaint themselves with the Sanskrit lan- 
 guage and its literature. The rapid extension and at 
 the same time the redoubled activity of the English 
 rule made it inconceivable that the existence of the 
 old indigenous civilization and literature of the na- 
 tion could long remain ignored or merely superfici- 
 ally recognized. 
 
 Preeminently did this necessity assert itself in the 
 administration of justice, where the policy of the East 
 India Company imperatively demanded that the na- 
 tives should be suffered to retain as many of their 
 laws and customs as it was possible to concede them. 
 Already, in an act of parliament passed in 1772 in re- 
 gard to the affairs of the company, a measure had 
 been incorporated, at the suggestion of Warren Hast- 
 ings, providing that Mohammedan and Indian lawyers 
 should take part in court proceedings, in order to give 
 effect to native laws and assist in the formulation of 
 judgments. The dependence that thus resulted, of 
 European judges upon the reliability or unreliability 
 of Indian pandits, must have been trying indeed, to the 
 conscientious jurist; for the assertions of Indian coun- 
 cillors as to the principles of the Law of inheritance, 
 contract, etc., contained in the native books, were sub- 
 ject to no control. 
 
 Warren Hastings, in order to obviate the difficulty, 
 had a digest made by several Brahmanical juris- 
 consults from the old Sanskrit law books, and this was 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 5 
 
 translated into English. The undertaking had but little 
 success, principally because no European was to be 
 found who could translate directly from the Sanskrit. 
 A translation had first to be made from Sanskrit into 
 Persian and from Persian again into English.* The 
 necessity therefore of gaining direct access to the 
 Sanskrit language was unquestionable. The under- 
 taking was not an easy one, though it was still quite 
 different from such apparently impossible feats of 
 philological ingenuity as the deciphering of hiero- 
 glyphic and cuneiform inscriptions. 
 
 The knowledge and likewise the use of Sanskrit in 
 India had lived on in unbroken tradition.f There were 
 countless pandits who knew Sanskrit as well as the 
 scholars of the Middle Ages knew Latin, and who 
 were eminently competent to teach the language. It 
 was easy to overcome the opposing Brahmanical pre- 
 judices. To become master, however, of the obstacles 
 which emanated from the indescribably intricate and 
 perverted grammatical systemj of the Hindus, offered 
 greater difficulties, which could only be overcome by 
 patience and enthusiasm. 
 
 Just at the first moments of this trouble came the 
 arrival of Sir William Jones in India. Immediately 
 he was the central figure. From him came the found- 
 ing of the Asiatic Society; from him, the impulse to a 
 new revision of the Hindu law of contract and inheri- 
 
 * Published in 1776, under the title, "A Code of Gentoo Law." 
 tThis is the case at the present time. Compare, upon this point. Max 
 Miiller's " India what can it teach us " p. 78 et seq. 
 
 ^:The original complaint of Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, a missionary in 
 India about the time of Jones, is well known.— "The devil, with a phenomenal 
 display of ingenuity and craft, had incited the Brahmanical sages to invent a 
 language so rich and so complex, that its mysteries might be concealed not 
 only from the people at large, but even from the very scholars who were 
 conversant with it." 
 
6 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 tance, this time undertaken on a surer basis. He as- 
 sembled about him competent Brahmans versed in 
 Sanskrit. In the year 1790 he wrote: "Every day I 
 talk Sanskrit with the pandits; I hope before I leave 
 India to understand it as I understand Latin." 
 
 It was not now a question of research, but of ac- 
 quisition, of study; that clear and satisfactory results 
 might rapidly be acquired, and that a proper selection 
 of noteworthy productions of the Hindu mind might 
 be made and presented before the eyes of all. Jones 
 translated the most delightful of all Hindu dramas, 
 the story of the touching fate of the ascetic maiden, 
 Sakuntala, who in the sylvan quiet of her retreat was 
 seen and loved by the kingly hunter Dushjanta— a 
 work, full of the most delicate sentiment, exhaling 
 fragrance like the summer splendor of Indian Nature, 
 and sung in the delicate rhythms of Kalidasa, of in- 
 spired eloquence.* 
 
 Still more important than the version of Sakuntala 
 was the publication of a second great work, which 
 Jones translated, the Laws of Manit. It seemed as 
 though a Lycurgus of a primitive oriental era had 
 come to light; for this wonderful picture of a strange 
 people's life was ascribed to the remotest antiquity — a 
 description of Braiimanical rule by the grace of Brah- 
 ma, magnified and distorted by priestly pride, in which 
 the people are nothing, the prince is little, the priest is 
 everything. In the face of such an abruptly accumu- 
 lated mass of unexpected revelations, respecting an an- 
 
 * It was formerly thought, for reasons that have not withstood the assault 
 of criticism, that Kalidasa flourished in the first century before Christ; it was 
 the custom to compare him to the Roman poets of the Augustan era, whose 
 contemporaries he in that event would about have been. In point of fact he 
 must be assigned to an era several centuries later,— about the sixth century 
 after Christ. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 7 
 
 cient civilization hitherto removed from all knowledge, 
 how could one resist an attempt to give to that civili- 
 zation and its language a place among known civili- 
 zations and languages? Wherever the eye turned 
 weighty and pregnant suggestions offered themselves, 
 and with them the temptation to let fancy stray in 
 aimless sallies. What is more, Jones was in no wise 
 the man to resist such a temptation. The vocabulary 
 and the grammatical structure of Sanskrit convinced 
 him that the ancient language of the Hindus was re- 
 lated to those of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans, 
 that it must have been derived with them from a com- 
 mon mother tongue. "^ But side by side with the con- 
 ception of this incomparably suggestive idea, innumer- 
 able fanciful theories abound in the works of Jones, 
 concerning the relationship of the primitive peoples, 
 where everything was found to be in some way related 
 to everything else. Now the Hindu tongue was iden- 
 tified with that of the Old Testament; now Hindu civ- 
 ilization was brought into connection with South 
 American civilization. Buddha was said to be Woden; 
 and the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt were claimed 
 to shov/ the style of the same workmen who built the 
 Hindu cave-temples and chiseled the ancient images 
 of Buddha. 
 
 Fortunately for the new study of Sanskrit, the con- 
 tinuation of the Vv^ork begun b}^ Jones fell to one of the 
 most cautious and comprehensive observers of facts 
 that have ever devoted their attention and talent to 
 
 *The identity of Hindu words with those of Latin, Greek, and other lan- 
 guages had been noticed by several before Jones, and likewise the correct ex- 
 planation of this phenomenon, namely the kinship of the Hindu nation with 
 the Latins and Greeks, had been declared by Father Pons as early as 1740. 
 For fuller account, see Benfey, "History of the Science of Language," {Ge- 
 schichte der Sprachwissenscha/t) pp. 222, 333-341. 
 
8 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 the study of oriental literatures. This was Henry 
 Thomas Colebrooke (born 1765; went to India 1782), 
 the most active in the active band of Indian adminis- 
 trative officers. He officiated now as an officer of the 
 government, now again as a justice, then as diplo- 
 matist — a man well versed in Indian agriculture and 
 Indian trade. One can scarcely regard without as- 
 tonishment the multitude of disclosures which, during 
 the long period he devoted to Sanskrit, he was able 
 to make from his incomparable collection of manu- 
 scripts. These to-day are among the principle treas- 
 ures of the India Office Library. From the province 
 of Indian poetry, Colebrooke, who well knew the lim- 
 its of his own power, kept aloof. But in the literature 
 of law, grammar, philosophy, and astronomy, he had 
 a wide reading, which in scope may never again be 
 reached. He it was who made the first comprehen- 
 sive disclosure in regard to the literature of the Veda. 
 
 Colebrooke's investigations are poor in hypotheses; 
 we may say he withheld too much from seeking to com- 
 prehend the historical genesis of the subjects with 
 which he dealt. But he established the actual foun- 
 dation of broad provinces of Hindu research ; filled 
 with wonder himself at the ever widening vistas of 
 that literature Vv^hich v^ere now revealed to him, and 
 awakening our just wonder by the sure and patient 
 toil with which he sought to penetrate into those dis- 
 tant parts. 
 
 While Colebrooke was at the height of his activity, 
 interest in Hindu inquiry began to be awakened in 
 a country which has done more than any other land 
 to make of Hindu research a firm and well-established 
 science — in Germany. 
 
 For the discoveries of Jones and Colebrooke there 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 9 
 
 could have been no more receptive soil than the Ger- 
 many of that time, full of spirited interest in the old 
 national poetry of all nations and occupied with the 
 stirring movements rife in its own philosophy and Ht- 
 erature. Apparently, indeed, the latter were closely al- 
 lied to the spirit of the distant Hindu literature; for 
 here too oriental romanticism and poetical thought 
 sought no less boldly than the absolute philosophy of 
 Germany, to penetrate to the primal and formless 
 source of all forms. From the beginning, poets stood 
 in the foremost ranks among the Sanskritists of Ger- 
 many j there were the two Schlegels and Friedrich 
 Riickert, and beside these, careful and unassuming, 
 the great founder of grammatical science, Franz Bopp. 
 In the year 1808 appeared Friedrich Schlegel's 
 work, Ueber die Sprache und VVeisheit der Inder (The 
 Language and Learning of the Hindus). From what 
 was known to him of Hindu poetry and speculation, 
 and according to his own ideas of the laws and aims 
 of the human mind, Schlegel, with warm and fanciful 
 eloquence, drew a picture of India as a land of exalted 
 primitive wisdom. Hindu reHgion and Hindu poetry 
 he described as replete with exuberant power and 
 Hght, in comparison with which even the noblest phi- 
 losophy and poetry of Greece was but a feeble spark 
 The time from which the masterpieces of the Hindus 
 dated, appeared to him a distant, gigantic, primeval 
 age of spiritual culture. There was the home of those 
 earnest teachings, full of gloomy tragedy, of the soul's 
 migration, and of the dark fate which ordains for all 
 beings their ways and their end: 
 
 Obedient to this purpose set, they wander; from God to plants; 
 
 Here, in the abhorred world of existence, that evermoves to destruction. 
 
 While Schlegel gave to the world this fanciful 
 
lo ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 picture of Hindu wisdom, highly effective from its 
 prophetic perspectives, but still wanting in sober 
 truth, Bopp applied himself, more unassumingly, but 
 with an incomparably deeper grasp and patient 
 sagacity, to investigating the grammatical structure 
 of Sanskrit; and, on the recognized fact of the rela- 
 tionship of this language with the Persian and the 
 principal European tongues, to establishing the science 
 of comparative grammar. In the year 1816 appeared 
 his Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Ver- 
 gleichung 7nit jenem der griechische7i, lateinischen, per- 
 sischen, und germanischen Sprache (Conjugational Sys- 
 tem of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with that 
 of the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Teutonic Lan- 
 guages). 
 
 This was no longer merely an attempt to find iso- 
 lated similarities in the sounds of the v/ords of related 
 languages, but an attempt to trace back not only 
 uniformities but also differences to their fixed laws; 
 and thus in the life and growth of these languages, as 
 they sprang from a common root and evolved them- 
 selves into a rich complexity, to discover more and 
 more the traces of a necessity dominated by definite 
 principles. 
 
 We can here only briefly touch upon the investi- 
 gations made durfng the last seventy years, for which 
 Bopp laid the foundation by the publication of his 
 work. Rarely have such astonishing results been 
 achieved by science as here. Elucidative of the early 
 history of the languages of Homer and the old Italian 
 monuments before they acquired the form in which 
 we now find them written, the most unexpected wit- 
 nesses were brought to give testimony; namely, the 
 languages of the Hindus, the Germans, the Slavs, 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. n 
 
 and the Celts. Of these related tongues, the one sheds 
 light upon the obscure features of the others, just as 
 natural history explains the stunted organs of some 
 animals by pointing out the same organs in their orig- 
 inal, perfect form, in other animals. 
 
 The picture of the mother tongue, whose fiHal de- 
 scendants are the languages of our linguistic family, 
 was no longer seen in merely vague or doubtful fea- 
 tures. The laws under whose dominion the system of 
 sounds and forms in the separate derived languages 
 have been developed from the mother tongue, are be- 
 ing ascertained ever more fully and formulated ever 
 more sharply. 
 
 From the very beginning the essential instrument, 
 yes, the very founciation of this investigation, was the 
 Sanskrit language. In the beginning, faith in the 
 primitiveness of Sanskrit in comparison with the rela- 
 ted languages was too strong. During the last few 
 years, however, this erroneous conception has been 
 fully rectified; and this in itself is a decided step in 
 advance. We know now that the apparently simpler 
 and clearer state of Sanskrit in sounds and forms is in 
 many respects less primitive than the complicated re- 
 lations of other languages, e. g., the Greek; and that 
 we must often set out from these languages rather 
 than from the Sanskrit, in order to make possible the 
 explanation of Sanskrit forms. Thus Sanskrit now 
 receives back the light which it has furnished for the 
 historical understanding of the European languages.* 
 
 * It may be permissible here to illustrate this reversion of methods in a sin- 
 gle point that has become of especially great importance to grammar. 
 The Greek has five short vowels, «, e, o, i, u. The Sanskrit has i and u corres- 
 ponding to z and u; but to the three sounds, a, e, o corresponds in Sanskrit only 
 a single vowel a. Thus, for example, the Greek aj>o (English, /roi7z) reads in 
 Sanskrit aj>a; the a of the first syllable, and the o of the second syllable of the 
 
12 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 I must not attempt to follow in detail the course 
 which the science of comparative grammar, apart 
 from its connection V\^ith Hindu research, has taken. 
 While the tv/o branches of the study were rapidly ad- 
 vanced by Germans particularly, and likewise in France 
 by the sagacious Burnouf, nev/ material kept pouring 
 in from India no less rapidly. In two countries on 
 the outskirts of Indian civilization, in the Himalayan 
 valleys of Nepal, and in Ceylon, the sacred literature 
 of the Buddhists, which had disappeared in India 
 proper, was brought to light in two collections, one in 
 Sanskrit and one in the popular dialect Pali. The in- ' 
 genuity of Prinseps succeeded in deciphering the 
 oldest Indian written characters on inscriptions and 
 coins. In Calcutta was undertaken and completed in 
 the Thirties the publication of the Mahabharata, a gi- 
 gantic heroic poem of almost a hundred thousand 
 
 Greek word is thus represented in Sanskrit by a. Or, to use another example, 
 the Greek menos (English, courage) is in Sanskrit inanas; Greek epheron (I 
 carried) — abharam. What now is the original, i. e,. what existed in the Indo- 
 Germanic mother tongue for the three sounds of the Greek «, e, o, or the single 
 sound of the Sanskrit a? When scholars began to study comparative philology 
 upon the basis of the Sanskrit they thought the a;— and this was a conclusion 
 apparently supported by the simplicity of the language— to be alone the orig- 
 inal sound; and were led to believe that this vowel was later divided on Euro- 
 pean soil into three sounds, a, e, o. Investigations of the most recent time — 
 and for these we are to thank Amelung, Burgman, John Schmidt, and others — 
 have shown that the development of the vowel system took the opposite course. 
 The vowels a, e, oweve already in the Indo-Germanic mother tongue; and in 
 Sanskrit, or more accurately, before the time of Sanskrit, in the language which 
 the ancestors of the Indians and Persians spoke when both formed one people, 
 these vowels were merged into a single vowel Thus the e of esiz and the o of 
 aJ>o are more original than the a of as;(z, apa. 
 
 Now, we find in Sanskrit that where the Greek e corresponds to the San- 
 skrit «, certain consonants preceding this vowel, as. e.g., k, are affected in a 
 different way by the latter, than in instances where for the a of Sanskrit the 
 Greek a ov o'ls used. From the linguistic form of Sanskrit alone, which in the 
 one case as in the other has a, it would not be intelligible why the k should 
 each time meet a different fate. The Greek, in that it has preserved the orig- 
 inal differences of the vowels, gives the key to an understanding of the peculiar 
 transformations which have taken place in the /^-sound in large and importaiitt 
 groups of Sanskrit words. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 13 
 
 couplets, in whose vast cantos with their labyrinth of 
 episodes and sub-episodes many generations of poets 
 have brought together legends of the heroes and days 
 of the olden time, of their struggles and flagellations. 
 
 The sum and substance of all this newly-acquired 
 knowledge has been incorporated in the great work of 
 a Norwegian, who became, in Germany, a German — in 
 the Indische Alterthumskunde (Hindu Antiquities) oi 
 Christian Lassen. 
 
 Lassen did not belong to the great pioneers of 
 science, like Bopp. It must also be said that often 
 that sagacity of philological thought is wanting in him, 
 which sheds light on questions even where it affords 
 no definite solution of them. And, indeed, was it not 
 a herculean undertaking, a work like that of the Dana- 
 ides, to explore the older periods of the Hindu past 
 when, as the chief sources of information, one was 
 solely limited to the great epic, and the law book of 
 Manu? Even a surer critical power than Lassen pos- 
 sessed could not have discovered much of history in 
 the nebulous confusion of legends, in the invented se- 
 ries of kings in Mahabhm-ata, and in that colorless uni- 
 formity which the style of the Hindu Virgils spreads 
 unchangeably over the enormous periods of time of 
 which they assume to inform us. In spite of this, Las- 
 sen's Antiquities — the work of tireless diligence and 
 rare learning — stands as a landmark in the history 
 of Hindu investigations, uniting all the results of past 
 time, and pointing out anew, by the very things in 
 which it is lacking, still untried undertakings. 
 
 Just at this time, however, when the first volume 
 of Lassen's work, treating of the earliest periods, ap- 
 peared, came the beginning of a movement which has 
 severed the development of Hindu studies into two 
 
14 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 parts. New personalities appeared upon the scene 
 and pushed to the front a new series of problems, for 
 the solution of which an apparently inexhaustible, and 
 to this day, in a certain sense, a still inexhaustible 
 supply of freshly acquired material was offered. This 
 was the most important acquisition that has ever been 
 added to our knowledge of the world's literature 
 through any one branch of oriental inquiry — the ac- 
 quisition of the Veda for science. 
 
 II. 
 
 Considering the circumstances, this acquisition 
 of the Veda for science can hardly be accounted a 
 discovery. The existence and position in Hindu lit- 
 erature of this great work, had long been known. At 
 every step the writings that had previously been 
 brought to light, pointed to the Veda as the source from 
 which all proceeded — even more strikingly than in the 
 literature of Greece, we are led back, at every turn, to 
 the poems of Homer. Manuscripts of the Vedic texts, 
 moreover, were to be found, not only in India; they 
 had long been possessed in great numbers by the 
 libraries of Europe. But an attempt had scarcely, if 
 at all, been made to lay hold of these and see if in the 
 unmeasurable chaos of this mass of writings a firm 
 ground for science could not be acquired. 
 
 The Sanskrit of the great epic poems, or of Kalidasa, 
 was understood well enough ; but of the dialect in 
 which the most important parts of the Veda were 
 written, no more was known than one familiar with 
 the French of to-day would know of the language of 
 the Troubadours. Without going deeply into the study 
 it was easy to discern its inherent difficulties from the 
 unwonted singularity of the text and its strange con- 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 15 
 
 tents, which, in part at least, were extremely compli- 
 cated, and often involved in a maze of minor details. 
 Would an earnest explorer of this territory, even in 
 case he succeeded, be rewarded for his pains? 
 
 It was a band of young German scholars who bent 
 their energies to this work. Most of them are, or 
 were till very lately, among us — Max Miiller, Roth, 
 and Weber. Two others, whose names should not be 
 omitted here, Adalbert Kuhn and Benfey, died some 
 years ago. There was no need of undertaking great 
 expeditions, such as were those that set out for the 
 investigation of Egyptian and Babylonian antiquity. 
 Those monuments in whose colossal and strange forms 
 fragments of a primeval age meet the eye, were want- 
 ing in India. Th^ knowledge which was to be ac- 
 quired was not contained in inscriptions, but in man- 
 uscripts.* Our scholars repaired to London for a 
 greater or less length of time, and the work was begun 
 among the store of manuscripts possessed by the East 
 India House. 
 
 There was no lack of confidence. *' It would be a 
 disgrace," wrote Roth, "to the criticism and the in- 
 genuity of our century which has deciphered the 
 stone inscriptions of the Persian kings and the books 
 of Zoroaster, if it did not succeed in reading in this 
 enormous literature the intellectual history of the 
 Hindu nation." 
 
 Much that Roth expected has been accomplished 
 or is on the way towards accomplishment. Of much 
 that was hoped for at that time, we can now say that 
 it was unattainable, and understand why. What has 
 
 * The royal library at Berlin also acquired and owns a rich collection of 
 Sanskrit manuscripts, for which a foundation was laid by the purchase, at 
 the command of Frederick William IV., of the Chambers ''manuscri'pts. 
 
i5 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 been attained, however, has given to the picture, which 
 science formed of Hindu antiquity, an entirely different 
 aspect. Unbounded in extent, this picture formerly 
 seemed to lose itself in the nebulous depths of an im- 
 measurable past. Now, determinate limits have been 
 found, and the remotest initial point has been discov- 
 ered for verifiable history. Authentic sources were 
 disclosed, leading to the earliest age of Hindu civiliza- 
 tion, from which, and regarding which, historical 
 testimony in the usual sense of the word became ac- 
 cessible ; and instead of the twilight, peopled v/ith 
 uncertain, shadowy giants, in which the epic poems 
 made those times appear, the Veda opened to us a 
 reality which we may hope to understand. Or, if in 
 many instances, instead of the hoped for forms, it has 
 afforded the eye but an empty space, even this was a 
 step in advance. For then it was at least shown that 
 the knowledge which was sought was not to be had ; 
 and that which had been given as such, had disclosed 
 itself as an imaginative picture born of the caprice of 
 a later legend-maker. 
 
 The literature of epic poetry, apparently, could no 
 longer lay claim to an incalculable antiquity ; it sank 
 back into a sort of Middle Ages, behind which the newly 
 discovered, real antiquity loomed forth, studding the 
 horizon of historical knowledge with significant forms. 
 We shall now see how the task of understanding the 
 Veda was accomplished, and shall describe at the same 
 time what it was that had thus been acquired. We 
 have here a newly disclosed literature of venerable an- 
 tiquity, rich in marks of earnest effort, logically devel- 
 oped in sharply, nay rigidly, characterized forms ; we 
 have a nev/ly discovered piece of history, forming the 
 historical — or shall we say unhistorical?— -beginnings 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 17 
 
 of a people related to us by race, who at an early day 
 set out in paths distinctly removed from the ways of 
 all other peoples, and created their own strange forms 
 of existence, bearing in them the germs of the mis- 
 fortunes they have suffered. 
 
 By what means did we succeed in understanding 
 the Veda? 
 
 Almost all the more important parts of the Vedic 
 literature— for the Veda, like the Bible, is not a sep- 
 arate text, but a literature with wide ramifications — 
 are preserved in numerous, and, for the most part, 
 relatively modern manuscripts. Only rarely are they 
 older than a few centuries; since in the destructive 
 climate of India it could not be otherwise. The texts, 
 however, of these later manuscripts descend from re- 
 mote antiquity. 
 
 Before they came to be written in the present 
 manuscripts, or written in manuscript - form at all, 
 they encountered, in the course of great periods of 
 time, many and manifold misfortunes. It is the task 
 of the philological inquirer to ascertain the character 
 of these events — to determine the genetic history of 
 the texts. It may be said that these texts in the 
 shape they have been transmitted to us, resemble 
 paintings by old masters, which bear unmistakable 
 traces of alternate injuries and attempted restorations 
 by competent and incompetent hands. What we 
 want to know, so far as it lies in our power, is the 
 form and general character in which they originally 
 existed. 
 
 The period to which the origin of the old Vedic 
 poems belongs, we cannot assign in years, nor yet in 
 centuries. But we know that these poems existed, 
 when there was not a city in India, but only hamlets 
 
i8 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 and castles j when the names of the powerful tribes 
 which at a later time assumed the first rank among 
 the nations of India were not even mentioned, no more 
 so than in the Germany which Tacitus described were 
 mentioned the names of Franks and Bavarians. It 
 was the period of migrations, of endless, turbulent 
 feuds among small unsettled tribes with their nobles 
 and priests; people fought for pastures, and cows, and 
 arable land. It was the period of conflict between the 
 fair-skinned immigrants, who called themselves Arya, 
 and the natives, the ^'dark people," the "unbelievers 
 that propitate not the Gods." 
 
 As yet the thought and belief of the Hindus did 
 not seek the divine in those formless depths in which 
 later ages conceived the idea of the eternal and hidden 
 Brahma. Wherever in nature the brightest pictures 
 met the eye and the mightiest tones struck the ear, 
 there were their Gods — the luminous arch of heaven, 
 the red hues of dawn, the thundering storm-god and 
 his followers, the winds. The Vedic Aryans had not 
 yet reached their later abode on the two powerful sis- 
 ter streams, the Ganges and the Yumna; the Sindhu 
 (Indus) was still for them the " Mother Stream," of 
 which one of the oldest poets of the Rig Veda says : * 
 
 " From earth along the reach of Heaven riseth the sound ; 
 Ceaseless the roar of her waters, the bright one. 
 
 As floods of thundering rain, poured from the darkened cloud-bosom, 
 So rushes the Sindu, like the steer, the bellowing one." 
 
 The poetry of the Rig Veda dates from the time of 
 those wanderings and struggles that took place on 
 the Indus and its tributary streams. Certain fam- 
 ilies exercised the functions of priestly offices, and 
 
 * Hundreds of Vedic melodies have been handed down to us in a form the 
 interpretation of which can be subject to no real doubt. As it appears, they 
 are the oldest but unfortunately the poorest memorials of musical antiquity. 
 
THE STUD V OF SANSKRIT. ig 
 
 possessed the acquisitions of an artificially connected 
 speech together with a simple form of chant using but 
 few tones. These families created Vedic poetry, and 
 transmitted the art to their posterity. The songs of 
 the Rig Veda, which are almost all sacrificial songs, were 
 not really what we call popular poetry. We do not 
 hear in them the language that pours forth from the soul 
 of a nation, as it communes in poetical rhythm with 
 itself. It was a poetry that wanted mainly the proper 
 hearers — the masses of the people who spoke through 
 the mouth of the poet. Their hearers were God Agni, 
 God Indra, or Goddess Dawn ; and the poet was not 
 he whom the passionate impulses of his own soul or 
 his own love of song and legend impelled to sing, but 
 he was mainly one who belonged to a poet-family — 
 one of the families of men who in the course of time 
 became united as a caste and erected ever more insu- 
 perable barriers between their sacred existence and 
 the profane reality of daily life. For the gods such 
 a poet only " could frame a worthy poem, as an expe- 
 rienced, skillful wheelwright makes a wagon," — a poem 
 which would be rewarded by the rich princely lords 
 of the sacrifice, with steeds and kine, with golden or- 
 naments and female slaves from the spoils of war, 
 '^Thy blessing," says a Vedic poet to a God,"" 
 
 " Rests with the givers, 
 With the victors, the many valiant heroes, 
 Who make gifts to us of clothing, kine, and horses ; 
 May they rejoice in the splendor and plenty of divine bounty. 
 
 Let all things waste that they have won 
 
 Who, without rewarding, would profit by our hymns to heaven. 
 
 The godless ones, that boast their fortune. 
 
 The transgressors— cast them from the light of day." 
 
 It has been fatal for all thought and poetry in In- 
 dia, that a second world, filled with strangely fantastic 
 
 *Rig Veda v. 42, 8-9. 
 
20 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 shapes, was established at an early day beside the 
 real world. This was the place of sacrifice with its 
 three sacred fires and the schools in which the virtu- 
 osos of the sacrificial art were educated — a sphere of 
 strangest activity and the playground of a subtle, 
 empty mummery, whose enervating power over the 
 spirit of an entire nation we can scarcely comprehend 
 in its full extent. The poetry of the Rig Veda shows 
 us this process of disease at an early stage ; but it is 
 there, and much of that which constitutes the essence 
 of the Rig Veda, is rooted in it. 
 
 In the foreground stands the sacrifice, and through- 
 out, only the sacrifice. " By sacrifice the Gods made 
 sacrifice ; these regulations were the first," it is said in 
 a verse which is thrice repeated in the Rig Veda. The 
 praise of the God for whom the sacrificial offerings 
 were intended, his power, his victories, and the prayers 
 for possessions which were hoped for in return for hu- 
 man offerings — the prosperity of flocks and posterity, 
 long life, destruction of enemies, the hated and the 
 godless — such is the subject-matter of the multitudi- 
 nous repetitions that recur throughout the hymns of 
 the Rig Veda. Still, among these verse-making sacri- 
 ficers there was not an utter absence of real poets. 
 And thus among^ the stereotyped implorations and 
 songs of praise we find here and there a great and 
 beautiful picture — the wonder of the poet's soul at the 
 bright marvels of nature or the deep expression of an 
 earnest inner life. A poet from the priestly family of 
 the Bharadvajas sings of the goddess Ushas, the 
 dawn:* 
 
 *The Indian word Ushas is related to the Greek Eos, the Latin Aurora. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 
 
 " We see thee, thou lovely one ; faf , far, thou shinest. 
 To heaven's heights thy brilliant light-beams dart. 
 In beauteous splendor shimmering, unveilest thou thy bosom, 
 Radiant v/ith heaven's sheen, celestial queen of dawn I 
 
 " The red bulls draw their chariot. 
 Where in thy splendor thou o'erspread'st the heavens ; 
 Thou drivest av/ay night ; as a hero, a bow-man, 
 As a swift charioteer frighteneth his enemies. 
 
 " A beautiful path has been made for thee in the mountain. 
 Thou unconquerable one, thou risest from out the waters. 
 So bring thou us treasures to revive us on 
 Our further course, queenly daughter of heaven."* 
 
 Another poet sings of Parjanya, the rain God: f 
 
 " Like the driver who forward whips his steeds. 
 So he urges onward his messengers, the clouds. 
 From afar the thunder-tone of the lion arises 
 When the God makes rain pour from the clouds. 
 
 " Parjanya's lightnirtgs dart ; the winds blow ; 
 The floods pour from heaven ; up spring grass and plants. 
 To all that lives and moves a quickening is imparted, 
 When the God scatters his seeds on the earth. 
 
 " At his command the earth bows deeply down ; 
 At his command hoofed creatures come to life ; 
 At his command bloom forth the bright flowers : 
 May Parjanya grant us strong defence ! 
 
 " A flood of rain hast thou sent ; now cease ; 
 Thou didst make penetrable the desert wastes. 
 For us thou hast caused plants to grow for food, 
 And the prayer of men thou hast fulfilled." 
 
 But we must turn from the description of Vedic 
 poetry to examine the fortune that this production 
 encountered on its way from distant antiquity to the 
 present time, from the sacrificial places on the Indus 
 to the workshops of the EngHsh and German philolo- 
 gists. Here a conspicious fact is to be dwelt upon, 
 
 * Rig Veda VI. 64. The hymn following is V. 83. 
 
 t This God also reappears among the kindred peoples of Europe, as Fior- 
 gynn in the northern mythology, and among the Lithuanians and Prussians as 
 the God Perkunas, of whom an old chronicle says : " Perkunas was the third 
 idol; and him the people besought for storms, so that during his time they had 
 rain and fair weather and suffered not from the thunder and the lightning." 
 
22 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 which belongs to the strangest phenomena of Indian 
 history, so rich in strange events. The hymns of the 
 Rig Veda, as well as the hymns of the other Vedas, 
 have been composed, collected, and transmitted to 
 succeeding ages. There has been incorporated in 
 them a very large sacerdotal prose literature, devel- 
 oped throughout the older and later divisions, and 
 treating of the art and symbolism of sacrifice. There 
 have also arisen heretical sects, like the Buddhists, 
 who denied the authority of the Veda, and instead of 
 its teachings reverenced as a sacred text the code of 
 ordinances proclaimed by Buddha. And all this has 
 taken place without the art of writing. 
 
 In the Vedic ages writing was not known. At the 
 time when Buddhism arose it was indeed known — the 
 Indians probably learned to write from Semites — but 
 it was used only for inditing short communications in 
 practical life, not for writing books. We have very 
 sure and characteristic information as to the role which 
 the art of writing played, or rather did not play, in the 
 church life of the Buddhists at a comparatively late 
 age, say about 400 B. C. The sacred text of this sect 
 affords a picture, executed even in its minutest features, 
 of life in the houses and parks which the brethren in- 
 habited. We can^see the Buddhist monks pursue their 
 daily life from morning to night ; we can see them in 
 their wanderings and during their rest, in solitude and 
 in intercourse with other monks, or laymen ; we know 
 the equipment of the places occupied by them, their 
 furniture, and the contents of their store-rooms. But 
 nowhere do we hear that they read their sacred texts 
 or copied them j nowhere, that in the dwellings of the 
 monks such things as writing utensils or manuscripts 
 were found. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 23 
 
 The memory of the spiritual brethren, "rich in 
 
 hearing," what we to-day call a well-read man was 
 
 then called one rich in hearing —took the place of a 
 cloister library ; and if the knowledge of some indis- 
 pensable text,— as, e. g., the formula of confession 
 which had to be recited at the full and new moon in 
 the assembly of the brethren,— was in danger of 
 being lost among a body of priests, they acted on the 
 dictum laid down in an old Buddhistic ordinance: "By 
 these monks a monk shall immediately be sent to a 
 neighboring parish. He must be thus instructed : ' Go, 
 Brother, and when thou hast learned by heart the 
 formula of confession, the complete one or the abre- 
 viated one, come back to us.' " 
 
 It must be admitted that under such circumstances 
 all the conditions for the existence of books, and the 
 relations between books and reader — if it be allowed me 
 for the sake of brevity to use these expressions— must 
 have been of a very different nature than in an age of 
 writing or one of printing. A book could then exist 
 only on condition that a body of men existed among 
 whom it was taught and learned and transmitted from 
 generation to generation. A book could be known only 
 at the price of learning it by heart, or of having some 
 one at hand who had thus learned it. Texts of a con- 
 tent which only claimed a passing notice, could not as 
 a rule exist. This was fatal for historical writing and 
 generally speaking for all profane literature. Above 
 all, the existing texts were subjected to the disfigure- 
 ments that errors of memory, carelessness, or attempts 
 at improvement on the part of the transmitters must 
 have imported into them. 
 
 Under conditions such as have been described 
 above, the poetry of the Rig Veda has been handed 
 
24 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 down from generation to generation through many- 
 centuries. Separate poems were brought into the col- 
 lection in the course of oral compilation and trans- 
 mission. The collection was re-corrected on repeated 
 occasions and was brought to greater completeness; 
 again only by oral compilation and transmission. It 
 is conceivable enough that thus the original structure 
 yes, even the existence itself of special hymns was 
 often injured, effaced, or destroyed. Remodeling de- 
 stroyed their form. The lines of division between 
 hymns standing side by side would often be forgotten 
 and numbers of them would be merged into an ap- 
 parent unity. Modern, and easily intelligible terms 
 drove out the obsolete phrases and the ancient word- 
 forms — often the most valuable remains for the inves- 
 tigator, whom they help to explain the history of the 
 language, just as the scientist deduces from fossil re- 
 mains the history of organic life. 
 
 Especially fatal was it for the old and true formi of 
 the Vedic hymns that they have been stretched upon 
 the Procrustean bed of grammatical analysis. Earlier 
 and more strongly than in any other nation of antiquity, 
 was interest and pleasure taken in India in scientifically 
 dissecting language. Closely examining the separate 
 sounds of speech, and their underlying modifications, 
 they employed exceptional ingenuity and discrimi- 
 nation in constructing a system from which, when 
 it became known in Europe, the science of our cen- 
 tury found ample reason to learn much that was 
 marvellous. The ingenuity and penetration of the 
 students of Vedic literature has been burdened like 
 a curse with that genuinely Hindu trait, subtlety; 
 the joy — which at times seems to border on malicious- 
 ness — of stretching and forcing things into an artistic 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 25 
 
 garment, of building up labyrinths of fine points, In 
 whose involved courses the skilled and cunning stu- 
 dent ostentatiously thought himself able to find his 
 way. Thus, in this grammatical science, understanding 
 and misunderstanding of the real truth are mingled 
 in inexplicable confusion. That under the hands of 
 such linguistic theorists the precious wealth of the 
 old Vedic hymns has not remained inviolate, is easily 
 comprehended. In some cases, isolated details of 
 the traditions of prior epochs were caught and clung 
 to with felicitous acumen j in others, no hesitation 
 was had in wiping out of existence entire domains of 
 old and genuine phenomena to suit half-correct theo- 
 ries, so that the most patient ingenuity of modern 
 science will only be able to restore in part what has 
 been lost. 
 
 Finally, however, the caprice under which the 
 hymns of the old singers must have suffered, had its 
 end. The more people accustomed themselves to see in 
 these poems not merely beautiful and efficacious 
 prayers but a sacred revelation of the divine, the higher 
 did their transmitted form — even when this is, or seems 
 to be, of necessity, so irregular — rise in the respect of 
 theologians, and the more careful must they have been 
 to describe and preserve this form with all its dissim- 
 ilarities. 
 
 We possess a remarkable work — it is composed in 
 verse like many Hindu treatises and hand-books — in 
 which a grammarian, Caunaka, who must probably be 
 placed about the time 400 B. C, has given a deep and 
 unusually well-planned survey of the vocal peculiar- 
 ities of the Rig Veda text. The study of Caunaka's 
 work affords us the proof that from that time on the 
 Vedic hymns, protected by the united care of gram- 
 
26 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 matical and religious respect for letters, have suffered 
 no further appreciable corruptions. The most im- 
 portant manuscripts of the Rig Veda which we know, 
 may be two thousand years later than this hand-book 
 of Caunaka's, but they bear all tests in a remarkable 
 way if we compare them with it. 
 
 The Rig Veda, indeed, which that Hindu scholar 
 found, was not unlike a ruin. And it was hardly pos- 
 sible by the help of Hindu scholarship to transmit it 
 to posterity in a better condition than it was received 
 But still the conscientious diligence of the Hindu lin- 
 guists and divines accomplished something : for the 
 last two thousand years it has preserved these vener- 
 able fragments from the dangers of further decay. 
 They lie there, untouched, just as they were in the 
 days of Caunaka. And the investigation of our day, 
 which has already succeeded in bringing forth from 
 many a field of ruins the living features of a by-gone 
 existence, is at work among them, now with the bold 
 grasp of confident divination, now in the quiet uni- 
 formity of slowly advancing deliberation, to deduce 
 whatever it may of the real forms of those old priestly 
 poems. 
 
 III. 
 
 We may say, that the greatest undertakings planned 
 and the most important results achieved in the field 
 of Sanskrit research, are linked with the names of Ger- 
 man investigators. If we add that this could not easily 
 be otherwise, it is not from national vanity ; we should 
 but express the actual facts of the case, based upon 
 the development of the science. It was natural that 
 
THE STUD V OF SANSKRIT. 27 
 
 the first movements toward the founding of Hindu re- 
 search, the first attempts to grasp the vastly accumu- 
 lated material and find provisional forms for it, should 
 have been the work of Englishmen, men who spent a 
 good part of their lives in India, and were there 
 brought in constant contact with native Sanskrit 
 scholars. But not less natural was it that the honor 
 of instituting further progress and gaining a deeper in- 
 sight should be accorded to Germans. The two fields 
 of knowledge by which, especially, life and power were 
 imparted to Hindu investigations were and are essen- 
 tially German. These are comparative grammar, which 
 we may say was founded by Bopp, and that profound 
 and potent science, or perhaps more correctly ex- 
 pressed art, of philology, which was practiced by 
 Gottfried Hermann, and likewise by Karl Lachmann, 
 a man imbued with the proud spirit of Lessing, full of 
 acute and purposeful ability, exact and truthful in 
 small matters as in great. Representatives of this 
 philology, moved to antipathy by many characteristic 
 features of the Hindu spirit, and not the least influ- 
 enced by the assertion that Latin and Greek grammar 
 has this or that to learn from the Sanskrit, might meet 
 the new science of India with reserve or more than 
 reserve. Still this could in no wise alter the truth that 
 the study of Hindu texts, the investigation of Hindu 
 literary remains, could be learned from no better teach- 
 ers than from those masters who had succeeded in im- 
 proving and interpreting the classical texts with un- 
 erring certainty and excellence of method. 
 
 It was a Leipsic disciple of Hermann and Haupt 
 who, at the instigation of Burnouf, in 1845, in Paris, 
 conceived the plan of publishing the Rig Veda with 
 the commentary of its Hindu expounder, the abbot Sa- 
 
28 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 yana, who flourished in the 14th century after Christ. 
 This was the great work of Max Miiller, the first of 
 of those fundamental undertakings on which Vedic 
 philology rests. It was necessary above all to know 
 how the Brahmins themselves translated the hymns 
 of their forefathers, which were preserved in the Rig 
 Veda, from the Vedic language into current Sanskrit, 
 and how they solved the problems which the grammar 
 of the Veda presented, by the means their own gram- 
 matical system offers. Herein lay the indispensable 
 foundation of all further investigation. It was ne- 
 cessary to weigh the Hindu traditions concerning the 
 explanation of the Veda, which erred in underestima- 
 tion as well as overestimation, and to test the conse- 
 quences of both errors, in order finally to learn the art 
 of scientifically estimating them. This constitutes the 
 great importance of Max Miiiler's work extending 
 through a quarter of a century (i 849-1 874). To com- 
 plete was easy, but to begin was exceedingly difficult; 
 for most of the grammatical and theological texts 
 which formed the basis for Sayana's deductions, were, 
 when Max Miiller began the work, books sealed with 
 seven seals. 
 
 A few years after the first volume of Max Miiiler's 
 Rig Veda appeared, two other scholars united in a 
 work of still greater magnitude. It has long since be- 
 come to all Sanskritists the most indispensable tool 
 for their labors. I refer to the Sanskrit dictionary, 
 compiled under the commission of the Academy of 
 St. Petersburg, Russia, by Roth and Bohtlingk. It 
 was intended to make a dictionary for a language the 
 greatest and most important part of whose texts were 
 still not in print. The work was similar to that 
 which the Grimm Brothers began at the same time 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT, 29 
 
 for the German language. Roth undertook the Vedic 
 literature, the foundation of the whole ; Bohtlingk the 
 later periods. Friendly investigators, and especially 
 Weber, helped them by bringing into use the known 
 and accessible texts or manuscripts that were service- 
 able to them. The most important thing was, that the 
 Veda had now for the first time — setting aside a few 
 previous studies — to be gone through with a view to 
 lexicography. The explanations which the Hindus 
 themselves were wont to give of the words of the Vedic 
 language were regarded as a valuable aid for under- 
 standing it. But the matter did not rest here. "We 
 do not hold it," said the two compilers in their preface, 
 " to be our task to acquire that understanding of the 
 Veda which was current in India some centuries ago j 
 but we seek the sense which the poets themselves gave 
 to their hymns and maxims." They undertook '*to get 
 at the sense from the texts themselves, by collating 
 all the passages related in word or meaning."' In this 
 way they hoped to re-establish the meaning of each 
 word, not as a colorless conception, but in its individu- 
 ality and therefore in its strength and beauty. The 
 Veda was thus to re-acquire its living sense, the full 
 wealth of its expression. The thought of the earliest 
 antiquity was to appear to us in new forms full of life 
 and reality. 
 
 The execution of this v/ork, carried on with tena- 
 cious industry and brilliant success for four and twenty 
 years (1852-1875), did not fall short of the magnitude 
 of the plan originally conceived. In minor points we 
 find it easy to point out numerous deficiencies and 
 errors. The two compilers well knew that without 
 that spirit of boldness which does not stand in fear of 
 unavoidable errors, it were better never to undertake 
 
30 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 their task. In face, however, of the great value of that 
 which they have accomplished, all faults sink into in- 
 significance. 
 
 What a chasm separates their work from that of 
 their predecessor, Wilson ! * In Wilson's work there is 
 little more than a fair enumeration of the meanings 
 which Hindu traditions assigned to the words ; for his 
 dictionary the Veda scarcely exists, if it does so at all. 
 Here in the work of Roth and Bohtlingk on the other 
 hand, is brought to light the immense wealth, replete 
 with oriental splendor, of the richest of all languages ; 
 the history of each word, and likewise the fortunes 
 that have befallen it in the different periods of the lit- 
 erature and have determined its meaning, are brought 
 before our eyes. The difference between the two great 
 periods in which the development of Hindu research 
 falls, could not be incorporated more clearly than in 
 these two dictionaries. In the one instance are found 
 the beginnings, which English science, resting imme- 
 diately on the shoulders of the Indian pandits, has 
 made ; in the other is the continuation of English 
 work conducted by strict philological methods to a 
 breadth and depth incomparably beyond those begin- 
 nings, and at the head of this undertaking stand Ger- 
 man scholars. 
 
 To Miiller's great edition of the Rig Veda and to 
 the St. Petersburg Dictionary further investigations 
 have been added in great abundance, and these have 
 more and more extended the limits of our knowledge 
 of the Veda. Already a new generation of laborers 
 have taken their places beside the original pioneers in 
 these once so impassable regions. As a whole, or in 
 its separate parts, the Rig Veda has been repeatedly 
 
 * Wilson's dictionary appeared in 1819; a second edition in 1832. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 31 
 
 translated. Its stock of words and inflections has been 
 studied and overhauled from ever new points of view 
 and with ever new questions in mind. To many a 
 picturesque word of the strong, harsh Vedic language 
 its full weight has thus been given back. 
 
 The principles and practices according to which 
 the old collectors and revisers of the Veda text pro- 
 ceeded, are now being examined by us with a view to 
 being able to determine what came into their hands 
 as tradition and what they themselves imported into 
 the traditions. The readings of the passages quoted 
 from the Rig Veda in the other Vedas are being col- 
 lected, in order to trace in them the remains of the 
 genuine and oldest textual form. The religion and 
 mythology of the Veda have been described ; the na- 
 tional hfe of the Vedic tribes has been portrayed in 
 all its phases. The texts afford the data for such a 
 portraiture of these features that it has justly been 
 said that the description given surpasses in clearness 
 and accuracy Tacitus's account of the national life of 
 the Germans.* Finally an attempt has been made — 
 or rather an attempt will have to be made, for even at 
 this time the work is in its beginnings — to discover 
 amid the masses of Vedic prayers and sacrificial 
 hymns something which must be an especially welcome 
 find to scientific curiosity— the beginning of the Indian 
 Epic.f 
 
 There could be no doubt that in so poetical a 
 period the pleasure of romancing produced abundant 
 fruit. Short narratives, short hymns must then have 
 
 * H. Zimmer : Altindisches Leben : die CulUir der vedischen Arier. (Ancient 
 Indian Life : the Civilization of the Vedic Aryans.) Berlin, 1879, p. vii. 
 
 t The remarks here made on the beginnings of the Indian Epic rest on 
 conceptions which I have before briefly sought to establish. ZeUschrift 
 der Deutschen Morgenldnd, Gesellsch,, 1885, p. 52, et seq. 
 
32 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 existed, enclosed, as it were, in narrow frames. Thus, 
 in general, are the beginnings of epic poetry shaped, 
 before poetic ability rises and ventures to narrate in 
 wider scope and with more complicated structure the 
 fate of men and heroes. It seemed, however, as though 
 those beginnings of the Indian epic were lost. But 
 they were preserved, though to be sure in a peculiarly 
 fragmentary form. In the Rig Veda there is many a 
 medley of apparently disconnected verses in which 
 we have thought to discover the accumulated sweep- 
 ings of poetic workshops. In fact we have here the 
 fragmentary remains of epic narratives. These verses 
 were once inserted in a prose framework; the narrative 
 part of the Epic being in prose, and the speeches and 
 counter-speeches in verse, just as, often, in Grimm's 
 fairy-tales when the poor daughter of the king or the 
 powerful dwarf has to speak an especially weighty or 
 touching word, a rhyme or two appears. 
 
 Now, only the verses were memorized in their 
 fixed original form by the Vedic tale-tellers. The 
 prose, each new narrator would render with fresh 
 words ; until finally its original subject-matter fell into 
 almost total oblivion, and the verses alone survived, 
 appearing sometimes as a series of dialogues suffi- 
 ciently long and full of meaning to enable us to gain 
 an understanding of the whole, and then again as un- 
 recognizable fragments no more admitting an infer- 
 ence as to their proper place and connection in the 
 story of which they form a part than — to keep the 
 same comparison — a couple of rhymes in one of 
 Grimm's fairy-tales would enable us to restore the 
 whole tale. 
 
 It may be permitted for the sake of making clear 
 what has been said, to cite here a passage from one of 
 
THE STUD Y OF SANSKRIT. 33 
 
 those old narratives whose connection, at least as a 
 whole, may be conjecturally determined.* The scene 
 is between gods and demons, its subject is the great 
 battle which was fought in heaven, the thunder fight, 
 which for the strife-loving spirit of that age was the 
 pattern of their own victories. Vritra, the envious 
 fiend, kept the waters of the clouds in captivity, that they 
 might not pour down upon the earth; but God Indra 
 smote the demon with his thunderbolt and let the lib- 
 erated waters flow. Indra — this must have been said 
 in the lost prose introduction to the narrative — felt, as 
 he entered the battle, too weak for his terrible oppo- 
 nent. The gods, faint-hearted, withdrew from his 
 side. Only one offered himself as an ally, Vayu (the 
 wind),f the swiftest of the gods, but he demanded as a 
 reward for his fidelity, part of the sacrificial draught 
 of Soma, which men offer to Indra. Vayu speaks : 
 
 " Tis I. I come to thee the foremost, as is meet ; 
 Behind me march in full array, the Gods. 
 Givest thou me, O Indra, but a share of sacrifice. 
 And thou shalt do, with my alliance, valiant deeds of might." 
 
 Indra accepted the alliance : 
 
 " Of the honied draught I give thee the first portion ; 
 Thine shall it be ; for thee shall be pressed the Soma. 
 Thou shalt stand as friend at my right hand ; 
 Then shall we slay the serried hosts of our foe." 
 
 Then a new person appears, a human singer. We 
 know not whether a definite one among the great 
 saints of that early time, the prophets of the later 
 generation of singers, was thought of or not. He 
 wished to praise Indra ; but can Indra now be praised? 
 The hostile demon is not yet conquered ; doubts as to 
 
 * Rig Veda 8,100. I omit a few verses of obscure meaning, and say noth- 
 ing of difficulties, for which this is not the place to give a solution. 
 
 t He is also called Vata. This name has been identified— though the cor- 
 rectness of this is highly questionable — with the German name Woden. 
 
34 
 
 ANCIENT INDIA 
 
 Indra and his might come to the singer. He says to 
 his people : 
 
 " A song of praise bring ye who long for a blessing, 
 If truth be truth, sing ye the praise of Indra." 
 
 " There is no Indra," then said many a one, 
 
 " Who saw him ? Who is he whom we shall praise ?" 
 
 Then Indra himself gives answer to the weak- 
 hearted : 
 
 •' Here stand I before thee, look hither, O Singer 
 In lofty strength I tower above all beings. 
 The laws of sacred order make me strong ; 
 I, the smiter, smite the worlds." 
 
 The confidence of the pious in their God is re- 
 stored, his hymn of praise is sounded. And now Indra 
 enters the conflict. The falcon has brought him the 
 Soma, and in the intoxication of the ambrosial drink, 
 the victorious one hurls his thunderbolt at the demon. 
 Like a tree smitten by lightning, falls the enemy. Now 
 the waters may flow forth from their prisons : 
 
 " Now hasten forth t Scatter thyself freely I 
 He who detained thee is no more. 
 Deep into the side of Vitra has been hurled 
 The dreaded thunderbolt of Indra. 
 
 " Swift as thought sped the Falcon along; 
 Pierced into the citadel, the brazen. 
 And up to heaven, to the thunderer, 
 The soaring falcon bore the Soma. 
 
 " In the sea the thunderbolt rests. 
 Deep engulfed in the watery billows. 
 The flowing and ever-constant waters 
 To him bring generous gifts." 
 
 I pass over the difficult conclusion of the poem — 
 the creation of language by Indra after the battle with 
 Vitra. One fourth of the languages that exist on earth, 
 Indra formed into clear and intelligible speech ; these 
 are the languages of men. The other three fourths, 
 however, have remained indistinct and incompre- 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 35 
 
 hensiMe ; these are the languages that quadrupeds and 
 birds and all insects speak. 
 
 This is one of the early narratives of the Hindus 
 concerning the deeds of their gods and heroes. We 
 must not endeavor here, to restore the lost portions 
 written in prose which served to connect the strophes. 
 To make the modern reader clear as to the connection 
 of the verses, another method of expression must be 
 chosen than that pecuHar to the narrators of the Vedic 
 epoch. As it appears, they were content with recount- 
 ing the necessary facts, or rather with recalling them 
 to their hearers, in short and scanty sentences. 
 
 The verses set in the narrative are not wanting, 
 however, in flights of poetic eloquence— as the poem 
 of Indra's battle will have shown. Without the finer 
 shades of human soul-life, it is true, yet in earnest 
 simple greatness, Hke mountains or old gigantic trees, 
 the heroic figures of these ancient sagas stand forth. 
 What takes place among them is similar, nay more 
 than similar, to that which takes place in nature. For 
 as yet the primitive natural significance of those gods 
 has hardly been veiled by the human vesture which 
 they wear, and in the narratives of their deeds the 
 great pictures of nature's life with its wonders and 
 terrors are everywhere present. The duty of bringing 
 together and interpreting such fragments of this most 
 ancient Epic activity, Vedic investigators must reckon 
 among their most fruitful though perhaps not their 
 easiest tasks. 
 
 IV. 
 
 At this stage of our inquiry, the question arises, 
 What do we know of the history of India in the 
 age which produced the Vedas ? Where does the pos- 
 
36 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 sibUity here begin of fixing events chronologically? 
 In that part of the province of history in which this 
 precision is lacking, can any determinate lines of an- 
 other sort be drawn ? 
 
 Of a history of ancient India in the sense in which 
 we speak of the history of Rome, or in the manner in 
 which the history of the Israelitic nation is recounted 
 in the Old Testament, the Vedas afford us no testi- 
 mony. A succession of events clearly united with one 
 another, the presence of energetic personalities, whose 
 aspirations and achievements we can understand, mo- 
 mentous struggles for the institution and security of 
 civil government — these are things of which nothing 
 is told to us. We may add that these are things which 
 seem to have existed in Ancient India less than in any 
 other civilized nation. The more we know of the his- 
 tory of this people the more it appears like an incohe- 
 rent mass of chance occurrences. These occurrences 
 are wanting in that firm bearing and significant sense 
 which the power of a willing and conscious national 
 purpose imparts to its doings. Only in the history of 
 thought, and especially of religious thought, do we 
 tread, in India, upon solid ground. Of a history in any 
 other sense we can here scarcely speak. And a peo- 
 ple who has no history, has of course no written his- 
 torical works. 
 
 In those eras in which, among soundly organized 
 nations, interest in the past and its connection 
 with the struggles and sufferings of the present 
 awakes, when the Herodotuses and Fabiuses, the nar- 
 rators of that which has happened, are wont to arise, 
 the literary activity of India was absorbed in theolog- 
 ical and philosophical speculation. In all occurrences 
 was seen but one aspect, namely, that they were tran- 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 37 
 
 sitory; and everything transitory was recognized, we 
 may not say as a simile, yet as something absolutely 
 worthless, an unfortunate nothing, from which the 
 sage was bound to divert his thoughts. 
 
 We can thus easily see how fully we must renounce 
 our hopes of an exact result, when the question is 
 raised as to the time to w^hich the little we know of the 
 outer vicissitudes of the ancient Hindu tribes must 
 be assigned, and, especially, as to the time in which the 
 great literary remains of the Veda and the changes 
 which it wrought in the Hindu world of thought be- 
 long. The basis that might serve toward definitely 
 answering these questions of chronology — lists of 
 kings with statements of the duration of each reign — 
 is wholly wanting for the Vedic period. Of early 
 tim.es at least no such lists have been handed down to 
 us; there are no traces indeed that such ever existed. 
 The later catalogues, however, which have been fab- 
 ricated in the shops of the Indian compilers, can to- 
 day no more be taken into consideration as the basis 
 of earnest research, than the statements of the Roman 
 chroniclers as to how many years King Romulus and 
 King Numa reigned. How unusual it was in the Ve- 
 dic times for the Hindus to ask the "when" of events, 
 is shown very clearly by the fact, that no expression was 
 in current use by which any year but the present was 
 distinguishable from any other year. 
 
 The result of this for us, and likewise, of course, 
 for the science of Ancient India, is that those long 
 centuries were and are practically synonymous with 
 immeasurable time. The standard by v/hich we are 
 accustomed to compute the distance of historical ante- 
 cedence in our thoughts or imaginations, fail us in this 
 richly developed civilization as completely as in the 
 
38 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 prehistoric domains of the stone age, — in the first 
 feeble glimmerings of human existence. In fact, as 
 prehistoric research tries to compute the duration of 
 the past ages which have given to the earth's surface 
 its form, so as to determine approximately the age of 
 the human remains embedded in the strata of the 
 earth; so, in a similar wa}^, the investigation of the 
 Hindu Vedas, in its attempts to compute the age of 
 the Veda, has sought refuge in the gradual changes 
 that have imperceptibly taken place in the course of 
 centuries, in that great time-measurer, the starry 
 heavens. 
 
 There was found in a work, classed as one of the 
 Vedas, an astronomical statement which has served as 
 a basis for such computations. The result attained 
 was that this particular work dated from the year 1181 
 B. C. (according to another reckoning 1391 B. C). 
 Unfortunately, the belief that in this way certain data 
 are to be acquired had to vanish quickly enough. It 
 was soon found out that the Vedic statement is not 
 sufficient to afford any tenable basis for astronomical 
 computations. Thus it remains that for the times of 
 the Vedas there is no fixed chronological date. And to 
 any one who knows of what things the Hindu au- 
 thors were wont. to speak, and of what not, it will be 
 tolerably certain, that even the richest and most unex- 
 pected discoveries of new texts, though they may 
 vastly extend our knowledge in other respects, will in 
 this respect make no changes whatever. 
 
 There are two great events in the history of India 
 with which this darkness begins to be dispelled — the 
 one approximately, and the other accurately, referable 
 to an ascertainable point of time. These are the ad- 
 vent of Buddha and the contact of the Hindus with 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 39 
 
 the Greeks under Alexander the Great and his succes- 
 sors. 
 
 That it was the old Buddhistic communities in In- 
 dia that first began the work of gathering up the con- 
 nected traditions within historical memory, seems 
 certain. At least this corresponds with the apparent 
 and accepted course of events. To Vedic and Brah- 
 manical philosophy all earthly fortunes were abso- 
 lutely worthless — a vanity of vanities; and over 
 against them stood the significant stillness of the Eter- 
 nal, undisturbed by any change. But for the follow- 
 ers of Buddha, there was a point at which this Eternal 
 entered the world of temporal things, and thus there 
 was for them a piece of history which maintained its 
 place beside or rather directly within their religious 
 teachings. This was the history of the advent of 
 Buddha and the life of the communities founded by 
 him. 
 
 There is a firm recollection of the assemblies in 
 which the most honored and learned leaders of the 
 communities, and great bands of monks coming to- 
 gether from far and wide, determined weighty points 
 of doctrine and ritual. The kings under whom 
 these councils were held are named, and the prede- 
 cessors of these kings are mentioned even as far 
 back as the pious King Bimbisara, the contemporary 
 and zealous protector of Buddha. Of the series of 
 kings which in this way have been fixed by the chron- 
 icles of the Buddhistic order, two figures are espe- 
 cially prominent — Tscha7idragupta (J. e., the one pro- 
 tected by the Moon) and his grandson Asoka (the 
 Painless). Tschandi'agupta is a personality well known 
 to Greek and Roman historians. They call him Sa7i- 
 drokyptos, and relate that after the death of Alexander 
 
40 
 
 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 the Great (in the year 323 B. C), he successfully op- 
 posed the power of the Greeks on their invasion into 
 India, and lifted himself from a humble position to 
 that of ruler of a wide kingdom. Asoka, on the other 
 hand, is not mentioned by the Greeks; but in one of 
 his inscriptions — by him were made the oldest inscrip- 
 tions discovered in India, and these have been found 
 on walls and pillars in the most distant parts of the 
 peninsula — he himself speaks of Antijoka, king of the 
 lona (lonians, /. e., Greeks), Antikina, Alikasandara, 
 and other Greek monarchs.* 
 
 Here at last a place is reached where the his- 
 torical investigator of India reaches firm ground. 
 Events whose years and centuries — as though they 
 occurred on another planet — are not commensurable 
 with those of the earth, meet at this point with spheres 
 of events which we know and are able to measure. If 
 we reckon back from the fixed dates of Tschandra- 
 gupta and Asoka to Buddha — and we have no grounds 
 for regarding the statements of time which we find re- 
 specting Buddhistic chronology as not at least ap- 
 proximately correct — we find the year of the great 
 teacher's death to be about 480 B. C. His work there- 
 fore falls in the time at which the Greeks fought their 
 battles for freedom from Persian rule, and the funda- 
 mental lines of a republican constitution were drawn 
 in Rome. 
 
 Buddha's life, however, marks the extreme limit at 
 which v/e may find even approximate dates. Beyond 
 this, through the long centuries which must have 
 
 * Antijoka is Antiochas Theos; Antikina, Antigonos Gonatos; Alikasandara, 
 of course, not Alexander the Great, but Alexander of Epirus, son of Pyr- 
 rhus, the enemy of the Romans. All these princes reigned about the middle 
 of the third century B. C. Of Alexander the Great in India no traces have 
 been found, with the exception of a coin which bears his picture and his name. 
 
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 41 
 
 elapsed from the beginning of the Rig Veda epoch to 
 that of Buddha, the question still remains: What was 
 the succession of events — the few events of which we 
 may speak? What the order in which the great strata 
 of literary remains were formed ? We observe the re- 
 lation which one text bears to the others which appear 
 to have previously existed; we follow the gradual 
 changes which the language has suffered, the blotting 
 out of old words and forms and the appearance of new 
 ones; we count the long and short syllables of the 
 verses so as to learn the imperceptible but strictly reg- 
 ular course by which their rhythms have been freed 
 from old laws of construction and subjected to new 
 forms; moving in a parallel direction with these lin- 
 guistic and metrical changes we note the changes of 
 religious ideas, and of the contents as well as the ex- 
 ternal forms of intellectual and spiritual life. Thus we 
 learn in the chaos of this literature ever more surely to 
 distinguish the old from the new, and understand the 
 course of development which has run through both. 
 
 Many a path, it is true, in which research hoped 
 to press forward, has been shown to be delusive 
 and worthless ; problems have had to be given up, 
 changed, and presented in different forms. But in its 
 last results the work has not been in vain. For, in 
 respect to the Veda in particular, and the antiquities 
 of India in general, we have learned to recognize the 
 principal directions in which the tendencies of histor- 
 ical growth are to be traced. 
 
 From the second century of Hindu research we can 
 scarcely expect discoveries similar to those which the 
 first has brought: such a sudden uprising of unusual, 
 broad, fruitful fields of historical knowledge. But 
 we may still hope that the future of our science will 
 
42 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 bring results of another sort no less rich — the expla- 
 nation of hitherto inexplicable phenomena, the trans- 
 formation of that which is half known into that which 
 is fully known. 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 
 
 OUT of all the rack and ruin of Indian antiquity, 
 the most momentous objects, which the investi- 
 gator can hope to render comprehensible to the modern 
 reader, are the great religions of ancient India. At 
 their head stands the religion embodied in the literature 
 of the Veda — a belief closely related to the ancient reli- 
 gions of the principal European peoples, but retaining 
 in a clearer manner than they the marks of distant pre- 
 historic stages, the traces of mighty commotions in 
 which man's religious thought and feeling laboriously 
 struggled forth from the crude confusion of primitive 
 ages to nobler and more elevated forms. The religion 
 of the Veda is in its turn replaced by the teaching 
 of Buddha, — the one, the sternly practical religion 
 of conquering shepherd-chieftains and their priests, 
 the other, the world-renouncing doctrine of salvation- 
 seeking monks. Far-reaching analogies interweave the 
 ideals, for which the followers of the Shakya's son for- 
 sook their homes for a life of wandering, with thoughts 
 evolved in the Western world, especially in Greece. It 
 seems practicable to reduce this development of the 
 religious nature, proceeding as it did in parallel direc- 
 tions among peoples so widely separated, to a single 
 general formula, that would set forth the agreement of 
 the various powerful impulses working among them. 
 
44 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 It will, I trust, be permitted a fellow worker in the 
 exploration of these domains, to describe and to ap- 
 praise the value of the attempts which science has 
 made, and is yet making, to interpret these primeval 
 monuments of human searching, longing, hoping, and 
 to assign to them their proper place in history. But 
 dare he make the attempt to conjure forth the figures 
 themselves of that prehistoric world, those rare ones 
 of silver, and with them the more numerous throng of 
 inferior metal : can he succeed in fixing them, even 
 though he leave the outlines somewhat doubtful and 
 obscure ? 
 
 The gods and myths of earliest India became ac- 
 cessible to research when the latter possessed itself of 
 the Rig- Veda, a collection of more than a thousand 
 hymns — the great majority of them sacrificial hymns. 
 I have described in the introductory essay of this 
 volume, how the knowledge of the Rig-Veda was ac- 
 quired, and how by hard but rapid philological work 
 its obscurities were surely and steadily overcome. A 
 feeling of awe was involuntarily felt on reading those 
 poems, the antiquity of whose language loomed far 
 beyond the old Sanskrit of even the law-book of Manu, 
 or of the great Indian epics. A sensation, as of being 
 led back into the deepest past of our own Teutonic an- 
 cestors, as of catching faint traces of their heart-beats 
 in the first dawn of their antiquity, was quite generally 
 felt, as those gods of a blood-related people arose be- 
 fore us ; Agni, fire, the genial guest of human habita- 
 tions ; Indra, the thundering dragon-slayer, who uses 
 his boundless strength to free the waters from their 
 prison j Varuna, in whom it was believed the all-em- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 45 
 
 bracing heavens were personified, the observer and 
 avenger of even the most hidden sins ; Ushas, the 
 lovely morning-blush, the dawn, who usurps the sway 
 of her sister, the night, and, with a herd of ruddy 
 cattle in her train traverses the firmament over, lavish- 
 ing benefits and blessings. 
 
 It so happened, in the progress of science, that the 
 first glances, which fell upon these apparitions of the 
 gods, starting up thus suddenly from the midst of a 
 desolated field, were the glances of comparative phi- 
 lologists : the same savants, who, leaping from one 
 triumph to another, were at that very time engrossed 
 with the work of illuminating the Greek, Latin, and 
 Germanic inflexions with the light coming from the 
 Sanskrit. What could be more natural than that those 
 investigators should apply to mythology the same crit- 
 ical method of comparison which had borne such rich 
 and abundant fruits in Grammar? that they should 
 seek to establish between the divinities of the Veda 
 and those of ancient Europe the same kinship, the 
 same identity of origin, as existed between certain 
 forms of Indian and Greek verbs, for example between 
 the Indian daddmi and the Greek didomi, both of which 
 mean *'I give''? And so, there grew up — one might 
 say, as a branch of comparative philology — a compar- 
 ative mythology, which uniformly placed the philolo- 
 gical points of view foremost ; and which placed spe- 
 cial reliance upon the names of the divinities or de- 
 mons, and then sought to estabhsh their primal na- 
 tures by means of an etymological treatment of these 
 names. 
 
 In the pursuit of this course, as between the Veda 
 and the European traditions, the leading part fell nat- 
 urally enough to the former. For the Veda had the 
 
46 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 benefit of all that prestige which the Sanskrit then 
 enjo5^ed in philological matters, of being the chief est 
 witness as to what was the first form and the first 
 meaning of words. Why the word daughter should be 
 thy gat er in Greek and Tochter in German, neither the 
 Greek nor the German language could explain. But 
 the Sanskrit did seem able to explain it. The history 
 of the Sanskrit word for daughter seemed written on 
 its very front. Since this word fell under the root duh 
 (to milk), it seemed obvious that the daughter was 
 originally the milker — a domestic idyl from remotest 
 antiquity. And at length there was a sort of conviction, 
 trailing at the hand of an etymology dominated by the 
 Sanskrit, that we could, to repeat an expression of 
 Max Miiller's, reach back into regions of the past so 
 far as to believe ourselves listening to the very voices 
 of the earth-born sons of Manu, 
 
 It was in fact unavoidable, that this scientific art, 
 whilst pursuing its labors with such ardor, such rich 
 hopes, such confidence, should at the same time ex- 
 perience within itself the calling and the capacity, to 
 expound, with the help of a catalogue of Sanskrit 
 roots, the primal meaning of the hitherto mysterious 
 divinities of Homer, of ancient Italy, and of the Edda. 
 And it must be admitted, too, that a few of these com- 
 parisons and elaborations of the names of the old di- 
 vinities really forced themselves upon the mind with 
 overpowering conviction, and remain at this day as 
 convincing as they were then. 
 
 But with the attempt to press on beyond this very 
 scanty store, an approach was ever more closely made 
 to a procedure the subjective character of which seri- 
 ously endangered the security of the results already 
 acquired. From the endless wealth of mythological 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 47 
 
 names, of which the Veda is literally full, the sharp 
 scent of the investigators hunted out and brought to 
 Hght here and there a word, which, while it may have 
 had some small resemblance to a Greek name, still 
 occurred but rarely in the Vedic tradition. Or if there 
 were no proper noun for the divinity to be found in 
 the Vedic, they would fasten upon a mere adjective. 
 Or, indeed, instead of a word actually transmitted in 
 the Veda, they would now and then upon their own 
 responsibiHty build up a Vedic word as a counterpart 
 to the name of a Greek divinity. 
 
 Thus, in a very obscure verse of the Rig-Veda there 
 appears a goddess, a female demon, Saranjus, of whose 
 nature the Veda reveals next to nothing at all ; it was 
 thought that the primitive* form of the Greek Erinys 
 had been found. The name Saranjus, according to its 
 derivation from a root sar (to hurry), seems to mean 
 '^the hurrying one"; and the view was accordingly 
 adopted, that she was the personification of the stormy 
 thunder-cloud. And when the Greeks speak of Erinys 
 as "walking in the mist," of her swinging torches in 
 her hands, immediately plain confirmation was therein 
 discerned for the proposition that the Erinyes, too, 
 sprang from the conception of the thunder-cloud ; their 
 torches are the thunder-bolts which strike down the 
 impious. 
 
 The Rig-Veda speaks of a goddess Sarama, a dog, 
 
 *Not "primitive" in the sense that the Greek goddess was derived from 
 the Indian, but in the sense that the Indo-European prototype, common alike 
 to the Greek and the Indian form, in all essential respects was correctly 
 represented in the Indian form. To properly appreciate the equating of the 
 names Saranjus and Erinys (so, too, that of Saramejas=Hermeias [Hermes]), 
 it is to be observed that the initial S of Indo-European words, which was re- 
 tained in Sanskrit (as also in the Latin and Teutonic), became in the Greek, 
 when followed by a vowel, either a mere aspirate or disappeared altogether ; 
 thus our seven (Latin, se^tem) in Greek is written hej>fa. 
 
48 ANCIENT INDIA, 
 
 who tracks the ruddy cows of the gods to their con- 
 cealment when stolen ; her sons, who also have canine 
 shapes and appear to play the part of genii of sleep 
 and death, are named after their mother Saramejas. 
 It was thought that the Greek Her7nes and Hermeias 
 had been discovered here, the guide of souls into the 
 realm of death, the dream-sending god of sleep. And 
 here again the same root sar (to hurry) seemed to con- 
 duct the mythological interpreter into the realm of the 
 agitated atmosphere, just as in the case of Erinys. 
 Sarania, "the hurrying one," was explained as the 
 wind ; to the fleetness of the wind the dog-form of the 
 goddess and her children seemed to correspond, in the 
 natural symbolism of the myth. 
 
 But the wind is not the only thing in nature which 
 moves hurriedly. And hence other interpretations 
 were possible. Sarania, who recovers the treasure of 
 ruddy cows lost in the darkness, could she not mean 
 the morning-blush, the dawn? And does not her name 
 appear to resemble the name of Helena? In that case, 
 the story of the Iliad is found again in one of the stand- 
 ing themes of the Veda-hymns ; the siege of Troy 
 would be but a repetition of the daily siege by the 
 martial forces of the sun, of the entrenchments of 
 night, where th« treasures of light are locked up. 
 
 Besides Helen, there appeared in the Greek a 
 whole list of goddesses representing the Indian morn- 
 ing, the foremost of which was disclosed in the Vedic 
 title of the dawn, Ahana. Here, it was thought, lay 
 the germ from which the Greek Athene had sprung, 
 the daughter of Zeus, just as in the Veda the dawn 
 was called the daughter of Djaus, or Heaven. 
 
 In conclusion, one more of these Indo-Greek com- 
 binations may be cited : the one which of them all 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 49 
 
 perhaps fared with the best luck. A part of the an- 
 cient Indian fire-drill, namely, the stick which was 
 kept turning to ignite the wood by its friction, was 
 called pramantha. Here was revealed, so it was 
 thought, the nature of the Titan form of Prometheus. 
 The friend of mankind — who brought to them, de- 
 spite of Zeus, fire, the fountain of all art — seemed 
 here to be announced in his original character as a 
 divine "rubber of fire," who afterv\^ards brings down 
 the flame, which he has himself produced, to the earth. 
 
 It is evident that in nearly all of these combina- 
 tions one characteristic regularly recurs : the origin of 
 the divine beings, including those which appear most 
 unequivocally to represent ethical forces or influences 
 active in human culture, is traced back to the powers 
 of nature. Erinys was the dark storm-cloud before 
 she undertook the office of avenging the misdeeds of 
 men. But in the great realm of nature there were 
 two regions in which these interpretations of the mean- 
 ing of divinities and myths lingered with particular 
 predilection : the phenomena of storm and thunder on 
 the one hand, and on the other the alternation of light 
 and darkness. 
 
 At this point the leanings of investigators diverged. 
 The question was much discussed as to which of the 
 two classes must have produced the deepest and most 
 lasting impressions upon the soul of youthful mankind, 
 — those extraordinary, and, as it were, convulsive com- 
 motions which agitate the atmosphere, or the calm 
 majesty of the divine powers of light, daily recurring 
 with uniform grandeur. 
 
 Adalbert Kuhn was the first among those investi- 
 gators who peopled the mythological landscape with 
 storm-gods, cloud-nymphs, and demons of lightning. 
 
50 ANCIENT INDIA, 
 
 He believed that the language of many myths was to 
 be interpreted as descriptions of meteorological phe- 
 nomena, the details of which — the various motions 
 of rising, departing, scattering dark clouds, and of 
 brighter little clouds — seemed to have been seized 
 and expatiated upon with painful exactitude through 
 whole lists of varying phases. According to Max Miil- 
 ler, on the other hand, the main theme of the Indo- 
 Germanic myths found expression in the words dawn 
 and sun. To his poetically attuned imagination the 
 ancient poets and thinkers stood revealed as daily des- 
 crying in what we call sunrise the mystery of all mys- 
 teries. The dawn was to them that unknown land 
 from whose impenetrable depths life ever newly flashes 
 forth. The dawn opens to the sun her golden gates, 
 and whilst her gates thus stand ajar, ej^es and hearts 
 yearn and struggle to peer beyond the limits of this 
 finite world ; the thought of the unending, the undy- 
 ing, the divine, awakens in the human soul. But 
 whether storm or sunrise, all concurred in the view 
 that in the Veda lay the guide which would conduct 
 us to the theogony of the Indo-European peoples, — 
 that there was here a system of religion to the last de- 
 gree primal in character, clear and transparent, all the 
 varying forms of which plainly took root in the primi- 
 tive views and expressions of man upon the powers 
 and processes of nature. As Max Miiller put it, the 
 mythological sphynx here reveals her secret ; we can 
 just barely throw a glance behind the scenes upon the 
 forces whose play, upon Greek soil, achieved that 
 splendid stage-effect, the majestic drama of the Olym- 
 pian gods. A new direction of inquiry seemed to have 
 opened to science, leading by undreamt-of paths to 
 the farthest past in the life of the human soul. 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 51 
 
 Those who first broke through these paths must 
 indeed have been possessed to an unnatural degree by 
 indifference and suspicion, had not a kind of intoxica- 
 tion overwhelmed them as they confronted this pleni- 
 tude of history, — if they had not experienced the hope 
 that in the Veda they might with one bold grasp suc- 
 ceed in seizing the origin of myths and of very religion 
 herself, zu schauen alle Wirkenskraft und Samen. 
 
 Have all these results — a lasting achievement, as 
 it was supposed — avoided the fate of annihilation? 
 
 II. 
 
 An attack upon the teachings of comparative myth- 
 ology, upon the belief in the prirriiiive character of the 
 world of Vedic gods and legends, was slowly prepar- 
 ing. It came, on the one hand, from the advances 
 made in philological investigations, which stripped 
 one supposed certainty after another of its plausible 
 glitter. It came, on the other, from a more material 
 opposition : the speculations, the criticisms, the dis- 
 coveries, of a newly sprouting but sturdy offshoot of 
 science, ethnology. 
 
 We shall inquire first how the art of manipulating 
 those philological problems deepened, upon which 
 pretty nearly everything as taught by comparative 
 mythology depended. 
 
 In the comparison of Indian words with the Greek 
 or Germanic a tendency arose to be severer, more sus- 
 picious, more deliberate. And with good reason. 
 Greater circumspection was observed in applying a 
 principle, theretofore too frequently neglected, of first 
 subjecting the word — before undertaking to draw par- 
 allels between it and words of another tongue — to a 
 thorough consideration within the domain of its own 
 
52 ANCIENT INDIA, 
 
 language, and to an examination of it in all its con- 
 nexions there, throughout the whole circle of words 
 related to it. And then, afterward, when the bound- 
 aries of the several great lingual families were crossed 
 and the attempt made to bridge over the wide clefts 
 between their respective vocabularies by means of 
 their resemblances, it was insisted upon, with a strin- 
 gency unknown to the earlier period, that a proper re- 
 gard should be paid to individual sounds and their 
 equivalent individual sounds in the kindred languages ; 
 correspondences which about this time began to be 
 reduced to laws of a more and more unerring charac- 
 ter. The mere external resemblance of words was no 
 longer worth considering — that was something subjec- 
 tive and only a subjective estimate could be passed 
 upon it. Now, the certain, unchangeable conditions 
 were known, in obedience to which the vocal sounds 
 of the parent Indo-European tongue have developed 
 into the Sanskrit or the Greek or the Teutonic. Of all 
 the comparisons made between mythological names, 
 as alluded to, only a small minority could pass an ex- 
 amination so severe, but so necessary, as was now ap- 
 plied to them. In a word, it is flatly impossible that 
 Prometheus should be the same word as the Indian 
 pramantha ; nor can Helena be the same as Sarama, 
 for the simple reason that the Greek n and the Indian 
 m are not equivalent. 
 
 And just as it resulted in these word-comparisons, 
 so too the practice, once pursued with such confidence, 
 of tracing words of different languages to roots, which 
 were taken from the capacious granary of Sanskrit 
 roots, proved more questionable in its character the 
 longer it was continued. The conviction grew that 
 instead of yielding to the dangerous temptation to 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 53 
 
 read the whole origin and history of a word, or of a 
 concept, from a few consonants, the coldest restraint 
 ought more properly to be exercised ; and that in thou- 
 sands of cases it was necessary to resignedly accept a 
 word as a fixed quantity, as the proper name of such 
 and such a mythological being, without endeavoring 
 to practise that dangerous art upon it of detecting 
 only too easily and everywhere a sunrise or a storm- 
 cloud. In a word : it grew daily more evident that an 
 endeavor had been made to learn too quickly, too 
 much from words, and that it was high time to exam- 
 ine things instead of words, to explore with greater 
 patience, less prejudice, the great concrete world of 
 religious and mythological ideas, instead of guessing 
 about them and in reliance upon doubtful etymologies 
 imposing upon them a meaning which really and at 
 bottom originated in the close atmosphere of the li- 
 brary. 
 
 But let no misunderstanding arise. It is by no 
 means my purpose to maintain that it was not a justi- 
 fiable effort on the part of investigation, to get at the 
 common inheritance from the pre-historic Indo-Euro- 
 pean ages, by a comparison of the Indian, Greek, and 
 German gods and legends, and thus, if possible, to 
 enable the ideas of the respective peoples to mutually 
 clear up and illumine both their source and their bear- 
 ing. Experience alone can tell what success is to be 
 attained in this way. But the measure of that success 
 — though by no means wholly negative — has thus far 
 justified but very modest expectations, if we consider 
 such hasty results of this period as that by which Pro- 
 metheus and pramantha were regarded equivalent. 
 
 In this direction, investigation achieved results al- 
 most as barren as its purely philological fruits were 
 
54 ANCIENT INDIA, 
 
 abundant. As to the latter, it has in the main restored 
 the paradigms of the Indo-Germanic language by the 
 comparison of Indian, Greek, Latin, Germanic, and 
 Slavic declensions and conjugations, and in the same 
 way gotten at the processes by which the parent para- 
 digms became transmuted into the paradigms of the 
 filial tongues ; and it has accomplished this with evi- 
 dences of growing confidence, since its successes all 
 the while steadily augmented in volume — and this is 
 the surest proof that the course pursued has been the 
 correct one. 
 
 The reason is manifest. The variations in forms, 
 of grammatical systems, are the product of factors re- 
 latively simple, which, for the most part, can be ex- 
 pressed in formulae of almost mathematical certainty. 
 In mythological history, on the contrary, a throng of 
 varying influences are all at once in play, so complex 
 and so involved that the glance in vain may seek to 
 comprehend them all at once. A certain group of ideas 
 at one time fades away and disappears, anon they col- 
 lect again, gather closely, and again assume a definite 
 concrete form. Elements, once widely separated, later 
 on meet and form new combinations, which, in their 
 turn, in the endeavor to assume a finished form, or to 
 maintain themselves at all, are compelled to give forth 
 new ideas, offshoots of themselves. Mental processes, 
 which are unconsciously conducted, intersect with con- 
 scious cerebrations of primitive poesy and specula- 
 tion, the motives of which frequently are far removed 
 and accessible only with great difficulty to modern 
 habits of thought. And finally external interests, too, 
 play their part : emulations of every kind, the struggle 
 for property or position, vanity, and no end of other 
 impulses of a similar character. And this chaotic con- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 55 
 
 fusion is lit up but sparsely, in spots, by the murky 
 light of tradition, and with this light, only, science has 
 to work. Between these dimly lighted spots are bound- 
 less expanses lying in deepest gloom ; so that when 
 the thread once slips from the hand of the investigator, 
 he is greatly in danger of losing himself altogether. 
 
 It is therefore easy to comprehend that the attempt 
 to bridge over the vast distance between India on the 
 one hand, and Greece or the Teutonic world on the 
 other, has infinitely poorer chances of success in things 
 pertaining to religions and legend than in the case of 
 mere inflexions. Still, when all is said, there is no 
 lack of specific instances where this comparison of 
 Indian and European divinities has succeeded in spite 
 of the difficulties presented. The twins Asvin, literally 
 '^the horsemen," those radiant young divinities, who 
 speed across the vault of heaven at early morn with 
 their fleet chariot and to the oppressed appear as de- 
 liverers from every kind of suffering, certainly corre- 
 spond — of this I am firmly convinced — to the Greek 
 Dioskuroi, as well as afford assistance in getting at the 
 nature of the Dioskuroi. Indra, the strongest of the 
 Vedic divinities, who, hurling his weapon, slays the 
 dragon and liberates the imprisoned waters, is truly 
 the same god as Thor in the Edda, the dragon-fighter, 
 the hammer-hurler.^ Both in India and in the Teutonic 
 
 INote that both in the comparison Indra=Thor, as well as in that of 
 Asvin=Dioskuroi, the names fail philologically to agree. As remarked be. 
 fore, the attempt has been made to draw a parallel between the Greek Hermes 
 and the Indian dog-divinity Sarameyas. Hermes really belongs, with greater 
 show of reason, to a classification with the Vedic god Pushan, who, like 
 Hermes, rules as protector over roads and travellers, like him is the messen- 
 ger of the gods, and acts as escort of souls into the future life, and like Hermes 
 protects herds and reveals lucky treasures. The juxtaposition of the material 
 qualities of ideas thus leads to results absolutely independent of any assis- 
 tance to be gotten from the etymological comparison of names. 
 
56 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 north the storm-god of the Indo-Europeans has pre- 
 served a uniformity of nature which is at once recog- 
 nisable. But, to repeat, the stock of such compari- 
 sons which can safely be maintained, is a very modest 
 one, and we hardly have reason to form hopes of ob- 
 taining greater successes of this sort in the future than 
 we have obtained in the past. 
 
 III. 
 
 More decisive than the reformation accomplished 
 within philology itself, the course of which we traced 
 in the last section, was the influence on Vedic research 
 of a new class of inquiries, which were far removed from 
 the domain of comparative philology and of Sanskrit, 
 and which tended to overthrow altogether the belief 
 that the Veda was the representative type of every 
 primitive religion and mythology. We refer to the 
 researches of the comparative ethnologists who were 
 now making a highly comprehensive and systematic 
 study of the elusive forms which the religious senti- 
 ment, the cult, the myth-creating phantasy of modern 
 peoples assumed in the lower and the lowest stages of 
 civilisation. 
 
 And here a discovery of the utmost import was 
 made, the honors of which belong first of all to Eng- 
 lish investigators such as Tylor and Lang, and along 
 with them to an excellent German scholar, Wilhelm 
 Mannhardt. It was found that, very much like their 
 weapons and utensils, so too the religion of the lowest 
 orders of man, the whole world over, was everywhere 
 one and the same in its essential elements. By some 
 intrinsic necessity, there is always imposed upon this 
 low state of evolution just this particular type of ideas 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 57 
 
 and customs, which is the normal one, and as such 
 may be looked for with absolute certainty. 
 
 This type of belief and cult, which is only faintly 
 idealistic, and is dominated by thoroughly harsh and 
 practical views, we shall describe at some length far- 
 ther on. At this point we have simply to remark upon 
 the evident conclusion to be drawn from these obser- 
 vations, that the ancestors, also of those peoples, which 
 we meet with in historic times as the possessors of 
 most opulent civilisations, must, in some prehistoric 
 age, however remote, have gone through just such a 
 savage period of religious and ritualistic development. 
 
 This fact established, there was at once opened to 
 scholars who did not deem it beneath them to learn 
 something from American Indians, negroes, and Aus- 
 tralians, a source of highly important data drawn di- 
 rectly from the mouths of living witnesses, by which 
 it was possible to reveal prehistoric epochs antedating 
 even the Homeric or Vedic religions, and preparatory 
 to them. Reasoning from the ideas of modern savages, 
 to the ideas obtaining in the prehistoric savage state 
 of subsequently civilised peoples, may have seemed a 
 hazardous undertaking ; but there was a sure correc- 
 tive for the procedure. It is well-known that in all 
 transitions of lower civilisations to higher, many ele- 
 ments of the old condition persist and hold over in the 
 new, and that the spirit of the new can neither destroy 
 nor assimilate them. They persist as survivals of the 
 past in the midst of altered surroundings, and are ab- 
 solutely unintelligible to people who know only the 
 tendency and ways of the new period ; they can be 
 explained only from the point of view of the time in 
 which they originated — a time when they were active 
 
58 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 principles, — a time, the tracks of which they preserve, 
 as it were, in a fossil condition. 
 
 Now if our view is correct, such survivals must be 
 found at every step in a mythology and a cult like the 
 Veda — and, we might likewise say, in the mythology 
 and cult of Homer ; they must be the special lurking- 
 places of whatever appears to be irrational, odd, self- 
 contradictory, and difficult of exposition. But, on the 
 other hand, whatever in those poems seems incompre- 
 hensible to the man of to-day must become intelligible 
 as soon as the art is acquired of looking at it from the 
 standpoint of the modern savage and with the help of 
 his peculiar logic, both of which are often totally dis- 
 tinct from ours. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the moment a search was made 
 through the ancient Indian and the related European 
 civilisations for such remains of prehistoric and an- 
 ticipatory culture, the conviction forced itself irresist- 
 ibly on scholars that the correct method had at last been 
 discovered. Problems quickly resolved themselves, 
 which theretofore dared scarcely be approached. The 
 most striking agreements were disclosed between the 
 various types of myth and cult scattered at this very 
 day over the earth among our savages and barbarians, 
 and the type of myth and cult which had lain imbedded 
 in the Veda as a mass of unintelligible facts, wholly ir- 
 reconcilable with any interpretation derived from the 
 known intellectual character of the Vedic world. 
 
 The chain of proof was thus rendered continuous 
 and conclusive. Science had succeeded (or at least 
 was steadily advancing toward success) — not by means 
 of bare grammatical speculations or the study of San- 
 skrit roots, but by inquiries which rested at every point 
 upon a basis of living fact — in showing that there was 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 59 
 
 a certain elementary state at the beginning of all civil- 
 isations and in disclosing the gray, early dawn anticipa- 
 tory of the broad daylight of their history. This was a 
 revelation, which — however gradually and modestly it 
 asserted itself — is perhaps of even farther-reaching im- 
 portance in the exploration of antiquity than those 
 brilliant exploits of the philologist's finished art which 
 has opened the way to the remote recesses of Egyptian 
 and Babylonian civilisation. 
 
 As a result of this discovery, a place was given to 
 the religion and mythology of the Veda widely differ- 
 ent from that which the enthusiasm of its earlier stu- 
 dents had sought to assign to them. The assumption 
 that the Veda revealed the secret of the elementary 
 formative processes of creed and cult, was thus shown 
 to be as far wide of the mark, as it would have been 
 to have considered the grammar of the Sanskrit, the 
 complexity of which points to an infinitely long prep- 
 aratory history, as the elemental grammar of human 
 speech. The fact is, it is not true, as the supposition 
 had been up to that time, that the myth-building phan- 
 tasy of man is revealed in its natural processes in the 
 Veda, as plainly as a clock housed in glass reveals all 
 its wheels and works. The Vedic divinities, the Vedic 
 sacrifices, are not primitive and transparent products 
 of the original creative force of religion, but for the 
 most part turn out, on close scrutinisation, to be an- 
 cient, obscure, and complex creations. 
 
 We shall next attempt a description of the age pre- 
 ceding the Vedic religion, and also of that religion 
 itself, as both appear from the point of view here 
 sketched.* 
 
 *I have given this subject a more detailed treatment in my book The Re- 
 ligion of the Veda. (1894.) 
 
6o ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The fundamental nature of the primary Indian re- 
 ligion, surviving from the very remotest antiquity and 
 rising to the surface of the Vedic times as a more or 
 less ruinous wreckage, is, as we have seen, essentially 
 that of the savage's religion. According to this, all 
 existence appears animated with spirits, whose con- 
 fused masses crowd upon each other, buzzing, flock- 
 ing, swarming along with the phantom souls of the 
 dead, and act, each according to its nature, in every 
 occurrence. If a human being fall ill, it is a spirit 
 that has taken possession of him and imposes upon 
 him his ills. The patient is cured by enticing the spirit 
 from him with magic. A spirit dwells in the flying 
 arrow. He who shoots off an arrow performs a bit of 
 magic which puts this spirit into action. The spirits 
 have sometimes human, sometimes animal form. 
 Neither form is nobler or lower than the other, for as 
 yet no distinction between the human and bestial na- 
 ture has been made. In fact, man is usually looked 
 upon as descended from the animal; the tribes of men 
 are called bears, wolves, snakes, and the individuals 
 of the animal genus after which they are thus called 
 are treated by tlie tribes as their blood-relations. 
 
 As they move hither and thither, the spirits may 
 select a domicile, abiding or temporary, in some vis- 
 ible object. A feather, or a bone, or a stone at differ- 
 ent times holds the spirit; and anon the spirit steals 
 into a human being whom it makes ill, or throws into 
 convulsions in which supernatural visions come to 
 him and in which the spirit talks through him in con- 
 fused phrases. 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 6i 
 
 And just as man at this stage of development lives 
 only for the moment, thrown unresistingly to and fro 
 by all sorts of vacillatory influences, such naturally is 
 the way of the spirits. The spirits of savages are 
 themselves savages, greedy, superstitious, easily ex- 
 citable. The man of skill, the magician, who as yet 
 occupies the place filled at a later period by the priest, 
 knows the art — first anticipatory hints of a cult — of 
 flattering the spirits ; he understands how to bar their 
 passage, to terrify them, to deceive them, to compel 
 them, to provoke them against his enemy. They are 
 washed away with water ; they are consumed by fire ; 
 even the friendly spirits, whenever they prove themselves 
 intractable, are subjected to the same sort of irreverent 
 treatment. It is apparent that this religion knows of 
 nothing possessing a majesty which at all rises above 
 the level of human life. An appreciation, an estimate 
 of differences of magnitude and of degree have not as 
 yet been formed. Animal, man, spirit, are mixed up 
 together, all more or less equal in their power and in 
 their rights. 
 
 But gradually the chaos of these ideas clarifies. 
 The great begins to separate itself from the little, the 
 noble from the base. A calmer survey of the world 
 obtains. 
 
 And so, out of all the confusion of forces working in 
 the shape of spirits, the great powers of nature more 
 and more emerge and assume the first position. Their 
 action, reaching far beyond human control into the 
 farthest regions of space, the same to-day as yesterday 
 and to-morrow as to-day, invincible to all human op- 
 position, is ever more felt to be decisive of destinies ; 
 — the more so, as the various branches of human in- 
 dustry (cattle breeding and agriculture) make improve- 
 
62 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 merit and hence intensify man's sensitiveness to the 
 favorable and unfavorable phenomena of nature. It is, 
 therefore, the normal characteristic of vast stretches 
 of historical development that the great powers of 
 nature, such as the heavens, sun, moon, storm, thun- 
 der, and with these the terrestrial element of fire and 
 the earth itself (usually first in importance in this 
 class), appear as the highes.t givers of blessings and 
 rulers of all that happens. They are superior to man 
 and are at a distance from him, as befits divinity. For 
 the embodiment of them into a living personification, 
 the more perfect form of man steadily secures the pref- 
 erence over that of the brute. It was only possible 
 to deify the torpid brute so long as man failed to feel^ 
 himself as something better than the brute. 
 
 Of course the animal figure does not disappear ab- 
 solutely and at a single blow from the midst of the 
 divinities. Subordinate divinities, standing in the 
 background and thus remaining untouched by the 
 ennobling tendencies, were allowed to retain their old 
 animal form. Or, an animal, which was once itself a 
 god, might, after the god had been exalted to the dig- 
 nity of human form, remain to the latter as a special 
 attribute, as a sort of celestial domestic animal, — as, 
 for illustration^ demons which were once of the shape 
 of horses, being raised to gods with the shape of man, 
 would thereafter appear as riding upon celestial horses. 
 Or, some part of the body of the original animal form 
 might be retained as a part of the newer human form 
 of the god ; or something emblematic of the animal be 
 af^xed externally in some way, and thus retain a trace 
 of the old conception which had been overthrown. 
 And wherever a plastic art has developed established 
 forms, as in Egypt or in Mexico, and is consequently 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 63 
 
 strongly conservative in retaining venerable traditions, 
 the animal-gods, cut in stone, may expect to maintain 
 themselves for a longer time than they could wher- 
 ever, as was the case in India in the time of the Veda, 
 they lived in the airy realm of the imagination. 
 
 In the same manner, the practice of considering 
 stone and wood as fetishes embodying the spirits, 
 while not disappearing suddenly and wholly, yet un- 
 avoidably withdraws from the foreground. The spook- 
 ish, magical conception of spirits slipping stealthily 
 from one home to another in matter of every shape 
 and kind loses ground. The figures of the divinities 
 obtain surer forms, each with peculiar outlines of its 
 own, and their dignity, at once human and super- 
 natural, is firmly established. Though far from ap- 
 proaching to that ideal of sanctity to which a later 
 age will attain ; though they are still animated by 
 egotism, passions, caprices of every sort, — yet, ac- 
 companying it all, a certain amount of constancy be- 
 comes manifest in them, and in all their doings there 
 is evident the steady growth of connected deliberation 
 and plan. Very often the tendency develops of trans- 
 fering to these divinities the role of kindly dispensers 
 of bounties, while, on the other hand, the occupation 
 of doing injury, of causing illness and harm of every 
 sort, is still allotted to inferior demons, gnomes, goblin 
 spirits, which in their essentials keep on a level with 
 sorcery of the earlier religion, and against which the 
 old arts of spell and exorcism are effective, — arts, 
 which, be it observed, are of no avail against the 
 higher power of the new great divinities. 
 
 The intercourse of man with these new gods at- 
 tunes itself to another key. He is studious to gratify 
 the immortals, powerful beings, willingly inclining 
 
64 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 themselves to favor, when approached with gifts. He 
 invites them to food and drink and they yield to his 
 solicitation ; not, however, with the bluster and din 
 of the spirits exorcised by the old sorcerers, but in 
 calm grandeur the invisible gods approach their ador- 
 srs. The distinctive seal, now stamped upon cult, is 
 henceforth, and for long periods of time, sacrifice and 
 prayer. 
 
 It is at this point that it becomes clear what the 
 proper position of the Vedic religious belief is. Not 
 all perhaps, but yet all the chief and dominant of the 
 Vedic divinities are based upon a personification of 
 natural forces, in forms of superhuman magnitude. 
 The dwelling-place of the most of them is the atmos- 
 phere or the heavens. The word devas (the god), 
 which the Indians had received from the Indo-Ger- 
 manic past and which is to be found among many of 
 the related branches of the family,* meant originally 
 **the heavenly one." And thus the belief, which ele- 
 vates the divinities above human kind to a heavenly 
 height, was firmly fixed and long antedates the times 
 of the Veda. 
 
 From it all, we see at the first glance that with the 
 Veda we are dealing with a stage of development which 
 must have been preceded by a long prior history. And 
 we find a confirmation for such a view, which, as was 
 explained above, might be expected in a case of this 
 kind : the types of divinities, or rather of spirits, char- 
 acteristic of more primitive stages of development, are 
 profusely apparent throughout the world of Vedic di- 
 vinities. The divinities themselves — heavenly human 
 
 ♦ Thus, Latin: divus, deus. Ancient Gallic: devo-, divo-. Lithuanian: 
 dSvas. Old Prussian: deiwas. Ancient Norse (in which, according to rules 
 of consonantalchange, t instead of ^appears): tivar, the gods 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 65 
 
 beings, exalted to a colossal magnitude, in agreement 
 with the general religious thought of the Vedic age — 
 retain numerous, not wholly obliterated, marks of their 
 ancient animal form. Demons of animal shape, like 
 "the serpent from the earth," '*the one-footed goat," 
 surround the world of man-resembling divinities, and 
 form a back-ground for them. And the gods them- 
 selves are, in certain rites,— although exceptionally, as 
 may be imagined, — represented fetish-like as embod- 
 ied in animals, sometimes too in inanimate objects. 
 A steed represents Agni, the fleet god of fire ; an ox, 
 Indra, who is strong as one. 
 
 Further, there are plain relics visible in the Veda 
 of the belief so characteristic of the savage races : the 
 behef in the blood-relationship between certain human 
 families and certain animal species. 
 
 Again, in India as elsewhere, there appear along 
 with the grand divinities, which are mainly beneficent 
 and are raised by the advance of thought to purer 
 forms, those spirits by which the savage imagines he 
 is encircled. They are those cobolds, malicious sprites, 
 spirits of illness, which we may say belong to the 
 Stone Age of religion, which are obdurate to any his- 
 torical growth, and yet are found with the same char- 
 acteristics among all peoples ; gliding about in human 
 and animal forms and misshapes— by day and by night, 
 but especially night— everywhere, but with a marked 
 partiality for cross-roads, grave-yards, and other such 
 dismal places ; stealing into man, cheating him, con- 
 fusing his mind, gnawing at his fl-ssh, sucking up his 
 blood, waylaying his women, drinking up the milk of his 
 cows. And finally, along with these spirits, and charac- 
 teristic of the same primitive notions, there appear, in 
 the belief of the Veda, the souls of the dead,— those of 
 
66 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 ancestors kindly watching over the destinies of their 
 children, — and treacherous, inimical souls : a domain 
 in which the Veda has retained in especial abundance, 
 and scarcely concealed beneath the veil spread over 
 them by its advanced ideas, the remains of a savage 
 and most crude religious life. 
 
 If we turn, now, from these survivals of a distant 
 past, to the great divinities, which are characteristic- 
 ally the figure-heads of the religion of the Veda, we 
 shall find that the stage at which the work of deifying 
 the powers of the air and of the heavens is usually ac- 
 complished, has been quite appreciably passed. While 
 these divinities, too, have sprung from early ideas of 
 nature, the roots which they there struck have with-, 
 ered or are at least touched with incipient decay ; the 
 original meaning taken from nature is either forgotten 
 or misunderstood. The mightiest of the Vedic gods, 
 Indra, was once the thunderer, who batters open the 
 cloud-cliffs with his weapon of lightning and frees the 
 torrents of rain ; — in the hymns of the Veda he has 
 faded into the very different figure of the divine herOy 
 physically strongest of the gods, the conferrer of vic- 
 tories, he who performs all the most powerful feats and 
 lavishes inexhaustible treasures. The Vedic poets do, 
 indeed, tell that legend of Indra, which was once the 
 legend of the thunder, of the slaying of the serpent 
 and the opening of the cliff; but in their recital it is 
 all distorted. The cliff, which Indra's weapon splits, 
 is no longer the cloud, but a literal terrestrial cliff ; 
 and the rivers which he releases are actual terrestrial 
 rivers. The conception of thunder has thus wholly 
 disappeared from the myth of Indra and there has 
 only remained the story that the strongest of the gods 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 67 
 
 had split a wall of rock with his marvellous weapon 
 and that the streams had poured forth from it. 
 
 The same process of fading out has befallen a num- 
 ber of other of these great natural divinities. The two 
 Asvin, the Dioskuroi of the Greeks, have lost their 
 meaning of morning and evening star. In the Vedic 
 creed their essential characteristic is that they are the 
 deliverers of the oppressed from all kinds of suffering. 
 Varuna, in his original character a lunar divinity, was 
 transformed into that of a heavenly king, the observer 
 and punisher of all sins ; and the single characteristic, 
 that he is the divine ruler of the night, alone shows 
 an obscure mark of his long-forgotten real nature. 
 
 In this way the deified forces of nature were trans- 
 muted into immortal masters, and protectors of the 
 different conditions and interests of human life. The 
 process is readily comprehended. The lively feeling 
 of owing everything good to the powers of nature, in 
 itself no mean advance upon the earlier crude concep- 
 tions, unavoidably dulls with time. The growing co- 
 hesion and order of society, the more extensive char- 
 acter of all the enterprises of peace and war at this 
 stage, allows new trains of ideas to press to the front. 
 The power of the king and war-hero now forces itself 
 upon the attention as decisive of destiny ; and accord- 
 ingly in those divinities who personified nature in the 
 forms of preternatural men, the element of nature re- 
 cedes more and more before the element derived from 
 man. The suggestion of the morning star, or of the 
 moon, pales before the stronger consciousness of being 
 under the merciful protection or the corrective power 
 of heroic and royal divine masters. 
 
 These divine lords, as they are pictured in the 
 Veda, all possess strong family resemblances. They 
 
68 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 are all very powerful, very glorious, very wise, very 
 ready in aid. They all stand out in uniformly Ti- 
 tanic stature, each one like his fellows, but poor in the 
 possession of that matchless beauty in which the Greek 
 saw his gods standing glorious before him. Zeus knits 
 his dark brows, his ambrosial locks tumble forwards, 
 and the Olympic heights tremble ; the barbaric god of 
 the Veda ''whets his horns and shakes them power- 
 fully like a bull," the same sort of expression as that 
 with which an early Chaldaic hymn, standing at about 
 the same point of evolution, says of its god, "that he 
 lifts his horns like a wild bull." As yet, religious thought 
 and feeling have not advanced the idea of divinity 
 from the point of grandeur to that of infinity, from 
 power to omnipotency, and have not in particular 
 taken the step from multiplicity to unity. 
 
 A single God is created by a history like that of the 
 Old Testament, which, in the stress of great national 
 experiences, in triumph and in defeat, so intimately 
 binds a people with the divinity that controls its des- 
 tiny, that beside it all other gods disappear. Or, a 
 single God may be created by reflexion seeking over 
 and beyond the heights and depths of existence the 
 one loftiest height or the one inmost germ of all things. 
 The former is the god of heroes and patriots ; the 
 latter the still, Calm divinity of the solitary speculator. 
 But the bards of the Veda were neither patriots nor 
 philosophers. The peace and comfortable existence 
 of ancient India, the dispassionate character of the 
 popular soul, to which a deep and intense attachment 
 to its own national existence remained unknown, were 
 but rarely disturbed by national misfortunes or pas- 
 sions such as those with which the history of Israel is 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 69 
 
 filled.* And that impulse of philosophical reflexion 
 toward unity in the confusion of phenomena is as yet 
 foreign to the age whose religious beliefs we are here 
 describing. Such an impulse does not begin to show 
 itself until the time of some of the latest poems of the 
 Rig-veda, then, however, growing in the succeeding 
 era to irresistible strength. 
 
 The same multiplicity of gods, therefore, prevails 
 in the Veda as of old — not the clean-cut result of a 
 methodical partition, so to speak, of the administra- 
 tive offices of the world's affairs among divine officials, 
 but the complex product of manifold historical pro- 
 
 *To appreciate thoroughly the difference in the whole tone of historical 
 and religious sentiment in the Veda and in the Old Testament, compare two 
 songs which in a measure occupy corresponding positions in the two litera- 
 tures—the Song of the Victory of King Suda (Rig-veda, 7, 18) and the Triumphal 
 Song of Deborah (Judges, v). Both belong to the earliest poetical monuments 
 —are possibly the oldest— of the nation from which they emanate. Both 
 glorify hardly-won victories ; the details of the two battles bear great resem- 
 blance to each other, so far as may be judged from the vacillating floods of 
 the two hymns of victory. In each a swollen stream brought destruction to 
 the foe. 
 
 But how differently does the song of the heroic-souled Jewish patriotess 
 resound from that of the Brahmanic court-priest and poet. In the former, 
 every word glows v/ith passion, with a drunken joy of victory. Every whit of 
 its energy is strained for the fight, the people staked its very soul upon the 
 issue. Jehovah marched forth and all nature joined in the combat; the 
 clouds deluged the earth with waters ; the stars in their courses contended 
 against Sisera. We see the hostile leader collapse before the shepherd wo- 
 man, who gave him milk when he asked for water, and struck him down with 
 her hammer. We see his mother gazing after him and moaning at the window 
 lattice, " Why tarry the wheels of his chariots ? " 
 
 How different is the atmosphere of the Indian poem I In the foreground 
 stands the priest, busily and successfully performing his office, 
 
 "As in pasture rich and fat the cow 
 Drips milk, so Vashtha's song dripped over thee, 
 O Indra I Master of the herds art thou, 
 All say. Incline, accept our noblest offering." 
 
 The foe fled like cattle from the pasture when they have lost their herder. 
 Indra struck them down the moment the votive offering was cast upon his 
 altar ; all the offered sweets he gave to Sudas to enjoy. What glimpse do we 
 catch here of anxiety and of the outburst of prodigious passion on the part of 
 a people battling for its existence I 
 
70 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 cesses, of a kind of ''struggle for existence" between 
 ideas, on the one hand, whose value for the religious 
 consciousness has dwindled away but which often 
 maintain themselves more or less by a sheer faculty of 
 pertinacity and those ideas which press into promi- 
 nence through being favored by the advance of intel- 
 lectual and material life. 
 
 A final very marked characteristic of these divini- 
 ties is that the phantasy of their adorers by no means 
 raised them to the highest level of moral majesty, as 
 they did to positions of the greatest power and highest 
 glory. This step of incomparable importance in the 
 evolution of religion — the association of the ideas of 
 God and good — as yet can be descried in but a few 
 faint signs, and this state most surely marks the reli-" 
 gion as still a barbaric one. At this stage, the thing 
 most essential to the needs of the devout is that the 
 God be a strong and kindly ruler, and of an easily in- 
 fluenced disposition. But how was it possible that 
 the mighty thunderer of pre-Vedic times, or the mighty 
 warrior and bestower of blessings of the Vedic reli- 
 gion, Indra, should be formed of other ethical stuff 
 than they, whose image he was, the terrestrial grands 
 seigneurs'^ The savage battles which fill his existence 
 alternate with savage adventures of love and drink. 
 Very little does he inquire into the sinfulness or recti- 
 tude of mankind ; but all the more is he desirous of 
 knowing who has slaughtered oxen on his altar and 
 brought as an offering his favorite drink, the intoxi- 
 cating soma, whose streams "pour into him as rivers 
 into the ocean," and ''fill his belly, head, and arms." 
 And it occasionally happens that he is not over par- 
 ticular about remembering the wishes which his wor- 
 shippers have preferred in their prayers, as when re- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 71 
 
 turning in the best of humor to his dwelling from a 
 sacrifice in his honor, he says : *'This is what I will 
 do, — no, that : I'll give him a cow ! — or shall it be a 
 horse ? I wonder if I have really had soma from him 
 to drink?" 
 
 Still, if one were to contemplate the picture of the 
 Vedic divinities from this position only, he would be 
 apt to falsely appreciate the manifold complexity of 
 the intermingling currents. Distinct, it may be they 
 were, originally, from the conceptions formed of the 
 gods, yet the ideas of right and wrong, the sympathy 
 naturally felt with the candid and fair man, the repu- 
 diation of tortuous treachery, dread of the chains im- 
 posed by guilt whether deliberate or unintentional, all 
 this, of course, is well known to the Vedic world, and 
 is expressed with sufficient vivacity in the Vedic poetry. 
 And why, indeed, should not this domain of human 
 interests and laws also find its rulers and representa- 
 tives among the heavenly beings as well as war, or 
 man's daily occupation, or his domestic life ? 
 
 Although, therefore, the Vedic divinities as such 
 and taken as a whole manifest no special character of 
 holiness or rectitude, properly speaking, there is among 
 them one particular divinity, Varuna, — originally a lu- 
 nar divinity, as already said, — who assumes, as pecu- 
 liarly his own, the office of caring for the mundane 
 moral order — assisted by a circle of less prominent 
 companions, who were originally, it is possible, the 
 sun and the planets. This moral order is looked upon 
 as having been originally established by Varuna, and 
 by Varuna's strong arm and sorcery it is preserved. 
 Varuna detects even the most secret transgression ; 
 his snares are set for the treacherous ; he sends forth 
 his avenging spirits ; he threatens the guilty with mis- 
 
72 
 
 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 fortune, illness, death. He suffers his forgiveness and 
 pardon to shield the penitent, who make effort to ap- 
 pease him. 
 
 In a song of the Rig-veda, a guilt-laden one, pur- 
 sued by disaster, cries: ''I commune thus with my- 
 self : When may I again approach Varuna ? What 
 offering will he deign to accept, without showing an- 
 ger ? When shall I, my soul reviving, behold again 
 his favor? Humbly, as a servant, will I make repara- 
 tion to him, merciful that he is, that I may be once 
 more blameless. To them that are thoughtless, the 
 god of the Aryans has given prudence ; wiser than the 
 knowing man, he advances them to riches." 
 
 Varuna is here called the Aryan god. The his- 
 torian, however, can hardly approve the bard's claim, 
 for I believe we can discover in the apparently Ar- 
 yan form of this god the signs of an un-Aryan deriva- 
 tion. This much at all events is certain : that faith 
 in their chief protector of the right extends backward 
 into the epoch when the ancestors of the Indians 
 still formed one people with the ancestors of the 
 Iranians, as they hesitated on the threshold of the 
 Indian peninsula. This god appears among the Indo- 
 Iranians as Varuna, among the Iranians (in the re- 
 ligion of Zoroaster) as the chief ruler of all that is 
 good, Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd. We cannot trace 
 Varuna beyond the age of the Indo-Iranians into the 
 prior time of the Indo-Europeans. Among the related 
 peoples, like the Greeks or Teutons, we find no signs 
 of him. Much, on the contrary, seems to me to agree 
 in favor of the view that the Indo-Iranians had re- 
 ceived this god from without, from the regions sub- 
 ject to Babylonian civilisation. If I am right in this 
 conjecture, is it to be looked upon as merely fortu- 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 73 
 
 itous that right at the time when the remotest Semitic 
 and pre-Semitic civilisation had fructified the rehgion 
 of the Aryans, the point lies where the figure of the 
 sin-avenging and sin-forgiving Varuna begins to sepa- 
 rate from the primeval coarseness of such bruiser and 
 tippler divinities as Indra, and to be distinguished by 
 the sublime traits of sanctity and divine mercy ? 
 
 It has been remarked that the cult devoted to di- 
 vinities, at the point of the evolution of the Veda, 
 chiefly assumes the form of the sacrifice. The gods 
 have so far grown beyond human dimensions that the 
 magic spells which could compel them at the will of 
 man, no longer appear as the proper agency with 
 which to influence them. And on the other hand, 
 they are as yet too far removed from pure spirituality 
 for a purely spiritual form of adoration. The wor- 
 shipper may and must make himself acceptable to 
 them by the simplest measures, industriously, loudly, 
 even obtrusively. Resembling man as they do, they 
 eat and drink like men. Accordingly offerings of 
 food and intoxicating drink were needful, in order 
 to fortify them and to stir them to mighty actions. 
 They had to be flattered ; they were to be addressed 
 in the most artfully agreeable style, and in the most 
 superlative expressions possible as to their grandeur 
 and their splendor. Thereupon is the proper moment 
 for the worshippers, who sit around the sacrificial cere- 
 mony "like flies about honey," to lay their desires 
 before the gods : desires which — corresponding to the 
 spirit of the age — are ever directed to the palpable 
 goods of earthly existence, — a long life, posterity, the 
 acquisition of property in horses and cattle, favorable 
 weather, triumph over all enemies. The art of prop- 
 erly performing these sacrifices and prayers is the 
 
74 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 main theme about which the whole spiritual life of 
 the poets of the Rig-veda revolves. To them the sac- 
 rifice is the embodiment of all mysteries, the symbol 
 of all the most important and profound of the phe- 
 nomena of life. "By means of sacrifices, the gods 
 offered sacrifices, — those were the first of all laws," 
 says the Rig-Veda. 
 
 The external marks of the Vedic sacrifice are so 
 far simple, that as yet all the elements are wanting to 
 it, which follow in the train of urban life and espe- 
 cially of the development of the fine arts. There are 
 no temples, no images of the divinities. The cult of 
 shepherd tribes, whose migratory manner of life has 
 not yet entirely become a fixed one, is as yet satisfied 
 with a very simple altar, — established with the same 
 facility everywhere, — the level, cleared greensward, 
 over which soft grass is strewn, about the holy fires, 
 as a resting-place for the invisible gods, who quickly 
 collect from the atmospheric regions around. 
 
 But there is no lack of artful embellishment of an- 
 other kind in the Vedic sacrifice, — or even of an over- 
 embellishment, according to Oriental custom. The 
 song of praise and prayer, delivered at the sacrifice, 
 is fashioned after the rules of an elaborate art, grow- 
 ing ever more intricate. It is overladen with obscure 
 allusions, in which theological mysticism parades its 
 acquaintance with the hidden depths and crannies of 
 things divine. To utter such a prayer and to offer up 
 such a sacrifice not every one is called or fitted whom 
 the inner impulse moves, but only the trained priest, 
 one belonging to certain families who have formed an 
 exclusive spiritual caste from time immemorial, — the 
 priest who alone is accounted equal to the perilous, 
 sacred duty of eating of the sacrificial feast, and to 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA, 75 
 
 drink of the soma, the intoxicating drink of the gods. 
 At sacrificial ceremonies of greater importance priests 
 of this kind appear in throngs, singing, reciting, and 
 performing the immense number of prescribed acts 
 with that painful, purely external nicety which is pe- 
 culiar to every cult standing at this point of historical 
 development, and the displacement of which by the 
 inner soul-life is everywhere the product of protracted 
 later evolution. 
 
 Religious ceremony of this sort is, indeed, far from 
 having attained to the "affair of conscience'' of the de- 
 vout believer — to the elevation of a force which exalts 
 and clarifies his inner life. It is — conducted on a 
 large scale and with reference to human interests as a 
 whole — simply ^hat the cult of sorcery of an earlier 
 age had been in a small way and with reference to 
 some particular human want : a practice which any 
 one, who could bear the expense, might have put into 
 motion for himself by the skilled practitioner, to en- 
 rich one's self, to prolong life, to avert sickness and 
 all harm. 
 
 But here there is repeated, in matters purely of 
 cult, the same characteristic which confronted us in 
 another connexion. Alongside of and interwoven with 
 the formations which carry the special imprint of Vedic 
 culture, everywhere and often in compact masses, 
 there are the remains of hoary constructions, traceable 
 to remoter and even to remotest times. As just re- 
 marked, it is a pecuharity of the Vedic cult of the 
 sacrifice, that it concerns itself chiefly with human in- 
 terests viewed as a whole ; but still it was an unavoid- 
 able retention, that the supernatural forces should be 
 put into action, upon occasion, for individual and par- 
 ticular situations, in behalf of want or suffering at some 
 
76 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 particular moment. It is here that the old witchcraft 
 especially retained whatever was left to it of its former 
 importance, in the Vedic age. He who wished to 
 drive away evil spirits, or the substance supposed to 
 have brought an illness, or, similarly, some guilt, had 
 recourse still, as in former ages, to fire, which con- 
 sumes the hostile thing, or to water which washes it 
 away, or he chased the spirits away with din and 
 alarms, blows and bow-shot. He who wished to pro- 
 duce rain, proceeded much like the rain-conjurer 
 among the savages of our day. He put on black robes, 
 and slew in sacrifice some black-colored beast, in or- 
 der to attract the black clouds with which it was de- 
 signed to cover the sky ; or, he threw herbs into the 
 water that the grass of his pastures might be splattered 
 by the divine waters. He who wished to prepare him- 
 self for particularly holy rites, acted just as the mod- 
 ern savage does, when he strives to transport himself 
 into the exalted state in which man may enjoy com- 
 munion with the gods. One about to perform the sac- 
 rifice of the soma, prepared himself for his holy labor, 
 clad in dark-colored skins, muttering in stuttering 
 speech, fasting until ''there is nothing left in him, 
 nothing but skin and bones, till the black pupil disap- 
 pears from his eye," maintaining his position beside 
 the magic fire which frightened away the evil demons, 
 thus producing within him the necessary condition of 
 inner fever {tapas^; a practice, which lies in the midst 
 of the Vedic ritual as an unintelligible relic of by-gone 
 ages,- but which a modern American Indian or a Zulu 
 would comprehend at once, since very similar customs 
 are familiar to him. 
 
 Thus, the religion and the cult of the Veda point 
 on the one hand to the past of the savage religion j on 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA. 77 
 
 the other hand, they point forward. We have seen 
 that the majority of the Vedic divinities had long since 
 lost their original meaning. Indra is no more the 
 thunderer ; nor Varuna the night-illuminating planet. 
 For a time the faded images of the powers, which were 
 once effective in their influence upon human faith, 
 maintain their entity by the sheer force of pertinacity 
 — similar to a movement, which, receiving no fresh 
 impulse, gradually dies away. The point will come 
 at which the motion will cease. The intellect, pressing 
 onward, recognises other forces as the effective. New 
 exigencies of the soul require to be satisfied by other 
 means than those proffered by the benevolence of In- 
 dra or Agni. 
 
BUDDHISM. 
 
 HAVING in the preceding essay sought to establish 
 the position which the earliest form of the Indian 
 religion properly occupies in the great process of the 
 evolution of religion, the task presents itself of at- 
 tempting to fix a similar historical position for a later 
 stage of the same growth, namely for ancient Bud- 
 dhism, — one of those structures in the history of re- 
 ligion, which, as a complete expression of deepest 
 content, may well be classified with the classic types 
 of human religion and human pursuit of salvation. 
 
 The prevailing mood and, even more yet, the forms 
 of mental expression in which the thought and life of 
 the mendicant Buddhist monks revolved possess an 
 almost contemporary double upon Greek soil : the cre- 
 ations of the West and the East corresponding closely 
 to each other to an astonishing degree, in matters the 
 most essential as well as in the most subordinate, even 
 to the coining of rally-words about which the religious 
 consciousness loves to concentrate, or to the drawing 
 of similes which aim to make the grand direction of 
 events in some sort palpable to the imagination, and 
 which, while apparently of inferior import, often really 
 belong to the most powerful factors of religion. 
 
BUDDHISM, 79 
 
 It is plainly no mere accident that a harmony be- 
 tween the ideas of two people, so widely separated 
 both in space and national characteristics, should be 
 so much more strongly and variously accentuated, 
 just at the period of evolution of which we are here 
 speaking, than it was before that time. The myth- 
 building imagination which holds sway during the 
 earlier periods, proceeds without aim or method upon 
 its course. It receives its impulse from chance ; acci- 
 dent combines in it capriciously materials widely di- 
 vergent in character ; as if at play, accident pours 
 into its lap, out of a copious horn, forms which are 
 sometimes of noteworthy depth and meaning, some- 
 times absurd, but which are ever changing and dis- 
 placing each other. But when reflexion, presently 
 developing into sustained and systematic investiga- 
 tion, takes a grasp of some firmness and certainty on 
 the problems of the cosmos and human existence, the 
 scope of possibilities contracts. However untrained 
 the mind may be in this age, yet the things that ap- 
 pear to it perforce as realities, go far to compel hu- 
 man ideas into a fixed and constrained course, like 
 a stream into its bed; and thus the most manifold 
 lineaments, showing remarkable resemblances to each 
 other, are similarly impressed upon analogous courses 
 of thought in widely different parts of the world, as 
 was the case with those which preoccupied the Greek 
 and Indian minds. 
 
 Being wholly without any knowledge as to the time- 
 limitations of Vedic antiquity, we can hardly attempt 
 to estimate the number of centuries lying between 
 the origin of the Rig- Veda hymns and the rise of Bud- 
 dha, the founder of the Buddhistic monastic order. 
 But we have sufficient reason to fix the latter event as 
 
8o ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 having taken place in the latter half of the sixth cen- 
 tury before Christ. The religious movements which 
 prepared the way for it and created a sort of Bud- 
 dhistic atmosphere before the appearance of Buddha, 
 must certainly have occupied a length of time which 
 is to be measured by centuries. So much is certain 
 that great historical changes occurred in India be- 
 tween the age of the bards who sang at the Vedic 
 altars, and that of the Buddhistic monastic thinkers. 
 The tribes who had originally settled as shepherds in 
 the northwest corner of the peninsula, and who were 
 still close to the gates by which they had shortly be- 
 fore entered India, had in the meantime penetrated 
 still farther. Having taken possession of a broad do- 
 main stretching down the Ganges, the period of mi-> 
 gration and of conquest over the obscure aborigines 
 is over. Cities have long since risen in the midst of 
 the villages in which had lived the herd owners of the 
 older time, — some of them were great municipalities, 
 seats of all the commotion and activity of splendid 
 despotic Oriental courts, where commerce and manu- 
 factures are highly developed, where life receives zest 
 from a voluptuously refined luxury, and where have be- 
 come established sharp social differentiations of rich 
 and poor, master and slave. The conditions have 
 thus been prepared, where, abandoning gradually the 
 careless and aimless existence, for the day as it were, 
 of the earlier period, the human mind of the new pe- 
 riod now becomes maturer and more thoughtful, may 
 begin to weave a connected fabric of reflexions upon 
 the import, the end, and the value of human existence. 
 Accordingly, in India, very similarly and at almost 
 the same time as in Greece, edifices of spiritual thought 
 and doctrine arise which soar to a height far above 
 
BUDDHISM. 8 1 
 
 the ancient structures. And they can, indeed, be de- 
 scribed, almost with completeness and in detail, with- 
 out feeling the necessity of intermingling any distinc- 
 tively Indian or Greek characteristics in the descrip- 
 tion ; so much is the type developed by the one people 
 like that developed by the other. 
 
 To the devout worshipper of the former age, com- 
 muning with his god by means of sacrifice and prayer, 
 the knowledge of his god and of the art by which the 
 god's favor may be secured, does not appear as some- 
 thing self-achieved or self-created, or indeed created 
 by any person. Rather, it is an intuition, the presence 
 of which is a simple fact, and the possession of which 
 by one's self as well as by every other rational being 
 is a matter of course. But a change takes place. The 
 intellect, as it proceeds in its experience of the toil and 
 the pleasure of personal search, learns to know the 
 elation of finding, the pride felt in knowledge which 
 has been personally achieved and wrested from re- 
 ality after many long and painful struggles. A man 
 enjoys the final triumph of his vision, the keenness of 
 which he has himself trained, and which is able to 
 penetrate to the centre of things, differently from the 
 masses, common-place beings, who stop at the surface 
 of things. Among them he feels himself like one who 
 can see among the blind. 
 
 Evidently enough, those possessed of such a vision 
 are not sufficiently numerous to compose more than 
 small knots of thinkers made up of the serious kind, of 
 those whose sentiments are of the more delicate or re- 
 fined sort, of those who cultivate their inner life with 
 more than ordinary zeal. In the bosom of these 61ite 
 bands, embodying their spiritual acquisitions to the 
 greatest degree of perfection, there can or must be 
 
82 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 certain particular individuals, dominating personal- 
 ities, who, however, can be the leading spirits that 
 they are only because they express with the greatest 
 energy in their own persons the same life and action 
 that animates their companions. 
 
 Thus, in sharp contrast with the great mass of the 
 unenlightened, there is developed the type of half- 
 heroic, half-philosophic heroes or virtuosi. A concep- 
 tion of this sort is hardly conceivable in a time like 
 that of the Veda, or of Homer. True, he who had 
 distinguished himself as a fine bard, or as an expert 
 sacrificer, or as an adept and successful priest and 
 sorcerer, may have had his honors in that age, too. But 
 he was always nothing more than the type of a genus, ^ 
 prominent expert in the use of the tools of the religious 
 trade which had representatives everywhere. But the 
 men whom we are now looking at are something very 
 different. They were, or so appeared to be, persons 
 who possessed a distinctive stamp of their own ; they 
 were sublime pathfinders, pioneers, not to be com- 
 pared with other mortals, steeped in the powers of a 
 peculiar mystical completeness and perfection. 
 
 It is a part of the essential character of such men 
 that they are conceivable to the creed of their follow- 
 ers only in the singular. The name of such a single 
 individual is needed as a rally-cry around which the co- 
 endeavorers can unite ; and if such a personage never 
 actually existed, recourse is had to the dim recesses 
 of the mythical past for one of the obscurely grandiose 
 names of that misty world, and around it are concen- 
 trated their spiritual possessions in which men find 
 such great bliss and often consolation. 
 
 Whilst the personal position of the devotee with 
 reference to his religious belief is thus undergoing 
 
BUDDHISM. 83 
 
 modification and becoming a very different one, the 
 matter and content of the beHef, too, is at the same 
 time assuming a new aspect. 
 
 Those supernatural giants, who were the gods of 
 the older age, now cease to govern the world accord- 
 ing to human-like caprices. The government is trans- 
 ferred to pov/ers of another kind, which, although they 
 were well-known ere this, in a primitive form, to the 
 intellect, leave the low, contracted sphere of super- 
 stition and advance to the heights of thought, which 
 afford a wider vision : — forces and substances which 
 are put in action by the mechanism of an impersonal 
 necessity, their action bemg the kernel of the cosmic 
 process itself. 
 
 These forces and substances are, of course, very 
 different, indeed, from those which modern learning 
 recognises as the recondite fundamental factors of be- 
 ing and happening. As the products of an analysis, 
 which has still to learn the task of being thorough, 
 they are rather the most prominent and first notice- 
 able of the light and shadow masses of the universe, 
 natural laws and im.pulses which most frequently press 
 upon his attention. Thus, the physical elements like 
 water and fire, members which exert so much attrac- 
 tive force upon the intellect in the youthful period of 
 the human mind, the great impulses of love and hatred, 
 the fluctuation of happening (becoming) and being 
 with its immutable calm. Substances and forces, of 
 which the importance varies with place and people, 
 but which, taken as a whole, have everywhere the 
 same appearance, and therefore belong properly to 
 the same category of reflexions upon the world and its 
 course. 
 
 The human soul is the special object to which this 
 
84 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 incipient rumination now more and more directs itself. 
 To those ages of spiritual childhood, wholly preoccu- 
 pied with phenomena, the outer world, follows the pe- 
 riod of youth, which gradually becomes introspective, 
 with all the earnestness of youth, all its sense of honor, 
 its heaving bosom panting with the thirst after bound- 
 less ideals. The ego is subjected to investigation to 
 see if the secret cannot be found in it for the attain- 
 ment of those ideals. There is a growing desire to 
 find a clue for the labyrinth of the phenomena of the 
 soul. Efforts are made to dissect its parts or forces; 
 to comprehend the influences mutually exerted by 
 them upon each other; to observe the entrance and 
 cessation of the soul's various functions. 
 
 Of foremost importance in these new lines of 
 thought is the idea of the migration of the soul. True, 
 this idea does not suddenly step forth, full-grown and 
 matured, now for the first time. The beginnings of 
 the doctrine appear everywhere to be traceable to the 
 dawn of religion ; that the soul of the deceased can 
 make its dwelling-place, temporarily or permanently, 
 in animals, plants, or in other things of every sort, is 
 a belief spread over the whole world among peoples 
 of low civilisation. 
 
 It was reserved for the subtler refinement of the 
 age we are now speaking of, however, to impress with 
 the strongest kind of emphasis the additional idea 
 upon this doctrine, of its continuation through endless 
 stretches of futurity, the horror of eternal futility, in- 
 exhaustible endurance. 
 
 The hitherside of life, which had circumscribed 
 almost all the hopes and desires of the ancients, now 
 appears petty and meaningless, being contrasted with 
 the vast spaces beyond ; the terrestrial life becomes a 
 
BUDDHISM. 85 
 
 mere place of preparation. Whatever of good one 
 has performed here below, whatever of sin committed, 
 will redound to him over there, perhaps infinitely 
 magnified, — as reward or punishment. 
 
 In the literature of an age working on this idea, 
 the type of voyages to the nether world and hell, plays 
 a prominent part : not the mere tales of story-tellers 
 as in the time of the Odyssey, but writings animated 
 with the purpose of picturing vividly to the senses the 
 awfulness and the inexorability of the punishment to 
 be surely expected in the hereafter for even small 
 transgressions. Throughout is dominant an austere, 
 even anxious solicitude, to preserve the personal ego 
 from contamination, even the most trifling, in order 
 to secure for it a completeness and perfection which 
 will impart confidence and hope to it while upon the 
 dark journey of the hereafter. But the chief good, 
 which belongs to such a complete perfection, — the 
 objective point to which those journeys tend, — is the 
 final release from the soul's migration, the exaltation 
 of self over all finite rewards and punishments, the 
 entrance of the soul into the world of things eternal. 
 It is part of the character of the age here portrayed 
 — that which we have called the spiritual youth of 
 man — that it can recognise as its objective point only 
 an absolute one, — one embracing within itself the ab- 
 solute perfection. As soon as the intellect grows fond 
 of absorbing itself in the antitheses of the transitory 
 and the eternal, of happening and being, it is unavoid- 
 able that the destiny of everything incomplete, imper- 
 fected, should appear to be swept along in the stream 
 of the incessant process of becoming and passing 
 away. But in the existence of the perfect, all move- 
 ment in the sense of change, which necessarily cleaves 
 
86 ANCIENT INDIA, 
 
 to the concept of the unattained goal or summit, must 
 have ended; and the dwelHng-place of the perfect 
 must lie in some sphere which spreads over and above 
 the inappeasable unrest of the imperfect. 
 
 But who is it that may attain to this highest goal ? 
 The answer might be and was given: *'He v/ho had 
 been purified by special consecrations, by the observ- 
 ance of special mysterious regulations, and even by 
 the precepts of sorcery." But in this age, everything 
 necessarily led to a new turn of belief. Mention has 
 been made of how, in those contracted circles where 
 the thoughts just laid down were cultivated, the think- 
 er's self-appreciation and seriousness induced a grow- 
 ing consciousness of his differentiation from and su- 
 periority to those who were without the pale, the 
 thoughtless, the blind. That world of eternal things 
 is intelligible only to the thinker. And the thinker 
 alone, therefore, may participate therein. True, the 
 motive, dating from a far remoter time, which was 
 allowed to the good man, — even the commonplace 
 member of society, so long as he is good, — that of the 
 hope of reward in the hereafter, has not lost all of its 
 old effectiveness. But it is subordinate to the more 
 powerful motive, that the chief and incomparable sal- 
 vation in a world, of which but the few have knowl- 
 edge, can accrue, not to the poor in spirit, but only 
 to those elect few, the thinkers, whose whole life is 
 directed to the one pursuit of shaking off terrestrial 
 imperfections, and of thus achieving a citizenship in 
 the empire of things eternal. 
 
 There is necessarily much of the local color want- 
 ing to our portrayel of these views, — much of all the 
 concrete reality. For the purpose has been to trace 
 the general outline of a particular stage of religious 
 
BUDDHISM. 87 
 
 evolution common alike to India and Greece. This 
 general abstract assumed concrete shape in India in 
 Buddhism and its kindred forms ; in Greece in a 
 m.ovement first manifest under the cloak of the an- 
 cient mysteries, presently struggling again and again 
 toward precision and clearness of thought, as the re- 
 flective mind strives to tear the veils which obstruct 
 its vision, only to fall back as often into the former 
 twilight of mysteries again, — all the forms of this 
 movement, however, breathing forth the same spirit, 
 the wishing one's self out of this transitory world into 
 the eternal world.* 
 
 Here, prominently, the mysteries of Orpheus pre- 
 sent themselves to notice : that mysterious doctrine 
 and cult of sects concentrating about the much-fabled 
 name of the bard of Thrace. Dating, as it appears, 
 from the sixth century before Christ, and cultivated 
 at Athens, and many other places, especially in the 
 Greek colonies of Lower Italy, this doctrine and cult 
 sought to prepare its devotees, as "The Pure," for 
 the future glory by ceremonies of consecration, sacred 
 teaching, and the holy orders of the "Orphean Life.*' 
 Our knowledge of the peculiar ideas of this cult is 
 very limited. But whoever approaches the little which 
 has been preserved, with the dogmas and the poetry 
 of the Indian mendicant monks in mind, will often be 
 surprised, at coming upon what seems a bit of Bud- 
 dhism in the midst of Greek civilisation. 
 
 Alongside of the Orphean mysteries, and closely 
 related to them, stands the sect of Pythagoreans, es- 
 tablished by and named after a man whose powerful, 
 
 *The chief features of this movement have lately been portrayed with as 
 much sage penetration, as fine restoration of the sentiment, by E. Rohde, 
 Psyche (1893), p. 395 ff. At many points, what here follows is an acceptance o£ 
 his views. 
 
88 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 deeply forceful personality shines through the mist of 
 a meagre legendary tradition with astonishing clear- 
 ness. Whilst the best-known characteristic of the 
 Pythagorean speculations is the attempt to discover 
 in numbers the most secret and essential kernel of all 
 things, yet our attention here is chiefly to be directed 
 to the efforts of these closely confederated companions 
 to liberate the soul of its imprisonment (for as such 
 they looked upon corporeal existence), and from the 
 bonds of the soul's migration. 
 
 We cannot attempt here to follow the current of 
 these religious-philosophical speculations in the Greece 
 of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C, through all its 
 various ramifications. It is, however, to be mentioned 
 that the influence of the Orphean and Pythagorean 
 ideas continues, clearly recognisable, up to the very 
 acme of all Greek thought, up to Plato's time. Plato's 
 conceptions as to the chief aims of human existence 
 stand in closest contact with those of his mystic pred- 
 ecessors. True, it is with a strength of which the 
 latter fall far short, that his intellect attempts to break 
 the shackles of creed and imagination, and to gain the 
 conquest of a complete scientific certainty. But quickly 
 enough — soonest of all in the problems of the human 
 soul and its future destiny — he, too, finds that he has 
 gotten to the boundary-lines of those regions, the en- 
 trance to which is barred to even the philosopher's 
 cognition and proof. 
 
 It is Plato's fashion not to stop for such a reason. 
 When the dialectician halts, the poet begins to speak: 
 and in pictures of profound beauty, the poesy of Plato 
 unrolls its grand views of the hereafter, the subterran- 
 ean realm of the shades, and the realm of light and 
 eternal ideas. He is accustomed to fortify himself by 
 
BUDDHISM. 89 
 
 an appeal to what he has heard ^'from men and wo- 
 men who are wise in things divine"; what Pindar and 
 many other of the poets, '*such of them as are in- 
 spired," have uttered; but it is especially the Orphe- 
 ans from whose dark wisdom he loves on such occa- 
 sions to draw half-mantled and half-revealed matter, 
 images from the same realm, intermediate between 
 thought and invention, in the twilight of which the 
 creations of Buddhism, too, have their being. 
 
 We shall next throw a glance at the chief features 
 of both the Indian and the Greek chains of thought, in 
 which embodiments of the type just described in the 
 history of religion may be recognised. The close re- 
 lationship between the two sets of ideas will be con- 
 firmed throughout. 
 
 II. 
 
 In both Greece and India, societies of devotees 
 were formed. They gave themselves a name which 
 served to remind them of their real or supposed 
 founder, from Orpheus or Pythagoras, just as the 
 '^monk-disciples of the son of the Shakya" did. In 
 close communion with each other, and separated from 
 the masses without, they strive after a salvation which 
 they hope to attain upon the strength of their own 
 particular doctrine and their own particular intellec- 
 tual and spiritual discipline. 
 
 True, — as one of the more recent historians of these 
 Greek developments has already observed, — the seg- 
 regation of these sectaries from the world was of a 
 much milder character in Greece than in India, cor- 
 responding to the differences in the national charac- 
 ters. Among the Buddhists the religious idea takes 
 
go ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 possession of the whole Hfe of devotees, with unlim- 
 ited force and austerity. It destroys their mundane 
 existence, with a logical consistency as thoroughly 
 merciless as ever any idea has destroyed man's en- 
 joyment of temporal life. 
 
 In the sacred legend, the royal scion, who after- 
 wards becomes the Buddha, thirsting for the life spi- 
 ritual, flees at night from his palace, where, recum- 
 bent upon a flower-strewn couch, his young wife lies 
 slumbering, a young mother, beside her their first and 
 newly born son whom the father has not yet beheld. 
 
 Possibly without any credibility in the ordinary 
 historical sense, this legend nevertheless possesses a 
 complete intrinsic veracity. The Buddhist, being 
 most deeply agitated by his craving for redemption, 
 abandons home and wealth, wife and child : they are 
 bonds chaining him down to earthly life. He wanders 
 from place to place, a homeless beggar. 
 
 In Greece, there is greater moderation. True, the 
 communities searching for redemption, in Greece too, 
 consider the present world as a place of uncleanness, 
 of imprisonment ; but there is no very great serious- 
 ness in their efforts to escape from this thraldom. 
 Outwardly they continue to observe the duties and 
 enjoy the pleasures of every-day life, and are satisfied 
 with the practice of securing inwardly a release from 
 the limitations of such a life by the secret power of 
 the mystic doctrine and the mystic cult. 
 
 Whatever the peculiarities of the different sets of 
 ideas evolved by these pious communities, the one 
 feature is common to them all : this world appears to 
 all of them as a gloomy domain of dissension and suf- 
 fering. The symbolism of the Orpheans has it that 
 Dionysus, the divinity, is torn to pieces by Titans: 
 
BUDDHISM. 91 
 
 the blessed unity of all Being undergoes the evil fate 
 of disintegration. 
 
 Another Greek conception, of the sixth century B. 
 C, discerns in the material existence of things a guilt ; 
 all heavens and all worlds, issuing from unity and in- 
 finity, having become guilty of wrong, must pay the 
 penalty and do penance therefor, resolving themselves 
 again into the components from which they original^ 
 came into being. 
 
 One noticeable trait is introduced into the appraisal 
 of this existence by speculations which are traceable 
 first of all to the great obscure Ephesian, Heraclitus. 
 ''All things are in flux," — all being is a continuous 
 change, self-mutation. ''Into the same stream we 
 step and yet do not step ; we are and are not." This 
 restless flux of becoming and passing away again is 
 also characteristic of the human soul, which essenti- 
 ally is identical with the least corporeal of the ele- 
 ments, fire. As the existence of flame is a. continuing 
 death and re-generation, so the soul lives in the cease- 
 less production and passing away, in the ceaseless 
 ebbing and flowing of its elements. Its apparently 
 undisturbed continuity of identity is a deception. 
 
 True, Heraclitus himself, buoyant and active by 
 nature, did not tint this doctrine with the gloomy color 
 of lamentation that human destiny was therefore all 
 aimless and made up of suffering. But to thinkers, 
 who were inclined to look upon the continuity and 
 constancy of a supreme eternal being as the sole satis- 
 factory reply to their inquiries regarding the end of 
 human life, this philosophical abstraction concerning 
 the nature of material existence was identical with de- 
 spair in its utter and hopeless emptiness. Thus, to 
 Plato, this is a world of immaterial seeming. Verity 
 
92 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 and complete satisfaction are obtainable aloft only, in 
 the flights beyond, where are the eternal ideas ; thither 
 the soul, fallen from its bright estate, home-sick, 
 yearns ardently to return. 
 
 Now contrast with these Greek thoughts their 
 counterparts in India. In the age when the way for 
 Buddhism was being prepared, thought moves exactly 
 in the same lines as it did with Plato, being a contrast 
 of that which is and persists, and that which is transi- 
 tory. On the one hand, the soul of the universe, the 
 great One, ever untouched by pain ; on the other hand, 
 the world of phenomena, the realm of hunger and 
 thirst, of care and perplexity, of old age and death. 
 And, like Heraclitus, Buddhism too sees in this lat- 
 ter world a continuous flux of becoming and passing 
 away, a never-ending concatenation of causes and ef- 
 fects, — the latter in their turn also becoming causes 
 which continue to produce new effects, and so on to 
 infinity. Peace there is alone in the world of ''the 
 unborn, of that which has not yet come into being, 
 has not yet been made, has not yet assumed form," 
 in the realm of the Nirvana. 
 
 An early Buddhistic dialogue compares life to a 
 tree, the root of which is perishable and mutable, as 
 are also its trunk, and branches, and leaves : who can 
 believe that the shadow of such a tree will always re- 
 main the same and escape the fate of change ? ''But 
 the unstable — is it suffering or joy?" asks Buddha of 
 his disciples. And they answer : " Suffering, master ! " 
 Or, in the words of a stanza, oft repeated : 
 
 "All shape assumed inconstant is, unstable, 
 All subject to the fate of birth and death. 
 It comes to pass, and soon it vanishes. 
 Blessed rest, when th' space of birth and death is done I " 
 
BUDDHISM, 93 
 
 Moreover, we find here exactly the same applica- 
 tion of the aforementioned fundamental philosophical 
 views that we do in Heraclitus. In both cases they 
 are applied to the soul and its life. ''Disciples!" 
 says Buddha, ''That which is called soul, or spirit, or 
 reason, is ever changing and becoming something else, 
 — ^ceaselessly, day and night, constantly going through 
 the process of becoming and of ceasing to be." 
 
 A dialogue of a later time, very remarkable in a 
 historical regard, reproducing throughout the early 
 Buddhistic views, treats of these thoughts in greater 
 detail. It is the conversation of a holy man with King 
 Milinda (the Greek Prince Menander, well-known from 
 coins), who, it seems likely, ruled over the Northwest 
 of India about lOO B. C. Strongly reminding one of 
 Heraclitus, it compares life, personality, to a flame. 
 "When, O great King, a man lights a candle, will not 
 the candle burn through the night ? " — " Yes, sire ! it 
 will burn through the night." — "How, then? O great 
 King ! Is the flame during the first watch of the night 
 the same that it is in the second watch ? " — "No, sire! 
 . . . but the light burned the whole night, adhering to 
 the same matter." — " So, also, O great King, the chain 
 of the elements of things is joined together. One ele- 
 ment is always coming into being, another is always 
 ceasing and passing away. Without beginning, with- 
 out end, the chain continues to be joined together.'^ 
 
 The identity of the Greek and Indian ideas con- 
 cerning the nature and destinies of the human soul ex- 
 tends still further. What are the effects upon those 
 ideas of this all-dominant, pain-bringing law which 
 subjects everything to the fate of coming into being 
 only to pass away again ? Both the Greek thinkers 
 and the Buddhists alike answer this question by postu- 
 
94 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 lating the doctrine of the migration of the soul. Death 
 is followed by a new birth — not necessarily in human 
 form, both the divine and the animal are deemed pos- 
 sible; this re-birth is followed again by death, and this 
 by re-birth : so that the one life is merely an infinites- 
 imal link in a vast chain of lives, to be bound up in 
 which is a great misfortune. 
 
 The Orpheans symbolise the migration of the soul 
 by means of a circle or wheel. They speak of the 
 wheel of fate and of birth ; the final end of existence 
 seems to them to be 
 
 "To release one's self from the circle and breathe anew, freed from dis- 
 tress." 
 
 In the inscription of a small gold plate taken from' 
 a tomb near the ancient Sybaris, the soul of the buried 
 person, an Orphean, for whom the claim of final re- 
 lease from the migration of the soul is made, exclaims : 
 
 "At last I have flown from the circle of ill, the toil-laden ring." 
 
 Imagine the rhythm of these hexameters turned 
 into the irregular movement of the Indian Sloka-in^XxQ, 
 and one might imagine himself in the very midst of 
 the Buddhistic poetry. A Buddhist proverb says : 
 
 " Dong to the watcher is the night, 
 To the weary wand'rer long the road, 
 To him, who will not see truth's light. 
 Long is the torment of his chain of births." 
 
 And another expression, which is put into the 
 mouth of Buddha, at the point when — his trials and 
 struggles over — he has achieved the knowledge of sal- 
 vation. He is triumphing in the fact that he has pen- 
 etrated the designs of the wicked foe, those evil powers 
 ruling terrestrial things, who unremittingly are ever re- 
 
BUDDHISM. 
 
 95 
 
 constructing the corporeal house, the body, and whom 
 he has succeeded in putting away from himself : 
 
 " In vain the endless road 
 Of rebirth I have wandered, 
 In vain have sought life's builder, 
 An ill is this fate of birth. 
 
 House-builder 1 found you arel 
 You'll build no more the house. 
 Your timbers are all broken, 
 Destroyed the house's spires. 
 The heart — escaped from earth — 
 Has compassed the aim of its search." 
 
 And in the same way that the Orpheans symbolise 
 the continuous existence of the migrating soul by 
 means of a circle or wheel, so too the Buddhists speak 
 of the ** wheel o^ lives." Buddhistic pictures usually 
 portray this wheel of existence in such manner that a 
 stage of existence is symbolically shown between every 
 pair of spokes, as the human kingdom, the animal 
 kingdom, heaven, hell \ beside the wheel is the form 
 of Buddha, who, as one redeemed, stands without the 
 revolution of existences. 
 
 In the dialogue above cited, King Milinda asks the 
 holy man for a parable which shall give a notion of 
 the interminable, beginningless migration of the soul. 
 Thereupon the holy man draws a circle on the ground 
 and asks: *'Has this circle any end, great King?" — 
 <'Ithasnot, sire!" — That is the same as the circle 
 made by the course of births," the holy man teaches 
 him. **Is there then any end to its succession ? " — 
 *' There is not, sire !" 
 
 And as the Orphean doctrine had it that he who 
 was redeemed '* had flown from the circle," so an early 
 Buddhistic proverb says : 
 
96 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 "The swan soars through the sun's ethereal pathways; 
 The sorcerer flies through all the realms of space: 
 So, sages, rich in v/isdom, flee this world, 
 The prince of death and all his powers o'erwhelming," 
 
 One brief glance more at a few of the particular 
 traits of the doctrine of the migration of the soul, 
 common to both India and Greece. It will be plainly- 
 seen that the fundamental similitude of ideas has had 
 the effect of making the aspect of even the minuter 
 details in the two religions similar. 
 
 One characteristic, very prominent among both 
 peoples, is the very natural connexion of the doctrine 
 of the soul's migration with the idea of moral retribu- 
 tion. The good and the evil which man has wrought 
 in this life will in turn be done to him in another life, " 
 meted out to him in the blessedness of heavenly, or in 
 the pain of infernal, worlds. 
 
 Naturally, at this point, the popular imagination— 
 widely removed from the colorless abstractions of re- 
 flective thought — begins to play a part. Poetry drew 
 all kinds of pictures of the horrors of the infernal 
 world. There was a '^voyage to the lower world" in 
 poetry among the Orpheans, and another of the same 
 name among the Pythagoreans ; the Buddhistic litera- 
 ture is fairty overrun with innumerable, moral-pointing 
 descriptions of -the descents of holy men into the in- 
 fernal regions and of the horrors there observed by 
 them.* 
 
 Opposed to these terrors are the heavenly ecstasies. 
 x\nd here a characteristic appears which is emphasised 
 strongly by the Buddhists, but visible only sporad- 
 ically in Greece, although entirely the same there.' 
 
 * We may refer here to the fine description which L. Scherman {Materials 
 for a Historji of the hidian Literature of Visions, 1892) has given of these phau= 
 tasjfis. 
 
BUDDHISM. 97 
 
 Empedocles denies immortality to the gods ; their 
 longevity is great, but they are not eternal. The di- 
 vinities of the Veda have in the same way ceased to 
 be immortal to the Buddhists. Possessed of a length 
 of life reaching beyond the grasp of all human stand- 
 ards of measurement, they are, nevertheless, along 
 with others, knit into the chain of the migration of 
 souls ; and the human being who has lived a blame- 
 less life, dare hope to be born again as a god. No 
 more lively illustration can be found in all the history 
 of religion than this fate of the ancient gods, how an 
 idea — having lost its original import, its own proper 
 life — yet maintains its existence into a later age and 
 is then by the latter animated with a new import, cor- 
 responding to the altered views of things. 
 
 As still another common Indo-Grecian character- 
 istic of the doctrine of the migration of the soul may 
 be mentioned, that, among both peoples, there were 
 certain especially inspired men, who could, so it was 
 held of them, recall the various earlier em/oodiments 
 which they themselves and others had passed through. 
 Pythagoras, of whom, it was sung that 
 
 " When he with might compelled to the fullest the powers of mind, 
 Easily could he th'adventures o'erscan of every existence. 
 Through ten, yea, through the vista of twenty past, long human life-spans," 
 
 is said to have related experiences and adventures 
 from his earlier lives. Empedocles said : 
 
 " Thus have I been in former existence a youth, and a maiden, 
 SO; too, a shrub, and an eagle, a poor mute fish in the ocean." 
 
 Exactly so, only exaggerating the marvellous into 
 the boundlessly wonderful, the Buddhistic religion tells 
 how in that holy night in which he first beholds the 
 true knowledge of salvation, as in a vision, the whole 
 
98 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 picture of his previous forms of existence, through 
 hundreds of thousands of births, passes in review be- 
 fore the soul of Buddha. Tales, recording adventures 
 of the most variegated colors from these past exist- 
 ences of Buddha himself, of his disciples and enemies, 
 accompanied with lessons and applications of every 
 sort, are among the most cherished elements of popu- 
 lar Buddhistic literature. Hundreds of re-births are 
 recounted of Buddha, now as a king, again as a devout 
 hermit, or as a courtier, or as a god, or as a lion, an 
 ape, a fish. And it is well known how inestimable is 
 the value of these stories and fables to the folk-lore 
 studies of our own time — seeing that the motive of 
 them frequently reappears, scattered over the whole 
 earth. 
 
 III. 
 
 Opposed to the realm of the migration of the soul 
 with all its sufferings, there is, for Greek and Indian 
 thinkers alike, a world of freedom, of the complete 
 cessation of all suffering. Whilst the youthful human 
 mind of the early ages perceived in power and victory, 
 in wealth and long life, the chief joys of life, the su- 
 preme end of life is now salvation from the misery of 
 becoming and passing away, rest in the calm glory of 
 eternity. 
 
 Among the Greeks, as we have seen, the Orpheans 
 speak of '^ releasing one's self from the circle," and of 
 ''taking flight from the circle." Plato pictures the 
 soul, as being rescued from its wanderings and enter- 
 ing into ''the community of the divine, the pure, the 
 true to itself. " At one time, it is the negative forrri 
 which this ideal assumes : the release from the suffer- 
 ing of existence. At another, it is the positive form : 
 
BUDDHISM. 
 
 99 
 
 perfect, unchanging blessedness. A certain reserve 
 was for the most part observed toward the temptation 
 to make the description of this condition of perfection 
 too concrete and to paint it in high colors : these most 
 beautiful homes of the soul are not easily described, 
 says Plato. 
 
 Now this all very closely touches upon Buddhistic 
 ideas. Buddha says to his followers: '*As the great 
 ocean, my disciples, is permeated with a single flavor, 
 the flavor of the salt ; so, too, disciples, is this doc- 
 trine and this law permeated with a single flavor, the 
 flavor of salvation." 
 
 ** There is, my disciples, a place where there is 
 neither earth nor water, neither light nor air, neither 
 this world nor that world, neither sun nor moon. I 
 call that, disciples, neither coming nor going nor rest- 
 ing, neither death nor birth. It is without substruc- 
 ture, without progress, without stop. It is the end of 
 suffering." 
 
 Sometimes the various turns taken by the Bud- 
 dhistic texts in which this final aim. Nirvana, is spoken 
 of, run as if this aim were the termination of all being, 
 or absolute nothing ; then again they seem to point to 
 a state of highest perfection, surpassing all compre- 
 hension and baffling all description. Taken as a whole, 
 the coloring of these thoughts is perceptibly a more 
 negative one than in Greece ; and the solution of all 
 too far-reaching questions is declined with greater 
 firmness and readiness. ''He who has gained salva- 
 tion," thus runs a Buddhistic quotation, ''surpasses 
 the point where his being can be compassed by the 
 numbers of the corporeal world. He is deep, immeas- 
 urable, unfathomable, like the ocean." And at an- 
 other time, Buddha says to a disciple, who will not 
 
loo ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 suffer a quietus to be imposed upon his questions about 
 the existence of him who has won salvation : '* What 
 is not revealed by me, suffer it to remain unrevealed." 
 
 As to the ideas concerning the way by which the 
 final highest aim was to be attained — in Greece they 
 rapidly developed in matter and profundity. Early 
 thought still remained essentially under the influence 
 of religious creations which carry the style of remotest 
 antiquity. We know what is the customary practice 
 in the cult of uncivilised peoples, for one who seeks 
 to acquire supernatural power or to ward off evil spirits 
 or death-bringing things of witchcraft. He fasts ; he 
 withdraws into solitude ; he avoids everything that has 
 any relation with death or similar perils, as food which 
 for some reason or other is considered to be connected 
 with the kingdom of death ; by various means he ex- 
 cites within himself ecstatic conditions. This technique 
 of the primitive sorcerer's art, applied to new pur- 
 poses, maintained itself in Greece as elsewhere with 
 indomitable pertinacity. 
 
 It has been justly observed, that a figure like that 
 of Epimenides — an adept master of mystical wisdom, 
 flourishing about 600 B. C, and celebrated throughout 
 all Greece, — bears a number of traits which character- 
 ise perfectly the type of the savage medicine-man : 
 fasts and solitude, mystic intercourse with the spirits, 
 long ecstacies, in which he gains his *' enthusiastic 
 wisdom." The interdiction of food and — if this ethno- 
 logical expression be permissible — the observance of 
 taboos of various kinds, among which is very promi- 
 nent the aversion to all things which in any way re- 
 mind one of the domain of death, — these are a special 
 vehicle for the spiritual endeavors both of the Orpheans 
 and of the Pythagoreans. 
 
BUDDHISM. loi 
 
 But a new tendency is soon introduced and gains 
 more and more in strength. True continence and 
 purity, so Plato teaches, lie in the purification of the 
 soul from all sensual things, liberation from the pas- 
 sions and desires which '< transfix the soul to the body 
 as with a nail" and which compel the soul to endure 
 being reborn in ever new forms of embodiment. The 
 redeemer from these bonds is philosophy, which alone 
 really prepares one for death. Philosophy guides us 
 from the world of constant becoming into that of ac- 
 tual being, into the realm of eternal ideas. The blessed 
 moment of a vision dawns : the curtain before the 
 thinker's eyes sunders, and truth herself shines upon 
 him, in the glory of which immersing itself, the soul 
 is released from the transitory world. In the joy, the 
 bliss of this contemplation, the philosopher, even here 
 below, deems himself in the islands of the blessed. 
 Death, however, forever releases the soul of him, who 
 '*has purified himself through philosophy, from cor- 
 poreality": his ?>o\x\ enters into ''that akin to his soul, 
 the invisible, the divine, the immortal, the truly wise." 
 
 In this last thought, the chain of ideas, which we 
 are now considering, found its culmination. And up 
 to this very point, the Indian ideas follow the Greek 
 ideas in undeviatingly parallel lines. 
 
 In India, too, in Buddha's age, the aims of the new 
 spiritual yearning were striven for with the same means 
 from the old cult of sorcery, that we find in Greece — 
 retirement into solitude, exhaustion by severe fastings, 
 and the development of a whole category of ecstatic 
 conditions. For its part. Buddhism rejects fasting as 
 well as every kind of self-torture ; but it lays great 
 stress upon the cultivation of those ecstatic medita- 
 tions, in the exalted calm and quiet of which, afar 
 
I02 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 from the confusing superabundance of form of the 
 material world, it was thought, a presentiment or fore- 
 taste might be enjoyed of the final termination of all 
 transitoriness. One of the old Buddhist monkish 
 poets sings : 
 
 " When the thundercloud its drum awakes, 
 Fast the rain sweeps o'er the bird's swift paths, 
 And in quiet mountain cave the monk 
 Fosters revery : no joy like that 1 
 
 "When, along the flowery bank of streams, 
 Which the forest's motley garland crowns. 
 He fosters revery, wrapped in blissful calm, 
 No joy ever can he find like that I " 
 
 But that which, before all other things, gives re- 
 lease from earthly suffering is the complete subjection 
 of desire, of *^that thirst which but leads from one re- 
 birth to another re-birth," — the attainment of the pure 
 and highest knowledge. 
 
 *'Who conquers it — that despicable thirst, which 
 it is difficult to escape in this world — ^from him all suf- 
 fering drops like drops of water from the lotus flower." 
 
 But this thirst which accompanies earthly exist- 
 ence may be subdued through knowledge, — that knowl- 
 edge which discovers the misery of the fate of be- 
 coming, merely to pass away again, and reveals the 
 cessation thereof in the escape from this world. Since 
 the value or worthlessness of life depends upon the 
 fateful play of great cosmic powers, the endeavor of 
 the devout, the sage, is directed no longer to the ob- 
 ject of securing the goods of this world through the 
 friendship of benevolent gods, but to the aim of pen- 
 etrating the infinite cosmic process, in order that, 
 having mastered it, he may prepare for himself the 
 future place where it is good to be. This last propo- 
 
BUDDHISM. 103 
 
 sitlon is alike characteristic of the religion of India 
 and of Greece. 
 
 Like the ideas of Plato, the doctrine of the Bud- 
 dhists is that the seeker gains possession of the knowl- 
 edge of salvation, — after a ceaseless struggle and en- 
 deavor continuing through a period of innumerable 
 re-births, — in the sudden inspiration of one incompar- 
 able instant of time. He to whom this instant has 
 come has *^ obtained salvation and beheld it face to 
 face." The Buddhist enlightened one, like the phi- 
 losopher of Plato, continues to live on earth as a com- 
 pleted being who, in his most fundamental nature, is 
 now no longer an earthly citizen. ''The monk who 
 has put away from him lust and desire, and is rich in 
 wisdom, he has even here on earth obtained salvation 
 from death, rest, Nirvana, the eternal home." And 
 when the end of earthly existence has come, he disap- 
 pears into those mysterious depths, concerning which 
 Buddha forbade his disciples to inquire whether their 
 meaning is ideal being or absolute nothing. 
 
 * * 
 
 The naturalist, studying a cellular structure, will 
 
 obtain very different views of the same object, accord- 
 ing to the direction in which he makes his sections. 
 The direction in which we have contemplated Bud- 
 dhism made it possible for us to notice the very clos- 
 est relationship between its fundamental principles 
 and the doctrines of the Orpheans, the Pythagoreans, 
 and Plato. But in conclusion, we must not omit 
 briefly to point out that other lines of consideration 
 would have produced other views and other compari- 
 sons of a very different nature. 
 
 If we scan the personality of the great Indian pro- 
 mulgator of these ideas, we find at once that Buddha 
 
104 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 is in all the phenomena of his life, in the manner of 
 his teachings and labors, as widely different from the 
 Greek thinkers as the Oriental character is from the 
 Hellenic. A nimbus of miracles surrounding and 
 glorifying his life, a lofty dignity which overtops all 
 the universe, caps his image in a way impossible to 
 imagine in connexion with the earthly and human fig- 
 ures of Pythagoras and Plato. It is no longer the 
 regions of Greek philosophy, but rather the regions 
 of the Gospels, into which the Buddhistic tradition 
 now seems to conduct us. In fact, some have gone 
 so far — though in my opinion without sufficient reason 
 — as to draw from the striking resemblances of these 
 two fields the conclusion that direct transfers have 
 been made from India to the West. As it was for- 
 merly supposed that Pythagoras had drawn his doc- 
 trines from Indian sources closely related to Bud- 
 dhism, so, too, the assumption has found believers — - 
 corresponding to the various views taken of Buddhism 
 — that Buddhistic prototypes underlie extensive por- 
 tions of the Gospels, and that either at Alexandria or 
 at Antioch the intercourse of Christian writers with 
 Buddhistic envoys led to the introduction of a large 
 number of stories, proverbs and parables from Indian 
 literature into that of the New Testament. 
 
 It would be possible to carry this identification 
 still further. If along with the person of Buddha and 
 with his doctrine we glance at the third member 
 of the ancient Buddhistic trinity — the ecclesiastical 
 brotherhood or church — we shall be reminded, with 
 sufficient vividness, by the immemorially ancient rules, 
 of the Buddhistic order of mendicant monks, — with 
 its deep-rooted aversion to the world, the austerity of 
 its precepts as to poverty and chastity, with its long 
 
BUDDHISM. 105 
 
 list of instructions concerning the observance of dignity 
 and reserve, which are manifested after a set fashion 
 in mien and glance, in the manner of eating and drink- 
 ing, in short, in every gesture, — of Christian monasti- 
 cism, whether viewed as a whole or in its minutest 
 details. 
 
 I think that we may and must be satisfied with the 
 similarity of historical causes at work in the two sep- 
 arate quarters of the world as the explanation for all 
 these resemblances, — a similarity which in my judg- 
 ment amply accounts for our meeting among civilisa- 
 tions nearer to us in time and place with formations, 
 isolated and scattered, yet closely resembling those 
 which at the height of Indian history, pulsating with 
 Indian life-blood, were united, in Buddhism, into so 
 compact and remarkable a whole. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Agni, 19, 44, 'JJ. 
 
 Ahana, 48. 
 
 Alexander of Epirus, 40. 
 
 Alexander the Great, 39, 
 
 Amelung, 12 footnote. 
 
 Animals, deified in early religions, 
 
 62 et seq. 
 Animism, 60 et seq. 
 Anthropomorphism, 6s et seq. 
 Antiochus, 40. 
 Arya, 18. 
 Asceticism, 90. 
 Asiatic Society, i et seq., 5. 
 Asoka, 39, 40. 
 Asvin, 55, 67. 
 Athene, 48. 
 Aurora, 20 footnote. 
 
 Babylon, influence of, on the religion 
 of India, 72. 
 
 Benfey, 7 footnote, 15. 
 
 Bimbisara, 39. 
 
 Birth and rebirth, 93. 
 
 Blessedness, state of, 99, 
 
 Bohtlingk, 28. 
 
 Books, committed to memory in an- 
 cient India, 22 et seq. 
 
 Bopp, 10, 13, 27. 
 
 Brahma, 18. 
 
 Brahmans, 4-6. 
 
 Buddha, 7, 90, 92-94, 98, 99, 103, 104; 
 date of his advent, 38 et seq., 79-80; 
 religion of, 43. 
 
 Buddhism, literature and customs 
 of, 12, 22; Greek religious thought 
 compared with, 78 etseq.,92etseq., 
 date of its rise, 79-80; resemblances 
 between Christianity and, 104. 
 
 Burgman, 12 footnote. 
 Burnouf, 12, 28. 
 
 Candle, simile of, 93. 
 
 Caste, priestly, 74. 
 
 Castes in early India, 18-19. 
 
 Caunaka, 25-26. 
 
 Causes, historical, similarity of, suf- 
 ficient to account for the resem- 
 blances of diflEerent religions, 105. 
 
 Chronology of early India, 37 et seq. 
 
 Coincidences in the religious thought 
 of various nations, 79. 
 
 Colebrooke, 8. 
 
 Comparative, grammar, 10, 27 ; myth- 
 ology, 45, 51 ; philology, 45. 
 
 Daughter, 46. 
 
 Dawn, 19, 50. 
 
 Deborah, song of, 69 footnote. 
 
 Demons, good and bad, 65. 
 
 Devas, 64. 
 
 Devotees, societies of, 89. 
 
 Dionysus, 90. 
 
 Dioskuroi, 55, 67. 
 
 Dushjanta, 6. 
 
 East India Company, policy of, 4. 
 
 Ecstasy, 100, loi. 
 
 Edda, 46, 55. 
 
 Ego, 84. 
 
 Egypt, 62. 
 
 Elements, natural, personification of 
 
 in early religions, 62 et seq, 
 Empedocles, 97. 
 English in India, 2, 4 et seq. 
 Enlightenment, Buddhistic, 103. 
 Epic, the Indian, 31. 
 
io8 
 
 ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 Epimenides, loo. 
 
 Erinys, 47, 49. 
 
 Ethical stage of the evolution of re- 
 ligion, 70 et seq. 
 
 Ethnology, its influence on Vedic re- 
 search, 51, 56 et seq. 
 
 Evolution of divinities, 65. 
 
 Fasting, 100, loi. 
 Fetishes, 65. 
 Fever {tapas), 76. 
 Futurity, 84-85. 
 
 Ganges, 18. 
 
 Germany, her share in Sanskrit re- 
 search, I, 9, 26. 
 
 Gospels, compared with Buddhism, 
 104. 
 
 Grammar, Sanskrit, its subtlety and 
 complexity, 5-6, 24-26. 
 
 Grammatical systems, their evolu- 
 tion, 54. 
 
 Greece, Buddhistic parallels in, 87 
 et seq., 93 et seq. 
 
 Greek mystics, go et seq. 
 
 Greek mythology, 55. 
 
 Greeks, contact of with the Hindus, 
 39- 
 
 Grimm Brothers, 28, 32. 
 
 Hastings, Warren, 4. 
 
 Haupt, 27. 
 
 Hearing, rich in, synonym of "well 
 
 read," 23. 
 Heaven, 85-86, 96. 
 Helen of Troy, 48-53. 
 Hell, 85, 
 
 Heraclitus, 91, 92, 93-, 
 Hermann, Gottfried, 27. 
 Hermes, 47, footnote, 55. 
 History of early India, 18-19. 
 Homer, 10, 14, 58, 82. 
 Hymns of the Rig- Veda, 18-26. 
 
 Ideas, Plato's, 88, 92. 
 
 Identity of historical causes, suffi- 
 cient to account for the resem- 
 blances of different religions, 105. 
 
 India, history of early, 35 et seq. 
 
 India Office Library, 8. 
 
 Indian civilisation, rise of, 80. 
 
 Indian philosophy, rise of, 80. 
 Indo-Germanic languages, 10. 
 Indra, 19, 33, 44, 55, 66, 69 footnote; 
 
 70, 77- 
 Indus, 18. 
 
 Intellect in religion, 83. 
 Iranian divinity, 72, 73. 
 Italic language, 10. 
 
 Jehovah, 69 footnote. 
 Jones, Sir William, 2-7. 
 
 Kalidasa, 6, 14. 
 
 Knowledge, of salvation, 103. 
 
 Kuhn, Adalbert, 15, 49. 
 
 Lachman, Karl, 27. 
 
 Lang, 56. 
 
 Lassen, Christian, 13. 
 
 Laws of India, 4 etseq. 
 
 Lessing, 27. 
 
 Lexicography of the Veda, 29. 
 
 Lycurgus, 6. 
 
 Mahabharata, 12, 13. 
 
 Mannhardt, W., 56. 
 
 Manu, laws of, 6, 13, 44, 46. 
 
 Manuscripts of the Veda, 14. 
 
 Medicine-man, 100. 
 
 Memorising of books, 23. 
 
 Meander, 93. 
 
 Mexico, 62. 
 
 Migration of the soul, 84, 94, 96-98, 
 99-103 et seq. 
 
 Migrations of the early Indians, 18- 
 19. 
 
 Milinda, King, 93, 95. 
 
 Monasticism, Christian and Bud- 
 dhistic, 104-105. 
 
 Monotheism, 68 et seq. 
 
 Mother-tongue, 11, 
 
 Miiller, Max, 5 footnote, 15, 28, 46, 50. 
 
 Mystical wisdom, 100. 
 
 Mystics, Greek, go et seq. 
 
 Mythological history, 54. 
 
 Mythology, and religion of early In- 
 dia, 33, 44 ; Greek and Latin, 46. 
 
 Myths, interpreted as meteorological 
 phenomena, 50 et seq.; of savage 
 races, 56 et se(^, 
 
INDEX. 
 
 109 
 
 Natural powers deified, 66-67. 
 Nether world, 85. 
 
 Nirvana, abstractly described, 85-86; 
 92, 99, 103. 
 
 Odyssey, The, 85. 
 
 Olympian gods, 50. 
 
 Ormuzd, 72. 
 
 Orpheans, 94-96. 
 
 Orpheus, mysteries of, 87-89, 98. 
 
 Paii, 12. 
 
 Parallelism of Buddhistic and Greek 
 religious thought, 78 et seq., 103. 
 
 Parjanya, 21. 
 
 Paulinus k St. Bartholomaeo, 5 foot- 
 note. 
 
 Perkunas, 21 footnote. 
 
 Philology, 27. 
 
 Pindar, 89. 
 
 Plato, ethics, philosophy, and poetry 
 of, 91, 92, 98, loi, 103, 104. 
 
 Poetry of early India, 19. 
 
 Polytheism, 68-69. 
 
 Pons, Father, 7 footnote. 
 
 Pramantha, 49, 52, 53. 
 
 Prayer, 64 et seq. 
 
 Prehistoric cults, 57 et seq. 
 
 Priests, early Indian, 18-19. 
 
 Prinseps, 12. 
 
 Prometheus, 49, 52, 53. 
 
 Punishment, 85. 
 
 Purification of the soul, Plato's, 
 
 lOI. 
 
 Pushan, 55. 
 Pythagoreans, 87-89, 96, 98. 
 
 Release from auttering, 94, 98 et seq. 
 
 Religion, primitive, 58 et seq., 60 et 
 seq.; intellect in, 83. 
 
 Religions of savage races, 56 et seq. 
 
 Religious, ceremonies, 75 ; heroes, 
 81, 82; thought, development of, 
 43; thought, resemblances of in 
 various nations, 79 ; rewards, 85. 
 
 Resignation, 90. 
 
 Retribution, moral, 96. 
 
 Rig-Veda, 18, 28, 31 et seq., 44. 
 
 Rohde, E., 87 footnote. 
 
 Roman and Greek history compared 
 with early Indian, 36. 
 
 Roth, 15, 28. 
 Ruckert, F., 9. 
 
 Sacrifices, cult of, 64 et seq.; early 
 Indian, 19-20; Vedic, 73-76- 
 
 Sage, religious, 102. 
 
 Sakuntala, 6. 
 
 Salvation, 85-86, 99. 
 
 Sanskrit, study of, its origin, i et 
 seq. ; supposed identity of, with 
 other languages, 7; its primitive- 
 ness, 11; St. Petersburg Diction- 
 ary of, 28; roots of, 46, 52. 
 
 Sarama, 47-48, 52. 
 
 Saramejas, 48. 
 
 Saranjus, 47. 
 
 Sayana, 28. 
 
 Schermann, L., 96 footnote. 
 
 Schlegel, 9. 
 
 Schmidt, John, 12 footnote. 
 
 Self, 85. 
 
 Seven, 47 footnote. 
 
 Soma, 33, 75. 
 
 Sorcery, 63 et seq., 75-76, 100. 
 
 Soul, the human, 83-85. 
 
 Spirits, 60 et seq. 
 
 Stone age of religion, 65. 
 
 Suffering, 90, 92. 
 
 Suffering, cessation of, 99. 
 
 Sun-myth, 48, 56. 
 
 Survivals, religious, 57 et seq. 
 
 Sybaris, 94. 
 
 Taboos, 100. 
 
 Tacitus, 18, 31. 
 
 Tapas, 76. 
 
 Teutonic mythology, 55. 
 
 Texts of the Veda, 17. 
 
 Theogony of early India, 44, 50. 
 
 Thirst for existence, 93. 
 
 Thor, 55. 
 
 Time-standards of the Veda, 38. 
 
 Trinity, Buddhistic, 95. 
 
 Troubadours, the, 14. 
 
 Troy, siege of, 48. 
 
 Tschandragupta, 39. 
 
 Tylor, 56. 
 
 Ushas, 20, 45. 
 
 Varuna, 44, 67, 71, 72, 77' 
 Vayu, 33- 
 
ANCIENT INDIA. 
 
 Veda, the study of, 2 ; history of its 
 acquisition, 14 et seq.; when com- 
 posed, 17 ; its form and import, 17- 
 24; its exegesis, 28 et seq.; litera- 
 ture and religion of, 43 ; Old Testa- 
 ment compared with, 69 footnote. 
 
 Vedic divinities, character of, 70 et 
 seq., 77; not primordial, 59, 97. 
 
 Vowels, their transformations in the 
 Indo-Germanic languages, 11 foot- 
 note. 
 
 Vritra, 33. 
 
 Weber, 15, 29. 
 
 Wheel, Orphean and Buddhistic, 94, 
 
 95- 
 Wilson's Sanskrit Dictionary, 30. 
 Woden, 33 footnote. 
 Writing, Vedas not transmitted in. 
 
 22-26. 
 
 Zimmer, 31 footnote. 
 Zoroaster, 15. 
 
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