History of Religion Part 19

E. Hardy, _Die Vedisch Brahmanische Periode der Religion des alten Indiens_.

Lehmann, in De la Saussaye.

Rhys Davids, _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 1, _sqq._

CHAPTER XIX INDIA

II. _Brahmanism_

The period in which the songs were collected by the Aryans dwelling in the Punjaub was succeeded by a period of wars and troubles, after which the successful race is found to have spread further towards the East, and to have settled on the Ganges and its tributaries. Along with this change of position a great change has also taken place in the spirit of the people, a change which is strikingly seen in their religion. The priesthood has come to occupy the position of a separate cla.s.s to an extent not formerly the case, and all the phenomena are apparent which are generally found a.s.sociated with a hierocracy or rule of priests. The early religious writings have been formed into a sacred canon: there is an active production of new works which explain the old ones; the sacrifices grow more elaborate and new virtues are attributed to them; and along with this hardening and formalising of the outward parts of religion there is a religious speculation of great volume and of great freedom of character.

The Caste System: The Brahmans.--The key to the whole movement is to be found in the new position of the priesthood, or in the establishment at this period of the system of caste. Though this system is only once mentioned in the Rigveda, and that in a hymn of late date, scholars find traces of it in the arrangement of the hymns, and as it is found in Persia, the Indians probably had it before they entered India. It may even, it is judged, be traceable to the division of ranks among the primitive Aryan families. Teutonic as well as Indian legends are found explaining how mankind were divided from the first into different cla.s.ses.[1] But the primitive differences of rank must have had a great development before they took shape in the rigid caste system of India. This system appears to be organised with a view expressly to the exaltation of the priesthood, and must have been the result of a struggle between the priests and the warrior or ruling cla.s.ses. The priests have made themselves indispensable in nearly all religious acts. Their very t.i.tle shows this. While _Brahman_, as the name of a G.o.d, means primarily growth, and later, devotion or prayer, _brahmana_ (neut.) signifies the ritual texts according to which worship is performed, and _brahman_ (mas.) is the name of those who use such texts, and comes to stand for the highest caste of Indian society. Without the brahman there can be no satisfactory worship, because there can be no security that any rite is performed correctly; and a rite which is not performed correctly has no efficacy. Religion, therefore, is in the hands of this caste, whose sacredness is hereditary, and cannot be acquired in any other way than by birth. The members of that caste and they alone are qualified to superintend religious observances, and without them the intercourse between man and the G.o.ds cannot be kept up. From his birth the brahman is a being of superior holiness; he is destined for higher ends than other men, and the distinction between him and them must be manifested in all his acts and habits throughout his life. He is the natural lord of all the cla.s.ses.

[Footnote 1: Compare Hans Sachs, _Die Ungleichen Kinder Eva's_.]

If the highest caste is strictly defined, so also are the others. The second caste is that of the Kshatriyas, warriors or rulers, the third that of the Vaisyas or farmers. These three have rank, they are the twice-born cla.s.ses (their second birth answers to confirmation, and takes place when a young man is invested with the sacred thread). The Sudras are the fourth and lowest cla.s.s; no duty is a.s.signed to them in the law books but that of serving meekly the other castes. It has been thought that the Sudras represent the conquered aborigines, the three cla.s.ses of rank belonging to the Aryan invaders, but this is open to question.

The student of religion has to fix his attention on the Brahmans, who have secured themselves in the position of the leading caste. We speak first of the literary movement in which they were concerned, then of the sacrifices they conducted, and of their G.o.ds. We shall then say something of the practical operation of their religion as a rule of life, and lastly we shall come to the speculative work of their period, which is not, however, to be set down to them alone.

1. The Growth of the Sacred Literature.--The Vedas rose in sacredness after the age which produced them pa.s.sed away. A few centuries after they were written they were not generally intelligible; they needed interpretation, but at the same time the doctrine of their inspiration rose higher and higher. The brahmans had both to interpret the words of the old hymns and to explain how, when used at the sacrifice, they produced the effect ascribed to them. This led to the production of the earliest Indian prose, the brahmanas or ritual treatises. Primarily intended to be directories of worship for the priests, these works were enriched with all sorts of ideas about the sacrifices, their origin, and their effects; points in the ritual are explained in them by mythological stories which we should not otherwise know, and we see from them that many superst.i.tions, to which the Vedas gave no encouragement, yet lived among the people.

Each Samhita, or collection of hymns, had its Brahmana, and some of the collections had several. These works, though transcending in dreariness most directories of worship, are yet of great value for the light they throw on the history of Indian manners and ideas, as well as on that of mythology. And as it happened among the Jews in their later period so it happened here;--the sanct.i.ty of the text was extended to the commentary, the brahmana also was held to be G.o.d-given and inspired, and by some was even more highly esteemed than the hymns themselves. A third cla.s.s of inspired writings consists of the Upanishads, or speculative treatises, of which we shall speak later. The "Veda" in the larger sense is made up of these three bodies of compositions, mantras, brahmanas, and upanishads.

These three belong to revelation or "S'ruti," _i.e._ hearing; what is contained in these is to be regarded as having been heard by inspired men from a higher source. The counterpart of S'ruti is "smriti,"

_i.e._ recollection, tradition. This embraces the Sutras or works dealing with ceremonial in the way of short rules gathered from the older literature, with the exposition of the Vedas, with domestic rites and conventional usages. The law books, the epics, and the Puranas, or ancient legendary histories, also belong to this cla.s.s.

The doctrine of the Vedas, of their sacredness and of their virtues, played a great part in Indian thought. They were revered not as a written word, for they were not written but handed down by memory,--the Brahman still knows his sacred literature by heart,--but as hymns possessing supernatural powers and of far higher than human origin. They were raised to the rank of a divinity, they were said to have had to do with the creation of the world, or to have been among the first created beings. The value of the study of them was not to be exaggerated; he who engages in it, we hear, offers a complete sacrifice, obtains for himself the world which does not pa.s.s away, and becomes united with Brahma. The cla.s.s of men who had installed themselves as the authorised interpreters of the hymns, had evidently taken up a very strong position.

2. Sacrifice.--Indian ritual is an immense subject. In the Vedic period there were several orders of sacrifice--the hymns of the Rigveda have to do with the Soma-sacrifice alone--and several kinds of priests, and it stands to reason that an elaborate ritual derived from a distant age and cherished by a priestly caste which was growing in power, could not quickly change. In spite of the considerable amount of materials accessible in the Brahmanas and Sutras, a history of Indian sacrifice as a whole has still to be written.

It is characteristic of early Indian sacrifice that it is not confined to a temple or to any sacred spot, and that it does not require any image of the deity. Instructions are always given for choosing and preparing a place for the rite, and for erecting an altar; a place had to be prepared on each occasion. The G.o.ds were asked to come, or were thought to be seated in heaven looking on; the sacrifice is in the open air. While the celebration proceeded according to a certain ritual, it lay with the worshippers to fix to what G.o.d or G.o.ds the sacrifice should be addressed. There was not one ritual for Agni and another for Indra, but the same would serve for either or for both. The sacrifices of which we hear in the Brahmanas are domestic rites; they are offered by the heads of the household, who invite ancestors also to be present. A Brahman is present to direct those who sacrifice and the inferior priests who a.s.sist them, and the benefits of the act extend to all the dependants of the household. The time was determined by natural seasons or by household events. Some sacrifices were greater than others, the more elaborate ones requiring several days, months, or even years for their celebration. Among the kinds of offerings which might be made we find that of man enumerated; human sacrifice, however, if it had prevailed in earlier times, had now grown obsolete.

The rise of the Brahmans into a caste changed the character of the sacrifice by making its due celebration depend more on special knowledge, and by increasing its elaborate mystery. Once the hymn was recognised as an essential element of such an act, the person who could interpret the hymn and explain its effects acquired great importance. And when the explanation of all the various features of the sacrifice was once begun, a wide door was opened to minute ingenuity. It is astonishing to what trifles these priestly directories descend, what explanations are brought from every part of earth and heaven of the most trivial circ.u.mstances, and what sacredness is found in the very blades of gra.s.s around the altar. Now the effect of such a treatment of ritual is inevitably that the rite itself, the outward mechanical performance, comes to be regarded as important, and that the ethical and religious end which was originally aimed at, is lost sight of. The priest and those he acts for are so intent on the minutiae of their celebration that they forget about the G.o.d it is intended for. And as they are quite convinced that the sacrifice, if offered with perfect correctness and with nothing left out, must produce its effect, the sacrifice itself comes to appear as the agent of the desired blessing; the G.o.d grows less but the sacrifice grows more. This process, which may be observed wherever ritualism exists, was carried in the period of Brahmanism to its utmost length. In this period the old G.o.ds lost the strong hold they had before over the people's mind; men ceased to look for their G.o.ds to the sky or to the tempest, and began to look instead to the long ceremonies of the priest or to the hymn he chanted at the altar, or to the austerities he practised. G.o.ds of a new type now make their appearance. As in the Vedic period we saw that Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, had a place beside Indra and Varuna, so now we see that the supreme deity is named Brahma. The prayer connected with the sacrifice has given its name to the ruler of the universe. Other names for the supreme are also found to be making their way to general use, as the old historical and mythological G.o.ds fall into the background, and an abstract divine unity is sought after. Praj.a.pati, lord of creatures, who is little heard of in the hymns, is frequently invoked as the head of all the G.o.ds, and a triad of G.o.ds is heard of, consisting of Agni, Vayu, Surya, fire, the air, the sun, and summing up the divine energies.

The attributes of the G.o.ds are personified, and a set of pale abstractions is thus added to the Pantheon; and spirits and goblins not heard of in the hymns, though not therefore necessarily unknown in the former period, make their appearance. These are, perhaps, the G.o.ds of the aborigines, who thus revenge themselves, as the religion of the invaders which at first suppressed them loses its earlier vigour. The strong G.o.ds retire and weak G.o.ds, many and shadowy, and bad as well as good, are worshipped. The Asuras were formerly the G.o.ds generally, now they are evil beings with whom the good G.o.ds have to contend.

3. Practical Life.--We possess very complete pictures of Indian life and manners in the period of Brahmanism. Of the codes of ancient sages by which Hindu society was supposed to be governed many are extant to us; and in Mr. Max Muller's _Sacred Books of the East_ the English reader may make himself acquainted with several of these. The most famous and the longest, is the laws of Manu, a mythical progenitor of mankind. In the form in which we have it this work dates probably from the second century A.D., but the body of the work is much older. Originally a local collection of rules, it extended its authority gradually over the entire Hindu population of India.

With other collections, also of local origin, it represents to us the condition of Indian society after the caste system became fixed; but much of the law thus handed down to us must have had its origin in prehistoric times.

The law of Manu hinges on the superiority of the Brahman over the other castes. The Brahmans form the centre of the state and really control everything; but their life, in turn, is framed in strict rules, and their whole history and actions are laid down for them to the last detail from the moment of their birth. The life of the Brahman is divided into four periods. For a quarter of his life he is a student living with a teacher and learning from him the sacred knowledge of the Vedas. Every act of study begins with the so-called Savitri-verse, "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine Vivifier. May he enlighten our understandings." This prayer, with the mystic syllable, Om (thought to have to do with the three G.o.ds of a triad, but probably the original meaning is Yes, an abstract all-embracing yes, in which nothing but pure being is affirmed), is repeated at every return to study, and also with great frequency at other times. The teacher is more to the student than his father, and is to be treated with the greatest deference and courtesy; these years are a training in gentle and seemly conduct as well as in law.

His student days completed, the Brahman offers his first sacrifice, marries, and becomes a householder. Little is said of earning a living; the Brahman is not to be worldly, but he is to be independent if he can. He is, however, allowed to beg if in want. But more stress is laid on the continued pursuit of knowledge, and on the domestic sacrifices to G.o.ds and manes which are to be his daily care. After he has brought up a son to take charge of his house and goods, the third stage of his life is reached; he may retire from the world and become a recluse, giving himself to contemplation and austerities. The fourth stage is that of the ascetic, _bhikku_ or _sannyasin_, the aged man who having given up all possessions, all human society, and the practice of all rites, and subsisting only on alms, seeks to purge his heart of all desire and to become united by deep meditation with the supreme soul, thus attaining union with Brahma and final liberation. In this section of the laws of Manu an ideal of moral perfection is set forth, which is not demanded at the earlier stages of life.

"_Let him not desire to die; let him not desire to live; let him wait for his time as a servant for the payment of his wages._

"_Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult any one, nor become any one's enemy for the sake of this perishable body. Against an angry man let him not in return show anger; let him bless when he is cursed._"

He is to be sedulously careful not to injure any living creature, he is to meditate on the supreme soul which is present in all organisms, both the highest and the lowest. He is to give up all attachments, and in this way, as his body decays, he enters even here into a state of perfect freedom and repose and union with the great spirit.

Such ideas prove that the mind of Brahmanism was not occupied with sacrifices alone. Manu speaks of the superintendence of sacrifices as only one of several careers which the Brahman might choose; and if he might with equal right devote himself to study or to self-discipline, we see that another side of religion than that directing itself to external G.o.ds or occupying itself with outward acts, was pressing itself forward. The inner world of the mind is growing larger as the outward G.o.ds grow shadowy; it is being found that salvation may be reached by inwards efforts as well as by outward rites, that the search for wisdom and the work of self-conquest, and a union with the deity which is quite apart from any offering or from any form of worship, also lead to salvation. It is objected to the ethics of Manu that the ideal they set up is not an active but a suffering one; the ascetic is placed on a higher platform than the householder, men are encouraged to withdraw from the performance of their duties in the family and in society, and to devote themselves to an aim which, however lofty, is personal and, so far, selfish. It is certainly a weakness in the religion that it has no higher aim than this to set before its most eager minds. Apart from this, life is regulated in a way we cannot but admire. Amid the ma.s.s of trivialities and formalities in which every action is involved there breathes a grave humane and gentle spirit, and a sound practical morality, and the ordinary household of the Brahman may have been a scene of activity and cheerfulness. The Sudra, however, is spoken of everywhere as a being whose degradation can never be removed, and to touch whom is to be defiled. Those who belonged to no caste were in a still worse plight and lived in the greatest misery.

4. Philosophy.--We have seen how both in the ritual system they administered and in the ideal they formed of the highest good, the Brahmans were led forward from the old ground of the Vedic nature-worship to a more inward and subjective religious att.i.tude.

The exaltation of Brahma, the power of prayer, to be the supreme G.o.d, was an advance from an external deity to a deity both external and present in man's own experience; and the appearance of a new way of salvation, though only permitted at first to the world-weary ascetic, in which inner contemplation and absorption could lead to the highest consummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was at hand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition is made from the service of G.o.ds external to man, by the mechanism of rites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feels himself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his own spiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members of the lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction made important contributions, and which may have appeared in its beginnings as a sceptical revolt against their own system, the Brahmans yet took part, and the works in which the record of it is contained became a part of revelation. The "Upanishads" or "communicated doctrines," form the third branch of the sacred knowledge, and much of this literature belongs to the period before Buddhism. These books are read still by the educated Hindu as part of scripture, and the philosophy of them is a part of his religion. We can only point out the princ.i.p.al terms and notions of that philosophy.

Seeking to escape from the confusion of many G.o.ds the Indian mind is looking out even from the Vedic period for some means to conceive of them all as one. In the earliest period each reigned in turn as the supreme; a G.o.d is supreme not because he is essentially the greatest of the G.o.ds, but because circ.u.mstances have brought him to the front.

This is Henotheism. Then we have attempts to sum them all up in one expression. Praj.a.pati, lord of creatures, Visvakarman, maker of all things, represent such attempts. Then we have as the supreme, Brahma, the power of prayer,[2] a being of a different character from all his predecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, a knower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits in unbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. In rendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are antic.i.p.ating.

Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean the person, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, the essential, innermost self. Now Brahma is the great self, the inmost essence of all things, which was before them, and is unaffected by their changes. But man also has an atma, a self; it may be very small and lodge in a part of the body where it cannot be detected, but it is there, and the small atma is the same as the great one. By what physiological doctrines this is upheld, cannot here be traced; but the notion of the atma, the great form of which in Brahma is identical with its small form in man, lies at the basis of Brahmanic thought.

[Footnote 2: On the etymology of Brahma see Mr. Max Muller's _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 366.]

In Brahma one G.o.d has been reached, but he has been reached by thinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates are unsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can only be described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meant to satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from any imperfection and entirely supreme--and it is the penalty of this that he has no clear outline or character. And how indeed is he to be related to the world? This world of change and decay, of disappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do with that? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer to this in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. It was due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in various ways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and this error has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth.

Or else it is held that it was not Brahma who became subject to illusion, but that the illusion resides in man's views and thoughts about the world; and if a man could free himself from the meshes of Maya by recognising that the world is an illusion, and that nothing exists but Brahma only, then he would have done something for his own emanc.i.p.ation, the Brahma in him would be free from illusion, and he would also have done something, though little, for the salvation of the world from its great error.

That the whole world-process is nothing but an illusion, a confused and troubled dream pa.s.sing over the mind of Brahma, who himself alone is real, this is the cardinal doctrine of Brahmanism, from which Buddhism also, as we shall see, sets out. The world is really nothing but an apparent world; and the true wisdom, the only salvation consists in knowing this, and in living a life in accordance with that knowledge. The wise man should regard a world which he knows to be illusion, with complete indifference; it can do nothing to him, he can do nothing for it; it affects him only with an ineradicable regret that it exists at all, and with a longing for its disappearance. The practical outcome of the state of matters which he recognises is firstly negative, that he must not allow the world to influence him at all, and, secondly, positive, that he must strive to be united with Brahma. The negative task is performed by withdrawing the mind from all particular things, and letting it be filled with the general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding the desires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire and ceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positive task is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot here describe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is within and realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts and affections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all is illusion morality disappears. There is no good, no evil, no effort to promote the good and lessen the evil. It is not because the world is bad that it is condemned, but because it exists. The energy which in other faiths is devoted to a moral struggle, is here poured into the ascetic discipline by which the individual looks to escape altogether from the world as it is. There are no good works, what is good is to abstain from all works; there is no benevolence further than that the mind must be kept clear of all that confuses or degrades; the salvation of the individual alone is sought after; there is no desire to spread the light and save others, since few are capable of that knowledge of the illusive nature of all things by which alone salvation is possible.

This, it is plain, could never be a popular religion. Brahma, the abstract one, does not appeal to the imagination; he could not drive out the popular nature-G.o.ds with their definite myths and attributes.

Nor could a religion spread among the people, which regarded the social and the domestic state as inferior, and could only be practised by one who had left his home and family. The hermits and ascetics and begging monks may form the religious aristocracy; but a teaching of a different nature was necessary for the people. And we find, in fact, two religions prevailing in India in the period of Brahmanism; that which we have described for the enlightened, who escapes in it from all law, all creed, all ritual, whose whole religion more than any other which ever flourished in the world is within the mind;[3] and on the other hand, a religion in which outward G.o.ds are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is counted sacred because a G.o.d or G.o.ds inspired it, and in which superst.i.tions gathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by no means killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On the contrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to a region whither the people could not follow, left the religion of the people to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine must here be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism received from the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to the higher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; the atman or self, which is identical with the supreme self, belongs to quite a different order of thought from the soul which was formerly in some one else, is now in me, and may yet come to be in many another being.

The doctrine is thought to have been an importation into India about the time we are speaking of. It admits of being made a powerful deterrent from vice and incentive to virtue. If my present sufferings are due not to my acts, but to the acts of the person in whom my soul dwelt before, it is possible for me so to act that my soul's future existence may be better and not worse than this one, and that it shall not sink but rise in the order of beings, and draw nearer to its final deliverance. Of this we shall hear more in connection with Buddhism.

[Footnote 3: "From the standpoint of unity with Brahma, the G.o.ds are no-G.o.ds, the Vedas no-Vedas."]

The further development of Indian religion, apart from Buddhism, is in two directions. There is a philosophical movement, in which the Brahmanic ideas on G.o.d, the world, the soul and its changes, are further worked out, and which leads to the six schools of Hindu philosophy. On the other hand, the G.o.ds have their history. Brahma remains the great G.o.d, but as his character is so undefined he is little worshipped. Indra, the old national G.o.d, yields to Vishnu, the old sun-G.o.d of the three steps (heaven, the air, the earth), who becomes the favourite deity. The stern and destructive S'iva is a new figure, and seems to be partly an adaptation of a G.o.d of the savage aborigines: his worship is the most fanatical. These three, the Creator, the Upholder, and the Destroyer, form the Trimurti, or divine trinity of India,--a trinity arrived at not by unfolding the riches of the one great G.o.d, but by compounding the claims of three G.o.ds who were rivals. The doctrine of incarnation is also found here.

Vishnu has ten avatars or incarnations in human form; he comes down to the earth when there is a special reason for his interference. In these avatars, especially in Krishna, the dark G.o.d, whose exploits as a hero are told in the great epic the Mahabharata, the need is to some extent met, of which both Buddhism and Christianity lay hold, of a divine figure who is not too far away from man, and who can be regarded with personal affection.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Most of the books mentioned at the end of last chapter deal also with Brahmanism.

Of the Brahmanic literature given in the Sacred Books of the East, the following may be mentioned:--

Vols. i. and xv. Upanishads.

Vols. ii. and xiv. Sacred Laws of the Aryas.

Vol. vii. The Inst.i.tutes of Vishnu.

Vols. xii., xxvi., and xli. The Satapatha-Brahmana (Sacrificial Rituals).

Vol. xxv. Manu.

Vols. xxix., and x.x.x. Grihya-Sutras (Domestic Ceremonies).

Vol. x.x.xiv. Vedic Hymns. xlvi. Hymns to Agni.

Vols. xlii.-xliv. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda.

Vols. x.x.xiv., x.x.xviii., xlviii. Vedanta Sutras.