Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi and Caste — The Aryans
There are few days in the year, even in mid-winter, or, what is worse still, in March, when I cannot sit out in my Veluvana, a sun-trap snugly sheltered from the north and the biting east. It is my thinking-place, and on this 28th of January, for some mysterious reason, with his image before me, my thoughts have been held entirely by the Buddha himself. Not that I am a Buddhist, or in the remotest degree likely to become one, though we hear of convinced followers of that religion even among Englishmen; but, as those who condescend to read me will have guessed, the story of his life has a great attraction for me, and that none the less because it is the record of one of the greatest rebellions that ever took place. Indeed, there is something weirdly fascinating in the history of all revolution even where we most hate it. What show-place can possess greater interest than the tragic collections of the Musée Carnavalet in what was once Madame de Sévigné’s home in Paris? Yet it is made up of relics which make men shudder, especially those few still left who, like myself, long ago knew not a few people who had lived through the days of the Terreur.
I have stood in that house of gruesome memories spellbound by a fascination such as that by which a snake paralyses its victim. In quite another way I am entranced by the upheaval which was the work of the Buddha. There was not the faintest likeness between the two revolutions—indeed, they were diametrically opposites. The one all fury, flame and murder—hatred, the guillotine, and the noyades of the Loire. The other, the calm extinction of all passion, all human desire, all ambition; a life spent in holy contemplation and in the wooing of that supreme wisdom which is virtue.
And yet Martin Luther himself, when he passionately scourged the Pope and his Bishop for the sale of indulgences, was not a more zealous rebel than this calm and contemplative Buddha, who, renouncing all honours and titles and worldly possessions for himself, contented, like St. Francis, to don the monk’s robe and to carry the beggar’s bowl, entered his peaceful protest against the usurpations and pretensions of the crafty Brahmans, who had long since drifted away from the simple and poetically beautiful teaching of the Rig Veda, albeit they acknowledged its authority as Sruti—inspiration, looking upon it as their one inspired sacred Book.4 In that wonderful collection of hymns and prayers about which I wish to say a few words later there is no allusion to suttee—the awful institution under which widows are burnt with their dead husbands; none to child-marriages, another cruelty; none to caste. All of these were inventions of the Brahmans, and it was upon the doctrine of caste that they founded their claim to superiority over the kings and princes whom they had gradually supplanted.
So long as the king and priest were one—so long, that is to say, as the king conducted the ceremonies and sacrifices of religion—the authority of the king was unchallenged.5 But there came a moment when the kings grew weary of a tedious ritual and delegated their religious duties to substitutes. That was the opportunity of the priestcraft, who, as the intercessors between the people and their gods—a powerful position indeed—were able to claim a rank higher than that of the king himself. Here was the beginning of Caste. When Buddha entered upon his ministry there were four castes: (1) The Brahmans, or priests; (2) the Kshatriya, the warrior and governing class, to which the kings and princes belonged—a class analogous to the Samurai or Bushi of Japan; (3) the Vaisiyas—farmers, traders, etc. These three classes, all of Aryan descent, were, and are, “the twice-born,” whose second birth is symbolized by their being invested with the sacred cord at an age which more or less corresponds to that of confirmation with us. (4) The Sudras were the fourth class; they were the lowest of all—despised as the descendants of the Dasyu, the enemies of the bright gods, the aborigines who were defeated by the migration of the white Aryan herdsmen descending upon India from the lofty plains of the Pamirs.
We talk glibly enough of Caste, yet there are not many of us who have any glimmering of light as to its real meaning or origin. The majority of Europeans speak of the word as if it were of Hindu origin, whereas it is simply a Portuguese word signifying race or family. In its present sense, indeed, it is of quite modern birth, for the old Portuguese Barbosa, writing in the sixteenth century, only uses the word casta in the sense of family, speaking of men and women de boa casta, of good family. When he wished to indicate the mysterious divisions of Indian society, he used the word leis, laws, leis de gentios, laws of the heathen. (Sir Henry Yule’s glossary.) Apart from the word, we are apt to speak of Caste as if it were an institution, respectable at any rate on account of its hoary antiquity. Old it certainly is, yet it was not known to the sacred poets of the Rig Veda.
The word which comes nearest to caste in Sanskrit is “Varna” (colour), and in the early days of the Aryan invasion of India there were only two classes: the white conquerors and the “Dasyu,” or enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered people, looked down upon. What we call caste, then, which was originally a question of skin, had already in the Buddha’s time, five centuries before our era, become far more complicated than that. Ethnologically, the division between the white man and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the conqueror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. But whereas the dark man remained as he was—the lowest of the castes—political reasons and the lust of power had subdivided the conquering race into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans laid the “precious corner-stone” of their priestly tyranny.
When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar and athlete, the man whom men envied and women loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order that for them he might work, striving for the good of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He went further than this: he denied the divine authority of the Veda, without which the whole structure of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally was branded as a heretic.
What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact that although Buddhism “became the state religion of India under Asōka, the Constantine of India, in the middle of the third century B.C.” (Max Müller), and was only declining in the seventh century A.D., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But that was not the case—on the contrary, it has become more and more involved, for there are now not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the subdivisions to which professions and occupations have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, looking down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion with some craftsman whose superior he deems himself to be. No wonder caste has been described as “a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of all employers of labour.” Life is, indeed, complicated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth falling upon a boiling pot defiles the food which it contains by an impurity which is almost worse than poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even in a European household, it has been said that no matter how low a menial may be, there is always someone a step lower to whom by payment he may assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning of the approaching contamination of his shadow.
Max Müller, in his “Chips from a German Workshop,” quotes a table by Berghaus showing the relative numbers of the people professing the chief religions into which the world is divided. Nothing can better show the extent of the influence which Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind.
| Buddhists | 31.2 |
| Christians | 30.7 |
| Mohammedans | 15.7 |
| Brahmanists | 13.4 |
| Various heathens | 8.7 |
| Jews | 0.3 |
In a note, Max Müller adds that: “As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssŭ Temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel.”
Ex Oriente lux. We see from this table that all the chief religions of the world have their rise, like the sun, in the East.
I have observed with no little astonishment that certain pundits of to-day speak in somewhat offensively patronizing tones of Max Müller, as if he were a thing of the past, all very well in his day, but not up to date, and already superseded. As to that, whether his theories upon the subject of mythology and comparative religion were sound or not, I am not competent to judge; but I feel that if others have pushed his work a step further than the point at which he left it, we may fairly ask whether, without his great labours, these sages would have attained their own success. There is no finality in science, and a Newton or a Faraday is in no way dethroned if others have built on the foundations which he laid. The world does not stand still, and it is the common fate of the pioneer that some new man should go beyond what he has reached. However that may be, the collating, translating and editing of the sacred books of India, and the editing of the thirty volumes of the sacred books of the East, including Chinese and Arabic works, were a colossal labour—the work of a lifetime, which has been of national and international value. All honour to the workman!
I first met Max Müller sixty years ago at the Deanery at Christ Church, where the evening parties were gatherings of all that was most distinguished in university life. He was then a most attractive personality, brilliant, of course, still young, not very tall, but extremely good-looking, an accomplished musician, the friend of Mendelssohn. His conversation was delightfully illuminating, and he was generous enough not to grudge the enjoyment of it to a humble undergraduate who was only too ready to sit at his feet. It was a regret to me that I left Oxford to enter the Foreign Office without having had the chance of attending his lectures; but his works on the Science of Language, and especially his “Chips from a German Workshop,” written at the behest of the great Bunsen, who persuaded the directors of the old East India Company on public grounds to defray the expense of his edition of the Vedas, have been to me the joy of many years, and still continue to fill many an idle moment, robbing it of its idleness, for who could be idle with Max Müller?
A very charming book is Sabatier’s “Life of St. Francis of Assisi.” To me one of its chief attractions lies in the strong parallel between the life of the mediæval saint and the Eastern reformer. The points of divergence are no more than would be accounted for by the differences of time, place and surroundings. St. Francis was not a prince of the blood royal like the Buddha, but he was the son of a rich man, one of those merchants and men of mark who travelled through the world, visiting all the important fairs of those days, and received as welcome guests by the great nobles. Indeed, they, too, had a sort of patent of nobility of their own, belonging to a guild of popularity—for in those days when newspapers were not, the rare visits of a man who could bring the latest court gossip from Paris or London, and whose waggons were often laden with golden tribute sent from beyond the sea to the Pope, were looked forward to with no little pleasure. So Francis, in his gilded youth, became one of the leading youngsters of the town, foremost in all mischief and riotous living, a fighter and a daredevil, ruffling it in all the fantastic coxcombry of weapons and dress which the ingenuity of mediæval tailors and armourers could devise.
Fighting there was in plenty in the Italian cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who so ready to fight as the extravagant young scapegrace, who was as keen to throw away his life as his money? After one of the local raids came imprisonment for a year—then more fighting, followed by illness, fever and repentance; after that solitude, meditation, and the final renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, when the manifest likeness to the Buddha first asserted itself.
The long, lonely silences in the carceri, the little natural caves on the side of Mount Subasio, when the saint, plunged in profoundest thought, was dreaming dreams of founding an order which was to save mankind, cannot but remind us of the royal prince starving in the wilderness, he, too, dreaming of the rescue of the world from sin. Both founded their orders on principles which involved the giving up of everything to which men hold most firmly. There was to be no property, no house, no home, no family. Rags and beggary were no disgrace—rather the hall-mark of a spiritual nobility. Homeless, their disciples were to wander forth, trusting in Providence and charity, which should do something towards filling the beggar’s bowl. Neither saw at first that these were conditions which sooner or later must break down. Religion needs its luxuries and will have them: a school of absolute effacement of the world was impossible in the West as it had been in the East. To venture any minute sketch of the aims of the two reformers is beyond what I can do here. Both were animated by the most perfect spirit of self-sacrifice with which they vainly endeavoured to inspire their orders, but no founder of religion has yet succeeded in establishing principles from which their so-called disciples have not sooner or later found self-justified means of breaking away.
One prominent feature in the characters of these two saintly men has in it a touch of poetry which it were ill to miss. Both loved animals with a love that was almost holy. The Buddha held the taking of all life to be a sin, and it is impossible to read the Birth Stories, to which I have alluded elsewhere, without feeling that they were inspired by the tenderest sympathy. St. Francis preached to the birds, and when Buddha taught in the Deer Forest near Benares, stags and hinds stood still and listened.
“Birds, my brethren,” said St. Francis to the birds that fluttered round him, “it is your duty greatly to praise and love your Creator. He has given you feathers for raiment, wings to fly, and filled all your needs. He has made you the noblest of His creatures; He allows you to live in the pure air: you have no need to sow or to reap, but He cares for you, protects you and directs you.” And the birds stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks and looked at him as if thanking him, while he walked about amongst them, caressing them with the hem of his robe. Then he gave them his blessing and took leave of them.
When he was preaching at Alviano the swallows made such a noise with their twittering that he could not make himself heard. The gentle saint rebuked them: “It is my turn to speak,” he said. “Swallows, little sisters, listen to the Word of God, be silent and hold your peace, until I shall have said my say!” But for all this and much more, how St. Francis praised God for all His creatures and specially for “My Lord the Sun, for of Thee, oh! Most High, he is the symbol,”6 we must turn to the pages of Sabatier. To St. Francis, as to the Buddha, all God’s creatures and the life which He gave them were sacred.
If there was much that was alike in the two men, there was one point in which they essentially differed. St. Francis was no scholar. He knew a little Latin, which he had learnt from the monks of St. George; that was a necessity for a man in his position, for Latin was a sort of lingua franca in his day, and was the language of sermons and of political discussions. Writing was a difficulty to him; he rarely took a pen in his hand and could do little more than sign his name. The autograph of the Sacro Convento, which is held to be genuine, gives evidence of great awkwardness. For the most part, he dictated, and would sign his letters with a simple T, the symbol of the Holy Cross. The Buddha, on the contrary, like St. Paul among the Pharisees, was a man of learning, deeply versed in the classics of the Brahmans, and well able to hold his own in discussions with the priests upon religion and upon the interpretation of the poems of the Rig Veda.
There is no ancient historical problem of so great interest as that of the Aryas, that mysterious people of whom we talk so much and know so little, as has been pointed out. The movements of the planets, the orbits of comets, have been accurately calculated; Nature is continually being compelled to yield many of her secrets to the patient investigations of science. But of this masterful white race, some of whom, from the high tablelands of Central Asia, swarmed down upon India as conquerors, while others, wandering by the shores of the Caspian Sea, overran Europe to become the progenitors of all that is noblest in mankind, there is no record, no history, and in regard to them even fable is silent. Where there is no writing, not so much as a graven stone, there can be no Champollion, no Rawlinson. The migrations of the Aryas, which meant so much for the children of men, were long unsuspected, and only in recent times realized. Even so, the few men of learning who gave thought to this crucial human enigma were travellers in a dense and dark forest, until in the Cimmerian gloom comparative philology opened out vistas—none too broad—through which they were enabled to gain glimpses of a civilization and people of whom all trace had been lost in the mist of many decades of centuries. Narrow as they were, they afforded the ποῦ στῶ, from which the investigation of the lost history was set in motion.
Of this modern learning we must acknowledge Max Müller as the foremost prophet. Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm and Burnouf were great men, but Max Müller, like Saul among the Benjamites, “from his shoulders and upward was higher” than any of them, and he it was who introduced the science of language into this country. To one who, like myself, has been a faithful believer in his teaching, it is a matter of unceasing wonder that there should be men of undoubted scientific and literary merit who hold in opposition to him that the Aryas were originally a European race, who in remote times found their way into Central Asia. This bold theory was started about the year 1839 by a famous Belgian geologist and ethnologist, Omalius d’Halloy, and it was taken up by no less a man than Robert Gordon Latham, by Benfey, Spiegel, Poesche, Penka, Schrader and others. Max Müller appears to attribute the idea to Benfey, a Jew, who was a learned Orientalist and professor of comparative philology at Göttingen. In Vol. IV., page 223, of Max Müller’s “Chips from a German Workshop,” we read: “We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to imagine these dialects flowing like streams from the centre of Asia to the south, the west and the north. I must confess that Professor Benfey’s protest against this theory seems to me very opportune, and his arguments in favour of a more Northern, if not European, origin of the whole Aryan family of speech deserve, at all events, far more attention than they have hitherto received.”
In spite of this, Max Müller does not seem to have bestowed that attention upon them, for I can find nothing either in confirmation or contradiction of the theory. He at once goes off at a tangent on the comparative inter-relations of the various Aryan languages among themselves, but on the supposed European origin of the Aryan race he is silent. I think it just possible that Max Müller may have wished to pay Benfey a compliment without committing himself to an endorsement of his views. Benfey had been strongly recommended to him by Bunsen, his own great friend and patron, for whom he cherished the most grateful affection.
In a letter, dated from Heidelberg, February 26th, 1855, Bunsen writes: “I wish you would take advantage of my communication to put yourself into correspondence with Benfey. He is well disposed towards you, and has openly spoken of you as the ‘apostle of German science in England.’ And then he stands infinitely higher than the present learned men of his department.” The desire to please Bunsen would account for Max Müller’s faint praise of Benfey’s theory, but its adoption would have seemed nothing less than the negation of all that he had so long striven to teach. (Cf. “Chips from a German Workshop,” Vol. III., page 469.) Of Omalius d’Halloy, Latham and the rest, Max Müller seems to take no heed. At any rate, I do not find them mentioned either in the “Chips” or in the lectures on the Science of Language.
I, for my part, should as soon accept the doctrine, in which I saw the other day that there is still here and there a believer, that the world is a flat surface, justifying the terrors of the sailors of Columbus lest, when they reached the extreme west, they should topple over, ship and all, into space or Hades, by whatever name you choose to call it.
To some men disputation and contradiction are an intellectual necessity—witness the beliefs that Bacon wrote Romeo and Juliet, and that Homer was an unlimited liability company of prehistoric ballad-mongers. According to the ethnological faith in which I have lived for the last sixty years, there existed in times so remote that they go back beyond the birth of chronology a white folk of shepherds and husbandmen who fed their flocks and tilled the soil in the valleys of the Highlands of Central Asia. There they increased and multiplied until the land of their birth could no longer hold them, and their pastures became insufficient for their flocks and herds. Then began their many wanderings. Toughened by a climate in which they had to live under most trying conditions of burning heat and extreme cold, they were a hardy race, having little to fear from the opposition of the weaker tribes who might seek to bar their way.
There is one point in regard to the theory that the Aryas were originally a European race, which, so far as I know, has not been taken into consideration. The Aryas were obviously a superior people. That they proved wherever they went. In every migration they came, conquered and remained. Has there ever been known a case where a superior race—not a handful of men, like the crew of the Mayflower, but a whole nation—has migrated, taking all the risks and uncertainties incident to travel and climate, and leaving the inferior race to enjoy the old well-proved home undisturbed?
Yet that is what the Aryas must have done if they left Europe for the terrors and privations of the Highlands of Asia, remaining to face the hardships of that inhospitable region for long centuries, until its insufficiencies drove them to seek the kindlier soil and climate which their forbears had deserted. But whether the Aryas left Europe for Asia and thence again descended upon Europe, or whether they were originally an Asiatic race of dominant nobility, that is a question over which we may leave the doctors to break their learned heads, in the confident assurance that never can they arrive at any certainty. Theory without a backing of facts, without documentary evidence, must remain valueless.
Only one thing in regard to the European migration or migrations is certain, and that is the fact that all the European languages, barring those of the Huns, their cousins the Finns, the Basques and the Turks (if we may call them Europeans, which let us hope will soon no longer be the case), can be traced back to the speech of the old tribe which perhaps three or four thousand years ago flitted south, east and west from the storm-vexed valleys of the Pamirs, conquering and civilizing, driving the aborigines before it like chaff before the wind.
When I was a lad we used to be taught by such pedagogues as were sufficiently advanced to have heard of Sanskrit, that this and that Greek or Latin or other European word was “derived from the Sanskrit.” That is all changed, and no teacher would nowadays dare to preach such nonsense. We know now that Sanskrit, which must have been more or less a dead language in Buddha’s time, only known at any rate by the more learned among the priests, was the descendant, like Greek, Latin, Russian, English, the Celtic tongues and others, from a much older language which was spoken by our forefathers in the Highlands of Central Asia. But Sanskrit, albeit not our parent speech, but rather a distant cousin of our own European tongues, dead and buried though it has been for some two thousand years, has been the key by which the learned have unlocked the door of the most secret muniment-room of ethnological lore.
It is not possible to realize all that the Buddha achieved in the world unless we have some conception of the religious and social condition of Asia at the time of his great renunciation. That condition was the result of the two great inroads of the Aryas, the one of the south into Persia, the other to the south and east overrunning India. The one was that of the fire-worshippers and Zarathustra (Zoroaster), whose sacred canon was the Zend Avesta; the other that of the Brahmans, whose inspired message was the Rig Veda. From the former are descended the modern Parsees and Guebres, and there is some justification for believing that the separation of these two streams of invasion may have been due to religious dissent; for to the Parsee—the believer in Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), the one God, Creator of the Universe—the gods of the Brahmans are an abomination, and no book is to a pious Parsee so much to be abhorred as the Rig Veda. In the Veda the Gods are called Deva. This word in Sanskrit means bright, brightness or light being one of the most general attributes shared by the various manifestations of the Deity, invoked in the Veda as Sun, or Sky, or Fire, or Dawn, or Storm.... In the Zend Avesta the same word Deva means evil spirit. Like the Buddha, Zarathustra was a heretic and a dissenter, and his sacred book, the Zend Avesta, was an attempt to replace the worship of the forces of nature by a religion—purer and more spiritual—under one Divine Creator, Ahura Mazda, the wise spirit.
It is much to be regretted that, like our Lord, the Buddha should have left no written word of his own. It would have been interesting to know whether he held the Brahmanic gods in the same contempt as did Zarathustra and his followers. Inasmuch as he denied the inspiration of the Veda, he obviously must have repudiated them, and in his teaching, as it has been recorded, they play no part. But Max Müller certainly underestimates the respect assigned to them in the later Buddhism of the monks when he says: “In Buddhism we find these ancient Devas, Indra and the rest, as merely legendary beings carried about at shows, as servants of Buddha, as goblins or fabulous heroes; but no longer worshipped or even feared by those with whom the name of Deva had lost every trace of its original meaning.”
Now it is impossible to deny that all over the East, wherever there is a Buddhist temple, there the images of the old Devas, grim and repellent, are devoutly worshipped and propitiated by prayer, even by people who have no inkling of their significance. Moreover, it has been for many centuries the policy of Buddhist missionaries to claim the native saints in countries which they seek to convert as reincarnations of the Buddha, and therefore to be worshipped. For instance, in Japan, Hachiman, the indigenous God of War, is adored in Buddhist temples, and there are many such cases, where there is no question of “goblins or fabulous heroes.” In modern times the Jesuits adopted the same policy in China, in regard to so-called Worship of Ancestors and of Tien—Heaven; thereby bringing down upon themselves the wrath of the meddling and muddling Dominicans and Franciscans and the interference of the Pope, between whom and the Emperor-King Hsi there arose a controversy, in which the former was worsted and the cause of Christianity in China was set back for centuries.
I have spoken of the Aryas as of “a people of whom we know so little,” and yet, in truth, the wonder is that we should know so much with the almost mathematical certainty afforded by the study of language and of the Rig Veda, those beautiful hymns for which the Brahmans claim Sruti—divine inspiration—and which are by far the oldest document of the whole Aryan race. That there should exist any writing of the age to which they belong is a physical impossibility; the heat and damp of the Indian climate are swift and ruthless in their work of destruction. Even in the Buddha’s time the very language of the Vedas was dead and understood only by the priests. But we know from the journals of the Chinese pilgrim, Hsüan Chwang—as Max Müller points out—with what painful care the hymns were preserved orally by the Brahmans in the seventh century A.D. We have also, as he further points out, the analogy of Hebrew, the MSS. of the Old Testament, none of which is older than the tenth century, but of which the truth is tested by comparison with the Septuagint. We know that “every hymn, every verse, every word and syllable in the Veda were accurately counted by native scholars about five or six hundred years before Christ.” It is supposed that the collection of hymns was finished some eleven or twelve hundred years B.C. But some of the hymns were then ancient, some modern, “so that we cannot well assign a date more recent than 1200 to 1500 before our era for the original composition of those simple hymns which up to the present day are regarded by the Brahmans with the same feelings with which a Mohammedan regards the Koran, a Jew the Old Testament, a Christian his Gospel.”7
Some of the hymns appear to me to contain passages of almost sublime beauty, though Max Müller says: “The historical importance of the Veda can hardly be exaggerated, but its intrinsic merit, and particularly the beauty or elevation of its sentiments, have by many been rated far too high. Large numbers of the Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme: tedious, low, commonplace.” And then he goes on to show how the Gods are invoked to grant long life, food, large flocks, large families, for which they are to be rewarded with sacrifices, etc. Here I cannot but think that the great professor, for whom I entertain such sincere respect, is a little unfair. Is not the idea of looking to their God as the Giver of all good things common to all primeval peoples?
The Jews, for instance, though they were full of wise words about the vanity of riches, still looked to Jehovah to enable them to “eat the riches of the Gentiles,” and to lead them to “a land of wheat and barley and fig trees and pomegranates: a land of oil olive, and honey,” and of mineral wealth. Again Solomon says: “My son, forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments; for length of days, and long life, and peace shall they add to thee.” Prayers for material prosperity to God, under whatsoever name He may be worshipped, are common to all religions, and it is hardly just to brand the hymns of the Veda as “tedious, low, commonplace,” because the ancient herdsmen of the Pamirs were no more disinterested in their prayers than the rest of mankind, but addressed their material petitions to God just as King David and King Solomon did.
It was natural enough that these men, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks and herds by day and by night, under the eternal ice and snow of the heaven-reaching mountains, should worship the light—all that was Deva (light) was to them sacred and symbolical of the Godhead—and so the Deus of the Latins was originally Light, and when we talk of “divine,” “divinity,” we are looking back to the worship of our ancestors when they prayed to the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the Dawn, which were the givers of all good things. Sometimes they are invoked under the names of Varuna, Mitra, Indra. “In one hymn Agni (fire) is called the ruler of the universe, the lord of men, the wise king, the father, the brother, the son, the friend of men.... In another hymn, Indra is said to be greater than all; the Gods, it is said, do not reach Thee, Indra, nor men; Thou overcomest all creatures in strength. Another God, Soma, is called the King of the World, the King of Heaven and Earth, the Conqueror of all. And what more could human language achieve in trying to express the idea of a divine and supreme power, than what another poet says of another God, Varuna: ‘Thou art Lord of all, of Heaven and earth; thou art the King of all, of those who are Gods and of those who are men?’”
How beautiful is the following litany:
“In the beginning there arose the golden child. He was the one born Lord of all that is. He established the earth and this sky; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He who gives life, 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?
“He who through His power is the one King of the breathing and awakening world; He who governs all, man and beast; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He Whose greatness these snowy mountains, Whose greatness the seas proclaim with the distant river; He Whose regions are, as it were, His two arms; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“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 light in the air; who is the God to Whom we shall offer sacrifice?
“He to Whom heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look up trembling inwardly—He over Whom the rising sun shines forth; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“Wherever the mighty waterclouds went, where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He who is the sole life of the bright Gods; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“He who by His might looked even over the waterclouds, the clouds which gave strength and lit the sacrifice, He who alone is God above all Gods; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?
“May He not destroy us—He, the creator of the earth; or He, the righteous, who created the Heaven—He also created the bright and mighty waters; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?”
Well might Max Müller, who has unearthed them, redeem his dispraise of the hymns by saying: “Hidden in this rubbish there are precious stones!” Right well do the hymns, or, at any rate, those which he admits to be “precious stones,” deserve their title Rig Veda, the knowledge of Praise. Nothing can be finer, more masculine, than a propitiatory hymn to the Maruts, the Storm Gods, of which he gives us a translation: “They make the rocks to tremble, they tear asunder the kings of the forest. Come on, Maruts, like madmen, ye Gods, with your whole tribe.” No wonder men, whose lives had to face the terrors of the icy wilderness, sought the favour of the unruly forces whose rage meant death to them and to their herds and flocks. A hymn to Agni (fire), “the son of strength, the conqueror of horses, the highborn,” is less striking, but the zenith of the Vedic poetry is reached, as it seems to me, in a prayer addressed to Ushas, the Dawn. What a picture it suggests of the old herdsman in those frozen solitudes, falling on his knees when the stars grow pale before the first glimmer of light that stretches along the eastern horizon, thankfully to worship the radiant Goddess who puts to flight the dark shadows of the night and its unseen dangers. Listen to his song of praise:
“She shines upon us, like a young wife, rousing every living being to go to his work. When the fire had to be kindled by men, she made the light by striking down darkness.”
“She rose up, spreading far and wide, and moving everywhere. She grew in brightness, wearing her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (the mornings), the leader of the days, she shone gold-coloured, lovely to behold.”
“She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the Gods, who leads the white and lovely steed (of the sun), the Dawn, was seen revealed by her rays, with brilliant treasures, following every one.
“Thou who art a blessing where thou art near, drive far away the unfriendly; make the pasture wide, give us safety! Scatter the enemy, bring riches! Raise up wealth to the worshipper, thou mighty Dawn.”
“Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the love of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth in cows, horses and chariots.”
“Thou daughter of the sky, thou highborn Dawn, whom the Vasishthas magnify with songs, give us riches high and wide; all ye Gods protect us always with your blessings.”8
So the old shepherd prays, and the Goddess, answering to his call, spreads her rosy mantle over the sky, and tinges the snowy peaks and ridges of the ice-bound mountains: the sun rises in his glory, and the peace of a new day is born to the world.
The piety of the old Aryans admits of no doubt. We are told that the consciousness of sin is a prominent feature in their religion. The poet of the Veda searches eagerly for his sin, and finds it not in his will but in his condition, which even in his dreams holds up evil before his eyes, and at last he turns to his God, the God of Grace who enlightens the simple. He believes in the power of the gods to take away from man the heavy burden of his sins. “Varuna is merciful to him who has committed.”
One more point should be noticed in any attempt, however slight, to give a sketch of the religion of the Veda. Max Müller tells us that it knows of no idols. This is the more remarkable when we think of the innumerable idols of savage and revengeful Gods by which Indian, Chinese and Japanese temples are degraded; all the nightmares of later monks who knew nothing of the pure and clean-minded Aryans, whose Gods, as Oldenberg tells us, in contrast to others, were bright and friendly beings without malice, cruelty and deceit.
It has been well said that the highest value of the sacred poems of the Aryans is historic, and that value has been revealed by the comparatively recent study of Sanskrit. That is in the school in which we learn who the Aryans were, what was the manner of their lives, their religion and their thoughts; and we can, in a measure, trace much of what, after many centuries, led to the development of a Hindu school of metaphysics, in comparison with which the much vaunted Pythagoreans and Greek thinkers were as babes and sucklings. The very name Arya tells us that this ancient people was a race of husbandmen and tillers of the soil, the root ar from which the word is derived being found again in the Latin arare, to plough, aratrum, a plough, and in the Greek ἄροτρον; and when we talk of our “daughters,” it is well that we should remember that our ancestors on the Steppes, many thousand years ago, themselves invented the word “duhitar,” the milk-maid, the very word with which we Europeans, in one shape or another, caress our women-children. The hymns and prayers of the Vedas abound in allusions to the herds and flocks of these old farmers, whose best friends—and therefore the objects of their adoration—were the sun, the stars, the rains of heaven; just as their enemies—therefore to be propitiated—were the storms, the snow and the cruel winds: these were—the life-givers and death-givers. The life of the lonely watcher of the Steppes was of its essence one of contemplation, reflection and introspection.
Let me give one pregnant quotation from Max Müller’s “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature”: “At the first dawn of traditional history we see these Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward toward the Seven Rivers (the Indus, the five rivers of the Punjab and the Sarasvati), and ever since India has been called their home. That before that time they had been living in more northern regions, within the same precincts, with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans, the Celts, is a fact as firmly established as that the Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historical periods. It would have been impossible to discover any traces of relationship between the swarthy natives of India and their conquerors, whether Alexander or Clive, but for the testimony borne by language.” (“Sanskrit Literature,” pp. 12, 13.)
To the learned Jew—a Semite, to the Hungarian, the Finn, or the Basque, who are Turanian settlers in Europe, the history of the Aryans is an interesting study, linguistic or racial. To us true Europeans, to us true Aryans, it has a far greater significance. It has all the charm of an inquiry into a piece of remote family history—all the glamour of a pedigree, not to be measured by a few puny centuries, but reaching far away into the clouds of incalculable æons.
Talking idly in a garden, we can do no more than touch the mere fringe of a mighty problem, even though it should be suggested by the great silent Buddha. For instance, we have summoned as witness the one word “daughter,” when there are so many others that we use a dozen times a day which are equally strong links in the long chain of evidence by which we prove our descent. But no matter—we have started the clue: let who will pick it up. It will reward him.