Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.9
Travels in the Mogul Empire (Constable) 6.9
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- English
6.9.1
I then tried them on the nature of their Deütas, but their explanation was very confused. These Gods consist, they said, of three kinds, good, bad, and indifferent. Some of the learned believe that the Deütas are composed of fire, others that they are formed of light, and many are of opinion that they are Biapek; a word of which I could obtain no clearer explication than that God is Biapek, that our soul is Biapek, and that whatever is Biapek is incorruptible and independent of time and place. There are Pendets again who, according to my learned host and his companions, pretend that Deütas are only portions of the divinity; and lastly, others consider them as certain species of distinct divinities, dispersed over the surface of the globe.
6.9.2
I remember that I also questioned them on the nature of the Lengue-cherire, which some of their authors admit; but I could elicit no more from them than what I had long before learnt from our Pendet; namely, that the seeds of plants, of trees, and of animals do not receive a new creation; that they have existed, scattered abroad and intermixed with other matter, from the first creation of the world; and that they are nothing more or less, not only in potentiality, as it is called, but in reality, than plants, trees and animals entirely perfect, but so minute that their separate parts only become visible when being brought to their proper place, and there receiving nourishment they develop and increase; so that the seed of an apple- or pear-tree is a Lengue-cherire, a small apple- or pear-tree, perfect in all its essential parts; and the seed of a horse, of an elephant, or of a man is a Lengue-cherire, a small horse, a small elephant or a small man, which requires only life and nourishment in order to its visibly assuming its proper form. In conclusion, I shall explain to you the Mysticum of a Great Sect, which has latterly made great noise in Hindoustan, inasmuch as certain Pendets or Gentile Doctors had instilled it into the minds of Dara and Sultan Sujah, the elder sons of Chah-Jehan.
6.9.3
You are doubtless acquainted with the doctrine of many of the ancient philosophers concerning that great life-giving principle of the world, of which they argue that we and all living creatures are so many parts : if we carefully examine the writings of Plato and Aristotle, we shall probably discover that they inclined towards this opinion. This is the almost universal doctrine of the Gentile Pendets of the Indies, and it is this same doctrine which is held by the sect of the Soufys and the greater part of the learned men of Persia at the present day, and which is set forth in Persian poetry in very exalted and emphatic language, in their Goul-tchen-raz or Garden of Mysteries. This was also the opinion of Flud, whom our great Gassendy has so ably refuted ; and it is similar to the doctrines by which most of our alchymists have been hopelessly led astray. Now these Sectaries or Indou Pendets, so to speak, push the incongruities in question further than all these philosophers, and pretend that God, or that supreme being whom they call Achar (immovable, unchangeable) has not only produced life from his own substance, but also generally everything material or corporeal in the universe, and that this production is not formed simply after the manner of efficient causes, but as a spider which produces a web from its own navel, and withdraws it at pleasure.
6.9.4
The Creation then, say these visionary doctors, is nothing more than an extraction or extension of the individual substance of God, of those filaments which He draws from his own bowels ; and, in like manner, destruction is merely the recalling of that divine substance and filaments into Himself; so that the last day of the world, which they call maperle or pralea, and in which they believe every being will be annihilated, will be the general recalling of those filaments which God had before drawn forth from Himself. — There is, therefore, say they, nothing real or substantial in that which we think we see, hear or smell, taste or touch ; the whole of this world is, as it were, an illusory dream, inasmuch as all that variety which appears to our outward senses is but one only and the same thing, which is God Himself; in the same manner as all those different numbers, of ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, etc., are but the frequent repetition of the same unit — But ask them some reason for this idea ; beg them to explain how this extraction and reception of substance occurs, or to account for that apparent variety ; or how it is that God not being corporeal but biapek, as they allow, and incorruptible. He can be thus divided into so many portions of body and soul, they will answer you only with some fine similes : — That God is as an immense ocean in which many vessels of water are in continual motion ;
6.9.5
let these vessels go where they will, they always remain in the same ocean, in the same water ; and if they should break, the water they contain would then be united to the whole, to that ocean of which they were but parts. — Or they will tell you that it is with God as with the light, which is the same everywhere, but causes the objects on which it falls to assume a hundred different appearances, according to the various colours or forms of the glasses through which it passes. — They will never attempt to satisfy you, I say, but with such comparisons as these, which bear no proportion with God, and which serve only to blind an ignorant people. In vain will you look for any solid answer. If one should reply that these vessels might float in a water similar to their own, but not in the same ; and that the light all over the world is indeed similar, but not the same, and so on to other strong objections which may be made to their theory, they have recourse continually to the same similes, to fine words, or, in the case of the Soufys, to the beautiful poems of their Goulshen-raz.
6.9.6
Now, Sir, what think you? Had I not reason from all this great tissue of extravagant folly on which I have remarked ; from that childish panic of which I have spoken above ; from that superstitious piety and compassion toward the sun in order to deliver it from the malignant and dark Deüta ; from that trickery of prayers, of ablutions, of dippings, and of alms, either cast into the river, or bestowed on Brahmens ; from that mad and infernal hardihood of women to burn themselves with the body of those husbands whom frequently they have hated while alive ; from those various and frantic practices of the Fakires ; and lastly, from all that fabulous trash of their Beth and other books; was I not justified in taking as a motto to this letter, — the wretched fruit of so many voyages and so many reflections, a motto of which the modern satirist has so well known how to catch and convey the idea without so long a journey — 'There are no opinions too extravagant and ridiculous to find reception in the mind of man'?
6.9.7
To conclude, you will do me a kindness by delivering Monsieur Chapelle's letter into his own hands; it was he who first obtained for me that acquaintance with your intimate and illustrious friend. Monsieur Gassendi, which has since proved so advantageous to me. I am so much obliged to him for this favour that I cannot but love and remember him wherever my lot may be cast. I also feel myself under much obligation to you, and am bound to honour you all my life, not only on account of the partiality you have manifested toward me, but also for the valuable advice contained in your frequent letters, by which you have aided me during my journeys, and for your goodness in having sent me so disinterestedly and gratuitously a collection of books to the extremity of the world, whither my curiosity had led me; while those of whom I requested them, who might have been paid with money which I had left at Marseilles, and who in common politeness should have sent them, deserted me and laughed at my letters, looking on me as a lost man whom they were never more to see.