The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.209

v1.c26.209

The Brāhmans have the greatest prestige, since they have a more consistent dogmatic system. As soon as they are conceived in the womb, men of learning take charge of them. These go to the mother and ostensibly sing a charm tending to make the birth happy for mother and child, but in reality convey certain virtuous counsels and suggestions; the women who listen most willingly are held to be the most fortunate in child-bearing. After birth, the boys pass from one set of teachers to another in succession, the standard of teachers rising with the age of the boy. The philosophers spend their days in a grove near the city, under the cover of an enclosure of due size, on beds of leaves and skins, living sparely, practising celibacy and abstinence from flesh-food, listening to grave discourse, and admitting such others to the discussion as may wish to take part. He who listens is forbidden to speak, or even to clear his throat or spit, on pain of being ejected from the company that very day, as incontinent. When each Brāhman has lived in this fashion thirty-seven years, he departs to his own property, and lives now in greater freedom and luxury, wearing muslin robes and some decent ornaments of gold on his hands and ears, eating flesh, so long as it is not the flesh of domestic animals, but abstaining from pungent and highly-seasoned food. They marry as many wives as possible, to secure good progeny; for the larger number of wives, the larger the number of good children is likely to be; and since they have no slaves, they depend all the more upon the ministrations of their children, as the nearest substitute. The Brāhmans do not admit their wives to their philosophy: if the wives are wanton, they might divulge mysteries to the profane; if they are good, they might leave their husbands, since no one who has learnt to look with contempt upon pleasure and pain, upon life and death, will care to be under another's control. The chief subject on which the Brāhmans talk is death; for this present life, they hold, is like the season passed in the womb, and death for those who have cultivated philosophy is the birth into the real, the happy, life. For this reason they follow an extensive discipline to make them ready for death. None of the accidents, they say, which befall men are good or evil. If they were, one would not see the same things causing grief to some and joy to others—men's notions being indeed like dreams—and the same men grieved by something which at another moment they will turn and welcome. Their teaching about Nature is in parts naïve; for they are more admirable in what they do than in what they say, and the theoretic proofs on which they base their teaching are mostly fable. In many points however their teaching agrees with that of the Greeks—for instance, that the world has a beginning and an end in time, and that its shape is spherical; that the Deity, who is its Governor and Maker, interpenetrates the whole; that the first principles of the universe are different, but that water is the principle from which the order of the world has come to be; that, beside the four elements, there is a fifth substance, of which the heavens and the stars are made²; that the earth is established at the centre of the universe. About generation and the soul their teaching shows parallels to the Greek doctrines, and on many other matters. Like Plato too, they interweave fables, about the immortality of the soul and the judgments inflicted in the other world, and so on.