History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s16: Mythology.
History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c8.s16
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Mythology.
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Whenever any one will seriously undertake to write the history of sculpture in India, he will find the materials abundant and the sequence by no means difficult to follow; but, with regard to mythology, the case is different. It cannot, however, be said that the materials are not abundant for this branch of the enquiry also; but they are of a much less tangible or satisfactory nature, and have become so entangled, that it is extremely difficult to obtain any clear ideas regarding them; and it is to be feared they must remain so, until those who investigate the subject will condescend to study the architecture and the sculpture of the country as well as its books. The latter contain a good deal, but they do not contain all the information available on the subject, and they require to be steadied and confirmed by what is built or carved, which alone can give precision and substance to what is written.
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It is remarkable that, with all the present day activity in every branch of Sanskrit research, so very little has been done for the illustration of mythology, which is so intimately connected with the whole literature. It would be a legitimate part of the duty of the Archæological Surveys to collect materials on a systematic plan for this object ; and the production of illustrations has now become so easy and inexpensive that photographs from original materials of a satisfactory class might readily be published to supply this most pressing desideratum. The details of the emblems and symbols of the numerous divinities of the pantheon could also be collected, along with the delineations, by those familiar with such symbols. All this could easily be accomplished, and it is consequently hoped it may before long be attempted.¹
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¹ Numerous excellent illustrations exist among the materials already accumulated by the Archæological Surveys in Southern and Western India and in the Calcutta Museum—but, at present, there seems little prospect of their publication.
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Much of the confusion of ideas that prevails on this subject no doubt arises from the exaggerated importance it has been the fashion to ascribe to the Vedas, as explaining everything connected with the mythology of the Hindûs. It would, indeed, be impossible to over-estimate the value of these writings from a philological or ethnological point of view. Their discovery and elaboration have revolutionised our ideas as to the migrations of races in the remote ages of antiquity, and established the affiliation of the Aryan races on a basis that seems absolutely unassailable ; but it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the Aryans are a race of strangers in India, distinct from the Indian peoples themselves. They may, as hinted above, have come into India some three thousand years before Christ, and may have retained their purity of blood and faith for many generations ; but with the beginning of the political Kaliyug—or, to speak more correctly, at the time of the events detailed in the Mahâbhârata, say 1200 years B.C.—they had lost much of both ; while every successive wave of immigration that has crossed the Indus during the last three thousand years has impaired the purity of their race. From this cause, and from their admixture with the aborigines, it may probably be with confidence asserted that there is not now five per cent.—perhaps not one—of pure Aryan blood in the present population of India, nor, consequently, does the religion of the Vedas constitute one-twentieth part of the present religion of the people.²
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² For the mythology of the Vedas, see Professor A. A. Macdonell's ‘Vedic Mythology’ in the ‘Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde,’ in Bd. iii. A useful general handbook is Dowson's ‘Dictionary of Hindu Mythology.’
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With the Vedas, however, we have very little to do in the present work. The worship they foreshadow is of a class too purely intellectual to require the assistance of the stonemason and the carver to give it expression. The worship of the Aryans was addressed to the sun and moon; the firmament and all its hosts; the rain-bearing cloud; the sun-ushering dawn. All that was beautiful in the heavens above or beneficent on earth, was sung by them in hymns of elevated praise, and addressed in terms of awe or endearment as fear or hope prevailed in the bosom of the worshipper.¹ Had this gone on for some time longer than it did, the objects worshipped by the Aryans in India might have become imaged as gods, like those of Greece and Rome, endowed with all the feelings and all the failings of humanity. In India it was otherwise; the deities were dethroned, but were not degraded. There is no trace in Vedic times, so far as at present known, of Indra or Varuna, of Agni or Ushas, being represented in wood or stone, or of their requiring houses or temples to shelter them. It is true indeed that the terms of endearment in which they are addressed are frequently such as mortals use in speaking of each other; but how otherwise can man express his feeling of love or fear, or address his supplication to the being whose assistance he implores?
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¹ The ritual of the Veda is chiefly, if not wholly, addressed to the elements, particularly to fire.—H. H. Wilson, ‘Asiatic Researches,’ vol. xvii. p. 194; ibid., p. 614. Conf. Bergaigne, ‘La Religion Védique’; Oldenburg, ‘Die Religion des Veda.’
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The great beauty of the Veda is, that it stops short before the powers of nature are dwarfed into human forms, and when every man stood independently by himself, and sought through the intervention of all that was great or glorious on the earth, or in the skies, to approach the great spirit that is beyond and above all created things.
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Had the Aryans been a numerical majority in India, and able to preserve their blood and caste in tolerable purity, the religion of India could hardly ever have sunk so low as it did, though it might have fallen below the standard of the Veda. What really destroyed it was, that each succeeding immigration of less pure Aryan or of Turanian races rendered their numerical majority relatively less and less, while their inevitable influence so educated the subject races as to render their moral majority even less important. These processes went on steadily and uninterruptedly till, in the time of Buddha, the native religions rose fairly to an equality with that of the Aryans, and afterwards for a while eclipsed it. The Vedas were only ultimately saved from absolute annihilation in India, by being connected with the Vaishnava and Saiva superstitions, where their inanimate forms may still be recognised, but painfully degraded from their primitive elevation.
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When we turn from the Vedas, and try to investigate the origin of those religions that finally absorbed the Vedas in their abominations, we find our means of information painfully scanty and unsatisfactory. As will appear in the sequel, all that was written in India that is worth reading was written by the Aryans; what was built was built by Turanians and Dravidians. But the known buildings extend back only to the 3rd century B.C., while the books may be ten centuries earlier, and, as might be expected, it is only accidentally and in the most contemptuous terms that the proud Aryans even allude to the abject Dasyus or their religion. What, therefore, we practically know of them is little more than inferences drawn from results, and from what we now see passing in India.
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Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Vaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sâkyamuni before his death about 480 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of belief, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas—according to the more formal accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and where he died, the father and mother's name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but they may have been real personages, whose dates extended back to a very remote antiquity.¹
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¹ A list of the twenty-four Buddhas, with these particulars, is given in the introduction to Turnour's 'Mahâwansa,' introd. p. 32. See also Spence Hardy's 'Manual of Budhism,' 2nd. ed. pp. 96ff. Representations of six or seven of their Bodhi-trees, with the names attached, have been found at Bharaut and Ajantâ, showing at least that more than four were recognised.
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The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tîrthankars, including Mahâvîra the last. Their places of birth and death, ages and numbers of converts, are equally recorded, all are in northern India, though little else is told of them; but, from their fabulous ages, stature, and the immeasurable periods of the past when they are said to have lived—they can only be looked on as purely fabulous. The series ends with Mahâvîra, who was the contemporary of Sâkyamuni, and is said to have died before him at Pâwâ in Bihâr.
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The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only ten Avatârs; but it, too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth, whilst the last is yet to come. Its fifth Avatâr takes us back to Râma, who, if our chronology is correct, may have lived B.C. 2000; the fourth—Narasimha, or the man lion—may possibly point to the time the Aryans entered India. The three first deal with creation and events anterior to man's appearance on earth. In this respect the Vaishnava list differs from the other two. They only record the existence of men who attained greatness by the practice of virtue, and immortality by teaching the ways of emancipation from rebirths. The Vaishnavas brought their god to earth, to mix and interfere in mundane affairs in a manner that neither the earlier Aryan nor the Buddhist dreamt of, and so degraded the earlier religion of India into the monstrous system of idolatry that now prevails in that country.
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No attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain the origin of the Saiva religion; it was, however, most probably an aboriginal superstition assimilated by the Brâhmans. The earliest authentic written allusion to it seems to be that of the Indian ambassador to Bardisanes (*cir.* A.D. 220), who described a cave in the north of India which contained an image of a god, half-man, half-woman.¹ This is beyond doubt the Ardhanârîsa form of Siva, so familiar afterwards at Elephanta and in every part of India. The earliest engraved representations of this god seem to be those on the coins of Kadphises II. (about 80 to 90 A.D.), where the figure with the trident and the Bull certainly prefigure the principal personage in this religion.² Besides all this, it seems now tolerably well ascertained, that the practice of endowing gods with a multiplicity of limbs took a much greater development in Tibet and the trans-Himâlayan countries than in India, and that the wildest Tantric forms of Durgâ and other divinities or demons are more common and more developed in Nepal and Tibet than they are even in India Proper.³ If this is so, it seems pretty clear, as the evidence now stands, that Saivism is an aboriginal or northern superstition—possibly introduced into India by some of the northern hordes who migrated into India long before the Christian Era.
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¹ Stobæus, 'Physica,' Gaisford's ed. p. 54; see also Priaulx, 'India and Rome,' p. 153; Burgess, 'Rock-Temples of Elephanta,' 8vo ed. p. 67.
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² Wilson's 'Ariana Antiqua,' plates 10, 11; P. Gardner's 'Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria and India,' pp. 124-128, plate 25, and introd. p. 50.
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³ Compare Grünwedel's 'Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolei.' Buddhist figures have been subjected to the same treatment as the Hindû gods: to make them demoniac.
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It is also only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before they adopted either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of religion. It is possible that among the *Pându Kallus*, and other forms of 'Rude Stone Monuments' that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian religion before they adopted that of the Hindûs. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a complex problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.¹
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¹ A book was published in 1873 by the late Mr. Breeks, of the Madras Civil Service, on the Primitive Tribes of the Nilagiris, which gives a fuller account of these "rude stone monuments" than any other yet given to the public. It can hardly, however, be accepted as a solution of the problem, which requires a wider survey than he was able to make. See also Fergusson's 'Rude Stone Monuments' (1872), pp. 455-499.
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In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as enquirers apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' in 1869, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proofs have accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Nâga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. In the Buddhist legends, Buddha is constantly represented as converting Nâgas, and whilst a superhuman character is ascribed to them, they doubtless represent people of Turanian descent.² Further, snake worship is prevalent still, especially among the lower castes, and, though to a less extent, yet somehow connected with it, is the veneration of trees.³ It is also quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.
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² The Nâgbansis of Chutia Nâgpur, who appear to have come from about Gorakhpur in northern Bihâr, are evidently of an early Nâga or snake-worshipping race.
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³ In Malabar, "a clump of wild jungle trees luxuriantly festooned with graceful creepers is usually found in the south-west corner of the gardens of all respectable Malayâli Hindûs. The spot is left free to nature to deal with as she likes; every tree and bush, every branch and twig is sacred. This is the '*vishâttum kâvu*' (poison shrine) or '*nâga kotta*' (snake shrine). Usually there is a granite stone (*chittra kuta kallu*) carved after the fashion of a cobra's hood set up and consecrated in this waste spot."—Logan's 'Malabar,' vol. i. p. 183. For some account of Trees worshipped in Western India, see *Bombay Gazetteer*, vol. ix. pt. i. pp. 382-388.
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The five, or seven, or thousand-headed Nâga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas.¹ In the great act of creation the Nâga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Nâga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vaishnavism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Kolarians, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the later Hindû forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of a pure Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites.² We seem, then, almost forced to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have competed with each other in the north during the last two thousand years.
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¹ Snake worship may have been introduced into the south from the north ; and it has been remarked that snake images are very frequent about Jaina temples in Mysore and Kanara. At Negapatam is a temple dedicated to Nâganâth, and at Subrahmanya in South Kanara, at Nâgarkoil, at Manârchâl in Travankor, and elsewhere, are also snake temples much resorted to. No Brâhman ever officiates in a Nâga temple. See also Thurston, 'Ethnographic Notes in Southern India,' 1906, pp. 283-293.
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² Though Siva is always represented with a black snake as one of his symbols there does not seem to be any very close connection between Snake worship and Saivism, though there are some coincidences that may point that way ; in Kanara, Nâga images are set up facing the east, under the shade of two pîpal trees — a male and female growing together and married with proper rites. Beside them grow a margosa and bilva tree as witnesses ; now these latter trees are more or less consecrated to Siva. On the other hand no trace of Tree-worship seems to be mingled with the various forms of adoration paid to this divinity. The *tulasi* or basil is sacred to Vishnu.
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This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency, as well as that of ethnology, now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Tibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himâlayan populations, and who were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon.
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Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged to the Turanian group; but, as hinted above, the Dravidians belonged to a different and more westerly branch of that great family of mankind.
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These, however, are speculations which hardly admit of proof in the present state of our knowledge, and would consequently be quite out of place here, were it not that some such theory seems indispensable to explain the phenomena of the architectural history of India. That of the north is so essentially different from that of the south that they cannot possibly belong to the same people. Neither of them are Aryan; and unless we admit that the two divisions of the country were occupied by people essentially different in blood, though still belonging to the building races of mankind, we cannot possibly understand how they always practised, and to the present employ, styles so essentially different. Until these various ethnographical and mythological problems are understood and appreciated, the styles of architecture in India seem a chaos without purpose or meaning. Once, however, they are grasped and applied, their history assumes a dignity and importance far greater than is due to any merely æsthetic merits they may possess. Even that, however, is in many respects remarkable, and, when combined with the scientific value of the styles, seems to render them as worthy of study as those of any other people with whose arts we are acquainted.
Cites (4)
- Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
- Veda — Sanskrit
- Bharhut
- Ajanta