Our Oriental Heritage

The Delhi Sultans remounted their throne, and taxed India for another century before the real conqueror came. Babur, founder of the great Mogul* Dynasty, was a man every whit as brave and fascinating as Alexander. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he inherited all the ability of these scourges of Asia without their brutality. He suffered from a surplus of energy in body and mind; he fought, hunted and traveled insatiably; it was nothing for him, single-handed, to kill five enemies in five minutes.⁸⁷ In two days he rode one hundred and sixty miles on horseback, and swam the Ganges twice in the bargain; and in his last years he remarked that not since the age of eleven had he kept the fast of Ramadan twice in the same place.⁸⁸

“In the twelfth year of my age,” he begins his Memoirs, “I became the ruler in the country of Farghana.”⁸⁹ At fifteen he besieged and captured Samarkand; lost it again when he could not pay his troops; nearly died of illness; hid for a time in the mountains, and then recaptured the city with two hundred and forty men; lost it again through treachery; hid for two years in obscure poverty, and thought of retiring to a peasant life in China; organized another force, and, by the contagion of his own bravery, took Kabul in his twenty-second year; overwhelmed the one hundred thousand soldiers of Sultan Ibrahim at Panipat with twelve thousand men and some fine horses, killed prisoners by the thousands, captured Delhi, established there the greatest and most beneficent of the foreign dynasties that have ruled India, enjoyed four years of peace, composed excellent poems and memoirs, and died at the age of forty-seven after living, in action and experience, a century.

His son, Humayun, was too weak and vacillating, and too addicted to opium, to carry on Babur’s work. Sher Shah, an Afghan chief, defeated him in two bloody battles, and restored for a time the Afghan power in India. Sher Shah, though capable of slaughter in the best Islamic style, rebuilt Delhi in fine architectural taste, and established governmental reforms that prepared for the enlightened rule of Akbar. Two minor Shahs held the power for a decade; then Humayun, after twelve years of hardship and wandering, organized a force in Persia, reentered India, and recaptured the throne. Eight months later Humayun fell from the terrace of his library, and died.

During his exile and poverty his wife had borne him a son whom he had piously called Muhammad, but whom India was to call Akbar—that is, “Very Great.” No effort was spared to make him great; even his ancestry had taken every precaution, for in his veins ran the blood of Babur, Timur and Genghis Khan. Tutors were supplied him in abundance, but he rejected them, and refused to learn how to read. Instead he educated himself for kingship by incessant and dangerous sport; he became a perfect horseman, played polo royally, and knew the art of controlling the most ferocious elephants; he was always ready to set out on a lion or tiger hunt, to undergo any fatigue, and to face all dangers in the first person. Like a good Turk he had no effeminate distaste for human blood; when, at the age of fourteen, he was invited to win the title of Ghazi—Slayer of the Infidel—by killing a Hindu prisoner, he cut off the man’s head at once with one stroke of his scimitar. These were the barbarous beginnings of a man destined to become one of the wisest, most humane and most cultured of all the kings known to history.*

At the age of eighteen he took over from the Regent the full direction of affairs. His dominion then extended over an eighth of India—a belt of territory some three hundred miles broad, running from the northwest frontier at Multan to Benares in the East. He set out with the zeal and voracity of his grandfather to extend these borders; and by a series of ruthless wars he made himself ruler of all Hindustan except for the little Rajput kingdom of Mewar. Returning to Delhi he put aside his armor, and devoted himself to re-organizing the administration of his realm. His power was absolute, and all important offices, even in distant provinces, were filled by his appointment. His principal aides were four: a Prime Minister or Vakir; a Finance Minister, called sometimes Vazir (Vizier), sometimes Diwan; a Master of the Court, or Bakhshi; and a Primate or Sadr, who was head of the Mohammedan religion in India. As his rule acquired tradition and prestige he depended less and less upon military power, and contented himself with a standing army of some twenty-five thousand men. In time of war this modest force was augmented with troops recruited by the provincial military governors—a precarious arrangement which had something to do with the fall of the Mogul Empire under Aurangzeb.* Bribery and embezzlement throve among these governors and their subordinates, so that much of Akbar’s time was spent in checking corruption. He regulated with strict economy the expenses of his court and household, fixing the prices of food and materials bought for them, and the wages of labor engaged by the state. When he died he left the equivalent of a billion dollars in the treasury, and his empire was the most powerful on earth.⁹⁰

Both law and taxation were severe, but far less than before. From one-sixth to one-third of the gross produce of the soil was taken from the peasants, amounting to some $100,000,000 a year in land tax. The Emperor was legislator, executive and judge; as supreme court he spent many hours in giving audience to important litigants. His law forbade child marriage and compulsory suttee, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, abolished the slavery of captives and the slaughter of animals for sacrifice, gave freedom to all religions, opened career to every talent of whatever creed or race, and removed the head-tax that the Afghan rulers had placed upon all Hindus unconverted to Islam.⁹¹ At the beginning of his reign the law included such punishments as mutilation; at the end it was probably the most enlightened code of any sixteenth-century government. Every state begins with violence, and (if it becomes secure) mellows into liberty.

But the strength of a ruler is often the weakness of his government. The system depended so much upon Akbar’s superior qualities of mind and character that obviously it would threaten to disintegrate at his death. He had, of course, most of the virtues, since he engaged most of the historians: he was the best athlete, the best horseman, the best swordsman, one of the greatest architects, and by all odds the handsomest man in the kingdom. Actually he had long arms, bow legs, narrow Mongoloid eyes, a head drooping leftward, and a wart on his nose.⁹² He made himself presentable by neatness, dignity, serenity, and brilliant eyes that could sparkle (says a contemporary) “like the sea in sunshine,” or flare up in a way to make the offender tremble with terror, like Vandamme before Napoleon. He dressed simply, in brocaded cap, blouse and trousers, jewels and bare feet. He cared little for meat, and gave it up almost entirely in his later years, saying that “it is not right that a man should make his stomach the grave of animals.” Nevertheless he was strong in body and will, excelled in many active sports, and thought nothing of walking thirty-six miles in a day. He liked polo so much that he invented a luminous ball in order that the game might be played at night. He inherited the violent impulses of his family, and in his youth (like his Christian contemporaries) he was capable of solving problems by assassination. Gradually he learned, in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, to sit upon his own volcano; and he rose far above his time in that spirit of fair play which does not always distinguish Oriental rulers. “His clemency,” says Firishta, “was without bounds; this virtue he often carried beyond the line of prudence.”⁹³ He was generous, expending vast sums in alms; he was affable to all, but especially to the lowly; “their little offerings,” says a Jesuit missionary, “he used to accept with such a pleased look, handling them and putting them in his bosom, as he did not do with the most lavish gifts of the nobles.” One of his contemporaries described him as an epileptic; many said that melancholy possessed him to a morbid degree. Perhaps to put a brighter color on reality, he drank liquor and took opium, in moderation; his father and his children had similar habits, without similar self-control.* He had a harem suitable to the size of his empire; one gossip tells us that “the King hath in Agra and Fathpur-Sikri, as they do credibly report, one thousand elephants, thirty thousand horses, fourteen hundred tame deer, eight hundred concubines.” But he does not seem to have had sensual ambitions or tastes. He married widely, but politically; he pleased the Rajput princes by espousing their daughters, and thereby bound them to the support of his throne; and from that time the Mogul Dynasty was half native in blood. A Rajput became his leading general, and a raja rose to be his greatest minister. His dream was a united India.⁹⁴

His mind was not quite as realistic and coldly accurate as Caesar’s or Napoleon’s; he had a passion for metaphysics, and might, if deposed, have become a mystic recluse. He thought constantly, and was forever making inventions and suggesting improvements.⁹⁵ Like Haroun-al-Rashid he took nocturnal rambles in disguise, and came back bursting with reforms. In the midst of his complex activity he made time to collect a great library, composed entirely of manuscripts beautifully written and engraved by those skilful penmen whom he esteemed as artists fully equal to the painters and architects that adorned his reign. He despised print as a mechanical and impersonal thing, and soon disposed of the choice specimens of European typography presented to him by his Jesuit friends. The volumes in his library numbered only twenty-four thousand, but they were valued at $3,500,000⁹⁷ by those who thought that such hoards of the spirit could be estimated in material terms. He patronized poets without stint, and loved one of them—the Hindu Birbal—so much that he made him a court favorite, and finally a general; whereupon Birbal made a mess of a campaign, and was slaughtered in no lyric flight.*⁹⁸ Akbar had his literary aides render into Persian—which was the language of his court—the masterpieces of Hindu literature, history and science, and himself supervised the translation of the interminable Mahabharata.¹⁰⁰ Every art flourished under his patronage and stimulation. Hindu music and poetry had now one of their greatest periods; and painting, both Persian and Hindu, reached its second zenith through his encouragement.¹⁰¹ At Agra he directed the building of the famous Fort, and within its walls erected (by proxy) five hundred buildings that his contemporaries considered to be among the most beautiful in the world. They were torn down by the impetuous Shah Jehan, and can be judged only by such remnants of Akbar’s architecture as the tomb of Humayun at Delhi, and the remains at Fathpur-Sikri, where the mausoleum of Akbar’s beloved friend, the ascetic Shaik Salim Chisti, is among the fairest structures in India.

Deeper than these interests was his penchant for speculation. This well-nigh omnipotent emperor secretly yearned to be a philosopher-much as philosophers long to be emperors, and cannot comprehend the stupidity of Providence in withholding from them their rightful thrones. After conquering the world, Akbar was unhappy because he could not understand it. “Although,” he said, “I am the master of so vast a kingdom, and all the appliances of government are at my hand, yet since true greatness consists in doing the will of God, my mind is not at ease in this diversity of sects and creeds; and apart from this outward pomp of circumstance, with what satisfaction, in this despondency, can I undertake the sway of empire? I await the coming of some discreet man of principle who will resolve the difficulties of my conscience. . . . Discourses in philosophy have such a charm for me that they distract me from all else, and I forcibly restrain myself from listening to them lest the necessary duties of the hour should be neglected.”¹⁰² “Crowds of learned men from all nations,” says Badaoni, “and sages of various religions and sects, came to the court and were honored with private conversations. After inquiries and investigations, which were their only business and occupation day and night, they would talk about profound points of science, the subtleties of revelation, the curiosities of history, and the wonders of nature.”¹⁰³ “The superiority of man,” said Akbar, “rests on the jewel of reason.”¹⁰⁴

As became a philosopher, he was profoundly interested in religion. His careful reading of the Mahabharata, and his intimacy with Hindu poets and sages, lured him into the study of Indian faiths. For a time, at least, he accepted the theory of transmigration, and scandalized his Moslem followers by appearing in public with Hindu religious marks on his forehead. He had a flair for humoring all the creeds: he pleased the Zoroastrians by wearing their sacred shirt and girdle under his clothes, and allowed the Jains to persuade him to abandon hunting, and to prohibit, on certain days, the killing of animals. When he learned of the new religion called Christianity, which had come into India with the Portuguese occupation of Goa, he despatched a message to the Paulist missionaries there, inviting them to send two of their learned men to him. Later some Jesuits came to Delhi and so interested him in Christ that he ordered his scribes to translate the New Testament.¹⁰⁵ He gave the Jesuits full freedom to make converts, and allowed them to bring up one of his sons. While Catholics were murdering Protestants in France, and Protestants, under Elizabeth, were murdering Catholics in England, and the Inquisition was killing and robbing Jews in Spain, and Bruno was being burned at the stake in Italy, Akbar invited the representatives of all the religions in his empire to a conference, pledged them to peace, issued edicts of toleration for every cult and creed, and, as evidence of his own neutrality, married wives from the Brahman, Buddhist, and Mohammedan faiths.

His greatest pleasure, after the fires of youth had cooled, was in the free discussion of religious beliefs. He had quite discarded the dogmas of Islam, and to such an extent that his Moslem subjects fretted under his impartial rule. “This king,” St. Francis Xavier reported with some exaggeration, “has destroyed the false sect of Mohammed, and wholly discredited it. In this city there is neither a mosque nor a Koran—the book of their law; and the mosques that were there have been made stables for horses, and storehouses.” The King took no stock in revelations, and would accept nothing that could not justify itself with science and philosophy. It was not unusual for him to gather friends and prelates of various sects together, and discuss religion with them from Thursday evening to Friday noon. When the Moslem mullahs and the Christian priests quarreled he reproved them both, saying that God should be worshiped through the intellect, and not by a blind adherence to supposed revelations. “Each person,” he said, in the spirit—and perhaps through the influence—of the Upanishads and Kabir, “according to his condition gives the Supreme Being a name; but in reality to name the Unknowable is vain.” Certain Moslems suggested an ordeal by fire as a test of Christianity vs. Islam: a mullah holding the Koran and a priest holding one of the Gospels were to enter a fire, and he who should come out unhurt would be adjudged the teacher of truth. Akbar, who did not like the mullah who was proposed for this experiment, warmly seconded the suggestion, but the Jesuit rejected it as blasphemous and impious, not to say dangerous. Gradually the rival groups of theologians shunned these conferences, and left them to Akbar and his rationalist intimates.¹⁰⁶

Harassed by the religious divisions in his kingdom, and disturbed by the thought that they might disrupt it after his death, Akbar finally decided to promulgate a new religion, containing in simple form the essentials of the warring faiths. The Jesuit missionary Bartoli records the matter thus:

He summoned a General Council, and invited to it all the masters of learning and the military commandants of the cities round about, excluding only Father Ridolfo, whom it was vain to expect to be other than hostile to his sacrilegious purpose. When he had them all assembled in front of him, he spoke in a spirit of astute and knavish policy, saying:

“For an empire ruled by one head it was a bad thing to have the members divided among themselves and at variance one with the other; . . . whence it came about that there are as many factions as religions. We ought, therefore, to bring them all into one, but in such fashion that they should be both ‘one’ and ‘all’; with the great advantage of not losing what is good in any one religion, while gaining whatever is better in another. In that way honor would be rendered to God, peace would be given to the people, and security to the empire.”¹⁰⁷

The Council perforce consenting, he issued a decree proclaiming himself the infallible head of the church; this was the chief contribution of Christianity to the new religion. The creed was a pantheistic monotheism in the best Hindu tradition, with a spark of sun and fire worship from the Zoroastrians, and a semi-Jain recommendation to abstain from meat. The slaughter of cows was made a capital offense: nothing could have pleased the Hindus more, or the Moslems less. A later edict made vegetarianism compulsory on the entire population for at least a hundred days in the year; and in further consideration of native ideas, garlic and onions were prohibited. The building of mosques, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and other Mohammedan customs were banned. Many Moslems who resisted the edicts were exiled.¹⁰⁸ In the center of the Peace Court at Fathpur-Sikri a Temple of United Religion was built (and still stands there) as a symbol of the Emperor’s fond hope that now all the inhabitants of India might be brothers, worshiping the same God.

As a religion the Din Ilahi never succeeded; Akbar found tradition too strong for his infallibility. A few thousand rallied to the new cult, largely as a means of securing official favor; the vast majority adhered to their inherited gods. Politically the stroke had some beneficent results. The abolition of the head-tax and the pilgrim-tax on the Hindus, the freedom granted to all religions,* the weakening of racial and religious fanaticism, dogmatism and division, far outweighed the egotism and excesses of Akbar’s novel revelation. And it won him such loyalty from even the Hindus who did not accept his creed that his prime purpose—political unity—was largely achieved.

With his own fellow Moslems, however, the Din Ilahi was a source of bitter resentment, leading at one time to open revolt, and stirring Prince Jehangir into treacherous machinations against his father. The Prince complained that Akbar had reigned forty years, and had so strong a constitution that there was no prospect of his early death. Jehangir organized an army of thirty thousand horsemen, killed Abu-1 Fazl, the King’s court historian and dearest friend, and proclaimed himself emperor. Akbar persuaded the youth to submit, and forgave him after a day; but the disloyalty of his son, added to the death of his mother and his friend, broke his spirit, and left him an easy prey for the Great Enemy. In his last days his children ignored him, and gave their energies to quarreling for his throne. Only a few intimates were with him when he died—presumably of dysentery, perhaps of poisoning by Jehangir. Mullahs came to his deathbed to reconvert him to Islam, but they failed; the King “passed away without the benefit of the prayers of any church or sect.”¹⁰⁹ No crowd followed his simple funeral; and the sons and courtiers who had worn mourning for the event discarded it the same evening, and rejoiced that they had inherited his kingdom. It was a bitter death for the justest and wisest ruler that Asia has ever known.

VIII. THE DECLINE OF THE MOGULS

The children of great men—Jehangir—Shah Jehan—His magnificence—His fall—Aurangzeb—His fanaticism—His death—The coming of the British

The children who had waited so impatiently for his death found it difficult to hold together the empire that had been created by his genius. Why is it that great men so often have mediocrities for their offspring? Is it because the gamble of the genes that produced them—the commingling of ancestral traits and biological possibilities—was but a chance, and could not be expected to recur? Or is it because the genius exhausts in thought and toil the force that might have gone to parentage, and leaves only his diluted blood to his heirs? Or is it that children decay under ease, and early good fortune deprives them of the stimulus to ambition and growth?

Jehangir was not so much a mediocrity as an able degenerate. Born of a Turkish father and a Hindu princess, he enjoyed all the opportunities of an heir apparent, indulged himself in alcohol and lechery, and gave full vent to that sadistic joy in cruelty which had been a recessive character in Babur, Humayun and Akbar, but had always lurked in the Tatar blood. He took delight in seeing men flayed alive, impaled, or torn to pieces by elephants. In his Memoirs he tells how, because their careless entrance upon the scene startled his quarry in a hunt, he had a groom killed, and the groom’s servants hamstrung—i.e., crippled for life by severing the tendons behind the knees; having attended to this, he says, “I continued hunting.”¹¹⁰ When his son Khusru conspired against him he had seven hundred supporters of the rebel impaled in a line along the streets of Lahore; and he remarks with pleasure on the length of time it took these men to die.¹¹¹ His sexual life was attended to by a harem of six thousand women,¹¹² and graced by his later attachment to his favorite wife, Nur Jehan*—whom he acquired by murdering her husband. His administration of justice was impartial as well as severe, but the extravagance of his expenditures laid a heavy burden upon a nation which had become the most prosperous on the globe through the wise leadership of Akbar and many years of peace.

Toward the end of his reign Jehangir took more and more to his cups, and neglected the tasks of government. Inevitably conspiracies arose to replace him; already in 1622 his son Jehan had tried to seize the throne. When Jehangir died Jehan hurried up from the Deccan where he had been hiding, proclaimed himself emperor, and murdered all his brothers to ensure his peace of mind. His father passed on to him his habits of extravagance, intemperance and cruelty. The expenses of Jehan’s court, and the high salaries of his innumerable officials, absorbed more and more of the revenue produced by the thriving industry and commerce of the people. The religious tolerance of Akbar and the indifference of Jehangir were replaced by a return to the Moslem faith, the persecution of Christians, and the ruthless and wholesale destruction of Hindu shrines.

Shah Jehan redeemed himself in some measure by his generosity to his friends and the poor, his artistic taste and passion in adorning India with the fairest architecture that it had ever seen, and his devotion to his wife Mumtaz Mahal—“Ornament of the Palace.” He had married her in his twenty-first year, when he had already had two children by an earlier consort. Mumtaz gave her tireless husband fourteen children in eighteen years, and died, at the age of thirty-nine, in bringing forth the last. Shah Jehan built the immaculate Taj Mahal as a monument to her memory and her fertility, and relapsed into a scandalous licentiousness.¹¹³ The most beautiful of all the world’s tombs was but one of a hundred masterpieces that Jehan erected, chiefly at Agra and in that new Delhi which grew up under his planning. The costliness of these palaces, the luxuriousness of the court, the extravagant jewelry of the Peacock Throne,† would suggest a rate of taxation ruinous to India. Nevertheless, though one of the worst famines in India’s history occurred in Shah Jehan’s reign, his thirty years of government marked the zenith of India’s prosperity and prestige. The lordly Shah was a capable ruler, and though he wasted many lives in foreign war he gave his own land a full generation of peace. As a great British administrator of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, wrote,

those who look on India in its present state may be inclined to suspect the native writers of exaggerating its former prosperity; but the deserted cities, ruined palaces and choked-up aqueducts which we still see, with the great reservoirs and embankments in the midst of jungles, and the decayed causeways, wells and caravanserais of the royal roads, concur with the evidence of contemporary travelers in convincing us that those historians had good grounds for their commendation.¹¹⁵

Jehan had begun his reign by killing his brothers; but he had neglected to kill his sons, one of whom was destined to overthrow him. In 1657 the ablest of these, Aurangzeb, led an insurrection from the Deccan. The Shah, like David, gave instructions to his generals to defeat the rebel army, but to spare, if possible, the life of his son. Aurangzeb overcame all the forces sent against him, captured his father, and imprisoned him in the Fort of Agra. For nine bitter years the deposed king lingered there, never visited by his son, attended only by his faithful daughter Jahanara, and spending his days looking from the Jasmine Tower of his prison across the Jumna to where his once-beloved Mumtaz lay in her jeweled tomb.

The son who so ruthlessly deposed him was one of the greatest saints in the history of Islam, and perhaps the most nearly unique of the Mogul emperors. The mullahs who had educated him had so imbued him with religion that at one time the young prince had thought of renouncing the empire and the world, and becoming a religious recluse. Throughout his life, despite his despotism, his subtle diplomacy, and a conception of morals as applying only to his own sect, he remained a pious Moslem, reading prayers at great length, memorizing the entire Koran, and warring against infidelity. He spent hours in devotion, and days in fasts. For the most part he practised his religion as earnestly as he professed it. It is true that in politics he was cold and calculating, capable of lying cleverly for his country and his god. But he was the least cruel of the Moguls, and the mildest; slaughter abated in his reign, and he made hardly any use of punishment in dealing with crime. He was consistently humble in deportment, patient under provocation, and resigned in misfortune. He abstained scrupulously from all food, drink or luxury forbidden by his faith; though skilled in music, he abandoned it as a sensual pleasure; and apparently he carried out his resolve to spend nothing upon himself save, what he had been able to earn by the labor of his hands.¹¹⁶ He was a St. Augustine on the throne.

Shah Jehan had given half his revenues to the promotion of architecture and the other arts; Aurangzeb cared nothing for art, destroyed its “heathen” monuments with coarse bigotry, and fought, through a reign of half a century, to eradicate from India almost all religions but his own. He issued orders to the provincial governors, and to his other subordinates, to raze to the ground all the temples of either Hindus or Christians, to smash every idol, and to close every Hindu school. In one year (1679-80) sixty-six temples were broken to pieces in Amber alone, sixty-three at Chitor, one hundred and twenty-three at Udaipur;¹¹⁷ and over the site of a Benares temple especially sacred to the Hindus he built, in deliberate insult, a Mohammedan mosque.¹¹⁸ He forbade all public worship of the Hindu faiths, and laid upon every unconverted Hindu a heavy capitation tax.¹¹⁹ As a result of his fanaticism, thousands of the temples which had represented or housed the art of India through a millennium were laid in ruins. We can never know, from looking at India today, what grandeur and beauty she once possessed.

Aurangzeb converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him as a monster, fled from his tax-gatherers, and prayed for his death. During his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into the Deccan; but it was a power that, had no foundation in the affection of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous touch. The Emperor himself, in his last years, began to realize that by the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his fathers. His deathbed letters are pitiful documents.

I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. . . . I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.¹²⁰

He left instructions that his funeral should be ascetically simple, and that no money should be spent on his shroud except the four rupees that he had made by sewing caps. The top of his coffin was to be covered with a plain piece of canvas. To the poor he left three hundred rupees earned by copying the Koran,¹²¹ He died at the age of eighty-nine, having long outstayed his welcome on the earth.

Within seventeen years of his death his empire was broken into fragments. The support of the people, so wisely won by Akbar, had been forfeited by the cruelty of Jehangir, the wastefulness of Jehan, and the intolerance of Aurangzeb. The Moslem minority, already enervated by India’s heat, had lost the military ardor and physical vigor of their prime, and no fresh recruits were coming from the north to buttress their declining power. Meanwhile, far away in the west, a little island had sent its traders to cull the riches of India. Soon it would send its guns, and take over this immense empire in which Hindu and Moslem had joined to build one of the great civilizations of history.

CHAPTER XVII

The Life of the People*

I. THE MAKERS OF WEALTH

The jungle background—Agriculture—Mining—Handicrafts—Commerce—Money—Taxes—Famines—Poverty and wealth

THE soil of India had not lent itself willingly to civilization. A great part of it was jungle, the jealously guarded home of lions, tigers, elephants, serpents, and other individualists with a Rousseauian contempt for civilization. The biological struggle to free the land from these enemies had continued underneath all the surface dramas of economic and political strife. Akbar shot tigers near Mathura, and captured wild elephants in many places where none can be found today. In Vedic times the lion might be met with anywhere in northwest or central India; now it is almost extinct throughout the peninsula. The serpent and the insect, however, still carry on the war: in 1926 some two thousand Hindus were killed by wild animals (875 by marauding tigers); but twenty thousand Hindus met death from the fangs of snakes.¹

Gradually, as the soil was redeemed from the beast, it was turned to the cultivation of rice, pulse, millet, vegetables and fruits. Through the greater part of Indian history the majority of the population have lived abstemiously on these natural foods, reserving flesh, fish and fowl for the Outcastes and the rich.²† To render their diet more exciting, and perhaps to assist Aphrodite,³ the Hindus have grown and consumed an unusual abundance of curry, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and other spices. Europeans valued these spices so highly that they stumbled upon a hemisphere in search for them; who knows but that America was discovered for the sake of love? In Vedic times the land belonged to the people,⁵ but from the days of Chandragupta Maurya it became the habit of the kings to claim royal ownership of all the soil, and to let it out to the tiller for an annual rental and tax.⁶ Irrigation was usually a governmental undertaking. One of the dams raised by Chandragupta functioned till 150 A.D.; remains of the ancient canals can be seen everywhere today; and signs still survive of the artificial lake that Raj Sing, Rajput Rana of Mewar, built as an irrigation reservoir (1661), and which he surrounded with a marble wall twelve miles in length.⁷

The Hindus seem to have been the first people to mine gold.⁸ Herodotus⁹ and Megasthenes¹⁰ tell of the great “gold-digging ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes,” which helped the miners to find the metal by turning it up in their scratching of the sand.* Much of the gold used in the Persian Empire in the fifth century before Christ came from India. Silver, copper, lead, tin, zinc and iron were also mined—iron as early as 1500 B.C.¹¹ The art of tempering and casting iron developed in India long before its known appearance in Europe; Vikramaditya, for example, erected at Delhi (ca. 380 A.D.) an iron pillar that stands untarnished today after fifteen centuries; and the quality of metal, or manner of treatment, which has preserved it from rust or decay is still a mystery to modern metallurgical science.¹² Before the European invasion the smelting of iron in small charcoal furnaces was one of the major industries of India.¹³ The Industrial Revolution taught Europe how to carry out these processes more cheaply on a larger scale, and the Indian industry died under the competition. Only in our own time are the rich mineral resources of India being again exploited and explored.¹⁴

The growing of cotton appears earlier in India than elsewhere; apparently it was used for cloth in Mohenjo-daro.¹⁵ In our oldest classical reference to cotton Herodotus says, with pleasing ignorance: “Certain wild trees there bear wool instead of fruit, which in beauty and quality excels that of sheep; and the Indians make their clothing from these trees.”¹⁶ It was their wars in the Near East that acquainted the Romans with this tree-grown “wool.”¹⁷ Arabian travelers in ninth-century India reported that “in this country they make garments of such extraordinary perfection that nowhere else is their like to be seen—sewed and woven to such a degree of fineness, they may be drawn through a ring of moderate size.”¹⁸ The medieval Arabs took over the art from India, and their word quttan gave us our word cotton.¹⁹ The name muslin was originally applied to fine cotton weaves made in Mosul from Indian models; calico was so called because it came (first in 1631) from Calicut, on the southwestern shores of India. “Embroidery,” says Marco Polo, speaking of Gujarat in 1293 A.D., “is here performed with more delicacy than in any other part of the world.”²⁰ The shawls of Kashmir and the rugs of India bear witness even today to the excellence of Indian weaving in texture and design.* But weaving was only one of the many handicrafts of India, and the weavers were only one of the many craft and merchant guilds that organized and regulated the industry of India. Europe looked upon the Hindus as experts in almost every line of manufacture—wood-work, ivory-work, metal-work, bleaching, dyeing, tanning, soap-making, glass-blowing, gunpowder, fireworks, cement, etc.²¹ China imported eyeglasses from India in 1260 A.D. Bernier, traveling in India in the seventeenth century, described it as humming with industry. Fitch, in 1585, saw a fleet of one hundred and eighty boats carrying a great variety of goods down the river Jumna.

Internal trade flourished; every roadside was—and is—a bazaar. The foreign trade of India is as old as her history;²² objects found in Sumeria and Egypt indicate a traffic between these countries and India as far back as 3000 B.C.²³ Commerce between India and Babylon by the Persian Gulf flourished from 700 to 480 B.C.; and perhaps the “ivory, apes and peacocks” of Solomon came by the same route from the same source. India’s ships sailed the sea to Burma and China in Chandragupta’s days; and Greek merchants, called Yavana (Ionians) by the Hindus, thronged the markets of Dravidian India in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ.²⁴ Rome, in her epicurean days, depended upon India for spices, perfumes and unguents, and paid great prices for Indian silks, brocades, muslins and cloth of gold; Pliny condemned the extravagance which sent $5,000,000 yearly from Rome to India for such luxuries. Indian cheetahs, tigers and elephants assisted in the gladiatorial games and sacrificial rites of the Colosseum.²⁵ The Parthian wars were fought by Rome largely to keep open the trade route to India. In the seventh century the Arabs captured Persia and Egypt, and thereafter trade between Europe and Asia passed through Moslem hands; hence the Crusades, and Columbus. Under the Moguls foreign commerce rose again; the wealth of Venice, Genoa and other Italian cities grew through their service as ports for European trade with India and the East; the Renaissance owed more to the wealth derived from this trade than to the manuscripts brought to Italy by the Greeks. Akbar had an admiralty which supervised the building of ships and the regulation of ocean traffic; the ports of Bengal and Sindh were famous for shipbuilding, and did their work so well that the Sultan of Constantinople found it cheaper to have his vessels built there than in Alexandria; even the East India Company had many of its ships built in Bengal docks.²⁶

The development of coinage to facilitate this trade took many centuries. In Buddha’s days rough rectangular coins were issued by various economic and political authorities; but it was not until the fourth century before Christ that India, under the influence of Persia and Greece, arrived at a coinage guaranteed by the state.²⁷ Sher Shah issued well-designed pieces of copper, silver and gold, and established the rupee as the basic coin of the realm.²⁸ Under Akbar and Jehangir the coinage of India was superior, in artistic execution and purity of metal, to that of any modern European state.²⁹ As in medieval Europe, so in medieval India the growth of industry and commerce was impeded by a religious antipathy to the taking of interest. “The Indians,” says Megasthenes, “neither put out money at usury” (interest), “nor know how to borrow. It is contrary to established usage for an Indian either to do or to suffer wrong; and therefore they neither make contracts nor require securities.”³⁰ When the Hindu could not invest his savings in his own economic enterprises he preferred to hide them, or to buy jewelry as conveniently hoardable wealth.³¹ Perhaps this failure to develop a facile credit system aided the Industrial Revolution to establish the European domination of Asia. Slowly, however, despite the hostility of the Brahmans, money-lending grew. The rates varied, according to the caste of the borrower, from twelve to sixty per cent, usually ranging about twenty.³² Bankruptcy was not permitted as a liquidation of debts; if a debtor died insolvent his descendants to the sixth generation continued to be responsible for his obligations.³³

Both agriculture and trade were heavily taxed to support the government. The peasant had to surrender from one-sixth to one-half of his crop; and, as in medieval and contemporary Europe, many tolls were laid upon the flow and exchange of goods.³⁴ Akbar raised the land-tax to one-third, but abolished all other exactions.³⁵ The land-tax was a bitter levy, but it had the saving grace of rising with prosperity and falling with depression; and in famine years the poor could at least die untaxed. For famines occurred, even in Akbar’s palmy days; that of 1556 seems to have led to cannibalism and widespread desolation. Roads were bad, transportation was slow, and the surplus of one region could with difficulty be used to supply the dearth of another.

As everywhere, there were extremes of poverty and wealth, but hardly so great as in India or America today. At the bottom was a small minority of slaves; above them the Shudras were not so much slaves as hired men, though their status, like that of almost all Hindus, was hereditary. The poverty described by Père Dubois (1820)³⁶ was the result of fifty years of political chaos; under the Moguls the condition of the people had been relatively prosperous.³⁷ Wages were modest, ranging for manual workers from three to nine cents a day in Akbar’s reign; but prices were correspondingly low. In 1600 a rupee (normally 32.5 cents) bought 194 pounds of wheat, or 278 pounds of barley; in 1901 it bought only 29 pounds of wheat, or 44 pounds of barley.³⁸ An Englishman resident in India in 1616 described “the plenty of all provisions” as “very great throughout the whole monarchy,” and added that “every one there may eat bread without scarceness.”³⁹ Another Englishman, touring India in the seventeenth century, found that his expenses averaged four cents a day.⁴⁰

The wealth of the country reached its two peaks under Chandragupta Maurya and Shah Jehan. The riches of India under the Gupta kings became a proverb throughout the world. Yuan Chwang pictured an Indian city as beautified with gardens and pools, and adorned with institutes of letters and arts; “the inhabitants were well off, and there were families with great wealth; fruit and flowers were abundant. . . . The people had a refined appearance, and dressed in glossy silk attire; they were . . . clear and suggestive in discourse; they were equally divided between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.”⁴¹ “The Hindu kingdoms overthrown by the Moslems,” says Elphinstone, “were so wealthy that the historians tire of telling of the immense loot of jewels and coin captured by the invaders.”⁴² Nicolo Conti described the banks of the Ganges (ca. 1420) as lined with one prosperous city after another, each well designed, rich in gardens and orchards, silver and gold, commerce and industry.⁴³ Shah Jehan’s treasury was so full that he kept two underground strong rooms, each of some 150,000 cubic feet capacity, almost filled with silver and gold.⁴⁴ “Contemporary testimonies,” says Vincent Smith, “permit of no doubt that the urban population of the more important cities was well to do.”⁴⁵ Travelers described Agra and Fathpur-Sikri as each greater and richer than London.⁴⁶ Anquetil-Duperron, journeying through the Mahratta districts in 1760, found himself “in the midst of the simplicity and happiness of the Golden Age. . . . The people were cheerful, vigorous, and in high health.”⁴⁷ Clive, visiting Murshidabad in 1759, reckoned that ancient capital of Bengal as equal in extent, population and wealth to the London of his time, with palaces far greater than those of Europe, and men richer than any individual in London.⁴⁸ India, said Clive, was “a country of inexhaustible riches.”⁴⁹ Tried by Parliament for helping himself too readily to this wealth, Clive excused himself ingeniously: he described the riches that he had found about him in India—opulent cities ready to offer him any bribe to escape indiscriminate plunder, bankers throwing open to his grasp vaults piled high with jewels and gold; and he concluded: “At this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”⁵⁰

II. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

The monarchy—Law—The Code of “Manu”—Development of the caste system—Rise of the Brahmans—Their privileges and powers—Their obligations—In defense of caste

Because the roads were poor and communication difficult, it was easier to conquer than to rule India. Its topography ordained that this semi-continent would remain, until the coming of railways, a medley of divided states. Under such conditions a government could have security only through a competent army; and as the army required, in frequent crises, a dictatorial leader immune to political eloquence, the form of government which developed in India was naturally monarchical. The people enjoyed a considerable measure of liberty under the native dynasties, partly through the autonomous communities in the villages and the trade guilds in the towns, and partly through the limitations that the Brahman aristocracy placed upon the authority of the king.⁵¹ The laws of Manu, though they were more a code of ethics than a system of practised legislation, expressed the focal ideas of India about monarchy: that it should be impartially rigorous, and paternally solicitous of the public good.⁵² The Mohammedan rulers paid less attention than their Hindu predecessors to these ideals and checks; they were a conquering minority, and rested their rule frankly on the superiority of their guns. “The army,” says a Moslem historian, with charming clarity, “is the source and means of government.”⁵³ Akbar was an exception, for he relied chiefly upon the good will of a people prospering under his mild and benevolent despotism. Perhaps in the circumstances his was the best government possible. Its vital defect, as we have seen, lay in its dependence upon the character of the king; the supreme centralized authority that proved beneficent under Akbar proved ruinous under Aurangzeb. Having been raised up by violence, the Afghan and Mogul rulers were always subject to recall by assassination; and wars of succession were almost as expensive—though not as disturbing to economic life—as a modern election.*

Under the Moslems law was merely the will of the emperor or sultan; under the Hindu kings it was a confused mixture of royal commands, village traditions and caste rules. Judgment was given by the head of the family, the head of the village, the headmen of the caste, the court of the guild, the governor of the province, the minister of the king, or the king himself.⁵⁵ Litigation was brief, judgment swift; lawyers came only with the British.⁵⁶ Torture was used under every dynasty until abolished by Firoz Shah.⁵⁷ Death was the penalty for any of a great variety of crimes, such as housebreaking, damage to royal property, or theft on a scale that would now make a man a very pillar of society. Punishments were cruel, and included amputation of hands, feet, nose or ears, tearing out of eyes, pouring molten lead into the throat, crushing the bones of hands and feet with a mallet, burning the body with fire, driving nails into the hands, feet or bosom, cutting the sinews, sawing men asunder, quartering them, impaling them, roasting them alive, letting them be trampled to death by elephants, or giving them to wild and hungry dogs.⁵⁸†

No code of laws applied to all India. In the ordinary affairs of life the place of law was taken by the dharma-shastras—metrical textbooks of caste regulations and duties, composed by the Brahmans from a strictly Brahman point of view. The oldest of these is the so-called “Code of Manu.” Manu was the mythical ancestor of the Manava tribe (or school) of Brahmans near Delhi; he was represented as the son of a god, and as receiving his laws from Brahma himself.⁵⁹ This code of 2685 verses, once assigned to 1200 B.C., is now referred vaguely to the first centuries of our era.⁶⁰ Originally intended as a handbook or guide to proper caste behavior for these Manava Brahmans, it was gradually accepted as a code of conduct by the entire Hindu community; and though never recognized by the Moslem kings it acquired, within the caste system, all the force of law. Its character will appear to some extent in the course of the following analysis of Hindu society and morals. In general it was marked by a superstitious acceptance of trial by ordeal,* a severe application of the lex talionis, and an untiring inculcation of the virtues, rights and powers of the Brahman caste.⁶³ Its effect was to strengthen enormously the hold of the caste system upon Hindu society.

This system had grown more rigid and complex since the Vedic period; not only because it is in the nature of institutions to become stiff with age, but because the instability of the political order, and the overrunning of India by alien peoples and creeds, had intensified caste as a barrier to the mixture of Moslem and Hindu blood. In Vedic days caste had been varna, or color; in medieval India it became jati, or birth. Its essence was twofold: the heredity of status, and the acceptance of dharma—i.e., the traditional duties and employments of one’s native caste.

The head and chief beneficiaries of the system were the eight million males of the Brahman caste.⁶⁴ Weakened for a while by the rise of Buddhism under Ashoka, the Brahmans, with that patient tenacity which characterizes priesthoods, had bided their time, and had recaptured power and leadership under the Gupta line. From the second century A.D. we find records of great gifts, usually of land, to the Brahman caste.⁶⁵† These grants, like all Brahman property, were exempt from taxation until the British came.^66a The Code of Manu warns the king never to tax a Brahman, even when all other sources of revenue have failed; for a Brahman provoked to anger can instantly destroy the king and all his army by reciting curses and mystical texts.⁶⁷ It was not the custom of Hindus to make wills, since their traditions required that the property of the family should be held in common, and automatically descend from the dying to the surviving males;⁶⁸* but when, under the influence of European individualism, wills were introduced, they were greatly favored by the Brahmans, as an occasional means of securing property for ecclesiastical purposes.⁷⁰ The most important element in any sacrifice to the gods was the fee paid to the ministrant priest; the highest summit of piety was largesse in such fees.⁷¹ Miracles and a thousand superstitions were another fertile source of sacerdotal wealth. For a consideration a Brahman might render a barren woman fecund; oracles were manipulated for financial ends; men were engaged to feign madness and to confess that their fate was a punishment for parsimony to the priests. In every illness, lawsuit, bad omen, unpleasant dream or new enterprise the advice of a Brahman was desirable, and the adviser was worthy of his hire.⁷²

The power of the Brahmans was based upon a monopoly of knowledge. They were the custodians and remakers of tradition, the educators of children, the composers or editors of literature, the experts versed in the inspired and infallible Vedas. If a Shudra listened to the reading of the Scriptures his ears (according to the Brahmanical law books) were to be filled with molten lead; if he recited it his tongue was to be split; if he committed it to memory he was to be cut in two;⁷³ such were the threats, seldom enforced, with which the priests guarded their wisdom. Brahmanism thus became an exclusive cult, carefully hedged around against all vulgar participation.⁷⁵ According to the Code of Manu a Brahman was by divine right at the head of all creatures;⁷⁶ he did not, however, share in all the powers and privileges of the order until, after many years of preparation, he was made “twice-born” or regenerate by solemn investiture with the triple cord.⁷⁷ From that moment he became a holy being; his person and property were inviolate; indeed, according to Manu, “all that exists in this universe is the Brahman’s property.”⁷⁸ Brahmans were to be maintained by public and private gifts—not as charity, but as a sacred obligation;⁷⁹ hospitality to a Brahman was one of the highest religious duties, and a Brahman not hospitably received could walk away with all the accumulated merits of the householder’s good deeds.⁸⁰* Even if a Brahman committed every crime, he was not to be killed; the king might exile him, but must allow him to keep his property.⁸³ He who tried to strike a Brahman would suffer in hell for a hundred years; he who actually struck a Brahman would suffer in hell for a thousand years.⁸⁵ If a Shudra debauched the wife of a Brahman, the Shudra’s property was to be confiscated, and his genitals were to be cut off.⁸⁶ A Shudra who killed a Shudra might atone for his crime by giving ten cows to the Brahmans; if he killed a Vaisya, he must give the Brahmans a hundred cows; if he killed a Kshatriya, he must give the Brahmans a thousand cows; if he killed a Brahman he must die; only the murder of a Brahman was really murder.⁸⁷

The functions and obligations that corresponded to these privileges were numerous and burdensome. The Brahman not only acted as priest,† but trained himself for the clerical, pedagogical and literary professions. He was required to study law and learn the Vedas; every other duty was subordinate to this;⁸⁹ even to repeat the Vedas entitled the Brahman to beatitude, regardless of rites or works;⁹⁰ and if he memorized the Rig-Veda he might destroy the world without incurring any guilt.⁹¹ He must not marry outside his caste; if he married a Shudra his children were to be pariahs;‡ for, said Manu, “the man who is good by birth becomes low by low associations, but the man who is low by birth cannot become high by high associations.”⁹² The Brahman had to bathe every day, and again after being shaved by a barber of low caste; he had to purify with cow-dung the place where he intended to sleep; and he had to follow a strict hygienic ritual in attending to the duties of nature.⁹³ He was to abstain from all animal food, including eggs, and from onions, garlic, mushrooms and leeks. He was to drink nothing but water, and it must have been drawn and carried by a Brahman.⁹⁴ He was to abstain from unguents, perfumes, sensual pleasure, coveteousness, and wrath.⁹⁵ If he touched an unclean thing, or the person of any foreigner (even the Governor-General of India), he was to purify himself by ceremonial ablutions. If he committed a crime he had to accept a heavier punishment than would fall upon a lower caste: if, for example, a Shudra stole he was to be fined eightfold the sum or value of his theft; if a Vaisya stole he was to be fined sixteen-fold; a Kshatriya, thirty-twofold; a Brahman, sixty-fourfold.⁹⁶ The Brahman was never to injure any living thing.⁹⁷

Given a moderate observation of these rules, and a people too burdened with the tillage of the fields, and therefore too subject to the apparently personal whims of the elements, to rise out of superstition to education, the power of the priests grew from generation to generation, and made them the most enduring aristocracy in history. Nowhere else can we find this astonishing phenomenon—so typical of the slow rate of change in India—of an upper class maintaining its ascendancy and privileges through all conquests, dynasties and governments for 2500 years. Only the outcast Chandalas can rival them in perpetuity. The ancient Kshatriyas who had dominated the intellectual as well as the political field in the days of Buddha disappeared after the Gupta age; and though the Brahmans recognized the Rajput warriors as the later equivalent of the old fighting caste, the Kshatriyas, after the fall of Rajputana, soon became extinct. At last only two great divisions remained: the Brahmans as the social and mental rulers of India, and beneath them three thousand castes that were in reality industrial guilds.*

Much can be said in defense of what, after monogamy, must be the most abused of all social institutions. The caste system had the eugenic value of keeping the presumably finer strains from dilution and disappearance through indiscriminate mixture; it established certain habits of diet and cleanliness as a rule of honor which all might observe and emulate; it gave order to the chaotic inequalities and differences of men, and spared the soul the modern fever of climbing and gain; it gave order to every life by prescribing for each man a dharma, or code of conduct for his caste; it gave order to every trade and profession, elevated every occupation into a vocation not lightly to be changed, and, by making every industry a caste, provided its members with a means of united action against exploitation and tyranny. It offered an escape from the plutocracy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alternatives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese. Amid a hundred anarchic changes in the state, the Brahmans maintained, through the system of caste, a stable society, and preserved, augmented and transmitted civilization. The nation bore with them patiently, even proudly, because every one knew that in the end they were the one indispensable government of India.

III. MORALS AND MARRIAGE

“Dharma”—Children—Child marriage—The art of love—Prostitution—Romantic love—Marriage—The family—Woman—Her intellectual life—Her rights—“Purdah”—Suttee—The Widow

When the caste system dies the moral life of India will undergo a long transition of disorder, for there the moral code has been bound up almost inseparably with caste. Morality was dharma—the rule of life for each man as determined by his caste. To be a Hindu meant not so much to accept a creed as to take a place in the caste system, and to accept the dharma or duties attaching to that place by ancient tradition and regulation. Each post had its obligations, its limitations and its rights; with them and within them the pious Hindu would lead his life, finding in them a certain contentment of routine, and never thinking of stepping into another caste. “Better thine own work is, though done with fault,” said the Bhagavad-Gita,⁹⁸ “than doing others’ work, even excellently.” Dharma is to the individual what its normal development is to a seed—the orderly fulfilment of an inherent nature and destiny.⁹⁹ So old is this conception of morality that even today it is difficult for all, and impossible for most, Hindus to think of themselves except as members of a specific caste, guided and bound by its rule. “Without caste,” says an English historian, “Hindu society is inconceivable.”¹⁰⁰

In addition to the dharma of each caste the Hindu recognized a general dharma or obligation affecting all castes, and embracing chiefly respect for Brahmans, and reverence for cows.¹⁰¹ Next to these duties was that of bearing children. “Then only is a man a perfect man,” says Manu’s code,¹⁰² “when he is three—himself, his wife, and his son.” Not only would children be economic assets to their parents, and support them as a matter of course in old age, but they would carry on the household worship of their ancestors, and would offer to them periodically the food without which these ghosts would starve.¹⁰³ Consequently there was no birth control in India, and abortion was branded as a crime equal to the murder of a Brahman.¹⁰⁴ Infanticide occurred,¹⁰⁵ hut it was exceptional; the father was glad to have children, and proud to have many. The tenderness of the old to the young is one of the fairest aspects of Hindu civilization.¹⁰⁶

The child was hardly born when the parents began to think of its marriage. For marriage, in the Hindu system, was compulsory; an unmarried man was an outcast, without social status or consideration, and prolonged virginity was a disgrace.¹⁰⁷ Nor was marriage to be left to the whim of individual choice or romantic love; it was a vital concern of society and the race, and could not safely be entrusted to the myopia of passion or the accidents of proximity;¹⁰⁸ it must be arranged by the parents before the fever of sex should have time to precipitate a union doomed, in the Hindu view, to disillusionment and bitterness. Manu gave the name of Gandharva marriage to unions by mutual choice, and stigmatized them as born of desire; they were permissible, but hardly respectable.

The early maturity of the Hindu, making a girl of twelve as old as a girl of fourteen or fifteen in America, created a difficult problem of moral and social order.* Should marriage be arranged to coincide with sexual maturity, or should it be postponed, as in America, until the male arrives at economic maturity? The first solution apparently weakens the national physique,¹¹⁰ unduly accelerates the growth of population, and sacrifices the woman almost completely to reproduction; the second solution leaves the problems of unnatural delay, sexual frustration, prostitution, and venereal disease. The Hindus chose child marriage as the lesser evil, and tried to mitigate its dangers by establishing, between the marriage and its consummation, a period in which the bride should remain with her parents until the coming of puberty.¹¹¹ The institution was old, and therefore holy; it had been rooted in the desire to prevent intercaste marriage through casual sexual attraction;¹¹² it was later encouraged by the fact that the conquering and otherwise ruthless Moslems were restrained by their religion from carrying away married women as slaves;¹¹³ and finally it took rigid form in the parental resolve to protect the girl from the erotic sensibilities of the male.

That these were reasonably keen, and that the male might be trusted to attend to his biological functions on the slightest provocation, appears from the Hindu literature of love. The Kamasutra, or “Doctrine of Desire,” is the most famous in a long list of works revealing a certain preoccupation with the physical and mental technique of sex. It was composed, the author assures us, “according to the precepts of Holy Writ, for the benefit of the world, by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student at Benares, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity.”¹¹⁴ “He who neglects a girl, thinking she is too bashful,” says this anchorite, “is despised by her as a beast ignorant of the working of the female mind.”¹¹⁵ Vatsyayana gives a delightful picture of a girl in love,¹¹⁶ but his wisdom is lavished chiefly upon the parental art of getting her married away, and the husbandly art of keeping her physically content.

We must not presume that the sexual sensitivity of the Hindu led to any unusual license. Child marriage raised a barrier against premarital relations, and the strong religious sanctions used in the inculcation of wifely fidelity made adultery far more difficult and rare than in Europe or America. Prostitution was for the most part confined to the temples. In the south the needs of the esurient male were met by the providential institution of devadasis—literally “servants of the gods,” actually prostitutes. Each Tamil temple had a troop of “sacred women,” engaged at first to dance and sing before the idols, and perhaps to entertain the Brahmans. Some of them seem to have lived lives of almost conventual seclusion; others were allowed to extend their services to all who could pay, on condition that a part of their earnings should be contributed to the clergy. Many of these temple courtesans, or nautch* girls, provided dancing and singing in public functions and private gatherings, in the style of the geishas of Japan; some of them learned to read, and, like the hetairai of Greece, furnished cultured conversation in homes where the married women were neither encouraged to read nor allowed to mingle with guests. In 1004 A.D., as a sacred inscription informs us, the temple of the Chola King Rajaraja at Tanjore had four hundred devadasis. The custom acquired the sanctity of time, and no one seems to have considered it immoral; respectable women now and then dedicated a daughter to the profession of temple prostitute in much the same spirit in which a son might be dedicated to the priesthood.¹¹⁷ Dubois, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, described the temples of the south as in some cases “converted into mere brothels”; the devadasis, whatever their original functions, were frankly called harlots by the public, and were used as such. If we may believe the old abbé, who had no reason to be prejudiced in favor of India,

their official duties consist in dancing and singing within the temples twice a day, . . . and also at all public ceremonies. The first they execute with sufficient grace, although their attitudes are lascivious and their gestures indecorous. As regards their singing, it is almost always confined to obscene verses describing some licentious episode in the history of their gods.¹¹⁸

Under these circumstances of temple prostitution and child marriage little opportunity was given for what we call “romantic love.” This idealistic devotion of one sex to the other appears in Indian literature—for example in the poems of Chandi Das and Jayadeva—but usually as a symbol of the soul surrendering to God; while in actual life it took most often the form of the complete devotion of the wife to her mate. The love poetry is sometimes of the ethereal type depicted by the Tennysons and Longfellows of our Puritan tradition; sometimes it is the full-bodied and sensuous passion of the Elizabethan stage.¹¹⁹ One writer unites religion and love, and sees in either ecstasy a recognition of identity; another lists the three hundred and sixty different emotions that fill the lover’s heart, and counts the patterns which his teeth have left on his beloved’s flesh, or shows him decorating her breasts with painted flowers of sandal paste; and the author of the Nala and Damayanti episode in the Mahabharata describes the melancholy sighs and pale dyspepsia of the lovers in the best style of the French troubadours.¹²⁰

Such whimsical passions were seldom permitted to determine marriage in India. Manu allowed eight different forms of marriage, in which marriage by capture and marriage “from affection” were ranked lowest in the moral scale, and marriage by purchase was accepted as the sensible way of arranging a union; in the long run, the Hindu legislator thought, those marriages are most soundly based that rest upon an economic foundation.¹²¹ In the days of Dubois “to marry” and “to buy a wife” were “synonymous expressions in India.”*¹²² The wisest marriage was held to be one arranged by the parents with full regard for the rules of endogamy and exogamy: the youth must marry within his caste, and outside his gotra or group.¹²³ He might take several wives, but only one of his own caste—who was to have precedence over the rest; preferably, said Manu, he was to be monogamous,†¹²⁴ The woman was to love her husband with patient devotion; the husband was to give to his wife not romantic affection, but solicitous protection.¹²⁶

The Hindu family was typically patriarchal, with the father full master of his wife, his children, and his slaves.¹²⁷ Woman was a lovely but inferior being. In the beginning, says Hindu legend, when Twashtri, the Divine Artificer, came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man, and had no solid elements left. In this dilemma he fashioned her eclectically out of the odds and ends of creation:

He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant’s trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot’s bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldness of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together he made woman, and gave her to man.¹²⁹

Nevertheless, despite all this equipment, woman fared poorly in India. Her high status in Vedic days was lost under priestly influence and Mohammedan example. The Code of Manu set the tone against her in phrases reminiscent of an early stage in Christian theology: “The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman; the source of earthly existence is woman; therefore avoid woman.”¹³⁰ “A female,” says another passage, “is able to draw from the right path in this life not a fool only but even a sage, and can lead him in subjection to desire or to wrath.”¹³¹ The law laid it down that all through her life woman should be in tutelage, first to her father, then to her husband, and finally to her son.¹³² The wife addressed her husband humbly as “master,” “lord,” even as “my god”; in public she walked some distance behind him, and seldom received a word from him.¹³³ She was expected to show her devotion by the most minute service, preparing the meals, eating—after they had finished—the food left by her husband and her sons, and embracing her husband’s feet at bedtime.¹³⁴ “A faithful wife,” said Manu, “must serve . . . her lord as if he were a god, and never do aught to pain him, whatsoever be his state, and even though devoid of every virtue.”¹³⁵ A wife who disobeyed her husband would become a jackal in her next incarnation.¹³⁶

Like their sisters in Europe and America before our own times, the women of India received education only if they were ladies of high degree, or temple prostitutes.¹³⁷ The art of reading was considered inappropriate in a woman; her power over men could not be increased by it, and her attractiveness would be diminished. Says Chitra in Tagore’s play: “When a woman is merely a woman—when she winds herself round and round men’s hearts with her smiles and sobs and services and caressing endearments—then she is happy. Of what use to her are learning and great achievements?”¹³⁸ Knowledge of the Vedas was denied to her;¹³⁹ “for a woman to study the Vedas,” says the Mahabharata, “is a sign of confusion in the realm.”¹⁴⁰* Megasthenes reported, in Chandragupta’s days, that “the Brahmans keep their wives—and they have many wives-ignorant of all philosophy; for if women learned to look upon pleasure and pain, life and death, philosophically, they would become depraved, or else no longer remain in subjection.”¹⁴¹

In the Code of Manu three persons were ineligible to hold property: a wife, a son, and a slave; whatever these might earn became the property of their master.¹⁴² A wife, however, could retain as her own the dowry and gifts that she had received at her nuptials; and the mother of a prince might govern in his stead during his minority.¹⁴³ The husband could divorce his wife for unchastity; the woman could not divorce her husband for any cause.¹⁴⁴ A wife who drank liquor, or was diseased, or rebellious, or wasteful, or quarrelsome, might at any time be (not divorced but) superseded by another wife. Passages of the Code advocate an enlightened gentleness to women: they are not to be struck “even with a flower”; they are not to be watched too strictly, for then their subtlety will find a way to mischief; and if they like fine raiment-it is wise to indulge them, for “if the wife be not elegantly attired, she will not exhilarate her husband,” whereas when “a wife is gaily adorned, the whole house is embellished.”¹⁴⁵ Way must be made for a woman, as for the aged or a priest; and “pregnant women, brides, and damsels shall have food before all other guests.”¹⁴⁶ Though woman could not rule as a wife, she might rule as a mother; the greatest tenderness and respect was paid to the mother of many children; and even the patriarchal code of Manu said, “The mother exceedeth a thousand fathers in the right to reverence.”¹⁴⁷

Doubtless the influx of Islamic ideas had something to do with the decline in the status of woman in India after Vedic days. The custom of purdah (curtain)—the seclusion of married women—came into India with the Persians and the Mohammedans, and has therefore been stronger in the north than in the south. Partly to protect their wives from the Moslems, Hindu husbands developed a system of purdah so rigid that a respectable woman could show herself only to her husband and her sons, and could move in public only under a heavy veil; even the doctor who treated her and took her pulse had to do so through a curtain.¹⁴⁸ In some circles it was a breach of good manners to inquire after a man’s wife, or to speak, as a guest, to the ladies of the house.¹⁴⁹

The custom of burning widows on their husbands’ pyres was also an importation into India. Herodotus describes it as practised by the ancient Scythians and Thracians; if we may believe him, the wives of a Thracian fought for the privilege of being slain over his grave.¹⁵⁰ Probably the rite came down from the almost world-wide primitive usage of immolating one or more of the wives or concubines of a prince or rich man, along with slaves and other perquisites, to take care of him in the Beyond.¹⁵¹ The Atharva-veda speaks of it as an old custom, but the Rig-veda indicates that in Vedic days it had been softened to the requirement that the widow should lie on her husband’s pyre for a moment before his cremation.¹⁵² The Mahabharata shows the institution restored and unrepentant; it gives several examples of suttee,* and lays down the rule that the chaste widow does not wish to survive her husband, but enters proudly into the fire.¹⁵³ The sacrifice was effected by burning the wife in a pit, or, among the Telugus in the south, by burying her alive.¹⁵⁴ Strabo reports that suttee prevailed in India in the time of Alexander, and that the Kathæi, a Punjab tribe, had made suttee a law in order to prevent wives from poisoning their husbands.¹⁵⁵ Manu makes no mention of the practice. The Brahmans opposed it at first, then accepted it, and finally lent it a religious sanction by interpreting it as bound up with the eternity of marriage: a woman once married to a man remained his forever, and would be rejoined to him in his later lives.¹⁵⁶ In Rajasthan the absolute possession of the wife by the husband took the form of the johur, in which a Rajput, facing certain defeat, immolated his wives before advancing to his own death in battle.¹⁵⁷ The usage was widespread under the Moguls, despite Moslem abhorrence; and even the powerful Akbar failed to dislodge it. On one occasion Akbar himself tried to dissuade a Hindu bride who wished to be burned on the pyre of her dead betrothed; but though the Brahmans added their pleas to the king’s, she insisted on the sacrifice; as the flames reached her, and Akbar’s son Daniyal continued to argue with her, she replied, “Do not annoy, do not annoy.” Another widow, rejecting similar pleas, held her finger in the flame of a lamp until the finger was completely burned; giving no sign of pain, she indicated in this way her scorn of those who advised her to refuse the rite.¹⁵⁸ In Vijayanagar suttee sometimes took a wholesale form; not one or a few but all of the many wives of a prince or a captain followed him to death. Conti reports that the Raya or King had selected three thousand of his twelve thousand wives as favorites, “on condition that at his death they should voluntarily burn themselves with him, which is considered to be a great honor for them.”¹⁵⁹ It is difficult to say how thoroughly the medieval Hindu widow was reconciled to suttee by religious inculcation and belief, and the hope of reunion with her husband in another life.

Suttee became less and less popular as India developed contacts with Europe; but the Hindu widow continued to suffer many disabilities. Since marriage bound a woman eternally to her husband, her remarriage after his death was a mortal offense, and was bound to create confusion in his later existences. The widow was therefore required by Brahmanical law to remain unmarried, to shave her head, and live out her life (if she did not prefer suttee) in the care of her children and in acts of private charity.¹⁶⁰ She was not left destitute; on the contrary she had a first lien on her husband’s estate for her maintenance.¹⁶¹ These rules were followed only by the orthodox women of the middle and upper classes—i.e., by some thirty per cent of the population; they were ignored by Moslems, Sikhs, and the lower castes.¹⁶² Hindu opinion likened this second virginity of the widow to the celibacy of nuns in Christendom; in either case some women renounced marriage, and were set aside for charitable ministrations.*

IV. MANNERS, CUSTOMS AND CHARACTER

Sexual modesty—Hygiene—Dress—Appearance—The gentle art among the Hindus—Faults and virtues—Games-Festivals—Death

It will seem incredible to the provincial mind that the same people that tolerated such institutions as child marriage, temple prostitution and suttee was also pre-eminent in gentleness, decency and courtesy. Aside from a few devadasis, prostitutes were rare in India, and sexual propriety was exceptionally high. “It must be admitted,” says the unsympathetic Dubois, “that the laws of etiquette and social politeness are much more clearly laid down, and much better observed by all classes of Hindus, even by the lowest, than they are by people of corresponding social position in Europe.”¹⁶⁴ The leading rôle played by sex in Occidental conversation and wit was quite alien to Hindu manners, which forbade any public intimacy between men and women, and looked upon the physical contact of the sexes in dancing as improper and obscene.¹⁶⁵ A Hindu woman might go anywhere in public without fear of molestation or insult;¹⁶⁶ indeed the risk, as the Oriental saw the matter, was all on the other side. Manu warns men: “Woman is by nature ever inclined to tempt man; hence a man should not sit in a secluded place even with his nearest female relative”; and he must never look higher than the ankles of a passing girl.¹⁶⁷

Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was not, as Anatole France thought it, la seule morale, but it was made an essential part of piety. Manu laid down, many centuries ago, an exacting code of physical refinement. “Early in the morning,” one instruction reads, “let him” (the Brahman) “bathe, decorate his body, clean his teeth, apply collyrium to his eyes, and worship the gods.”¹⁶⁸ The native schools made good manners and personal cleanliness the first courses in the curriculum. Every day the caste Hindu would bathe his body, and wash the simple robe he was to wear; it seemed to him abominable to use the same garment, unwashed, for more than a day.¹⁶⁹ “The Hindus,” said Sir William Huber, “stand out as examples of bodily cleanliness among Asiatic races, and, we may add, among the races of the world. The ablutions of the Hindu have passed into a proverb.”¹⁷⁰*

Yuan Chwang, 1300 years ago, described thus the eating habits of the Hindus:

They are pure of themselves, and not from compulsion. Before every meal they must have a wash; the fragments and remains are not served up again; the food utensils are not passed on; those which are of pottery or of wood must be thrown away after use, and those which are of gold, silver, copper or iron get another polishing. As soon as a meal is over they chew the tooth-stick and make themselves clean. Before they have finished ablutions they do not come in contact with each other.¹⁷²

The Brahman usually washed his hands, feet and teeth before and after each meal; he ate with his fingers from food on a leaf, and thought it unclean to use twice a plate, a knife or a fork; and when finished he rinsed his mouth seven times.¹⁷³ The toothbrush was always new—a twig freshly plucked from a tree; to the Hindu it seemed disreputable to brush the teeth with the hair of an animal, or to use the same brush twice:¹⁷⁴ so many are the ways in which men may scorn one another. The Hindu chewed almost incessantly the leaf of the betel plant, which blackened the teeth in a manner disagreeable to Europeans, and agreeable to himself. This and the occasional use of opium consoled him for his usual abstention from tobacco and intoxicating drinks.

Hindu law books give explicit rules for menstrual hygiene,¹⁷⁵ and for meeting the demands of nature. Nothing could exceed in complexity or solemnity the ritual for Brahman defecation.¹⁷⁶ The Twice-born must use only his left hand in this rite, and must cleanse the parts with water; and he considered his house defiled by the very presence of Europeans who contented themselves with paper.¹⁷⁷ The Outcastes, however, and many Shudras, were less particular, and might turn any roadside into a privy.¹⁷⁸ In the quarters occupied by these classes public sanitation was confined to an open sewer line in the middle of the street.¹⁷⁹

In so warm a climate clothing was a superfluity, and beggars and saints bridged the social scale in agreeing to do without it. One southern caste, like the Canadian Doukhobors, threatened to migrate if its members were compelled to wear clothing.¹⁸⁰ Until the late eighteenth century it was probably the custom in southern India (as still in Bali) for both sexes to go naked above the waist¹⁸¹ Children were dressed for the most part in beads and rings. Most of the population went barefoot; if the orthodox Hindu wore shoes they had to be of cloth, for under no circumstances would he use shoes of leather. A large number of the men contented themselves with loin cloths; when they needed more covering they bound some fabric about the waist, and threw the loose end over the left shoulder. The Rajputs wore trousers of every color and shape, with a tunic girdled by a ceinture, a scarf at the neck, sandals or boots on the feet, and a turban on the head. The turban had come in with the Moslems, and had been taken over by the Hindus, who wound it carefully around the head in varying manner according to caste, but always with the generosity of a magician unfurling endless silk; sometimes one turban, unraveled, reached a length of seventy feet.¹⁸² The women wore a flowing robe—colorful silk sari, or homespun khaddar—which passed over both shoulders, clasped the waist tightly, and then fell to the feet; often a few inches of bronze flesh were left bare below the breast. Hair was oiled to guard it against the desiccating sun; men divided theirs in the center and drew it together into a tuft behind the left ear; women coiled a part of theirs upon their heads, but let the rest hang free, often decorating it with flowers, or covering it with a scarf. The men were handsome, the young women were beautiful and all presented a magnificent carriage;¹⁸³ an ordinary Hindu in a loin cloth often had more dignity than a European diplomat completely equipped. Pierre Loti thought it “incontestable that the beauty of the Aryan race reaches its highest development of perfection and refinement among the upper class” in India.¹⁸⁴ Both sexes were adept in cosmetics, and the women felt naked without jewelry. A ring in the left nostril denoted marriage. On the forehead, in most cases, was a painted symbol of religious faith.

It is difficult to go below these surface appearances and describe the character of the Hindus, for every people harbors all virtues and all vices, and witnesses tend to select such of these as will point their moral and adorn their tale. “I think we may take as their greatest vice,” says Père Dubois, “the untrustworthiness, deceit and double-dealing . . . which are common to all Hindus. . . . Certain it is that there is no nation in the world which thinks so lightly of an oath or of perjury.”¹⁸⁵ “Lying,” says Westermarck, “has been called the national vice of the Hindus.”¹⁸⁶ “Hindus are wily and deceitful,” says Macaulay.¹⁸⁷ According to the laws of Manu and the practice of the world a lie told for good motives is forgivable; if, for example, the death of a priest would result from speaking the truth, falsehood is justifiable.¹⁸⁸ But Yuan Chwang tells us: “They do not practice deceit, and they keep their sworn obligations. . . . They will not take anything wrongfully, and they yield more than fairness requires.”¹⁸⁹ Abu-1 Fazl, not prejudiced in favor of India, reports the Hindus of the sixteenth century as “religious, affable, cheerful, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in business, admirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity.”¹⁹⁰ “Their honesty,” said honest Keir Hardie, “is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.”¹⁹¹ “I have had before me,” says a British judge in India, “hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it.”¹⁹² How shall we reconcile these conflicting testimonies? Perhaps it is very simple: some Hindus are honest, and some are not.

Again the Hindus are very cruel and gentle. The English language has derived a short and ugly word from that strange secret society—almost a caste—of Thugs which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries committed thousands of atrocious murders in order (they said) to offer the victims as sacrifices to the goddess Kali.¹⁹³ Vincent Smith writes of these Thugs (literally, “cheats”) in terms not quite irrelevant to our time:

The gangs had little to fear, and enjoyed almost complete immunity; . . . they always had powerful protectors. The moral feeling of the people had sunk so low that there were no signs of general reprehension of the cold-blooded crimes committed by the Thugs. They were accepted as part of the established order of things; and until the secrets of the organization were given away, . . . it was usually impossible to obtain evidence against even the most notorious Thugs.^193a

Nevertheless there is comparatively little crime in India, and little violence. By universal admission the Hindus are gentle to the point of timidity;¹⁹⁴ too worshipful and good-natured, too long broken upon the wheel of conquest and alien despotisms, to be good fighters except in the sense that they can bear pain with unequaled bravery.¹⁹⁵ Their greatest faults are probably listlessness and laziness; but in the Hindus these are not faults but climatic necessities and adaptations, like the dolce far niente of the Latin peoples, and the economic fever of Americans. The Hindus are sensitive, emotional, temperamental, imaginative; therefore they are better artists and poets than rulers or executives. They can exploit their fellows with the same zest that characterizes the entrepreneur everywhere; yet they are given to limitless charity, and are the most hospitable hosts this side of barbarism.¹⁹⁶ Even their enemies admit their courtesy,¹⁹⁷ and a generous Britisher sums up his long experience by ascribing to the higher classes in Calcutta “polished manners, clearness and comprehensiveness of understanding, liberality of feeling, and independence of principle, that would have stamped them gentlemen in any country in the world.”¹⁹⁸

The Hindu genius, to an outsider, seems sombre, and doubtless the Hindus have not had much cause for laughter. The dialogues of Buddha indicate a great variety of games, including one that strangely resembles chess;¹⁹⁹* but neither these nor their successors exhibit the vivacity and joyousness of Western games. Akbar, in the sixteenth century, introduced into India the game of polo,* which had apparently come from Persia and was making its way across Tibet to China and Japan;²⁰² and it pleased him to play pachisi (the modern “parchesi”) on squares cut in the pavement of the palace quadrangle at Agra, with pretty slave-girls as living pieces.²⁰³

Frequent religious festivals lent color to public life. Greatest of all was the Durga-Puja, in honor of the great goddess-mother Kali. For weeks before its approach the Hindus feasted and sang; but the culminating ceremonial was a procession in which every family carried an image of the goddess to the Ganges, flung it into the river, and returned homeward with all merriness spent.²⁰⁴ The Holt festival celebrated in honor of the goddess Vasanti took on a Saturnalian character: phallic emblems were carried in parade, and were made to simulate the motions of coitus.²⁰⁵ In Chota Nagpur the harvest was the signal for general license; “men set aside all conventions, women all modesty, and complete liberty was given to the girls.” The Parganait, a caste of peasants in the Rajmahal Hills, held an annual agricultural festival in which the unmarried were allowed to indulge freely in promiscuous relations.²⁰⁶ Doubtless we have here again relics of vegetation magic, intended to promote the fertility of families and the fields. More decorous were the wedding festivals that marked the great event in the life of every Hindu; many a father brought himself to ruin in providing a sumptuous feast for the marriage of his daughter or his son.²⁰⁷

At the other end of life was the final ceremony—cremation. In Buddha’s days the Zoroastrian exposure of the corpse to birds of prey was the usual mode of departure; but persons of distinction were burned, after death, on a pyre, and their ashes were buried under a tope or stupa—i.e., a memorial shrine.²⁰⁸ In later days cremation became the privilege of every man; each night one might see fagots being brought together for the burning of the dead. In Yuan Chwang’s time it was not unusual for the very old to take death by the forelock and have themselves rowed by their children to the middle of the Ganges, where they threw themselves into the saving stream.²⁰⁹ Suicide under certain conditions has always found more approval in the East than in the West; it was permitted under the laws of Akbar to the old or the incurably diseased, and to those who wished to offer themselves as sacrifices to the gods. Thousands of Hindus have made their last oblation by starving themselves to death, or burying themselves in snow, or covering themselves with cow-dung and setting it on fire, or allowing crocodiles to devour them at the mouths of the Ganges. Among the Brahmans a form of hara-kiri arose, by which suicide was committed to avenge an injury or point a wrong. When one of the Rajput kings levied a subsidy upon the priestly caste, several of the wealthiest Brahmans stabbed themselves to death in his presence, laying upon him the supposedly most terrible and effective curse of all—that of a dying priest. The Brahmanical lawbooks required that he who had resolved to die by his own hand should fast for three days; and that he who attempted suicide and failed should perform the severest penances.²¹⁰ Life is a stage with one entrance, but many exits.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Paradise of the Gods

IN no other country is religion so powerful, or so important, as in India. If the Hindus have permitted alien governments to be set over them again and again it is partly because they did not care much who ruled or exploited them—natives or foreigners; the crucial matter was religion, not politics; the soul, not the body; endless later lives rather than this passing one. When Ashoka became a saint, and Akbar almost adopted Hinduism, the power of religion was revealed over even the strongest men. In our century it is a saint, rather than a statesman, who for the first time in history has unified all India.

I. THE LATER HISTORY OF BUDDHISM

The Zenith of Buddhism—The Two Vehicles—“Mahayana”—Buddhism, Stoicism and Christianity—The decay of Buddhism—Its migrations: Ceylon, Burma, Turkestan, Tibet, Cambodia, China, Japan

Two hundred years after Ashoka’s death Buddhism reached the peak of its curve in India. The period of Buddhist growth from Ashoka to Harsha was in many ways the climax of Indian religion, education and art. But the Buddhism that prevailed was not that of Buddha; we might better describe it as that of his rebellious disciple Subhadda, who, on hearing of the Master’s death, said to the monks: “Enough, sirs! Weep not, neither lament! We are well rid of the great Samana . We used to be annoyed by being told, “This beseems you, this beseems you not.’ But now we shall be able to do whatever we like; and what we do not like, that we shall not have to do!”¹

The first thing they did with their freedom was to split into sects. Within two centuries of Buddha’s death eighteen varieties of Buddhistic doctrine had divided the Master’s heritage. The Buddhists of south India and Ceylon held fast for a time to the simpler and purer creed of the Founder, which came to be called Hinayana, or the “Lesser Vehicle”: they worshiped Buddha as a great teacher, but not as a god, and their Scriptures were the Pali texts of the more ancient faith. But throughout northern India, Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan the Buddhism that prevailed was the Mahayana, or the “Greater Vehicle,” defined and propagated by Kanishka’s Council; these (politically) inspired theologians announced the divinity of Buddha, surrounded him with angels and saints, adopted the Yoga asceticism of Patanjali, and issued in Sanskrit a new set of Holy Writ which, though it lent itself readily to metaphysical and scholastic refinements, proclaimed and certified a more popular religion than the austere pessimism of Shakya-muni.

The Mahayana was Buddhism softened with Brahmanical deities, practices and myths, and adapted to the needs of the Kushan Tatars and the Mongols of Tibet, over whom Kanishka had extended his rule. A heaven was conceived in which there were many Buddhas, of whom Amida Buddha, the Redeemer, came to be the best beloved by the people; this heaven and a corresponding hell were to be the reward or punishment of good or evil done on earth, and would thereby liberate some of the King’s militia for other services. The greatest of the saints, in this new theology, were the Bodhisattwas, or future Buddhas, who voluntarily refrained from achieving the Nirvana (here freedom from rebirth) that was within their merit and power, in order to be reborn into life after life, and to help others on earth to find the Way.* As in Mediterranean Christianity, these saints became so popular that they almost crowded out the head of the pantheon in worship and art. The veneration of relics, the use of holy water, candles, incense, the rosary, clerical vestments, a liturgical dead language, monks and nuns, monastic tonsure and celibacy, confession, fast days, the canonization of saints, purgatory and masses for the dead flourished in Buddhism as in medieval Christianity, and seem to have appeared in Buddhism first.† Mahayana became to Hinayana or primitive Buddhism what Catholicism was to Stoicism and primitive Christianity. Buddha, like Luther, had made the mistake of supposing that the drama of religious ritual could be replaced with sermons and morality; and the victory of a Buddhism rich in myths, miracles, ceremonies and intermediating saints corresponds to the ancient and current triumph of a colorful and dramatic Catholicism over the austere simplicity of early Christianity and modern Protestantism.

That same popular preference for polytheism, miracles and myths which destroyed Buddha’s Buddhism finally destroyed, in India, the Buddhism of the Greater Vehicle itself. For—to speak with the hindsight wisdom of the historian—if Buddhism was to take over so much of Hinduism, so many of its legends, its rites and its gods, soon very little would remain to distinguish the two religions; and the one with the deeper roots, the more popular appeal, and the richer economic resources and political support would gradually absorb the other. Rapidly superstition, which seems to be the very lifeblood of our race, poured over from the older faith to the younger one, until even the phallic enthusiasms of the Shakti sects found place in the ritual of Buddhism. Slowly the patient and tenacious Brahmans recaptured influence and imperial patronage; and the success of the youthful philosopher Shankara in restoring the authority of the Vedas as the basis of Hindu thought put an end to the intellectual leadership of the Buddhists in India.

The final blow came from without, and was in a sense invited by Buddhism itself. The prestige of the Sangha, or Buddhist Order, had, after Ashoka, drawn the best blood of Magadha into a celibate and pacific clergy; even in Buddha’s time some patriots had complained that “the monk Gautama causes fathers to beget no sons, and families to become extinct.”⁵ The growth of Buddhism and monasticism in the first year of our era sapped the manhood of India, and conspired with political division to leave India open to easy conquest. When the Arabs came, pledged to spread a simple and stoic monotheism, they looked with scorn upon the lazy, venal, miracle-mongering Buddhist monks; they smashed the monasteries, killed thousands of monks, and made monasticism unpopular with the cautious. The survivors were re-absorbed into the Hinduism that had begotten them; the ancient orthodoxy received the penitent heresy, and “Brahmanism killed Buddhism by a fraternal embrace.”⁶ Brahmanism had always been tolerant; in all the history of the rise and fall of Buddhism and a hundred other sects we find much disputation, but no instance of persecution. On the contrary Brahmanism eased the return of the prodigal by proclaiming Buddha a god (as an avatar of Vishnu), ending animal sacrifice, and accepting into orthodox practice the Buddhist doctrine of the sanctity of all animal life. Quietly and peacefully, after half a thousand years of gradual decay, Buddhism disappeared from India.*

Meanwhile it was winning nearly all the remainder of the Asiatic world. Its ideas, its literature and its art spread to Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula in the south, to Tibet and Turkestan in the north, to Burma, Siam, Cambodia, China, Korea and Japan in the east; in this way all of these regions except the Far East received as much civilization as they could digest, precisely as western Europe and Russia received civilization from Roman and Byzantine monks in the Middle Ages. The cultural zenith of most of these nations came from the stimulus of Buddhism. From the time of Ashoka to its decay in the ninth century, Anuradhapura, in Ceylon, was one of the major cities of the Oriental world; the Bo-tree there has been worshiped for two thousand years, and the temple on the heights of Kandy is one of the Meccas of the 150,000,000 Buddhists of Asia.† The Buddhism of Burma is probably the purest now extant, and its monks often approach the ideal of Buddha; under their ministrations the 13,000,000 inhabitants of Burma have reached a standard of living considerably higher than that of India.⁷ Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot have unearthed from the sands of Turkestan hundreds of Buddhist manuscripts, and other evidences of a culture which flourished there from the time of Kanishka to the thirteenth century A.D. In the seventh century of our era the enlightened warrior, Srong-tsan Gampo, established an able government in Tibet, annexed Nepal, built Lhasa as his capital, and made it rich as a halfway house in Chinese-Indian trade. Having invited Buddhist monks to come from India and spread Buddhism and education among his people, he retired from rule for four years in order to learn how to read and write, and inaugurated the Golden Age of Tibet. Thousands of monasteries were built in the mountains and on the great plateau; and a voluminous Tibetan canon of Buddhist books was published, in three hundred and thirty-three volumes, which preserved for modern scholarship many works whose Hindu originals have long been lost.⁸ Here, eremitically sealed from the rest of the world, Buddhism developed into a maze of superstitions, monasticism and ecclesiasticism rivaled only by early medieval Europe; and the Dalai Lama (or “All-Embracing Priest”), hidden away in the great Potala monastery that overlooks the city of Lhasa, is still believed by the good people of Tibet to be the living incarnation of the Bodhisattwa Avalokiteshvafa.⁹ In Cambodia, or Indo-China, Buddhism conspired with Hinduism to provide the religious framework for one of the richest ages in the history of Oriental art. Buddhism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its birth; and it won them without shedding a drop of blood.

II. THE NEW DIVINITIES

Hinduism—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—Krishna—Kali—Animal gods—The sacred cow—Polytheism and monotheism

The “Hinduism” that now replaced Buddhism was not one religion, nor was it only religion; it was a medley of faiths and ceremonies whose practitioners had only four qualities in common: they recognized the caste system and the leadership of the Brahmans, they reverenced the cow as especially representative of divinity, they accepted the law of Karma and the transmigration of souls, and they replaced with new gods the deities of the Vedas. These faiths had in part antedated and survived Vedic nature worship; in part they had grown from the connivance of the Brahmans at rites, divinities and beliefs unknown to the Scriptures and largely contrary to the Vedic spirit; they had boiled in the cauldron of Hindu religious thought even while Buddhism maintained a passing intellectual ascendancy.

The gods of Hinduism were characterized by a kind of anatomical superabundance vaguely symbolizing extraordinary knowledge, activity or power. The new Brahma had four faces, Kartikeya six; Shiva had three eyes, Indra a thousand; and nearly every deity had four arms.¹⁰ At the head of this revised pantheon was Brahma, chivalrously neuter, acknowledged master of the gods, but no more noticed in actual worship than a constitutional monarch in modern Europe. Combined with him and Shiva in a triad—not a trinity—of dominant deities was Vishnu, a god of love who repeatedly became man in order to help mankind. His greatest incarnation was Krishna; as such he was born in a prison, had accomplished many marvels of heroism and romance, healed the deaf and the blind, helped lepers, championed the poor, and raised men from the grave. He had a beloved disciple, Arjuna, before whom he was transfigured. He died, some say, by an arrow; others say by a crucifixion on a tree. He descended into hell, rose to heaven, and will return on the last day to judge the quick and the dead.¹¹

To the Hindu there are three chief processes in life and the universe: creation, preservation and destruction. Hence divinity takes for him three main forms: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer; these are the Trimurti, or “Three Shapes,” which all Hindus but the Jains adore.* Popular devotion is divided between Vaishnavism, the religion of Vishnu, and Shivaism, the religion of Shiva. The two cults are peaceful neighbors, and sometimes hold sacrifices in the same temple;¹³ and the wise Brahmans, followed by a majority of the people, pay equal honor to both these gods. Pious Vaishnavites paint upon their foreheads every morning with red clay the trident sign of Vishnu; pious Shivaites trace horizontal lines across their brows with cow-dung ashes, or wear the linga—symbol of the male organ—fastened on their arms or hung from their necks.¹⁴

The worship of Shiva is one of the oldest, most profound and most terrible elements in Hinduism. Sir John Marshall reports “unmistakable evidence” of the cult of Shiva at Mohenjo-daro, partly in the form of a three-headed Shiva, partly in the form of little stone columns which he presumes to be as phallic as their modern counterparts. “Shivaism,” he concludes, “is therefore the most ancient living faith in the world.”†¹⁵ The name of the god is a euphemism; literally it means “propitious”; whereas Shiva himself is viewed chiefly as a god of cruelty and destruction, the personification of that cosmic force which destroys, one after another, all the forms that reality takes—all cells, all organisms, all species, all ideas, all works, all planets and all things. Never has another people dared to face the impermanence of forms, and the impartiality of nature, so frankly, or to recognize so clearly that evil balances good, that destruction goes step by step with creation, and that all birth is a capital crime, punishable with death. The Hindu, tortured with a thousand misfortunes and sufferings, sees in them the handiwork of a vivacious force that appears to find pleasure in breaking down everything that Brahma—the creative power in nature—has produced. Shiva dances to the tune of a perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming world.

Just as death is the penalty of birth, so birth is the frustration of death; and the same god who symbolizes destruction represents also, for the Hindu mind, that passion and torrent of reproduction which overrides the death of the individual with the continuance of the race. In some parts of India, particularly Bengal, this creative or reproductive energy (Shakti) of Shiva or nature is personified in the figure of Shiva’s wife, Kali (Parvati, Uma, Durga), and is worshiped in one of the many Shakti cults. Until the last century this worship was a bloody ritual, often involving human sacrifice; latterly the goddess has been content with goats.¹⁷ The deity is portrayed for the populace by a black figure with gaping mouth and protruding tongue, adorned with snakes and dancing upon a corpse; her earrings are dead men, her necklace is a string of skulls, her face and breasts are smeared with blood.¹⁸ Two of her four hands carry a sword and a severed head; the other two are extended in blessing and protection. For Kali-Parvati is the goddess of motherhood as well as the bride of destruction and death; she can be tender as well as cruel, and can smile as well as kill; once, perhaps, she was a mother-goddess in Sumeria, and was imported into India before she became so terrible.¹⁹ Doubtless she and her lord are made as horrible as possible in order that timid worshipers may be frightened into decency, and perhaps into generosity to the priests.*

These are the greater gods of Hinduism; but they are merely five of thirty million deities in the Hindu pantheon; only to catalogue them would take a hundred volumes. Some of them are more properly angels, some are what we should call devils, some are heavenly bodies like the sun, some are mascots like Lakshmi (goddess of good luck), many of them are beasts of the field or fowl of the air. To the Hindu mind there was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls, and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again; all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincarnation. The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was recognized as Shiva’s son;²¹ he personified man’s animal nature, and at the same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honor of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the entrance to their holes.²² Temples have been erected in honor of snakes, as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests.²³ Crocodiles, tigers, peacocks, parrots, even rats, receive their meed of worship.²⁴

Most sacred of all animals to a Hindu is the cow. Images of bulls, in every material and size, appear in temples and homes, and in the city squares; the cow itself is the most popular organism in India, and has full freedom of the streets; its dung is used as fuel or a holy ointment; its urine is a sacred wine that will wash away all inner or outer uncleanness. Under no circumstances are these animals to be eaten by a Hindu, nor is their flesh to be worn as clothing—headgear or gloves or shoes; and when they die they are to be buried with the pomp of religious ritual.²⁵ Perhaps wise statesmanship once decreed this tabu in order to preserve agricultural draft animals for the growing population of India;²⁰ today, however, they number almost one-fourth as many as the population.²⁷ The Hindu view is that it is no more unreasonable to feel a profound affection for cows, and a profound revulsion at the thought of eating them, than it is to have similar feelings in regard to domestic cats and dogs; the cynical view of the matter is that the Brahmans believed that cows should never be slaughtered, that insects should never be injured, and that widows should, be burned alive. The truth is that the worship of animals occurs in the history of every people, and that if one must deify any animal, the kind and placid cow seems entitled to her measure of devotion. We must not be too haughtily shocked by the menagerie of Hindu gods; we too have had our serpent-devil of Eden, our golden calf of the Old Testament, our sacred fish of the catacombs, and our gracious Lamb of God.

The secret of polytheism is the inability of the simple mind to think in impersonal terms; it can understand persons more readily than forces, wills more easily than laws.²⁸ The Hindu suspects that our human senses see only the outside of the events that they report; behind the veil of these phenomena, he thinks, there are countless superphysical beings whom, in Kant’s phrase, we can only conceive but never perceive. A certain philosophical tolerance in the Brahmans has added to the teeming pantheon of India; local or tribal gods have been received into the Hindu Valhalla by adoption, usually by interpreting them as aspects or avatars of accepted deities; every faith could get its credentials if it paid its dues. In the end nearly every god became a phase, attribute or incarnation of another god, until all these divinities, to adult Hindu minds, merged into one; polytheism became pantheism, almost monotheism, almost monism. Just as a good Christian may pray to the Madonna or one of a thousand saints, and yet be a monotheist in the sense that he recognizes one God as supreme, so the Hindu prays to Kali or Rama or Krishma or Ganesha without presuming for a moment that these are supreme deities.* Some Hindus recognize Vishnu as supreme, and call Shiva merely a subordinate divinity; some call Shiva supreme, and make Vishnu an angel; if only a few worship Brahma it is because of its impersonality, its intangibility, its distance, and for the same reason that most churches in Christendom were erected to Mary or a saint, while Christianity waited for Voltaire to raise a chapel to God.

III. BELIEFS

The “Puranas”—The reincarnations of the universe—The migrations of the soul—“Karma”—Its philosophical aspects—Life as evil—Release

Mingled with this complex theology is a complex mythology at once superstitious and profound. The Vedas having died in the language in which they were written, and the metaphysics of the Brahman schools being beyond the comprehension of the people, Vyasa and others, over a period of a thousand years (500 B.C.—500 A.D.), composed eighteen Puranas—“old stories”—in 400,000 couplets, expounding to the laity the exact truth about the creation of the world, its periodical evolution and dissolution, the genealogy of the gods, and the history of the heroic age. These books made no pretense to literary form, logical order, or numerical moderation; they insisted that the lovers Urvashi and Pururavas spent 61,000 years in pleasure and delight.³⁰ But through the intelligibility of their language, the attractiveness of their parables, and the orthodoxy of their doctrine they became the second Bible of Hinduism, the grand repository of its superstitions, its myths, even of its philosophy. Here, for example, in the Vishnupurana, is the oldest and ever-recurrent theme of Hindu thought—that individual separateness is an illusion, and that all life is one:

After a thousand years came Ribhu

To Nidagha’s city, to impart further knowledge to him.

He saw him outside the city

Just as the King was about to enter with a great train of attendants,

Standing afar and holding himself apart from the crowd,

His neck wizened with fasting, returning from the wood with fuel and grass.

When Ribhu saw him, he went to him and greeted him and said:

“O Brahman, why standest thou here alone?”

Nidagha said: “Behold the crowd pressing about the King,

Who is just entering the city. That is why I stand alone.”

Ribhu said: “Which of these is the King?

And who are the others?

Tell me that, for thou seemest informed.”

Nidagha said: “He who rides upon the fiery elephant, towering like a mountain peak,

That is the King. The others are his attendants.”

Ribhu said: “These two, the King and the elephant, are pointed out by you

Without being separated by mark of distinction;

Give me the mark of distinction between them.

I would know, which is here the elephant and which the King.”

Nidagha said: “The elephant is below, the King is above him;

Who does not know the relationship of borne to bearer?”

Ribhu said: “That I may know, teach me.

What is that which is indicated by the word ‘below’, and what is ‘above’?”

Straight Nidagha sprang upon the Guru,* and said to him:

“Hear now, I will tell thee what thou demandest of me:

I am above like the King. You are below, like the elephant.

For thy instruction I give thee this example.”

Ribhu said: “If you are in the position of the King, and I in that of the elephant,

So tell me this still: Which of us is you, and which is I?”

Then swiftly Nidagha, falling down before him, clasped his feet and spake:

“Truly thou art Ribhu, my Master. . . .

By this I know that thou, my Guru, art come.”

Ribhu said: “Yes, to give thee teaching,

Because of thy former willingness to serve me,

I, Ribhu by name, am come to thee.

And what I have just taught thee in short-

Heart of highest truth—that is complete non-duality.”*

When he had thus spoken to Nidagha the Guru Ribhu departed thence.

But forthwith Nidagha, taught by this symbolic teaching, turned his mind completely to non-duality.

All beings from thenceforth he saw not distinct from himself.

And so he saw Brahman. And thus he achieved the highest salvation.³¹

In these Puranas, and kindred writings of medieval India, we find a very modern theory of the universe. There is no creation in the sense of Genesis; the world is perpetually evolving and dissolving, growing and decaying, through cycle after cycle, like every plant in it, and every organism. Brahma—or, as the Creator is more often called in this literature, Prajapati—is the spiritual force that upholds this endless process. We do not know how the universe began, if it did; perhaps, say the Puranas, Brahma laid it as an egg and then hatched it by sitting on it; perhaps it is a passing error of the Maker, or a little joke.³² Each cycle or Kalpa in the history of the universe is divided into a thousand mahayugas, or great ages, of 4,320,000 years each; and each mahayuga contains four yugas or ages, in which the human race undergoes a gradual deterioration. In the present mahayuga three ages have now passed, totaling 3,888,888 years; we live in the fourth age, the Kali-yuga, or Age of Misery; 5035 years of this bitter era have elapsed, but 426,965 remain. Then the world will suffer one of its periodical deaths, and Brahma will begin another “day of Brahma,” i.e., a Kalpa of 4,320,000,000 years. In each Kalpa cycle the universe develops by natural means and processes, and by natural means and processes decays; the destruction of the whole world is as certain as the death of a mouse, and, to the philosopher, not more important. There is no final purpose towards which the whole creation moves; there is no “progress”; there is only endless repetition.³³

Through all these ages and great ages billions of souls have passed from species to species, from body to body, from life to life, in weary transmigration. An individual is not really an individual, he is a link in the chain of life, a page in the chronicle of a soul; a species is not really a separate species, for the souls in these flowers or fleas may yesterday have been, or tomorrow may be, the spirits of men; all life is one. A man is only partly a man, he is also an animal; shreds and echoes of past lower existences linger in him, and make him more akin to the brute than to the sage. Man is only a part of nature, not actually its center or master;³⁴ a life is only a part of a soul’s career, not the entirety; every form is transitory, but every reality is continuous and one. The many reincarnations of a soul are like years or days in a single life, and may bring the soul now to growth, now to decay. How can the individual life, so brief in the tropic torrent of generations, contain all the history of a soul, or give it due punishment and reward for its evil and its good? And if the soul is immortal, how could one short life determine its fate forever?*

Life can be understood, says the Hindu, only on the assumption that each existence is bearing the penalty or enjoying the fruits of vice or virtue in some antecedent life. No deed small or great, good or bad, can be without effect; everything will out. This is the Law of Karma—the Law of the Deed—the law of causality in the spiritual world; and it is the highest and most terrible law of all. If a man does justice and kindness without sin his reward cannot come in one mortal span; it is stretched over other lives in which, if his virtue persists, he will be reborn into loftier place and larger good fortune; but if he lives evilly he will be reborn as an Outcaste, or a weasel, or a dog.³⁵† This law of Karma, like the Greek Moira or Fate, is above both gods and men; even the gods do not change its absolute operation; or, as the theologians put it, Karma and the will or action of the gods are one.³⁸ But Karma is not Fate; Fate implies the helplessness of man to determine his own lot; Karma makes him (taking all his lives as a whole) the creator of his own destiny. Nor do heaven and hell end the work of Karma, or the chain of births and deaths; the soul, after the death of the body, may go to hell for special punishment, or to heaven for quick and special reward; but no soul stays in hell, and few souls stay in heaven, forever; nearly every soul that enters them must sooner or later return to earth, and live out its Karma in new incarnations.³⁹*

Biologically there was much truth in this doctrine. We are the reincarnations of our ancestors, and will be reincarnated in our children; and the defects of the fathers are to some extent (though perhaps not as much as good conservatives suppose) visited upon the children, even through many generations. Karma was an excellent myth for dissuading the human beast from murder, theft, procrastination, or offertorial parsimony; furthermore, it extended the sense of moral unity and obligations to all life, and gave the moral code an extent of application far greater, and more logical, than in any other civilization. Good Hindus do not kill insects if they can possibly avoid it; “even those whose aspirations to virtue are modest treat animals as humble brethren rather than as lower creatures over whom they have dominion by divine command.”⁴¹ Philosophically, Karma explained for India many facts otherwise obscure in meaning or bitterly unjust. All those eternal inequalities among men which so frustrate the eternal demands for equality and justice; all the diverse forms of evil that blacken the earth and redden the stream of history; all the suffering that enters into human life with birth and accompanies it unto death, seemed intelligible to the Hindu who accepted Karma; these evils and injustices, these variations between idiocy and genius, poverty and wealth, were the results of past existences, the inevitable working out of a law unjust for a life or a moment, but perfectly just in the end.† Karma is one of those many inventions by which men have sought to bear evil patiently, and to face life with hope. To explain evil, and to find for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer, then with peace of mind—this is the task that most religions have attempted to fulfill. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering, the religion of India mitigates the human tragedy by giving meaning and value to grief and pain. The soul, in Hindu theology, has at least this consolation, that it must bear the consequences only of its own acts; unless it questions all existence it can accept evil as a passing punishment, and look forward to tangible rewards for virtue borne.

But in truth the Hindus do question all existence. Oppressed with an enervating environment, national subjection and economic exploitation, they have tended to look upon life as more a bitter punishment than an opportunity or a reward. The Vedas, written by a hardy race coming in from the north, were almost as optimistic as Whitman; Buddha, representing the same stock five hundred years later, already denied the value of life; the Puranas, five centuries later still, represented a view more profoundly pessimistic than anything known in the West except in stray moments of philosophic doubt.* The East, until reached by the Industrial Revolution, could not understand the zest with which the Occident has taken life; it saw only superficiality and childishness in our merciless busyness, our discontented ambition, our nerve-racking labor-saving devices, our progress and speed; it could no more comprehend this profound immersion in the surface of things, this clever refusal to look ultimates in the face, than the West can fathom the quiet inertia, the “stagnation” and “hopelessness” of the traditional East. Heat cannot understand cold.

“What is the most wonderful thing in the world?” asks Yama of Yudishthira; and Yudishthira replies: “Man after man dies; seeing this, men still move about as if they were immortal.”⁴⁴ “By death the world is afflicted,” say the Mahabharata, “by age it is held in bar, and the nights are the Unfailing Ones that are ever coming and going. When I know that death cannot halt, what can I expect from walking in a cover of lore?”⁴⁵ And in the Ramayana Sita asks, as her reward for fidelity through every temptation and trial, only death:

If in truth unto my husband I have proved a faithful wife,

Mother Earth, relieve thy Sita from the burden of this life!⁴⁶

So the last word of Hindu religious thought is moksha, release—first from desire, then from life. Nirvana may be one release or the other; but it is fullest in both. The sage Bhartri-hari expresses the first:

Everything on earth gives cause for fear, and the only freedom from fear is to be found in the renunciation of all desire. . . . Once upon a time the days seemed long to me when my heart was sorely wounded through asking favors from the rich; and yet again the days seemed all too short for me when I sought to carry out all my worldly desires and ends. But now as a philosopher I sit on a hard stone in a cave on the mountainside, and time and again I laugh when I think of my former life.⁴⁷

Gandhi expresses the second form of release: “I do not want to be reborn,” he says.⁴⁸ The highest and final aspiration of the Hindu is to escape reincarnation, to lose that fever of ego which revives with each individual body and birth. Salvation does not come by faith, nor yet by works; it comes by such uninterrupted self-denial, by such selfless intuition of the part-engulfing Whole, that at last the self is dead, and there is nothing to be reborn. The hell of individuality passes into the haven and heaven of unity, of complete and impersonal absorption into Brahman, the soul or Force of the World.

IV. CURIOSITIES OF RELIGION

Superstitions—Astrology—Phallic worship—Ritual—Sacrifice—Purification—The sacred waters

Amid all this theology of fear and suffering, superstition—first aid from the supernatural for the minor ills of life—flourished with rank fertility. Oblations, charms, exorcisms, astrology, oracles, incantations, vows, palmistry, divination, 2,728,812 priests, a million fortune-tellers, a hundred thousand snake-charmers, a million fakirs, yogis and other holy men—this is one part of the historic picture of India. For twelve hundred years the Hindus have had a great number of Tantras (manuals) expounding mysticism, witchcraft, divination and magic, and formulating the holy mantras (spells) by which almost any purpose might be magically attained. The Brahmans looked with silent contempt upon this religion of magic; they tolerated it partly because they feared that superstition among the people might be essential to their own power, partly, perhaps, because they believed that superstition is indestructible, dying in one form only to be reborn in another. No man of sense, they felt, would quarrel with a force capable of so many reincarnations.

The simple Hindu, like many cultured Americans,* accepted astrology, and took it for granted that every star exercised a special influence over those born under its ascendancy.⁵⁰ Menstruating women, like Ophelia, were to keep out of the sunshine, for this might make them pregnant.⁵¹ The secret of material prosperity, said the Kaushitaki Upanishad, is the regular adoration of the new moon. Sorcerers, necromancers and soothsayers, for a pittance, expounded the past and the future by studying palms, ordure, dreams, signs in the sky, or holes eaten into cloth by mice. Chanting the charms which only they knew how to recite, they laid ghosts, bemused cobras, enthralled birds, and forced the gods themselves to come to the aid of the contributor. Magicians, for the proper fee, introduced a demon into one’s enemy, or expelled it from one’s self; they caused the enemy’s sudden death, or brought him down with an incurable disease. Even a Brahman, when he yawned, snapped his fingers to right and left to frighten away the evil spirits that might enter his mouth,† At all times the Hindu, like many European peasants, was on his guard against the evil eye; at any time he might be visited with misfortune, or death, magically brought upon him by his enemies. Above all, the magician could restore sexual vitality, or inspire love in any one for any one, or give children to barren women.⁵²

There was nothing, not even Nirvana, that the Hindu desired so intensely as children. Hence, in part, his longing for sexual power, and his ritual adoration of the symbols of reproduction and fertility. Phallic worship, which has prevailed in most countries at one time or another, has persisted in India from ancient times to the twentieth century. Shiva was its deity, the phallus was its ikon, the Tantras were its Talmud. The Shakti, or energizing power, of Shiva was conceived sometimes as his consort Kali, sometimes as a female element in Shiva’s nature, which included both male and female powers; and these two powers were represented by idols called linga or yoni, representing respectively the male or the female organs of generation.⁵³ Everywhere in India one sees signs of this worship of sex: in the phallic figures on the Nepalese and other temples in Benares; in the gigantic lingas that adorn or surround the Shivaite temples of the south; in phallic processions and ceremonies, and in the phallic images worn on the arm or about the neck. Linga stones may be seen on the highways; Hindus break upon them the cocoanuts which they are about to offer in sacrifice.⁵⁴ At the Rameshvaram Temple the linga stone is daily washed with Ganges water, which is afterwards sold to the pious,⁵⁵ as holy water or mesmerized water has been sold in Europe. Usually the phallic ritual is simple and becoming; it consists in anointing the stone with consecrated water or oil, and decorating it with leaves.⁵⁶

Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement from phallic processions;⁵⁷ but for the most part the people appear to find no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing the power of Shiva.⁵⁸ Perhaps the difference between the European and the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frustrated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained. The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats—the most Puritanic sect in India.⁵⁹ “It has remained for our Western visitors,” says Gandhi, “to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learned that Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all.”⁶⁰

The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day; indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays. But the people rejoiced in the many feasts that marked the ecclesiastical year and brought them in great processions or pilgrimages to their ancient shrines. They could not understand the service there, for it was conducted in Sanskrit, but they could understand the idol. They decked it with ornaments, covered it with paint, and encrusted it with jewels; sometimes they treated it as a human being—awakened it, bathed it, dressed it, fed it, scolded it, and put it to bed at the close of the day.⁶¹

The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death.⁶² When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes.⁶³* As morals improved, the gods had to content themselves with animals, of which great numbers were offered them. The goat was especially favored for these ceremonies. Buddhism, Jainism and ahimsa put an end to animal sacrifice in Hindustan,⁶⁷ but the replacement of Buddhism with Hinduism restored the custom, which survived, in diminishing extent, to our own time. It is to the credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that involved the shedding of blood.⁶⁸

Purification rites took many an hour of Hindu life, for fears of pollution were as frequent in Indian religion as in modern hygiene. At any moment the Hindu might be made unclean—by improper food, by offal, by the touch of a Shudra, an Outcaste, a corpse, a menstruating woman, or in a hundred other ways. The woman herself, of course, was defiled by menstruation or childbirth; Brahmanical law required isolation in such cases, and complex hygienic precautions.⁶⁹ After all such pollutions—or, as we should say, possible infections—the Hindu had to undergo ritual purification: in minor cases by such simple ceremonies as being sprinkled with holy water;⁷⁰ in major cases by more complicated methods, culminating in the terrible Panchagavia. This purification was decreed as punishment for violating important caste laws (e.g., for leaving India), and consisted in drinking a mixture of “five substances” from the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine and dung.⁷¹*

A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a semitropical climate, was clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. “Sacred” pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul. Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every morning;⁷³ from that century to ours those waters have never seen the sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently, “Om, Om, Om.” Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn, and smelled with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats, and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the same silent deities. The unresponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her desolation.

V. SAINTS AND SCEPTICS

Methods of sanctity—Heretics—Toleration—General view of Hindu Religion

Saints seem more abundant in India than elsewhere, so that at last the visitor feels that they are a natural product of the country, like the poppy or the snake. Hindu piety recognized three main avenues to sanctity: Jnanayoga, the Way of Meditation, Karma-yoga, the Way of Action, and Bhakti-yoga, the Way of Love. The Brahmans allowed for all three by their rule of the four Ashramas, or stages of sanctity. The young Brahman was to begin as a Brahmachari, vowed to premarital chastity, to piety, study, truthfulness, and loving service of his Guru or teacher. After marriage, which he should not delay beyond his eighteenth year, he was to enter the second stage of Brahmanical life as Grihastha, or householder, and beget sons for the care and worship of himself and his ancestors. In the third stage (now seldom practiced) the aspirant to sanctity retired with his wife to live as a Vanaprastha, or jungle-dweller, accepting hard conditions gladly, and limiting sexual relations to the begetting of children. Finally the Brahman who wished to reach the highest stage might, in his old age, leave even his wife, and become a Sannyasi, or “abandoner” of the world; giving up all property, all money and all ties, he would keep only an antelope skin for his body, a staff for his hand, and a gourd of water for his thirst. He must smear his body with ashes every day, drink the Five Substances frequently, and live entirely by alms. “He must,” says the Brahmanical Rule, “regard all men as equals. He must not be influenced by anything that happens, and must be able to view with perfect equanimity even revolutions that overthrow empires. His one object must be to acquire that measure of wisdom and of spirituality which shall finally reunite him to the Supreme Divinity, from which we are separated by our passions and our material surroundings.”⁷⁴*

In the midst of all this piety one comes occasionally upon a sceptical voice stridently out of tune with the solemnity of the normal Hindu note. Doubtless when India was wealthy, sceptics were numerous, for humanity doubts its gods most when it prospers, and worships them most when it is miserable. We have noted the Charvakas and other heretics of Buddha’s time. Almost as old is a work called, in the sesquipedalian fashion of the Hindus, Shwasamved y o panishad, which simplifies theology into four propositions: (1) that there is no reincarnation, no god, no heaven, no hell, and no world; (2) that all traditional religious literature is the work of conceited fools; (3) that Nature the originator and Time the destroyer are the rulers of all things, and take no account of virtue or vice in awarding happiness or misery to men; and (4) that people, deluded by flowery speech, cling to gods, temples and priests, when in reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog.⁷⁶ With all the inconsistency of a Bible harboring Ecclesiastes, the Pali canon of Buddhism offers us a remarkable treatise, probably as old as Christianity, called “The Questions of King Milinda,” in which the Buddhist teacher Nagasena is represented as giving very disturbing answers to the religious inquiries made of him by the Greco-Bactrian King Menander, who ruled northern India at the turn of the first century before Christ. Religion, says Nagasena, must not be made a mere way of escape for suffering men; it should be an ascetic search for sanctity and wisdom without presuming a heaven or a god; for in truth, this saint assures us, these do not exist.⁷⁷ The Mahabharata inveighs against doubters and atheists who, it tells us, deny the reality of souls, and despise immortality; such men, it says, “wander over the whole earth”; and it warns them of their future punishment by the horrible example of a jackal who explains his species by admitting that in a previous incarnation he had been “a rationalist, a critic of the Vedas, . . . a reviler and opposer of priests, . . . an unbeliever, a doubter of all.”⁷⁸ The Bhagavad-Gita refers to heretics who deny the existence of a god and describe the world as “none other than a House of Lust.”⁷⁹ The Brahmans themselves were often sceptics, but too completely so to attack the religion of the people. And though the poets of India are as a rule assiduously pious, some of them, like Kabir and Vemana, speak in defense of a very emancipated theism. Vemana, a South Indian poet of the seventeenth century, writes scornfully of ascetic hermits, pilgrimages, and caste:

The solitariness of a dog! the meditations of a crane! the chanting of an ass! the bathing of a frog! . . . How are you the better for smearing your body with ashes? Your thoughts should be set on God alone; for the rest, an ass can wallow in dirt as well as you. . . . The books called Vedas are like courtesans, deluding men, and wholly unfathomable; but the hidden knowledge of God is like an honorable wife. . . . Will the application of white ashes do away with the smell of a wine-pot?—will a cord cast over your neck make you twice-born? . . . Why should we constantly revile the Pariah? Are not his flesh and blood the same as our own? And of what caste is He who pervades the Pariah? . . . He who says, “I know nothing” is the shrewdest of all.⁸⁰

It is worthy of note that pronouncements of this kind could be made with impunity in a society mentally ruled by a priestly caste. Except for foreign repressions (and perhaps because of alien rulers indifferent to native theologies) India has enjoyed a freedom of thought far greater than that of the medieval Europe to which its civilization corresponds; and the Brahmans have exercised their authority with discrimination and lenience. They relied upon the conservatism of the poor to preserve the orthodox religion, and they were not disappointed. When heresies or strange gods became dangerously popular they tolerated them, and then absorbed them into the capacious caverns of Hindu belief; one god more or less could not make much difference in India. Hence there has been comparatively little sectarian animosity within the Hindu community, though much between Hindus and Moslems; and no blood has been shed for religion in India except by its invaders.⁸¹ Intolerance came with Islam and Christianity; the Moslems proposed to buy Paradise with the blood of “infidels,” and the Portuguese, when they captured Goa, introduced the Inquisition into India.⁸²

If we look for common defining elements in this jungle of faiths, we shall find them in the practical unanimity of the Hindus in worshiping both Vishnu and Shiva, in reverencing the Vedas, the Brahmans, and the cow, and in accepting the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as no mere literary epics, but as the secondary scriptures of the race.⁸³ It is significant that the deities and dogmas of India today are not those of the Vedas; in a sense Hinduism represents the triumph of aboriginal Dravidic India over the Aryans of the Vedic age. As the result of conquest, spoliation and poverty, India has been injured in body and soul, and has sought refuge from harsh terrestrial defeat in the easy victories of myth and imagination. Despite its elements of nobility, Buddhism, like Stoicism, was a slave philosophy, even if voiced by a prince; it meant that all desire or struggle, even for personal or national freedom, should be abandoned, and that the ideal was a desireless passivity; obviouslv the exhausting heat of India spoke in this rationalization of fatigue. Hinduism continued the weakening of India by binding itself, through the caste system, in permanent servitude to a priesthood; it conceived its gods in unmoral terms, and maintained for centuries brutal customs, like human sacrifice and suttee, which many nations had long since outgrown; it depicted life as inevitably evil, and broke the courage and darkened the spirit of its devotees; it turned all earthly phenomena into illusion, and thereby destroyed the distinction between freedom and slavery, good and evil, corruption and betterment. In the words of a brave Hindu, “Hindu religion . . . has now degenerated into an idol-worship and conventional ritualism, in which the form is regarded as everything, and its substance as nothing.”⁸⁴ A nation ridden with priests and infested with saints, India awaits with unformulated longing her Renaissance, her Reformation, and her Enlightenment.

We must, however, keep our historical perspective in thinking of India; we too were once in the Middle Ages, and preferred mysticism to science, priestcraft to plutocracy—and may do likewise again. We cannot judge these mystics, for our judgments in the West are usually based upon corporeal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and superficial to the Hindu saint. What if wealth and power, war and conquest, were only surface illusions, unworthy of a mature mind? What if this science of hypothetical atoms and genes, of whimsical protons and cells, of gases generating Shakespeares and chemicals fusing into Christ, were only one more faith, and one of the strangest, most incredible and most transitory of all? The East, resentful of subjection and poverty, may go in for science and industry at the very time when the children of the West, sick of machines that impoverish them and of sciences that disillusion them, may destroy their cities and their machines in chaotic revolution or war, go back, beaten, weary and starving, to the soil, and forge for themselves another mystic faith to give them courage in the face of hunger, cruelty, injustice and death. There is no humorist like history.

CHAPTER XIX

The Life of the Mind

I. HINDU SCIENCE

Its religious origins—Astronomers—Mathematicism—The “Arabic” numerals—The decimal system—Algebra—Geometry—Physics—Chemistry—Physiology—Vedic medicine—Physicians—Surgeons—Anesthetics—Vaccination—Hypnotism

INDIA’S work in science is both very old and very young: young as an independent and secular pursuit, old as a subsidiary interest of her priests. Religion being the core of Hindu life, those sciences were cultivated first that contributed to religion: astronomy grew out of the worship of the heavenly bodies, and the observation of their movements aimed to fix the calendar of festival and sacrificial days; grammar and philology developed out of the insistence that every prayer and formula, though couched in a dead language, should be textually and phonetically correct.¹ As in our Middle Ages, the scientists of India, for better and for worse, were her priests.

Astronomy was an incidental offspring of astrology, and slowly emancipated itself under Greek influence. The earliest astronomical treatises, the Siddhantas (ca. 425 B.C.), were based on Greek science,³ and Varahamihira, whose compendium was significantly entitled Complete System of Natural Astrology, frankly acknowledged his dependence upon the Greeks. The greatest of Hindu astronomers and mathematicians, Aryabhata, discussed in verse such poetic subjects as quadratic equations, sines, and the value of π; he explained eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, announced the sphericity of the earth and its diurnal revolution on its axis, and wrote, in daring anticipation of Renaissance science: “The sphere of the stars is stationary, and the earth, by its revolution, produces the daily rising and setting of planets and stars.”⁴ His most famous successor, Brahmagupta, systematized the astronomic knowledge of India, but obstructed its development by rejecting Aryabhata’s theory of the revolution of the earth. These men and their followers adapted to Hindu usage the Babylonian division of the skies into zodiacal constellations; they made a calendar of twelve months, each of thirty days, each of thirty hours, inserting an intercalary month every five years; they calculated with remarkable accuracy the diameter of the moon, the eclipses of the moon and the sun, the position of the poles, and the position and motion of the major stars.⁵ They expounded the theory, though not the law, of gravity when they wrote in the Siddhantas: “The earth, owing to its force of gravity, draws all things to itself.”⁶

To make these complex calculations the Hindus developed a system of mathematics superior, in everything except geometry, to that of the Greeks.⁷ Among the most vital parts of our Oriental heritage are the “Arabic” numerals and the decimal system, both of which came to us, through the Arabs, from India. The miscalled “Arabic” numerals are found on the Rock Edicts of Ashoka (256 B.C.), a thousand years before their occurrence in Arabic literature. Said the great and magnanimous Laplace:

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.⁸

The decimal system was known to Aryabhata and Brahmagupta long before its appearance in the writings of the Arabs and the Syrians; it was adopted by China from Buddhist missionaries; and Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarazmi, the greatest mathematician of his age (d. ca. 850 A.D.), seems to have introduced it into Baghdad. The oldest known use of the zero in Asia or Europe* is in an Arabic document dated 873 A.D., three years sooner than its first known appearance in India; but by general consent the Arabs borrowed this too from India,⁹ and the most modest and most valuable of all numerals is one of the subtle gifts of India to mankind.

Algebra was developed in apparent independence by both the Hindus and the Greeks;* but our adoption of its Arabic name (al-jabr, adjustment) indicates that it came to western Europe from the Arabs—i.e., from India—rather than from Greece.¹⁰ The great Hindu leaders in this field, as in astronomy, were Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara. The last (b. 1114 A.D.), appears to have invented the radical sign, and many algebraic symbols.¹² These men created the conception of a negative quantity, without which algebra would have been impossible;¹³ they formulated rules for finding permutations and combinations; they found the square root of 2, and solved, in the eighth century A.D., indeterminate equations of the second degree that were unknown to Europe until the days of Euler a thousand years later.¹⁴ They expressed their science in poetic form, and gave to mathematical problems a grace characteristic of India’s Golden Age. These two may serve as examples of simpler Hindu algebra:

Out of a swarm of bees one-fifth part settled on a Kadamba blossom; one-third on a Silindhra flower; three times the difference of those numbers flew to the bloom of a Kutaja. One bee, which remained, hovered about in the air. Tell me, charming woman, the number of bees. . . . Eight rubies, ten emeralds, and a hundred pearls, which are in thy ear-ring, my beloved, were purchased by me for thee at an equal amount; and the sum of the prices of the three sorts of gems was three less than half a hundred; tell me the price of each, auspicious woman.¹⁵

The Hindus were not so successful in geometry. In the measurement and construction of altars the priests formulated the Pythagorean theorem (by which the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other sides) several hundred years before the birth of Christ.¹⁶ Aryabhata, probably influenced by the Greeks, found the area of a triangle, a trapezium and a circle, and calculated the value of π (the relation of diameter to circumference in a circle) at 3.1416—a figure not equaled in accuracy until the days of Purbach (1423-61) in Europe.¹⁷ Bhaskara crudely anticipated the differential calculus, Aryabhata drew up a table of sines, and the Surya Siddhanta provided a system of trigonometry more advanced than anything known to the Greeks.¹⁸

Two systems of Hindu thought propound physical theories suggestively similar to those of Greece. Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika philosophy, held that the world was composed of atoms as many in kind as the various elements. The Jains more nearly approximated to Democritus by teaching that all atoms were of the same kind, producing different effects by diverse modes of combination.¹⁹ Kanada believed light and heat to be varieties of the same substance; Udayana taught that all heat comes from the sun; and Vachaspati, like Newton, interpreted light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances and striking the eye.²⁰ Musical notes and intervals were analyzed and mathematically calculated in the Hindu treatises on music;* and the “Pythagorean Law” was formulated by which the number of vibrations, and therefore the pitch of the note, varies inversely as the length of the string between the point of attachment and the point of touch. There is some evidence that Hindu mariners of the first centuries A.D. used a compass made by an iron fish floating in a vessel of oil and pointing north.²¹

Chemistry developed from two sources—medicine and industry. Something has been said about the chemical excellence of cast iron in ancient India, and about the high industrial development of Gupta times, when India was looked to, even by Imperial Rome, as the most skilled of the nations in such chemical industries as dyeing, tanning, soap-making, glass and cement. As early as the second century B.C. Nagarjuna devoted an entire volume to mercury. By the sixth century the Hindus were far ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry; they were masters of calcination, distillation, sublimation, steaming, fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of anesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic salts, compounds and alloys. The tempering of steel was brought in ancient India to a perfection unknown in Europe till our own times; King Porus is said to have selected, as a specially valuable gift for Alexander, not gold or silver, but thirty pounds of steel.²² The Moslems took much of this Hindu chemical science and industry to the Near East and Europe; the secret of manufacturing “Damascus” blades, for example, was taken by the Arabs from the Persians, and by the Persians from India.^22a

Anatomy and physiology, like some aspects of chemistry, were by-products of Hindu medicine. As far back as the sixth century B.C. Hindu physicians described ligaments, sutures, lymphatics, nerve plexus, fascia, adipose and vascular tissues, mucous and synovial membranes, and many more muscles than any modern cadaver is able to show.²³ The doctors of pre-Christian India shared Aristotle’s mistaken conception of the heart as the seat and organ of consciousness, and supposed that the nerves ascended to and descended from the heart. But they understood remarkably well the processes of digestion—the different functions of the gastric juices, the conversion of chyme into chyle, and of this into blood.²⁴ Anticipating Weismann by 2400 years, Atreya (ca. 500 B.C.) held that the parental seed is independent of the parent’s body, and contains in itself, in miniature, the whole parental organism.²⁵ Examination for virility was recommended as a prerequisite for marriage in men; and the Code of Manu warned against marrying mates affected with tuberculosis, epilepsy, leprosy, chronic dyspepsia, piles, or loquacity.²⁶ Birth control in the latest theological fashion was suggested by the Hindu medical schools of 500 B.C. in the theory that during twelve days of the menstrual cycle impregnation is impossible.²⁷ Fœtal development was described with considerable accuracy; it was noted that the sex of the fœtus remains for a time undetermined, and it was claimed that in some cases the sex of the embryo could be influenced by food or drugs.²⁸

The records of Hindu medicine begin with the Atharva-veda; here, embedded in a mass of magic and incantations, is a list of diseases with their symptoms. Medicine arose as an adjunct to magic: the healer studied and used earthly means of cure to help his spiritual formulas; later he relied more and more upon such secular methods, continuing the magic spell, like our bedside manner, as a psychological aid. Appended to the Atharva-veda is the Ajur-veda (“The Science of Longevity”). In this oldest system of Hindu medicine illness is attributed to disorder in one of the four humors (air, water, phlegm and blood), and treatment is recommended with herbs and charms. Many of its diagnoses and cures are still used in India, with a success that is sometimes the envy of Western physicians. The Rig-veda names over a thousand such herbs, and advocates water as the best cure for most diseases. Even in Vedic times physicians and surgeons were being differentiated from magic doctors, and were living in houses surrounded by gardens in which they cultivated medicinal plants.²⁹

The great names in Hindu medicine are those of Sushruta in the fifth century before, and Charaka in the second century after Christ. Sushruta, professor of medicine in the University of Benares, wrote down in Sanskrit a system of diagnosis and therapy whose elements had descended to him from his teacher Dhanwantari. His book dealt at length with surgery, obstetrics, diet, bathing, drugs, infant feeding and hygiene, and medical education.³⁰ Charaka composed a Samhita (or encyclopedia) of medicine, which is still used in India,³¹ and gave to his followers an almost Hippocratic conception of their calling: “Not for self, not for the fulfilment of any earthly desire of gain, but solely for the good of suffering humanity should you treat your patients, and so excell all.”³² Only less illustrious than these are Vagbhata (625 A.D.), who prepared a medical compendium in prose and verse, and Bhava Misra (1550 A.D.), whose voluminous work on anatomy, physiology and medicine mentioned, a hundred years before Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and prescribed mercury for that novel disease, syphilis, which had recently been brought in by the Portuguese as part of Europe’s heritage to India.³³

Sushruta described many surgical operations—cataract, hernia, lithotomy, Cæsarian section, etc.—and 121 surgical instruments, including lancets, sounds, forceps, catheters, and rectal and vaginal speculums.³⁴ Despite Brahmanical prohibitions he advocated the dissection of dead bodies as indispensable in the training of surgeons. He was the first to graft upon a torn ear portions of skin taken from another part of the body; and from him and his Hindu successors rhinoplasty—the surgical reconstruction of the nose—descended into modern medicine.³⁵ “The ancient Hindus,” says Garrison, “performed almost every major operation except ligation of the arteries.”³⁶ Limbs were amputated, abdominal sections were performed, fractures were set, hemorrhoids and fistulas were removed. Sushruta laid down elaborate rules for preparing an operation, and his suggestion that the wound be sterilized by fumigation is one of the earliest known efforts at antiseptic surgery.³⁷ Both Sushruta and Charaka mention the use of medicinal liquors to produce insensibility to pain. In 927 A.D. two surgeons trepanned the skull of a Hindu king, and made him insensitive to the operation by administering a drug called Samohini. *³⁸

For the detection of the 1120 diseases that he enumerated, Sushruta recommended diagnosis by inspection, palpation, and auscultation.⁴⁰ Taking of the pulse was described in a treatise dating 1300 A.D.⁴¹ Urinalysis was a favorite method of diagnosis; Tibetan physicians were reputed able to cure any patient without having seen anything more of him than his water.⁴² In the time of Yuan Chwang Hindu medical treatment began with a seven-day fast; in this interval the patient often recovered; if the illness continued, drugs were at last employed.⁴³ Even then drugs were used very sparingly; reliance was placed largely upon diet, baths, enemas, inhalations, urethral and vaginal injections, and blood-lettings by leeches or cups.⁴⁴ Hindu physicians were especially skilled in concocting antidotes for poisons; they still excel European physicians in curing snakebites.⁴⁵ Vaccination, unknown to Europe before the eighteenth century, was known in India as early as 550 A.D., if we may judge from a text attributed to Dhanwantari, one of the earliest Hindu physicians: “Take the fluid of the pock on the udder of the cow . . . upon the point of a lancet, and lance with it the arms between the shoulders and elbows until the blood appears; then, mixing the fluid with the blood, the fever of the small-pox will be produced.”⁴⁶ Modern European physicians believe that caste separateness was prescribed because of the Brahman belief in invisible agents transmitting disease; many of the laws of sanitation enjoined by Sushruta and “Manu” seem to take for granted what we moderns, who love new words for old things, call the germ theory of disease.⁴⁷ Hypnotism as therapy seems to have originated among the Hindus, who often took their sick to the temples to be cured by hypnotic suggestion or “temple-sleep,” as in Egypt and Greece.⁴⁸ The Englishmen who introduced hypnotherapy into England—Braid, Esdaile and Elliotson—“undoubtedly got their ideas, and some of their experience, from contact with India.”⁴⁹

The general picture of Indian medicine is one of rapid development in the Vedic and Buddhist periods, followed by centuries of slow and cautious improvement. How much Atreya, Dhanwantari and Sushruta owed to Greece, and how much Greece owed to them, we do not know. In the time of Alexander, says Garrison, “Hindu physicians and surgeons enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for superior knowledge and skill,” and even Aristotle is believed by some students to have been indebted to them.⁵⁰ So too with the Persians and the Arabs: it is difficult to say how much Indian medicine owed to the physicians of Baghdad, and through them to the heritage of Babylonian medicine in the Near East; on the one hand certain remedies, like opium and mercury, and some modes of diagnosis, like feeling the pulse, appear to have entered India from Persia; on the other we find Persians and Arabs translating into their languages, in the eighth century A.D., the thousand-year-old compendia of Sushruta and Charaka.⁵¹ The great Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid accepted the preeminence of Indian medicine and scholarship, and imported Hindu physicians to organize hospitals and medical schools in Baghdad.⁵² Lord Ampthill concludes that medieval and modern Europe owes its system of medicine directly to the Arabs, and through them to India.⁵³ Probably this noblest and most uncertain of the sciences had an approximately equal antiquity, and developed in contemporary contact and mutual influence, in Sumeria, Egypt and India.

II. THE SIX SYSTEMS OF BRAHMANICAL PHILOSOPHY

The antiquity of Indian philosophy—Its prominent rôle—Its scholars—Forms—Conception of orthodoxy—The assumptions of Hindu philosophy

The priority of India is clearer in philosophy than in medicine, though here too origins are veiled, and every conclusion is an hypothesis. Some Upanishads are older than any extant form of Greek philosophy, and Pythagoras, Parmenides and Plato seem to have been influenced by Indian metaphysics; but the speculations of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and Empedocles not only antedate the secular philosophy of the Hindus, but bear a sceptical and physical stamp suggesting any other origin than India. Victor Cousin believed that “we are constrained to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.”⁵⁴ It is more probable that no one of the civilizations known to us was the originator of any of the elements of civilization.

But nowhere else has the lust for philosophy been so strong as in India. It is, with the Hindus, not an ornament or a recreation, but a major interest and practice of life itself; and sages receive in India the honor bestowed in the West upon men of wealth or action. What other nation has ever thought of celebrating festivals with gladiatorial debates between the leaders of rival philosophical schools? We read in the Upanishads how the King of the Videhas, as part of a religious feast, set one day apart for a philosophical disputation among Yajnavalkya, Asvala, Artabhaga and Gargi (the Aspasia of India); to the victor the King promised—and gave—a reward of a thousand cows and many pieces of gold.⁵⁶ It was the usual course for a philosophical teacher in India to speak rather than to write; instead of attacking his opponents through the safe medium of print, he was expected to meet them in living debate, and to visit other schools in order to submit himself to controversy and questioning; leading philosophers like Shankara spent much of their time in such intellectual journeys.⁵⁷ Sometimes kings joined in these discussions with the modesty becoming a monarch in the presence of a philosopher—if we may credit the reports of the philosophers. The victor in a vital debate was as great a hero among his people as a general returning from the bloody triumphs of war.⁵⁸

In a Rajput painting of the eighteenth century⁵⁹ we see a typical Indian “School of Philosophy”—the teacher sits on a mat under a tree, and his pupils squat on the grass before him. Such scenes were to be witnessed everywhere, for teachers of philosophy were as numerous in India as merchants in Babylonia. No other country has ever had so many schools of thought. In one of Buddha’s dialogues we learn that there were sixty-two distinct theories of the soul among the philosophers of his time.⁶⁰ “This philosophical nation par excellence” says Count Keyserling, “has more Sanskrit words for philosophical and religious thought than are found in Greek, Latin and German combined.”⁶¹

Since Indian thought was transmitted rather by oral tradition than by writing, the oldest form in which the theories of the various schools have come down to us is that of sutras—aphoristic “threads” which teacher or student jotted down, not as a means of explaining his thought to another, but as an aid to his own memory. These extant sutras are of varying age, some as old as 200 A.D., some as recent as 1400; in all cases they are much younger than the traditions of thought that they summarize, for the origin of these schools of philosophy is as old as Buddha, and some of them, like the Sankhya, were probably well-established when he was born.⁶²

All systems of Indian philosophy are ranged by the Hindus in two categories: Astika systems, which affirm, and Nastika systems, which deny.* We have already studied the Nastika systems, which were chiefly those of the Charvakas, the Buddhists, and the Jains. But, strange to say, these systems were called Nastika, heterodox and nihilist, not because they questioned or denied the existence of God (which they did), but because they questioned, denied or ignored the authority of the Vedas. Many of the Astika systems also doubted or denied God; they were nevertheless called orthodox because they accepted the infallibility of the Scriptures, and the institution of caste; and no hindrance was placed against the free thought, however atheistic, of those schools that acknowledged these fundamentals of orthodox Hindu society. Since a wide latitude was allowed in interpreting the holy books, and clever dialecticians could find in the Vedas any doctrine which they sought, the only practical requirement for intellectual respectability was the recognition of caste; this being the real government of India, rejection of it was treason, and acceptance of it covered a multitude of sins. In effect, therefore, the philosophers of India enjoyed far more liberty than their Scholastic analogues in Europe, though less, perhaps, than the thinkers of Christendom under the enlightened Popes of the Renaissance.

Of the “orthodox” systems or darshanas (“demonstrations”), six became so prominent that in time every Hindu thinker who acknowledged the authority of the Brahmans attached himself to one or another of these schools. All six make certain assumptions which are the bases of Hindu thought: that the Vedas are inspired; that reasoning is less reliable as a guide to reality and truth than the direct perception and feeling of an individual properly prepared for spiritual receptiveness and subtlety by ascetic practices and years of obedient tutelage; that the purpose of knowledge and philosophy is not control of the world so much as release from it; and that the goal of thought is to find freedom from the suffering of frustrated desire by achieving freedom from desire itself. These are the philosophies to which men come when they tire of ambition, struggle, wealth, “progress,” and “success.”

1. The Nyaya System

A Hindu logician

The first of the “Brahmanical” systems in the logical order of Indian thought (for their chronological order is uncertain, and they are in all essentials contemporary) is a body of logical theory extending over two millenniums. Nyaya means an argument, a way of leading the mind to a conclusion. Its most famous text is the Nyaya Sutra ascribed without surety to a Gautama dated variously between the third century before, and the first century after, Christ.⁶³ Like all Hindu thinkers, Gautama announces, as the purpose of his work, the achievement of Nirvana, or release from the tyranny of desire, here to be reached by clear and consistent thinking; but we suspect that his simple intent was to offer a guide to the perplexed wrestlers in India’s philosophical debates. He formulates for them the principles of argument, exposes the tricks of controversy, and lists the common fallacies of thought. Like another Aristotle, he seeks the structure of reasoning in the syllogism, and finds the crux of argument in the middle term;* like another James or Dewey he looks upon knowledge and thought as pragmatic tools and organs of human need and will, to be tested by their ability to lead to successful action.⁶⁴ He is a realist, and will have nothing to do with the sublime idea that the world ceases to exist when no one takes the precaution to perceive it. Gautama’s predecessors in Nyaya were apparently atheists; his successors became epistemologists.⁶⁵ His achievement was to give India an organon of investigation and thought, and a rich vocabulary of philosophical terms.

2. The Vaisheshika System Democritus in India

As Gautama is the Aristotle of India, so Kanada is its Democritus. His name, which means the “atom-eater,” suggests that he may be a legendary construct of the historical imagination. The date at which the Vaisheshika system was formulated has not been fixed with excessive accuracy: we are told that it was not before 300 B.C., and not after 800 A.D. Its name came from vishesha, meaning particularity: the world, in Kanada’s theory, is full of a number of things, but they are all, in some form, mere combinations of atoms; the forms change, but the atoms remain indestructible. Thoroughly Democritean, Kanada announces that nothing exists but “atoms and the void,” and that the atoms move not according to the will of an intelligent deity, but through an impersonal force or law —Adrishta, “the invisible.” Since there is no conservative like the child of a radical, the later exponents of Vaisheshika, unable to see how a blind force could give order and unity to the cosmos, placed a world of minute souls alongside the world of atoms, and supervised both worlds with an intelligent God.⁶⁶ So old is the “pre-established harmony” of Leibnitz.

3. The Sankhya System

Its high repute—Metaphysics—Evolution—Atheism—Idealism—Spirit—Body, mind and soul—The goal of philosophy—Influence of the Sankhya

This, says a Hindu historian, “is the most significant system of philosophy that India has produced.”⁶⁷ Professor Garbe, who devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that “in Kapila’s doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited.”⁶⁸ It is the oldest of the six systems,⁶⁹ and perhaps the oldest philosophical system of all.* Of Kapila himself nothing is known, except that Hindu tradition, which has a schoolboy’s scorn for dates, credits him with founding the Sankhya philosophy in the sixth century B.C.⁷¹

Kapila is at once a realist and a scholastic. He begins almost medically by laying it down, in his first aphorism, that “the complete cessation of pain . . . is the complete goal of man.” He rejects as inadequate the attempt to elude suffering by physical means; he refutes, with much logical prestidigitation, the views of all and sundry on the matter, and then proceeds to construct, in one unintelligibly abbreviated sutra after another, his own metaphysical system. It derives its name from his enumeration (for this is the meaning of sankhya) of the twenty-five Realities (Tattwas, “Thatnesses”) which, in Kapila’s judgment, make up the world. He arranges these Realities in a complex relationship that may possibly be clarified by the following scheme:

(1) A. SUBSTANCE (Prakriti, “Producer”), a universal physical principle which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces

(2) I. Intellect (Buddhi), the power of perception; which, through its evolutionary powers (Gunas), produces

(3) i. The Five Subtle Elements, or Sensory Powers of the Internal World:

(4) 1. Sight,

(5) 2. Hearing,

(6) 3. Smell,

(7) 4. Taste, and

(8) 5. Touch; (Realities (1) to (8) cooperate to produce (10) to (24))

(9) ii. Mind (Manas), the power of conception;

iii. The Five Organs of Sense (corresponding with Realities (4) to (8)):

(10) 1. Eye,

(11) 2. Ear,

(12) 3. Nose,

(13) 4. Tongue, and

(14) 5. Skin;

iv. The Five Organs of Action:

(15) 1. Larynx,

(16) 2. Hands,

(17) 3. Feet,

(18) 4. Excretory organs, and

(19) 5. Generative organs;

v. The Five Gross Elements of the External World:

(20) 1. Ether,

(21) 2. Air,

(22) 3. Fire and light,

(23) 4. Water, and

(24) 5. Earth.

(25) B. SPIRIT (Purusha, “Person”), a universal psychical principle which, though unable to do anything of itself, animates and vitalizes Prakriti, and stirs its evolutionary powers to all their activities.

At its outset this seems to be a purely materialistic system: the world of mind and self as well as of body and matter appears entirely as an evolution by natural means, a unity and continuity of elements in perpetual development and decay from the lowest to the highest and back again. There is a premonition of Lamarck in Kapila’s thought: the need of the organism (the “Self”) generates the function (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), and the function produces the organ (eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin). There is no gap in the system, and no vital distinction in any Hindu philosophy, between the inorganic and the organic, between the vegetable and the animal, or between the animal and the human, world; these are all links in one chain of life, spokes on the wheel of evolution and dissolution, birth and death and birth. The course of evolution is determined fatalistically by the three active qualities or powers (Gunas) of Substance: purity, activity, and blind ignorance. These powers are not prejudiced in favor of development against decay; they produce the one after the other in an endless cycle, like some stupid magician drawing an infinity of contents from a hat, putting them back again, and repeating the process forever. Every state of evolution contains in itself, as Herbert Spencer was to say some time later, a tendency to lapse into dissolution as its fated counterpart and end.

Kapila, like Laplace, saw no need of calling in a deity to explain creation or evolution;⁷² in this most religious and philosophical of nations it is nothing unusual to find religions and philosophies without a god. Many of the Sankhya texts explicitly deny the existence of a personal creator; creation is inconceivable, for “a thing is not made out of nothing”;⁷³ creator and created are one.⁷⁴ Kapila contents himself with writing (precisely as if he were Immanuel Kant) that a personal creator can never be demonstrated by human reason. For whatever exists, says this subtle sceptic, must be either bound or free, and God cannot be either. If God is perfect, he had no need to create a world; if he is imperfect he is not God. If God were good, and had divine powers, he could not possibly have created so imperfect a world, so rich in suffering, so certain in death.⁷⁵ It is instructive to see with what calmness the Hindu thinkers discuss these questions, seldom resorting to persecution or abuse, and keeping the debate upon a plane reached in our time only by the controversies of the maturest scientists. Kapila protects himself by recognizing the authority of the Vedas: “The Vedas” he says, simply, “are an authority, since the author of them knew the established truth.”⁷⁶ After which he proceeds without paying any attention to the Vedas.

But he is no materialist; on the contrary, he is an idealist and a spiritualist, after his own unconventional fashion. He derives reality entirely from perception; our sense organs and our thought give to the world all the reality, form and significance which it can ever have for us; what the world might be independently of them is an idle question that has no meaning, and can never have an answer.⁷⁷ Again, after listing twenty-four Tattwas which belong, in his system, under physical evolution, he upsets all his incipient materialism by introducing, as the last Reality, the strangest and perhaps the most important of them all—Purusha, “Person” or Soul. It is not, like twenty-three other Tattwas, produced by Prakriti or physical force; it is an independent psychical principle, omnipresent and everlasting, incapable of acting by itself, but indispensable to every action. For Prakriti never develops, the Gunas never act, except through the inspiration of Purusha; the physical is animated, vitalized and stimulated to evolve by the psychical principle everywhere.⁷⁸ Here Kapila speaks like Aristotle: “There is a ruling influence of the Spirit” (over Prakriti, or the evolving world), “caused by their proximity, just as the loadstone (draws iron to itself). That is, the proximity of Purusha to Prakriti impels the latter to go through the steps of production. This sort of attraction between the two leads to creation, but in no other sense is Spirit an agent, or concerned in creation at all.”⁷⁹*

Spirit is plural in the sense that it exists in each organism; but in all it is alike, and does not share in individuality. Individuality is physical; we are what we are, not because of our Spirit, but because of the origin, evolution and experiences of our bodies and minds. In Sankhya the mind is as much a part of the body as any other organ is. The secluded and untouched Spirit within us is free, while the mind and body are bound by the laws and Gunas or qualities of the physical world;⁸¹ it is not the Spirit that acts and is determined, it is the body-mind. Nor is Spirit affected by the decay and passing of the body and the personality; it is untouched by the stream of birth and death. “Mind is perishable,” says Kapila, “but not Spirit”;⁸² only the individual self, bound up with matter and body, is born, dies, and is born again, in that tireless fluctuation of physical forms which constitutes the history of the external world.⁸³ Kapila, capable of doubting everything else, never doubts transmigration.

Like most Hindu thinkers, he looks upon life as a very doubtful good, if a good at all. “Few are these days of joy, few are these days of sorrow; wealth is like a swollen river, youth is like the crumbling bank of a swollen river, life is like a tree on the crumbling bank.”⁸⁴ Suffering is the result of the fact that the individual self and mind are bound up with matter, caught in the blind forces of evolution. What escape is there from this suffering? Only through philosophy, answers our philosopher; only through understanding that all these pains and griefs, all this division and turbulence of striving egos, are Maya, illusion, the insubstantial pageantry of life and time. “Bondage arises from the error of not discriminating”⁸⁵—between the self that suffers and the Spirit that is immune, between the surface that is disturbed and the basis that remains unvexed and unchanged. To rise above these sufferings it is only necessary to realize that the essence of us, which is Spirit, is safe beyond good and evil, joy and pain, birth and death. These acts and struggles, these successes and defeats, distress us only so long as we fail to see that they do not affect, or come from, the Spirit; the enlightened man will look upon them as from outside them, like an impartial spectator witnessing a play. Let the soul recognize its independence of things, and it will at once be free; by that very act of understanding it will escape from the prison of space and time, of pain and reincarnation.⁸⁶ “Liberation obtained through knowledge of the twenty-five Realities,” says Kapila, “teaches the one only knowledge—that neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor do I exist;”⁸⁷ that is to say, personal separateness is an illusion; all that exists is the vast evolving and dissolving froth of matter and mind, of bodies and selves, on the one side, and on the other the quiet eternity of the immutable and imperturbable soul.

Such a philosophy will bring no comfort to one who may find some difficulty in separating himself from his aching flesh and his grieving memory; but it seems to have well expressed the mood of speculative India. No other body of philosophic thought, barring the Vedanta, has so profoundly affected the Hindu mind. In the atheism and epistemological idealism of Buddha, and his conception of Nirvana, we see the influence of Kapila; we see it in the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu, in the Puranas* and the Tantras—which transform Purusha and Prakriti into the male and female principles of creation;⁸⁸ above all in the system of Yoga, which is merely a practical development of Sankhya, built upon its theories and couched in its phrases. Kapila has few explicit adherents today, since Shankara and the Vedanta have captured the Hindu mind; but an old proverb still raises its voice occasionally in India: “There is no knowledge equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the Yoga.”⁸⁹

4. The Yoga System

The Holy Men—The antiquity of “Yoga”—Its meaning—The eight stages of discipline—The aim of “Yoga”—The miracles of the “Yogi”—The sincerity of “Yoga”

In a fair, still spot

Having fixed his abode—not too much raised,

Nor yet too low—let him abide, his goods

A cloth, a deerskin, and the Kusha-grass.

There, setting hard his mind upon the One,

Restraining heart and senses, silent, calm,

Let him accomplish Yoga, and achieve

Pureness of soul, holding immovable

Body and neck and head, his gaze absorbed

Upon his nose-end, rapt from all around,

Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent

Upon his Brahmacharya vow, devout,

Musing on Me, lost in the thought of Me.†

On the bathing-ghats, scattered here and there among reverent Hindus, indifferent Moslems and staring tourists, sit the Holy Men, or Yogis, in whom the religion and philosophy of India find their ultimate and strangest expression. In lesser numbers one comes upon them in the woods or on the roadside, immovable and absorbed. Some are old, some are young; some wear a rag over the shoulders, some a cloth over the loins; some are clothed only in dust of ashes, sprinkled over the body and into the mottled hair. They squat cross-legged and motionless, staring at their noses or their navels. Some of them look squarely into the face of the sun hour after hour, day after day, letting themselves go slowly blind; some surround themselves with hot fires during the midday heat; some walk barefoot upon hot coals, or empty the coals upon their heads; some lie naked for thirty-five years on beds of iron spikes; some roll their bodies thousands of miles to a place of pilgrimage; some chain themselves to trees, or imprison themselves in cages, until they die; some bury themselves in the earth up to their necks, and remain that way for years or for life; some pass a wire through both cheeks, making it impossible to open the jaws, and so condemning themselves to live on liquids; some keep their fists clenched so long that their nails come through the back of the hand; some hold up an arm or a leg until it is withered and dead. Many of them sit quietly in one position, perhaps for years, eating leaves and nuts brought to them by the people, deliberately dulling every sense, and concentrating every thought, in the resolve to understand. Most of them avoid spectacular methods, and pursue truth in the quiet retreat of their homes.

We have had such men in our Middle Ages, but we should have to look for them today in the nooks and crannies of Europe and America. India has had them for 2500 years—possibly from the prehistoric days when, perhaps, they were the shamans of savage tribes. The system of ascetic meditation known as Yoga existed in the time of the Vedas;⁹⁰ the Upanishads and the Mahabharata accepted it; it flourished in the age of Buddha;⁹¹ and even Alexander, attracted by the ability of these “gymnosophists” to bear pain silently, stopped to study them, and invited one of their number to come and live with him. The Yogi refused as firmly as Diogenes, saying that he wanted nothing from Alexander, being content with the nothing that he had. His fellow ascetics laughed at the Macedonian’s boyish desire to conquer the earth when, as they told him, only a few feet of it sufficed for any man, alive or dead. Another sage, Calanus (326 B.C.), accompanied Alexander to Persia; growing ill there, he asked permission to die, saying that he preferred death to illness; and calmly mounting a funeral pyre, he allowed himself to be burned to death without uttering a sound—to the astonishment of the Greeks, who had never seen this unmurderous sort of bravery before.⁹² Two centuries later (ca. 150 B.C.), Patanjali brought the practices and traditions of the system together in his famous Yoga-sutras, which are still used as a text in Yoga centers from Benares to Los Angeles.⁹³ Yuan Chwang, in the seventh century A.D., described the system as having thousands of devotees;⁹⁴ Marco Polo, about 1296, gave a vivid description of it;⁹⁵ today, after all these centuries, its more extreme followers, numbering from one to three million in India,⁹⁶ still torture themselves to find the peace of understanding. It is one of the most impressive and touching phenomena in the history of man.

What is Yoga? Literally, a yoke: not so much a yoking or union of the soul with the Supreme Being,⁹⁷ as the yoke of ascetic discipline and abstinence which the aspirant puts upon himself in order to cleanse his spirit of all material limitations, and achieve supernatural intelligence and powers.⁹⁸ Matter is the root of ignorance and suffering; therefore Yoga seeks to free the soul from all sense phenomena and all bodily attachment; it is an attempt to attain supreme enlightenment and salvation in one life by atoning in one existence for all the sins of the soul’s past incarnations.⁹⁹

Such enlightenment cannot be won at a stroke; the aspirant must move towards it step by step, and no stage of the process can be understood by anyone who has not passed through the stages before it; one comes to Yoga only by long and patient study and self-discipline. The stages of Yoga are eight:

I. Yama, or the death of desire; here the soul accepts the restraints of ahimsa and Brahmacharia, abandons all self-seeking, emancipates itself from all material interests and pursuits, and wishes well to all things.¹⁰⁰

II. Niyama, a faithful observance of certain preliminary rules for Yoga: cleanliness, content, purification, study, and piety.

III. Asana, posture; the aim here is to still all movement as well as all sensation; the best asana for this purpose is to place the right foot upon the left thigh and the left foot upon the right thigh, to cross the hands and grasp the two great toes, to bend the chin upon the chest, and direct the eyes to the tip of the nose.¹⁰¹

IV. Pranayama, or regulation of the breath: by these exercises one may forget everything but breathing, and in this way clear his mind for the passive emptiness that must precede absorption; at the same time one may learn to live on a minimum of air, and may let himself, with impunity, be buried in the earth for many days.

V. Pratyahara, abstraction; now the mind controls all the senses, and withdraws itself from all sense objects.

VI. Dharana, or concentration—the identification or filling of the mind and the senses with one idea or object to the exclusion of everything else.* The fixation of any one object long enough will free the soul of all sensation, all specific thought, and all selfish desire; then the mind, abstracted from things, will be left free to feel the immaterial essence of reality.†

VII. Dhyana, or meditation: this is an almost hypnotic condition, resulting from Dharana; it may be produced, says Patanjali, by the persistent repetition of the sacred syllable Om. Finally, as the summit of Yoga, the ascetic arrives at

VIII. Samadhi, or trance contemplation; even the last thought now disappears from the mind; empty, the mind loses consciousness of itself as a separate being;¹⁰³ it is merged with totality, and achieves a blissful and godlike comprehension of all things in One. No words can describe this condition to the uninitiate; no intellect or reasoning can find or formulate it; “through Yoga must Yoga be known.”¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless it is not God, or union with God, that the yogi seeks; in the Yoga philosophy God (Ishvara) is not the creator or preserver of the universe, or the rewarder and punisher of men, but merely one of several objects on which the soul may meditate as a means of achieving concentration and enlightenment. The aim, frankly, is that dissociation of the mind from the body, that removal of all material obstruction from the spirit, which brings with it, in Yoga theory, supernatural understanding and capacity.¹⁰⁵ If the soul is cleansed of all bodily subjection and involvement it will not be united with Brahman, it will be Brahman; for Brahman is precisely that hidden spiritual base, that selfless and immaterial soul, which remains when all sense attachments have been exercised away. To the extent to which the soul can free itself from its physical environment and prison it becomes Brahman, and exercises Brahman’s intelligence and power. Here the magical basis of religion reappears, and almost threatens the essence of religion itself—the worship of powers superior to man.

In the days of the Upanishads, Yoga was pure mysticism—an attempt to realize the identity of the soul with God. In Hindu legend it is said that in ancient days seven Wise Men, or Rishis, acquired, by penance and meditation, complete knowledge of all things.¹⁰⁶ In the later history of India Yoga became corrupted with magic, and thought more of the power of miracles than of the peace of understanding. The Yogi trusts that by Yoga he will be able to anesthetize and control any part of his body by concentrating upon it;¹⁰⁷ he will be able at will to make himself invisible, or to prevent his body from being moved, or to pass in a moment from any part of the earth, or to live as long as he desires, or to know the past and the future, and the most distant stars.¹⁰⁸