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VIII. SCIENCE AND ART

Medicine—Minor arts—The tombs of Cyrus and Darius—The palaces of Persepolis—The Frieze of the Archers—Estimate of Persian art

The Persians seem to have deliberately neglected to train their children in any other art than that of life. Literature was a delicacy for which they had small use; science was a commodity which they could import from Babylon. They had a certain relish for poetry and romantic fiction, but they left these arts to hirelings and inferiors, preferring the exhilaration of keen-witted conversation to the quiet and solitary pleasures of reading and research. Poetry was sung rather than read, and perished with the singers.

Medicine was at first a function of the priests, who practised it on the principle that the Devil had created 99,999 diseases, which should be treated by a combination of magic and hygiene. They resorted more frequently to spells than to drugs, on the ground that the spells, though they might not cure the illness, would not kill the patient—which was more than could be said for the drugs.¹²⁸ Nevertheless lay medicine developed along with the growing wealth of Persia, and in the time of Artaxerxes II there was a well-organized guild of physicians and surgeons, whose fees were fixed by law—as in Hammurabi’s code—according to the social rank of the patient.¹²⁹ Priests were to be treated free. And just as, among ourselves, the medical novice practises for a year or two, as interne, upon the bodies of the immigrant and the poor, so among the Persians a young physician was expected to begin his career by treating infidels and foreigners. The Lord of Light himself had decreed it:

O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One, if a worshiper of God wish to practice the art of healing, on whom shall he first prove his skill—on the worshipers of Ahura-Mazda, or on the worshipers of the Daevas (the evil spirits)? Ahura-Mazda made answer and said: On worshipers of the Daevas shall he prove himself, rather than on worshipers of God. If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he die; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he die, he is unfit forever and ever; let him never attend any worshiper of God. . . . If he treat with the knife a worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a second worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; if he treat with the knife a third worshiper of the Daevas and he recover; then he is fit forever and ever; he may at his will treat worshipers of God, and heal them with the knife.¹³⁰

Having dedicated themselves to empire, the Persians found their time and energies taken up with war, and, like the Romans, depended largely upon imports for their art. They had a taste for pretty things, but they relied upon foreign or foreign-born artists to produce them, and upon provincial revenues to pay for them. They had beautiful homes and luxuriant gardens, which sometimes became hunting-parks or zoological collections; they had costly furniture—tables plated or inlaid with silver or gold, couches spread with exotic coverlets, floors carpeted with rugs resilient in texture and rich in all the colors of earth and sky;¹³¹ they drank from golden goblets, and adorned their tables or their shelves with vases turned by foreign hands;* they liked song and dance, and the playing of the harp, the flute, the drum and the tambourine. Jewelry abounded, from tiaras and ear-rings to golden anklets and shoes; even the men flaunted jewels on necks and ears and arms. Pearls, rubies, emeralds and lapis lazuli came from abroad, but turquoise came from the Persian mines, and contributed the customary material for the aristocrat’s signet-ring. Gems of monstrous and grotesque form copied the supposed features of favorite devils. The king sat on a golden throne covered with golden canopies upheld with pillars of gold.¹³³

Only in architecture did the Persians achieve a style of their own. Under Cyrus, Darius I and Xerxes I they erected tombs and palaces which archeology has very incompletely exhumed; and it may be that those prying historians, the pick and the shovel, will in the near future raise our estimate of Persian art.† At Pasargadae Alexander spared for us, with characteristic graciousness, the tomb of Cyrus I. The caravan road now crosses the bare platform that once bore the palaces of Cyrus and his mad son; of these nothing survives except a few broken columns here and there, or a door-jamb bearing the features of Cyrus in bas-relief. Nearby, on the plain, is the tomb, showing the wear of twenty-four centuries: a simple stone chapel, quite Greek in restraint and form, rising to some thirty-five feet in height upon a terraced base. Once, surely, it was a loftier monument, with some fitting pedestal; today it seems a little bare and forlorn, having the shape but hardly the substance of beauty; the cracked and ruined stones merely chasten us with the quiet permanence of the inanimate. Far south, at Naksh-i-Rustam, near Persepolis, is the tomb of Darius I, cut like some Hindu chapel into the face of the mountain rock. The entrance is carved to simulate a palace façade, with four slender columns about a modest portal; above it, as if on a roof, figures representing the subject peoples of Persia support a dais on which the King is shown worshiping Ahura-Mazda and the moon. It is conceived and executed with aristocratic refinement and simplicity.

The rest of such Persian architecture as has survived the wars, raids, thefts and weather of two millenniums is composed of palace ruins. At Ecbatana the early kings built a royal residence of cedar and cypress, plated with metal, which still stood in the days of Polybius (ca. 150 B.C.), but of which no sign remains. The most imposing relics of ancient Persia, now rising day by day out of the grasping and secretive earth, are the stone steps, platform and columns at Persepolis; for there each monarch from Darius onward built a palace to defer the oblivion of his name. The great external stairs that mounted from the plain to the elevation on which the buildings rested were unlike anything else in architectural records; derived, presumably, from the flights of steps that approached and encircled the Mesopotamian ziggurats, they had nevertheless a character specifically their own—so gradual in ascent and so spacious that ten horsemen could mount them abreast*¹³⁵ They must have formed a brilliant approach to the vast platform, twenty to fifty feet high, fifteen hundred feet long and one thousand feet wide, that bore the royal palaces.† Where the two flights of steps, coming from either side, met at their summit, stood a gateway, or propyleum, flanked by winged and human-headed bulls in the worst Assyrian style. At the right stood the masterpiece of Persian architecture—the Chehil Minar or Great Hall of Xerxes I, covering, with its roomy antechambers, an area of more than a hundred thousand square feet—vaster, if size mattered, than vast Karnak, or any European cathedral except Milan’s.¹³⁸ Another flight of steps led to this Great Hall; these stairs were flanked with ornamental parapets, and their supporting sides were carved with the finest bas-reliefs yet discovered in Persia.¹³⁹ Thirteen of the once seventy-two columns of Xerxes’ palace stand among the ruins, like palm-trees in some desolate oasis; and these marble columns, though mutilated, are among the nearly perfect works of man. They are slenderer than any columns of Egypt or Greece, and rise to the unusual height of sixty-four feet. Their shafts are fluted with forty-eight small grooves; their bases resemble bells overlaid with inverted leaves; their capitals for the most part take the form of floral—almost “Ionic” volutes, surmounted by the forequarters of two bulls or unicorns upon whose necks, joined back to back, rested the crossbeam or architrave. This was surely of wood, for such fragile columns, so wide apart, could hardly have supported a stone entablature. The door-jambs and window-frames were of ornamented black stone that shone like ebony; the walls were of brick, but they were covered with enameled tiles painted in brilliant panels of animals and flowers; the columns, pilasters and steps were of fine white limestone or hard blue marble. Behind, or east of, this Chehil Minar rose the “Hall of a Hundred Columns”; nothing remains of it but one pillar and the outlines of the general plan. Possibly these palaces were the most beautiful ever erected in the ancient or modern world.

At Susa the Artaxerxes I and II built palaces of which only the foundations survive. They were constructed of brick, redeemed by the finest glazed tiles known; from Susa comes the famous “Frieze of the Archers”—probably the faithful “Immortals” who guarded the king. The stately bowmen seem dressed rather for court ceremony than for war; their tunics resound with bright colors, their hair and beards are wondrously curled, their hands bear proudly and stiffly their official staffs. In Susa, as in the other capitals, painting and sculpture were dependent arts serving architecture, and the statuary was mostly the work of artists imported from Assyria, Babylonia and Greece.¹⁴⁰

One might say of Persian art, as perhaps of nearly every art, that all the elements of it were borrowed. The tomb of Cyrus took its form from Lydia, the slender stone columns improved upon the like pillars of Assyria, the colonnades and bas-reliefs acknowledged their inspiration from Egypt, the animal capitals were an infection from Nineveh and Babylon. It was the ensemble that made Persian architecture individual and different—an aristocratic taste that refined the overwhelming columns of Egypt and the heavy masses of Mesopotamia into the brilliance and elegance, the proportion and harmony of Persepolis. The Greeks would hear with wonder and admiration of these halls and palaces; their busy travelers and observant diplomats would bring them stimulating word of the art and luxury of Persia. Soon they would transform the double volutes and stiff-necked animals of these graceful pillars into the smooth lobes of the Ionic capital; and they would shorten and strengthen the shafts to make them bear any entablature, whether of wood or of stone. Architecturally there was but a step from Persepolis to Athens. All the Near Eastern world, about to die for a thousand years, prepared to lay its heritage at the feet of Greece.

IX. DECADENCE

How a nation may die-Xerxes-A paragraph of murders-Artaxerxes II—Cyrus the Younger—Darius the Little—Causes of decay: political, military, moral—Alexander conquers Persia, and advances upon India

The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral as well as the physical backbone of Persia was broken by Marathon, Salamis and Plataea; the emperors exchanged Mars for Venus, and the nation descended into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated almost in detail the decline of Rome: immorality and degeneration among the people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne. The Persians, like the Medes before them, passed from stoicism to epicureanism in a few generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy: these men who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day now interpreted the rule to allow them one meal—prolonged from noon to night; they stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies, and often served entire animals to their guests; they stuffed themselves with rich rare meats, and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts.^140a A corrupt and corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while drunkenness became the common vice of every class.^140b Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

Xerxes I was every inch a king—externally; tall and vigorous, he was by royal consent the handsomest man in his empire.¹⁴¹ But there was never yet a handsome man who was not vain, nor any physically vain man whom some woman has not led by the nose. Xerxes was divided by many mistresses, and became for his people an exemplar of sensuality. His defeat at Salamis was in the nature of things; for he was great only in his love of magnitude, not in his capacity to rise to a crisis or to be in fact and need a king. After twenty years of sexual intrigue and administrative indolence he was murdered by a courtier, Artabanus, and was buried with regal pomp and general satisfaction.

Only the records of Rome after Tiberius could rival in bloodiness the royal annals of Persia. The murderer of Xerxes was murdered by Artaxerxes I, who, after a long reign, was succeeded by Xerxes II, who was murdered a few weeks later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who was murdered six months later by Darius II, who suppressed the revolt of Terituchmes by having him slain, his wife cut into pieces, and his mother, brothers and sisters buried alive. Darius II was followed by his son Artaxerxes II, who at the battle of Cunaxa, had to fight to the death his own brother, the younger Cyrus, when the youth tried to seize the royal power. Artaxerxes II enjoyed a long reign, killed his son Darius for conspiracy, and died of a broken heart on finding that another son, Ochus, was planning to assassinate him. Ochus ruled for twenty years, and was poisoned by his general Bagoas. This iron-livered Warwick placed Arses, son of Ochus, on the throne, assassinated Arses’ brothers to make Arses secure, then assassinated Arses and his infant children, and gave the sceptre to Codomannus, a safely effeminate friend. Codomannus reigned for eight years under the name of Darius III, and died in battle against Alexander at Arbela, in the final ruin of his country. Not even the democracies of our time have known such indiscriminate leadership.

It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that created it disappears from those who inherit it, at the very time that its subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty. Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the artificial bond. In its two hundred years of empire Persia did nothing to lessen this heterogeneity, these centrifugal forces; she was content to rule a mob of nations, and never thought of making them into a state. Year by year the union became more difficult to preserve. As the vigor of the emperors relaxed, the boldness and ambition of the satraps grew; they purchased or intimidated the generals and secretaries who were supposed to share and limit their power, they arbitrarily enlarged their armies and revenues, and engaged in recurrent plots against the king. The frequency of revolt and war exhausted the vitality of little Persia; the braver stocks were slaughtered in battle after battle, until none but the cautious survived; and when these were conscripted to face Alexander they proved to be cowards almost to a man. No improvements had been made in the training or equipment of the troops, or in the tactics of the generals; these blundered childishly against Alexander, while their disorderly ranks, armed mostly with darts, proved to be mere targets for the long spears and solid phalanxes of the Macedonians.¹⁴² Alexander frolicked, but only after the battle was won; the Persian leaders brought their concubines with them, and had no ambition for war. The only real soldiers in the Persian army were the Greeks.

From the day when Xerxes turned back defeated from Salamis, it became evident that Greece would one day challenge the empire. Persia controlled one end of the great trade route that bound western Asia with the Mediterranean, Greece controlled the other; and the ancient acquisitiveness and ambition of men made such a situation provocative of war. As soon as Greece found a master who could give her unity, she would attack.

Alexander crossed the Hellespont without opposition, having what seemed to Asia a negligible force of 30,000 footmen and 5,000 cavalry.* A Persian army of 40,000 troops tried to stop him at the Granicus; the Greeks lost 115 men, the Persians 20,000.¹⁴⁴ Alexander marched south and east, taking cities and receiving surrenders for a year. Meanwhile Darius III gathered a horde of 600,000 soldiers and adventurers; five days were required to march them over a bridge of boats across the Euphrates; six hundred mules and three hundred camels were needed to carry the royal purse.¹⁴⁵ When the two armies met at Issus Alexander had no more than 30,000 followers; but Darius, with all the stupidity that destiny could require, had chosen a field in which only a small part of his multitude could fight at one time. When the slaughter was over the Macedonians had lost some 450, the Persians 110,000 men, most of these being slain in wild retreat; Alexander, in reckless pursuit, crossed a stream on a bridge of Persian corpses.¹⁴⁶ Darius fled ignominiously, abandoning his mother, a wife, two daughters, his chariot, and his luxuriously appointed tent. Alexander treated the Persian ladies with a chivalry that surprised the Greek historians, contenting himself with marrying one of the daughters. If we may believe Quintus Curtius, the mother of Darius became so fond of Alexander that after his death she put an end to her own life by voluntary starvation.¹⁴⁷

The young conqueror turned aside now with what seemed foolhardy leisureliness to establish his control over all of western Asia; he did not wish to advance farther without organizing his conquests and building a secure line of communications. The citizens of Babylon, like those of Jerusalem, came out en masse to welcome him, offering him their city and their gold; he accepted these graciously, and pleased them by restoring the temples which the unwise Xerxes had destroyed. Darius sent him a proposal of peace, saying that he would give Alexander ten thousand talents* for the safe return of his mother, his wife and his children, would offer him his daughter in marriage, and would acknowledge his sovereignty over all Asia west of the Euphrates, if only Alexander would end the war and become his friend. Parmenio, second in command among the Greeks, said that if he were Alexander he would be glad to accept such happy terms, and avoid with honor the hazard of some disastrous defeat. Alexander remarked that he would do likewise—if he were Parmenio. Being Alexander, he answered Darius that his offer meant nothing, since he, Alexander, already possessed such parts of Asia as Darius proposed to cede to him, and could marry the daughter of the emperor when he pleased. Darius, despairing of peace with so reckless a logician, turned unwillingly to the task of collecting another and larger force.

Meanwhile Alexander had taken Tyre, and annexed Egypt; now he marched back across the great empire, straight to its distant capitals. In twenty days from Babylon his army reached Susa, and took it without resistance; thence it advanced so quickly to Persepolis that the guards of the royal treasury had no time to secrete its funds. There Alexander committed one of the most unworthy acts of his incredible career: against the counsel of Parmenio, and (we are told) to please the courtesan Thaïs,† he burned the palaces of Persepolis to the ground, and permitted his troops to loot the city. Then, having raised the spirits of his army with booty and gifts, he turned north to meet Darius for the last time.

Darius had gathered, chiefly from his eastern provinces, a new army of a million men¹⁴⁸—Persians, Medes, Babylonians, Syrians, Armenians, Cappadocians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, Sacæ and Hindus—and had equipped them no longer with bows and arrows, but with javelins, spears, shields, horses, elephants, and scythe-wielding chariots intended to mow down the enemy like wheat; with this vast force old Asia would make one more effort to preserve itself from adolescent Europe. Alexander, with 7,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, met the motley mob at Gaugamela,* and by superior weapons, generalship and courage destroyed it in a day. Darius again chose the better part of valor, but his generals, disgusted with this second flight, murdered him in his tent. Alexander put to death such of the assassins as he could find, sent the body of Darius in state to Persepolis, and ordered it to be buried in the manner of the Achæmenid kings. The Persian people flocked readily to the standard of the conquerer, charmed by his generosity and his youth. Alexander organized Persia into a province of the Macedonian Empire, left a strong garrison to guard it, and marched on to India.

BOOK TWO

INDIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. . . . It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty years. . . . let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . . The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. . . . He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

—Vivekananda.¹

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF INDIAN HISTORY*

B.C.

4000:

Neolithic Culture in Mysore

2900:

Culture of Mohenjo-daro

1600:

Aryan invasion of India

1000-500:

Formation of the Vedas

800-500:

The Upanishads

599-527:

Mahavira, founder of Jainism

563-483:

Buddha

500:

Sushruta, physician

500:

Kapila and the Sankhya Philosophy

500:

The earliest Puranas

329:

Greek invasion of India

325:

Alexander leaves India

322-185:

The Maury a Dynasty

322-298:

Chandragupta Maurya

302-298:

Megasthenes at Pataliputra

273-232:

Ashoka

A.D. 120:

Kanishka, Kushan King

120:

Charaka, physician

320-530:

The Gupta Dynasty

320-330:

Chandragupta I

330-380:

Samudragupta

380-413:

Vikramaditya

399-414:

Fa-Hien in India

100-700:

Temples and frescoes of Ajanta

400:

Kalidasa, poet and dramatist

455-500:

Hun invasion of India

499:

Aryabhata, mathematician

505-587:

Varahamihira, astronomer

598-660:

Brahmagupta, astronomer

606-648:

King Harsha-Vardhana

608-642:

Pulakeshin II, Chalukyan King

629-645:

Yuan Chwang in India

629-50:

Srong-tsan Gampo, King of Tibet

630-800:

Golden Age of Tibet

639:

Srong-tsan Gampo founds Lhasa

712:

Arab conquest of Sind

750:

Rise of the Pallava Kingdom

750-780:

Building of Borobudur, Java

760:

The Kailasha Temple

788-820:

Shankara, Vedanta philosopher

800-1300:

Golden Age of Cambodia

800-1400:

Golden Age of of Rajputana

900:

Rise of the Chola Kingdom

973-1048:

Alberuni, Arab scholar

993:

Foundation of Delhi

997-1030:

Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni

A.D.

1008:

Mahmud invades India

1076-1126:

Vikramaditya Chalukya

1114:

Bhaskara, mathematician

1150:

Building of Angkor Wat

1186:

Turkish invasion of India

1206-1526:

The Sultanate of Delhi

1206-1210:

Sultan Kutbu-d Din Aibak

1288-1293:

Marco Polo in India

1296-1315:

Sultan Alau-d-din

1303:

Alau-d-din takes Chitor

1325-1351:

Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak

1336:

Foundation of Vijayanagar

1336-1405:

Timur (Tamerlane)

1351-1388:

Sultan Firoz Shah

1398:

Timur invades India

1440-1518:

Kabir, poet

1469-1538:

Baba Nanak, founder of the Sikhs

1483-1530:

Babur founds the Mogul Dynasty

1483-1573:

Sur Das, poet

1498:

Vasco da Gama reaches India

1509-1529:

Krishna deva Raya rules Vijayanagar

1510:

Portugese occupy Goa

1530-1542:

Humayun

1532-1624:

Tulsi Das, poet

1542-1545:

Sher Shah

1555-1556:

Restoration and death of Humayun

1560-1605:

Akbar

1565:

Fall of Vijayanagar at Talikota

1600:

Foundation of East India Co.

1605-1627:

Jehangir

1628-1658:

Shah Jehan

1631:

Death of Mumtaz Mahal

1632-1653:

Building of the Taj Mahal

1658-1707:

Aurangzeb

1674:

The French found Pondicherry

1674-1680:

Raja Shivaji

1690:

The English found Calcutta

1756-1763:

French-English War in India

1757:

Battle of Plassey

1765-1767:

Robert Clive, Gov. of Bengal

1772-1774:

Warren Hastings, Gov. of Bengal

1788-1795:

Trial of Warren Hastings

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF INDIAN HISTORY

A.D.

1786-1793:

Lord Cornwallis, Gov. of Bengal

1798-1805:

Marquess Wellesley, Gov. of Bengal

1828-1835:

Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck, Governor-General of India

1828:

Ram Mohun Roy founds the Brahma-Somaj

1829:

Abolition of suttee

1836-1886:

Ramakrishna

1857:

The Sepoy Mutiny

1858:

India taken over by the British Crown

1861:

Birth of Rabindranath Tagore

A.D.

1863-1902:

Vivekananda (Narendranath Dutt)

1869:

Birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

1875:

Dayananda founds the Arya-Somaj.

1880-1884:

Marquess of Ripon, Viceroy

1885:

Foundation of India National Congress

1889-1905:

Baron Curzon, Viceroy

1916-1921:

Baron Chelmsford, Viceroy

1919:

Amritsar

1921-1926:

Earl of Reading, Viceroy

1926-1931:

Lord Irwin, Viceroy

1931-:

Lord Willingdon, Viceroy

CHAPTER XIV

The Foundations of India

I. SCENE OF THE DRAMA

The rediscovery of India—A glance at the map—Climatic influences

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.*

The scene of the history is a great triangle narrowing down from the everlasting snows of the Himalayas to the eternal heat of Ceylon. In a corner at the left lies Persia, close akin to Vedic India in people, language and gods. Following the northern frontier eastward we strike Afghanistan; here is Kandahar, the ancient Gandhara, where Greek and Hindu* sculpture fused for a while, and then parted never to meet again; and north of it is Kabul, from which the Moslems and the Moguls made those bloody raids that gave them India for a thousand years. Within the Indian frontier, a short day’s ride from Kabul, is Peshawar, where the old northern habit of invading the south still persists. Note how near to India Russia comes at the Pamirs and the passes of the Hindu Kush; hereby will hang much politics. Directly at the northern tip of India is the province of Kashmir, whose very name recalls the ancient glory of India’s textile crafts. South of it is the Punjab—i.e., “Land of the Five Rivers”—with the great city of Lahore, and Shimla, summer capital at the foot of the Himalayas (“Home of the Snow”). Through the western Punjab runs the mighty river Indus, a thousand miles in length; its name came from the native word for river, sindhu, which the Persians (changing it to Hindu) applied to all northern India in their word Hindustan—i.e., “Land of the Rivers.” Out of this Persian term Hindu the invading Greeks made for us the word India.

From the Punjab the Jumna and the Ganges flow leisurely to the southeast; the Jumna waters the new capital at Delhi, and mirrors the Taj Mahal at Agra; the Ganges broadens down to the Holy City, Benares, washes ten million devotees daily, and fertilizes with its dozen mouths the province of Bengal and the old British capital at Calcutta. Still farther east is Burma, with the golden pagodas of Rangoon and the sunlit road to Mandalay. From Mandalay back across India to the western airport at Karachi is almost as long a flight as from New York to Los Angeles. South of the Indus, on such a flight, one would pass over Rajputana, land of the heroic Rajputs, with its famed cities of Gwalior and Chitor, Jaipur, Ajmer and Udaipur. South and west is the “Presidency” or province of Bombay, with teeming cities at Surat, Ahmedabad, Bombay and Poona. East and south lie the progressive native-ruled states of Hyderabad and Mysore, with picturesque capitals of the same names. On the west coast is Goa, and on the eastern coast is Pondicherry, where the conquering British have left to the Portuguese and the French respectively a few square miles of territorial consolation. Along the Bay of Bengal the Madras Presidency runs, with the well-governed city of Madras as its center, and the sublime and gloomy temples of Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madura and Rameshvaram adorning its southern boundaries. And then “Adam’s Bridge”—a reef of sunken islands—beckons us across the strait to Ceylon, where civilization flourished sixteen hundred years ago. All these are a little part of India.

We must conceive it, then, not as a nation, like Egypt, Babylonia, or England, but as a continent as populous and polyglot as Europe, and almost as varied in climate and race, in literature, philosophy and art. The north is harassed by cold blasts from the Himalayas, and by the fogs that form when these blasts meet the southern sun. In the Punjab the rivers have created great alluvial plains of unsurpassed fertility;⁴ but south of the river-valleys the sun rules as an unchecked despot, the plains are dry and bare, and require for their fruitful tillage no mere husbandry but an almost stupefying slavery.⁵ Englishmen do not stay in India more than five years at a time; and if a hundred thousand of them rule three thousand times their number of Hindus it is because they have not stayed there long enough.

Here and there, constituting one-fifth of the land, the primitive jungle remains, a breeding-place of tigers, leopards, wolves and snakes. In the southern third, or Deccan,* the heat is drier, or is tempered with breezes from the sea. But from Delhi to Ceylon the dominating fact in India is heat: heat that has weakened the physique, shortened the youth, and affected the quietist religion and philosophy of the inhabitants. The only relief from this heat is to sit still, to do nothing, to desire nothing; or in the summer months the monsoon wind may bring cooling moisture and fertilizing rain from the sea. When the monsoon fails to blow, India starves, and dreams of Nirvana.

II. THE OLDEST CIVILIZATION?

Prehistoric India—Mohenjo-daro—Its antiquity

In the days when historians supposed that history had begun with Greece, Europe gladly believed that India had been a hotbed of barbarism until the “Aryan” cousins of the European peoples had migrated from the shores of the Caspian to bring the arts and sciences to a savage and benighted peninsula. Recent researches have marred this comforting picture—as future researches will change the perspective of these pages. In India, as elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them. Remains of an Old Stone Age fill many cases in the museums of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay; and neolithic objects have been found in nearly every state.⁶ These, however, were cultures, not yet a civilization.

In 1924 the world of scholarship was again aroused by news from India: Sir John Marshall announced that his Indian aides, R. D. Banerji in particular, had discovered at Mohenjo-daro, on the western bank of the lower Indus, remains of what seemed to be an older civilization than any yet known to historians. There, and at Harappa, a few hundred miles to the north, four or five superimposed cities were excavated, with hundreds of solidly-built brick houses and shops, ranged along wide streets as well as narrow lanes, and rising in many cases to several stories. Let Sir John estimate the age of these remains:

These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro.⁷

Among the finds at these sites were household utensils and toilet outfits; pottery painted and plain, hand-turned and turned on the wheel; terracottas, dice and chess-men; coins older than any previously known; over a thousand seals, most of them engraved, and inscribed in an unknown pictographic script; faïence work of excellent quality; stone carving superior to that of the Sumerians;⁸ copper weapons and implements, and a copper model of a two-wheeled cart (one of our oldest examples of a wheeled vehicle); gold and silver bangles, ear-ornaments, necklaces, and other jewelry “so well finished and so highly polished,” says Marshall, “that they might have come out of a Bond Street jeweler’s of today rather than from a prehistoric house of 5,000 years ago.”⁹

Strange to say, the lowest strata of these remains showed a more developed art than the upper layers—as if even the most ancient deposits were from a civilization already hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. Some of the implements were of stone, some of copper, some of bronze, suggesting that this Indus culture had arisen in a Chalcolithic Age—i.e., in a transition from stone to bronze as the material of tools.¹⁰ The indications are that Mohenjo-daro was at its height when Cheops built the first great pyramid; that it had commercial, religious and artistic connections with Sumeria and Babylonia;* and that it survived over three thousand years, until the third century before Christ.†¹³ We cannot tell yet whether, as Marshall believes, Mohenjo-daro represents the oldest of all civilizations known. But the exhuming of prehistoric India has just begun; only in our time has archeology turned from Egypt across Mesopotamia to India. When the soil of India has been turned up like that of Egypt we shall probably find there a civilization older than that which flowered out of the mud of the Nile.*

III. THE INDO-ARYANS

The natives—The invaders—The village community—Caste—Warriors—Priests—Merchants—Workers—Outcastes

Despite the continuity of the remains in Sind and Mysore, we feel that between the heyday of Mohenjo-daro and the advent of the Aryans a great gap stands in our knowledge; or rather that our knowledge of the past is an occasional gap in our ignorance. Among the Indus relics is a peculiar seal, composed of two serpent heads, which was the characteristic symbol of the oldest historic people of India—those serpent-worshiping Nagas whom the invading Aryans found in possession of the northern provinces, and whose descendants still linger in the remoter hills.²⁰ Farther south the land was occupied by a dark-skinned, broad-nosed people whom, without knowing the origin of the word, we call Dravidians. They were already a civilized people when the Aryans broke down upon them; their adventurous merchants sailed the sea even to Sumeria and Babylon, and their cities knew many refinements and luxuries.²¹ It was from them, apparently, that the Aryans took their village community and their systems of land-tenure and taxation.²² To this day the Deccan is still essentially Dravidian in stock and customs, in language, literature and arts.

The invasion and conquest of these flourishing tribes by the Aryans was part of that ancient process whereby, periodically, the north has swept down violently upon the settled and pacified south; this has been one of the main streams of history, on which civilizations have risen and fallen like epochal undulations. The Aryans poured down upon the Dravidians, the Achaeans and Dorians upon the Cretans and Ægeans, the Germans upon the Romans, the Lombards upon the Italians, the English upon the world. Forever the north produces rulers and warriors, the south produces artists and saints, and the meek inherit heaven.

Who were these marauding Aryans? They themselves used the term as meaning noblemen (Sanskrit arya, noble), but perhaps this patriotic derivation is one of those after-thoughts which cast scandalous gleams of humor into philology.* Very probably they came from that Caspian region which their Persian cousins called Airyana-vaejo—“The Aryan home.”† About the same time that the Aryan Kassites overran Babylonia, the Vedic Aryans began to enter India.

Like the Germans invading Italy, these Aryans were rather immigrants than conquerors. But they brought with them strong physiques, a hearty appetite in both solids and liquids, a ready brutality, a skill and courage in war, which soon gave them the mastery of northern India. They fought with bows and arrows, led by armored warriors in chariots, who wielded battle-axes and hurled spears. They were too primitive to be hypocrites: they subjugated India without pretending to elevate it. They wanted land, and pasture for their cattle; their word for war said nothing about national honor, but simply meant “a desire for more cows.”²⁶ Slowly they made their way eastward along the Indus and the Ganges, until all Hindustan‡ was under their control.

As they passed from armed warfare to settled tillage their tribes gradually coalesced into petty states. Each state was ruled by a king checked by a council of warriors; each tribe was led by a raja or chieftain limited in his power by a tribal council; each tribe was composed of comparatively independent village communities governed by assemblies of family heads. “Have you heard, Ananda,” Buddha is represented as asking his St. John, “that the Vajjians foregather often, and frequent public meetings of their clans? . . . So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians foregather thus often, and frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long may they be expected not to decline, but to prosper.”²⁷

Like all peoples, the Aryans had rules of endogamy and exogamy-forbidding marriage outside the racial group or within near degrees of kinship. From these rules came the most characteristic of Hindu institutions. Outnumbered by a subject people whom they considered inferior to themselves, the Aryans foresaw that without restrictions on intermarriage they would soon lose their racial identity; in a century or two they would be assimilated and absorbed. The first caste division, therefore, was not by status but by color;* it divided long noses from broad noses, Aryans from Nagas and Dravidians; it was merely the marriage regulation of an endogamous group.²⁸ In its later profusion of hereditary, racial and occupational divisions the caste system hardly existed in Vedic times.²⁹ Among the Aryans themselves marriage (except of near kin) was free, and status was not defined by birth.

As Vedic India (2000-1000 B.C.) passed into the “Heroic” age (1000-500 B.C.)—i.e., as India changed from the conditions pictured in the Vedas into those described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—occupations became more specialized and hereditary, and caste divisions were more rigidly defined. At the top were the Kshatriyas, or fighters, who held it a sin to die in bed.³⁰ Even the religious ceremonials were in the early days performed by chieftains or kings, in the fashion of Cæsar playing Pontifex; the Brahmans or priests were then mere assistants at the sacrifice.³¹ In the Ramayana a Kshatriya protests passionately against mating a “proud and peerless bride” of warrior stock to “a prating priest and Brahman”;³² the Jain books take for granted the leadership of the Kshatriyas, and the Buddhist literature goes so far as to call the Brahmans “low-born.”³³ Even in India? things change.

But as war gradually gave way to peace—and as religion, being then largely an aide to agriculture in the face of the incalculable elements, grew in social importance and ritual complexity, and required expert intermediaries between men and gods—the Brahmans increased in number, wealth and power. As educators of the young, and oral transmitters of the race’s history, literature and laws, they were able to recreate the past and form the future in their own image, moulding each generation into greater reverence for the priests, and building for their caste a prestige which would, in later centuries, give them the supreme place in Hindu society. Already in Buddha’s days they had begun to challenge the supremacy of the Kshatriyas; they pronounced these warriors inferior, even as the Kshatriyas pronounced the priests inferior;³⁴ and Buddha felt that there was much to be said for both points of view. Even in Buddha’s time, however, the Kshatriyas had not conceded intellectual leadership to the Brahmans; and the Buddhist movement itself, founded by a Kshatriya noble, contested the religious hegemony of India with the Brahmans for a thousand years.

Below these ruling minorities were the Vaisyas, merchants and freemen hardly distinct as a caste before Buddha, the Shudras, or workingmen, who comprised most of the native population; and finally the Outcastes or Pariahs—unconverted native tribes like the Chandalas, war captives, and men reduced to slavery as a punishment.³⁵ Out of this originally small group of casteless men grew the 40,000,000 “Untouchables” of India today.

IV. INDO-ARYAN SOCIETY

Herders—Tillers of the soil—Craftsmen—Traders—Coinage and credit—Morals—Marriage—Woman

How did these Aryan Indians live? At first by war and spoliation; then by herding, tillage and industry in a rural routine not unlike that of medieval Europe; for until the Industrial Revolution in which we live, the basic economic and political life of man had remained essentially the same since neolithic days. The Indo-Aryans raised cattle, used the cow without considering it sacred, and ate meat when they could afford it, having offered a morsel to priests or gods;³⁶ Buddha, after nearly starving himself in his ascetic youth, seems to have died from a hearty meal of pork.³⁷ They planted barley, but apparently knew nothing of rice in Vedic times. The fields were divided by each village community among its constituent families, but were irrigated in common; the land could not be sold to an outsider, and could be bequeathed only to the family heirs in direct male line. The majority of the people were yeomen owning their own soil; the Aryans held it a disgrace to work for hire. There were, we are assured, no landlords and no paupers, no millionaires and no slums.³⁸

In the towns handicrafts flourished among independent artisans and apprentices, organized, half a thousand years before Christ, into powerful guilds of metal-workers, wood-workers, stone-workers, leather-workers, ivory-workers, basket-makers, house-painters, decorators, potters, dyers, fishermen, sailors, hunters, trappers, butchers, confectioners, barbers, shampooers, florists, cooks—the very list reveals the fulness and variety of Indo-Aryan life. The guilds settled intra-guild affairs, even arbitrating difficulties between members and their wives. Prices were determined, as among ourselves, not by supply and demand but by the gullibility of the purchaser; in the palace of the king, however, was an official Valuer who, like our secretive Bureau of Standards, tested goods to be bought, and dictated terms to the makers.³⁹

Trade and travel had advanced to the stage of horse and two-wheeled wagon, but were still medievally difficult; caravans were held up by taxes at every petty frontier, and as like as not by highwaymen at any turn. Transport by river and sea was more developed: about 860 B.C. ships with modest sails and hundreds of oars carried to Mesopotamia, Arabia and Egypt such typical Indian products as perfumes and spices, cotton and silk, shawls and muslins, pearls and rubies, ebony and precious stones, and ornate brocades of silver and gold.⁴⁰

Trade was stunted by clumsy methods of exchange—at first by barter, then by the use of cattle as currency; brides like Homer’s “oxen-bearing maidens” were bought with cows.⁴¹ Later a heavy copper coinage was issued, guaranteed, however, only by private individuals. There were no banks; hoarded money was hidden in the house, or buried in the ground, or deposited with a friend. Out of this, in Buddha’s age, grew a credit system: merchants in different towns facilitated trade by giving one another letters of credit; loans could be obtained from such Rothschilds at eighteen per cent,⁴² and there was much talk of promissory notes. The coinage was not sufficiently inconvenient to discourage gambling; already dice were essential to civilization. In many cases gambling halls were provided for his subjects by the king, in the fashion, if not quite in the style, of Monaco; and a portion of the receipts went to the royal treasury.⁴³ It seems a scandalous arrangement to us, who are not quite accustomed to having our gambling institutions contribute so directly to the support of our public officials.

Commercial morality stood on a high level. The kings of Vedic India, as of Homeric Greece, were not above lifting cattle from their neighbors;⁴⁴ but the Greek historian of Alexander’s campaigns describes the Hindus as “remarkable for integrity, so reasonable as seldom to have recourse to lawsuits, and so honest as to require neither locks to their doors nor writings to bind their agreements; they are in the highest degree truthful.⁴⁵ The Rig-veda speaks of incest, seduction, prostitution, abortion and adultery,⁴⁶ and there are some signs of homosexuality;⁴⁷ but the general picture that we derive from the Vedas and the epics is one of high standards in the relations of the sexes and the life of the family.

Marriage might be entered into by forcible abduction of the bride, by purchase of her, or by mutual consent. Marriage by consent, however, was considered slightly disreputable; women thought it more honorable to be bought and paid for, and a great compliment to be stolen,⁴⁸ Polygamy was permitted, and was encouraged among the great; it was an act of merit to support several wives, and to transmit ability.⁴⁹ The story of Draupadi,⁵⁰ who married five brothers at once, indicates the occasional occurrence, in Epic days, of that strange polyandry—the marriage of one woman to several men, usually brothers—which survived in Ceylon till 1859, and still lingers in the mountain villages of Tibet.⁵¹ But polygamy was usually the privilege of the male, who ruled the Aryan household with patriarchal omnipotence. He held the right of ownership over his wives and his children, and might in certain cases sell them or cast them out.⁵²

Nevertheless, woman enjoyed far greater freedom in the Vedic period than in later India. She had more to say in the choice of her mate than the forms of marriage might suggest. She appeared freely at feasts and dances, and joined with men in religious sacrifice. She could study, and might, like Gargi, engage in philosophic disputation.⁵³ If she was left a widow there were no restrictions upon her remarriage.⁵⁴ In the Heroic Age woman seems to have lost something of this liberty. She was discouraged from mental pursuits, on the ground that “for a woman to study the Vedas indicates confusion in the realm;”⁵⁵ the remarriage of widows became uncommon; purdah—the seclusion of women—began; and the practice of suttee, almost unknown in Vedic times, increased.⁵⁶ The ideal woman was now typified in the heroine of the Ramayana—that faithful Sita who follows and obeys her husband humbly, through every test of fidelity and courage, until her death.

V. THE RELIGION OF THE VEDAS

Pre-Vedic religion—Vedic gods—Moral gods—The Vedic story of Creation—Immortality—The horse sacrifice

The oldest known religion of India, which the invading Aryans found among the Nagas, and which still survives in the ethnic nooks and crannies of the great peninsula, was apparently an animistic and totemic worship of multitudinous spirits dwelling in stones and animals, in trees and streams, in mountains and stars. Snakes and serpents were divinities—idols and ideals of virile reproductive power; and the sacred Bodhi tree of Buddha’s time was a vestige of the mystic but wholesome reverence for the quiet majesty of trees.⁵⁷ Naga, the dragon-god, Hanuman the monkey-god, Nandi the divine bull, and the Yakshas or tree-gods passed down into the religion of historic India.⁵⁸ Since some of these spirits were good and some evil, only great skill in magic could keep the body from being possessed or tortured, in sickness or mania, by one or more of the innumerable demons that filled the air. Hence the medley of incantations in the Atharva-veda, or Book of the Knowledge of Magic; one must recite spells to obtain children, to avoid abortion, to prolong life, to ward off evil, to woo sleep, to destroy or harass enemies.*⁵⁹

The earliest gods of the Vedas were the forces and elements of nature herself—sky, sun, earth, fire, light, wind, water and sex.⁶² Dyaus (the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter) was at first the sky itself; and the Sanskrit word deva, which later was to mean divine, originally meant only bright. By that poetic license which makes so many deities, these natural objects were personified; the sky, for example, became a father, Varuna; the earth became a mother, Prithivi; and vegetation was the fruit of their union through the rain.⁶³ The rain was the god Parjanya, fire was Agni, the wind was Vayu, the pestilential wind was Rudra, the storm was Indra, the dawn was Ushas, the furrow in the field was Sita, the sun was Surya, Mitra, or Vishnu; and the sacred soma plant, whose juice was at once holy and intoxicating to gods and men, was itself a god, a Hindu Dionysus, inspiring man by its exhilarating essence to charity, insight and joy, and even bestowing upon him eternal life.⁶⁴ A nation, like an individual, begins with poetry, and ends with prose. And as things became persons, so qualities became objects, adjectives became nouns, epithets became deities. The life-giving sun became a new sun-god, Savitar the Life-Giver; the shining sun became Vivasvat, Shining God; the life-generating sun became the great god Prajapati, Lord of all living things.*⁶⁵

For a time the most important of the Vedic gods was Agni—fire; he was the sacred flame that lifted the sacrifice to heaven, he was the lightning that pranced through the sky, he was the fiery life and spirit of the world. But the most popular figure in the pantheon was Indra, wielder of thunder and storm. For Indra brought to the Indo-Aryans that precious rain which seemed to them even more vital than the sun; therefore they made him the greatest of the gods, invoked the aid of his thunderbolts in their battles, and pictured him enviously as a gigantic hero feasting on bulls by the hundred, and lapping up lakes of wine.⁶⁶ His favorite enemy was Krishna, who in the Vedas was as yet only the local god of the Krishna tribe. Vishnu, the sun who covered the earth with his strides, was also a Subordinate god, unaware that the future belonged to him and to Krishna, his avatar. This is one value of the Vedas to us, that through them we see religion in the making, and can follow the birth, growth and death of gods and beliefs from animism to philosophic pantheism, and from the superstition of the Atharva-veda to the sublime monism of the Upanishads.

These gods are human in figure, in motive, almost in ignorance. One of them, besieged by prayers, ponders what he should give his devotee: “This is what I will do—no, not that; I will give him a cow—or shall it be a horse? I wonder if I have really had soma from him?”⁶⁷ Some of them, however, rose in later Vedic days to a majestic moral significance. Varuna, who began as the encompassing heaven, whose breath was the storm and whose garment was the sky, grew with the development of his worshipers into the most ethical and ideal deity of the Vedas—watching over the world through his great eye, the sun, punishing evil, rewarding good, and forgiving the sins of those who petitioned him. In this aspect Varuna was the custodian and executor of an eternal law called Rita; this was at first the law that established and maintained the stars in their courses; gradually it became also the law of right, the cosmic and moral rhythm which every man must follow if he would not go astray and be destroyed.⁶⁸

As the number of the gods increased, the question arose as to which of them had created the world. This primal rôle was assigned now to Agni, now to Indra, now to Soma, now to Prajapati. One of the Upanishads attributed the world to an irrepressible Pro-creator:

Verily, he had no delight; one alone had no delight; he desired a second. He was, indeed, as large as a woman and a man closely embraced. He caused that self to fall (v pat) into two pieces; therefrom arose a husband (pati) and a wife (patni). Therefore . . . one’s self is like a half fragment; . . . therefore this space is filled by a wife. He copulated with her. Therefore human beings were produced. And she bethought herself: “How, now, does he copulate with me after he has produced pie just from himself? Come, let me hide myself.” She became a cow. He became a bull. With her he did indeed copulate. Then cattle were born. She became a mare, he a stallion. She became a female ass, he a male ass; with her he copulated of a truth. Thence were born solid hoofed animals. She became a she-goat, he a he-goat; she a ewe, he a ram. With her he did verily copulate. Therefore were born goats and sheep. Thus indeed he created all, whatever pairs there are, even down to the ants. He knew: “I, indeed, am this creation, for I emitted it all from myself.” Thence arose creation.⁶⁹

In this unique passage we have the germ of pantheism and transmigration: the Creator is one with his creation, and all things, all forms of life, are one; every form was once another form, and is distinguished from it only in the prejudice of perception and the superficial separateness of time. This view, though formulated in the Upanishads, was not yet in Vedic days a part of the popular creed; instead of transmigration the Indo-Aryans, like the Aryans of Persia, accepted a simple belief in personal immortality. After death the soul entered into eternal punishment or happiness; it was thrust by Varuna into a dark abyss, half Hades and half hell, or was raised by Yama into a heaven where every earthly joy was made endless and complete.⁷⁰ “Like corn decays the mortal,” said the Katha Upanishad, “like corn is he born again.”⁷¹

In the earlier Vedic religion there were, so far as the evidence goes, no temples and no images;⁷² altars were put up anew for each sacrifice as in Zoroastrian Persia, and sacred fire lifted the offering to heaven. Vestiges of human sacrifice occur here,⁷³ as at the outset of almost every civilization; but they are few and uncertain. Again as in Persia, the horse was sometimes burnt as an offering to the gods.⁷⁴ The strangest ritual of all was the Ashvamedha, or Sacrifice of the Horse, in which the queen of the tribe seems to have copulated with the sacred horse after it had been killed.*⁷⁵ The usual offering was a libation of soma juice, and the pouring of liquid butter into the fire.⁷⁷ The sacrifice was conceived for the most part in magical terms; if it were properly performed it would win its reward, regardless of the moral deserts of the worshiper.⁷⁸ The priests charged heavily for helping the pious in the ever more complicated ritual of sacrifice: if no fee was at hand, the priest refused to recite the necessary formulas; his payment had to come before that of the god. Rules were laid down by the clergy as to what the remuneration should be for each service—how many cows or horses, or how much gold; gold was particularly efficacious in moving the priest or the god.⁷⁹ The Brahmanas, written by the Brahmans, instructed the priest how to turn the prayer or sacrifice secretly to the hurt of those who had employed him, if they had given him an inadequate fee.⁸⁰ Other regulations were issued, prescribing the proper ceremony and usage for almost every occasion of life, and usually requiring priestly aid. Slowly the Brahmans became a privileged hereditary caste, holding the mental and spiritual life of India under a control that threatened to stifle all thought and change.⁸¹

VI. THE VEDAS AS LITERATURE

Sanskrit and English—Writing—The four “Vedas”—The “Rigveda”—A Hymn of Creation

The language of the Indo-Aryans should be of special interest to us, for Sanskrit is one of the oldest in that “Indo-European” group of languages to which our own speech belongs. We feel for a moment a strange sense of cultural continuity across great stretches of time and space when we observe the similarity—in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and English—of the numerals, the family terms, and those insinuating little words that, by some oversight of the moralists, have been called the copulative verb.* It is quite unlikely that this ancient tongue, which Sir William Jones pronounced “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,”⁸³ should have been the spoken language of the Aryan invaders. What that speech was we do not know; we can only presume that it was a near relative of the early Persian dialect in which the Avesta was composed. The Sanskrit of the Vedas and the epics has already the earmarks of a classic and literary tongue, used only by scholars and priests; the very word Sanskrit means “prepared, pure, perfect, sacred.” The language of the people in the Vedic age was not one but many; each tribe had its own Aryan dialect.⁸⁴ India has never had one language.

The Vedas contain no hint that writing was known to their authors. It was not until the eighth or ninth century B.C. that Hindu—probably Dravidian—merchants brought from western Asia a Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician; and from this “Brahma script,” as it came to be called, all the later alphabets of India were derived.⁸⁵ For centuries writing seems to have been confined to commercial and administrative purposes, with little thought of using it for literature; “merchants, not priests, developed this basic art.”⁸⁶ Even the Buddhist canon does not appear to have been written down before the third century B.C. The oldest extant inscriptions in India are those of Ashoka.⁸⁷ We who (until the air about us was filled with words and music) were for centuries made eye-minded by writing and print, find it hard to understand how contentedly India, long after she had learned to write, clung to the old ways of transmitting history and literature by recitation and memory. The Vedas and the epics were songs that grew with the generations of those that recited them; they were intended not for sight but for sound.* From this indifference to writing comes our dearth of knowledge about early India.

What, then, were these Vedas from which nearly all our understanding of primitive India is derived? The word Veda means knowledge;† a Veda is literally a Book of Knowledge. Vedas is applied by the Hindus to all the sacred lore of their early period; like our Bible it indicates a literature rather than a book. Nothing could be more confused than the arrangement and division of this collection. Of the many Vedas that once existed, only four have survived:

I. The Rig-veda, or Knowledge of the Hymns of Praise;

II. The Sama-veda, or Knowledge of the Melodies;

III. The Yajur-veda, or Knowledge of the Sacrificial Formulas; and

IV. The Atharva-veda, or Knowledge of the Magic Formulas.

Each of these four Vedas is divided into four sections:

1. The Mantras, or Hymns;

2. The Brahmanas, or manuals of ritual, prayer and incantation for the priests;

3. The Aranyaka, or “forest-texts” for hermit saints; and

4. The Upanishads, or confidential conferences for philosophers.‡

Only one of the Vedas belongs to literature rather than to religion, philosophy or magic. The Rig-veda is a kind of religious anthology, composed of 1028 hymns, or psalms of praise, to the various objects of Indo-Aryan worship—sun, moon, sky, stars, wind, rain, fire, dawn, earth, etc.* Most of the hymns are matter-of-fact petitions for herds, crops, and longevity; a small minority of them rise to the level of literature; a few of them reach to the eloquence and beauty of the Psalms.⁹² Some of them are simple and natural poetry, like the unaffected wonder of a child. One hymn marvels that white milk should come from red cows; another cannot understand why the sun, once it begins to descend, does not fall precipitately to the earth; another inquires how “the sparkling waters of all rivers flow into one ocean without ever filling it.” One is a funeral hymn, in the style of Thanatopsis, over the body of a comrade fallen in battle:

From the dead hand I take the bow he wielded

To gain for us dominion, might and glory.

Thou there, we here, rich in heroic offspring,

Will vanquish all assaults of every foeman.

Approach the bosom of the earth, the mother,

This earth extending far and most propitious;

Young, soft as wool to bounteous givers, may she

Preserve thee from the lap of dissolution.

Open wide, O earth, press not heavily upon him,

Be easy of approach, hail him with kindly aid;

As with a robe a mother hides

Her son, so shroud this man, O earth.⁹³

Another of the poems (Rv. x, 10) is a frank dialogue between the first parents of mankind, the twin brother and sister, Yama and Yami. Yami tempts her brother to cohabit with her despite the divine prohibition of incest, and alleges that all that she desires is the continuance of the race. Yama resists her on high moral grounds. She uses every inducement, and as a last weapon, calls him a weakling. The story as we have it is left unfinished, and we may judge the issue only from circumstantial evidence. The loftiest of the poems is an astonishing Creation Hymn, in which a subtle pantheism, even a pious scepticism, appears in this oldest book of the most religious of peoples:

Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky

Was not, nor heaven’s broad woof outstretched above.

What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?

Was it the water’s fathomless abyss?

There was not death—yet was there naught immortal,

There was no confine betwixt day and night;

The Only One breathed breathless by itself;

Other than It there nothing since has been.

Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled

In gloom profound—an ocean without light—

The germ that still lay covered in the husk

Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.

Then first came love upon it, the new spring

Of mind—yea, poets in their hearts discerned,

Pondering, this bond between created things

And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth

Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven?

Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose—

Nature below, and power and will above—

Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,

Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?

The gods themselves came later into being—

Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?

He from whom all this great creation came,

Whether his will created or was mute,

The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,

He knows it—or perchance even He knows not.⁹⁴

It remained for the authors of the Upanishads to take up these problems, and elaborate these hints, in the most typical, and perhaps the greatest, product of the Hindu mind.

VII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS

The authors—Their theme—Intellect vs. intuition—Atman—Brahman—Their identity—A description of God—Salvation—Influence of the “Upanishads”—Emerson on Brahma

“In the whole world,” said Schopenhauer, “there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.”⁹⁵ Here, excepting the moral fragments of Ptah-hotep, are the oldest extant philosophy and psychology of our race; the surprisingly subtle and patient effort of man to understand the mind and the world, and their relation. The Upanishads are as old as Homer, and as modern as Kant.

The word is composed of upa, near, and shad, to sit. From “sitting near” the teacher the term came to mean the secret or esoteric doctrine confided by the master to his best and favorite pupils.⁹⁶ There are one hundred and eight of these discourses, composed by various saints and sages between 800 and 500 B.C.⁹⁷ They represent not a consistent system of philosophy, but the opinions, aperçus and lessons of many men, in whom philosophy and religion were still fused in the attempt to understand—and reverently unite with—the simple and essential reality underlying the superficial multiplicity of things. They are full of absurdities and contradictions, and occasionally they anticipate all the wind of Hegelian verbiage;⁹⁸ sometimes they present formulas as weird as that of Tom Sawyer for curing warts;⁹⁹ sometimes they impress us as the profoundest thinking in the history of philosophy.

We know the names of many of the authors,¹⁰⁰ but we know nothing of their lives except what they occasionally reveal in their teachings. The most vivid figures among them are Yajnavalkya, the man, and Gargi, the woman who has the honor of being among the earliest of philosophers. Of the two, Yajnavalkya has the sharper tongue. His fellow teachers looked upon him as a dangerous innovator; his posterity made his doctrine the cornerstone of unchallengeable orthodoxy.¹⁰¹ He tells us how he tried to leave his two wives in order to become a hermit sage; and in the plea of his wife Maitreyi that he should take her with him, we catch some feeling of the intensity with which India has for thousands of years pursued religion and philosophy.

And then Yajnavalkya was about to commence another mode of life.

“Maitreyi!” said Yajnavalkya, “lo, I am about to wander forth from this state. Let me make a final settlement for you and that Katyayani.”

Then spake Maitreyi: “If, now, Sir, this whole earth filled with wealth were mine, would I now thereby be immortal?”

“No, no!” said Yajnavalkya. “Of immortality there is no hope through wealth.”

Then spake Maitreyi: “What should I do with that through which I may not be immortal? What you know, Sir—that, indeed, explain to me.”¹⁰²

The theme of the Upanishads is all the mystery of this unintelligible world. “Whence are we born, where do we live, and whither do we go? O ye who know Brahman, tell us at whose command we abide here. . . . Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements be considered the cause, or he who is called Purusha”—the Supreme Spirit?¹⁰³ India has had more than her share of men who wanted “not millions, but answers to their questions.” In the Maitri Upanishad we read of a king abandoning his kingdom and going into the forest to practice austerities, clear his mind for understanding, and solve the riddle of the universe. After a thousand days of the king’s penances a sage, “knower of the soul,” came to him. “You are one who knows its true nature,” says the king; “do you tell us.” “Choose other desires,” warns the sage. But the king insists; and in a passage that must have seemed Schopenhauerian to Schopenhauer, he voices that revulsion against life, that fear of being reborn, which runs darkly through all Hindu thought:

“Sir, in this ill-smelling, unsubstantial body, which is a conglomerate of bone, skin, muscle, marrow, flesh, semen, blood, mucus, tears, rheum, feces, urine, wind, bile and phlegm, what is the good of enjoyment of desire? In this body, which is afflicted with desire, anger, covetousness, delusion, fear, despondency, envy, separation from the desirable, union with the undesirable, hunger, thirst, senility, death, disease, sorrow and the like, what is the good of enjoyment of desires? And we see that this whole world is decaying like these gnats, these mosquitoes, this grass, and these trees that arise and perish. . . . Among other things there is the drying up of great oceans, the falling-away of mountain-peaks, the deviation of the fixed polestar, . . . the submergence of the earth. . . . In this sort of cycle of existence what is the good of enjoyment of desires, when, after a man has fed upon them, there is seen repeatedly his return here to the earth?”¹⁰⁴

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless; it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and this reason. “Not by learning is the Atman (or Soul of the World) attained, not by genius and much knowledge of books. . . . Let a Brahman renounce learning and become as a child. . . . Let him not seek after many words, for that is mere weariness of tongue.”¹⁰⁵ The highest understanding, as Spinoza was to say, is direct perception, immediate insight; it is, as Bergson would say, intuition, the inward seeing of the mind that has deliberately closed, as far as it can, the portals of external sense. “The self-evident Brahman pierced the openings of the senses so that they turned outwards; therefore man looks outward, not inward into himself; some wise man, however, with his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the self behind.”¹⁰⁶

If, on looking inward, a man finds nothing at all, that may only prove the accuracy of his introspection; for no man need expect to find the eternal in himself if he is lost in the ephemeral and particular. Before that inner reality can be felt one has to wash away from himself all evil doing and thinking, all turbulence of body and soul.¹⁰⁷ For a fortnight one must fast, drinking only water;¹⁰⁸ then the mind, so to speak, is starved into tranquillity and silence, the senses are cleansed and stilled, the spirit is left at peace to feel itself and that great ocean of soul of which it is a part; at last the individual ceases to be, and Unity and Reality appear. For it is not the individual self which the seer sees in this pure inward seeing; that individual self is but a series of brain or mental states, it is merely the body seen from within. What the seeker seeks is Atman,* the Self of all selves, the Soul of all souls, the immaterial, formless Absolute in which we bathe ourselves when we forget ourselves.

This, then, is the first step in the Secret Doctrine: that the essence of our own self is not the body, or the mind, or the individual ego, but the silent and formless depth of being within us, Atman. The second step is Brahman,* the one pervading, neuter,† impersonal, all-embracing, underlying, intangible essence of the world, the “Real of the Real,” “the unborn Soul, undecaying, undying,”¹¹⁰ the Soul of all Things as Atman is the Soul of all Souls; the one force that stands behind, beneath and above all forces and all gods.

Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him. “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”

He answered, . . . “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”