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' PART OK A HORSK — SACRIKIOK PROCESSION ' . 111 169 189 '95 :o7 5 00 >»7 00 345 354 355 404 ' From T.efmann*s GestJiieAt* «/««• «»/A?i» Itufiem, Muller, (Irote, & * F»\M\» Rousscl^t's /*//.». J. S. Virtue & Cv^. : T o»\don. ' Fivin I Ux^ker's //# wits valleys. A continuous ridge nearly double the height and five times the length of the Swiss- Italian Alps, with a mountain region depending on it, the size of Spain, Italy, and Greece put together in a row, and of which one small portion, Kash- mir, looking like a nook nestled in the north- west corner, is as large as all Switzerland, — surely such a ridge gives scope to variety of scenery. We are told that it is not uncommon to stand on some point, from which the eye takes in a semicircular sweep of undulating or jagged snow-line with an iridescent, opal-like glory ever playing along it, and with peaks rising from it at intervals, — " heaven-kissing hills " indeed ! — the least of which is several thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc, like pillars of ice support- ing a dome of a blue so intense as to seem solid ; while at your feet, forest-clothed and cut by valleys, stretch down the lower ridges, which descend, tier below tier, in four great terraces, into the hot plains of Lower Hindustan. If the spectator had taken his station on a summit of the northernmost — and highest — ridge, somewhere on the northwest boundary of Nepal, the grandeur of the physical surroundings would be helped by that of memories and associations. He would there be at the very core and centre of the divine HIjMAVAT — to use the fine ancient name, which means " Abode of Winter," — the region to which the Aryan Hindu has, for ages well-nigh untold, looked with longing and rever- ence ; for there, on the fairest and loftiest heights ' 'Ihi W 8 VEDIC INDIA. he knew, he placed the dwellings of his gods. There they were enthroned in serene and unattainable majesty ; there they guarded the hidden storehouses of their choicest gifts to men : for there lay the mysterious caves of KuVERA, the god of wealth, the keeper of gold and silver and other precious ore, and of sparkling gems : there, snow-fed and pure, at a height of about 15,000 feet, slumber the sacred lakes, eternally mirroring in their still waters only the heavens and the mountain wilderness that cradles them ; and there, too, cluster the springs of the great rivers, holiest of things, — the Indus, and the SuTLEj, and the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra with the most glorious name — '* Son of God," — that river ever had. To such regions, all wildness and mystery, all peace and silence, but for the rush of torrents and the music of winds and leaves, world- weary men and women, longing for the rest and beauty of passionless, eternal things, have come age after age, and still come, on long pilgrimages, fre- quently stretching into years of self-exile in rude forest-hermitages, to drink deep of solitude and meditation, and return, heart-healed and renovated, to the plains below ; unless— and thrice blessed those to whom this is given, — they can stay among the mountains and woods, as in the vestibule to a higher world, stripped of all earthly clingings, desires and repinings, patiently and happily waiting for the final release. Thus the Himalayas have ever been woven into the deepest spiritual life of the people whose physical destinies they helped to shape. They literally bounded their view in every sense, and what THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 9 lay beyond was the great unknown North, where dwelt the Uttara-Kura, the " remotest of men" — whether the spirits of the happy dead or a fabu- lous race enjoying a perpetual golden age of sinless- ness and bliss, cannot be made out with absolute clearness — perhaps both. 5. A review of all the conditions and manifesta- tions of India's physical life were needed to appre- ciate the entire range of the influence exercised by that stupendous chain, which, as it is the main feature of India's geography, is also the main agent of her prosperity. Its eternally renewed, inexhausti- ble treasury of snows is drawn on by the whole of Hindustan through the channels of its noble and numerous rivers, its true wealth-givers, which a thou- sand branching smaller ridges, dwindling down to mere slopes, direct into as many valleys, breaking the mass into a perfect, nicely graded and dis- tributed network. Indeed, the privileged land gets more than its share of the great store ; for some of its largest rivers — the Indus with its companion and later feeder, the Sutlej, and also the Brahmaputra — have their springs and a certain length of course on the northern side of the watershed, thus bringing to their own side much of the rainfall which should by rights go to the far thirstier plains of Tibet and Bokharia. Nor is it only by storing the moisture in its snowdrifts and glaciers, by nursing and feed- ing India's infant rivers, that the Himalaya benefits the land it overshadows and protects : it also secures to it the largest rainfall in the world, as far as measured to this day, and regulates the " rainy lO VEDIC INDIA. season," without which even such rivers, would be insufficient to ensure the productiveness of a soil exposed to torrid heat during most of the year. Shut off from the cooling gales of the north, India depends entirely on that peculiar form of trade- v/inds known as the MoNSOONS, or rather on the southwestern monsoon which sets in in June, laden with the accumulated vapors exhaled through many months by the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, and condensed in mid-air into huge solid banks of clouds. These clouds travel with great swiftness northward across the atmosphere or hang over the land obscuring the light of day, according as the violence of the wind rages or abates, until they are dashed against the stony breast of the Himalaya, whose elevation infinitely overtops the region of drifting vapors. Shattered with the shock, they discharge their torrents of rain as would a water- filled skin cut open by a rock against which it was hurled. The monsoon, being abruptly stopped as well as the clouds by the double Himalayan wall, besides getting involved in the countless narrow valleys and winding passes of the intricate highlands which lead up to it, combined with the tremendous accumulation of electricity, produces the most ter- rific thunderstorms of the world — and thus the Himalayas detain and confiscate for the exclusive benefit of their privileged land the supply of waters which cannot sail over their lofty heads, and for want of which the great Central Tableland is doomed to thirst and comparative barrenness. The consequence is that the average yearly rainfalls 3. — TAMBUR RIVER AT LOWEST LIMIT OF FIRS (HIMALAYA). 12 VEDIC INDIA. recorded for Hindustan, according to the most ex. act scientific calculations, give well-nigh incredible figures : 125 inches in that part of the Penjab high- lands which faces the southwest and is exposed to the full force of the monsoon ; 220 inches in similarly situated parts of Bengal ; while Assam, raised on a higher tier of the Himalayan platforms, and backed more closely by the main ridge, claims the honor of owning the largest rainfall in the whole world : 481 inches.' Even this tremendous figure is surpassed in exceptional years ; indeed it was all but doubled in the year 1861, for which 805 inches were shown, 366 inches having fallen in the single month of July. But this, again, is a visitation nothing short of a public calamity, as disastrous in its way as the oppo- site extreme. 6. It would seem that failing crops and dearth should be evils unknown in a country blessed with rivers so many and so noble, and so bountiful a sky. Unfortunately, the contrary is frequently the case, owing to the extremely uneven distribution of the rainfall, excessive in places and insufficient in others. Meteorological observations are carried on at 435 stations in British India. With such a number the distances between the stations cannot be very great ; yet the figures returned vary as much as though they belonged to different climes. Thus in Penjab, not a very extensive province, the average fall dwin- * At the station of Cherra-Poonjee. All the figures and scientific data which, it is hoped, will lend this chapter an authority beyond that of a mere general description, are taken from that mine of pre- cise knowledge, W. W. Hunter's Indian Empire— lis People^ His- tory , and Products (second edition, 1886). THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 13 dies from 125 inches to 7 and even 5, at the stations along the Indus, because they are protected by the Suleiman range, which breaks the force and direction of the monsoon, being attacked by it not in front, but sideways, and, so to speak, indirectly. The same causes — i.e., the disposition of the various mountain ridges and spurs — interferes with the even distribution of rain all over Dekhan no less than Hindustan. Thus it is that the same year not infrequently brings both floods and drought, crops and whole villages being swept away in one province, while in another noth- ing has come up at all, with the uniform result — famine and frightful mortality — not to speak of such seasons when the southwestern monsoon itself, for some unknown reason, totally fails at the appointed time, or comes along feeble and unsteady. And as everything in India seems to affect an extravagant scale, so a year of famine, even local, is attended with horrors well-nigh indescribable, for with a population so dense, and, as a rule, so poor and improvident, the ravages of actual starvation are doubled by its attendant diseases, and deaths are numbered by hundreds of thousands. With truly Oriental resignation and apathy, the people look to the Government for relief, and, when the calamity gets beyond the possibility of help, die without a word, as they stand, or sit, or lie. The annals of India from the time it came under British rule show a string of famines, separated by intervals of no more than from three to eight years, seldom ten, and lasting quite frequently over a year, even as long as three years. Some are limited to particu- 14 VEDIC IN^DIA. lar provinces, but only too many are recorded as general. 7. Of these, the most widely spread and most prolonged that India ever experienced, was that of 1876-78. The southwest monsoon failed in 1875, and again in 1876; and in this latter year the north- east monsoon, — which sets in in October, and is at best a poor resource, coming, as it does, not across an ocean but an inland waste, and being, moreover, intercepted by the Himalaya, — proved ev^en less efficient than usual. The main crops had perished in the drought of 1875, and this disappointment fin- ished the rest. Nor did the summer of 1877 bring relief, for the southwest monsoon failed for the third time, and though the autumn monsoon, for a wonder, did arrive laden with some goodly showers, the curse was not removed from the land until a normal rainfall once more visited it in June, 1878. All these years the people died — of starvation, of cholera, of hunger-fevers ; mortality rose to forty per cent, above the usual rates, and as the number of births greatly diminished at the same time, and the normal proportions were not restored until 1880, the total of the population was found in this year to have actually decreased during the last four years, instead of increasing at a moderate but steady rate, as is the case wherever the normal law of life-statis- tics is undisturbed and the number of births exceeds that of deaths. To give one palpable illustration of the ghastly phenomenon, we will borrow the record for the single province of Madras from a contem- porary work of the highest authority and reliability ^ : ' \V. Vr. Hunter's, The Indian Einpin\ etc. THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 1 5 " In 1876, when famine, with its companion, cholera, was already beginning to be felt, the births registered in Madras numbered 632,113, and the deaths 680,381. In 1877, the year of famine, the births fell to 477,447, while the deaths rose to 1,556,312. In 1878 the results of the famine showed themselves by a still further reduc- tion of the births to 348,346, and by the still high number of 810,921 deaths. In 1879 the births recovered to 476,307, still below the average and the deaths diminished to 548,158. These figures are only approximate, but they serve to show how long the results of famine are to be traced in the vital statistics of a people." To complete this appalling picture, it may be mentioned that the British Government spent, in famine relief, during the three tragic years, 1876-78, 11,000,000 pounds sterling = 55,000,000 dollars, in actual cash out of pocket, not including the negative expense in loss of revenue. In September, 1877, 2,600,000 persons were supported by the Govern- ment in Madras alone ; of these, a few over 600,000 were nominally employed on works, and nearly two millions were gratuitously fed. It is asserted that this last tremendous visitation has been a lesson to the British Government that will not fail to bear beneficent fruits, in the shape of more numerous and better means of communication, an increase in the acreage under cultivation, for which there is, fortu- nately, still a large margin, and various lesser local measures, — a combination which is to make up for the unequal distribution of the rainfall by a prompter and more even exchange and distribution of the earth's products between the different provinces. 8. The Himalayas, with their immense sweep and elevation — reaching, in the higher edges, an average of 19,000 feet, a height equal to the lower half of the atmosphere, are apt to monopolize one's powers i6 riij>fG mmA. ol .il l>i\( i.Mi. .111.1 I.) Iiii- (111- iiii.i;;iii.il ii>n to llir r\ iluM.Mi »>t til.- iii.iii\' »»lli.i I li.uir. ol 111. Mint. iiir. tli.il Oil U|> t lu' lihluM iOMtinrut into Mil mrioM,«» 1,11 j'.ri .mil .SUtiUlor UlviiiiotlS. Vcl SUI\Jr t>l' thrm iur vny coil aidemhle, and, on ulej^sei* sealr. Iniluciuo the dinuxte ttHil Ct>tulitl»>i\H of lilV «>f thoir trsprvtivc ivj»'ions tuiuh \\\ the 8ai\»(^ \v.»\- tit.tt (hr }«i.»Mt ii«l'V «^f tl\r ti.Mlh il.tt^ji those ol th.- rtitirc I'onl itinit. Allrt tlu- I'omth .uul low'q^st y>{ the llln\AI.»yan tcnaccs has slopr^l ilowM JMti* thc^low, hot riwil.tMi! whirh. with only « filii-iht -.wvlliu^' to St^t'VC as w.it.-i-.lu-.l lutw.cn the .syvStems of the lntln«. m.l the* Uan^es, 8ti*etehes across fron\ sea to sc^a. from t h.- month of otte of these ri>val livers to that «>f thr othvi. lorn\in!> a wiilc belt of plain, the j»r\niiul -.{.(pes upa^am. '..Mithw .u.l. iiii.> the \*lNhtlV,\ ranj^'.o, whieh. l»rv>lven »\p iiUv> a \\\\\\\ ber of oot\fnsril ihaius at\d sinus. it\terposes its broail wiM m.>uiit.im l>.lt between thr moi-e properly coiitincMi.il llmtlu-.i.\n an*l the tapetinvi, peninsular iVkhan. ,\lihou^;h ot a nioie or rather less thai\ motierate elevation (averagiu;; iiom igoo to ,}ux^ feet, with no peak to surpaSvS or even etptal the 5050 feet of Mr. v\nu at itvS western envO. this intricate system of "hills," with its exuberant j^wwth of for- est and jungle, was very ditVioult of access until piercetl with \\>ads atvd railways by Kuropean et\gii\eenng\ forminjj almost as etTective a barrier between the northern and southern halves of the continent, as the Uin\Alayasthen\selves between the whole of lt\dia and the rest of the world, and durinj^^ long a^^s kept the two separate in race. l.in;.u.i:>. and cuUvtre. 1 8 VEDIC INniA. 9. A bird's-eye view, embracing the whole of Dek- han, would show it to be a roughly outlined triangu- lar table-land, raised from one to three thousand feet above the sea on three massive buttresses of which the broad Vindhya ridge is one, covering the base of the reversed triangle, while the sides are represented by two chains of unequal height, respectively named Western and Eastern GhAts. This name, mean- ing " landing stairs," is particularly appropriate to the western chain, which rises in serrated and pre- cipitous rocky steeps almost from the very sea, only in places receding from the shore sufficiently to leave a narrow strip of cultivable and habitable land. On such a strip the wealthy and magnificent city of Bombay is built, very much like the Phoenician cities of yore, the Ghats stretching their protecting wall behind them just as the Lebanon did behind Tyre and Sidon, the sea-queens of Canaan. Like the Lebanon, too, they slope inland, directing the course of all the rivers of Dekhan from west to east. In scenery they are much sterner and grainier than the Vindhya range, which they, moreover, surpass in elevation, their average height being uniformly about 3000 feet along the coast, with abrupt peaks reaching 4700 feet, and nearly the double of that in the considerably upheaveil southern angle of the i)eninsula, where they form a sort of knot, joining the southern extremity of tlie Eastern Ghats. This latter range is really not a continuous mountain chain at all, but rather a series of inconsiderable spurs and hills, interrupted at frequent intervals by broad gaps, through which the rivers, fed by the 11 . -^.^ ■tei 20 VEDIC INDIA. drainage of the Western Ghats, flow easily and peaceably to the sea, known, all too modestly con- sidering its size, as the Bay of Bengal. lo. There was a time when the whole of Southern India or Dekhan was " buried under forests " ; such is the description in which all ancient poets agree. It would be vastly exaggerated in the present day, for fire and the axe of the husbandman, the timber cutter, the charcoal burner, have been at work un- checked through some thirty centuries and have revelled in wanton destruction after operating the necessary clearing. The most ruthless and formida- ble foes of the old virgin forests are the nomadic tribes, chips of the ancient aboriginal stock, which have escaped the influences of the Aryan immigra- tion and conquest, and lead even now, in their mountain fastnesses, the same more than half savage existence which was theirs when the first Aryan set- tlers descended into the valleys of the Indus. These tribes have a habit of stopping every year in their perpetual wanderings and camping just long enough to raise a crop of rice, cotton, or millet, or all three, in any spot of their native primeval forest where the proper season may find them. They go to work after a rude and reckless fashion which sets before us the most primitive form of agriculture followed by the human race at the very dawn of invention. First of all they burn down a patch of forest, regardless of the size and age of its most venerable giants, and as they do not care for the extent of the damage, and certainly do not attempt to limit the action of the fire, it usually runs wild and devours many square THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 21 miles in addition to the clearing actually wanted for cultivation. Then comes the breaking up of the soil thus summarily reclaimed, for which purpose almost any implement seems good enough. It is only a few tribes that know the use of a rough sort of antedilu- vian plough. Most of them content themselves with a bill-hook, a spade, or a hoe pick ; nay, a common stick sometimes is sufficient to scratch the surface of the soil with— which is all that is needed ; the seed is then laid in the shallow furrow, sometimes covered up and sometimes not, and the tillers sit down confi- dently to await results. Now a rich virgin soil, fer- tilized with fresh ashes, has quite enough of such treatment and a tropical rainfall to yield a return from thirty- to fifty-fold. Not infrequently several crops are raised simultaneously and on the same patch, by the simple process of throwing rice, Indian corn, millet, oil seeds, and cotton into the ground together, and gathering the crops successively as each ripens in its own season. No wonder that the nomads prefer such easy and remunerative culture to the laborious routine of regular farm work on partially exhausted soil. They do sometimes at- tempt to get a crop off the same clearing two or even three years in succession, but these experiments seem only to confirm them in their own easier and more attractive method. II. It is only of late years that these lawless pro- ceedings have encountered some resistance. It is a fact scientifically established that the wholesale de- struction of forests is attended by baleful results to the country where it takes place, the worst of 22 VEDIC INDIA. which are a perceptible change of climate and de- crease in the average of the rainfall. The under- ground moisture attracted by the roots which it feeds, being deprived of the protecting shade, dries up and evaporates ; the air necessarily becomes drier, and colder or hotter, according to the latitude, from exposure to the severe northern blasts or the scorching southern sun, while, the large mass of moist emanations which a forest contributes towards the formation of clouds being cut off, the denuded district no longer supplies its own rain, but entirely depends on passing clouds and storms. These re- sults would be particularly fatal in tropical India, living under continual dread of droughts, not to speak of the immediate pecuniary loss represented by the annual destruction of thousands of gigantic valuable timber-trees. This loss is greatly increased when we remember that many tropical trees bring a considerable income without being cut down; these are the gum-trees, with their rich yield of caoutchouc, lac, and other gums.' The British Government at last awoke to the absolute necessity of taking vigor- ous measures for the preservation of the forests still in existence and, as far as possible, the gradual re- stocking of those hopelessly thinned or partially destroyed. Twelve million acres of forest land are now " reserved," i. e., managed as state property by ' Lac is not exactly a gum, although it looks and is counted as one. It is the resinous secretion of an insect, which forms abundant in- crustations around the branches of various trees. But without the trees we should not have the gum ; so it is as much an article of forest wealth as the real vesretable srums. THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 23 special state officers ; in these reservations, which are carefully surveyed, nomadic cultivation and cat- tle-grazing are strictly forbidden, timber-cutting is limited by several regulations, and the exuberant growth of tropical creepers is ruthlessly cut down. Even the " open " forests are subjected to some con- trol, and large patches of forest land have been turned into nurseries, to grow the finest kinds of timber-trees. 12. Fortunately such is the bountiful produc- tiveness of the soil, and so great was the original wealth of forest vegetation, that these measures, although so belated, came in time to save, in spite of the depredations carried on through thousands of years, a mass of timber and woodland such as few spots on earth can match or even emulate. Virgin forests are plentiful even now, and cover vast mountain regions, in the Vindhya belt of highlands, and especially in the wildernesses of the Western Ghats, of which the most conspicuous feature is the lordly teak, unanimously voted " king of forests " and ." prince of timber." It is an indigenous variety of oak, which thrives best at a height of from three to four thousand feet, and grows in continuous masses, absorbing the nourishment of the soil so as not to allow any other tree or plant to come up in its domain. The only rival of the teak in size and quality of timber is the pine — or, more correctly, larch of the Western Himalayas, admiringly named " tree of the gods," deva ddru (anglicized into " deodar "). It is even more aspiring than the teak, and does not reach its full grandeur and beauty lower than six thousand 24 VEDIC INDIA. feet above the sea ; but in that elevated region a trunk of from twenty to twenty-five feet in circum- ference is no rarity, and such is the height to which the tree shoots up, that with this thickness of trunk, it gives the impression of sHmness. It was as famous in its way as the cedars of Lebanon, and ancient writers tell us that Alexander the Great used it to build his fleet. But the Himalaya has, over the Lebanon, the advantage of being far out of the way of armies and conquests, and therefore still wears its royal forest crown unimpaired, while the Leb- anon stands almost denuded, and only an occasional solitary tree tells of its former glory. 13. But, valuable and majestic as these two forest kings are, they are far eclipsed, both in beauty and dimensions, by a native tree, which may be consid- ered the most characteristic of Indian vegetation. It belongs to the family of fig-trees, to which the soil and climate of India are so congenial that it is repre- sented, in different parts of the continent, by no less than a hundred and five varieties. This particular variety, specially known ■&.%[' Indian fig-tree" [Ficiis Indicd)y surely may claim to be admired as the paragon not only of its own species, but of all vegeta- tion without exception. It takes so influential and prominent a place in the life, both physical and moral, of India, and is moreover such a marvel of nature, that a description of it is not out of place even in a necessarily brief sketch, and we may as well borrow that given by Lassen in his monumental work*: ' Chr. Lassen's Indische Alter thumskimdei 2d ed., vol. i., pp. 301 ff. W < . 5 -^ Pi <; 20 VEDIC INDIA. " Tlie Ficiis Indiiii is ]>rol)al)ly tlio most aslouiuling piece of vege- tation on the face of our earth. From one single root it produces a vast green temple of many halls, with cool, shady bowers impervious to the light, and seems created expressly and exclusively for the pur- ]iose of supplying shelterless primeval humanity with ready-made dwellings. For neither is its wood of nuich use, nor are its fruits eatable for man, and if it inspires the Hindus and tlieir neighbors with a profound veneration, it is owing lo the surpassing marvel of its well-nigh preternatural growtli, ils indestructible duration and everlasting self-renewal ; to wliicli traits the mysterious gloom of its galleries and avenues adds not a little, yielding a most grateful retreat from tlie torrid summer lieat. The trunk of the tree, at a moderate height from the ground, branches out into several stout limbs which stretch from it horizontally ; from these, slender shoots — the so-called " air-roots" — grow downwards until they reach the ground, where they take root, whereupon tliey increase in thickness and become strong supports for the mother-limb. The central trunk repeats the branching out process at a greater height, and the second circle of limbs in its turn sends down a number of air-roots which forn\ an outer circle of props orpillars. As the central trunk increases in height, it goes on producing tier upon tier of horizontal limbs, and these add row after row to the outer circle of jnllars, not indeed with perfect regularity, but so as to form a grove of leafy halls and verdant galleries multiplying r its being found in places along the Persian Gulf, in parts THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 2/ with the Ganges and the Himalaya, completes the picture of India as evoked in a few apt strokes the poet's fancy (see p. i). To the elephants that wander majestically among its shady walks, and the apes that laugh and gambol in its airy galleries, we must add the noisy parrots and other birds of no less flaming plumage, but softer voice, — and to these numerous and playful denizens the berries or small figs disdained by men yield grateful and sufificient food. It is needless to mention that these trees grow singly, not in forests — since one evidently is in itself if not a forest, at least a grove of consider- able size. Hoxv large, indeed, can scarcely be realized without the help of a few figures. Fortunately many have been accurately measured, and several have attained historical celebrity. Thus the central trunk of one handsome banyan-tree near Madras is known to have been twenty-eight feet in diameter, and to have been surrounded by a first circle of twenty-seven secondary trunks, each about eleven feet in diameter, and from thirty to fifty feet in height, and after that by almost innumerable others, of decreasing stoutness. The largest known banyan tree had over thirteen hundred large trunks, and three thousand smaller ones. Armies of six or seven thousand men have frequently been encamped in its bowers, and it was seen afar as a solitary green hillock, until a violent hurricane half destroyed it in 1783. Besides which, being situated on an island in of Arabia (Yemen), and even of Africa, although its native land is emphatically the Indian Continent, where it thrives in all provinces, except the table-land of Dekhan. 28 VEDIC INDIA. the Nerbudda, the river has from time to time carried away large slices of its domain, till it is liow c;4t'^5'^ '4=-/ 7. — clasping roots of the vvightia (in the himalayan forests). reduced to a skeleton of its former glory. What maybe its age, no one can tell. Five hundred years are historically recorded. But these trees may get THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 29 to be thousands of years old for aught we can know or prove. For since each new trunk, after it has become firmly rooted and has reached a certain average of thickness, inherits the parent trunk's capacity of branching out into horizontal limbs which in their turn drop root-tendrils into the ground, and consequently absorb the nourishment of ever new soil, there is practically no reason why the multiplying process should ever stop. It is no wonder that almost every village in Hindustan has a banyan-tree which it holds as sacred as a sanctuary. 14. The companions of Alexander who enthusi- astically admired the banyan-tree and gave it its name of " Indian fig-tree," leave it uncertain whether they included under that name another variety, which has obtained an even greater renown and im- portance from the fact that from the oldest times it has been, as it still is, the sacred tree of Indian religions. This is the Ficus Religiosa, very well known under its pretty native and popular names of Ashvattha and Pippala. It is frequently planted next to a banyan so as to have them mix their foliage and stems, from a superstitious notion that they are of different sex and their growing together is an emblem of marriage. The contrast between the large, massive leaves of the banyan, and the light, brilliant, continually vibrating foliage of the pippala is striking and grateful to the eye. The pippala does not reach the stupendous dimensions that the banyan does, nor are its trunks as numer- ous. But it has a way, wherever a seed is acciden- tally dropped on top of another tree — say a palm 30 VEDIC INDIA. tree — or a buildinL;", to sink several fibrous shoots through the air down into the ground, and thus in time, when these shoots have thickened and hard- ened into trunks, to entirely encompass tree or building, turning it into a most picturesque and at first sight puzzling object. Although the ashvattha alone is professetlly held sacred, it is a crime to destroy or injure cither of the two ; both indifferently shelter in their verdant halls altars and images of gods, as well as the performance of sacrifices and the pious coutcmiilations of hoi)' hermits. Still, where neither banyan nor pippala is familiar, villagers usually pay a certain homage to the largest and oldest tree within their radius, no mattcrof what kind ; and it is not the native trees alone which thrive and expand under that wonderful sky, but those which India shares with Europe and other moderate climes also attain dimensions unheard of elsewhere. Thus Anquetil Duperron mentions having on one of his tramps through the Dekhan enjoyed a noonday rest untU-r an elm tree which could cover over six hun- dretl persons witii its shade, and adds: " One often mods in India these trees, lunKr whose shade travel- lers while away the hottest time of the day. 'I'lu y eook llure sueh provisions as thev eariy with them, and drink llie water of the ponds near wliieli tl\ese trees are plaMted ; yon see there sellars of fried rice and fruits in a small wa\, and erowds of men and horses from various parts iif llie eount r\'. 15. 'The same cxuluM-ance coiilVtinls iis in almost any s[H-cimcn of Inilia's vegetation. Thuits that grow elsewhere ami in Imlia also are sure to reach here extraortlinat y size atul to be amazingl\- produc- tive. 'I'hus tlic bambiHK so plentiful ii\ China and 39 Vfifi/C /A'/)A4. otl\ri iiMiuliiv's ol' I'.istiMU Asi.i. aitains in Imlia.i height of sixty loct, aiul i\s»s such euurn\o\»s Us^ves th>\t a luMvl ol h>u\ts cai\ lio ronooalrtl in a \\\\\\ hv>o planlation. The banana, w hivh >mv>\\s wiKl in pvvM- the contu\ent, seems to hear its Iu^umous. wuliitious fruits in even greater ahumlanee anvl to he n\vMe proline of t)e\v shoots from the 8an\e root than in other nppart?ntly as favoreil climes, \Vhet\, at the en^l of the yesU\ the lon^ hearin^^ stalk hs\s been eUxsed of Its gx^lden hnnien at\il cnt iK>\\ n at ilu- j;ft\M\nd,some tSonew stalks spviui^- up in itsstead. and the yearly an\onnt of fruit jnodueevl hy a plant at ivM\ of these plants is t^^^ times th»»t of the san^e space planted in wheat,' NiM' is the breail-fvnit tree want- ing^ in this anay of tropical vegetable treasures, .u\vl as to paints, no kvsss than forty-two varieties wave their graceful crowns over the bewitchi»\g landsc.ipes of K^th HinvlnstAn anvi IVkhan, and i>f these n\ost at^? a source v4 wealth even more than ovu.uuent. Chief amvM\g them of coui^e comes the cocv>a-palm, which, with the manifold uses which every part v>f it, f«\Mn fruit to r\x>t, is made to ,serve» supplies welU nigh all the neccvssaries of life to many an isl,\t\d wlunv it is tl>e natives* only »>?source, while in this thrice Messed land it is onlv one of a hwst. In the ^^ *»wx"? fw\U *& th«/»W»<.;s» v^ \s « M,^j>t<> ftvt\ott> v\( th^ Y^ry s)\«v^ a»U whvvttY v<>^t?lalvW \W<>t \>( twvtu^u \v%vi«xs Artvl h»*r»«>ts as »^u\Avk^t at»^?avtY t>y «>un*>ut THE IVOND/'lk'LANJ) ()/• T/fE EAST. 33 interior of the Isle oi Ceylon is a forest of cocoa- palms numbering eleven millions of trees, while in Dckhan, along the western coast alone, duty was paid years ago on three millions. When to all these we add cotton, the sugar-cane, and the tea-plant, all three natives of India, besides the imported cinchona ((juinine-tree) and all the native gums, spices, and varieties f)f grains, it really seems as though this chosen land had more than its share of the good things of creation, and it becomes more and more evident that with such a variety of resources it ought not to sufTer so dreadfully even from pro- tracted droughts, and that increase of management and improved communications are all that is wanted to j)ut an end forever to such horrors as the famine of 1876-78.' ' This is how ITerodotus describes the cotton plant in his chapter on India. " There are trees wliicli grow wild there, the fruit whereof is a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep. The natives make their clothes of tliis tree-wool." Of this same " tree- wool " (the exact counterpart, by the way, of the German ^^ Baum- 7uolh\" cotton), they also made ])aper to write on, as was known to the (ireeks of Alexander's tiiiu;. — 1 lie sugar-cane is so much a native of India that we still call its ])r()duce Ijy its Sanskrit name, sharkara, later sakkara, but slightly corruplcd in ntir European languages: Latin saccharuin, Slavic saUtar, CJerman ziicker, Italian zucchero, Spanish aziicar, I'Vench sucre, English sugat- — not to mention Arabic sukkar n.\\A Persian shakar. Even the word "candy" — originally crystallizeIA. 16. \\\ ^("i necessarily cursory a sketch of India's physical features and products, we are forced 'to ignore a vast number of vahiable items of her vege- table wealth, and may scarcely pause to mention even such important plants as rice and indigo. The immense variety of her vegetation will be inferred from the fact that, besides the distinctly tropical and indigenous plants which have Just been brietly touched upt^n and a great many more, there is scarcely a variety of fruit-tree, timber-tree, food plant, or orna- mental plant that Europe and the temperate regions of Asia can boast, but makes its home in Ii\dia and thrives there. The cause of such extraordinary exuberance is not far to seek : it lies in the great variety of climates which in India range through the entire scale from hottest tropical to moderately warm and even cold. h\>r latitude ensures uni- formity of climate only if the land be flat and other- wise uniformly conditioned. A mountainous coun- try can enclose many climes, with their respective vegetations, within a small compass, for the average temperature is lowered regularly and perceptibly — America. — That tea shov\Ui be a «ati\*e of India, not of China, will probably be a surprise to many ; vet it grows wild in Assam where it sometimes reaches the siae of a lai^ tree and which is the real home of the plant, whence it was intKuUxciHl into China where thei-e is a quaint legend about it : a very studious and philosophic!\l young prince grudged nature the hours of rest, considering them wastei.1, stolen frv^m his belovtxl studies and meilitations. One night he got into svich a rage at his wretched inability to conquer the numb- ness which all his etTorts cx>nld not prevent f ivm sealing his eyes in sleep, that he cut off his eyelids and threw them on the earth — where they struck r».»ots and grew into the tea-plant, that foe and antidote of the sleepy poppy. THE WONDERLAND OP THE EAST. 35 one degree to an ascent of from 350 to 500 feet — in proportion as the elevation increases; so that a very high range is divided into many narrow belts or zones, which answer, as to climate and productions, to whole countries of entirely different latitudes. The position of the various mountain walls and ridges, by catching and directing or entirely intercepting this or that wind, and the greater or lesser vicinity of the sea, also contribute to form patches of local climate, and India, being cut up in every direction by innumerable ridges and spurs, ranging from moderate hills to the highest solid chain in the world, abounds in these, so that a complete review of her vegetation would really comprise nearly every- thing that grows on the face of the earth, from the distinctively tropical flora to the oak forests which clothe the first tier of the Himalayan terraces, and the white-barked northern birch, which marks, as with a sparse, uncertain fringe, the extreme limit of mountain vegetation. 17. The same variety, and for the same reasons, marks the animal creation or fauna of the Indian Continent, both wild and domestic. Of the latter some animals appear to be indigenous, for instance the dog, which still roves wild in packs all over the Dekhan and portions of Hindustan. There are, too, some particularly fine breeds of hunting dogs, large powerful animals, which have been a boast of India from very old times, and so valuable as to have fig- ured on lists of tribute and royal presents, almost like elephants. Herodotus tells us of a Persian satrap of Babylon under the Akhsemenian kings who l6 VEDIC INDIA. kept so many of these hounds, that " four large vil- lages of the plain were exempt from all other charges on condition of finding them in food." It is thought that a very handsome dog, portrayed together with his groom on a terra-cotta tablet found in Babylon may be a specimen of this Indian breed. Such too, no doubt, were the dogs presented to Alexander, which were said to fight lions. Too well known to be more than mentioned is the elephant, the prince of the Indian animal world, as well as the fact that there are two varieties, one native to Africa and the other to India. But to many readers it will be an unfa- miliar and amusing detail of rural economy that throughout the Himalayan highlands the favorite beasts of burden are — sheep and cows! both, how- ever, of a peculiar local breed fitted by nature for the work. The sheep are large and strong, and are driven, loaded with bags, to the marts on the out- skirts of the ranges towards the plains, where in addition to their burden — generally borax — they bring their own wool to market, being shorn of which, they return to their mountain pastures with a load of grain or salt. The cow, on the contrary is a small variety, the ydk, which is also useful in a double capacity, for it is the happy owner of a par- ticularly fine and bushy tail, which is manufactured into a rare and highly prized lace-like texture. It is a serviceable little animal, sure-footed and enduring, which safely conveys even heavy loads up the steep- est paths and through the roughest gorges. It is a comfort to think that this patient servant of man at least is well cared for and does not end her life in the 38 VEDIC INDIA. shambles, the cow being the one sacred animal of India, inviolable in life and limb, and never on any account used not only for food, but even for sacrifice. Besides, both custom and religion, in accordance with the climate and the abundance of choice and varied vegetable food, have long discouraged the practice of eating meat, and even the sacrifices ceased at an early stage of the country's history to consist of bloody offerings. For this reason, one great object of raising and keeping cattle almost vanishes out of sight in India, and domestic animals are chiefly valued for their milk, their wool, and their services. 1 8. Whenever we think of wild animals in con- nection with India, the tiger first presents himself to our mind. And well he may, for he is the most distinctively national beast, and there is no doubt whatever that Hindustan is his original home, whence he migrated into other parts of Asia, both east and west. Low hot plains, with tangled jungles to hide in, are his realm ; hence it is that the royal tiger of Bengal is the handsomest, fiercest, and altogether the most representative specimen of the race. The lion was once his rival. The ancient poetry of India bears ample witness to the fact ; indeed it is he, and not his more wily and bloodthirsty cousin, who is called "the king of beasts." Alexander the Great still found lions in Penjab, where he hunted them with the hounds that were presented to him for the pur- pose. But the gradually changing conditions of life, the advance of civilization with the attendant de- struction of the noble forests where he loved to THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 39 range, gradually made existence impossible to him, until now there are only a few lion-families left in one particular forest tract in the peninsula of Gujerat where they are strictly preserved by the Government. Not so the tiger. Nothing repressed him, and though, no doubt, the jungles of Bengal were his first and favorite haunt, he spread west- ward as fast as the lion retreated, for the two never have been known to dwell within hearing or meeting distance of each other. As long as he has plenty of antelopes, deer, and wild hogs to feast upon he is not a very objectionable neighbor ; in fact he is, in such districts, to some extent a protector of the native agriculturist, as all those animals are exceed- ingly destructive to crops. When he is reduced to domestic cattle, his vicinity is of course troublesome and ruinous ; but nothing can express the horror of having " a man-eater " in the district, i. e., a tiger, generally an old one, which has once tasted human flesh and blood, and thenceforth, from a hideous peculiarity of his nature, will not satiate his hunger with any other prey. Tigers at all times, unlike the lion and most beasts of prey, kill more victims than they need for food, and this instinct of sheer killing seems to grow fiercer and fiercer in a man-eater. Without referring to mere sportsmen's reports, which may be suspected of romance and partiality, there are the dry statistic records with such figures as these: 108 persons killed in one place by a single tiger in three years ; an average of about 80 a year destroyed by another in the course of several years ; thirteen villages abandoned and 250 acres of rich 40 VEDIC INDIA. paying land thrown out of cultivation from terror of a third ; and a fourth, as lately as 1869, killing 127 people and stopping a public road for many weeks, until an English sportsman killed him. The aggre- gate of these isolated cases sums up tremendously. Thus, for the single year of 1877, we have a total of 8 19 persons and 16,137 head of cattle killed by tigers, and for 1882 — 895 persons and 16,517 cattle — which reports seem to establish an appalling average. It is some satisfaction to place to the credit side of the balance, for 1877, 1579 tigers killed by native hunters, and 1726 for 1882, which, however, cost the Government respectively £^777 and ;^48oo in rewards. Yet, incredible as it may appear, the loss of life from tigers and other wild beasts is as nothing compared to that caused by snakes. The serpent tribe is perhaps more numerous in India than in any other country, and the most poisonous varieties seem to have congregated there. The openness of the dwel- lings imperatively demanded by the climate, and the vast numbers of people sleeping in the open air, in groves, forests, gardens, etc. give them chances of which they make but too good use, swarming in the gardens and seeking shelter in the houses during the rainy season. As a consequence, death from snake- bite almost equals an epidemic. In that same year of 1877, 16,777 human victims perished by this means, although i^8ii reward were paid for the destruction of 127,295 snakes, while in 1882, 19,519 persons were reported to have been killed by snakes as compared with 2606 by tigers, leopards, wolves, and all other wild beasts together. That year ;^I487 were paid in lO. PRIMEVAL FOREST ; MONKEYS SCARED BY A LARGE SNAKE. 41 42 VEDIC INDIA. rewards for the destruction of 322,421 venomous reptiles, 19. The insect world is not less profusely repre- sented than the other divisions of animated creation, and though it successfully does its best to make life disagreeable to those who have not sufificient wealth to protect themselves by costly and ingenious de- vices, it seems ridiculous to mention the tiny nuis- ance in one breath with the huge standing disaster the country possesses in its tigers and snakes. Be- sides, there are two insects which in almost any land would be considered a sufficient source of income, and which here step in as an incidental and second- ary resource. They are the insect that produces the valuable and inimitable lac-dye, and especially the silk-worm. This latter, like the tea plant, we are apt to hold as originally the exclusive property of China, and imported thence into every country where it is raised. Yet it appears that it is as much an indigenous native of India as of China, like several other products, and, among them, that most vital one — rice. The mulberry tree, of course, is cultivated in connection with the silk industry, but by no means universally, as there are many vari- eties of the worm which content themselves with other plants. That which feeds on the leaves of the ashvattha {Fiats Religiosd) is called deva (divine), on account of the sacredness of the tree, and very highly prized — nor altogether on superstitious grounds, for the thread it spins is said to be quite equal, if not superior, to that of the mulberry worm, both in glossy beauty and flexible strength ; perhaps 44 VEDIC INDIA. this may be the effect of a gum-like substance con- tained in the sap of both this tree and the banya'n, and which in both frequently exudes from the bark, thickens into a kind of caoutchouc, and is gathered for sale and use. 20. Even so brief and cursory a review of India's physical traits and resources would be incomplete without some mention of the mineral wealth which, for ages, has been pre-eminently associated with the name. To say "India" was to evoke visions of gold, diamonds, pearls, and all manner of precious stones. These visions, to be just, were made more than plausible by the samples which reached the west from time to time in the form of treasures of untold variety and value, either in the regular ways of trade, from the Phoenicians down, or by that shorter road of wholesale robbery which men call conquest ; and indeed, but for the glamour of such visions and the covetousness they bred, India might not have seen most of the nations of Europe fight for a place on her soil, from a mere foothold to whole realms, and might have remained free from invasion and foreign rule. Yet, strangely enough, it now turns out that her chief and real mineral worth lies not so much in the gold and precious stones whose glitter fascinated the nations far and near, as in the less showy but far more permanently useful and inexhaustible minerals and ores: the coal fields which underlie most of central Dekhan ; the natural petroleum wells of Penjab, Assam, and Burma ; the salt which both sea and inland salt lakes yield abundantly by evaporation, and which in THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 45 the northeast of Penjab is quarried like any stone from a range of solid salt cliffs, unrivalled for purity and extent ; the saltpetre which covers immense sur- faces of the soil in the upper valleys of the Ganges; the iron which is found in almost all parts of the continent ; the rich copper mines of the lower Hima- layas, — not to speak of various quarries — building stone, marble, slate, etc. As for gold, although India has always distinctly ranked as a gold-pro- ducing country, and many of her rivers have been known from oldest times to carry gold, and gold- washing has always been going on in a small way here and there and everywhere, so that the metal probably exists in many places, and very possibly in large quantities, yet the industry of gold-seeking does not appear to thrive ; it is carried on in a desul- tor}', unbusinesslike manner which yields but meagre returns. Silver is no longer found anywhere in the country, and the famed diamonds of Golconda are nothing nowadays but a legendary name, nor are other gems, with the exception, perhaps, of car- nelian, onyx, agate, and lapis lazuli, found in much greater abundance ; either the deposits are ex- hausted, or, more probably, the enormous quantities which came out of the country in the way of pres- ents, trade, and conquest, and those which still partly fill the treasuries of native princes and temples, were due to accumulation through the many, many cen- turies of India's seclusion, before the land became known and open to other nations. 2 1 . But all and more than the visionary legends of fantastic wealth coupled with the name of India gen- 46 VEDIC IXDIA. erally, is realized in India's most southern and latest annexed appendage, the Isle of Ceylon. That island, about three fourths the size of Ireland, is in very truth what the adjoining- continent was long errone- ously thought to be : the richest mine in the world of the rarest, choicest precious stones of nearly every known kind; independently of and apart from its pearl-fishcrios, which yield the most perfect pearls in existence, surpassing even those of the Persian Gulf in purity and soft radiance. Nor is the island less surpassingly endowed with regard to vegetation. The interior is one huge tropical forest, where all the palms, timber-trees, gum-trees, spice- and fruit- trees of India thrive side by side with those of Europe and other temperate zones ; the cotton there grows to the size of a real tree, and justifies the apparently exaggerated accounts of the Greeks (see p. ) ; and to all these must be added the coffee-tree which grows wild, and the wonderful bread-tree, not to speak of the vanilla vine, cinnamon, and other most valuable plants, and, of late, the successful tea plantations. In its animal creation, Ceylon is not less blest : it abounds in most kinds of handsome and useful animals, except horses, which are entirely wanting, and is renowned for its breed of elephants, the finest and cleverest, though not the largest, in India. If to all these advantages we add a soil that regularly \-ields three harvests a )'ear, a glorious and most wholesome climate, not afflicted with extreme heat, notwithstanding the island's position so near the equator, but maintained on a mild and pretty uniform level by a perfect combination of sea and THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST. 47 mountains, and, as a consequence, absence of fever and all malarial affections, we shall understand why this chosen spot, which .Milton might have had in his mind's eye when he spoke of isles " That, like to rich and various gems, inlay The unadorned bosom of the deep," has been called the jewel casket and finishing glory of India; and we may pre-eminently apply to it the name of " Wonderland of the East," even though it assuredly beseems all this peerless portion of our habitable earth. CHAPTKR II. TIIK ARYAS. " ^^'ll^> (.an see tlie green eailli any more As slie was by the sources of Time ? Who imagines her fields as she lay In the sunshine unworn by tlie iilough ? Wlio thinks as they thought, The tribes who tlien roamed on lier lireast, Her vigorous, primitive sons?" Matthew Arnold, from TIu- rtiturc. I. In a work which undertakes to present, in a set of parallel pictures, the history of several nations, diffcrino- in race, culture, and religion, but covering pretty much the same span of the world's age, it is at times very difficult to keep them well apart, be- cause the influences to which they mutually subject one another cannot be ignored, unless we are willing to content ourselves with fragmentary and fanciful sketches, leaving a good half of the characteristic traits either indistinct or unaccounted for. This difficulty increases considerably when we have to do with two nations derived from the same stock, and exhibiting such striking affinities, such undcnia- 4S THE ARYAS. 49 ble resemblances, as to betray their original identity at every turn and make us feel as though we can actually grasp and hold fast the time when they were as yet undivided, even though that time may lie far beyond all calculable bounds of historical research. Two such sister nations we have in the Aryan Hindus and Eranians. It is impossible to do justice to the history and culture of the one without drawing the other into the same field of vision and comparing the two, — a process which necessarily brings out their common origin, by presenting identi- cal or similar features, obviously borrowed by neither from the other, but inherited by both from a common ancestry. It was thus that in a former volume, when treating of the Eranians, their culture and their religion, we were unavoidably led to trespass on the ground reserved for the present work.' We found it impossible, " in dealing with the Aryan peoples of Eran, to separate them entirely from their brethren of India, these two Asiatic branches of the Aryan tree being so closely connected in their beginnings, the sap coursing through both being so evidently the same life-blood, that a study of the one necessarily involves a parallel study of the other."* Thus we were actually compelled to stop for a brief glimpse at the conditions which regulated the existence of the ancestors of both in the period that has been called " Indo-Eranian,"?'. ^., the period before the future settlers of Eran and the future conquerors of India had separated, before they had ' See Story of Media, Babylon, and Persia, chap, ii.-v. ' Ibid., p. 36. 4 50 VEDIC INDIA, scvci.illy w.uulortxl inln tlio cinintrics, far distant from one anotlicr aiul from the primeval home, of whicli they were to win and hold possession through well-nigh countless future ages. 2. A cursory sketch was suflicient for the compre- hension of Eranian history, because the nations of this branch soon diverged very widely from the parent stock, and wont their own sc[)arate and strongly individual way. Not so the peoples who descended into India and settled there. The natitins of this blanch were merely the coutiiuiation of the mother trunk. The)' ilid not break with any of their ancestial tr.uiitious. but. o\\ the contrar\', faithfidly treasuied thorn, .mil on!)- in the course of time and further migrations, develoiied from them, not an opposition, but a pri>gressi\e and consistent sequel, in the shape of a moie i^Iaborate religion and, later on, |>hi!oso[>hic.il systems and si>ecu!ations, based on the same principles, which, in ruder, simpler forms, had been their intelloclu.il inheritance from the tirst. At the iM'cscnt stage of our studios, therefore, we must pause for a longer aiul iiumo searching" retro- spect, if we moan to folKnv out .uul com[)rehei\d the long and gr.ulual owilutiiMi (^{ the people who, of all Orientals, are nearest akin to us in ilvvuight, in feel- ing, in manner, and in language. Hy doing so, we feel assut od that we an.^ loconstnicting tlio past of our own laoo .it its eiUrance k>\\ the c.ueer of con- scious humanity, that we are learning how our own f.ithers, in incaloulahly romoto .igos, not o\\\\ li\od and labored, but thought and jM-.u-ed, — \\-\\\ how they began to think and to pni\-. THE ARYAS. $1 3. A fascinating task, but not as easy as it would seem. For, if learning be a difficult achievement, far more difficult is that of ////learning, — forgetting what we have assimilated through years of that conscious or unconscious process of absorption which not only fills but, so to speak, permeates our brains, moulds and shapes them, till our mental acquirements be- come part of our being, in fact the most tenacious, the most inalienable part of ourselves. Yet this is exactly what wc must strive to do, if we would suc- cessfully identify ourselves with these beginnings of all the things of which we, in this our span of life, are witnessing the bloom, the fruition, the perfec- tion, and, alas! in many cases, the decay. We must not forget for a time what forms as much a part of our intellectual consciousness, as breath or motion does of our physical existence. This mode of work- ing backward, dropping item after item of our intel- lectual ballast as we go, alone enables us to divest ourselves of our obtrusive and narrow self and to put ourselves in the place of our remote progeni- tors, to think their eager but as yet untutored thoughts, to feel with their simple directness, their unsophisticated in tenseness. 4. Behold them, then, our forefathers, the Aryas, in their early inland home — which, let it be at once understood, is neither India nor the Eran of the Zoroastrians, but some region, not as yet ascertained, though eagerly and patiently sought for, — where the ancestors of both these and many more nations have dwelt as one undivided race for many ages before that ever spying, ever prying spirit.of inquiry, which $2 VEDIC INDIA. is one of the chief characteristics of our race, first stirred in their settlements. At that moment we ah-eady find a people, rude and primitive, but by no means wholly savage or barbarous, nor even what is usually understood by " a very young people." For the earliest glimpse it is permitted us to cast into their dwelling-places and mode of life shows them pos- sessed of domestic arts and crafts which, rudimentary as they may appear to us, imply centuries of undis- turbed sojourning in the land of their primary choosing, under conditions favoring the training and development of the most essential features of moral and social culture, as well as of material prosperity. A people must have passed out of the purely no- madic stage," to be found established in rural home- steads ; nor can it be said to be in its infancy when, after having achieved the momentous transition, it has gone boj-ond the solitar)^ family life in de- tached dwellings — huts built on a patch of enclosed land, — and has learned to cluster these homesteads into villages anci boroughs, for mutual protection and assistance, — where their daily life presents the normal and healthful combination of agricultural labor and cattle-breeding, in short the manifold occu- pations which, in our languages, go under the name of "farming," — without excluding the exercise of hunting, now, however, a relaxation more than a necessity, a means of introducing wholesome variety into the monotony of the daily farm-fare, and also of repelling and destroying the ravenous night-prowlers, the wild creatures of the woods and the desert. ' See Story of Chaldea, ch. i., " The Four Stages of Culture." THE ARYAS. 53 Once arrived at this really advanced stage of culture, the Aryas, like all primitive races, must have ad- vanced rapidly in the work of social organization, forwc ever find intellectual improvement developing hand in hand with material prosperity. It is an at- tractive and instructive task to reconstruct their life from such imperfect and scattered scraps of informa- tion as we can dispose of. 5. The first feature which it pleases us to note in these early settlements of our own, still undivided, race, is the reverence for family ties and duties, firmly established and held sacred. The father ac- knowledges himself the protector, supporter, and nourisher of his own immediate family ; brothers and sisters live on terms of mutual assistance and cheer- ful companionship, sharing in the manifold duties of house and farm. The degrees of relationship by marriage are determined to a nicety, and persons connected by this secondary bond are close friends and allies. Thus the family grows into the tribe; the head of the one remains the head, the king, of the other.' The several tribes, at first more or less closely related, live, as a rule, on terms of peaceful neighborliness and hospitality. If quarrels do occur and lead to armed strife, they mostly arise out of some dispute about flocks and herds, and, at a later time, out of the competition between kin- dred tribes striving for supremacy or the appro- priation of more land. At the more primitive era the principal occasion of warfare was one calcu- lated to tighten the bond of race rather than loosen ' See Story of Chaldea, ch. i., especially pp. 123-125. 54 VEDfC fAWIA. il, boiui; scll'-ilofoiKc-, llu- const. ml necessity of l;u.uc1- ing against the r.uils of innunuM.ihK-. law less hoixlcs of noiuads, n\ostly of non-Aryan slock, w ho, mounted o\\ their tleot and indefalii^alilo sleppo-j>onies, kept conlinu.ill\- ho\ eriiu; .uul circhni; lound the pasture hu\dsand setllements. whose prosperit\- excited their i^reed. (>. rh\"sicall\-, the Aiyas. as we can picture them from certain indications, are of hi^^h vSlaUire, and powerful build, white-skinned, fair-haired, and prob- abl\- bhie-eyed. Agfcs of seclusion in their first home ha\e moulded these oriL;inally loc.d characteristics into .1 perntanenl. iui^leiible t\pe, which no amount of uiiitino- with other races w ill e\ er be able wholly to obliterate. To the de\eK>pment of this noble /i^i;in to separate, ami tletaeh- n\onl .illt-i iKi.uhn\rn( Umncs llu" iiiothtM" liiink. m\ ii iiMiturn anil nt~\oi' a^ain ti> moot, sa\e in ages to lomo. nu^stly as eiUM\uos, \\iti\ no remotest niem- o\\ of a lon_i>' SCVerctl tio. oi a (.lunmon orii;in. 8. As trailitii>n itself iloos not bei;in its donhtfnl records till ai^os aftiM- this orii;inal separation, anil the il.iw n of histoiy linils nt^^st o\ the nations whiih we ascribe to the v\ryan stock establisheil on the lands oi which they had severally taken possession, it fol- lows that we h.i\e just been con(ei\iplat in;; a piclnre for which we have not the slii;htest tangible uuiterials. No monnments. no coins, inscriptions, hicroj^lyphic scraw Is. teach baek as far as the time wo have endeavored to retrace. Indeed, the first really histoiical monnments of any kind at onr command are the inscriptions, cansed to be eni;"raved in various parts of llindnstan, oi\ pillars and rocks, by AsilOKA. a kiny; w ho reigned as late as 1750 1?.0. The same applies to architectme ; no lniildini;s or rnins of buildings are to be ti aced further b.uk than 5(.x) U.C. Was it then an imaginary sketch, the features of which were put together at random, supplied b\- fancy or any trite description of pastoral life? So far from it, we can boldly say : would that all infor- n\ation that conu\s down to us as history were as true to nature, as well authenticated, as this short sketch of an age on which not even the marvellously trained skill of modern historical investigation could fasten THE ARYAS. 57 by so much as a single thread. But where history tlirows down the web, philology takes it up and places in our hands the threads which connect us with that immeasurable past — threads which we have held and helped to spin all the days of our lives, but the magic power of which we did not suspect until the new science, Ariadne-like, taught us where to fasten them, when we have but to follow ; these threads are — our languages. 9. A hundred years ago, several eminent English scholars resided in India, as servants of the East India Company, and, unlike their coarse and igno- rant predecessors, thought it their duty to become familiar both with the spoken dialects and the liter- ary languages of the country they helped to govern. They were earnest and enthusiastic men, and the discovery of an intellectual world so new and ap- parently different from ours drew them irresisti- bly on, into deeper studies than their duties re- quired. Warren Hastings, then the head of the executive government, representing the Company in India, cordially patronized their efforts, from political reasons as well as from a personal taste for scholarly pursuits, and not content with lending them his powerful moral countenance, gave them material assistance, and even urgently commended them to the Board of Directors at home. It was then that Charles Wilkins translated portions of the great national epic, the Mahabharata, and compiled the first Sanskrit grammar in English ; that Sir William Jones ' translated the national code • The old enemy and traducer of Anquetil Duperron. — See Story of Media, etc., pp. 12-15. 58 VEDIC INDIA. known as " TllE Laws of Manu " ; while COLE- BROOKE wrote masterly treatises on Hindu law, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. These in- defatigable learners could not but be struck with the exceeding resemblance, nay frequently the obvious identity, between a great number of Sanskrit words and the corresponding words in all or many of the living languages of Europe, as well as in the dead tongues of ancient Greece and Rome, the old Teutonic and Slavic idioms. The great future importance of this discovery at once flashed on the mental vision of these gifted and highly trained students, and comparative studies were zealously entered upon. Great and noble was the work which these men did, with results, on the whole, marvel- lously correct ; but, as is alwaj^s the case with such zealous pioneering in a new field, some of the con- clusions they arrived at were necessarily immature and misleadingly positive and sweeping. Thus it was for many years universally believed that Sanskrit was the mother tongue, to which all languages could be traced. This theory was not by far as absurd as that which had been set up sometime previously by certain religious zealots who, from an exaggerated regard, untutored by science, for all that is connected with the " inspired books " of our creed, went so far as to assert that Hebrew was the mother of all the languages in the world. Still it might, from its plausibility and the large percentage of truth it con- tained, have done much harm, by leading people to imagine that they had touched the goal, when, in reality, they were at the initial stage of knowledge ; THE ARYAS. 59 but the question was placed on its proper ground by the somewhat later discovery of a still more ancient language, standing to Sanskrit in the relation of Latin to French, Italian, and Spanish, or Old German to English. Since then Jacob Grimm discovered the law that rules the changes of consonants in their passage from language to language, — the law that bears his name, although it is but one among the many titles to glory of that most indefatigable, most luminous of searchers. The unity of Aryan speech is now established beyond the possibility of a doubt. 10. This common language, or — more correctly — this common ancestor of the so-called Aryan family of tongues, would prove, could it be raised from the dead, to be that of the race, whose mode of life and state of culture we just now attempted to reconstruct. Reconstruct from what ? From nothing but tJie words, which are the only heirloom they have transmitted to us, their late and widely scattered successors. Only words. But as words stand for thoughts, and knowledge, and feelings, this heirloom implies all our histories, all our philo- sophical systems, our poetry — in fact, all that we are and will be. It is the nutshell in the fairy tale, out of which the endless web is forthcoming, unrolling fold after fold of marvellous designs and matchless variety of color. 11. If, then, in the oldest offspring of this imme- morial language, we find words which we meet alike in most Aryan languages of a later growth and in our present living ones, unchanged or having under- gone such slight alterations that any intelligent per- 6o VEDIC IMDIA. son will immediately know thcni, — and if those words, all or nearly all, concern the most essential and therefore most ordinary features of social and ilonicstic life, the simplest pursuits and relations and chief necessaries of our material existence — have we not there evidence amounting to proof, that the rela- tions determined by those words existed, that the things called b\' those names were in use, the actions expressed by those verbs were habitually done, amongst ami by those men, the ancestors of many of us, several, na\', man\- llunisaiuls of years ago? And are not the '* points " thus obtained sufficient, lack- ing any visible or tangible materials, to arrive at something much more substantial ami reliable than mere conjecture on what the life, pursuits, and itleas of those men may and must have been ? Could we apply the test to the short sketch from which we started, it would bear out ex^My single word of it, — literally *' every word," for it is composed of noth- ing but words, which ha\'e been transmitted from the original language to all the languages of the Aryan stock, /. <-., later Sanskrit and the Hindu dia- lects, ancient Avcstan and modern Persian, and the tongues of the Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, and Celtic branches. 12. Almost everybody will have noticed that words go in families. That is — several words, and sometimes a great many, are connected with or derived from one another, all expressing different forms or shadings of one common fundamental idea. On examining such words more closely, it will turn out that this common idea resides in a cer- THE ARYAS. 6l tain combination of sounds which will be found in all. This combination we detach from the words to which it gives their general meaning, and call it " a root." Let us take as an example the following words : " stay, stand, stable, stiff, stile, stalwart, staff, stick, stack, stump, stem, stool, stead, state, station, statue, statute, stoic," and many more, with all their numer- ous derivatives, like steady, unsteady, unstable, stand- ard, statuary, statutory, etc. Different as these words are, they all ring the changes on one central idea — that of permanence, stability, remaining fixed in one place. It will readily be seen that this central idea is conveyed by the combination ST, which is as the soul of all these words. In philo- logical parlance, ST is " the root from which they all sprang " ; these and a vast number more, for ST being a Sanskrit root, it runs through all the Aryan lan- guages, ancient and modern, and is in each unusually prolific ; if counted, the words to which it serves as family bond, would go into the hundreds. Let us now take the Sanskrit root AR, of which the general and original meaning is " plough." We find it in- tact in Latin and Italian arare, in Slavic arati — " to plough " ; in Greek arotron, Latin aratrum, Tchekh (so-called Bohemian, a Slavic language) oradlo — " a plough " ; in English arable — " fit to be ploughed " ; in Greek aroura, Latin arvum — " a ploughed field," whence aroma, originally beyond a doubt signifying the peculiar fragrance of a ploughed field, of the loose, moist, upturned earth. It has even been sug- gested — but the attractive suggestion has unfortu- nately not proved capable of sufificient scientific 62 VEDIC INDIA. proof — that the name Arya itself is connected with this root, and that the people who took it for their own originally meant to call themselves " the people who plough," in proud distinction from their sheep-raising, steppe-roaming, robber-neigh- bors, the Tura/ At the time at which we begin to know them, " Arya " meant " noble," " exalted," " venerable " ; the name had become something al- most sacred, it embodied the Aryan peoples' national pride, — or a feeling deeper still, more intense, en- during, and inspiring : their pride of race, and that down to a very late period ; for was not Dareios, the great Persian king, careful to preface his family genealogy in his famous inscriptions by the state- ment : " I am an Arya, the son of an Arya " ? 13. Neither space nor the scope of the present work allow of our taking up the above sketch and justifying every feature of it by a thorough study of each of the words that suggest it. That would be simply embarking on a treatise of comparative phi- lology. Still, as words have of late acquired such immense importance in the study of what may be called " prehistoric history " — an importance as great as the things found in the caves, mounds, and bar- rows that sheltered primitive humanity in life and death, or, in geology, the fossils and imprints which reveal the meaning of the various rocks and strata, — it will not be an unnecessary digression, ' "Arya and Tura," in later historical times " Eran and Turan;" the same distinction ever, the same opposition, the same battle-cry. {Erdii, Eraniaii is only a slightly altered form of Aryan ; %o'\% Erin^ the national name of //viand.) THE ARYAS. 63 if we pause awhile to trace a few of the words which are our only key, and by no means an insufficient one, to the material and intellectual life of the early Aryan world. This brief review will at the same time serve to indicate and illustrate the processes of philological research in their special bearings on historical reconstruction. 14. We have already had a hint of the great im- portance which attached to the cow as a factor in the life of early Aryan communities. Indeed we may safely proclaim the cow the characteristic animal of the Aryan race. We find it the companion of every Aryan people, one of the chief conditions of their existence ; it stands to the Aryas in exactly the same relation that the sheep does to the Tura- nians. The very fact of the cow's predominance in a people's life is sufficient proof of that people's having reached the settled stage of existence — the pastoral-farming, because the cow, unlike the sheep, is unfit for a nomadic life and incapable of bear- ing the hardship of continual change and march- ing. Those who use oxen as beasts of burden and draught know very well that they have to be driven at an easy pace, by short stages, and moreover posi- tively require one full day of rest at least in seven or eight, if they are to be kept in anything like toler- able condition. They are also very fastidious as to their food, and the least neglect in the care of them, the least pressure of overwork, cause loss of flesh and spirits, agonizingly sore hoofs, then illness and death in a very short time. 15. The Sanskrit name of the cow is GO, plural 64 VEDIC INDIA. gAvas, and this short radical we find running, with the modifications consequent on the character of each, through most of our languages: Old German dino, modern German kiiJi, English cozv. The Slavic branch has preserved it, like a great many others, in the form most resembling the original. Thus, Old Slavic has govyado, a herd ; modern Servian gove- dar, a cow-herd ; Russian, govyadina, — beef, the flesh of cows and oxen ; then gospod)n, master ; gospbd (i), the Lord ; gospodar, the title given to South Slavic rulers ; all meaning originally " master of cows," and corresponding to the Old Sanskrit gopa, which first means a herdsman, and later a chieftain, a king/ By the same evolution of com- pound words from a simple radical, following on the evolution of various more or less subtle shades of meaning from the plain meaning of the original radical, the Sanskrit word gotra, literally " the en- closure which protects a herd from thieves and keeps it from straying," gradually comes to desig- nate a family, then a tribe, /. i., the people who live behind the same walls. 1 6. Let us linger awhile on a few of the names expressing the closest of domestic ties, for they will give us a precious insight into the Aryas' moral life, and help us realize what we cannot sufficiently im- press on our minds — that, contrary to all first (a ' The association of ideas between " a herdsman " — a leader, niler of cattle, — and "a king," a leader, ruler of men, is obvious and close ; see the Homeric poems, where the kings, especially the more wealthy and powerful, are regularly titled " shepherds," or "pastors of men." THE ARYAS. 65 priori) impressions and plausible prejudice born of faulty training, in adjusting our historical glasses to an unhistorical, — otherwise prehistorical, i. e., un- monumental, undocumented — antiquity, the race we have to deal with was far from being a primitive — or, better, primary — block of humanity, unshaped, save to the lowest uses of material service to the one instinct of preserving life, with none as yet of the re- fining, ennobling stirrings of the spirit which come from experience, length of days, and leisure from bodily toil, — leisure to look and listen, to think, re- member, feel. Rough-hewn they surely were, but they were the finest material ever provided for chisel to work upon, and the work had been going on for more years — nay, centuries, than we at first feel at all willing to concede. Whenever we address our thoughts to the human race of a few thousand years back, we pucker our lips into a superciliously con- descending smile, and admire how many fine things our race could do and say when it was so very young and, naturally, ignorant. We should know better by this time ; for has not Chaldea — to take but one branch — taught us that as far as six or seven thou- sand years ago great civilizations had not only dawned or begun to bloom, but some had reached and even passed their maturity and were declining into that inevitable doom of decay into which others .wncre to follow them and some, to a certainty, had preceded them. A very little calculation of probabili- ties will show us that mankind, at the very earliest point at which our eager grasp can secure the first slight hold of it, was not young, and when it had 5 66 VEDIC TNDIA. reached, say, the cave-dwelling stage, had probably existed, in the dignity of speaking, fire-using MaYi, more centuries than separate it from ourselves. To stand out at all where the long slim ray from the pr}'ing bull's-eye of modern research, historic or pre- historic, can. however feebly, reach it, the race — or a race — must have emerged out of the colorless past of tentative groping, into a stage of positive achieve- ment of some kind — for without that, without some- thing to hold to, our most pressing questionings must have been eluded and have been met by nought but the silence of the grave. 17. Let us then try to open the intellectual treas- ure-house of our earliest forebears with the golden keys they left for our use : their words. We may not yet enquire what they did with them ; that they had them is their crowning glory and our gain, even greater than the wonders of literature in which they culminated. For, in the words of one of the greatest masters of words, their histories and their uses,' " our poets make poems out of words, but every word, if carefully examined, will turn out to be itself a poem, a record of a deed done or of a thought thought by those to whom we owe the whole of our intellectual inheritance. . . ." Take, for instance, the word PITAR — father, the meaning of which is threefold — " feeder," " protector," " ruler " : does not the underlying connection between these at the. first glance different conceptions already warrant, by the subtlety and depth of observation which they ' Max MiiUer, Biographies of Words, Introduction. THE ARYAS. 6y betray, the same writer's enthusiastic assertion ' : " Wherever we analyze hmguage in a scholarhke spirit . . . we shall find in it the key to son:ie of the deepest secrets of the human mind, . . ." And does it not speak for an already highly de- veloped moral feeling that the root PA, from which is formed pilar, the most generally used word for " father," does not mean " to give birth " but to pro- tect, to support, showing how entirely the Aryan father realized and accepted the idea of duty and re- sponsibility towards those who belonged to him by the most sacred of human ties. Each duty gives corre- sponding rights, just as each right imposes a duty, that the eternal fitness and balance of things may be maintained, that universal dualism, moral and physical, which is the very root and soul of the world.'' And thus it is that it has been admitted from all time as self-evident that he who fulfils the duty of supp(jrting and protecting a family, has the undisputed right of governing it, of imposing his will as the law of those who depend on his toil and affec- tion for their sustenance, comfort, and safety. I fence pati, " master." This is, in few words, a complete definition of the word "patriarch," in which the Greeks, by a trick of language familiar to them, and, among the moderns, to the Germans, have deftly embodied the two indivisible conceptions: "father and ruler.*" ' IhU. 'See Story of Assyria, p. lo6. "The word " Patriarch" occurs for the first time in the Soptua- gint, consequently came into use at a period much later than the 68 VEDic mmA. This wiMil "pil.u" w c can iMsily pmsuo thrinu;h most Aiy.iM l.mi;uagos, ancient ai\il ntiuloin.allliou^h, as is \\\c n»antuM" of \\oiils in tluMf w.iiulorin;;s, it lunv takt^s on a loltoi. i\o\\ iliops one, nvnv allots a \o\vol or o\ on si>nic o{ its i\>nsonants, nnlil il boconios batoU- lom^jMU/ahlo to the trainoil o\ o and oaf i>l"thc philolojMst. rims Sat\sktit /*//<>/• (^.\\ ostan p:t,u also\ can haiill\- tail to In- at oi\co iilcnlit'icil in /\;/{7- (^(.uook anil 1 atinX can cMsily he known in .w/f/' and /i////r*/-, the toin\ iloiix Oil by tho two northern sister lani^uatjcs from the old WuXowxcfatfar,' the rokitionshi[> is not quite as ohxions in /"lU/fY (Spanish aiul ltalian\ and espc^cially inti\i> I'^ench/^fVv* ; indeed, the three sonth- ein 1 at in sister-ton_t;iies may he said to ha\e adopted decideil corruptioi\s of the inii^inal wonl ; and when we come to (.\^ltic <;//''//•. <>///,//• (^(.ia^lic. Welsh. Irish. Ai n\oi ican^. nothini; shoi t ot scient itic t raininti' will siUVice to establish the identity. U^. The word for "mother" is even more i;ei\er- ally in use in the \avions Aryan lani^'uagcs, and has imderi^onc fewer alterations. Ti\e Sanskrit tndttir, unchanged it\ A vest an Mo'for, except in accent, scarcely dexiatesin the Cj reek W/r'/* and 1 atin ////r/*"r, which abides in the Slaxic mattr, only slii;hil\- short- golden age of Gr«ek speech. Its immem f\ifn\f or /», " a clan, a trilne," and tirlM^ " to n\U\"giving tt»e meaning', " ruler of a olan or tribe," This, how- ever, in no wise impairs the i-emoter, orisjiual association of ideas Wtwecn /v).VV', '* father,'' and/\nV{\j, "tribe" ; in fact, it still more dearly establishes the twofold — ^domestic and political— ohanxoter of the wojxl /\}/.»V,/, " clan," — the family jiivwn into the tribe, and the father of the one into the ruler of the other. Another enlargement — and the tribe his beeome a pcH^ple, (he patrian-h a king. THE ARYAS. 69 cncd by modern Russian into matt, very recogniza- ble for once in the Celtic inathi, even more than in the German mutter, and English mother, from Old Teutonic muotar ; but corrupted in the Spanish and Italian madre, and the French mire, after exactly the same fashion as the word for " father," — evidently with conscious intention to establish a symmetry akin to alliteration — a rhyme — a trick of language by which it pleased a slightly barbaric car and taste to couj^le together kindred objects or ideas. The root of this multiform word is MA, " to make," and also "to measure." A combination particularly sugges- tive, since the mother, she who " has given birth," is also she who " measures," " portions out " the pro- visions, the food, and the other necessaries of life to the various members of the household. From the same root we have nids, the moon, the measurer of time, so that the same word means " moon " and " month," as it still does in its Slavic form, " mesiats.'' 19. The other words expressing near relationship are no less generally preserved in the several Aryan languages. To begin with : Sanskrit bJircitar — svdsar; Avestan, brdtar — Jivanhar ; Greek, frater; (only the word, at the stage of which it comes under our ken, had become diverted from its original meaning and was used in a political or social sense, to designate a member of one of the tribes or brotherhoods — fratri- as — into which citizens were divided. For the family relationship of both brother and sister the Greeks adopted an entirely different word). Latin, frater — soror ; Old Teutonic, brotJiar — svistar ; modern German, bruder — schivester ; English, brother — 70 VEDIC INDIA. sister; Italian, fraU,/rate//o — suora, sorella. (Frate and suora are used exclusively to designate religious brotherhood and sisterhood, " monk " " nun." Frate in this respect answers to the English /V/^r. J Slavic and Russian, brat — sestra ; Celtic, brdtJdr — suir ; French, frere — soeiir. Take further Sanskrit, diihitar ; Avestan, dughdhar ; Greek, tkugater ; Ger- man, tocJiter ; English, daug/iter ; Irish, dear ; Slavic, dtisJitcr (the pronunciation cannot be understood from the written word, but must be heard and imi- tated) ; Russian, dotcher, dotch ; Latin and her chief daughter languages, Italian, Spanish, and French, have adopted another designation, _/?/m — figlia — hija —fille. 20. The secondary family ties — those by marriage — are no less nicely determined — which in itself speaks highly for an advanced state of social order, — and the words denoting them also turn up in most Aryan languages, some in many, others in but a few. One example must satisfy us : Sanskrit devdr, "brother-in-law," is almost unchanged in the Rus- sian de'ver and Lithunian deveris, and very recogniz- able in the Greek daer and even the Latin levir. 21. We will conclude with a word embodying bereavement as universal as the family relations, and therefore reserved even more faithfully than many others through most languages of Aryan stock : vidhavd, " widow " ; German, wittzve ; Russian, vdova ; Latin, vidua; Italian, vedova, corrupted by Spanish into viuda and by French into veuve. A word of mighty import, especially to later and modern India, as it means " husbandless," and so would, all THE ARYAS. 71 alone, suffice to prove that in enforcing the horrible practice of widow-burning on the ground of sacred tradition, the Brahmans have been guilty of heinous misrepresentation ; for, if the custom had, as they assert, existed from the beginning of time, there would have been no vidJiavds, no " husbandless women." Now they not only existed, but, as we shall see later on, are repeatedly mentioned, and once in the reli- gious service attending the burial (or, later, the burn- ing) of the dead, explicitly addressed, as returning from the grave or the pyre to stay among the living. All this in the book which the Brahmans regard as the holiest in all their sacred literature. Further- more, in their law-books, also invested with sacred- ness, widows are provided and legislated for at great length. So that the Brahmans stand convicted of deliberately falsifying, at least in this one instance, their own most sacred and, as they believe and assert, revealed \.QKis. And thus the English authori- ties, merely through ignorance of the natives' literary language and their classical literature, were placed in the atrocious necessity of tolerating this abomination or breaking that portion of their agreement with the Hindus by which they engaged not to interfere with any of their religious observances. Now that the texts themselves and their correct interpretation have been given to the world at large by the life- long labors of our great Sanskritists, the Govern- ment's hands are free to forbid and prevent, by armed force if necessary, these unnatural sacrifices. The abolition of the time-honored horrors of the widow- burning or suttee (more correctly written satt), yields 72 VEDIC INDIA. US one more convincing proof of what tremendous practical issues may be waiting on the mere study of zvords, patiently, peacefully carried on by scholars in their quiet studies and libraries, so remote in space and spirit from the battle-places of the workaday world, 22. It would be easy to swell the list of such pic- turesque and tell-tale words. These few instances, however, must suffice — only adding the remark that the absence of certain words can be at times as eloquently significant by the presumptive negative evidence it supplies. We called the Aryas' primeval home an " inland home," and later stated that " they had never beheld the sea nor the ocean." This is suggested by the fact that no name for " sea " is found in their earliest known language. That name is of later growth and different in the various branches of the Aryan speech, this very difference showing most curiously how one tribe was affected by one aspect of the new element, and another by a totally different, if not opposite one. Latin and Greek call the sea " a highroad " pontos, pontiis — from the same root as pons, pontis, " a bridge," and the Slavic pont(i), Russian put(e), " a road." But the Slav does not apply this name to the sea ; that he calls morie (Latin mar, Italian and Spanish mare, French mer, German meer, hence English mere, " a lake," Celtic imiir), from .a Sanskrit root meaning " destruction." A difference well accounted for, when we consider that the only seas the Slavs and Teutons were acquainted with were the Black Sea, the Baltic, and the German Ocean, all rough and THE ARYAS. 73 treacherous, all renowned for their fierce tempests, which must have been destructive indeed to small and imperfect craft, — while the fortunate dweller on the genial Mediterranean shores well could look at the sea, not as a barrier, but as a highroad, more use- ful for trade and travel than any other road. 23. Now as regards intellectual achievements and abstract speculation, we must not be too prompt to depreciate the efforts of our fathers on this ground on the plea that there is no common word for " thousand " in our languages, — or, more correctly in the parent languages of ours — Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Teutonic having each fabricated a word of its own, which their respective offspring dutifully adopted with the usual tribal alterations. As to our Aryan forebears, we cannot escape the inference from this fact that they could count only up to a hundred, the numerals so far coinciding in all Aryan languages with almost comical regularity. This, however, is no proof as yet that they had no con- ception of thousands, or never saw things assem- bled in so large a number — men, cattle, etc. They may have known of thousands as so many " tens of hundreds," and counted as we ourselves still do up to a certain point: twelve hundred, eighteen hun- dred, and even twenty hundred, twenty-five hun- dred, and so on. Furthermore, the very fact of having invented a numeral system at all — and that a decimal one ! — is an achievement which presup- poses a longer growth and evolution both of the mind and language than all the wonders of abstract speculation which followed, and were a necessary 74 VEDIC INDIA. deduction from it, astronomical calculations in- cluded. For every one who has learned and taught knows what a weary long time the beginnings of any science or art take to master, and that, once the first principles are really and firmly grasped, the rest comes with a wonderful and ever-increasing rapidity, with a rush, as it were, partly owing to the training which the mind has undergone in the effort to step from " not thinking" to "thinking," and partly be- cause these same "first principles" really contain the whole art or science, which is only evolved from them, as the variations from the theme, as the play from the plot, or the plant from the seed. 24. One word to conclude this, on the whole, in- troductory chapter. We have come to speak quite familiarly of "the Aryas' primeval home," of their separations and migrations, as though we knew all about these subjects. We are, in a sense, justified in so speaking and imagining, on the testimony afforded by the formation and evolution of lan- guages, of which we can, to a great extent, pursue the track over and across the vast continent which, though geographically one, has been artificially divided, in conformity with political conditions and school conveniences more than with natural charac- teristics, into two separate parts of the world : Asia and Europe. The division is entirely arbitrary, for there is no boundary line south of the Ural chain, and that chain itself, important as it is, from its posi- tion and the treasures it holds, is anything but sepa- rating or forbidding. Of very moderate altitude, with no towering summits or deep-cut gorge-passes, THE ARYAS. 75 its several broad, flat-topped ridges slope down im- perceptibly on the European side, and are by no means beetling or impassable on the Asiatic side either. This barrier, such as it is, stops short far north of the Caspian Sea, leaving a wide gap of flat steppeland invitingly open to roaming hordes with their cattle and luggage-wagons, Avith only the mild Ural River or Yaik to keep up the geographical fic- tion of a boundary. Through this gap wave after wave of migration and invasion has rolled within the range of historical knowledge, to break into nations whose original kinship is demonstrated by their lan- guages. The induction is obvious that many more such waves than we can at all be aware of must have rolled back and forward in times wholly out of the reach of our most searching methods. The diverging directions of such migrations — irregularly timed, of course — as we know of in Asia, and only a few of which can have taken the way of the Uralo-Caspian Gap : to northwest, to west, to southwest, persua- sively point to a centre which, at some incalculably remote period, must have been the starting-point of these departing Aryan hives. Until within the last few years it was the almost universally accepted the- ory that this centre, — which the lines of march of the several nations, as well as their confronted mythical and cosmogonical traditions, pretty consistently locate somewhere in Central Asia, towards the high but fertile tableland of the Pamir region, — was also the original cradle-home of the primeval Aryas. That question, owing to new elements received into the materials and methods of prehistoric research. 76 VEDTC INDIA, has bcctv I.Ui'l)- reopoiuul, ami trcaUxl, wilh \ar)'ing results, by tviany ahlo aiul niulilo scholars. Ikit, aUlioni;li each of thcin. of course, honestly and tri- umphantly believes that he has anived at the only rational and eonelusive s«iluti«ni, it is, as )'et, iin[>os- sible t(> say wIumi and in what \va\' the ([uestion will be hnally and unanswerably settled - if ever and at all. l"'ortunaleh', it is not K^{ \\\c slii;htest piaetieal inipoitanee for general students; in i)ther words, for an\' but spi\-i.dists in ethnoIoi;y, cranii)loi;y, etc.. and least of all foi- the subject-matter of this \olume. W'e ilo not neeil to pry inti^ the daikness of an in- calculable past beyond the ci-ntu- of dei^arture just mentioned, which is the liist laiulmark of Aryan antiquity touched with a i^olden ray of the historical dawn. It is suflicient to know that that centre, no matter whence the primeval Aryas of all — the Proto- Aryas — may have conu\ h.is been a station o\\ w liich a large portion of the nice must have been sojourners for many, many centuries,— that portion of it, at all events, i>f which the two principal limbs, the leading sister nations of the i\i\an l^ast, I-lranians and Hindus, ilivided almost w ithin v>\w ken, fm' reasons easy to cv>njecture, if not to establish \\ilh actual certainty, and some of which have been alluded to in a former volume. CHAPTER III. THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. I. On the 31st of December, of the year 1600 A.D., Queen Elizabeth signed a charter incorporating into one soHd body the hitherto disconnected and inde- pendent Enghsh mercliants who pHed the export and import trade between England and India, — or the East Indies, as the Indian Continent began to be called, to distinguish it from the islands discovered a hundred years before by Christopher Columbus and known ever since as " the West Indies," thus perpetuating that great man's geographical mistake. In virtue of this charter, 125 shareholders, with a joint stock of i^ 70,000, entitled themselves " The Governor and Company of Merchants of Lon- don Trading to the East Indies," both charter and privileges being granted for a limited time, to be renewed on application at stated intervals. Such were the modest beginnings of that famous " East India Compan}^," which was to offer the world the unprecedented spectacle of a private association ruling, with sovereign power and rights, a land of ten times the population of their mother country, sub- 77 ^8 VEDIC INDIA. jects in one hemisphere, kings in the other, treating with royalties on an equal footing, levying armies, waging war and making peace, signing treaties, and appointing a civil government. 2. Not that the English Company was alone or even first in the field or had things its own way in India from the beginning. On the contrary, the object of its creation was to counteract the influence of the rival company of Portuguese merchants, and to wrest from them some of those profits and advan- tages which they were monopolizing ever since Vasco de Gama opened the direct route to India, by doub- ling the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. Through the whole of the sixteenth century the Portuguese had enjoyed an undisputed supremacy in the eastern seas and on the Indian Continent, ingratiating them- selves with the numerous princes, Mohammedan and native Hindu, extending their possessions by grants, by purchase, or by actual force. There is no doubt that they contemplated a gradual annexation of province after province and the eventual sovereignty of the entire country. They seemed in a fair way to achieve what they schemed, when the English Com- pany came forward, enterprising and active, and stoutly equipped for vigorous competition, and they almost immediately began to lose ground before the new arrivals, having thoroughly alienated the people by their unscrupulous dealings, their unmitigated rapacity, and their ruthless cruelty in seeking their profits and enforcing, by fire and torture, the so-called conversion of the unfortunate population who had received them with unsuspecting and generous hospi- THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. yg tality. Step by step the Portuguese receded before the English company, one source of wealth after another was barred to them until, in 1661, they voluntarily yielded up to the English Crown the last of their important possessions, the city and district of Bomba\', as part of the dowry of the Portuguese princess Catharine of Braganza when she was be- trothed to Charles II. (Stuart). So ignorant were England's ofificial statesmen at the time of the value of the gift, which they regarded as a most ungainly and unprofitable appendage, that they, in their turn, ceded it to the Company for the ridiculous consid- eration of an annual payment of ;!^io sterling ! 3. Still, though so easily rid of Portuguese com- petition, the Company was far from running an unobstructed race for power and Avealth. Their example speedily fired other nations to emulation. Within twelve years from their incorporation several East India Companies had sprung up: a Dutch, a French, and a Danish one. This last, however, as well as a German and even a Swedish one, which haltingly brought up the rear a full hundred years later, never were of sufficient account to molest the English Company or cause them any anxiety. Not so the two former. The Dutch, being confessedly the foremost maritime power all through the seven- teenth century, and conducting their Indian venture not only on enterprising, but on vigorously aggres- sive principles, proved most formidable neighbors and rivals, the more so that they did not confine themselves to operations on the continent, but swiftly secured the partial or entire possession of the 80 r / which eventually stranded it, was the indifference of the i)eo[)le at home and the lu-aitless callousness which refused it assistance of any sort at the most critical moments. It so hap- pened that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, oni' of the ablest French directors. Dun -Mix, was pitted against one of iMigland's most remarkable men, Governor lattM- Lord — CliVIC. The struggle btiwet-n tlu'se two men, in open A\ar and in tliplo- matic efforts to secure the favor of the most power- ful native [)rinces, furnishes one of the nu)st brilliant pages of histor\'. The signal victories gained by the luiglishmen at that time, have been set down as the beginning of the modern I>ritish Emi)ire in India, THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 8 1 for, the French Company once beaten from the field, the competition was virtually at an end, and the French possessions do not interfere with the British rule any more than the few miles of land which the Portuguese still own on the western shore. 4. That this rule henceforth became firmly estab- lished and was more or less willingly submitted to by the people of India and such of the native princes who were still allowed, as allies or vassals of the Company, a semblance of independence and a lim- ited range of power, England owed to the men who, at this particularly critical period, were invested with supreme authority. It was desirable that the con- quest by force of arms should be followed up by a wise and mild civil administration, and it was owing to the Company's good fortune more than their wis- dom that, for once, the Indian offices in their gift were filled by a set of men such as seldom are brought together to co-operate in a common field of action, — emphatically the right men in the right places. Lord Clive's successor, the illustrious and highly cultured Warren HASTINGS, seems to have been the first English governor who took pains to understand the people he ruled. He was not an Orientalist, nor a scholar at all, either generally or specially. Had he been, he would have been far less well fitted either for his executive duties or for the part of sympathizing and impartial patronage into which he quite naturally fell towards those men, officially his subordinates, whose studies were of such material assistance to him in compassing his noble ends. As a private man, ' Warren Hastings 6 82 VEDfC IN in A. was an cnli^litciicd .md icfmcd .im.ih-iif ; as a statcs- 11), III .ind llic Miprcnic ruler ol a luu;i" so called l)ar- baroiis land, whose iidiabitants had, up to hini, been looked on as so many niillion beasts of drout^ht or burden, oi' worse for fliein slill liviiiL^ treasure- casks, to be tapped, antl staved in, and rilled of their contents by all and any means, he un- mooted point. .So, with tin- best will, nothing re- mains to the hairopcan governoi-, in his hel[)less ignorance, but to judge the cases that come beft^re him. to the best oi his abilitx'. .iccording to his own country's laws, as unknt>wn aiul strange to the people as theirs are to him. or. if thrown on his ow n (liscrction, after stand. irds of modern Western tlunight and niimners, which lit the Oriental's mind and life about as well as the European garb his THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 83 bodily habits and sense of beauty and fitness. Chance, which, in the vast field of Oriental discovery has, from the beginning, played so predominant a part, here again befriended the earnest searchers, by frequently putting unlocked for opportunities in their way, or placing within their reach precious finds of which they learned the value and the bear- ing only in using them, sometimes at first with quite a different object from that to which they were led by the threads thrust into their searching hands. Of how one may, in such studies, set out to look for one thing, and blunder on another, far richer and more valuable, we have an amusing instance on rec- ord in an experience of Sir William Jones, which opened to the amazed scholars of Europe the vast and hitherto unsuspected world of Indian fine literature. 6. It was scarcely five years since Sir William's appointment to the Supreme Court of Bengal, and four since the foundation of the Bengal Asiatic So- ciety (1784), and in this short period the great Arabic and Persian scholar, M-ho had brought to his com- paratively late vocation — the law, the same earnest- ness, thoroughness, and facility that had so early lifted him to the summit in his beloved Oriental and linguistic studies, had very nearly mastered the in- tricate and unfamiliar Sanskrit tongue. Not that it was of much practical use in the transaction of cur- rent court business, for, as is perhaps not generally known except to special students, Sanskrit is a dead language, which stands to modern Hindustanee in the relation of Latin to Italian ; but so much was known, that the entire body of native high-standard litera- 84 VEDIC INDIA. line, il.issii.il or sin-iial, was fiislii incd in tli.il lail- giuij^c, aiul Sir William, vvilh liis usual iiitrc[)iclily, uiulcrtook an exhaustive study of India's uatioiml Icgislalioii, an inliinalc knowledge of whiih was indispensable to .i ralituial and luunanc adniinis- tiation. As seholarly (|ualiruat ions and t'onipetilive (Naniinat ions wvw not dieanit ol llun as recjuire- nieiits for Indian appointments, it was necessary — if tlie good work iu)w inaugurateil was not to remain merely the temporary achievement of an exeei^tional group of men, to hi- obliterated b\' the ijMioianee of their successors - to place that knowleilge within every funclionar\''s reach, b\- tiansferring it into the English laniMia-ye. This gii'antic task n'snlted in Jones' famous DiCKSi' oi' IIindu Laws, which, liowever, he was not permitte*! to complete, and in the translation o{ llu- 1 NS I'll'li ri':s OP' INIaNII, the Coi,U> most widel)- acknowli'ilgeil in India. This woik. the last of a life luapeil to o\crtlo\\ ing with noble labor, but shoiteuid b\- tin" long, neviM' ri'lax- ing str.iin undt-r a homicid.il climate, was publislu^d just before his diMth, in 1700. It hatl foi yeaisbeen his pet project, and, the belter to lit himself for it, ht^ hail ilevotcHl his few houis of comparative leisure to literar)- and linguistic sluilii\s in the seemingly boundUss iuld of Sanskrit sch(»larship. 7. (>nce. when so employed, under the guidance of a Ci>mpelenl and intelligent Hiahman master, .Sir Williai\i bethought him o{ ;i pa>sage in a wtll- known collection o{ (.'atholic missionaries' letters about certain '* books calleil Xiifdr" and supposi"il to "contain a large portion of ancient liistory, without THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 8$ any mixture of fable." As nothing is so hard to get in all the huge mass of Sanskrit writing as a crumb of real history, he made inquiries, having a strong inducement, as he says himself, in his desire to learn anything that might in any way be connected with the administration of justice. But he could not make much of the information that was given him, except that those books were not histories but abounded with fables, and consisted of conversations, in prose and verse, on an infinite variety of subjects, and in various dialects of India, " from which he naturally concluded that they were some sort of dialogues on moral and literary topics," until a more than usually observant and intelligent Brahman, he goes on to re- late, " removed all his doubts and gave him no less delight than surprise by telling him that the English had compositions of the same sort, which were pub- licly represented at Calcutta and bore the name, as he had been informed, of plays. . . ." Naturally, Sir William asked which was the most popular of these Natakas or dramas, and was answered "The Ring OF Shakuntala." Whereupon, he proceeds to tell, " I soon procured a correct copy, and, assisted by my teacher, began with translating it verbally into Latin, which bears so great a resemblance to Sanskrit that it is more convenient than any modern language for a scrupulous interlineary version. I then turned it word for word into English, and afterwards, without adding or suppressing any material sentence, disengaged it from the stiffness of a foreign idiom, and prepared the faithful translation of the Indian drama, which I now present to the public." 8. Thus, out of something very like a grammar exercise, came a revelation of beauty and high art, the unpretending form of which enhanced its effect 84 VEDIC INDIA. ture, classical or special, was enshrined in that lan- guage, and Sir William, with his usual intrepidity, undertook an exhaustive study of India's national legislation, an intimate knowledge of which was indispensable to a rational and humane adminis- tration. As scholarly qualifications and competitive examinations were not dreamt of then as require- ments for Indian appointments, it was necessary — if the good work now inaugurated was not to remain merely the temporary achievement of an exceptional group of men, to be obliterated by the ignorance of their successors — to place that knowledge within every functionary's reach, by transferring it into the English language. This gigantic task resulted in Jones' famous DIGEST OF Hindu Laws, — which, however, he was not permitted to complete, — and in the translation of the INSTITUTES OF Manu, the code most widely acknowledged in India. This work, the last of a life heaped to overflowing with noble labor, but shortened by the long, never relax- ing strain under a homicidal climate, was published just before his death, in 1790. It had for years been his pet project, and, the better to fit himself for it, he had devoted his few hours of comparative leisure to literary and linguistic studies in the seemingly boundless field of Sanskrit scholarship. 7. Once, when so employed, under the guidance of a competent and intelligent Brahman master. Sir William bethought him of a passage in a well- known collection of Catholic missionaries' letters about certain " books called Ndtac " and supposed to " contain a large portion of ancient historj^ without THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 85 any mixture of fable." As nothing is so hard to get in all the huge mass of Sanskrit writing as a crumb of real history, he made inquiries, having a strong inducement, as he says himself, in his desire to learn anything that might in any way be connected with the administration of justice. But he could not make much of the information that was given him, except that those books were not histories but abounded with fables, and consisted of conversations, in prose and verse, on an infinite variety of subjects, and in various dialects of India, " from which he naturally concluded that they were some sort of dialogues on moral and literary topics," until a more than usually observant and intelligent Brahman, he goes on to re- late, " removed all his doubts and gave him no less delight than surprise by telling him that the English had compositions of the same sort, which were pub- licly represented at Calcutta and bore the name, as he had been informed, of plays. . . ." Naturally, Sir William asked which was the most popular of these Natakas or dramas, and was answered " The Ring OF Shakuntala." Whereupon, he proceeds to tell, " I soon procured a correct copy, and, assisted by my teacher, began with translating it verbally into Latin, which bears so great a resemblance to Sanskrit that it is more convenient than any modern language for a scrupulous interlineary version. I then turned it word for word into English, and afterwards, without adding or suppressing any material sentence, disengaged it from the stiffness of a foreign idiom, and prepared the faithful translation of the Indian drama, which I now present to the public." 8. Thus, out of something very like a grammar exercise, came a revelation of beauty and high art, the unpretending form of which enhanced its effect 86 VEDIC INDIA. on the literary and scholarly world of the We§t. " Shakuntala " has been translated into nearly all European languages, sometimes in exquisite verse — but for years was known only from the great lawyer's almost interlinear prose rendering, and in this sim- ple garb aroused unbounded enthusiasm and aston- ishment. Needless to say what a sudden lift was given in public opinion to the hitherto despised '* natives " of a land valued merely for its wealth, by the discovery that, instead of the rude attempts at poetical expression with which the most liberal were willing to credit them, they possessed a fine litera- ture as abundant, if not as varied, as any in the West — older, too, than any, not excepting the so-called classical ones, glittering with all the finish and the brilliancy of their country's own rainbow-hued thousand-faceted gems. For, with Shakuntala, the Hindu theatre was discovered, a mine as rich in legend and mythic lore as the Greek and Elizabethan dramas. With the latter, indeed, as piece after piece came to light, the Hindu drama was found to have astonishing afifinities, not only in the general manner of treating the subject and working the plot, in the natural, unconstrained development of the characters and sequence of events, but down to details of form. " They are all in verse," says Sir William Jones, who, being once put on the right track, did not, we may be sure, rest content with one specimen, "where the dialogue is elevated, and in prose where it is familiar: the men of rank and learning are repre- sented as speaking pure Sanskrit, and the women Prakrit, which is little more than the language of the THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, 8/ Brahmans melted down b}' a careful articulation to the softness of Italian ; while the low persons of the drama speak the vulgar dialects of the several prov- inces which they are supposed to inhabit." Does not this description apply word for word to the Shakespearian drama ? Not even prologues and epilogues are wanting — addresses to the audience by the manager, a chief actor, or an allegorical character, — with explanations of matters pertaining to the play, or the usual petitions for an indulgent hearing and kind forbearance with shortcomings, while the remarks or expressions of feeling thrown in by the secondary characters — friends, spectators, and the like — strongly remind us of the Greek chorus.' ' Not that any intrinsic connection between the two dramas can be supposed or admitted. Some few scholars, indeed, advance the hypothesis that the Hindu drama may have been influenced by its great Greek predecessor. They find a suggestion to that effect in the circumstance that Greek female slaves are mentioned in one play, — that the Hindu play, like the Greek tragedy, took for its heroes royal or semi-divine personages, and its subjects from the cycle of national myth and heroic romance. That the drama flourished in the Western provinces and along the Western coastland, while it had no hold at all on the Eastern portion of India, seems to them to confirm their hypothesis. But serious researches have resulted in the rejection of any direct action or intrinsic affinity. A study of the Hindu drama does not enter into the scope of this volume, except incidentally as one of the sources of our knowledge of the country and people. But it is a fascinating subject, on which full informa- tion can be obtained in the most attractive form from the following works: The Hindu Theatre oi W. H. Wilson, with a most valu- able introduction ; the chapter on the same subject in Schroeder's popular but scholarly and reliable lectures, Indietis Literatur tntd Cultttr ; in Etudes de Litter ature Sanscrite by Philibert Souppe ; also Le Thc'dtre Itidien (Paris, 1890), by Sylvain Levy. 88 VEDIC INDIA. 9. The Hindu drama, like the Ehzabethan, bursts on us in full flush of perfection, and its beginnings, the unskilled stammerings of the voice which charms us with its plenitude of harmony, are lost to us. This is only natural, in an age and land where there was no printing-press, to create an artificial immortality and embalm for the bewilderment of future genera- tions the still-born efforts of an infant muse : the wholesome working of that lately discovered law known as "survival of the fittest," applies to the intellectual as well as to the physical world. " Shakuntala " belongs to the golden age of the drama, that of a king of the name of ViKRAMADITYA, who reigned in the fifth century, A.D., at UjJAiN, one of the most ancient and sacred cities of India, in the present native vassal state of MalwA, and at whose court the author, Kalidasa, who has been surnamed " the Hindu Shakespeare," and who distinguished himself in other branches of poetry besides the drama, appears to have lived. It seems not a little wonderful that, in the remote and unknown East, a contemporary of Hengist and Horsa should indite works which could inspire such a critic as Goethe with lines like his famous epigram on Kalidasa's favorite play : Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline, And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed, — Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine ? I name thee, O Shakuntala, and all at once is said. 10. Not less great than the admiration for the play as a work of art was the astonishment at the plot, when it was perceived that it is founded on one THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 89 of the most universally familiar stories of European folk-lore : that of the lover who, stricken by a wicked spell, forgets his love — whether sweetheart or bride — and recovers his memory of her only on seeing the golden ring he gave her, and which is brought back to him under a variety of romantic circumstances — sometimes by the maiden's or wife's own contrivance, as when she arrives to find him on the point of wed- ding another and manages to have the ring dropped into the goblet of wine presented him at the feast — sometimes by sheer accident. The latter is the solu- tion adopted by Kalidasa, and — doubly wonderful — the accident is the same which makes the subject of one of the best known and most popular stories bequeathed us by Greek antiquity. The ring is dis- covered in the stomach of an exceptionally fine fish caught in a stream into which Shakuntala had acci- dentally dropped it, and the fisherman, accused of stealing it, is brought into the presence of the king for judgment ; the ring is produced, and, the moment it catches the monarch's eye, he awakes as from a trance and asks for his wife. Now, who does not remember the same ring-and-fish incident as told by Herodotus in his story of Polykrates, the too fortu- nate tyrant of Samos, who casts into the sea his most costly and highly prized ring, to propitiate the Deity by a voluntary sacrifice, and sees it reappear the same night at his table, cut out of the body of a huge fish presented to him by the fisherman as too fine for any but the royal board ? There is no love in the case, and the Greek uses the incident to point a moral of his own, but the incident itself is there, in both, identical. go VEDIC INDIA. 1 1. Another play by the same poet, Vikrama AJSTD Urvasi, or The Hero and the Nymph, develops a mythical incident made as familiar to us by a pop- ular story from a similar source. A celestial nymph loves and marries an earthly king, warning him, how- ever, that she can abide with him only so long as he will be careful she shall not behold him disrobed. For many years they enjoy unalloyed happiness, when her former companions, the nymphs and sprites, who had sorely missed her, resolved to bring her back by stratagem and contrived, by sending an oppor- tune flash of lightning in the night, that the condi- tion of her existence on earth should be violated. In that flash she saw her lord divested of his robes, — and, with a wail, forthwith vanished. King Vikrama mourned for her and sought her all over the world, until, after long, sorrowful wanderings, he found her and they were miraculously reunited. Even this brief epitome will at once have suggested to the lover of storydom the adventures of Eros AND PsYCHE as told by that bright story-teller, the precursor of Boccaccio and Chaucer, Greek APULEIUS, in spite of a few circumstances being altered or even inverted. In the Greek legend it is the lover who is divine and the woman is a mortal, forbidden from beholding his face or form not only disrobed, but in any way what- ever. And he is not shown to her by any external agency, but she deliberately seeks him with a lighted lamp at the dead of night. Yet the external agency is supplied by the promptings of her sisters, who wish, out of envy or affection, to get her back, and urge her to the disobedience which is her undoing. THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 9 1 As natural, it is she who wanders and seeks for the lost one, to whom she is reunited in the end. And this story too, like that of Shakuntala, can be matched by one of a vastly different age and clime, the north- ern mediaeval legend of LOHENGRIN, THE Knight OF THE Swan. He too is a more than human being and the maiden he weds is warned that she must ask him no questions as to his past — nor so much as to inquire who he is — for though he must satisfy her, that moment he leaves her. Like Psyche, she listens to evil promptings, breaks the command, and pays the penalty. \\\ all these stories, vastly differing in details, substance and spirit are the same. 12. That such resemblances could not come under the head of casual coincidence was clear to the most superficial of the "general reader" class, and a mo- mentary curiosity was pretty universally aroused as to what might be their cause and meaning. But the scholarly world — philologists. Orientalists, mytholo- gists — was far more deeply stirred. This was con- firmation of much knowledge that had been coming in thick and fast for some years, — ever since the English residents in India had begun to study San- skrit, and made and promptly published the startling discovery of that ancient tongue's close kinship with all the languages, old and modern, of Europe. Confirmation, too, that completed observations al- ready made in the parallel field of mythology, and embodied by Sir William Jones in a celebrated paper on the affinity — if not identity — of the divini- ties of the I^rahmanic religion with the gods and goddesses of the classic world ; an identity which 92 VEDIC INDIA. often extended to minute details, as in the case, of Kama, the child-god of Love, bearer of a bow and arrows of flowers, whose very name, meaning DE- SIRE, seems merely translated into the Greek Eros, and the Latin CUPID. Owing to the same few scholars* indefatigable zeal, which was soon to arouse in Europe the emulation of such men as FrIEDRICII WlLllELM VON SCIILEGKL and WlL- iiEi/M VON Humboldt, the field was widening almost hourly, and the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mauaijuarata, were becom- ing known, — in fragments at first, as the students went on on the simple plan of translating the selec- tions given them to read by their native teachers, mostly Pundits of renown. But these fragments were like those scattered erratic granite blocks which show what the primeval mountains of the earth were made of. And it was evident that these epics were treasuries of national heroic legends, myths, and stories which all went to prove the same thing, besides being an absolutely inexhaustible mine of information not only on the customs and manners, but also, and even more, on the spiritual life of the Hindu people — the ways of their thinking in reli- gion, philosophy, and ethics. 13. Poetry in India, like the country itself and everything in it — its scenery, its vegetation, all its nature — is on an enlarged scale with regard not only to copiousness of fancy and exuberance of imagery and diction, but to the actual size of its productions, the bulk of words. The dramas, long indeed, do not so far exceed the proportions familiar to our THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 93 traininnii)HslK'il fact, jjcrhaps for sonu" lime alioail}-. It is then tliat \\e can imagine the firsl Aryan detachment — soon to be followed at intervals by others — emerging, still awe-struck and bewildered, with a sense upon them as of a wonder- ful escape, from the sinuous and beetling mountain passes through which they had followed at a venture the bounding, tumbling huhis w lu-re. with a sharp southward bend, the river for which a continent is named, digs and breaks its rocky bed out of gloom and wildncss, into a region of sunlight and peaceful plains. 4. It w.is the rKNlAl?, A land of many rivers and bnxul \'alleys, of mountains grading down into hills, wooiKhI, forest-clad, oi moderate clime and ever-bearing soil. It had exerything to invite set- tlers — and to keep them a long, IiMig time, even to isolation. l<\>r a glance at the map w ill show that this garden in the shape of a corner or triangle, while fenced from the cniter world on two sides by a well- nigh impassable barrier, is on the third side separated from its t)wn continent by a wide belt of desert ; and its wonderful system of rivers is entirely its own ; their course, — with the exception of the giant, Indus, — begins and ends within its limits. Five bountiful streams descend from various points of extreme Western Himalaya, their courses converging, uniting by twos, now here, now there, until their waters blend into one short but wide, deep, and rapid river which has always borne the collective name PantchanAda, " The Five Rivers " — a name which was transferred, unaltered, to the land itself, and of THE VEDAS. IQ-J which " Pcnjab " is the Persian form.' The Indus, the while, has been gathering volume and swiftness all by itself, without any contributions from affluents, of which it receives only a few inconsiderable ones in the upper portion of its course before it emerges into the open land. It advances, sohtary, majestic, to where the Pantchanada brings it the united trib- ute of " The Five," and then rolls down towards the sea, such a mighty, often storm-tossed, mass of waters, that the early poets habitually described it by that very name, — Saniudra — which they used for the accumulation of atmospheric moisture in the shape of rain-clouds — the celestial ocean — and which was given later to the sea itself when the Aryas from the Penjab, probably by navigation down the Indus, reached at last the Indian Ocean. 5. There is a name under which the land we know as Penjab was even more widely designated both in the early or Vedic, and the later, so-called ' The five rivers can show up between them about five times as many names, which, to a beginner, is confusing. Their modern names are different from those of the Epic Brahmanic period, while the very oldest have been discovered in the Vedic literature of a re- moter era still. Then the Greeks, who knew this portion of India tolerably well, had their own names for them, with a slight assonance to the native ones. The list begins with the westernmost, modern Jhelum, the Epic and Vedic Vitasta, of which the Greeks made Hydaspes ; next comes Vedic AsiknI, Greek Akesinos, now TCHENAB ; these two unite and for a considerable distance flow on in one stream of double volume and rapid current, as indicated by the picturesque Vedic name Marldvridiia, " The Wind-Swelled " ; its later Sanskrit name, Tchandrabhaga, hellenized into Sanijro- PHAGUS, it still retains. There is a pretty story of this river having set a term to Macedonian Alexander's Indian campaign ; its Greek I08 VEDIC INDIA. Classic periods: it is Sapta-Sindhavah, — "the Seven Rivers." This is the Hapta-Hendu of the Eranians, — the land mentioned in the famous geo- graphical chapter of the Avesta among the earliest creations of Ahura-Mazda, and in the rock-inscription on the tomb of Dareios I. in the list of the Persian Empire's tributary provinces. It is, indeed, a far more correctly descriptive name, as it takes due count of the Indus, — the SiNDH of Indian antiquity' — and includes a seventh river, of high and even sacred legendary fame, the Sarasvati, which may be described as the eastern boundary of this first Aryan dominion in India, since it skirts the edge of the Indian desert already mentioned. That river has, in the course of ages, undergone some rather peculiar changes. It springs from the western slopes of the slight watershed which divides the river- system of the Penjab and the Indian Ocean from name meaning " Devourer of Alexander," the conqueror is said to have accepted it as an evil omen and decided on returning. The modern RavI or Iroti is easily recognized in the Epic IravatI, but not in the Vedic ParushnI or the Greek Hydraotes, while both SHUTUDRt and the later Shatadr& are little altered in the Greek Zadadres, and leave a slightly reminiscent sound in the modern SuTLEDj ; just as in the name of the Viyas or Bias there is a faint echo of the Vedic Vipasa, transparently hellenized into HypasIs, HypanIs, or, closer still, ViPASts. Of the five, the Sutledj is by far the most considerable, in length and volume, and the most fre- quently mentioned — almost as the Indus' twin sister river ; " Indus and Sutledj " go together just as "Ganges and Djumna," the two leaders of the other twin system, that of the Gulf of Bengal. * " Sindh" means " River." This is another instance of a coun- try's principal stream being styled by the inhabitants "The River" far excellence. THE VEDAS. IO9 that of Eastern Hindustan and the Gulf of Bengal, and used to accomplish its travels in the customary manner, and end them in the Indus, as indicated on the map by the punctured line which designates its original course. But the Sarasvati does not seem to have had the vigor of its sister-rivers. Perhaps from scantness of water at the start, or from the spongy nature of the soil which, being dry and sandy, absorbed too much of its volume — be it as it may, its waters gave out, and at some time it stopped midway and got lost in the sands of the desert. This must have happened already at a very early .period, for quite ancient manuscripts mentioned the place as a landmark, observing that such or such a locality is distant so or so many days' march from where the Sarasvati disappears into the ground. What is left of it is now known, in its upper course, as the Sarsuti, and, lower down, it changes its name to Gharghar. At the present time it has no importance save that which it derives from old poetic and legendary associations and from having been one of the original " Seven Rivers " that graced and nourished the first Aryan settlements in the land — " the Seven Sisters," or "the Seven Mothers," as the ancient bards often gratefully and prettily addressed them in their songs. 6. A people's life and pursuits were mapped out for it in such a country: agriculture and cattle- breeding — the cornfield and the pasture, the barn and the dairy, together with the few simple auxiliary crafts which make primitive farming self-suf^cing — pottery, carpentering, hide-tanning, spinning, and iWSLiAij^m A M'' *S?^ >i-^« -' 112 VEDIC INDIA. weaving, — these were the departments which claimed nearly the whole attention of the Aryan settlers, the joint and divided labor of their men and women. It would have been strange if the many wide and deep rivers had not encouraged boat-building, even ship-building and navigation ; so that, while the gen- eral formation of the land, divided by intersecting mountain spurs into countless valleys, favored the establishment of separate and independent tribes, the many easy ways of communication fostered neighborly intercourse, and laid the beginnings of commerce. These almost ideal conditions for a nation's development, moreover, though full of the promise of great prosperity, did not in the least dis- pose it to indolence or effeminacy. For, generous as was the soil, it repaid labor, but would not, like many tropical zones and isles, support the human race in idleness ; balmy as was the climate part of the year, it was not enervating, and winter, snow-clad, was a yearly visitant. Then there were wild animals, especially wolves and bears, to be kept at bay. Last but not least, ample scope was afforded these first Aryas of India for the development of manly and even warlike qualities by their position in a land which they had occupied and held in defiance of a brave and numerous native population who kept up armed resistance probably for centuries, and receded or submitted only step by step. Not for several hundred years did this conquering coloni- zation, pushing slowly eastward, cross the watershed and enter the valley of the Ganges. . 7. The natives, whom the Aryas for a long time THE VEDAS, II3 gathered under the general Old-Aryan designation of Dasyu/ belonged to a black, or at least a very dark race, and everything about them, from their color and flat noses, to their barbarous customs, such as eating raw or barely cooked meat, and their Shaman- istic goblin-worship,^ was intensely repulsive to the handsome, gentler mannered and, to a certain degree, religiously refined and lofty-niinded Aryas, who strenuously kept away from them and were especially intent on avoiding the moral contamination of asso- ciation with them precisely in matters of religion and of worship. There is every reason to believe that this spirit of fastidious exclusiveness was the occasion of their collecting and ordering into one body the hymns and sacred songs embodying the religion they brought with them, and which probably had not yet at that early period assumed the finished poetic form under which it has at last descended to us. This work was accomplished by a number of specially gifted men, poets and priests both, the RiSHlS of India's oldest and sacred litera- ture, at more or less long intervals and at different periods, ranging over certainly the whole of five hundred years, probably much more. The result is the collection known as the RiG-Veda, — " the Veda of praise or of hymns," — or, to give the full title : the Rig-Veda-Samhita. ^Meaning simply "peoples," "tribes"; a meaning which the word, under the Eranian form Dahyu, retains all through the Avesta and the Akhsemenian inscriptions, while in India it soon underwent peculiar changes, as will be seen. * See Story of Chaldea, p. 180, and the chapter " Turanian Chaldea" generally. 114 VEDIC INDIA. 8. The word samJiitd means " collection." It is here used to denote the collection of original MAN- TRAS (hymns, sacred texts)/ 1028 in number, which compose the Rig-Veda, free of all additions in the way of explanations, commentaries, and the like. This is, without the shadow of a doubt, the oldest book of the Aryan family of nations, — in contents if not in actual tangible shape, for writing did not come into use for centuries after even the latest of the Rig-hymns had finally assumed the poetical garb in which they have come down to us, and which cannot have been later than 1000 B.C., while it was probably much earlier. And when close study of the hymns has given us the training necessary to discern, from intrinsic evidence of language and matter, the oldest portions even of this stupendous collection, — most probably about 1500 B.C. and rather earlier than later, — we are forced to the admission (for which, however, we are not un- prepared, having already had glimpses, beyond the Indo-Eranian period, of a primeval or Proto-Aryan era)'' that many, both of the words and the con- ceptions that confront us there, already mark a secondary stage of development and are the result of historical growth. 9. The earliest religious life of the Penjab Arya and its outer forms, as they can still faintly be traced here and there through the later complications of * An old Indo-Eranian word, familiar to us under the Eranian form Maitthra from the Avesta. (See Story of Media, etc., pp. 30, 49, 86.) * See Story of Media, etc., p. 37. THE VEDAS. llg the Rig-Veda, are beautifully simple — almost entirely- family worship. The head of the household is also its spiritual representative and leader ; he lights the flame of the daily sacrifice, which he feeds with the simple offering of melted butter and cakes, singing the appropriate hymns. But this latter feature already contained the germ of a much more artificial state of things. What zvere appropriate hymns? The selection implies a form, a ritual. The 1028 songs are divided into ten separate books or collec- tions (mandalas) some of them subdivided into smaller groups, the authorship (more probably com- pilation) of each being ascribed to some particularly renowned saintly poet-priest — Rishi — of olden times. The historical authenticity of these names is of course more than doubtful, as they became, in the course of time, encrusted with such a growth of myth and legend as to leave almost no loophole for anything like sober, reasonable conjecture. On the whole, it may be assumed, with no small degree of prob- ability, that behind these names would be found not only individuals, but also whole families in suc- cessive generations, in which both priesthood and poetic gifts were hereditary. It is these families who will have made the selections and gradually estab- lished the more and more systematized forms of worship which, by the time the Aryan conquest and colonization had, in their steady eastward pro- gress, reached the valleys of the Upper Ganga and Yamuna, had expanded into the most elaborate and intricate ritual and sacrificial ceremonial the world has ever known, in the hands of an exclusive and Il6 VEDIC INDIA. privileged priesthood, who, under their final nanje of Brai-IMANS, had in the interval grown into that all-powerful caste, which, for nearly thirty centuries, has held India prostrate — the most perfect theocracy of any land or age, possibly rivalled only by the Egyptian. lO. Where there is a liturgy, there needs must be prayer-books. Such was the origin and such the use of two other samhitds or collections included among the sacred books under the titles of YajuR- Veda and Sama-Veda. Both consist of hymns and fragments of hymns {^mantras, " texts") taken out of the Rig, and arranged in a certain order so as to accompany each action and incident of any given religious service, and especially sacrifices — these lat- ter in particular having become so numerous and varied as to require the ministrations of a great many priests, — on solemn occasions as many as seven- teen, — of unequal rank and having entirely different, very strictly prescribed and limited duties. Some are to mutter their mantras, some to recite them rapidly and moderately loud, others to intone, and others again to sing them. The mantras of the Saman, which can be traced to the Rig with a very few exceptions — 78 out of 1 549 — are all to be chanted. Those of the Yajur mostly come from the same source, but are interspersed with passages in prose, containing explanations and directions for the guid- ance of the priests who make use of this liturgical manual.' They are grouped in two uneven halves ' These explanatory interpolations are thought to be the oldest existing specimens of Aryan or Indo-European prose-writing. THE VEDAS. WJ or parts — the " Black Yaju " (Taittiriya SamhitA) and the "White Yaju " (VajasaneyA Samhita) — an arrangement insufficiently accounted for by a very grotesque legend. II. For a long time these three Samhitds — the Rig, the Yaju, and the Saman — the bulk of them in reality reducible to only one, the Rig,' — formed the entire body of sacred lore, under the collective title of Traividya, /. e., " the threefold Veda," or " the threefold knowledge." It was only at a consider- ably later period, for which no precise date can be suggested, that a fourth one was incorporated in the sacred canon — the Atharva-Veda. It may therefore, in one way, be called a comparatively modern addition. Yet in another it may probably lay claim, at least in part, to a higher antiquity than even the Rig-hymns. Nothing could well be imagined more different in contents and more oppo- site in spirit than these tw^o samhitds. That of the Atharvan contains a comparatively small number of mantras from the Rig, and those only from the por- tions unanimously recognized as the latest, while the bulk of the collection along with some original hymns of the same kind and, in many cases, of great poetic beauty, consists chiefly of incantations, spells, exorcisms. We have here, as though in opposition to the bright, cheerful pantheon of beneficent deities, so trustingly and gratefully addressed by the Rishis of the Rig, a weird, repulsive world of darkly scowl- ing demons, inspiring abject fear, such as never * The Yajur-Veda contains some original matter, which has been found to be not later than the Rig. Il8 VEDIC INDIA. sprang from Aryan fancy. We find ourselves in the midst of a goblin-worship, the exact counterpart of that with which we became familiar in Turanian Chaldea.' Every evil thing in nature, from a drought to a fever or bad qualities of the human heart, is per- sonified and made the object of terror-stricken pro- pitiation, or of attempts at circumvention through witchcraft, or the instrument of harm to others through the same compelling force. Here as there, worship takes the form of conjuring, not prayer; its ministers are sorcerers, not priests. The conclu- sion almost forces itself on us, that this collection represents the religion of the native races, who, through a compromise dictated by policy after a long period of struggle, ending in submission, obtained for it partial recognition from the conquering and every way superior race. It is easy to see how the latter, while condescending to incorporate the long abhorred ritual into their own canonical books, prob- ably at first in some subordinate capacity, would, so to speak, sanctify or purify it, by supplementing it with some new hymns of their own, addressed to the same deities as those of the Rig and breathing the same spirit." If, as is more than probable, this is the history of the fourth Veda, the manner of its creation justifies the seemingly paradoxical assertion that it is 'See Story of Chaldea, chapter iii., "Turanian Chaldea," especially pp. 153-170. * We have seen something of the kind in the fusion of the old Shamanism of Turanian Chaldea with the nobler religion of the Semitic priestly rulers, actuated most probably by a similar policy of conciliation. — See Siory of Chaldea, pp. 174-179, and especially pp. 235-237. THE VEDAS. II9 at once the most modern of the four, and, in portions, more ancient than even the oldest parts of the Rig- Veda. As a samJiitd, it is a manifestly late produc- tion, since it bears evidence of having been in use in the valleys of the Ganga and the Yamuna; but the portions which embody an originally non-Aryan religion are evidently anterior to Aryan occupation, 12. It would be a mistake to suppose that the mantras of the Yajur and the Saman are reproduced from the Rig-Veda with absolutely literal accuracy. Indeed this is far from being the case, and although there never is any difficulty in identifying the texts, a careful collation of them shows many, at times quite considerable, discrepancies. This fact is very easily accounted for. The oldest known manuscripts of the Rig-Veda do not date back much earlier than 1500 A.D. Yet, two thousand years before that, about 600 B.C., the study of it, exclusively pursued in several theological schools, by the simple but arduous process of memorizing, was so accurate and minute that, with a view to establish the text and prevent interpolations, every verse, word, and syllable had been counted. From treatises written at that period we learn that the number of the words is 153,826, that of the syllables 432,000, while that of the verses is differently computed and varies from 10,402 to 10,622. Now it is quite possible, as every- one may find out by trying on a passage of either prose or verse, to alter a quotation, without materi- ally injuring the sense, by changing some of the words and substituting others of the same length, so that the ear will detect no difference. Indeed this I20 VEDIC INDIA. often happens when quotations are made fro^n memory. How easily would such corruptions occur where there was no written standard of the canonical text to check and correct them ! The wonder — a great, standing wonder — is that the text was pre- served so unimpaired,, on the whole and in detail. But where deviations did occur, of course each par- ticular school would not admit them, but stood by its own text as being the only pure one, and thus it came to pass that we have several versions of the Rig- Veda slightly differing in details. Furthermore, when the Rig mantras were arranged in liturgical order as prayer-books or sacrificial manuals for the priests, the compilers might slightly adapt them to this or that action of the ritual, and all these causes more than account for the divergences in the samJiitds of the Yajur-Veda and the Sama-Veda. 13. To be studied with such exceeding care, to have its every syllable numbered and treasured as so many crumbs of gold, a book must needs be, not only sacred, but old. The fear of losing some of the spiritual wealth is closely followed by that of losing the full appreciation of it — of ceasing to understand it. Then begins the period of commentaries. Every- thing has to be explained. The language has be- come antiquated. The poetic metres — very rich and varied in the Rig-Veda — are out of use, and must be studied laboriously as we study those of our dead languages. Allusions to once familiar things are no longer understood. Myths are lost track of ; their true meaning is forgot. Names that once were house- hold words and told their own tale, have become THE VEDAS. 121 empty sounds. In short, times have changed and the thread is broken. On the other hand, these new times must be anchored on to the old. All these new things — new notions, new customs, new laws, new rites, new social conditions — must be accounted for, justified, consecrated by the old, now almost unintelligible, for these are the sole, universally acknowledged, holy fountain-head of the entire na- tional life — social and spiritual. It will be easily seen what a feat of intellectual gymnastics such a task must have been, nor will it be wondered at that there was enough of it to keep several generations of priestly specialists occupied. The beginning was made with the prose passages intermixed with the mantras of the Yajur-Veda, and which converted that compilation into a manual for uses that had not been contemplated by the old Rishis, but had gradu- ally grown out of sundry slender roots which twined their nearly invisible threads below the bare surface of the ancient simple worship. 14. Such was the origin and purport of the numer- ous theological works which, under the name of Brahmaxas (composed by Brahmans and for the use of Brahmans), formed the staple literature of the Aryan Hindus through several centuries, belonging as distinctively to the second stage of their estab- lishment in the northern half of the Himalayan continent, that gravitating around the Upper Ganga and Yamuna, as the early portions of the Rig- Veda belonged to the first stage, with the Sindh for the main artery of their material life. In this way the Brahmanas mark the transition from Vedic culture 122 VEDIC INDIA. to the later Brahmanic social order and modes of thought — indeed help to bring on that transition, some evidently belonging to the beginning, others to the end of that intercalary period, 15. As was but natural, this work gave rise to numerous theological schools, each of which jealously guarded and handed down its own version of this or that Brahmana, just as was the case with the Vedas themselves. This of course materially increases the difficulties that beset our students, especially when one remembers that each of the four Vedas had several Brahmanas attached to it. Many are lost, or not yet found, but it is doubtful whether they would add much valuable knowledge to that im- parted by those which are open to our inspection, the survivors naturally being the most important and popular works. Perhaps the most interesting portion of each Brahmana is the appendix with which each is supplied, under the title of Aranyaka ■ — " belonging to the forest " — for the use of such Brahmans as had retired from the world into forest hermitages, to spend there a few quiet years, or the latter end of their lives. Four Aranyakas are known to us. 16. As already remarked elsewhere, all religions that have sacred books, and, in consequence, an im- mutable canon of law and belief, claim for them a superhuman origin.' They are to be accepted, obeyed, believed in, as being supernaturally dictated or re- vealed to their human authors by the Deity. The body of Scriptures which the Hindus gather under ' See Story of Media, etc., pp. 17-19. THE VEDAS. 1 23 this head is unusually large, as it comprises not only the mantras of the Vedas but the whole of the Brah- manas, including the philosophical UPANISHADS. They call it Shruti, " what was heard," in opposition to Smriti or " what was remembered," — only remem- bered, and therefore liable to error, to be respected as invested with a sort of secondary sacredness, but not necessarily and implicitly believed, as a matter of salvation. All the law books, including the great code of Manu, are Smriti, so are the Itihasas (see p. 94), the Puranas (95), and another important class, of which anon. It would seem to the unbiassed mind as though the Rig-Veda alone, being the corner-stone and fountain-head of India's entire spiritual life, would be entitled to be enshrined in it as Shruti — revealed, repeated from " what was heard " by the Rishis who were the chosen vessels and instruments of the divine message to men. This would be logical, but would not have suited the Brahmans at all. This most ambitious and crafty of all priesthoods made such exorbitant, nay monstrous demands on the credulity, docil- ity, and liberality of the people over which they claimed — though they may never have quite estab- lished — absolute power, both spiritual and temporal, that not even such a contemplative, indolent, physi- cally enervated race as the once vigorous Aryas were changed into by a long sojourn amid the relaxing, debilitating influences of sem.i-tropical Eastern Hindustan, would have submitted to them tamely and unresistingly, had they not become imbued with the conviction that they were obeying 124 VEDIC INDIA. the will of Heaven. Now all these things that the Brahmans claimed for themselves were not in the Rig-Veda, — to begin with the claim to revelation itself, which the old poets did not put forth for their hymns, of which, indeed, they emphatically speak as their own creation, boasting that they made this or that new song, " as the carpenter fashions a wagon." It had all to be spun out of embryonic hints con- tained in scattered texts, meanings made out, twisted, and made to fit where needed. The text was nothing, the interpretation was everything. This was supplied by the Brahmanas, and so it came to pass that a huge body of literature — larger than we even yet can realize, since many Brahmanas have been lost or not yet found — by a host of authors, of a score of different theological schools, and ranging over between five and eight hundred years, was enveloped in one shroud of mystery and sacredness and labelled Shruti, " Revealed." Of course such a high-handed proceeding could not but give rise to contradictions and glaring inconsistencies. Thus, the Brahmanas are continually referred to by the names of their authors or at least schools, and spoken of as " old " or " new," which is downright heresy, as Shriiti can, properly speaking, be neither old nor new, having pre-existed, unaltered, through all eternity. But theological casuistry will thread its way out of worse difficulties. 17. Smriti, — which might be comprehensively paraphrased by " venerable tradition " — embraces a vast range of subjects and of time, as we have seen. But there is one set of literary productions of this THE VEDAS. 1 25 extensive class which specially belongs to the Vedas, and supplements the Brahmanas and Upanishads, They are manuals on certain principal subject-mat- ters connected with and partly contained in them and which go to the making of the perfect Vedic lore required of every Brahman. These subject- matters are six in number, and, by their nature, show the kind and minuteness of the study to which the Veda — especially the Rig- Veda of course — has been subjected from very early times. They come under the following heads : 1. Phonetics (pronunciation and accentuation), — SiKSHA. 2. Metre — Chhandas. 3. Grammar — Vyakarana. 4. Explanation of words (etymology, homonyms, and the like) — NiRUKTA. 5. Astronomy — JYOTISHA. 6. Ceremonial — Kalpa. . An exhaustive knowledge of these six things is considered so essential to a full understanding of the Veda and the proper idea of the infinitely com- plicated forms of worship evolved out of the Rig, that they are said to belong to it organically as members to a body, and are very realistically called Vedangas, " limbs of the Veda," as necessary to its articulate perfection. 18. It follows from this that, in speaking of '' the six Vedangas " we do not mean six distinct books or treatises, as is sometimes superficially concluded, but six subject-matters which are contained in the Veda as part of its substance and which are to be abstracted 126 VEDIC INDIA. tlicrcout ami developed for purposes of study. W,e continually ap[)ly a similar process to Homer, or to Shakesi)eare. Wc might just as well speak of Homeric accentuation, Homeric metre, Homeric grammar, Homeric mythology, Homeric astronomy,. Homeric worship, and say that these six subjects or studies are "the pillars of Homeric scholarship," It further follows thai, if there were six Vedangas, the numbers of works or manuals treating of them could multi[)ly indefinitely — which is just what did happen. One feature, however, was common to all these works ; as they were only meant to specialize and epitomize knowledge which for the most part was already scattered, in a loose and desultory form, through the BrAhmanas, they were compiled in short paragraphs or aphorisms compact and con- cise — a sort of telegraphic memorandum style, — in which bievity often degenerates into obscurity and at times into an a|most nnintelligible jargon, that provides enough hard nuts to crack for a few more generations of special students. These collec- tions are called SOtras, literally " strung together," or rather " sewn together," from the root stv or syA, " to sew." * 19. The Hindu scholars must have found this epitomic hantl-book style particularly convenient and lulpful to the memory, for they applied it to many other than sjiecially Vedic subjects: knv, phi- losophy, medicine, crafts. These subjects belonging to the " remembered " or "traditional " half of classi- ' Sometimes the Siitras are comprised under the term " Ve- dtlnga." THE VEDAS. 12/ cal literature, Smriti, the Sutras that treat of them are designated as Smarta-Sutras, to distinguish them from those that treat of matters connected with " revelation," or " what was heard," ' Shruti, and which go by the general name of Shrauta- StJTRAS. Of these, as of Brahmanas, there are several sets annexed to each Veda, and they embrace a large variety of subjects, minute subdivisions of the gen- eral matter classed under the headings of the Vedan- gas, till we actually find a set of Sutras on the art of adapting the words of the sacred hymns to music. It may be confidently asserted that India is the only country in the world where grammar, prosody, versi- fication, are a portion of the nation's sacred litera- ture, and indeed partly of its revealed scriptures, since the bulk of the material worked over by the Sutra-compilers in their peculiar style, is really found in the Brahmanas and, in one case, in the Veda itself — meaning the prose portions of the Yajur- Veda. However incongruous and almost grotesque this may appear at the first glance, if unexplained, it becomes quite logically intelligible when the connection is made plain and pursued from the start. 20. The sacredness attaching to these branches of ' It is quite natural that revelation should be conceived of as com- ing through the sense of hearing in an age so much anterior to writing, and even later, when, preferably and on principle, .the entire sacred literature was committed by students to memory, being re- ceived orally from the teacher's lips. Yet, curiously enough, parts of Shruti are usually spoken of as seen. Thus a certain Rishi is said to have seen certain hymns of the Rig- Veda -which have come down under his name. 128 ]'II)IC INDIA. st iitly, usiiall)' coiisidni'd as cmpliat ically a part of 1 he layman's cducalion, accounts for (lie cxliaoidinary pains and rare early bestowed on them, and which cuhnin.ilcd in the most elahorate. profound, svdotle, and finished invest i<;at ions of lani;uaf;e cvei' aeiiiex'ed by any people. It will be notici-d that such (piestions maUe up lour out of the six Vcdant^as : Phonetics, Metre (oi- versilieal ion and prosod)'). 1'",! \'n\oloij;;y (comprising; homonyms and synonyms), ami (iram- mar [jroper. In llu" intricate system of sacrificial rites, based on foiins puic and sin>i)|e, into whieh the once beautiful Vedic worship (juickly and surely dc- H'lMierati'd, one misplaced accent, out- mis-pronounced word, one lalsely ^iveii (pi.udit)-, was supposeil not only to destioy the beneficial virtue of a sacritke, but actuall)' to turn it a<;ainst the sacrificer. \'et how easy to commit such a slip wlu-n nsim; onl)- half inti-IIiqible words and forms in a lanj^ua^e whiih. fioin beinv; at all times a more or less ai'tifieial, liliMar\- idiom, w.is fast cominfT to bi' a ilead one! What wonder (hen if m'ee points of .^'i the n.itional inli-IIeet ; if (-.uh theolojdcal school I'u-rcely vindicatid and ehnu; to its own versii)n of a pas- sage n.i\-. its o\\ n pronunciation, its own accentua- tion of this or that word, jiroducini;' a Ioul;" and varii'd series of scientitlcally elaborateil treatises (.SAtras), the lari;er number of which, judging; from (piol.ilions in ihosi- th.il were preserved, have evi- dent I)- been lost, only the best havini; survived the natural selection of unwritten literature, the produc- THE VEDAS. 1 29 tions of which must stand or fall exclusively on their own merits. 21. We have now arrived at the end of a survey, not incomplete, if necessarily brief, of what can, in the stricter sense, be called Vedic Literature. In a wider sense, all the literature of India may, theo- retically, be said to come under that head, since the Veda — the Rig-Veda in the last instance — per- vades and dominates her spiritual life, even as her own Himalaya sways and regulates the conditions of her material existence. But the special and distinc- tive Vedic literature is that which follows directly from the Veda and revolves around it, treating only of such matters as it either contains or suggests. It naturally falls into three very obvious main divisions : I, the Mantra period — the period of collecting the songs with no special object beyond that of preserv- ing them ; 2, the Brahmana period — the period of commentary and a certain amount of exegesis, with the patent object of establishing the supremacy of the Brahman caste ; 3, the Sutra period — the period of concise special treatises for practical use at school and sacrifice. Chronologically, these periods do not strictly succeed one another, any more than the so- called culture ages — of stone, of brass, of iron — but overlap both ways over and over. Thus, if the second period corresponds to a well-defined stage of the Aryas' conquest of India — that of their advance eastward and their establishment in the valleys of the Ganga and Yamuna — the third may be said to straggle down actually into modern times, since the monumental commentary on the Rig-Veda, 130 VEDIC INDIA. the lirahnians' staiulard aiitlu)rity, was written by SAyanA as late as the fourteenth century oi our era.' ' PAnini's no less monumental grammar, though a much earlier work (4th cent, li.c.), and by its sul)jcct belonging to tlie Vedangas, can hardly ho classed under strictly Vedic literature, for the language wliiili he found and dissected vvitii an acumen and thoroughness un- rivalled even by t'lreek grammarians, is not that of the Veda at all, ami Vcdic forms of speech are studied by him as curious philological relics. Jl^ CHAPTER V. THE RIG-VEDA : THE OLDER GODS. I. When we prepare to investigate one of the world's great religions, and before we enter on an analytical study of details, we naturally incline, in our desire to feel firm ground under our feet, to ask the preliminary question : What is its character? in what category should it be classed ? to what division of the spiritual world does it belong? Polytheism? Pantheism? Animism? or what other? When it is the Rig-Veda into which we are about to plunge, we doubly feel the need of some such guiding thread, some anchor to rest upon, for its 1028 hymns, bris- tling with names and allusions, produce, on a first perusal, a labyrinthine, chaotic, wholly bewildering impression. But alas, a direct, plain answer to such a question is seldom, if ever, possible, and, in the case of the Rig-Veda, perhaps a little less so than in that of any other analogous spiritual document. The growth of a long series of centuries, elaborated in many million busy, subtle brains, containing a great race's spiritual food for as many centuries to come and materials for endless transformations, could not 131^ 132 ]•/:/>/(' iNPiA. |)o,ssil)ly he so .simple aiul liansp.ircnl a lliiii*.,^ :is to admit (>( a swccpinj.; clclinit ion in one word. The: study of tlu; Zc'iid-Avcsla showed us how many va- lied eh-meiits, aud liow iiitiic alely stratifu'd, j,;() to t he malxin;'_ ol a jMcat national relijdon. 'I lu; same; unconscious woi'l< of lime and inllucnccs confronts us in the Veda, hut hy so much more many-sided and eomphc. lied h)' iiow nuuh tlu- contemplalive, introspective character which the Aryas deveU)ped in India is more involved and self-a])sorl)ed than that of thcM"r sternly simple, active-, and hardy ICranian hret hreii. 2. Let US, however, attempt to answer the (jucs- tistraetreason- iiij;, Init the visihle Infinite, visible by tlie naked eye, the endless expanse iieyond tiic earth, beyond the elmids, beyond the sky. . . The idea of the InCmitc was reveaU'd, was most powerfully impressed on the awakeninjj nund by tlie Kasl. It is impossible to enter fully into all the thout;lils and feelings that [nissed through the minds of the early poets wl»en they found names for that far, far East from whenee even the early dawn, the sun, the day, their own bfc seemed to sprinj; \diti is a n;\me lor tiiat distant East f but Aditi is more than the d.iwii. Aditi is bi-youil the dawn, and in one plaec llie dawu is lalK'd ' the face of Aditi." That siU'iit asinnl awakoneil in till- Iniuian mind, the eonception of the Intinile, liie imuuirlal, the l>iviiu- \dili is not a jirominent deily in (he \ eda, never- llieless hers is a f,ii\iiUar name, that lives on in that of tlie Adityas — the sons of Atliti. 17. Varuna .iml Milia then aie Aiiit)'as. Wc know now what is the far from literal moanino- of such terms as "Sons of Aditi" : Sons of Ktcfiiity, — Sons of Immoftality, — Sons of boundless Time and Space, — theie is nolhini;- but what is metajihorical, appro- priate, and poeticall)- beautifid in all these names for the deitled impersotuitions of Sky and Lii;ht. They are shareil In' se\er.il more dixine beiui^s, w ho seem but palini; rellections of their threat brothers. Of THE OLDER GODS. 1 55 these only one, Aryaman, is frequently addressed with words of praise and homage, though never alone, but jointly with Mitraand Vdruna. A fourth, Bhaga, quite impersonal and only occasionally men- tioned along with the others, is of great interest to us because of his name, which, in a very slightly modified form, BOGH, has been adopted by the en- tire Slavic branch of the Indo-European family of nations as that of God — the one God of Christian monotheism. The Adityas are said to be seven ; yet only two more are named occasionally in the hymns ; the seventh remains in a shadow of uncertainty, while now and then an eighth is spoken of ; once or twice the Fire-god would seem to be that eighth.' But all this is very vague and misty. One thing, how- ever, is evident from the hymns to all the Adityas, which are quite numerous : they all share, — and so does Aditi herself — in the special attributions so char- acteristic of Mitra and Varuna ; they are all keepers of the Rita and its innumerable ordinances, they all are guardians of purity and truth ; avengers — and also forgivers — of sins, healers and givers of health, and the prayer " to be held or made guiltless before the face of Aditi and the Adityas " is a familiar and oft- repeated one. 'Just as Atar is once mentioned in the Avesta as an eighth Amesha-Spenta, though otherwise the "Bountiful Immortals" are always seven in number. That there is some affinity between the original conceptions — Amesha-Spentas and Adityas — has always been suspected, and the names do not militate against it, seeing that Aditya, in the sense of " Son of Immortality " would not match badly with Amesha, "Immortal." See Story of Media, etc., pp. 41 and 7S. 156 V /■:/>/(' INDIA. I pieces of wood. . . . He is produced of them like a new-born infant." In one place wonder is expressed that a living being should spring out of dry wood ; in another, that, born of a mother that cannot suckle him, he should grow so rapidly and at once begin his work as messenger. " This I declare, O Heaven and Earth," one poet exclaims, horrified, " the son, no sooner born, devours his parents. But," he hastens to add, " I, a mortal, cannot judge a god; Agni is wise and knows." 21. So far, nothing can be plainer than the ma- terial nature of the god. There is even very little anthropomorphism about it. It is the pure, un- disguised element of Fire. Nor is any abstraction THE OLDER GODS. l6l attempted when Agni is entreated to disperse the fiends (of darkness) with his club, or is said to look on the world with a thousand eyes. All this clearly lies within his attributions as light-giver and dis- penser of heat on earth. But it is not on earth alone that light and heat abide ; not to earth alone is their action limited. A people less thoughtful and observ- ant than the ancient Aryas could not fail to asso- ciate the phenomena of lightning with those of fire, or, when contemplating the sun — SuRYA — in his exuberant glory of light and heat, to come to the conclusion that their own fire — whether mildly illum- ing the household hearth, blazing, butter-fed, on the altar, or devouring forests and hostile forts — was but his earthly substitute, or rather that the two were one, of one substance, variously manifested. And indeed, this is the view most explicitly expressed in this one brief line : "Agni is Surya in the morning, Surya is Agni at night." It is an accepted and oft- repeated saying that Agni has more than one abode, sometimes two, and then again — more truly — three : on earth, as fire; in the heavens, as the sun ; in the atmosphere, as lightning. From this to identifyincr all three together is but one step, and it is frequently taken. The humble birth — from " two dry sticks " — which suited the god in his earthly manifestation, no lonirer accounted for his existence in those exalted spheres ; " Son of the Waters " — Apam-Napat ' — is ' The name is certainly older than the Aryan colonization of India ; it must be Indo-Eranian at least, if not older still, since we find it in the Avesta as one of the habitual siirnames of Atar. See Story of Media, etc., pp. 37,45, 80. 1^2 /'A7)/r /x/u.t. the luystii' liiit .i|i|)n i|ii i,il (• ii.imc nl Ai'iii, llic T.ip;hinil1^, wliti, .illil l\ iii!.; I<'iii; Iiiddcn ill tlic «(l(',| i.il (1(111(1 I uc, 111 { SdiNiii/rd ), 11. 1'. lie; loilli (lom il , ill \ (I \- 1 1 111 li " w,il ci horn." 1 1 is «)iil\' ,111 (il) MiinT idiiu (il the s.illic iii\ III w lull AjMlI is .illiidcd to as " the son of seven iiiol liii .," oi , " ol iii.iiiN' iiiol li( IS," or of "the Motlici;"' jmiki ,ill\', hcc.iiisc llicii the t loud., iiiidci llic 11, line ol .\r,\S, "llic w.ilcis," ,in- t.ikcii iii(li\i(lii.ill\-, .scpai .ilciv, lioiii till- iii.is.s of suspended vv. iters, wliii i\ is iiii.iidiicd .is llic iciest i.il sea, the Sirf/z/zt/nr. 22. l-ike the I''.i aiiiaiis, llie AiyJlS of India held thai I'ire dweh not oiil\- in w.iN r, hiil in pl.ints. Hoth positions .sccni, .it hi. I si:;lil, mil ciLililc. \'ot we s,iw how e.isil\- llic fiisl ol tlicin is |ii.tilicd 1)\- f.ui, and .1 inonienl's lhoii|;lil shows lli.il the sec- ond is hill tliesc(picl ol il. I'dl, pl.ii ill;; oiiisi-lvcs for .1 moincnl ^u\ tluii sl.iiidpoinl , lire could not he 1)1 oil" 111 out ol pl.iiil s (^w Odd ( (Mill s ol I I CCS .ind I feeS .lie pi. lilt'.) il il Wi'ie not in them. i''iii- lu'at — hiddiii in the iil.int, is wli.il iiio\cs the .s.ip, (piiekens t lie !M «>\\ I h ; it istli.- l.ilcnl piinciplc ol the pi. nil's life. Ihit how did il ;'/l into them? W-iy simply: it descended sti.iiidit lioin \\rA\c\\, ■:(ii/U t//<' 7(>a/t'rs whuh .lie its n.itivc i-lcniciil, in the .shows-is whieh, Willi I 11 under .111(1 liidit iiiii;'., pom dow n on I lie I hirst}' c.iilh. In the I. nil I'lii- dc'.ecnds, nol upon, Imt ///A' the gToniid, .111(1 tluMUH> lises into the pl.ints US sap ami \Uc ; do we iu>t s.i\- "\il.il s/\>/i-"r There is no laek of passa!.;"c>?; m tin- l\i;;\'ed.i whieh luoie or less t i.msp.iicnt 1\- deserihc this \ ciA- process. I'^Oi" instance : " 1 lis lo.id is llic llood th.it poms throui^'U THE OLDER GODS. 1 63 the arid space ; he reaches earth with the clear waters ; he devours what is old (wood), and pene- trates into new plants." (I., 95, 10.) And again : " When he is brought down from the highest Father [Dyiius, Heaven], he climbs into the sapful plants . . . to be born again, ever most young." 23. This is undoubtedly one of the ways in which Agni was supposed to have descended to the earth. But this manifestation is accomplished in a very roundabout way and continually repeated. The question remained, in what more direct manner he came among men for the first time in his more fa- miliar and visible form — for Agni's original home is not sought on earth. It is said : " Agni was born first in heaven ; his second birth is with us ; the third in the clouds, imperishable. . . ." (X.,45, i.) The Aryas, no doubt, had several myths embodying their beliefs or traditions — speculations or reminiscences — on this fascinating question, which has not only not lost any of its interest in the course of the ages, but rather gained more, in the first place because we are better able to measure and appraise all that fire has done for our race, in the second because we have hardly arrived nearer to a reliable or at least plausible solution, and we are so made that curiosity never relents until satisfied. But the Rig-Veda is not a book of mythology. Myths are not told by the old Rishis, but only alluded to as things well known to their audience, — just as a modern preacher might refer to Jonah's adventure with the whale or the Hebrew boys' fortitude before- the fiery ordeal, without every time narrating at length the familiar 164 VEDIC INDIA. Bible stories. From such brief snatches and alhi- sions we gather that Agni was brought from afar by some superhuman agency ; and he has always to he fowid, fetched out of hiding, so strongly had the notion of the latent presence of fire in water and plants taken hold of men's fancy. The finder who is most frequently named is MAtarishvan, a being whose nature is not explained, and who is said to have brought Agni " from heaven," " from the gods, very far away," and to have given him, " as a gift," to the Bhrigus, an equally mysterious race, nearly connected with humanity, however, as they, in their turn, after again concealing him in the wood, brought him forth and gave him to men — or to Manu, apparently the first man, whose name stands for the entire race ; which can only mean that the illustrious priestly race of the Bhrigus claimed that their ancestors taught men to " bring forth," i. e., kindle fire by friction. As Matarishvan is certainly the lightning (" Agni is manifested to him the very moment he is born in the highest heaven "),this very coherent if incomplete story is not at all spoiled by the fact that Agni is himself repeatedly called by that name. It is more confusing to find that, once in a while, he is spoken of as being found without Matarishvan's assistance. For instance : " The wise Bhripus followed him, the hidden one, as one hastens after cattle that has strayed ; they found him in the waters and placed him in the homes of men." But then philology by a careful comparative study of the name and the large family of its kindred or derived words in the Aryan languages, both ancient and of THE OLDER GODS. 1 65 later formation, has proved that the mythical Bhrigus had something to do with such things as " flame " and " blaze," if not with the lightning itself. The affinity strikes us still more clearly when we are told that " Atharvan drew Agni forth, by friction, out of the blue lotus-blossom " (a not unusual poetical name for the vault of heaven), since the name at once suggests a fire-priest, being identical with that of the Eranian priests of Atar,' besides being, prob- ably, one of the oldest names for Lightning itself, not to mention the Sanskrit words athare, " flame," and atharyni, " blazing," a by-word of Agni.* As there was a class of priests called Atharvans, — those specially appointed to the care of the different fires at great sacrifices, — this is another instance of the connection claimed by classes or families of men with semi-mythical progenitors. The Angiras, another highly reverenced family of hereditary priests and Rishis, are also mentioned in the Rig-Veda as having first kindled Agni. And "Angiras," in the singular, as the name of an individual, is now that of the human but half-mythical ancestor of the priestly race, and now unmistakably a name of Agni himself. The confusion produced by so many names is not as great as might appear at first sight, because one soon detects an underlying general idea, which is neither more nor less than the kinship between Agni and his mortal worshippers, indeed points to a belief in the celestial and fiery origin of the human race. ' See Story of Media, etc., pp. 150-152. This is also the only trace in the Rig- Veda of the older Eranian name of Fire. ' See ib., p. 42. 1 66 VEDIC INDIA. 24. Truly, the association of ideas is very obvious. Of the heavenly birth and descent of Fire (which name, it must not be forgot, covers the conception and manifestations of Heat generally) no doubt was entertained, whether in its patent — obvious — form, as sunlight and lightning, or in its latent — hidden — form, as the elementary principle concealed in the waters and the plants, and ever ready to escape therefrom. Now the warmth of the living body is a still clearer indication of the divine presence, and Agni may be said to have descended into men in the same way that he has descended into plants — not to mention another possibihty : that of his passing into the human frame in the guise of the vegetable food it consumes, and then from generation to generation, as the ** vital spark," which, being perpetuated by heredity, is not destroyed even by death. In this sense also the god is " immortal among mortals." Well may he be called, " he of many births." Numer- ous are the passages in which " community of race " — kindred — is claimed with gods for men, explicitly, though in a general way : thus the verse " We have in common with you, O gods, the quality of brothers in the mother's bosom " is fully explained by this other : " Heaven (Dyaus) is my father, who bore me ; my mother is this wide earth (Prithivi)." The oldest Rishis are styled " heaven-born," and one poet in- vokes them all by name (Angiras and Manu in the number), as " knowing his race " and the fact that ** it reaches up to the gods, its stock is among them." And if these claims and assertions seem too vague to be directly referred to Agni, no doubt is possible before the positive statement that he " gave birth to THE OLDER GODS. 1 67 men " and " found a way for his descendants " and the direction to men " to invoke him as the first father."' Marvellous to watch is this dim percep- tion of the unity of nature, the kinship of man with the entire universe (or at least our own solar system), so lately established by modern science, struggling into expression at that early age, with nothing but poetic intuition to guide. 25. We have now learned to know Agni : ist, in heaven as the Sun ; 2d, in the atmosphere, as Light- ning ; 3d, on earth, as the Domestic, and 4th, as the Sacrificial, Fire. We have still to be introduced to the god in his fifth aspect, in which he plays an ex- ceedingly important part in the Hindu Arya's life : as consumer of corpses and guide of departed souls to the abodes of " the Fathers." For, unlike the Eranians, the Hindu did not hold that the impure contact of death could pollute the holy element, but on the contrary ascribed to the latter the power of purifying and sanctifying all things its flames con- sume or only touch. ^ Yet the " funereal Agni " was ' This theme, of man's celestial and fiery origin, is treated with great erudition and convincing mastery by Abel Bergaigne, in his colossal work La Religion Ve'dique (vol. i., pp. 31^. chapter entitled Origine Celeste de la Race ILiiniaine). ^ What would the Eranians have said to the niodern Brahmanic custom of floating corpses down the Ganges, to be carried out to the ocean by the sacred river's sanctifying waters ! This dreadful cus- tom is especially in force at Benares, the great city near the Junction of the Ganges and Djumna, the holiest spot of all Brahmanic India. There the dying are actually carried to the river and plunged into it to breathe their last in the sacred waters, not only singly, but at cer- tain times in crowds. Of course all these practices were abomina- tions to the Parsis. See Story of Media ^ etc., pp. I2i^ff. 1 68 VEDIC INDIA. kept separate from all other forms of fire, and was not allowed either on the sacrificial altar or on the hearth. 26. There is an entire book of the Rig-Veda — the ninth — which, contrary to all the others, is devoted to the praises of only one deity — SOMA. Like Agni, with whom he is most intimately associated, Soma has many forms, and more than one dwelling-place ; like Agni, the place of his birth is not on earth ; like Agni, the form under which he first presents himself is an unmistakably material one : Agni is the fire and Soma is a plant. Only, whereas Agni, under this his earthly form, was put to many and widely differ- ing uses, the Soma plant had but one : an intoxi- cating beverage was prepared from it, which was offered at sacrifices, being partaken of by the wor- shippers and poured into the flame on the altar. And like the Fire-worship, the Soma-cult takes us back to the so-called Indo-Eranian period, the time before the separation of the two great sister-races, for we have seen the Soma, under the name of Haoma, play exactly the same part in the worship and sacri- fices of the Eranian followers of the Avesta. Indeed we probably have here one of the very few relics of an even earlier time — that of the undivided Aryan, or as it is sometimes called, '' the Proto-Aryan period." ' For, as we noticed in its place, the Avesta bears evident traces of the use of the Haoma at the sacrifices being a concession made by Zarathushtra ' Such is the opinion of most students of both sacred books, con- vincingly expressed in two special studies by that eminent and deep- seeing scholar, Windischmann. 15. — DYING HINDU BROUGHT TO THE GANGES TO BREATHE HIS LAST IN THE WATERS OF THE SACRED RIVER. — (MODERN CUSTOM.) 169 I/O VEDIC INDIA. to old-established custom, not without subjecting it to a reforming and purifying process/ 27. In India, as in Eran, the Soma is mountain- born." It is said that King Varuna, who placed the Sun in heaven and Fire in the waters, placed the Soma on the mountain. Like Fire, it is brought to men by superhuman agency : " The one," says a hymn already quoted, " was brought from heaven by Matarishvan, the other by the falcon from the mountain." The Soma used in India certainly grew on mountains, probably in the Himalayan highlands of Kashmir. It is certain that Aryan tribes dwelt in this land of tall summits and deep valleys in very early times — probably earlier than that when the Rig-hymns were ordered and collected, or the al- ready complicated official ritual which they mostly embody was rigidly instituted. From numerous in- dications scattered through the hymns, it appears probable that this was the earliest seat of the Soma worship known to the Aryan Hindus, whence it may have spread geographically with the race it- self, and that, as the plant did not grow in the lower and hotter regions, the aridity of some parts disa- greeing with it as much as the steam-laden sultriness of others, they continued to get " from the moun- tains " the immense quantities needed for the con- sumption of the gradually widening and increasing ' See Story of Media, etc., pp. 118-121. ' It should not be forgotten, however, that it can hardly be the identical plant. Scholars are pretty well agreed that the Aryan sacrificial liquor, though retaining the same name, may — or indeed must — have been prepared from different plants in the different lands where Aryas settled. THE OLDER GODS. I71 Aryan settlements. A regular trade was carried on with the Soma plant, and the traders belonged to mountain tribes who were not Aryan, and, therefore, irreverently handled their sacred ware like any other merchandise, bargaining and haggling over it. This is evidently the reason why Soma-traders were con- sidered a contemptible class ; so much so that, when customs hardened into laws, they were included in the list — comprising criminals of all sorts, breakers of caste and other social laws, followers of low pro- fessions, as usurers, actors, etc. — of those who are forbidden to pollute sacrifices by their presence. To an Aryan Hindu, the man who owned the Soma and did not press it was a hopeless reprobate. In fact he divided mankind into "pressers" and "not pressers," the latter word being synonymous with "enemy" and "godless barbarians." They were probably itinerant traders, and the bargain was con- cluded according to a strictly prescribed ceremonial, the details of which seem singularly absurd and gro- tesque, until one learns that they had a symbolical meaning. The price (probably for a given quantity, though that is not mentioned) is a cow— light-col- ored, or, more precisely, reddish-brown, with light- brown eyes, in allusion to the ruddy or " golden " color of the plant — which must not be tied, nor pulled by the ear — i. e., not handled roughly. 28. The Soma used in India is thought to be the Asclepia acida or Sarcostemma viniinale, a plant of the family of milk-weeds. It is described as having hanging boughs, bare of leaves along the stalks, of light, ruddy color (" golden"), with knotty joints, 172 VEDIC lAWIA. containing, in a fibrous, cane-like outer rind, an abundance of milky, acid, and slightly astringent sap or juice. It is this juice which, duly pressed out, l6. — THE SOMA PLANT. mixed with other ingredients, and fermented, yields the intoxicating sacrificial beverage. The process — the most sacred and mystic act of the Vedic and THE OLDER GODS. 1 73 Brahmanic liturgy — is alluded to in the Rig-Veda innumerable times, but in such fanciful and often enigmatical ways that we might be puzzled to recon- struct it, had we not in some of the Bramanas most precise directions, amounting to a thorough and de- tailed description of the operation. Though pages might easily be written on the subject, the following brief description after Windischmann must sufifice, as it is both graphic and comprehensive : "... The plant, plucked up by the roots, collected by moonlight on the mountains, is carried on a car drawn by two goats to the place of sacrifice, where a spot covered with grass and twigs is prepared,^ crushed between stones by the priests^ ; and is then thrown, stalks as well as juice, sprinkled with water, into a sieve of loose woollen weave, whence, after the whole had been further pressed by the hand, the juice trickles into a vessel or kettle which is placed beneath.^ The fluid is then mixed with sweet milk and sour milk, or curds, with wheaten and other flour, and brought into a state of fermentation ; it is then offered thrice a day and partaken of ?jy the Brahmans. ... It was unquestionaVjly the greatest and holiest offer- ing of the ancient Indian worship. . . . The gods drink the offered beverage ; they long for it ; they are nourished by it and thrown into a joyous intoxication. . . . The beverage is divine, it purifies, it is a water of life, gives health and immortality, prepares the way to heaven, destroys enemies," etc. ' The vedi, made of the famous kusha grass, and called " the seat of the gods," for whom it was prepared, and who were supposed in- visibly to occupy it, when they came to receive the sacrifice offered them, on being formally invited thereto. It was therefore meet that the Soma should be laid on this consecrated spot before the ceremony of pressing began. ■"* A mortar is also mentioned in the Rig- Veda, but rarely. As a mortar was used in the preparation of the Eranian Haoma {Story of Media, etc., pp. I18-121), this was very probably the older custom, a relic of the forgotten Indo-Eranian period. * These vessels were, very appropriately, made of the sacred ashvattha-wood (Ficus religiosa). 174 VEDIC INDIA. The fieriness of the drink, its exhilarating and in- spiriting properties are especially expatiated upon. The chosen few who partook of it — few, for besides the officiating priests, only those were allowed a taste who could show that they had provisions enough stored up to last them three years — give most vivid expression to the state of exaltation, of intensified vitality, which raises them above the level of humanity. Some such effusions are neither more nor less than bragging; for instance (X., 119): I. I think to myself : I must get a cow ; I must get a horse : have I been drinking Soma ? — 2. The beverages carry me along like impetuous winds : have I, etc. — 3. They carry me along as fleet horses a chariot : have I, etc. — 4. The hymn has come to me as a cow to her beloved calf : have I, etc. — 5. I turn my song over in my heart as a carpenter fashions a chariot : have I, etc. , . . — 7. The five tribes seem to me as nothing : have I, etc. — 8. One half of me is greater than both worlds : have I, etc. — 9. My greatness reaches be- yond the heavens and this great earth : have I, etc. — 10. Shall I carry this earth hither or thither? Have I, etc. — 11. Shall I shatter this earth here or there? Have I, etc.— 12. One half of me is in the heavens and I have stretched the other down deep : have I, etc. — I am most great ; I reach up to the clouds : have I, etc. ' The effects of the exhilarating beverage are not always described in such exaggerated strains. The following passages, culled here and there, although ' Until very lately this hymn was supposed to be spoken by the bat- tle-god Indra after quaffing the sacrificial liquor. A. Bergaigne shows that it comes much more appropriately from an exhilarated mortal, " We have drunk the Soma," exclaims another ; " we have become immortal, we have entered into light, we have known the gods. What can an enemy now do to us, or what can the malice of any mortal effect ? " THE OLDER GODS. 1 75 enthusiastic, depict no abnormal condition of body or mind, but may be produced by the moderate and wholesome use of a rich stimulant : " He, the wise, has entered into me, who are simple." — " Make me burn as with fire, O Soma , . . . prolong our life as the sun renews the days each morning. . . . Our intelligence is excited by thee . . , thou hast descended into all our limbs. . . . Disease has fled, powerless , . . the powerful Soma has descended into us and our days are lengthened." 29. Through all this runs a consciousness of the presence of something divine in the liquor which can produce such wonderful effects in those who partake of it. And indeed, this liquor is only the earthly form of the celestial Soma, or, more correctly, it is a symbol of the celestial Soma, the god Soma. When the sacrificer, after pouring a small quantity of the sacred beverage into the flame on the altar, describes how the gods — especially the battle-god Indra — quaff Soma by the pailful, by the barrel, and only then feel strengthened for their daily strife against the powers of evil, he certainly does not mean it liter- ally. There is, however, a divine liquor which gives the gods (the Powers of Nature) strength and immor- tality, without which they would lose their might, their eternal youth, their life even, without which the world — our world at least — would become barren and dead, and uninhabitable ; and that heavenly liquor, the veritable Amrita or drink of immortality, is — the rain, the dews, perhaps it were more correct to say, the moisture which is diffused through nature, exhilarating, vivifying, calling forth and fostering life in all its forms. Of the gathering and flowing 176 VEDIC INDIA. of this fountain of life — the arnrita, the celestial Soma — the sacrificial process is an apt illustration : the skin on which the pressing stones are disposed is the cloud, and the stones themselves are the thun- derbolts ; the sieve is the sky, the liquor that falls through it in more or less abundant drops is the rain, and the large vessel or kettle into which they fall is the Savmdra — the celestial sea that holds all the atmospheric waters. The likeness — the symbol — is never lost sight of. Nothing can be clearer than this invocation : " Drink exhilaration from the heavenly Soma, O Indra, drink it from the Soma which men press on earth." This identification of Soma with the waters and with plants accentuates very strongly his afifinity with Agni which we noticed from the start and — to make a long line of proof and argument as brief as our limited space commands — we may at once arrive at the conclusion that Soma, in this phase of the myth, is a form of Agni, in a word, is liquid fire. ' It is no wonder, therefore, that the two should be so constantly asso- ciated together and even invoked jointly in numbers of hymns specially addressed to them. 30. But even the celestial Soma, the drink that in- vigorates the gods and gives them eternal youth and immortality, — in short, the anirita — cannot rationally ' We saw that the fiery or vital principle is conveyed into the heart of plants, and into the human frame, by water. For exhaustive stud- ies on this, as it may be called, most sacred mystery of the Aryan faith, see A. Kuhn, The Descent of Fire and the Celestial Beverage ; A. Bergaigne, the chapters on Agni and Soma in La Religion Vedique : and Ilillebrandt, Vediselie Mythohgie, vol. i. THE OLDER GODS. 177 have been tJie god Soma. Water, moisture, could not possibly, at any time, be thought of as a person. This water, this moisture, must be produced, or at least held in keeping, — then given out, distributed, by a being, a Power that could be imagined as a per- son, and when we find that power, we have the god. The parallelism between Soma and Agni which we traced throughout this study points to the a priori conclusion that, Agni being the Sun, Soma must be the Moon, and the fact instantly occurs to us that in the mythology of the post-vedic, so-called "epic" or " classical," period, down to our own day, Soma has always been and is the moon. Very peculiar and consistently developed are the later Brahmanical theories about the moon as expounded in the Pura- nas, but always hinging on this one fundamental fact, that the moon is the reservoir of ainrita^ the drink of the gods, and both in these and the poeti- cal works it has a number of epithets alluding to this. During the light part of the month (while the moon is visible), the gods drink from it — and it swells the more as they drink — the sweet avirita which makes them immortal. During the dark half of the month (while the moon is invisible), the PiTRls — the spirits of the dead — drink from it, when it gradually decreases. Its beams are woven of cool watery atoms which penetrate into the plants, refresh and vivify them. Another has it the other way ; the gods approach the moon at its full, and the dead on the night it is new. The same in the Upanishads, which are earlier than the Puranas. ' " The Moon is Kirg Soma, the food of the gods." The same, more I/S VEDIC INDIA. frequently, more insistently, in the Shatapatha- Brahmana, the most important of all. " This King Soma, the food of the gods, is the Moon. . . . When it decreases, then they feed on it." ** . . . The Seasons are King Soma's royal broth- ers, just as a man has brothers." Whose brothers can the seasons be but the moon-god's ? 31. And so it turns out that moon-worship occu- pies a prominent place in the Aryan religion, and that the ninth book of the collection is exclusively devoted to this worship, the ritual of which is specially contained in the Sama-Veda. This book, and for that matter, the numerous Soma-hymns scattered in the other books of the Rig, teem with allusions too trans- parent and direct to need explanation, provided the lunar nature of the deity they celebrate is thor- oughly comprehended, whereas they would be hard to make even tolerable sense of, even allowing most amply for archaic mannerisms of thought and ima- gery, under the supposition that the god Soma is only the sacrificial beverage of Aryan worship or the celestial beverage of the gods — the vivifying mois- ture diffused through the universe. Some of the similes are very graceful and pretty. Soma is a well of sweetness in the midst of the sky ; a golden drop hung up in the heavens ; a bowl of ambrosia {amrita), nay, an ocean {sanuidra) of the drink of gods. Soma is a wise god, for does he not know the times and the seasons, bring round the months, and fix the days and hours for the rites, and the prayers, and the sacrifices which are the gods' due ? Soma also is a warrior god, vigorous and well armed. THE OLDER GODS. 1 79 equipped for battle against the demons and monsters who people the " dark forest " — night, and whom he dispels, and also for the defence of the precious spring of life which he has in his keeping, and which evil beings, hostile to the Devas — the Asuras — are ever on the watch to steal. To whom but the moon could lines like the following apply: "Soma stands above all the worlds, similar to the divine Surya," or, " he has clothed himself in the radiance of the Sun, and, full of wisdom, surveys the races ? " Lastly there is a myth in which Soma is married to Surya, the Sun-maiden, and the ver}^ hymn (X., 85) which tells this myth with unusual length of detail and circumstance, begins with this passage, the most explicit and decisive of all, which indeed sums up in few words the results to which we have laboriously worked our way : " Through the Law [Rita] the earth stands firm, the heavens and the Sun, through the Law the Adityas stand, and Soma stands in the sky. . . , Soma is placed in the midst of these stars. " When they crush the plant, he who drinks regards it as Soma. Of him ivhoni the priests 7'e^ard as So??ia, no one dritiks. " Protected by those who shelter thee and preserved by thy guar- dians, thou, Soma, hearest the sound of the crushing-stones ; but no earthly being tastes thee. " When the gods drink thee, O god, thou increasest again. . . ." It is impossible more fully to realize the symbolism of the Soma sacrifice. Yet there is no lack of pas- sages which as plainly express the conception that the god descends personally into the plant, giving up his own body and limbs to be broken for the good of men and gods, and that a mysterious communion is established between the god and his worshipper, I So VEDIC INDIA. who has tasted the sacred drink, that this drink ^ is part of the divine substance. This thread of mysti- cism runs through the whole Rig-Veda : We have tasted Soma, — the god has descended into us, — we have become like unto the gods — immortal life is ours. 32. The following beautiful prayer, a poetical gem of purest water, may be considered as the crown- ing expression of the Aryan Soma-worship in its noblest, most spiritual form (IX., 113). "Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed, in that immortal, imperishable world place me, O Soma! " Where the son of Vivasvat reigns as King, where the secret place of heaven is, where these mighty waters are, there make me im- mortal ! "Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds are radiant, there make me immortal ! "Where wishes and desires are, where the bowl of the bright Soma is, where there is food and rejoicing, there make me im- mortal ! "Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside, where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me immortal ! " ' There is not one line here, not one image that offers the least difficulty to interpretation if the iden- tity of Soma and the Moon be accepted as the basis thereof — as there is not one that does not present almost insuperable difficulty on any other supposi- tion. The " bowl of the bright Soma," the " radiant worlds " (the stars), the world of " eternal light," of " the mighty waters " — how beautiful and how self- evident, when we know that the moon is the abode ' Translated by Max Miiller. THE OLDER GODS. l8l of the dead who partake of its " honeyed sweetness," even as the gods and, Hke the gods, quaff length of days in the draught. There is, however, one Hne in this passage which introduces us to two new mythi- cal persons : Vivasvat and his son. 33. This son is Yama, whom we have already learned to know in the Avesta as YiMA, SON OF ViVANHVANT,' but in how altered a garb ! The Rig- Veda knows very little about Vivasvat except his name and that he is Yama's father ; yet that he had been a god and had the power of one is proved by such prayers as the following, addressed to him: " May the shaft of Vivasvat, the poisoned arrow, not strike us before we are old ! " " May Vivasvat grant us immortality. Let death go its way and immor- tality come. May he protect our people to their old age." But this is only a faint trace, an obliterated memory of the position he must have occupied in a remote Indo-Eranian past, for in the Avesta, con- sistently with the anti-polytheistic tendency of the creed, Vivanhvant is a mere mortal man, a saintly priest, the first who offered a Haoma sacrifice, while his son Yima is also a mortal, the first king, the ruler of a golden age.^ But if the father has lost ground in India, the son, Yama, fills one of the most prominent and picturesque positions in the Vedic pantheon, as the king of the dead, the mild ruler of an Elysium-like abode where the shades of ' See Story of Media, etc., pp. 89-94. "^ The name, which means " the Luminous," has been taken to indi- cate a sun-god, and the concUision is borne out by the entire Brah- mana-literature. See on this question, however, ch. vii. 1 82 VEDIC INDIA. the PiTRlS (the departed fathers of the living, an- swering the Avestan Fravashis),' lead a happy, dreamy existence. 34. The bare facts are these: Yama was the first to die and we all follow him to the world which he was the first to enter, and where, therefore, he as- sumed the part of host, receiving those that joined him as they came, and naturally becoming their king and ruler. He has messengers who roam the world spying out those who are to die, and whom they drive or escort to his realm. These messengers, generally two in number, most frequently take the shape of dogs of weird and fantastic appearance, and are probably meant to personify the morning and evening twilight — a most apt poetical image, since it can certainly be said that each morning and evening brings some recruits from the living world to that of the dead. It is remarkable that the most explicit and pithy text is contained in the Atharva-Veda : " Him who first of mortals died, who first went to that world, the gatherer of men — King Yama, son of Vivasvat, honor ye with an oblation." " Death is Yama's wise messenger." A wonderful thought, wonderfully expressed, which we also find in the Atharva-Veda. Birds of evil omen also, are mentioned in the Rig as Yama's messengers, and one poet prays that the thing which such a bird an- nounces with its cry may not come to pass. The dogs are called Sarameya or children of Sarama, 1 Story of Media, etc., pp. S3-84, 154. THE OLDER GODS. 1 83 and described as spotted, broad-snouted, four-eyed, and Yama is entreated to bid them protect the guests they bring him on the road.' 35. The world over which Yama rules is not repul- sive, dark, or in any way dread-inspiring, being situated, as we have seen, in the highest heaven, in the sphere of the sun, in the midst of radiant worlds, and no idea of judgment or punishment attaches to it. In the Rig-Veda Yama is the king of the dead, not as yet their judge and chastiser. That came later, and in the Brahmanical literature of the clas- sical period Yama appears stripped of all gracious features and tricked out in all the cheap horrors of the vulgar devil. How different from the mild, benignant deity, to whose gentle rule the earlier Aryan Hindus lovingly, trustfully committed their departed dear ones ! ^ 36. The question naturally arises : what natural phenomenon originally was disguised under the myth of Yama Vaivasvata? The answer as natu- rally suggests itself : the setting sun, for that is one of the scenes in the grand drama of nature which always most forcibly suggested the belief and hope in a future life." And in the poetical language of early myth-makers, bristling with bold metaphor, the setting sun can very well be said to be the child of the morning sun (Vivasvat). But then it is by ' See Story of Media, etc., pp. 93, 94 {Sagdtd ceremony), and p, 165 (the dogs guarding the Chinvat Bridge). ^ See, for details and texts, ch. ix., Early Culture, in connection with the Vedic funeral rites. ^ See Story of Chaldea, pp. 337-339. 1 84 VEDTC INDIA. no means sure, as will be seen,' that Vivasvat was always the sun, and quite recently a school of interpreters has arisen who would identify Yama, like Soma, with the Moon. ^ It cannot be denied that the arguments they bring in favor of this solution carry great weight. They point out, among other things, that the " seat of Yama " is avowedly in the " third heaven," in " its most secret {i. e., remotest) place," and that the setting sun can- not be said to occupy that position ; that the moon easily could appear to the unscientific eye of the early myth-makers as a smaller, younger sun — the child of the sun, who dies (disappears) after running his course ; that the two, with the inconsistency so characteristic of myths, which delight in presenting the same divine beings under different aspects, to place them in different mutual relations, might just as easily have appealed to the imagination as twins — as in point of fact they Jiave been considered by most ancient peoples, and that the very name "Yama" is a word signifying "twin." Yama is often spoken of as having been the first man, the progenitor of the human race. But that honor be- longs to another son of Vivasvat — Mann (J. e., Man), and was mistakenly transferred to Yama, on the strength of an imperfect argument, namely, that he who was the first to die must have been the first man who lived. But Yama is nowhere styled " the first ' In ch. vii. * A. Hillebrandt argues the point at great length, and decides it in this sense, in the first volume of his Vedic Mythology, already men- tioned. THE OLDER GODS. 1 85 of men," only " the first oi mortals'' Now the word " mortal " (martya) is very frequently used to denote " man " ; but two other words — niamishya and jana occur quite as frequently * ; yet neither is used when Yama is spoken of. The persistency with which he is called the first of inartyas, " mortals," is scarcely accidental. Not man alone is mortal in the concep- tion of ancient myth-making peoples : the gods themselves would die did they not continually renew their life and vigor by draughts of the divine Soma, the water of youth and immortality ; the sun dies when it sets, or faints at the numbing touch of win- ter ; the moon dies when, after waning away before our eyes, it disappears. True, after death comes resurrection ; but that does not belong here. We must be content with establishing the fact that Yama is invariably styled the " first of mortals who died," not " the first of mortal men." 37. Another Vedic deity who can be traced with certainty to a pre-Eranian (or Proto-Aryan) past is Vayu or Vata, the Wind. Not the violent storm-wind, but the wholesome, cooling breeze, that clears the atmosphere, purifies the air, brings health and life to men and animals prostrated by heat. Vayu holds a modest place in the Rig-Veda. Few hymns are addressed to him alone, but he is fre- quently joined with other gods, and always men- ' It is impossible not to admire the ingenious and pithy names by which those who spoke the ancient Sanskrit tongue designated the human race: martya, "the mortal" ; nianushya, " the thinking " (the root man being the same as that of mens, mind) ; jana, " the begotten," " the born " (same root as in gens, genus, ^lot oC the ili.im.i very sinipk^ aiul in s\»bstatice always the same — we may introduce the actors and let the various scenes unfoUl tlu>mselves, keeping", as we (.liil in tlu- preceding;' chapifi. to the only really forciMo and iniprcssivf nii-thoil : that of letting" the ancient poi-ts spi-ak, /. *.. ipiotiui:;- as nuich iis possible fioni thr Ki;; \ \-da itsilt. 4. It is ^cncialK' uudiTsti>oil that \ rdic worship knew of no temples or ima^ios o{ its j;ihIs, and this must of covirse appK' to Imba. tlu- kini;' of the Mid- dle-Region hini who ma\- well be teinu-d the champion-t;od of Aryan liulia.' \"et otu- is almost tempted to iloubt the fact in his case aiul that of his faithful con\rades and esciut the Maruts — the Storm-Winds*- who ride forth to battle w ilh hin), an t-ai»er, rushing troop — so realistic ami complete are the ilescriptiiMis o{ their jUMsonal appt\uance, strength, and warlike equipment, down to the small- est iletails. Indra is shown us biMiu- on a shining chaiiol. a golden whip in his hand, the thundtMbolt in his arm, helmeted with gold, and not only are his long, strong arn\s spokc-n i>f, ami the beauty of his nose and ruddy cheeks, but we are told how his ' This name has been the the\ne of mxich ami vigi^rous j^hilological iliscussion. The w^wt conviuoing exj^hxnation, hei-ause the simplest anil mast pertinent, is that which connects it with tl^e root INU — '*sap, ilixTp." — a root which we tind again in Sinilhu-ln(h\s(" river") It is very plain that " Intlia" is the laud of Imlra and the Imhis. 'Literally "the Smashers," " (.'.riuileis," as this is one of the meanings containeil in that extremely serviceable anvl prolitu- i-oot MAK, — See Max MUller's SaV/ttY 0/ /.(»M;'-«<»jiV. Second Series, pp. 333^. (New York IMition, Scribner, 1S75). THE s'joh'M-MYTrr. 197 golden beard is violently agitated by the swift motion, as he guides his mettlesome steeds and hurls his bolts around. Aj^ain the Maruts. Not much is left to the imagination when they are presented to us as driving chariots borne along with the fury of boisterous winds by their swift tawny horses or dappled deer, and described as follows : " Spears rest upon your shoulders ; ye have anklets on your feet, golflen ornaments on your breasts, ornaments on your ears, fiery lightnings in your hands, and golden helmets on your hea/ls," Together with Indra they are bidden by Agni, the priest-messenger, to the sacrificer's banquet ; together they quaff huge quantities of the invigorating soma, and together rush to do battle against Vritra, whom they helped Indra to overcome, to pierce through and through, to cut to pieces, till his remains strew the mountain side, and the waters which he impris- oned leap merrily forth, and roll and tumble and pour down on both worlds. Brush and color could hardly give a more vivid picture — and for that picture Indian warrior kings and their gorgeously arrayed body-guards have surely sat. It is anthro- pomorphism running riot. The question is not : how did the hero of the Middle-Region become the war- god of men, the champion and protector of his Aryan and native worshippers? but: how could he have helped becoming both ? 5. Anthropomorphism, however, seldoms keeps long within such sober bounds — certainly not in India. In its tendency to bring the superhuman within the mind's ken, by clothing it in human. 198 VEDIC INDIA. familiar garb, it but too easily slips into exaggera- tion, and, in exalting the object of worship, is apt to represent greatness by material size. Scarcely any of the Indra hymns, which are more numerous than those to any other deity, are free from this taint of fancy, or rather weakness of expression, to which, however, together with some images of the most grotesque grossness, we owe some of great poetical beauty. Let us pick out a few at random, as they occur scattered through the hymns. 6. Nothing is more frequently impressed on the worshipper than Indra's physical immensity and strength. He is " so superior to men, heaven and earth do not suffice for his girdle," and " when he grasps the two boundless worlds, they are but a handful to him." " He contains all that exists as the tire of a wheel contains the spokes " ; indeed, " as the axle passes both wheels, so his greatness sur- passes both worlds " ; but, "not a hundred heavens and a hundred earths, with a thousand suns — no, not all created worlds could contain himy But it is Indra's soma-drinking capacities which inspire the poets with the most extravagant absurdities ; he is said to drink it in pailfuls — tubfuls — thirty lakes at a sitting ; he is invited to drink freely, like a thirsty stag, or a bull roaming in a waterless waste. The acme is reached when he is credited with two bellies, which are compared to two lakes, and which he is requested to fill — which he does with a will, if we are to believe the translator who reads a cer- tain verse as saying that Indra cannot wait for the soma to be drawn for him, but gulps down cask, fau- THE STORM-MYTH. 1 99 cet, and all * ; it is doubtless after an exploit of the kind that he is admiringly described as staggering about at the sacrificial feast, tottering like a boat on the waters — " soma in his belly, great might in his body, wisdom in his head, and lightning in his hand." It is in this " exhilarated " condition that the hero-god performs his most notable deeds and most brilliantly earns his highest title, that of Vritra- HAN — " Slayer of Vritra," the cloud-demon of Drought. The same idea re-appears in a spiritual- ized form in the hymns in which Soma the god is invoked jointly with Indra and both are besought for help against fiends or earthly foes, when they impartially share the credit and praise. In one place Soma is called "the soul of Indra." 7. As the god of war on earth between men and men, Indra is not merely the Aryas' champion and helper in single battles, he is the leader of the Aryan eastward movement generally ; it is he who guides them from the Indus to the Yamuna, and makes their path one of conquest : " Look forward for us, O Indra, as a leader, and guide us onward towards greater riches. Take us safely across, lead us wisely and in safety." Nothing could mean more clearly: pushing eastward, crossing rivers, dislodging dasyus. 8. It must be admitted that the goods which the Arya pleads for to Indra are always of the most ma- terial kind. When it is not rain or the dispersion of darkness, it is cows, horses, many sons healthy and strong, gold and riches of every kind, victory in war, and " the riches of the enemies." He is essentially ^ Mr. E. D. Perry of Columbia College, 20O VEDIC INDIA. the creation of a rushing, active, coveting time-^a " storm and stress " period, — and his personality has none of the spiritual charm which radiates from such contemplative conceptions as Varuna or Aditi, or the philosophical play of fancy which makes the elusive forms of Agni and Soma so truly divine. Still, there is something very touching and tender in the confiding familiarity with which he is addressed in some few passages, as in the following : " Come, O Indra, brother. . . . Here thy friends have lived from oldest time ; look now on thy later friends, and the youngest. . . . For thou wast our fathers' friend of old and willingly didst grant them their wishes. . , . We call on thee, who dost not make thy ear deaf to our voice, but hearest us from afar. . . . For thou, O gracious one, hast always been both father and mother to us . . . the most fatherly of fathers. " The old songs hasten to thee ever anew . . . like harnessed steeds, like kine that lick their young calves, like wives that fondle ' and cling to the stateliest of husbands. . . . O stay, go not from us, thou mighty one, when I offer thee the well-pressed soma. I take hold of thy robe, as a son of his father's robe, with my song. ..." 9. If we believe his worshippers, Indra certainly is not insensible to so much love and trust. The hymns abound in lists of the things he does for them and gives them : he threshes their foes as corn- sheaves on the threshing-floor ; he comes to his friends with both hands full of riches, and benefits shoot from him as boughs from a tree — and he is asked to shower down wealth on his worshippers as the hook shakes the ripe fruit from the tree. . . . He is the helper of the poor — the deliverer and the comforter — a wall of defence — his friendship is inde- structible — it is no idle phrase when one poet ex- claims : " We are thine and thou art ours ! , . . " THE STORM-MYTH. 20I " The days dawn prosperously for him who says : Come, let us press the soma for Indra! . . . That king's power is never shaken in whose house Indra drinks strong soma mixed with milk ; he flourishes in peace, conquers in war, and dwells securely at home, enjoying high renown." It is but just to say that Indra is very exclusive in his friendships, and " will have nothing to do with the wretch who does not press the soma " — i. e., with such native peoples as have not become converted to the Aryan faith. lO. That one whose favors were so very substan- tial, and who was so lavish of them, should be the object of selfish and envious solicitations, is but natural. Many are the passages in which Indra is warned against rival petitioners, with a naive direct- ness which is highly amusing, for instance : " I will harness the bays to Indra's chariot and draw him down by a new song. Do not let other hymn-singers — and there are many — turn thee from thy way." — (II., i8, 3.) ' ' Speed thee hither, Indra, with thy mettlesome bays ; let no one snare thee, like a bird in a net, but drive straight on, as through a flat country,"— (III., 45, i.) No less amusing are the remonstrances, nay, downright upbraidings, with which one or other wor- shipper does not fear to assail his favorite god if he thinks himself slighted or inadequately remembered : " Gracious are thy hands, O Indra, and beneficent when they be- stow gifts on the singer. Where tarriest thou ? "Why hastest thou not to the drinking-bout? Or art thou disinclined to give?" — (IV., 29. 9-) "Why do men call thee generous, thou wealthy one? A giver thou art, so I hear : then give to me. Let my hymn be blest with treasure, O mighty one. . . ." — (X,, 42, 3.) 202 VEDIC INDIA. Most characteristic of all in the way of chiding Js the following, though there is no lack of separate passages where the god is called " stingy," and " tardy," and " grudging " : " Had I, O Indra, so much wealth as thou possessest, I should freely give to my worshipper, thou source of wealth ; I should not leave him in poverty. — I would lavish riches on him day by day, wherever he might be ; for nothing is more valuable to us than thou art — not kindred, not even a father." — (VII., 42, 18-19.) Or this: " Were all the riches mine, O Indra, which thou ownest, my poet should be wealthy. — I would help him, bless him with gifts, O Lord of Might, were I the Lord of Kine. . . . For no god nor mortal can hinder thy liberality, O Indra, when it is thy will to give." — (VIII., 14, I, 2, 4.) II. When scholars tell us that Indra is a creation of a later and different epoch from that of the old sky-gods Dyaus and Varuna, a growth, moreover, of India's own soil — (it were per- haps more correct to say Penjab's) — they by no means rest their assertion on mere circumstantial evidence. There is, in the Rig-Veda itself, ample evidence of the impetuous Storm- and War-god having supplanted the two great Asuras, and that by no means peaceably, without strife and bitterness dividing the followers of the new worship and the old — until the latter were carried away by the tide of the times and public feeling. If the interpretation of scattered single lines or expressions might still leave room for doubt, the following entire hymn (IV., 42) does not. Nothing could be more explicit. It is in the dramatic form of a dialogue : each god THE STORM-MYTH. 2O3 speaks for himself, and the poet decides between their rival claims. ' '( Vdrzma speaks) : I am the King : mine is the lordship. All the gods are subject to me, the universal life-giver, and follow Varuna's ordinances ; I rule in men's highest sanctuary. — I am King Varuna ; my own are these primeval heavenly powers. . . . — I, O Indra, am Varuna, and mine are the two wide, deep, blessed worlds. A wise maker, I created all the beings ; Heaven and Earth are by me preserved. — I made the flowing waters to swell ; I established in their sacred seat the heavens ; I, the holy Aditya,. spread out the tri- partite (or threefold) universe." (Heaven, Earth, and Atmosphere.) " {Indra speaks) : I am invoked by the steed-possessing men, when pressed hard in battle ; I am the mighty one who stirs up the fight and whirls up the dust, in my overwhelming strength. All that have I done, nor can the might of all the gods restrain me, the Uncon- quered ; when I am exhilarated by libations and prayers, then quake both boundless worlds." " (T/ie p7-iest speaks) : That thou didst all these things, all beings know ; and now thou hast proclaimed it to Varuna, O Ruler ! Thee, Indra, men praise as the slayer of Vritra ; it was thou who didst let loose the imprisoned waters." 12. There is another hymn — a much later one, as shown by the far abstruser tone and more elaborate diction (X., 124) — which tells (or commemorates) the same story. There the poet summons Agni out of the darkness to conduct the sacrifice. The divine hotar then announces that he is loth to forsake an old friend and go among strangers, but that he " has long observed the guest of the other party," has travelled through many places, and he concludes : ' ' I now say farewell to the Father, the Asura ; I go from him to whom no sacrifices are offered to him to whom men sacrifice. — In choosing Indra, I give up the Father, though I have lived with him many years in friendship. Agni, Varuna, and 'Soma must give way ; the power goes to another, I see it come." 204 VEDIC INDIA, 13. Indra clearly was the god for a struggling, conquering, unscrupulously pushing people, rather than the great Aditya — majestic, serene, and just. In what way the supremacy was, so to speak, offi- cially transferred to him, there is nothing to inform us. There is quite a number of passages, even of whole hymns, full of allusions to Indra's birth, child- hood, early exploits, and the like. But the wording is so obscure, most of the things alluded to are so utterly unknown to us, that nothing coherent or satisfactory can be made out of all these texts. Heaven and earth are said to quake with fear before his anger at his birth. His mother (who is she?) seems to die almost as soon as he is born ; then he is said to have taken his father by the foot and hurled him down. There are also hints of conspir- acy to kill him in his sleep or on his wanderings, and he himself is made to say : " Pressed hard by hunger, I cooked dogs' entrails ; I found no god who would take pity on me ; I saw my wife deeply bowed with grief ; then the eagle brought me sweet Soma." ' It would be vain to try to piece a consist- ent story out of these shreds : for there are plenty of other lines, even in the same hymn, which point to different versions of the same events. All that we can gather from the above quotations, and other passages, is the plain allusion (in mythical language) to the antagonism and persecution of which he is the object, on the part of the other gods, i. c, the fol- lowers of the older gods. 14. Neither do we know when or how the feud ' See for more on tliis subject, ch. vii. THE STORM-MYTH. 205 between " the gods " was laid. But certain It is that harmony was restored at some time, for we meet with numerous hymns addressed to Indra and Vdruna jointly ; they peacefully share at last the government of the world, each in his own line. This is expressly intimated in a text : " The one [Indra] loves to slay foes, the other [Varuna] always main- tains his ordinances." Indra is also frequently addressed jointly with several of the greater gods — with Agni, Soma, Vayu, and others. Vayu and Agni, indeed, became in the course of time most closely associated with him — till, at the later period of Brahmanic theology, the three — Rain, Fire, and Wind — formed a sort of mystic trinity or triad. 15. The personality of Indra, though sufficiently transparent, still has enough of complexity in its duality (Storm-god and War-god) to suggest evolu- tion from simpler material, from a more directly naturalistic conception. We shall hardly go wrong if we seek the latter in Parjanya, the Storm-god pure and simple, originally neither more nor less than the rain-cloud or the thunder-cloud itself, for par- janya is frequently used in the Rig-Veda as a common noun for cloud} Of several texts, one is absolutely decisive : " Even during the day the Maruts shed darkness by the water-bringing par- janya." Now nothing but a cloud can shed dark- * The word is said to come from the same root 2.% pdrvata — cloud and mountain. This god has a special interest for us moderns, be- cause he remained the highest god of a large branch of the Aryan race — the Slavo-Lithuanian, who still worshipped him for many cen- turies after Christ, under the scarcely altered name of Perkunas = Perkons = PeriJn. 2o6 VEDIC INDIA. ness during- the day. Agni is asked to "send the rain-bringing /rt-r/'irrz/jv? hither"; then the pkiral is used : " the parjanyd [clouds] bring joy to the earth." But these are isolated survivals. The Rain-and-Storm god (for India knows little of our quiet rains) is almost always separated from the cloud, which is sometimes his chariot, sometimes the barrel or skin filled with the water which he pours down on the worlds ; then he is the " Son of Hea\-cn," who "speaks a gleam-accompanied, re- sounding word which brings refreshment." 16. Parjan}-a has one peculiar feature : he pours the seed on the earth ; it enters the plants and there becomes the germ. His name is hardly ever mentioned without some allusion being made to this important duty of his, and he is in consequence directly invoked as the special guardian of plants : " Parjanya, who brings us food through the plants." Does not this forcibly remind us of that curious Old-Eranian belief that the seeds of all plants were carried down to earth by the rain ? ' 17. From all this it will be seen that Parjanya very possibly goes back to the oldest Aryan period, and might fairly claim a place, in Aryan India, among the " Older gods." the subject-matter of our pre- ceding chapter. But, with every presumption in favor of the suggestion, which great scholars en- dorse,'^ the link is broken, direct proof is wanting, no ' See Story of Media, etc., p. 65. - See especially the two exhaustive papers by Geo. Bilhler, in the TraiisiU-fions of the London P/ti/oIog^ica/ Sorict\', 1S59, pp. 154 J^. (English), and in Benfey's Orient t7iid Occident, vol. i., pp. 214^. THE STORM-MYTH. T.O'J corresponding name being found in Indo-Eranian antiquity. One thing is sure: that Indra and Par- janya are distinct mythical persons, not convertible quantities. We have a text which says expressly : " Great Indra, who is like to Parjanya in power." It is extremely probable that at one time they were, so to speak, parallel gods, i. e., that two different Aryan tribes worshipped the Storm-and-Rain god under these two different names, with some differ- ences also in their functions; that Indra happened to be the god of the more pushing, warlike tribes, and thus early developed into the champion of Aryan conquest, and by his growing popularity quickly eclipsed his former brother. 1 8. Among the five or six hymns to Parjanya, there is one — V., 83 — which is one of the very few Vedic pieces of complete and faultless poetical beauty, without anticlimaxes or any of the puerilities or vulgarities which so often leave us disappointed with otherwise fine effusions : " I. Sing unto the strong with these songs, laud Parjanya, with praise worship him. Loud bellows the Bull ; he lays down the seed and fruit in the herbs. — 2. He cleaves the trees asunder, he slays the Rakshasas ; all living creatures fear the wearer of the mighty bolt. Even the sinless trembles before him, the giver of rain, for Parjanya, thundering, slays the evil-doers. — 3. As a driver who urges his horses with his whip, he makes the rainy messengers appear. From far arises the roar of the lion when Parjanya makes the cloud full of rain. — 4. The winds rage, the lightnings shoot through the air, the herbs sprout forth from the ground, the (German). One of the greatest contemporary Vedic scholars, Lud- wig, on the other hand, specially identifies Parjanya with the spring monsoon. If so, he might very well be of Indian growth, yet older than Indra. 2o8 VEDIC INDIA. heavens overflow, refreshment is borne to all creatures vi'hen !^ar- janya blesses the earth vs^ith rain. — 5. Thou, Parjanya, shield us well, by whose doing the earth is shaken, by whose doing the hoofed herd is supported, by whose doing herbs of all kinds sprout forth. — 6. ... Oh come to us with the thunder-cloud, pouring down the waters, Asura, our father. — 7. Roar, thunder, give fruit, fly round us with thy chariot that is filled with water. Pull strongly the downward-bent, well-fastened water-skin ; may the heights and the valleys be made even. — 8. Lift up the great barrel, pour down ; loosened may the streams rush forward. Drench heaven and earth, give good drink to the kine. . . . — 10. Well hast thou poured down the rain, now cease ; thou makest that we can pass over the dry plains ; thou hast made the herbs to sprout that we may eat, and hast received praise from the creatures." 19. The Rig- Veda was not generally known, even in name, sixty years ago, except among English and a few German scholars, — certainly not in Russia. Yet we find in the works of the great Russian poet Pushkin a short poem, which might be a free para- phrase on this hymn to Parjanya. We must be per- mitted to translate it for our readers, as it suggests interesting comparisons, and may serve as an addi- tional warning not to be too prompt to suspect connections or imitation wherever there is similarity of thought or imagery. Besides, the poem is both short and beautiful. THE CLOUD. Thou latest straggler of a storm that 's fled ! Alone thou floatest o'er the joyous blue, And castest, on thy envious course and sad, O'er day reviving an ungenial hue. It was but now thy shade the sky o'erspread. And from thy gloom the threatening lightning broke, THE STORM-MYTH. 209 And from thy womb the mystic thunder spoke, And ^vith thy rain the thirsting earth was fed. Enough then ! hie thee from the peaceful scene ! Refreshed is earth, and long dispersed the storm ; The zephyr courts the trees and sweeps thy form Far from the azure of the sky serene. 20. But little need be added specially about Indra's companions in battle, the warlike Maruts — the Storm-Winds. They are the sons of Prishni, the Cloud-cow/ and of RuDRA, rather a subordinate deity in the Veda, though undoubtedly very old, but who, in later Brahmanism and especially Hin- duism, rose to the highest rank. He is thought by the latest scholars to be a personification of the stormy sky, as opposed to the serene sky — Varuna. Ludwig suggests that the oldest conception of Dyaus — the Sky in its entirety, in all its manifestations — split itself into those of Varuna and Rudra, the latter representing the elementary, the former the spiritual and moral side of the original conception ^ — of course a later evolution, yet older than Indra. Rudra undoubtedly is a wielder of the thunder- bolt : it is his deadly arrow, with which he is en- treated not to strike the worshipper, or his children, or his cattle, but, if need be, to draw his mighty bow against "somebody else." ''The Terrible" (rudra) is his name, and terrible he is ; and the 1 Prishni, "speckled," from the root PRISH, which, however, also means " sprinkle " (the connection between the two is obvious) — a play on homonyms or pun quite in the taste of all ancient mythical poetry, and a liberal source of stories, riddles, and puzzles. ^ The Rigveda, vol. iii., p'. 320. 14 2IO VEDIC INDIA. flattering things which are said of and to him, about his beauty, his splendor, his healing powers, must be taken as the deprecatory utterances of fear. The best that is expected of him is to spare. It will be seen how widely this deity differs from Indra. 21. The Maruts themselves are frequently called Rudras. They appear always in troops ; sometimes they are twenty-seven, sometimes sixty-six; then there are said to be thousands of them — ways of saying " a great many." They are all alike ; no distinctions are made between them, either of age or appearance ; they always act in a body and are " of one mind." Sometimes they drive along " with golden mantles waving, sometimes " cloaked in rain," and once they are shown " clothed in the Avoolly cloud " as they " split open the rock with might." Their chariots, drawn by self-yoked dappled mares or spotted deer, fleet as birds, now are " laden with lightning," now with buckets and barrels of water which they pour down as they go, singing loudly. Their very sweat is rain, and pleasant to the ear is the crack of their whips (the whistle and whizz of the wind that ushers in a storm). They are boister- ous and noisy. The hymns are simply inexhausti- ble on this theme, and rise on some occasions to naturalistic poetry of great beauty. No enemy is there to face them, not in heaven nor on earth ; they make the mountains to tremble, they rend and shake the trees like wild elephants ; the earth totters and quakes before them with fear " as an aged king." Of course they are entreated for all the usual good things of which Indra is commonly the dispenser, THE STOkM-MYTH. 2ll and they are not spared rebuke any more than Indra when they do not respond promptly enough to their votaries' instances : " Were ye but mortals, O sons of Prishni, and your worshipper were an immortal — ye should not be neglected as the insect (?) in the grass, nor should ye go the road to Yama [die] ; nor be perpetually subjected to distress and danger." 22. Great and constant as is the friendship between Indra and the Maruts, there are some few traces in the hymns of a dispute between them, with mutual reproaches and self-assertion. Now a dispute be- t\Veen gods always means one between their votaries, and verses like the following may point to some ancient schism between priests of the Maruts and priests of Indra, each party probably contending for their favorites' respective claims to superior prowess and power. In the principal of the pas- sages in question, Indra rebukes the Maruts for having left him to fight the serpent Ahi single- handed, immediately adding that he is strong and powerful enough to overcome his enemies by his own might alone. They reply : " Thou hast indeed done great things, O mighty one, with us for thy helpers, through our equal valor. But we Maruts, O strong Indra, can perform many great deeds by our power when we so desire. " Indra retorts: "By my own inborn might, O Maruts, I slew Vritra. Through my own wrath I grew so strong. It was I who, wielding the lightning, opened the way for the shining waters to run down for men " The Maruts : " In truth, O hero, there is nought thou canst not conquer. Thou hast no equal among the gods. ..." 212 VRDTC INDIA. Indra : "Mine tlicii iiiu.st be llio .supreme jjower. What I l,iave begun, I carry out wisely ; for, O Maruts, I am known as the Strong (Inc. . . . " (I., ^(^S■^ 111 conclii.sion, Iiulni expresses himself as pleased with their praise and homage, and the old friendshi[) is ri-newed — on the distinct understanding that In- dra is the greater. And so he has the best of it here, as he had in his dispute with Viiruna. 23. We have now pretty thoroughly stiulied those gloomy scones of what we called the Atmospheric Drama which are known in mythological language as the .S roKM-Mvril. Hut there is another drama, enacted not in the Mitldle- Region, but on a higher [)lane- in the highest heaven itself; nor are the chief actors beings of war aiul violence, but the most beauteous and gentle of Powers — the lighl-and-life- giving Sun, and the loveliest of heaven's daughters, tlu' I )awn. Wheiefore the scenes in which they take part have received the collective name of SUN-AND- Dawn M\ ri I. Their parts — as those of genuine pro- tagonists or " first subjects" should — embrace both love ami war: love towards each other (for in some way Sun and Dawn must always be closely con- nected), and war with the beings of opposite nature to theirs: Darkness in all its forms, and consequently .Slime of the foes of Indra and the Marut.s — ob.scuring clouds and blinding mists. 24. The Sun-and-Dawn drama presents more variety of incident than the Storm drama, for the reason that these two mythical persons offer richer pi)etical material to a lively imagination which, according to the moment's nuiod or fancy, can THE STORM-MYTH. 217, place them in different relations to each other and to the other and lesser powers which complete the cast. Thus, if the Dawn is the born enemy of Darkness, which to dispel and rout is her only business, she is also the twin sister of Night, as they are manifestly both daughters of Dyaus, the Sky, and both work in harmony in their alternate times, keeping the eternal ordinances of Rita and the Adityas (see pp. 146, 155). Then again she has another sister, even more brilliant, but also older, sadder than herself — the evening Gloaming, doomed to be devoured by the demon Darkness, the shaggy Beast, which the bright young sister vanquished in the morning. Or yet — Dawn and Gloaming are one : the maiden, dazzling in her beauty, arrayed in saf- fron and rosy robes, drives her golden chariot through the portals of the East, closely followed by her lover the young Sun, whose advances she re- ceives, coy, but not unwilling, until her delicate, ethereal being shrinks from his more and more fiery touch and she flees to the ends of the heavens, van- ishes, and is lost to her gay lover ; he, meantime, not being free to tarry (for the path laid out by Rita must be run), pursues his way, meets foes — the cloud- demons of many shapes, the crawling mist-serpents, whom he transfixes and dispels with his golden spear — meets other loves too, especially the dangerously fascinating Apsdras, the water-maidens that sail the sky on light shifting cloudlets — until, weary, shorn of his power, yet glorious still, he sinks low and lower, sometimes serenely victorious, sometimes still fight- ing his darkling, crowding foes, whom he disperses Ml VEDIC INDIA. h\ .1 List iiiii^htN" otTort. like .i ihiui; hero : .iiul hcic at l.isl lu-. \\\c oKl Sun, In-hoKls ai;.un his Kno oi {\\c nuMiuui;" no loiii;cr tho radiant, hopctul Dawn. Init tho suhdiioil. tho saiidonoil l^loanuui;'. l'\irono biiot whdo tho lo\ois aio unit(.\l at thoir (."arooi's end ; tvM ono hiiot" nioniont tho joy of thoir mooting; irradiatos \\\c W'ost. tlion. in oai.h othor's onihraoo. they sink to thoir rost tO' thoii d^HMU, and Paiknoss. thoir aroli too, oiii^ulphs tlionu ro-niorrow's yoiuii;' rising' Sun is tlioir ol\ild - it tho popnlar fancN* caros to look for a soviiu^l to tho day's dianui. whuh is not usual in oail\- Indian potniy. It prefers the tiction of tho oKl Sun hoint;" sonuhow rojnvenated. cured. liboiatvd, Mu\ loappearini^" youthfid anil vii^orous in tho nun-ning. -'5. It is very ia idont that tlioso aie oidy one or two of a i^reat many possible poetical interpretations of tho same natuiai phononiona, and that oaeh such interpretation nuist shape itself into an iniai;e. an inciilenl. .i story. What endless material for love stories. lo\ o trai;edios ! l^ach such utterance, sepa- rateh*. is only a more or less w\A and beautiful poetical fii^ure. simile, met.iphor. l>ut if collected and tilted .ind pieced intv^ a s\ stem, then consistently carried throuj^h, sonte very queer and even distressini^j feat- ures w ill appear distressing", /.a, so Kmijj as we have nv>t tho ko\ to mythical lanj^uaj^e and take its say- ittgs as we would so many bald statements on human affairs. So, while the Sun is the eternal foe of Dark- ness, still, as he is seen to enierge out of darkness, he may, in a sense, be said to be the *' Child of Dark- ness,** and it follows that he of necessity must kill THE STORM-MYTH. 2 1$ his father, just as Agiii must needs devour his parents as soon as born (see p. i6o). Again, it is no faulty poetical figure to call the Sun the child, or the brother, of the Dawn — and then it may very well happen that he loves, or weds, his mother or his sis- ter, or kills her ! Bad enough to place gods in such awkward positions ; at least the devout votary has the resource, like Agni's worshipper, to abstain from judging the acts of great deities (see p. i6o). But bring down all this to earth — as all nature-myth has invariably been brought down, to become Heroic Epos — and see in what a fine tangle the later poets will find themselves, what horrible deeds they will calmly relate of their most cherished ancient heroes and founders of royal houses, without the least consciousness or recollection of the original real meaning of what they tell ! Fortunately there is lit- tle system or consistency in the Rig-Veda — at least, so far as combining and connecting the different myths with which it teems. So we can take each one on its own merits, untroubled by moral qualms or logical misgivings. SOrYA — THE SUN. 26. To begin with plain fact, SURYA is the Sanskrit common noun designating the Sun ; the root contained in it gives it the meaning of " bril- liant, shining." And Surya is, in the Rig-Veda, the material, visible luminary, " created " by the gods (or even some particular god), and obedient to their bidding. But Surya is not only the sun, he is also the Sun-god, powerful, independent, subject only to 2l6 VEDIC INDIA. the ordinances of the great Adityas, themselves governed by Rita, the supreme Cosmic and Moral Law. This distinction — surely unconscious, and which we find in the presentment of all the Nature- gods — between their physical and moral essence, accounts for the difference in the tone of the several hymns, and even different parts of the same hymns, addressed to this deity. These invocations are mostly fine poetry, and the figures used explain themselves. 27. One quality has been universally ascribed to the divinized Sun in every age, by every ancient race : that of being " all-seeing." The association of this quality with the giver of light and the disperser of darkness is too natural to suggest mutual borrow- ing, and we need not wonder if we find a striking resemblance between the Old Chaldean and the Old Aryan hymns to the Sun, not only in this particular, but in several other poetical conceptions.* Surya, a Son of the Sky (Dyaus), we have already learned to know as the Eye of Mitra and Varuna." Now, in Oriental phraseology, the Eyes of the King are his spies, so it is but natural that he should observe all the deeds of men, and report them to the great Adityas, the guardians and avengers of Law and Right. That the expression was really understood in this manner is proved by the frequent prayer to Surya to " report men sinless before the Adityas," — which looks singularly like a request, in child-slang, " not to tell on them," and so not bring them into 'See Story of Chaldea, pp. 171, 172. * Once Surya is called the Eye of Agni also (I., 115). THE STORM-MYTH. 21/ disgrace and punishment. Thus one of the Vasish- thas sings : "If thou, O Surya, at thy rising wilt report us truly sinless to Varuna and Mitra, we will sing to please the gods. . . . Surya is rising, O Varuna-Mitra, to pace both worlds, looking down on men, protector of all that travel or stay, beholding right and wrong among men. He unharnesses his seven Harits ' , . . and hastens dutifully to your throne, ye twain, surveying all beings, as a shepherd his flock. . . . Surya emerges from the sea of light, he whose path the Adityas laid out. . . ." (VII., 60.) ". . . He unweaves [ravels up] the black mantle, his rays cast off the darkness, rolling it up as a hide and dropping it into the waters. " Not hanging on to anything, not made fast, how comes it that he falls not from such height? By whose guidance does he travel? Who has seen it ? " (IV., 13.) Even more rapturous is the following greeting : " The gods' bright face has now arisen, the Eye of Mitra, Varuna, and Agni ; Surya fills heaven, earth, and atmosphere, the breath of life of all that stands and moves. . . . The beautiful golden Harits, the bright ones, hailed by songs of joy, they mount to the highest heaven, and in one day their course encircles heaven and earth. . And when he unharnesses the mares, the veil of darkness spreads over all things." (I., 115.) We have learned to know the Sun as a horse, and as a bird. These images both remain standing symbols of the god, and there even are two hymns (L, 163 and X., 177), rather obscurely and mystically worded, celebrating him as " the Bird adorned by ^ Surya's seven steeds or mares — as also the Dawn's — are generally called Harits (" brilliant, ruddy"); they are of course his rays, as the first verse of I., 50, expressly shows (see farther on). It should be noted, however, that the steeds of other gods — Indra's and Agni's, for instance — are also sometimes called so. 2l8 VEDIC INDIA. the Asura " (Varuna), and as " the Horse w,ho neighed as soon as he was born, emerging out of the waters [or mist]," the Steed with the "falcon's wings and the gazelle's feet." So the Dawn is said to bring "the Eye of the gods" to "lead forth the white and lovely horse." There are few entire hymns addressed to Surya, but of these the fol- lowing (I., 50), has become famous for its rich imagery and its unusually finished literary form : " I. The god who knows all beings rises aloft, drawn by his rays, that he, Siirya, may behold all things.' — 2. Straightway, like thieves, the stars with their brightness slink away before the all-seeing god. — 3. His rays are visible to all mankind, blazing like flames. — 4. All- conspicuous on thy rapid course thou Greatest light, illumining the whole firmament. — 5. Thou risest for the race of gods and for that of men, that all may behold thy light. — 6. With that same glance where- with Varuna, the illuminator, surveys the busy race of men, — 7. Thou, O Surya, searchest the sky and the wide space, making the days, spying out all creatures. — 8. Seven mares bear thee on, O far- seeing Surya, in thy chariot, god of the flaming locks. — 9. Surya has harnessed the seven Harits, daughters of the car, self-yoked. — 10. Gazing out of the darkness up at the highest light, we have reached Silrya, a god among the gods. " INDRA AND SURYA. Surya's relations to Indra are rather peculiar. The grim warrior god appears to treat him sometimes in a friendly and sometimes in a hostile way. True, there are many passages — in hymns to Indra, be it noted — which would place the sun-god in his direct dependence, by actually saying that he was created * This is the rendering of the French scholar A. Bergaigne ; others translate, " that all may behold Surya." Either meaning would be appropriate and satisfactory. THE STORM-MYTH. 2ig by Indra; but this must be taken only as a piece of exaggeration from excessive zeal on the part of the worshipper to ingratiate himself with the deity he is invoking — a trick of Vedic priestly poetry which has long been noticed as one of its most peculiar and characteristic features. When, however, Indra is said to have prepared the way for Surya, or " caused him to shine," it is no more than good myth-rhetoric. For we can well imagine — from personal observation — the sun-god so overwhelmed in battle with Ahi, Vritra, and other cloud-demons as to be unable to extricate himself and overcome his foes without the help of the Thunderer's weighty arm ; in plain prose — a thunderstorm clears the sky and allows the sun to shine. It is, in substance, the same myth as that contained in a passage which tells how " the gods lifted Surya out of the sea [sauiiuiral wherein he lay hidden " (X., 72). Not less transparent is the re- quest to Indra that he should "hide the sun," here likened to a wdieel, and direct his bolts against Shushna, the Demon of Drought. But this short verse also very clearly shows how Surya, on cer- tain occasions, could be regarded by Indra, on be- half of men and nature generally, as an enemy and a nuisance, to be suppressed, at least temporarily, at all cost. For when battle is to be waged in earnest against the wickedest of all fiends, the blazing disc, or wheel, of the sun is hardly a desirable auxiliary. So that we do not wonder at the climax when Indra is praised for having, with the help of Soma, broken a wheel from Surya's chariot and sent it spinning downhill, thereby laming " the great wizard." 320 rh'/>/i' LXntA. 1M)K,\ .\N1> 1 1 SI IAS. 27. ( >i\ till" s.u\>r piiuiipK- \\c iMn uiuU-rst.incl luiw thr iKiw n luisril' I'siias. tlu- lnMutiliil, the .uispicious'-- could bo treat oil by Imha.it tinuswitli \\\c utmost sfvtMity ; iu seasons of drouj-lit, is not thi- lui.iKI ol aut'tluM iloiulK-ss day, t Iu- l)iiM!;n- of the bhi/any; sun, a wiekeil sorceress, a ft>i> tt» i;ocls ami lUiMi, to be ilealt with as such b\' the Tlmiulerer wlu-n, soma ill nnk. he stii\i's with his fiioiuls the Maruts to stmni {\\c br.i/en stables of the sky, ami brin^ out the blessed n\ileh kim> which are therein in\prisoneil? Indra's trial n\ent iA the hostile Dawn is ius summary as his treatment o{ Sih\ a. thoni'li at other times he is as read\' to help hei, A\\i\ " lay out a path " ft>r her, ami " causi> hn to slune " or " lii;ht hei up." It is the sanuMuyth ; ami foi t unati'ly w e have it in a far clearer ai\il ci>mpletei form. .Sn\ash- ini^' the obi\o\ious iMie's car seen\s to bo the one n\ethod whuh lucuis to the iMeat fi>esmiter. who is mure earnest th.ui invent i\i\ "This Ivfi'oio tusk also, tl»is manly ilt'fil, (.^ Initm, thou didst perform, tlvat thou didst siuite tlie womuu who phiuneil misohici, tl\e Piiu^litev of tl\e Sky [l\va»is|; this I'shas, who was t*xaltii\g Iwrself, thou didst strike her r from her shattered oar whe»\ tlve mighty one had felled it to the jjrouud. There it lay, broken utterly, while she herself tied far awav." OV.,.u>.) This feat i>f Indra's is recounted in a hynui which rehearses a list of his fii\est exploits. It is evidently looked on as one t>f his hiohest claims to o-lorv and ' Ushas — from a root nu'.iniu^ " to hum," " to j;lo\v." THE STORM-MYTH. 221 gratitude, for it is repeatedly alluded to in different books. In one passage, the fair Ushas is represented as having taken the lesson to heart and flying of her own accord, leaving her chariot standing, from fear of Indra's bolt, while in another the latter is said to have smitten certain enemies as he had broken Ushas' car. USIIAS, 'I'lIE DAWN. 28. What strikes us most in all this is the exulting and insulting tone in which the poets celebrate the defeat of the goddess who is, except on this one oc- casion, their greatest favourite, their heart's desire, — one might almost say their pet. Some twenty hymns are addressed wiiolly to her, and she has a place in numerous others ; and everywhere the pcjets' fancy exhausts itself in brilliant and dainty imagery, in a variety of loving and admiring epithets. Again and again she is likened to a beautiful woman or maiden, who reveals herself in all her loveliness ; and it must be confessed that these descriptions, as a rule, recall Oriental harem life (or the Zenana of In- dian princes), too realistically to be relished by the general reader in their original crudity. So that such passages, scattered through most of the Rig books, may best be summed up in the very compre- hensive lines of Mr. J. Muir.' " Like a beautiful young woman dressed by her mother, a richly decked dancing girl, a gaily attired wife appearing bef