Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3: Pessimism, Metempsychosis, Deliverance

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3

Language: English

Pessimism, Metempsychosis, Deliverance

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This is the place in which to speak of the inferences which the speculation of the Indians drew from the doctrine of the universal One side by side with and in the world of plurality, bearing on the estimate of the value of the world, life and death, and the ethical questions so closely connected therewith.

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We stand here at the birthplace of Indian pessimism.

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When thought, liberal to itself, had laden the idea of the Âtman with all attributes of every perfection, of absolute unity, of unlimited fulness, the world of plurality, measured by the standard of the everlasting One, must have necessarily appeared a state of disruption, restriction and pain. The unconstrained feeling of being at home in this world is destroyed at one stroke, as soon as thought has weighed it against its ideal of the supreme One, and found it wanting, and thus the glorification of the Âtman becomes involuntarily an ever increasingly bitter criticism of this world. If the Âtman be commended "who is far above hunger and thirst, above sorrow and confusion, above old age and death," who is there who does not detect in such words a reflection, though it be not openly expressed, on the world of the creature, in which hunger and thirst, sorrow and confusion are at home, and in which men grow old and die? "The unseen seer," thus Yâjnavalkya speaks to Uddâlaka, "the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower; there is no other seer, no other hearer, no other thinker, no other knower. That is thy Âtman, the mover within, the immortal; whatever is besides him, is full of sorrow.”—And it is said on another occasion: “as the sun, the eye of the universe, remains far off and unaffected by all sickness that meets the (human) eye, so also the One, the Âtman, who dwells in all creatures, dwells afar and untouched by the sorrows of the world.” Here occurs for the first time the expression “Sorrow of the world.” That the One, the happy Âtman, has chosen to manifest himself in the world of plurality, of becoming and decease, was a misfortune: this is not openly stated, for men are shy of a thought, which would trace to the happy One Being the roots of the sorrow of earth or even any fault, but they cannot have been very far from this thought when they proposed to man as the highest aim of his effort, the undoing in his case of this manifestation, and the finding for himself a return from the plurality to the One.

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The place which Indian speculation allots to man, in and between the two worlds of the happy Âtman and the sorrowful state of the present life, is intimately connected with the conceptions of metempsychosis, the first traces of which appear in the Vedic texts not long before the doctrine of the everlasting One comes to the surface.

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The thought that new wanderings, new repetitions of death and re-birth await the soul after death, are wholly foreign to the ancient times in which the hymns of the Rig Veda are sung. Men can talk of the habitations of the happy, where in Yama’s kingdom those who have trodden the dark way of death enjoy everlasting pleasures—

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“Where joy and pleasure and gladness
And rapture dwell, where the wish
Of the wisher finds fulfilment”—

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and men speak also of the deep places of darkness, and of the horrors which await the evil-doer in the world to come. But men have no other thought but the one, that on the entry into the world of the blessed, or into the world of everlasting darkness, destiny is for ever fixed.

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We have shown how the age which followed the period of the Rig Veda created a new scheme of the universe. On all sides men descried gloomy formless powers, either openly displayed or veiled in mysterious symbols, contending with each other, and, like harassing enemies, preparing contretemps for human destiny. The tyranny of death also is enhanced in the estimation of the dismal mystic of this age; the power of death over men is not spent with the one blow which he inflicts. It soon comes to be averred that his power over him, who is not wise enough to save himself by the use of the right words and the right offerings, extends even into the world beyond, and death cuts short his life yonder again and again; we soon meet the conception of a multiplicity of death-powers, of whom some pursue men in the worlds on this side, and others in the worlds beyond. "Whoever passes into that world without having made himself free from death, will become in that world again and again the prey of death, in the same way that death shows no respect in this world and kills him when he wills." And in another place, "Through all worlds truly death's powers have dominion; if he offered to these no libations, death would pursue him from world to world—if he offers libations to the powers of death, he repels death through world after world."*

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∗ We must refrain from asking the question, whether the influences of the belief of non-Aryan peoples in India have had any share in the origin of this idea of new existences and recurrences of the fate of death. This idea is quite capable of explanation, if we regard it as the outcome of the progressive course which the thought or imagination of the Brahmans has taken, entirely independent of the co-operation of extraneous impulses, the existence of which is as incapable of proof as of disproof.

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In the texts of the times, in which these plays of a cheerless fancy first appear, there is little said of the idea of re-birth, or, as it first meets us in characteristic form, of that of re-dying. And yet the influence, which these ideas must have had on the aspirations of religious life, cannot have been small. The spirit can bear the thought of a decision of its destiny once for all, determined for all eternity; but the endless migration from world to world, from existence to existence, the endlessness of the struggle against the pallid power of that ever-recurring destruction—a thought like this might well fill the heart even of the brave with a shudder at the resultlessness of all this unending course of things. When other associations directed the thought to the opposition of a happy world of unity, of rest, to a second world of plurality, of change, the appalling prospect of re-birth—that is, of re-death—will have had no small share in causing men to paint the domain of plurality in those dark colours, as unhappy and desolated by sorrow.

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But a thought such as that of more and still more deaths, which await the mortal in future forms of being, cannot be entertained without evoking its complement—or, we should rather say, perhaps, its neutralizer—the thought of the deliverance from death: without this the end would be despair. From the beginning, therefore, the idea of metempsychosis was not so conceived, as though there were in it an unavoidable fatality, to which every human life is subject without hope of escape. At the same time, with the belief in the transmigration of the soul, and as its necessary complement, the conception is formed that from the limitless change of birth and death a way out stands open; the thought and the word “deliverance” are now ready to step into the foreground of religious life.

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The phases, both of style and matter, through which Brahmanical thought passes at this time, in rapid succession, are reflected successively in the way in which the thought of deliverance is embodied.

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So long as the way out of that confused maze of grotesque and formless symbolical conceptions to the idea of the Âtman, the universal One, had not been found, the notions of deliverance also bear the same stamp of an arbitrary fantastic externality, which is characteristic of the spiritual creations of that age. The offering, the great fundamental power, and the fundamental symbol of all being and of all procession of being, is also the power by which man bursts the bands of death; and next to the offering itself, the sacred knowledge of the sacrificial rites has the power to set free. Above all, the daily offering to the two luminaries of the day and the night: the morning offering to the sun, and the evening offering to Agni, the sun of the night, both accompanied by a silently-performed offering to Prajâpati, the lord of the created. In the sun dwells death; the sun’s rays are the cords by which death has power to draw man’s life-breath to himself. “If in the evening, after sunset, he makes the two offerings, he takes his stand with the two fore-quarters (of his being) in that death’s power (i.e., in the sun); if in the morning, before sunrise, he makes the two offerings, he takes his stand with the two hind-quarters (of his being) in that death’s power. When he rises, then, he bears him with him as he rises; thus he delivers himself from that death. This is the deliverance from death which is inherent in the Agnihotra offering. He delivers himself from the recurrence of death who thus understands this deliverance from death in the Agnihotra.” And in another place, “Those who have this knowledge, and perform this offering, will after death be born again; they will be born again to die no more. But those who have not this knowledge, or do not perform this offering, will after death be born again, and will become the prey of death anew, over and over again for ever.”

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These are the earliest appearances of the belief in the transmigration of souls and the deliverance from death, dressed in fanciful miraculous shapes. When these thoughts came to the front, events were in process which were to give a new aspect to the Brahmanical world of ideas; at that very time speculation directed itself to detect in the Âtman, or the Brahma, the everlasting, imperishable Being, the source of every state of existence, the unity resting at the back of all plurality. As soon as this step was taken, a ground was gained on which those thoughts of death and deliverance could be planted out, and from which they could derive new intrinsic value. The different elements of speculation of themselves here fitted together into a whole which left no joinings to be seen. On the one side a dualism—the everlasting Brahma, the ground of all being, the true nature also of the human spirit (Brahma =Âtman), and opposed to him the world of becoming and of decease, of sorrow and of death. On the other side a similar opposition—the undelivered soul, which death holds in his bonds, and ever anew hurries from one state of being into another, and the delivered soul, which has overcome death, and attained the goal of wayfarers. The result of the union of the two trains of thought could only be this: the wandering of the soul through the domains of death is the fruit of its non-union with the Brahma: the deliverance is the attained unity of the soul with its true mode of being, the Brahma. Unity there is not, as long as the human soul conducts itself in thought and will as a citizen of the world of plurality; so long does it remain subject to the law which operates in this world, the law of origination and decease, of birth and death.

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But where the look and longing fixed on plurality have been vanquished, the soul, freed from the dominion of death, returns to the home of all life, to the Brahma. “As a weaver,” says the Brâhmana of the hundred paths, “takes away a piece of a many-coloured cloth and weaves another, new, more beautiful pattern, so also the spirit (in death) shuffles off this body, and allows consciousness to be extinguished, and takes upon itself another, new form, of Manes or Gandharvas, of Brahma’s or Prajâpati’s nature, of divine or human or other manner of being. . . . . As he acted and as he walked, so he becomes: he who does good becomes a good being, he who does bad a bad; he becomes pure by pure action, evil by evil action. . . . . So with him who is in the net of desire. But he who desires not? He who is without desire, who is free from desire, who desires the Âtman only, who has attained his desire, from his body the breath-powers do not escape (into another body), but here draw themselves together; he is the Brahma, and he goes to the Brahma. The following couplet speaks of this:—

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‘When he has set himself free from every desire of his heart,
The mortal enters immortal into the Brahma here below.’”

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Desire (kâma) and action (karman) are here named as the powers which hold the spirit bound within the limits of impermanence. Both are essentially the same. “Man’s nature,” it is said in the same treatise which we have taken the passage quoted, “depends on desire. As his desire, so is his aspiration; as his aspiration, so is the course of action (karman) which he pursues; whatever be the course of action he pursues, he passes to a corresponding state of being.”

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The form in which the idea of a moral retribution here appears, and in which, through long ages, it has constituted a fundamental principle of religious thought, with Buddhists as well as with Brahmans, is the doctrine of the *karman* (action) as the power which pre-determines the course of the migration of the soul from one state of being to another. Our sources of information show us that this new doctrine did not at first meet with general acceptance among the circles of philosophizing Brahmans; whoever knows it, has the feeling of possessing in it a mysterious secret, of which one should speak only covertly and in private. So in the great debate, of which the Brâhmana of the hundred paths gives an account, among the opponents who seek to trip up the wise Yâjnavalkya with their questions, Jâratkârava Artabhâga comes forward. He puts a question: "Yâjnavalkya, when man dies, his voice goes into the fire, his breath into the wind, his eye to the sun, his thought to the moon, his ear to the quarters of heaven, his body to earth, his personality to the æther, his hairs to the plants, the hair of his head to the trees; his blood and his semen find a place in the waters. But where, then, remains the man himself?" "Give me thy hand, my friend," is the answer. "Artabhâga! we two alone must be privy to this; not a word on that subject where people are listening." "And they two went out and conversed together. What they then said, they said regarding action (karman); and what they then propounded, they propounded regarding action: by pure action man becomes pure (fortunate), by evil action evil (unfortunate)."

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But no action can lead into the world of deliverance and happiness. Even good action is something which remains confined to the sphere of the impermanent; it receives its reward, but the reward of the impermanent can only be an impermanent one. The everlasting Âtman is highly exalted alike above reward and effort, above holiness and unholiness. "He, the immortal, is beyond both, beyond good and evil;

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what is done and what is left undone, cause him no pain; his domain is affected by no action.” Thus, action and the being delivered are two things, quite separate from each other; the dualism of impermanence and permanence, which influences all thought in this age, here imposes from the first on the idea of deliverance, and on the ethical postulates which flow from it, this negative character: morality is not a form of active participation in the world, but a complete severance of self from the world.

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The felicity of the perfection which has divested itself of all action and dealing, good and evil, has its prefiguration and illustration in the state of the deepest sleep, when the world, which surrounds the mind in its waking hours, has vanished from its view, and not even a dream is seen; when it sleeps “like a child, or like a great sage, when he, wrapt in sleep, feels no desire and sees no vision, that is the condition in which he desires only the Âtman, when he has attained his desire, when he is without desire.”

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The succeeding age turned, with a special predilection, to the description of conditions of the deepest self-contained abstraction, in which perception and feeling, space and all objectivity, vanished from the mind, and it hangs, as it were, in the middle, between the transient world and the Nirvâna. Disquisitions on these ecstasies of contemplation are among the pet themes of the discourses which the Buddhist Church have put in their master’s mouth. We shall not be wrong if we here recognize the preliminary traces of these ideas. When man seeks for an earthly prefiguration of the return to the universal One, he must, before he lights upon those sickly conditions of semi- or complete unconsciousness, picture to himself the rest of deep, dreamless sleep as the most natural and readiest image.

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Up to this point we have found the opposition of the delivered and undelivered associated with the opposition of desire and non-desire. The same thought is often expressed, with a slight alteration of such a turn that, instead of desire, knowledge and absence of knowledge are set up as the determinators of the ultimate destiny of the soul: the knowledge, on the one hand, of the unity, to which the individual ego and all beings draw together in Brahma; and, on the other hand, the being absorbed in the contemplation of the finite as a plurality. "Where all beings have become one's self, for the knowing how can there be delusion—how can there be pain for him who has his eye on the unity?" "He who has discovered and understood (pratibuddha) the Âtman dwelling in the darkness of this corporeity, he is all-creating, for he is the creator of the universe: his is the world, he is himself the world. They who know the breath of the breath, and the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the food of food, the thought of thought, they have comprehended the Brahma, the ancient, the supreme, attainable by thought alone; there is not in it any diversity. He attains the death of death who here detects any diversity; thought alone can behold it, this Imperishable, Everlasting."

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If then deliverance be based at one time on the conquest of all desire, and at another on the knowledge of the Brahma, both may be regarded merely as the expression of one and the same thought. "If a man knows the Âtman:[*] 'that am I myself'—wishing what, for the sake of what desire, should he cling to the bodily state?" The main thing is knowledge; if it be obtained, all desire vanishes of itself. In other words, the deepest root of the clinging to the impermanent, is the absence of knowledge.

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[*] These words also mean: "If a man knows himself."

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Here we stand wholly in those very ranges of thought with which Buddha’s teaching dealt. The question, which has suggested the Buddhist views on deliverance, is here already put exactly in the same form as afterwards, and the same two-fold answer is given to this question. What keeps the soul bound in the cycle of birth, death, and re-birth? Buddhism answers: desire and ignorance. Of the two, the greater evil is ignorance, the first link in the long chain of causes and effects, in which the sorrow-working destiny of the world is fulfilled. Is knowledge attained, then is all suffering at an end. Under the tree of knowledge, Buddha, when he has obtained the knowledge that gives deliverance, utters these words:

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When the conditions (of existence) reveal themselves
To the ardent, contemplating Brahman,
To earth he casts the tempter’s hosts,
Like the sun, diffusing light through the air.

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Here Brahmanical speculation anticipates Buddhism in diction as well as in thought. Language even now begins to make use of those phrases, which have received at a later time from the lips of Buddha’s followers, their established currency as an expression of the tenets of the Buddhist faith. When he who has come to know the Âtman, is mentioned in the “Brâhmana of the hundred paths,” as delivered, the word then used for “knowing” is that word (pratibuddha) which also signifies “awaking,” the word which the Buddhists are accustomed to use, when they describe how Buddha has in a solemn hour under the Açvattha tree gained the knowledge of the delivering truth, or is awake to the delivering truth: the same word from which also the name “Buddha,” i.e., “the knowing,” “the awake,” is derived.

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Of all the texts in which the Brahmanical speculations as to the delivering power of knowledge are contained, perhaps not even one was known except by hearsay to the founder of the Buddhist community of believers. But, for all that, it is certain that Buddhism has acquired as an inheritance from Brahmanism, not merely a series of its most important dogmas, but, what is not less significant to the historian, the bent of its religious thought and feeling, which is more easily comprehended than expressed in words.

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If in Buddhism the proud attempt be made to conceive a deliverance in which man himself delivers himself, to create a faith without a god, it is Brahmanical speculation which has prepared the way for this thought. It has thrust back the idea of a god step by step; the forms of the old gods have faded away, and besides the Brahma, which is enthroned in its everlasting quietude, highly exalted above the destinies of the human world, there is left remaining, as the sole really active person in the great work of deliverance, man himself, who possesses inherent in himself the power to turn aside from this world, this hopeless state of sorrow.

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Every people makes for itself gods after its own ideal, and is not less made what it actually is by the reflex influence of what its gods are. A people with a history make themselves gods who shall show their power in their history, who shall fight their battles with them, and join in the administration of their state. The god of Israel is the Holy One, before whose flaming majesty the heart of man bows in adoration and supplication, and to whom it draws near in prayer as to a father with the confidence of a child; whose wrath causes men to disappear, whose tender mercy worketh good to children, and children's children even unto the thousandth generation. And the god of the Brahmanical thought? The Great One, before whom all human movement is stilled, where all colours pale and all sounds expire. No song of praise, and no petition, no hope, no fear, no love. The gaze of man is unmoved, is turned upon himself and looks into the depths of his own being, expecting his ego to disclose itself to him as the everlasting One, and the thinker, for whom the veil has risen, discovers as an enigma of deep meaning, the mystery of the Unseen Seer, the Unheard Hearer, to find out whom Brahmans leave goods and chattels, wife and child, and move as mendicants, homeless through the world.

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Tradition enables us to gain but a very imperfect idea of how the remaining notions, images, expressions, which passed to Buddhism as an inheritance from Brahmanical speculation, ranged themselves one after another round the central point of the religious thought, with which our sketch has been dealing. If we except the oldest, fundamental texts of the doctrine of the Âtman, from which we have drawn material for our sketch up to the present, we are driven to conjectures of the most uncertain kind, when we ask what works may be received as pre-Buddhist and what not. Internal evidence, on which alone we are thrown in this case, is sufficient in very few instances to render it possible to form even a probable estimate, as to whether what is connected in these texts in thought or form of expression with the Buddhist, belongs to the stages preparatory to the Buddhist phase of thought, or has on its part been influenced by that phase. I might claim a pre-Buddhist origin for the Kâthaka Upanishad, a poem which in the rude grandeur of its composition reflects all the earnestness and all the singularity of that age of self-study. If I am correct in my surmise as to the time of the production of this Upanishad, it contains an important contribution to the history of thought preparatory to Buddhist thought: namely, we here find the Satan of the Buddhist world, Mâra, the Tempter, the demon death-foe of the deliverer, in the form of Mrityu, the God of Death. The identity of the conception is most unmistakably apparent notwithstanding the difference of the clothing, and indeed the Brahmanical poem has preserved that image, which it has in common with the Buddhist legends, in a form assuredly far more original.

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“Uçant, son of Vâjaçravas,” the Upanishad begins, “gave away all that he had.* He had one son, named Naciketas. In this youth faith was awakened, when the offerings† were being carried away. He then reflected:

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“Water-drinking, grass-eating, milked-out (creatures) whose strength is exhausted—
Cheerless are the worlds called, to which he tends, who offers such gifts.”‡

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He said to his father: “Father, to whom wilt thou give me?” And a second and a third time (he asked this). Then his father said: “I give thee to Death.”

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THE SON.

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“Many come after me: many have before me trodden the path of death. The Prince of Death, the god Yama, what need can he have of me?”

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THE FATHER.

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“Look forward, look backward; a like fatality rules here and yonder. The destiny of man resembles the grain, which ripens, falls, and again returns.”

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The poem passes over what now happens: Naciketas descends to the kingdom of Death. Yama, the God of Death, does not see him : so he remains three days unhonoured in the realms of the departed.

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∗ He divided these out to the priests as sacrificial remuneration. † All his father’s gifts, especially cows. ‡ The rewards for earthly gifts, such as those cows, are vain.

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THE SERVANTS OF THE GOD OF DEATH.

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A flaming fire is the Brahman who approaches the house as a guest. Yama presents water to the guest, thus the heat of the fire is allayed.

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“Hope and wish, friendship and every joy,
The fruit of his actions, children and fruitfulness of the flock,
These the Brahman takes away from the foolish man
In whose house he tarries unfed.”

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YAMA (THE GOD OF DEATH).

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“Unfed within my house three nights,
Brâhmana, a worthy guest, hast thou tarried.
Honour to thee, let prosperity attend me;
Three wishes shall be granted thee; choose!”

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Naciketas chooses as the first wish, that his father may receive him without ill will on his return from the realms of the dead; as the second, that the God of Death may teach him the hidden knowledge of the sacrificial fire, by the help of which man wins the heavenly world. Death imparts to him the mystic knowledge of this fire and guarantees that it shall be called among men after his name the Naciketas-fire. Naciketas has now to express his third wish.

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NACIKETAS.

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“Inquiry is made regarding the fate of the dead:
‘They are,’ says one; ‘they are not,’ says another.
This I wish to know, resolve this (doubt) for me.
This is the third wish, which I choose.”

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THE GOD OF DEATH.

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“The gods themselves sought after this long since;
Hard to fathom, dark is this secret.
Choose some other boon, Naciketas,
On this insist not; release me from my promise.”

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NACIKETAS.

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“From the gods themselves is this hidden, thou sayest; Hard to fathom hast thou, O Death, declared it. There is no other who can reveal this to me as thou canst, There is no other wish which I can choose instead of this.”

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THE GOD OF DEATH.

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“Fulness of years, and children’s children, Choose gold, herds, elephants, horses, Choose widely-extended rule upon the earth, Have thy life long as thou desirest. If this appear to thee acceptable instead of that other wish, Then choose wealth, choose long life; Rule broad realms, Naciketas; I give thee the fulness of all pleasures. What mortal men obtain but with difficulty, Choose every pleasure on which thy heart is set. Maidens here, with harps, with carriages, Fairer than men may hope to gain, These give I thee, that they may do thee service; Ask not of death, Naciketas.”

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NACIKETAS.

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“The lapse of days causes, O Lord of Death, The power of the organs of life to fail in the children of men; The whole life swiftly passes away; Song and dance, chariot and horse, thine are they. Riches cannot give contentment to man; What is wealth to us when we have beheld thee? We shall live as long as thou biddest us; Still this wish alone is that which I choose. Tell us of the far-reaching future of the world to come, Whereon, O Death, man meditates in doubt. The wish, which penetrates into hidden depths, That alone it is which Naciketas chooses.”

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The reluctance of the God of Death is overcome, and he grants to the importunate inquirer his request. The two paths of knowledge and ignorance diverge widely from each other.

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Naciketas has chosen knowledge; the fulness of pleasures has not led him astray. They who walk in the path of ignorance, endlessly wander about through the world beyond, like the blind led by the blind. The wise man who knows the One, the Everlasting, the ancient God, who dwells in the depths, has no part in joy and sorrow, becomes free from right and wrong, free from the present, and free from hereafter. That is Yama’s answer to Naciketas’s inquiry.

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A strange picture coming from this great period of old Indian thought and poetry: the Brahman who descends to Hades, and, unmoved by all promises of transient pleasures, wrings from the God of Death the secret of that which lies beyond death.

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We now turn from this Vedic poem to Buddhist legend.

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Through many a long age, he who is destined to the Buddhahood pursues his quest of the knowledge which is to deliver him from death and re-birth. His enemy is Mâra, the Evil One. As the god Mrityu promises Naciketas dominion over extended realms, if he will forego the knowledge of the hereafter, so Mâra offers Buddha the sovereignty of the whole earth, if he will renounce his career of Buddha; as Mrityu offers Naciketas nymphs of more than earthly beauty, so Buddha is tempted by Mâra’s daughters, named Desire, Unrest, and Pleasure. Naciketas and Buddha alike withstand all temptations, and obtain the knowledge which delivers them from the hand of death. The name Mâra* is no other than Mrityu; the God of Death is at the same time the "Prince of this world," the lord of all worldly enjoyment, the foe of knowledge; for pleasure is in Brahmanical, as it is in Buddhist speculation, the chain which binds to the bondage of death, and knowledge is the power which breaks that chain. This aspect of the God of Death, as the tempter to pride and worldly pleasures, steps in the Buddhist legend in the shape of Mâra so prominently into the foreground that the original character of that god thereby almost disappears; the older poem of the Kâthaka-Upanishad preserves clearly the original nature of Mrityu, but it shows us at the same time in it the point from which the conception of the Prince of Death could be transformed into that of the Tempter.

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∗ Both words signify “death,” and are derived from the same root, mar, “to die.” The mode of expression in many places of the Dhammapada makes the identity of Mâra and Mrityu (Pâli maccu) clearly evident. Compare ver. 34, “Mâradheyyam pahâtave,” with ver. 86, “maccudheyyam suduttaram; v. 46: chetyâna Mârassa papupphakâni adassanam maccu-râjassa gacche.” Cf. also ver. 57 with 170. See also “Mahâvagga,” I, ii. 2.

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Together with Mâra, we find in the Buddhist texts very frequently mentioned another spiritual being, the conception of whom had likewise been first formed in the later Vedic age, Brahman. The god Brahman's figure is an outcome of that idea of the Brahma, the development of which has occupied our attention in a previous passage. It is exceedingly characteristic of the influence which the most abstract speculation of the schools exercised in India over the notions of the people generally, that the Brahma, the colourless, formless absolutum, has become an important element in the popular faith; of course, not without the thought in its original purity having been modified or, more accurately speaking, lost sight of. The thing in the abstract would have been rather too unconcrete a god even for the Indians. So the neuter personified itself, and became masculine; the Brahma turned into the god Brahman, the "progenitor of all worlds," the first-born among beings.

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We cannot here attempt to give a more detailed picture of this peculiar invasion of the popular consciousness by the speculative idea; our sources of information completely forbid it. This much only we know with certainty, that the process of which we speak had not only completed itself in the age of earlier Buddhism, but that a considerable period must have elapsed since its completion. Scarcely any divine being is so familiar to the imagination of the Buddhists as Brahmâ Sahampati; at all important moments in the life of Buddha and his followers, he is wont to leave his Brahma-heaven and to appear on earth as the profoundly humble servant of holy men. And from this one principal Brahman the Buddhist imagination has created whole classes of Brahma-gods, who have their place in different Brahma-heavens:—one more finger-post in addition to many others, indicating the impossibility of those Vedic texts, in which the origin of the doctrine of the universal One is exhibited, coming at all near the Buddhist period, in which the god Brahman has already developed himself from the Brahma, and the whole system of the Brahma-divinities from the god Brahman.

Cites (5)

Mahāvagga — Pāli
Dhammapada — Pāli
Kaṭhopaniṣad — Sanskrit
Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Śatapathabrāhmaṇa — Yājñavalkya & Śāṇḍilya (Vedic teacher), Sanskrit