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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7: Introduction

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7

Language
English

Contents

Introduction

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INDIA AND BUDDHISM.

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The history of the Buddhist faith begins with a band of mendicant monks who gathered round the person of Gotama, the Buddha, in the country bordering on the Ganges, about five hundred years before the commencement of the Christian era. What bound them together and gave a stamp to their simple and earnest world of thought, was the deeply felt and clearly and sternly expressed consciousness, that all earthly existence is full of sorrow, and that the only deliverance from sorrow is in renunciation of the world and eternal rest.

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An itinerant teacher and his itinerant followers, not unlike those bands, who in later times bore through Galilee the tidings: "the kingdom of heaven is at hand," went through the realms of India with the burden of sorrow and death, and the announcement: "open ye your ears; the deliverance from death is found."

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Vast gaps separate the historical circle, in the middle of which stands the form of Buddha, from the world on which we are wont next to fix our thoughts, when we speak of the history of the world.

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Those upheavals of nature which partitioned off India from the cooler lands of the west and north by a gigantic wall of vast mountains, allotted at the same time to the people, who should first tread this highly favoured land, a *rôle* of detached isolation. The Indian nation, in a manner scarcely paralleled by any other nation in the civilized world, has developed its life out of itself and according to its own laws, far removed alike from the alien and the cognate peoples, who in the west, within the compass of closer mutual relations, have performed the parts to which history called them. India took no share in this work. For those circles of the Indian race, among whom Buddha preached his doctrine, the idea of non-Indian lands had hardly a more concrete signification than the conception of those other worlds, which, scattered through infinite space, combine with other suns, other moons and other hells, to form other universes.

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The day was yet to come, when an overpowering hand broke down the partition between India and the west—the hand of Alexander. But this contact of India and Greece belongs to a much later period than that which formed Buddhism: between the death of Buddha and Alexander's Indian expedition there elapsed perhaps about one hundred and sixty years. Who can conceive what might have been, if, at an earlier epoch, when the national life of the Indians might have opened itself more freshly and genially to the influences of a foreign life, such events had overtaken it as this incursion of Macedonian weapons and Hellenic culture? For India Alexander came too late. When he appeared, the Indian people had long since come, in the depth of their loneliness, to stand alone among nations, ruled by forms of life and habits of thought, which differed wholly from the standards of the non-Indian world. Without a past living in their memory, without a present, which they might utilize in love and hate, without a future, for which men might hope and work, they dreamed morbid and proud dreams of that which is beyond all time, and of the peculiar government which is within these everlasting realms. On scarcely any of the creations of the exuberant culture of India, do we find the stamp of this Indian characteristic so sharply, and therefore, too, so enigmatically impressed, as on Buddhism.

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But the more completely do all external bonds between these distant regions and the world with which we are acquainted, as far as they consist of the intercourse of nations and the interchange of their intellectual wealth, seem to us to be severed, so much the more clearly do we perceive another tie, which holds closely together internally what are outwardly far apart and apparently foreign: the bond of historical analogy between phenomena, which are called into being in different places by the working of the same law.

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Invariably, wherever a nation has been in a position to develope its intellectual life in purity and tranquillity through a long period of time, there recurs that phenomenon, specially observable in the domain of spiritual life, which we may venture to describe as a shifting of the centre of gravity of all supreme human interests from without to within: an old faith, which promised to men somehow or other by an offensive and defensive alliance with the Godhead, power, prosperity, victory and subjection of their enemies, will, sometimes by imperceptible degrees, and sometimes by great catastrophes, be supplanted by a new phase of thought, whose watchwords are no longer welfare, victory, dominion, but rest, peace, happiness, deliverance. The blood of the sacrificial victim no longer brings reconciliation to the dismayed and erring heart of man: new ways are sought and found, to overcome the enemy within the heart, and to become whole, pure, and happy.

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This altered condition of the inner life gives rise externally to a new form of spiritual fellowship. In the old order of things nature associated religious unity with the family, the clan, and the nation jointly, and inside these unity of faith and worship existed of itself. Whoever belongs to a people has thereby the right to, and is bound to have a share in, the worship of the popular gods. Near this people are other people with other gods; for each individual it is determined as a natural necessity by the circumstances of his birth, what gods shall be to him the true and for him the operative deities. A particular collective body, which may be denominated a church, there is not and there cannot be, for the circle of all worshippers of the popular gods is no narrower and no wider than the people themselves.

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The circumstances under which the later forms of religious life come to the surface are different. They have not an antiquity co-eval with the people among whom they arise. When they come into existence they find a faith already rooted in the people and giving an imprint to popular institutions. They must begin to gather adherents to themselves from among the crowds of professors of another faith. It is no longer natural necessity, but the will of the individual, which determines whether he hopes to find his salvation on this side or on that. There arise the forms of the school, the society, and the holy order. From the narrow social circle of teacher and disciples there may eventually grow a church, which, exceeding the limits of the nation, the limits of all seats of culture, may extend to distances the most remote.

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Were it allowable to borrow from one particular instance of those cases which illustrate this, a designation for this revolution of universal occurrence, which transforms the religious life of nations internally as well as externally, we might describe it as the transition from the Old Testament dispensation to the New Testament dispensation. The honour of having given the most unique and most marked expression to this transition in forms unequalled in history, belongs to the Semitic race. Somewhere about five hundred years earlier than in Palestine, analogous occurrences took place among the Indo-Germanic nations in two places, widely separated in locality, but approximate in time, in Greece and in India.

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In the former case we find the most eccentric among the Athenians, the defining explorer of the bases of human action, who, in the market and over the wine-cup, to Alkibiades as well as to Plato, demonstrates that virtue can be taught and learned,—in the latter case there steps out as the most prominent among the world's physicians, who then traversed India in monastic garb, the noble Gotama, who calls himself the Exalted, the holy, highly Illuminated One, who has come into the world to show to gods and men the path out of the sorrowful prison of being into the freedom of everlasting rest.

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What can be more different than the relative proportions in which in these two spirits—and historical treatment will permit us to add as a third their great counterpart in his mysterious majestic form of suffering humanity—the elements of thought and feeling, of depth and clearness, were arranged and mixed? But even in the sharply-defined difference of that which was, and still is, Socratic, Buddhistic, and Christian vitality, historical necessity holds good. For it was a matter of historical necessity that, when the step was attained at which this spiritual reconstruction was required and called for, the Greeks were bound to meet this demand with a new philosophy, the Jews with a new faith. The Indian mind was wanting in that simplicity, which can believe without knowing, as well as in that bold clearness, which seeks to know without believing, and therefore the Indian had to frame a doctrine, a religion and a philosophy combined, and therefore, perhaps, if it must be said, neither the one nor the other; Buddhism. Our sketch is intended to keep in view, at every step in detail, the parallelism of these phenomena. While it obtains from the similar historical pictures of the western world a light which enables it in many a dark place within its own province to descry outlines and forms, it hopes on its part in return to aid thereby in suggesting bases founded on facts, sifted and assured, for the discovery of those universally valid rules, which govern the changes in the religious thought of nations.

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The course which our sketch will have to follow, is clearly indicated by the nature of the case. Obviously, our first task is to describe the historical national antecedents, the ground and base on which Buddhism rests, above all the religious life and philosophical speculation of pre-Buddhist India; for hundreds of years before Buddha's time movements were in progress in Indian thought, which prepared the way for Buddhism and which cannot be separated from a sketch of the latter. Then the review of Buddhism will naturally divide itself into three heads, corresponding to that Triad, under which even in the very oldest time the Buddhist society in their liturgical language, distributed the whole of those matters which they esteemed sacred, the trinity of Buddha, the Law, the Order. Buddha's own person stands necessarily in our sketch also, as it did in that ancient formula, in the foreground. We must acquaint ourselves with his life and his death, with his *début* as teacher of his people, with his band of disciples, who gathered round him, and with his intercourse with rich and poor, high and low. We shall then turn, in the second place, to the dogmatic thought of the oldest Buddhism, above all to that which stands evermore as a focus in this world of thought, to the doctrine of the sorrow of all that is earthly, the deliverance from this sorrow, the goal of all effort to escape, the Nirvâna. There then remains the characteristic feature of Buddhism, as well as of Christianity, that which externally binds together all who are united by a common faith, and a common effort for deliverance, in bonds of a common church fellowship. In that formula of the Buddhist trinity we find the order named after Buddha and the Law as the third member. We shall follow this course and, when we have spoken of Buddha and his Law, we shall keep in view, in the third place, the Order and their corporate life. We shall come to understand the organization which Buddhism has given to the narrower circle of believers, who have taken their vows as monks and nuns, as well as to the lay community, who accept the doctrine of Buddha. With this will end the investigation of the most ancient Buddhism; or, more accurately expressed, the sketch of Buddhism in that form, which is to us the oldest; and to this investigation only will our sketch be confined.

Western and Eastern India—The Brahman-Castes

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The stage upon which antecedent history as well as the most ancient history of Buddhism was enacted, is the Gangetic valley, the most Indian of Indian lands. In the times of which we have to speak, the Gangetic valley, almost alone in the whole peninsula, comprised within itself all centres of Aryan state-government and culture. The great natural divisions of this territory, which coincide with stages in the distribution of the Indian family-stock, and with stages in the extension of old-Indian culture, correspond also to stages in the course of development which this religious movement has taken.

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At the outset we are carried into the north-west half of the Gangetic valley, to those territories where the Gangetic tracts and the Indus tracts approach each other, and to those through which the two twin streams of the Ganges and Yamunâ flow as they converge to their conjunction. Here, and for a long period here alone, lay the true settlements of Brahmanical culture; here first, centuries before the time of Buddha, in the circles of Brahman thinkers, at the place of sacrifice and in the solitudes of forest life, those thoughts were thought and uttered, in which the transition from the old Vedic religion of nature to the doctrine of deliverance began and ultimately found development.

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The culture fostered in the north-west, and with it these thoughts, following the course of the Ganges, flowed on to the south-east through those powerful veins in which from of old beat most strongly the life of India. Among new peoples they assumed new forms, and when Buddha himself at last appeared, the two greatest kingdoms in the south-eastern half of the Gangetic valley, the lands of Kosala (Oude) and Magadha (Bihar), became the chief scenes of his teaching and labours. Thus there lie broad strips of land between the tracts in which, long before Buddha, Buddhism began its preparatory course of development, and those in which Buddha himself gathered round him his first believers; and this change of scenery and actors has had, it could not have been otherwise, an appreciable effect in more than one respect on the course of the play.

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We next take a glance at the tribes, which successively meet us, some as the originators and others as the promoters of this religious movement.

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The Aryan population of India came into the peninsula, as is well known, from the north-west. This immigration lay already in the remote past at the time to which the oldest monuments which we have of religious poetry belong. The Indians had as completely lost the memory of this as the corresponding events had been forgotten by the Greeks and Italians. Fair Aryans pressed on and broke down the strongholds of the aboriginal inhabitants, the "black-skinned," the "lawless," and "godless." The enemy was driven back, annihilated, or subjugated. When the songs of the Veda were sung, Aryan clans, though perhaps only as adventurous, solitary pioneers, had already pressed on to where the Indus in the west, and possibly also to where the Ganges in the east, empty their mighty waters into the sea; inexhaustibly rich regions in which the flocks of the Aryans grazed and the Aryan deities were honoured with prayer and sacrifice.

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Probably the first immigrants, and, therefore, the farthest forward to the east, whether confederate or disassociated we know not, are those tribes which meet us later on east of the junction of the Ganges and Yamunâ, settled on both banks of the Ganges, the Anga and Magadha, the Videha, the Kâçi and Kosala.

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A second wave of the great tide of immigration brought with it new groups of Aryans, a number of tribes closely interconnected, who, surpassing their brothers intellectually, have produced the most ancient great monuments of the Indian mind which we possess, and which we call by the name of the Vedas. We find these tribes at the time of which the hymns of the Rig Veda give us a picture, near the entrances of the Indian peninsula, at the Indus and in the Panjáb; later on they are driven to the south-east and have founded on the upper stream of the Ganges and on the Yamunâ those kingdoms, which are called in “Manu’s Institutes” the land of the “Brahmarshis,” the home and the type of holy, upright living: “By a Brahman who has been born in this land,” says the Law (Manu), “shall all men on earth be instructed as to their conduct.” The names of the Bharata tribe, Kuru, Pancâla, stand out among the peoples of this classic land of Vedic culture, which lies before our gaze in clear illumination as a land rich in advanced intellectual creation, while the destinies of the other tribes, who had immigrated at an earlier date, remained in darkness until the period when they came into contact with the culture of their brother tribes.*

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In a Vedic work, the “Brahmana of the hundred paths,” we have a remarkable legend, in which is clearly depicted the course which the extension of the cult and culture of the Veda took. The flaming god Agni Vaiçvânara, the sacrificial fire, wanders eastward from the river Sarasvatî, beyond the old sacred home-land of the Vedic Sacra. Rivers cross his path, but Agni burns on across all streams, and after him follow the prince Mâthava and the Brahman Gotama. Thus they came to the river Sadânîrâ, which flows down from the snowy mountains in the north: Agni does not cross it. “Brahmans crossed it not in former ages for Agni Vaiçvânara had not burned beyond it. But now many Brahmans dwelt beyond it to the east. This was formerly very bad land, inundated soil, for Agni Vaiçvânara had not made it habitable. But now it is very good land, for Brahmans have since made it enjoyable through offerings;"—in India bad land is not converted into good, as in the rest of the world, by peasants who plough and dig, but by sacrificing Brahmans. Prince Mâthava takes up his abode to the east of the Sadânîrâ, in the bad land, which Agni had not essayed to enter. His descendants are the rulers of Videha. The opposition is clear in which these legends place the eastern tribes to the western, among whom Agni Vaiçvânara, the ideal champion of Vedic life, is from of old at home. Whoever pursues an inquiry into the beginning of the extension of Buddhism, must remember that the home of the oldest Buddhist communities lies in the tracts or near the limits of those tracts, into which Agni Vaiçvânara did not cross in his flaming course when he travelled to the east.

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∗ Further proofs in support of the view here taken of the separation of the western Vedic and the eastern non-Vedic tribes, are advanced at the close of this work in Excursus I.

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We are unable to fix any graduated series of dates, either by years or by centuries, indicating the progress of this victorious campaign, in which Aryans and Vedic culture overran the Gangetic valley. But, what is more important, we are able from the layers of Vedic literature which overlie each other, to gather some idea of how, under the influences of a new home, of Indian nature and Indian climate, a change came over the life of the people—first and foremost of the Vedic peoples, the tribes of the north-west—and how the popular mind received that morbid impression of sorrow and disease, which has survived all changes of fortune, and which will last as long as there is an Indian people.

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In the sultry, moist, tropical lands of the Ganges, highly endowed by nature with rich gifts, the people who were in the prime of youthful vigour when they penetrated hither from the north, soon ceased to be young and strong. Men and peoples come rapidly to maturity in that land, like the plants of the tropical world, only just as rapidly to fall asleep both bodily and spiritually. The sea with its invigorating breeze, and the school of noble national energy, play no part in the life of the Indians. The Indian has above all, at an early stage, turned aside from that which chiefly preserves a people young and healthy, from the battle and struggle for home, country, and law. The thought of freedom with all the quickening, and, it is true, also with all the deadly powers which it brings in its train, has always been unknown and incomprehensible in India. The free will of man may not chafe against the system of Brahma, the natural law of caste, which has given the people into the power of the king and the king into the power of the priest. Well might it awaken the astonishment of the Greek to see in India the peasant calmly go forth between opposing armies to till his fields:* “He is sacred and inviolable for he is the common benefactor of friend and foe.” But in what the Greeks mention as a beautiful and sensible feature in Indian national life, there lies something more than mere soft mildness. When Hannibal came, the Roman peasant ceased to sow his fields. The Indians are wholly strangers to the highest interests and ideals which are at the basis of all healthy national life. Will and action are overgrown by thought. But when once the internal balance is disarranged and the natural relationship between the spirit and the reality of the world is disturbed, thought has no longer the power to take a wholesome grasp of what is wholesome. Whatever is, appears to the Indian worthless compared to the marginal illuminations with which his fancy surrounds it, and the images of his fancy grow in tropical luxuriance, shapeless and distorted, and turn eventually with terrific power against their creator. To him the true world, hidden by the images of his own dreams, remains an unknown, which he is unable to trust and over which he has no control: life and happiness in this world break down under the burden of excessively crushing contemplation of the hereafter.

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∗ This fact mentioned by Megasthenes is also confirmed by modern writers, cf. Irving, “Theory and Practice of Caste,” p. 75.

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The visible manifestation of the world to come in the midst of the present world is the caste of the Brahmans, who have knowledge and power, who can open and shut to man the approach to the gods, and make friends or enemies for him above. Those powers, which were excluded from development in political life, could find in the case of the Brahmans alone a sphere for creation, but verily for what a creation! Instead of a Lykurgus or a Themistokles, whom fate peremptorily denied to the Indians, they have had all the more Arunis and Yâjnavalkyas, who knew how to found with masterly hand the mysteries of fire-offering and soma-offering, and to give currency in not less masterly fashion to those claims which are advanced against the secular classes by the champions of the kingdom which is not of this world.

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No one can understand the course which Indian thought has taken, without keeping in view the picture, with its lights and shadows, of this order of philosophers, as the Greeks named the Brahmanical caste. And above all it must be remembered that, at that time at least, which has shaped the determinative fundamental thoughts for the intellectual efforts of a subsequent age and for Buddhism also, this priestly class was something more than a vain and greedy priestcraft, that it was the necessary form in which the innermost essence, the evil genius, if we may so call it, of the Indian people has embodied itself.

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The days of the Brahman passed in solemn routine. At every step those narrow, restraining limits held him in, which the holy dignity that he represented imposed on the inner and outer man. He passed his youth in hearing and learning the sacred word, for a true Brahman is he alone “who has heard.” And if he acquired the reputation “of having heard,” his adult life passed in teaching, in the village or out in the solitude of the forest in the consecrated circle, on which the sun shone in the east, where alone the most secret instruction could be imparted openly to the muffled scholar. Or he was be found at the place of sacrifice, performing for himself and for others the sacred office, which, with its countless observances, demanded the most painful minuteness and the most laborious proficiency, or he fulfilled the life-long duty of Brahma-offering, that is, the daily prayer from the sacred Veda. Well might riches flow into his hands by the remuneration for sacrifice, which kings and nobles gave to the Brahmans, but he passed as most worthy, who lived, not by offerings for others, but by the gleanings of the field, which he gathered, or by alms for which he had not asked, or such charity as he had begged as a favour. Still, living even as a beggar, he looked on himself as exalted above earthly potentates and subjects, made of other stuff than they. The Brahmans call themselves gods, and, in treaty with the gods of heaven, these gods of earth know themselves possessed of weapons of the gods, weapons of spiritual power, before which all earthly weapons snap powerless. "The Brahmans," says a Vedic song, "carry sharp arrows: they have darts; the aim, which they take, fails not. They attack their enemy in their holy ardour and their fury, they pierce him through from afar." The king, whom they anoint to rule over their people, is not their king; the priest, at the coronation, when he presents the ruler to his subjects, says: "This is your king, O people; the king over us Brahmans is Soma." They, the Brahmans, standing without the pale of the State, bind themselves together in a great confederacy, which extends as far as the ordinances of the Veda are current. The members of this confederacy are the only teachers of the rising youth. The young Indian of Aryan birth is as good as out-caste, if he be not brought at a proper age to a Brahman teacher, to receive from him the sacred cord, the mark of the spiritual twice-born, and to be inducted into the wisdom of the Vedas. "Into my control," then says the teacher, "I take thy heart, let thy thought follow my thought, with all thy soul rejoice in my word." And through the long years, which the pupil passes in the master's house, he is coerced by his fear and obedience to him. The house of the Brahman is, like the army in the modern State, the great school, which demands of every one a share of the best part of his life, to discharge him eventually with the indelibly implanted consciousness of subordination to the idea embodied, in the one case in the State, in the other case in the Brahman-class.

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In the strength and the weakness of the forms of life of this class of thinkers lies also, as it were in a germ, the strength and weakness of their thought. They were, so to speak, banished into a self-made world, cut off from the refreshing atmosphere of real life, by nothing shaken in their unbounded belief in themselves and in their unique omnipotence, in comparison with which all that gave character to the life of others, must have appeared small and contemptible. And thus, therefore, in their thought also the utmost boldness of world-disclaiming abstraction shows itself, which soars beyond all that is visible into the regions of the spaceless and timeless, to caper in sickly company in baseless chimeras, without limit or aim, in fancies such as can be conceived only by a spirit which has lost all taste for the sober realities of fact. They have created a mode of thought in which the great and profound has joined partnership with childish absurdities so uniquely that the history of the attempts of humanity to comprehend self and the universe affords no parallel. To study this thought in its development is our next task.

Chapter II

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INDIAN PANTHEISM AND PESSIMISM BEFORE BUDDHA.

Symbolism of the Offering—The Absolute

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THE rudiments of Indian speculation extend back to the lyric poetry of the Rig Veda. Here, in the oldest monument of Vedic poetry, among songs at sacrifice and prayers to Agni and Indra for protection, prosperity, and victory, we discover the first bold efforts of a reflecting mind, which turns its back on the spheres of motley worlds of gods and myths, and, in conscious reliance on its own power, approaches the enigmas of being and origination:—

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“Nor Aught nor Naught existed, yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven’s broad roof outstretched above.
What covered all? What sheltered? What concealed?
Was it the water’s fathomless abyss?

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“There was not death—yet was there naught immortal,
There was no confine betwixt day and night;
The only One breathed breathless by itself,
Other than It there nothing since has been.

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“Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound—an ocean without light—
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.

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“Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here, Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang? The gods themselves came later into being— Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?

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“He from whom all this great creation came, Whether His will created or was mute, The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven, He knows it—or perchance even He knows not.”*

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And in another song a poet speaks, who, estranged from the faith in the old deities, seeks after the one God, “who alone is Lord over all that moves:”

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“He who gives breath, He who gives strength; Whose command all the bright gods revere, Whose shadow is immortality, whose shadow is death;— Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

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“He through whose greatness these snowy mountains are, And the sea, they say, with the distant river (the Rasâ)— He of whom these regions are the two arms;— Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

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“He through whom the sky is bright and the earth firm— He through whom the heaven was ’stablished, nay the highest heaven— He who measured out the space in the sky?— Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?

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“He who by His might looked even over the waters Which held power and generated the sacrificial fire, He who alone is God above all gods;— Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?†”

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Each strophe of the lyric ends in these words: “who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice?” The gap is clearly perceptible which lies between inquiring hymns like this and the positive faith of an earlier age, which knew, but inquired not regarding the gods to whom they should make sacrifice.

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∗ Rig Veda, x.

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¹²⁹ Translated by Max Müller. † Ibid., x.

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¹²¹ Translated by Max Müller.

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We can only touch with brief comment this first flash of conscious thought of the Indians regarding the fundamental questions of the universe and life. The development of speculation—or, rather, its self-development out of a world of phantasms—first assumes a connected progressive form at a time which is later—probably much later—than that to which these hymns, quoted from the Rig Veda, belong. It was that period of widely ramified and exuberant literary production which has given birth to the endless mass of sacrificial works and mystic collections of dogmas and discourses, written in prose, which are usually named Brâhmana, Aranyaka, and Upanishad. The age of these works, upon which alone we can rely for this portion of our sketch, we can determine only approximately and within uncertain limits. We shall scarcely be much in error, if we place their origin somewhere between the ninth and seventh centuries before the Christian era. The development of thought, which was progressing in this period, while resting apparently on the basis of the old faith in gods, had really undermined that faith, and, forcing its way through endless voids of fantastic chimeras, had at last created a new ground of religious thought, the belief in the undisturbed, unchangeable universal-Unity, which reposes behind the world of sorrow and impermanence, and to which the delivered, leaving this world, returns. On this very foundation, moreover, centuries after the Brahmanical thinkers had laid it, were the doctrine and the church built, which were named after the name of Buddha.

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We now proceed to trace step by step the process of that self-destruction of the Vedic religious thought, which has produced Buddhism as its positive outcome.

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At the time when this process begins, all spiritual exercises which are performed in India are concentrated round one focus, the sacrifice. The world, which surrounds the Brahmans, is the place of sacrifice; the matters, of which, above all others, he has knowledge, are those relating to sacrificial duties. He must understand the sacrifice with all its secrets, for understanding is all-subduing power. By this power the gods have chained the demons—"mighty," so runs the promise for those who have knowledge, "doth he himself become, and powerless becomes his enemy and controverter, who possesses such knowledge."

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The elements, of which this knowledge of the meaning of the sacred sacrificial rites consists, are twofold; some spring from the spiritual bequests of the past, and others are a newly-acquired possession.

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On the one side, the legacy inherited from the time of the simple belief in Agni and Indra and Varuna, and all the hosts of gods, before whom fathers and ancestors had bowed themselves in prayer and sacrifice. Every hand laid on the offering points to these. When the offerer seizes the sacred implement, he says, "I grasp thee at the call of god Savitar, with the arms of the Açvins, with Pûshan's hands." If the sacrificial object is to be consecrated with sprinkling of water, he says to the waters, "Indra hath chosen you as his associates at the conquest of Vritra; ye have chosen Indra as your associate at the conquest of Vritra." And from early morn until evening there resound at the place of sacrifice praises and songs to Ushas, the redness of dawn, the divine maiden, who, with her glistening steeds, approaches the dwellings of man, dispensing blessings; to Indra, who, fired by the soma-draught, breaks in wild battle the legions of demons with his thunderbolt; to Agni, the benign god, the heavenly guest, who beams in the habitations of men, and bears their sacrificial gifts to heaven.

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But the world of the old gods, the living gods of flesh and blood, can no longer of itself alone satisfy the mind of the later age. Ever stronger becomes the tendency to name by their proper names the powers which govern the wide world and the life of man. There is space; the Indians named it “the regions of the world.” There is time, with its creating and destroying power; the Indians named it “the year.” There are the seasons, the moon, day and night, earth and air, the sun—“he who burns,” and the wind—“he who blows.” There are the breath-powers, which pass through the human body. There are thought and speech, “which are one with each other and yet separate.” The movements and operations of these powers govern the course of the universe, and bring men weal and woe.

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And now men look for an answer, in the new language of their own age, to the question which the sacrifice and the world of gods, to whom sacrifice is made, suggest to the thought. Then the atmosphere assumes a state in which mysteries and symbols increase. In all the surroundings of the Brahman at the altar of sacrifice, and above all in the sacred office which he there performs, the god Agni and the god Savitar will no longer be present alone, but there shall be there all the hidden powers which move to and fro in the universe, “for the universe,” it is said, “is swayed by the movement of sacrifice.” What meets the eye in the offering is not merely it is or appears to be, but there is something further—that which it signifies. Speech and action have a double signification, the apparent and the hidden; and, if human knowledge follows the apparent, yet the gods love the hidden and abhor the apparent.

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Numbers have mysterious power, words and syllables have mysterious power, rhythms have mysterious power. There is an imaginary play between imaginary forces which is subject to no law of perceptibility. Consecration (dîkshâ) escapes from the gods; they search for it through the months; they find it neither with summer nor with winter, but they find it with the months of the cool season (çiçira); therefore man must consecrate himself when the months of the cool season have come round. The metra fly up to heaven to bring the soma-draught; the voice speaks standing in the seasons.

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The system of offering is a type of the year, or, briefly, the sacrifice is the year; the officiating priests are the seasons of the year; the objects offered up are the months. We should import something foreign into these plays of thought if we attempted to trace in them any sharply-defined line of demarcation between the being and the signifying, between the reality and its representative; the one overlaps the other. "Prajâpati (the Creator) created as his image that which is the offering. Therefore people say the offering is Prajâpati. For he created it as his image."

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Morning after morning, and evening after evening, two offerings are placed in the sacred fire; the one is the past, the other the future; the one is to-day, the other the morrow. To-day is certain; therefore, the first of both offerings will be made with an utterance of sacrificial formula, for speech is certainty. The morrow is uncertain; therefore, the second offering will be made in silence, for silence, as the Indian says, is the uncertain.

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In the confused cloud-world of these mysteries, there lurk, concealed from the eye of the ignorant, countless enemies of the destinies of the children of men; days and nights roll on, and bear away with them the blessings which the good deeds of men had won for them; above the realm of changing days and nights the sun, "who shines," is enthroned; and "he who burns is death. Since he is death, therefore the creatures who dwell below him die; those who live beyond him are the gods; therefore are the gods immortal. His rays are the traces, wherewith all these creatures are yoked to life. Whosoever life he wishes, he draws to himself and he departs—he dies." But the wise man knows formulas and offerings, which exalt him above the region of rolling days and nights, and above the world, in which the sun, with his heat, has power over life and death. Day and night rob not him of the reward of his works; he sets his life free from death—"that is the deliverance from death, which is in the Agnihotra offering."

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The world thus darkens down for the fancy of this race to a dismal arena for the movement of unlimited lifeless shapes. Symbols are heaped unceasingly on symbols; wherever thought turns, new gods and new miraculous powers confront it, each as formless as the rest. That God, it is true, who was before all gods and all existences, the creator of worlds, Prajâpati, who was alone in the beginning and desired "might I become a plurality, might I produce creatures," stands out above all; and in the hot work of toilsome creation he gave forth from himself the worlds, and gods and men, and space and time, and thought and speech. But even the thought of Prajâpati, the lord of beings, evoked no louder response from the breast of the believer; the image of the Creator floats hazily among others in the great, gray, shapeless mist, which surrounds the world of creatures.

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Wherever we look in the vast mass of monuments, which the strange activity of that age has bequeathed to us, there is nowhere to be seen an operation of the inquiring mind, proceeding from the depths, nowhere that effort of bold thought, which plays for a heavy stake and wins. That imbecile wisdom which knows all things and declares all things, sits enthroned in self-content in the middle of its absurd images, and not even quakes before the spectral hosts which it has conjured up; wherefore should the wise tremble, who knows the word before which spirits and demons bow? One generation after another grows up under the ban of confused thoughts, and one after another unwearied adds its quota to the contributions of departed races, and then it also passes away.

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Our eyes must accustom themselves, until they have learned to see in the dim light of this shadow-land, in which the fanciful images of those ages move, crowding formlessly together. But then even here there reveals itself a kind of natural law operating in the region of the spiritual. Let us first on our part trace what is preserved to us in the oldest monuments of those speculations, and then the work of later generations successively, and thus as we mount up layer by layer, the picture which we see changes, and the changes have connection and meaning.

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The more important of these conceptions of the fancy gradually emerge from the confused mass, press into the foreground, trample down the weak, and step triumphantly into the centre of every circle. The powers and symbols, on whose working the Indian thinker fancies the system of the universe to rest, are what they are, not in and by themselves alone, but the farther thought goes, the more clearly do they appear to rest on great fundamental forces, from which their existence is principally derived, or in which they are again merged, when the goal of their being is reached. From the surface, where each phenomenon presents itself as something different from every other, the speculative imagination strives to pierce into the depths below, in which lies the unifying bond of all diversity. Man looks for the essence in things, and the essence of the essence,* for the reality, the truth of phenomena, and the truth of the true. This quest of the substance is necessarily a search for unity in all diversity. And thus thought lays hold separately upon one single group of phenomena, connected by a common feature, and regards them as united in a common root, and ere long thought passes all bounds and boldly declares, so and so is the universe. And then it lets go what it laid hold of; that one phenomenon which had just now been declared to be the universe is lost again in the floating crowd of all the powers, which hold sway in man and the world, in space and time, in word and speech.

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In none of the Vedic texts can we trace the genesis of the

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∗ Cf. "Chândogya Upanishad," i. 1, 2:—"The essence of all beings is the earth, the essence of the earth water, the essence of water the plants, the essence of plants man, the essence of man speech, the essence of speech the Rig Veda, the essence of the Rig Veda the Sâma Veda, the essence of the Sâma Veda the Udgîtha (which is Om). That Udgîtha (Om) is the best of all essences, the highest, deserving the highest place, the eighth."

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The conception which lies at the bottom of this eight-fold series of essence, essence of the essence, and so on, is (in the words of Max Müller) something like this:—"Earth is the support of all beings, water pervades the earth, plants arise from water, man lives by plants, speech is the best part of man, the Rig Veda the best part of speech, the Sâma Veda the best extract from the *Rik*, Udgîtha, or the syllable Om, the crown of the Sâma Veda."

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Later on, where the idea of the Brahma will claim our attention, we shall have to speak of the symbolical relation or of the hidden intrinsic identity, which the Indian fancy detects between nature and the world of language, especially the sacred word. This passage has an important bearing on this, inasmuch as it shows how, in the mind of the Indian, the objects of nature point back through a series of middle terms, to the word of the Veda, and finally to the Om, the most suitable expression of the Brahma, as it were to the life-giving power in them.

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conception of the unity in all that is, from the first dim indications of this thought until it attains a steady brilliancy, as clearly as in that work, which, next to the hymns of the Rig Veda, deserves to be regarded as the most significant in the whole range of Vedic literature, the “Brâhmana of the hundred paths.”

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The “Brâhmana of the hundred paths” shows us first and foremost how from these confused masses of ideas the notion of the “ego” presses to the front of all others, and will domineer over them, in the language of the Indians: the Âtman, the subject, in which the forces and functions of human life find root and footing. The breath-powers penetrate the human body and give it life; the Âtman is lord over all breath-powers; he is the central power, which works and creates in the basis of personal life, the “innominate breath-power,” from which the other “nominate” breath-powers derive their being. “A decade of breaths truly,” so says the Brâhmana, “dwells in man; the Âtman is the eleventh, on him are dependent the breath-powers.” “From the Âtman come all these members (of the human body) into being,” “of all that is, the Âtman is the first.”

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A central point is here found for the domain of human personality, with its limbs and its faculties, that power which is the intrinsic and essential, working in all forms of life. And what the Indian thinker has conceived in the particular “ego” extends in his idea, by inevitable necessity, to the universe at large beyond him; according to him microcosm and macrocosm continuously play corresponding parts, and here and yonder similar appearances point significantly to each other. As the human eye resembles the cosmic eye, the sun, and as the gods, resembling in the general system the human breath-powers, act as the breath-powers of the universe, so also the Âtman, the central substance of the “ego,” steps forth on the domain of the bare human individual, and is taken as the creating power that moves the great body of the universe. He, the lord of the breath-powers, the firstling, from whom the limbs of the body were formed, is at the same time the lord of the gods, the creator of creatures, who has caused the worlds to proceed from his "ego;" the Âtman is Prajâpati. Yea, the very expression occurs, "the Âtman is the universe." At this stage this phrase is only one play of the fancy among a thousand others, not the thought grasped in its fulness, that the boundless universe and the restricted "ego," which contemplates it, are in truth one. A crowd of other figures pushes to the front and diverts the attention from the Âtman, who is the universe; but the expression once uttered, though it die away, works on in secret and awaits the time when he who once uttered it, will turn his thoughts back to it.

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Meanwhile from another train of conceptions another power not less potent pushes itself forward, with a claim to be recognized as the great cosmic energy. The sacred word, the established guide in sacrifice, is preserved in its three forms of hymn, formula, and song,* making up the "threefold knowledge" of those who knew the Vedas. The spiritual fluid, which bears the sacred word and its supporters, the Brahmans, floating above the profane word and the profane world, is the Brahma :† it is the power which dwells in hymn, formula, and song, as the power of holiness; "the truth of the word is the Brahma."

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∗ That is Ric (hymn of the Rig Veda), Yajus (sacrificial formula of the Yajur Veda), Sâman (songs contained in the Sâma Veda).—Translator.

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† It will not be superfluous to bear in mind that the times, of which we are speaking, know nothing of the god Brahman. While "brahman," "brâhmana" occur frequently enough in the oldest texts in the signification of "Priest," the god Brahman appears first only in the very latest parts of the Veda.

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The world of the word is to the Indian another microcosm. In the rhythm of the sacred song he hears the echoes of the rhythm of the universe resound.* Thus must that substance from which the sacred word derives its being, also be a power which operates at the basis of all things. The fanciful subtleties, regarding the enigma of the Brahma reposing in the

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* Of the countless passages which could be quoted in illustration of this, let us merely refer to one, to the working out by the theologians of the Sâma Veda of the idea of the symbolic relation of the Sâman-(song-) diction with its five parts (“ Chândogya Upanishad,” ii. 2, etc.). “Let a man meditate on the fivefold Sâman as the five worlds. The hinkâra is the earth, the prastâva the fire, the udgîtha the sky, the pratihâra the sun, the nidhana heaven.—Let a man meditate on the fivefold Sâman as rain. The hinkâra is wind (that brings the rain); the prastâva is ‘the cloud is come;’ the udgîtha is ‘it rains;’ the pratihâra, ‘it flashes, it thunders;’ the nidhana ‘it stops.’ There is rain for him and he brings rain for others, who, thus knowing, meditates on the fivefold Sâman as rain.”

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And then it goes on through a series of other comparisons; the Sâman with its five parts represents the waters, the seasons, the animals, and more of the like. Often these symbolizings rest upon nothing more than the most meaningless superficialities, as when the matter treated of is the three syllables of the word udgîtha (sacred song), “ut (ud) is breath, for by means of breath a man rises (ut-tishthati); gî is speech, for speeches are called giraḥ; tha is food, for by means of food all subsist (sthita).” [“ Chând. Up.,” i. 3, 6. To this passage Max Müller furnishes from Irish sources interesting parallels in the fanciful conceits of the Christians of the Middle Ages.] However senseless such fancies may appear to us, they cannot be overlooked as precursors of the most important event in the religious development of India. In the symbolical interpretation or mystical identification, which the individual word or the individual sacred song furnishes, of the individual phenomenon in the life of nature or of the ego, the ultimate tendency of this development is being shaped: the identification of the central power in the whole range of the sacred word (Brahma), with the central power of the human person (Âtman), and with the life-centre of nature: the genesis of the idea of the universal One.

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Vedic text, and the priestly pride of the human supporters of the Brahma, combine to elevate this entity to a dominant position in the Indian’s world of thought. “He makes,” it is said of the priest who completes a specific sacrificial operation, “the Brahma the head of this universe; therefore the Brahman is the head of this universe.” There was an ancient Vedic ode which began: “On truth is the earth founded, on the sun is the heaven founded. By the right do the Adityas (the supreme gods, the sons of the Aditi, the infinite) consist.” Now it is said “the Brahma is the word, the truth in the word is the Brahma.” “The Brahma is the right.” “By the Brahma are the heavens and the earth held together.”

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