Reading section 6

Where did this new spirit come from? Some have laboured to prove that it had its source in Christianity; others have argued that it was Christianity that was the debtor to India in this respect. Both theories are in the main impossible. This cult of the child Krishna arose in India, and, with the possible exception of a few obscure tales, it never spread outside the circle of Indian religion. But how and where did it arise? That is a question hard to answer; there is no direct evidence, and we can only balance probabilities. Now what are the probabilities?

The worship of Krishna as a babe, a boy, and a young man among the herdsfolk of Vraja seems to have no relation with the older form of the religion as set forth in the epic textbooks. It is a new element, imported from without. The most natural conclusion then is that it came from the people who are described in it, some tribe that pastured their herds in the woodlands near Mathura. Perhaps these herdsfolk were Abhiras, ancestors of the modern Ahir tribes. If so, it would be natural that their cult should attract attention; for sometimes Abhiras counted for something in society, and we even find a short-lived dynasty of Abhira kings reigning in Nasik in the third century A.D.[29] Be this as it may, it seems very likely that some pastoral tribe had a cult of a divine child blue or black of hue, and perhaps actually called by them Krishna or Kanha, "Black-man" (observe that henceforth Krishna is regularly represented with a blue skin), a cult in which gross rustic fantasy had free play; that it came in some circles to be linked on to the epic cycle of Krishna Vasudeva; and that some Bhagavatas, seeing in it latent possibilities, gave it polished literary expression and thereby established it as a part of the Vasudeva legend. It quickly seized upon the popular imagination and spread like wild-fire over India. For it satisfied many needs. The tenderness of the father and still more of the mother for the little babe, their delight in the sports of childhood, the amorist's pleasure in erotic adventure, and, not by any means least, the joy in the romantic scenery of the haunted woodlands--all these instincts found full play in it, and were sanctified by religion.

[Footnote 29: Rapson, _Catal. of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, etc._, pp. xliv, lxii, lxix, cxxxiii-cxxxvi, clxii; _Indian Antiq._, xlvii, p. 85, etc.]

II. RAMA

Rama is the hero of the Ramayana, the great epic ascribed to Valmiki, a poet who in course of time has passed from the realm of history into that of myth, like many other Hindus. The poem, as it has come down to us, contains seven books, which relate the following tale. Dasa-ratha, King of Ayodhya (now Ajodhya, near Faizabad), of the dynasty which claimed descent from the Sun-god, had no son, and therefore held the great _Asva-medha_, or horse-sacrifice, as a result of which he obtained four sons, Rama by his queen Kausalya, Bharata by Kaikeyi, and Lakshmana and Satrughna by Sumitra. Rama, the eldest, was also pre-eminent for strength, bravery, and noble qualities of soul. Visiting in his early youth the court of Janaka, king of Videha, Rama was able to shoot an arrow from Janaka's bow, which no other man could bend, and as a reward he received as wife the princess Sita, whom Janaka had found in a furrow of his fields and brought up as his own daughter. So far the first book, or Bala-kanda. The second book, or Ayodhya-kanda, relates how Queen Kaikeyi induced Dasa-ratha, sorely against his will, to banish Rama to the forests in order that her son Bharata might succeed to the throne; and the Aranya-kanda then describes how Rama, accompanied by his wife Sita and his faithful brother Lakshmana, dwelt in the forest for a time, until the demon King Ravana of Lanka, by means of a trick, carried off Sita to his city. The Kishkindha-kanda tells of Rama's pursuit of Ravana and his coming to Kishkindha, the city of Sugriva, the king of the apes, who joined him as an ally in his expedition; and the Sundara-kanda describes the march of their armies to Lanka, which is identified with Ceylon, and their crossing over the straits. Then comes the Yuddha-kanda, which narrates the war with Ravana, his death in battle, the restoration of Sita, the return of Rama and Sita to Ayodhya, and the crowning of Rama in place of Dasa-ratha, who had died of grief during his exile. Finally comes the Uttara-kanda, which relates that Rama, hearing some of the people of Ayodhya spitefully casting aspersions on the virtue of Sita during her imprisonment in the palace of Ravana, gave way to foolish jealousy and banished her to the hermitage of Valmiki, where she gave birth to twin sons, Kusa and Lava; when these boys had grown up, Valmiki taught them the Ramayana and sent them to sing it at the court of Rama, who on hearing it sent for Sita, who came to him accompanied by Valmiki, who assured him of her purity; and then Sita swore to it on oath, calling upon her mother the Earth-goddess to bear witness; and the Earth-goddess received her back into her bosom, leaving Rama bereaved, until after many days he was translated to heaven.

Such is the tale of Rama as told in the Valmiki-ramayana--a clean, wholesome story of chivalry, love, and adventure. But clearly the Valmiki-ramayana is not the work of a single hand. We can trace in it at least two strata. Books II.-VI. contain the older stratum; the rest is the addition of a later poet or series of poets, who have also inserted some padding into the earlier books. This older stratum, the nucleus of the epic, gives us a picture of heroic society in India at a very early date, probably not very long after the age of the Upanishads; perhaps we shall not be far wrong if we say it was composed some time before the fourth century B.C. In it Rama is simply a hero, miraculous in strength and goodness, but nevertheless wholly human; but in the later stratum--Books I. and VII. and the occasional insertions in the other books--conditions are changed, and Rama appears as a god on earth, a partial incarnation of Vishnu, exactly as in the Bhagavad-gita and other later parts of the Mahabharata the hero Krishna has become an incarnation of Vishnu also. The parallel may even be traced further. Krishna stands to Arjuna in very much the same relation as Rama to his brother Lakshmana--a greater and a lesser hero, growing into an incarnate god and his chief follower. This is thoroughly in harmony with Hindu ideas, which regularly conceive the teacher as accompanied by his disciple and abhor the notion of a voice crying in the wilderness; indeed we may almost venture to suspect that this symmetry in the epics is not altogether uninfluenced by this ideal. This, however, is a detail: the main point to observe is that Rama was originally a local hero of the Solar dynasty, a legendary king of Ayodhya, and as the Puranas give him a full pedigree, there is no good reason to doubt that he really existed "once upon a time." But the story with which he is associated in the Ramayana is puzzling. Is it a pure romance? Or is it a glorified version of some real adventures? Or can it be an old tale, perhaps dating from the early dawn of human history, readapted and fitted on to the person of an historical Rama? The first of these hypotheses seems unlikely, though by no means impossible. The second suggestion has found much favour. Many have believed that the story of the expedition of Rama and his army of apes to Lanka represents a movement of the Aryan invaders from the North towards the South; and this is supported to some extent by Indian tradition, which has located most of the places mentioned in the Ramayana, and in particular has identified Lanka with Ceylon. In support of this one may point to the Iliad of Homer, which has a somewhat similar theme, the rape and recovery of Helen by the armies of the Achaeans, the basis of which is the historical fact of an expedition against Troy and the destruction of that city. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting this analogy, the most serious of all being the indubitable fact that there is not a tittle of evidence to show that such an expedition was ever made by the Aryans. True, there were waves of emigration from Aryan centres southward in early times; but those that travelled as far as Ceylon went by sea, either from the coasts of Bengal or Orissa or Bombay. Besides, the expedition of Rama is obviously fabulous, for his army was composed not of Aryans but of apes. All things considered, there seems to be most plausibility in the third hypothesis[30]. Certainly Rama was a local hero

of Ayodhya, and probably he was once a real king; so it is likely enough that an old saga (or sagas) attached itself early to his memory. And as his fame spread abroad, principally on the wings of Valmiki's poem, the honours of semi-divinity began to be paid to him in many places beyond his native land, and about the beginning of our era he was recognised as an incarnation of Vishnu sent to establish a reign of righteousness in the world. In Southern India this cult of Rama, like that of Krishna, has for the most part remained subordinate to the worship of Vishnu, though the Vaishnava church there has from early times recognised the divinity of both of them as embodiments of the Almighty. But its great home is the North, where millions worship Rama with passionate and all-absorbing love.

[Footnote 30: I regret that I cannot accept the ingenious hypothesis lately put forward by Rai Saheb Dineshchandra Sen in his _Bengali Ramayanas_. The story of the Dasaratha-jataka seems to me to be a garbled and bowdlerised snippet cut off from a possibly pre-Valmikian version of the old Rama-saga; the rest of the theory appears to be quite mistaken.]

III. SOME LATER PREACHERS

With all its attractions and success, the new Krishnaism did not everywhere overgrow the older stock upon which it had been engrafted. There were many places in which the early worship of Vishnu and Vasudeva remained almost unchanged. The new legends of Krishna's childhood might indeed be accepted in these centres of conservatism, but they made little difference in the spirit and form of the worship, which continued to follow the ancient order. In some of them the Bhagavad-gita, Narayaniya, and other epic doctrinals still remained the standard texts, which theologians connected with the ancient Upanishads and the Brahma-sutra summarising the latter; in other centres there arose, beginning perhaps about the seventh century A.D., a series of Samhitas, or manuals of doctrine and practice for the Pancharatra[31] sect, which, though in essentials agreeing with the Narayaniya, taught a different theory of cosmogony and introduced the worship of the goddess Sri or Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, as the agency or energy through which the Supreme Being becomes active in finite existence; and in yet other places other texts were followed, such as those of the Vaikhanasa school. This worship of Vishnu-Vasudeva on the ancient lines was peculiarly vigorous among the representatives of Aryan culture in the South, who had introduced the cults of Vishnu and Siva with the rest of the Aryan pantheon into the midst of Dravidian animism. Hinduism, transplanted into the Dravidian area, has there remained more conservative than anywhere else, and has clung firmly to its ancient traditions. There is nothing of Dravidian origin in the South Indian worship of Vishnu and Siva; they are entirely Aryan importations. But they have become thoroughly assimilated in their southern home, and each of them has produced a huge mass of fine devotional literature in the vernaculars. In the Tamil country the church of Vishnu boasts of the Nal-ayira-prabandham, a collection of Tamil psalms numbering about 4,000 stanzas composed by twelve poets called Alvars, which were collected about 1000 A.D.; and the worship of 'Siva is equally well expressed in the Tiru-murai, compiled about the twelfth century, of which one section, the Devaram, was put together about the same time as the Nal-ayira-prabandham. Both the Tiru-murai and the Nal-ayira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of ecstatic devotion as the Bhagavata-purana; they are the utterances of wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the larger temples frequently have attached to them female staffs of attendant votaries and _corps de ballet_ of very easy virtue. But this aspect was far more marked in neo-Krishnaism, which often tends to intense pruriency, than in the other two cults. The Alvars pay little regard to the legends of Krishna, and concentrate their energies upon the worship of Vishnu as he is represented in the great temples of Srirangam, Conjevaram, Tirupati, and similar sanctuaries.

[Footnote 31: On this name see above, p. 86.]

About the beginning of the ninth century the peaceful course of Vaishnava religion was rudely disturbed by the preaching of Samkara Acharya. Samkara, one of the greatest intellects that India has ever produced, was a Brahman of Malabar, and was born about the year 788. Taking his stand upon the Upanishads, Brahma-sutra, and Bhagavad-gita, upon which he wrote commentaries, he interpreted them as teaching the doctrine of Advaita, thorough monistic idealism, teaching that the universal Soul, Brahma, is absolutely identical with the individual Soul, the _atma_ or Self, that all being is only one, that salvation consists in the identification of these two, and is attained by knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (_maya_) conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to him--in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it had been taught by some ancient schools of Aupanishadas, and was very like the doctrine of some of the Buddhist idealists; but the vigour and skill with which Samkara propagated his doctrines threatened ruin to orthodox Vaishnava theologians, and roused them to counter-campaigns. Among the Vaishnava Brahmans of the South who won laurels in this field was Yamunacharya, who lived about 1050, and was the grandson of Natha Muni, who collected the hymns of the Alvars in the Nal-ayira-prabandham and founded the great school of Vaishnava theology at Srirangam. In opposition to Samkara's monism, Yamunacharya propounded the doctrine of his school, the so-called Visishtadvaita, which was preached with still greater skill and success by his famous successor Ramanuja, who died in 1137. Ramanuja's greatest works are his commentaries on the Brahma-sutra and Bhagavad-gita. In them he expounds with great ability the principles of his school, namely, that God, sentient beings or souls, and insentient matter form three essentially distinct classes of being; that God, who is the same as Brahma, Vishnu, Narayana, or Krishna, is omnipotent, omnipresent, and possessed of all good qualities; that matter forms the body of souls, and souls form the body of God; that the soul attains salvation as a result of devout and loving meditation upon God, worship of him, and study of the scriptures; and that salvation consists in eternal union of the soul with God, but not in identity with him, as Samkara taught. The scriptures on which Ramanuja took his stand were mainly the Upanishads, Brahma-sutra, and Bhagavad-gita; but he also acknowledged as authoritative the Pancharatra Samhitas, in spite of their divergences in details of doctrine, and it is from them that his church has derived the worship of Sri or Lakshmi as consort of Vishnu, which is a very marked feature of their community and has gained for them the title of Sri-vaishnavas. But Ramanuja was much more than a scholar and a writer of books; he was also a man of action, a "practical mystic." Like Samkara, he organised a body of _sannyasis_ or ascetic votaries, into which, however, he admitted only Brahmans, whereas Samkara opened some of the sections of his devotees to non-Brahmans; but on the other hand he was far more liberal than Samkara in the choice of his congregations, for he endeavoured to bring men of the lowest castes, Sudras and even Pariahs, within the influence of his church, though he kept up the social barrier between them and the higher castes, and he firmly upheld

the principle of the Bhagavad-gita that it is by the performance of religious and social duties of caste, and not by knowledge alone, that salvation is most surely to be won. He established schools and monasteries, reorganised the worship of the temples, usually in accordance with the Pancharatra rules, and thus placed his church in a position of such strength in Southern India that its only serious rival is the church of Siva.

Nimbarka, who probably flourished about the first half of the twelfth century, preached for the cult of Krishna a doctrine combining monism with dualism, which is followed by a small sect in Northern India. Ananda-tirtha or Madhva, in the first three quarters of the thirteenth century, propounded for the same church a theory of thorough dualism, which has found many admirers, chiefly in the Dekkan. Vallabhacharya, born in 1479, founded a school of Krishna-worshippers which claims a "pure monism" without the aid of the theory of _maya_, or illusion, which is a characteristic of Samkara's monism. This community has become very influential, chiefly in Bombay Presidency; but in recent times it has been under a cloud owing to the scandals arising from a tendency to practise immoral orgies and from the claims of its priesthood, as representing the god, to enjoy the persons and property of their congregations.

Besides these and other schools which were founded on a basis of Sanskrit scholastic philosophy, there have been many popular religious movements, which from the first appealed directly to the heart of the people in their own tongues.

The first place in which we see this current in movement is the Maratha country. Here, about 1290, Jnanesvara or Jnanadeva, popularly known as Jnanoba, composed his Jnanesvari, a paraphrase of the Bhagavad-gita in about 10,000 Marathi verses, as well as a number of hymns to Krishna and a poem on the worship of Siva. To the same period belonged Namadeva, who was born at Pandharpur, according to some in 1270 and according to others about a century later. Then came Ekanatha, who is said to have died in 1608, and composed some hymns and Marathi verse-translations from the Bhagavata. The greatest of all was Tukaram, who was born about 1608.[32] In the verses of these poets the worship of Krishna is raised to a level of high spirituality. Ramananda, who apparently lived between 1400 and 1470 and was somehow connected with the school of Ramanuja, preached salvation through Rama to all castes and classes of Northern India, with immense and enduring success. To his spiritual lineage belongs Tulsi Das (1532-1623), whose Rama-charita-manasa, a poem in Eastern Hindi on the story of Valmiki's Ramayana, has become the Bible of the North. The same influences are visible in the poems of Kabir, a Moslem by birth, who combined Hindu and Muhammadan doctrines into an eclectic monotheism, and is worshipped as an incarnation of God by his sect. He died in 1518. A kindred spirit was Nanak, the founder of the Sikh church (1469-1538).[33]

[Footnote 32: The student may refer to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar's _Vaisnavas and Saivas_ (in Buehler's _Grundriss_, p. 74 ff.,) J. N. Farquhar's _Outline of the Relig. Liter. of India_, p. 234 f., 298 ff., and my _Heart of India_, p. 60 ff., for some details on these poets.]

[Footnote 33: See Farquhar, _ut supra_, p. 323 ff.; _Heart of India_, p. 49 f., etc.]

By the side of these upward movements there have been many which have remained on the older level of the Bhagavata. The most important is that of Visvambhara Misra, who is better known by his titles of Chaitanya and Gauranga (1485-1533); he carried on a "revival" of volcanic intensity in Bengal and Orissa, and the church founded by him is still powerful, and worships him as an incarnation of Krishna.

IV. BRAHMA AND THE TRIMURTI

_Brahma_, the Creator, a masculine noun, must be carefully distinguished from the neuter _Brahma_, the abstract First Being. The latter comes first in the scale of existence, while the former appears at some distance further on as the creator of the material world (see above, p. 60 f.). In modern days Brahma has been completely eclipsed by Vishnu and Siva and even by some minor deities, and has now only four temples dedicated to his exclusive worship.[34] But there was a time when he was a great god. In the older parts of the Mahabharata and Ramayana he figures as one of the greater deities, perhaps the greatest. But in the later portions of the epic he has shrunk into comparative insignificance as compared to Vishnu and Siva, and especially to Vishnu. This change faithfully reflects historical facts. During the last four or five centuries of the millennium which ended with the Christian era the orthodox Vedic religion of the Brahmans had steadily lost ground, and the sects worshipping Vishnu and Siva had correspondingly grown in power and finally had come to be recognised as themselves orthodox. Brahma, as his name implies, is the ideal Brahman sage, and typifies Vedic orthodoxy. He is represented as everlastingly chanting the four Vedas from his four mouths (for he has four heads), and he bears the water-pot and rosary of eleocarpus berries, the symbols of the Brahman ascetic. But Vedic orthodoxy had to make way for more fascinating cults, and the Vedic Brahman typified in the god Brahma sank into comparative unimportance beside the sectarian ascetics. Still the old god, though shorn of much of his glory, was by no means driven from the field. The new churches looked with reverence upon his Vedas, and often claimed them as divine authority for their doctrines; and though each of them asserted that its particular god, Siva or Vishnu, was the Supreme Being, and ultimately the only being, both of them allowed Brahma to retain his old office of creator, it being of course understood that he held it as a subordinate of the Supreme, Siva or Vishnu as the case might be. Meanwhile, at any rate between the third and the sixth centuries, there existed a small fraternity who regarded Brahma as the Supreme, and therefore as identical with the abstract Brahma; but although they have left a record of their doctrines in the Markandeya-purana and the Padma-purana, they have had little influence on Indian religion in general.

[Footnote 34: Those are at Pushkar in Rajputana, Dudahi in Bundelkhand, Khed Brahma in Idar State, and Kodakkal in Malabar.]

A love of system--unfortunately not always effectual--is a notable feature of the Hindu mind in dealing with most subjects, from grammar to _Ars Amoris_; and this instinct inspired some unknown theologian with the idea of harmonising the three gods into a unity by representing in one compound form or _Trimurti_ Brahma as creator, Vishnu as the sustaining power in the universe, and Siva as the force of dissolution which periodically brings the cosmos to an end and necessitates in due course new cycles of being.[35] This ingenious plan has the advantage that it is without prejudice to the religion of any of the gods concerned, for all the three members of this trinity are subordinate to the Supreme Being, or Param Brahma, whom the Vaishnavas identify with Vishnu in his highest phase, Para-Vasudeva, and distinguish from his lower phase, the Vishnu of this compound, while the Saivas draw a corresponding distinction between Parama-Siva, the god in his transcendent nature, and the Siva who figures in the Trimurti. So the most orthodox Vaishnava and the most bigoted Saiva can adore this three-headed image of the Trimurti side by side with easy consciences.