Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1. Friedrich Max Müller
has passed over it; his character remained the same, passive, meditative, quiet, and thoughtful. A people of this peculiar stamp was never destined to act a prominent part in the history of the world; nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they lived could not but exercise a detrimental influence on the active and moral character of the Indians. Social and political virtues were little cultivated, and the ideas of the useful and the beautiful hardly known to them. With all this, however, they had, what the Greek was as little capable of imagining, as they were of realising the elements of Grecian life. They shut their eyes to this world of outward seeming and activity, to open them full on the world of thought and rest. The ancient Hindus were a nation of philosophers, such as could nowhere have existed except in India, and even there in early times alone. It is with the Hindu mind as if a seed were placed in a hothouse. It will grow rapidly, its colours will be gorgeous, its perfume rich, its fruits precocious and abundant. But never will it be like the oak growing in wind and weather, and striking its roots into real earth, and stretching its branches into real air beneath the stars and the sun of heaven. Both are experiments, the hothouse flower and the Hindu mind; and as experiments, whether physiological or psychological, both deserve to be studied.
We may divide the whole Aryan family into two branches, the northern and the southern. The northern nations, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Slavonians, have each one act allotted to them on the stage of history. They have each a national character to support. Not so the southern tribes. They are absorbed in the struggles of thought, their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of existence; and the present, which ought to be the solution of both, seems never to have attracted their attention, or called forth their energies. There never was a nation believing so firmly in another world, and so little concerned about this. Their condition on earth is to them a problem; their real and eternal life a simple fact. Though this is said chiefly with reference to them before they were brought in contact with foreign conquerors, traces of this character are still visible in the Hindus, as described by the companions of Alexander, nay, even in the Hindus of the present day. The only sphere in which the Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, and to worship, is the sphere of religion and philosophy; and nowhere have religious and metaphysical ideas struck root so deep in the mind of a nation as in India. The shape which these ideas took amongst the different classes of society, and at different periods of civilisation, naturally varies from coarse superstition to sublime spiritualism. But, taken as a whole, history supplies no second instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed all the other faculties of a people.
It was natural, therefore, that the literary works of such a nation, when first discovered in Sanskrit MSS. by Wilkins, Sir W. Jones, and others, should have attracted the attention of all interested in the history of the human race. A new page in man's biography was laid open, and a literature as large as that of Greece or Rome was to be studied. The Laws of Manu, the two epic poems, the Râmâyana and Mahâbhârata, the six complete systems of philosophy, works on astronomy and medicine, plays, stories, fables, elegies, and lyrical effusions, were read with intense interest, on account of their age not less than their novelty.
Still this interest was confined to a small number of students, and in a few cases only could Indian literature attract the eyes of men who, from the summit of universal history, survey the highest peaks of human excellence. Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, and Goethe, discovered what was really important in Sanskrit literature. They saw what was genuine and original, in spite of much that seemed artificial. For the artificial, no doubt, has a wide place in Sanskrit literature. Everywhere we find systems, rules and models, castes and schools, but nowhere individuality, no natural growth, and but few signs of strong originality and genius.
There is, however, one period of Sanskrit literature which forms an exception, and which will maintain its place in the history of mankind, when the name of Kalidâsa and Sakuntalâ will have been long forgotten. It is the most ancient period, the period of the Veda. There is, perhaps, a higher degree of interest attaching to works of higher antiquity; but in the Veda we have more than mere antiquity. We have ancient thought expressed in ancient language. Without insisting on the fact that even chronologically the Veda is the first book of the Aryan nations, we have in it, at all events, a period in the intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other part of the world. In the hymns of the Veda we see man left to himself to solve the riddle of this world. We see him crawling on like a creature of the earth with all the desires and weaknesses of his animal nature. Food, wealth, and power, a large family and a long life, are the theme of his daily prayers. But he begins to lift up his eyes. He stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He opens his ears to the winds, and asks them whence and whither? He is awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and him whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily pittance of his existence, he calls 'his life, his breath, his brilliant Lord and Protector.' He gives names to all the powers of nature, and after he has called the fire Agni, the sun-light Indra, the storms Maruts, and the dawn Ushas, they all seem to grow naturally into beings like himself, nay, greater than himself. He invokes them, he praises them, he worships them. But still with all these gods around him, beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at rest within himself. There too, in his own breast, he has discovered a power that wants a name, a power nearer to him than all the gods of nature, a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers, and yet to listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is Bráhman; for bráhman meant originally force, will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal bráhman, too, as soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worshipped to the present day. And still the thought within him has no real name; that power which is nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the heavens, and every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but not expressed. At last he calls it Âtman; for âtman, originally breath or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone—Self whether divine or human, Self whether creating or suffering, Self whether one or all, but always Self, independent and free. 'Who has seen the first-born,' says the poet, 'when he who has no bones (i. e. form) bore him that had bones? Where was the life, the blood, the Self of the world? Who went to ask this from any that knew it?' (Rv.I. 164, 4). This idea of a divine Self once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy, 'Self is the Lord of all things, Self is the King of all things. As all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and the circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves are contained in this Self.33 Bráhman itself is but Self.'34
This Âtman also grew; but it grew, as it were, without attributes. The sun is called the Self of all that moves and rests (Rv. I. 115, 1), and still more frequently self becomes a mere pronoun. But Âtman remained always free from mythe and worship, differing in this from the Bráhman (neuter), who has his temples in India even now, and is worshipped as Bráhman (masculine), together with Vishnu and Siva, and other popular gods. The idea of the Âtman or Self, like a pure crystal, was too transparent for poetry, and therefore was handed over to philosophy, which afterwards polished, and turned, and watched it as the medium through which all is seen, and in which all is reflected and known. But philosophy is later than the Veda, and it is of the Vaidik period only I have here to speak.35
In the Veda, then, we can study a theogony of which that of Hesiod is but the last chapter. We can study man's natural growth, and the results to which it may lead under the most favourable conditions. All was given him that nature can bestow. We see him blest with the choicest gifts of the earth, under a glowing and transparent sky, surrounded by all the grandeur and all the riches of nature, with a language 'capable of giving soul to the objects of sense, and body to the abstractions of metaphysics.' We have a right to expect much from him, only we must not expect in his youthful poems the philosophy of the nineteenth century, or the beauties of Pindar, or, with some again, the truths of Christianity. Few understand children, still fewer understand antiquity. If we look in the Veda for high poetical diction, for striking comparisons, for bold combinations, we shall be disappointed. These early poets thought more for themselves than for others. They
B
Ibid. p. 478.
In writing the above, I was thinking rather of the mental process that was necessary for the production of such words as bráhman, âtman, and others, than of their idiomatic use in the ancient literature of India. It might be objected, for instance, that bráhman, neut. in the sense of creative power or the principal cause of all things, does not occur in the Rig-veda. This is true. But it occurs in that sense in the Atharva-veda, and in several of the Brâhma
In other passages, again, this same Brahman is represented as existing in man (Atharva-veda X. 7, 17), and in this very passage we can watch the transition from the neutral Bráhman into Bráhman, conceived of as a masculine:
The word Brãhma
The word bráhman, as a neuter, is used in the Rig-veda in the sense of prayer also, originally what bursts forth from the soul, and, in one sense, what is revealed. Hence in later times bráhman is used collectively for the Veda, the sacred word.
Another word, with the accent on the last syllable, is brahmán, the man who prays, who utters prayers, the priest, and gradually the Brahman by profession. In this sense it is frequently used in the Rig-veda (I. 108, 7), but not yet in the sense of Brahman by birth or caste.