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Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect c7: Foreword

Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect c7

Language
English

Foreword

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“The most important branch of Indian history,” says Vincent Smith, “is the history of her thought.” “The soul of Hindu Civilisation,” says C. N. Krishna Swami Aiyar, “is at once made out to be in the religious history of India.” “The history of religion in India,” he adds, “has a much larger meaning than it can have in connection with the civilisation of any other country or nationality.” Hitherto the attention of Indologists has been mainly engrossed by the mighty religious movements associated with the names of Mahāvīra the Jina and Gautama the Buddha. Vaishnavism and other orthodox Indian creeds have received but scant attention at the hands of scientific historians. The prevailing ignorance with regard to Vaishnavism is reflected in such a widely read book of reference as Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary where Krishna is described as “a deity in later Hindu Mythology.”

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Whatever be the right kind of test in determining the importance of a religious system—the amount of the following, or the intrinsic worth of the system—Vaishnavism must be regarded as one of the most important religions of India. It was the religion of Heliodoros, of the Gupta Emperors, of Rāmānuja, of Kavīra, of Chaitanya and of Tukārāma. It still counts as its votaries many among the teeming millions of India. It is the religion which produced the *Bhagavadgītā*, the songs of the Tamil *Aḻvārs*, the splendid *Padāvalīs* of mediæval Bengal, and the *Rāmacharitamānasa* of Tulasī Dās. If Sir George Grierson is right India owes the preservation of the ideas of *Bhakti* and *Prasāda* (loving faith and divine grace) to the Vaishnavas. Any endeavour which is meant to throw light on the story of the rise and expansion of this important religion cannot but be of great use in reconstructing the history of our country. In his introduction to the *Sūtras* of Āpastamba¹ Dr. Bühler observes, "the earlier history of the Purāṇas, which as yet is a mystery, will only be cleared up when a real history of the orthodox Hindu sects, especially of the Sivites and Vishṇuites has been written." The writer of the following pages has tried to present the materials for a connected history of Vaishnavism from the Vedic times to the age of the early Tamil *Āchāryas* who laid the foundation of the Śrī Vaishṇava school of which the greatest exponent was Rāmānuja, the earliest of the celebrated mediæval Bhakti Reformers of India.

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¹ P. xxix, n.

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Valuable information regarding this faith has been supplied by several eminent scholars, Western as well as Indian, e.g., Jones, Colebrooke, Wilson, Weber, Lorinser, Lassen, Muir, Bühler, Barth, Hopkins, Grierson, Garbe, Schrader, Niveditā, Macnicol, Keith, Vogel, Barnett, Hill, Carpenter, Eliot, Telang, Bhandarkar, Sukthankar, T. Rājagopāla Chariar, S. K. Aiyangar, Govindāchārya Swāmin, Dr. Seal, Bankimchandra, R. P. Chanda and others. The author has consulted their works and the following books and journals, viz., the Rig Veda, the Aitareya and the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇas, the Chhāndogya, Kaṭha and Śvetāśvatara Upanishads, the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, the Nirukta of Yāska, the Ashṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, the Mahābhāshya of Patañjali, the Sūtras of Bodhāyana, the Mahābhārata including the translations by P. C. Ray and M. N. Dutt, the Matsya, Vāyu, Vishṇu and Bhāgavata Purāṇas, the Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, the Harsha-Charita and the Kādambarī of Bāṇa, Śaṅkara’s Commentary on the Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa, the Buddhist Suttas and Jātakas, the works of Aśvaghosha, the Jaina Sūtras, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Vienna Oriental Journal, the Indian Antiquary, the Epigraphia Indica, the Corpus *Inscriptionum Indicarum*, Macdonell and Keith's *Vedic Index*, Sorrensen's *Index of Names in the Mahābhārata* and other works references to which will be found in the following pages. In preparing these lectures the author has been mainly guided by the evidence of archæology, remembering the famous dictum of Colebrooke:¹ “In the scarcity of authentic materials for the ancient, and even for the modern, history of the Hindu race, importance is justly attached to all genuine monuments and especially inscriptions on stone and metal.” He has also made use of literature to which an early date can be assigned, and which is comparatively free from late interpolations, *viz.*, (i) Pre-Buddhistic Vedic literature, (ii) ancient works to which a date in a definite epoch can be assigned, *e.g.*, the *Artha-Śāstra* attributed to Kauṭilya, the *Mahābhāshya* of Patañjali, the *Indika* of Megasthenes, the works of Aśvaghosha, etc., and (iii) works on Vāsudeva free from any Vaishṇava bias, *e.g.*, the *Ghata Jātaka* and the *Uttarādhyayana Sūtra*. The epics and the Purāṇas have been utilised very sparingly because of the numerous interpolations they contain and the uncertainty of their chronology.

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¹ *Essays*, Vol. II, p. 213.

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In his first lecture the author has tried to draw a distinction between the worship of Urukrama-Vishṇu which is as old as the Ṛig Veda, and the *Bhakti* religion known as Vaishnavism. He then tries to show that this *Bhakti* religion is not a plagiarism from Christianity, but owes its origin to Vāsudeva.

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He next tries to prove the correctness of the tradition that the true Vāsudeva was Kṛiṣhṇa, the famous prince of the Vṛiṣhṇi family of Mathurā. In doing this he has attempted to demonstrate the unsoundness of the following theories, *viz.* :—

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(1) That the true Vāsudeva, *i.e.*, the originator of Bhāgavatism, was not the Kshatriya prince Kṛiṣhṇa, the son of Vasudeva.

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(2) That Vāsudeva, though a Kshatriya prince, is not to be identified with Kṛiṣhṇa.

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(3) That Vāsudeva-Kṛiṣhṇa was a solar deity.

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(4) That Vāsudeva-Kṛiṣhṇa was a tribal god.

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(5) That Vāsudeva-Kṛiṣhṇa was a vegetation deity.

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In his second lecture the author proceeds to reconstruct the true history of the life of Vāsudeva-Kṛiṣhṇa from such historical data as are available, and points out that Kṛiṣhṇa came into contact with Solar worship, and the doctrines which he learnt from a Solar priest were the foundations on which the superstructure of Bhāgavatism was raised. Next follows the story of the spread of the new faith from its cradle in the valley of the Jumna. An attempt is made to show that the earlier Brāhmaṇical attitude towards the faith was one of hostility, but later on there was a combination between Brāhmaṇism and Bhāgavatism probably owing to the Buddhist propaganda of the Mauryas. As a result of this alliance Vāsudeva was identified with the Brāhmaṇic gods, Nārāyaṇa and Viṣṇu.

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In his third lecture the author discusses the question of the relation of Bhāgavatism to the following non-Brāhmaṇical creeds, viz., Ājīvikism, Jainism, Buddhism and Christianity.

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In his fourth lecture the author traces the fortunes of the Bhāgavata religion from the first century A.D. to the time of the Tamil Āchāryas. It is suggested that the Śaka and Kushāṇ sovereigns of Northern India were generally not friendly towards the religion of Vāsudeva and this anti-Bhāgavata attitude may have brought the foreign kings into conflict with the Vaishṇava monarchs Chandra and the imperial Guptas. The Guptas did for Bhāgavatism what Aśoka had done for Buddhism. With the fall of the Guptas and the coming of the Huns Bhāgavatism lost its predominance in Northern India, but it flourished in the Tamil country and finally Rāmānuja and his followers restored it to the position it had held under the Guptas.

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Bhāgavatism, like the religions of Mahāvīra and Buddha, was the expression of a natural reaction from the sacrifice-ridden religion of the Brāhmaṇic period. The earliest teachers of this faith, while refraining from an open denunciation of the *Vidhi Yajña* or the ordinary Vedic sacrifice, propounded a new doctrine which laid emphasis, among other things, on *Ahiṃsā*. *Ahiṃsā* is taught by the guru of Kṛṣṇa Devakīputra in the *Chhāndogya Upanishad*.¹ Viṣṇu, according to several Bhāgavata texts, appeared as four sons of Dharma and *Ahiṃsā*,² and his highest region (*param padam*) could only be reached by those who gave assurance of harmlessness to all creatures.³

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¹ iii. 17. 4.

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² Schrader, *Introduction to the Pañcarātra*, p. 44.

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³ *Mahābhārata*, xi. 7. 25.

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*Abhayam sarva bhutebhyo yo dadāti mahīpate*
*Sa gachchhati param sthānam*
*Viṣṇoḥ padamanāmayam*

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A recent writer⁴ considers the analogy suggested to Buddhism and Jainism to be ‘superficial’ and opines that ‘‘there was an intervening Upanishadic period in which the formal sacrificial religion of the Brāhmaṇas was being gradually replaced by a more intellectual theosophy, and that within this intellectual theosophy not only theistic but devotional tendencies were developing.’’ It is, however, undeniable that Vāsudevism, like the religions of the Sākya sage and the Jñātrika reformer, originated amongst a free clan outside the Brāhmaṇical pale (*Vrātya* according to the *Mahābhārata*).¹ It laid emphasis on moral traits rather than ritualistic observances, glorified gods and heroes unknown to the Vedic pantheon, and centred round a personality that called forth the loving devotion of its followers which in due course fructified into *Bhakti*. Looked upon as heterodox by most of the people of the ‘pale’ where the literature on Brāhmaṇical ritual and theosophy was produced, the new faith nevertheless captured the imagination of the masses and produced a Holy Writ which was not the close preserve of a sacerdotal oligarchy but had a message even for the woman and the *Śūdra*.² As the first exponents of Bhāgavatism find mention in one of the earliest Upanishads it is hardly correct to say that the theistic and devotional tendencies noticeable in the younger Upanishads belong to a period which supervened between the Age of the Brāhmaṇas and the dawn of the Bhāgavata movement. It is rather the impact of new ideas radiating from the territories beyond ‘‘the fixed Middle Region’’ which leavened Brāhmaṇic thought and gave it a new orientation.

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⁴ *Indian Historical Quarterly*, 1931, p. 97.

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¹ vii, 141, 15.

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² The *Bhagavad-gītā*, ix, 32; *Brahma Purāṇa*, 178, 186.

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The new faith that developed on the banks of the Jumna finally coalesced with a few Brāhmaṇical and popular cults to form the great federation of religions known as Vaishṇavism. The agencies employed in effecting this union were the following :—

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(i) the *Vyūha* doctrine in virtue of which Vāsudevism united with Saṅkarshaṇa worship to form Bhāgavatism ;

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(ii) the doctrine of *Avatāra* which effected a synthesis between Bhāgavatism and the cult of Vishṇu-Nārāyaṇa and gave birth to Vaishṇavism ;

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(iii) the *Purusha-Prakṛiti* theory in virtue of which the cult of Śrī was engrafted on Vaishṇavism.

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Just as the reaction against the old Vedic sacrifices gave birth to the intellectual movement of the Upanishadic Ṛishis and the religious movement of Kṛishṇa Vāsudeva, so the attempted revival of the *Karma-kāṇḍa* by the *Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā* school was followed by the neo-Vedāntic movement of Śaṅkarāchārya and the neo-Bhāgavatism of the Śrī Vaishṇava saints, the greatest amongst whom was Rāmānuja.

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