Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.8
Travels in the Mogul Empire (Constable) 6.8
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6.8.1
Whether these modes of treatment be judicious, I leave to our learned physicians to decide ; I shall only remark that they are successful in Hindoustan, and that the Mogol and Mahometan physicians, who follow the rules of Avicenna and Averroes, adopt them no less than do those of the Gentiles, especially in regard to abstinence from meat broth. The Mogols, it is true, are rather more given to the practice of bleeding than the Gentiles; for where they apprehend the inflammations just mentioned, they generally bleed once or twice, not in the trifling manner of the modern practitioners of Goa and Paris, but copiously, like the ancients, taking eighteen or twenty ounces of blood, sometimes even to fainting; thus frequently subduing the disease at the commencement, according to the advice of Galen, and as I have witnessed in several cases. It is not surprising that the Gentiles understand nothing of anatomy. They never open the body either of man or beast, and those in our household always ran away, with amazement and horror, whenever I opened a living goat or sheep for the purpose of explaining to my Agah the circulation of the blood, and showing him the vessels, discovered by Pecquet, through which the chyle is conveyed to the right ventricle of the heart. Yet notwithstanding their profound ignorance of the subject, they affirm that the number of veins in the human body is five thousand, neither more nor less; just as if they had carefully reckoned them.
6.8.2
In regard to astronomy, the Gentiles have their tables, according to which they foretell eclipses, not perhaps with the minute exactness of European astronomers, but still with great accuracy. They reason, however, in the same ridiculous way on the lunar as on the solar eclipse, believing that the obscuration is caused by a black, filthy, and mischievous Deüta, named Rach, who takes possession of the moon and fills her with infection. They also maintain, much on the same ground, that the moon is four hundred thousand coses, that is, above fifty thousand leagues, higher than the sun; that she is a luminous body, and that we receive from her a certain vital liquid secretion, which collects principally in the brain, and, descending thence as from its source into all the members of the body, enables them to exercise their respective functions. They believe likewise that the sun, moon, and stars are all so many deutas; that the darkness of night is caused by the sun retiring behind the Someire, an imaginary mountain placed in the centre of the earth, in form like an inverted sugar loaf, and an altitude of I know not how many thousand leagues: so that they never enjoy the light of day but when the sun leaves the back of this mountain.
6.8.3
In geography they are equally uninstructed. They believe that the world is flat and triangular; that it is composed of seven distinct habitations, differing in beauty, perfection, and inhabitants, and that each is surrounded by its own peculiar sea; that one sea is of milk; another of sugar; a third of butter; a fourth of wine; and so on; so that sea and land occur alternately until you arrive at the seventh stage from the foot of the Someire mountain, which is in the centre. The first habitation, or that nearest to the Someire, is inhabited by Deutas who are very perfect; the second has also Deutas for inhabitants, but they are less perfect; and so it is with the rest, whose inhabitants are less and less perfect, until the seventh, which is our earth, inhabited by men infinitely less perfect than any of the Deutas; and finally that the whole of this world is supported on the heads of a number of elephants, whose occasional motion is the cause of earthquakes.
6.8.4
If the renowned sciences of the ancient Bragmanes of the Indies consisted of all the extravagant follies which I have detailed, mankind have indeed been deceived in the exalted opinion they have long entertained of their wisdom. I should find it difficult to persuade myself that such was the fact, did I not consider that the religion of the Indians has existed from time immemorial; that it is written in Sanscrit, as are likewise all their scientific books; that the Sanscrit has long become a dead language, understood only by the learned; and that its origin is unknown: all which proves a very great antiquity. I will now say a word or two on the worship of idols. When going down the river Ganges, I passed through Benares, and called upon the chief of the Pendets, who resides in that celebrated seat of learning. He is a Fakire or Devotee so eminent for knowledge that Chah-Jehan, partly for that consideration, and partly to gratify the Rajas, granted him a pension of two thousand roupies, which is about one thousand crowns. He is a stout, well-made man, and his dress consists of a white silk scarf, tied about the waist, and hanging half way down the leg, and of another tolerably large scarf of red silk, which he wears as a cloak on his shoulders. I had often seen him in this scanty dress at Dehli, in the assembly of the Omrahs and before the King, and met him in the streets either on foot or in a paleky.
6.8.5
During one year he was in the constant habit of visiting my Agah, to whom he paid his court in the hope that he would exercise his influence to obtain the pension of which Aureng-Zebe, anxious to appear a true Musulman, deprived him on coming to the throne. I formed consequently a close intimacy with this distinguished personage, with whom I had long and frequent conversations; and when I visited him at Benares he was most kind and attentive, giving me a collation in the university library, to which he invited the six most learned Pendets in the town. Finding myself in such excellent company, I determined to ascertain their opinion of the adoration of idols. I told them I was leaving the Indies scandalised at the prevalence of a worship which outraged common sense, and was totally unworthy such philosophers as I had then the honour of addressing. 'We have indeed in our temples,' said they, 'a great variety of images, such as that of Brahma, of Mehadeu, of Genich, and of Gavani, who are the principal and the most perfect of the Deutas, and we have many others esteemed less perfect. To all these images we pay great honour; prostrating our bodies, and presenting to them, with much ceremony, flowers, rice, scented oil, saffron and other similar articles. Yet do we not believe that these statues are themselves Brahma or Bechen; but merely their images and representations.
6.8.6
We show them deference only for the sake of the deity whom they represent, and when we pray it is not to the statue, but to that deity. Images are admitted in our temples, because we conceive that prayers are offered up with more devotion where there is something before the eyes that fixes the mind; but in fact we acknowledge that God alone is absolute, that He only is the omnipotent Lord.' I have neither added to nor taken from the answer that the Pendets gave me; but I suspect it was so framed as to correspond with the tenets of Christianity. The observations made to me by other learned Pendets were totally different. I then turned the conversation to the subject of chronology, and my company soon showed me a far higher antiquity than ours. They would not say that the world was without a beginning; but the great age they gave it sounded almost as if they had pronounced it eternal. Its duration, said they, is to be reckoned by four Dgugues, or distinct ages; not ages composed, as with us, of an hundred years, but of one hundred lecques, that is to say, of an hundred times one hundred thousand years. I do not recollect exactly the number of years assigned to each Dgugue, but I know that the first, called Sate-Dgugue, continued during a period of five-and-twenty lecques of years ; that the second, called Trita, lasted above twelve lecques; the third, called Duapor, subsisted, if I mistake not, eight lecques and sixty-four thousand years;
6.8.7
and the fourth, called the Kale-Dgugue, is to continue I forget how many lecques of years. The first three, they said, and much of the fourth, are passed away, and the world will not endure so many ages as it has done, because it is destined to perish at the termination of the fourth Dgugue, when all things will return to their first principles. Having pressed the Pendets to tell me the exact age of the world, they tried their arithmetical skill over and over again ; but finding that they were sadly perplexed, and even at variance as to the number of lecques, I satisfied myself with the general information that the world is astonishingly old. Whenever any of these learned Brahmens is urged to state the facts on which he grounds his belief of this vast antiquity, he entertains the inquirer with a set of ridiculous fables, and finishes by asserting that it is so stated in their Beths, or Books of the Laws, which have been given to them by Brahma.