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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1: Western and Eastern India—The Brahman-Castes

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1

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English

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.

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