The History of Hinduism and Buddhism. Charles Eliot
of the gods and practically becomes a Deva and the bliss of great sages is declared equal to the bliss of the gods[138]. The human and divine worlds are not really distinct, and as in China and Japan, distinguished men are deified. The deification of Buddha takes place before our eyes as we follow the course of history: the origin of Krishna's godhead is more obscure but it is probable that he was a deified local hero. After the period of the Brâhmaṇas the theory that deities manifest themselves to the world in avatâras or descents, that is in our idiom incarnations, becomes part of popular theology.
There are other general characteristics of Indian religion which will be best made clear by more detailed treatment in succeeding chapters. Such are, firstly, a special theory of sacrifice or ritual which, though totally rejected by Buddhism, has survived to modern times. Secondly, a belief in the efficacy of self-mortification as a means of obtaining super-human powers or final salvation. Thirdly, an even more deeply rooted conviction that salvation can be obtained by knowledge. Fourthly, there is the doctrine that faith or devotion to a particular deity is the best way to salvation, but this teaching, though it seems natural to our minds, does not make its appearance in India until relatively late. It is not so peculiarly Indian as the other ideas mentioned, but even at the outset it is well to insist on its prevalence during the last two thousand years because a very false impression may be produced by ignoring it.
There also runs through Indian religion a persistent though inconspicuous current of non-theistic thought. It does not deny the existence of spirits but it treats them as being, like men, subject to natural laws, though able, like men, to influence events. The ultimate truth for it is not pantheism but fixed natural laws of which no explanation is offered. The religion of the Jains and the Sânkhya philosophy belong to this current. So did the teaching of several ancient sects, such as the Âjîvìkas, and strictly speaking Buddhism itself. For the Buddha is not an Avatâra or a messenger but a superman whose exceptional intelligence sees that the Wheel of Causation and the Four Truths are part of the very nature of things. It is strange too that asceticism, sacrifices and modern tantric rites which seem to us concerned with the relations between man and God are in India penetrated by a non-theistic theory, namely that there are certain laws which can be studied and applied, much like electricity, and that then spirits can be coerced to grant what the ascetic or sacrificer desires. At the same time such views are more often implied than formulated. The Dharma is spoken of as the teaching of the Buddha rather than as Cosmic Order like the Tao of the Chinese and though tantric theory assumes the existence of certain forces which can be used scientifically, the general impression produced by tantric works is that they expound an intricate mythology and ritual.
CHAPTER IV
VEDIC DEITIES AND SACRIFICES
1
Our knowledge of early Indian religion is derived almost entirely from literature. After the rise of Buddhism this is supplemented to some extent by buildings, statues and inscriptions, but unlike Egypt and Babylonia, pre-Buddhist India has yielded no temples, images or other religious antiquities, nor is it probable that such will be discovered. Certainly the material for study is not scanty. The theological literature of India is enormous: the difficulty is to grasp it and select what is important. The enquirer is confronted with a series of encyclopædic works of great bulk and considerable antiquity, treating of every aspect of religion which interested the Brahmans. But he continually feels the want of independent testimony to check their statements. They set forth the views of their authors but whether those views met with general acceptance outside the Brahmanic caste and influenced Indian life as a whole or whether classes, such as the military caste, or regions, such as western India and Dravidian India, had different views, it is often hard to say. Even more serious is the difficulty of chronology which affects secular as well as religious literature. The feats of Hindus in the matter of computing time show in the most extravagant form the peculiarities of their mental temperament, for while in their cosmogonies æons whose length the mind can hardly grasp are tabulated with the names of their superhuman rulers there are few[139] dates in the pre-Mohammedan history which can be determined from purely Indian sources. The fragments of obscure Greek writers and the notes of a travelling Chinaman furnish more trustworthy data about important epochs in the history of the Hindus than the whole of their gigantic literature, in which there has been found no mention of Alexander's invasion and only scattered allusions to the conquests of the Sakas, Kushans and Hûnas. We can hardly imagine doubt as to the century in which Shakespeare or Virgil lived, yet when I first studied Sanskrit the greatest of Indian dramatists, Kalidasa, was supposed to have lived about 50 B.C. His date is not yet fixed with unanimity but it is now generally placed in the fifth or sixth century A.D.
This chronological chaos naturally affects the value of literature as a record of the development of thought. We are in danger of moving in a vicious circle: of assigning ideas to an epoch because they occur in a certain book, while at the same time we fix the date of the book in virtue of the ideas which it contains. Still we may feel some security as to the sequence, if not the exact dates, of the great divisions in Indian religious literature such as the period of the Vedic hymns, the period of the Brâhmaṇas, the rise of Buddhism, the composition of the two great epics, and the Puranas. If we follow the opinion of most authorities and accept the picture of Indian life and thought contained in the Pali Tripitaka as in the main historical, it seems to follow that both the ritual system of the Brâhmaṇas and the philosophic speculations of the Upanishads were in existence by 500 B.C.[140] and sufficiently developed to impress the public mind with a sense of their futility. Some interval of mental growth seems to separate the Upanishads from the Brâhmaṇas and a more decided interval separates the Brâhmaṇas from the earlier hymns of the Rig Veda, if not from the compilation of the whole collection[141]. We may hence say that the older Upanishads and Brahmaṇas must have been composed between 800 and 500 B.C. and the hymns of the Rig Veda hardly later than 1000 B.C. Many authorities think the earlier hymns must date from 2000 rather than 1000 B.C. but the resemblance of the Rig Veda to the Zoroastrian Gathas (which are generally regarded as considerably later than 1000 B.C.) is plain, and it will be strange if the two collections prove to be separated by an interval of many centuries. But the stage of social and religious culture indicated in the Vedic hymns may have begun long before they were composed, and rites and deities common to Indians and Iranians existed before the reforms of Zoroaster[142].
It may seem that everything is uncertain in this literature without dates or authors and that the growth of religion in India cannot be scientifically studied. The difficulties are indeed considerable but they are materially reduced by the veneration in which the ancient scriptures were held, and by the retentiveness of memory and devotion to grammar, if not to history, which have characterized the Brahmans for at least twenty-five centuries. The authenticity of certain Vedic texts is guaranteed not only by the quotations found in later works, but by treatises on phonetics, grammar and versification as well as by indices which give the number of words in every book, chapter and verse. We may be sure that we possess not perhaps the exact words of the Vedic poets, but what were believed about 600 B.C. to be their exact words, and there is no reason to doubt that this is a substantially correct version of the hymns as recited several centuries earlier[143].
In drawing any deductions from the hymns of the Rig Veda it must be remembered that it is the manual of the Hotri priests[144]. This does not affect the age or character of the single pieces: they may have been composed at very different dates and they are not arranged in the order in which the priest recites them. But the liturgical character of the compilation does somewhat qualify its title to give a complete picture of religion. One could not throw doubt on a ceremony of the Church, still less on a popular custom, because it was not mentioned in the missal, and we cannot assume that ideas or usages not mentioned in the Rig Veda did not exist at the time when it was composed.
We have no other Sanskrit writings contemporary with the older parts of the Rig Veda, but the roots of epic poetry stretch far back and ballads may be as old as hymns, though they neither sought nor obtained the official sanction of the priesthood. Side by