Reading section 18

[Footnote 374: Apparently the same as the Vrishnis.]

[Footnote 375: III. XV.]

[Footnote 376: It would seem that the temple of Dvaraka was built between the composition of the narrative in the Mahabharata and of the Vishnu Purana, for while the former says the whole town was destroyed by the sea, the latter excepts the temple and says that whoever visits it is freed from all his sins. See Wilson, _Vishnu Purana_, V. p. 155.]

[Footnote 377: A most curious chapter of the Vishnu Purana (IV. 13) contains a vindication of Krishna's character and a picture of old tribal life.]

[Footnote 378: Neither can I agree with some scholars that Krishna is mainly and primarily a deity of vegetation. All Indian ideas about the Universe and God emphasize the interaction of life and death, growth and decay, spring and winter. Krishna is undoubtedly associated with life, growth and generation, but so is Siva the destroyer, or rather the transmuter. The account in the Mahabhashya (on Pan. III. 1. 26) of the masque representing the slaughter of Kamsa by Krishna is surely a slight foundation for the theory that Krishna was a nature god. It might be easily argued that Christ is a vegetation spirit, for not only is Easter a spring festival but there are numerous allusions to sowing and harvest in the Gospels and Paul illustrates the resurrection by the germination of corn. It is a mistake to seek for uniformity in the history of religion. There were in ancient times different types of mind which invented different kinds of gods, just as now professors invent different theories about gods.]

[Footnote 379: The Krishna of the Chandogya Upanishad _receives_ instruction but it is not said that he was himself a teacher.]

[Footnote 380: Hopkins, _India Old and New_, p. 105.]

[Footnote 381: Bhandarkar. Allusions to Krishna in Mahabhashya, _Ind. Ant._ 1874, p. 14. For the pastoral Krishna see Bhandarkar, _Vaishnavism and Saivism_, chap. IX.]

[Footnote 382: The divinity of Radha is taught specially in the Brahma-vaivarta Purana and the Narada pancaratra, also called Jnanamritasara. She is also described in the Gopala-tapaniya Upanishad of unknown date.]

[Footnote 383: But Kamsa appears in both series of legends, _i.e._, in the Ghata-Jataka which contains no hint of the pastoral legends but is a variant of the story of the warlike Krishna.]

[Footnote 384: Vishnu Purana, V. 10, 11 from which the quotations in the text are taken. Much of it is repeated in the Harivamsa. See for instance H. 3808.]

[Footnote 385: The Muttra cycle of legends cannot be very late for the inscription of Glai Lomor in Champa (811 A.D.) speaks of Narayana holding up Goburdhan and a Cambojan inscription of Prea Eynkosey (970 A.D.) speaks of the banks of the Yamuna where Krishna sported. These legends must have been prevalent in India some time before they travelled so far. Some of them are depicted on a pillar found at Mandor and possibly referable to the fourth century A.D. See _Arch. Survey Ind._ 1905-1906, p. 135.]

[Footnote 386: Strom, III. 194. See M'Crindle, _Ancient India_, p. 183.]

[Footnote 387: Vincent Smith, _Fine Art in India_, pp. 134-138.]

[Footnote 388: In the Sutta-nipata Mara, the Evil One is called Kanha, the phonetic equivalent of Krishna in Prakrit. Can it be that Mara and his daughters have anything to do with Krishna and the Gopis?]

[Footnote 389: Compare the Greek stories of the infant Hermes who steals Apollo's cattle and invents the lyre. Compare too, as having a general resemblance to fantastic Indian legends, the story of young Hephaestus.]

[Footnote 390: Mgr. Bongard, _Histoire de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie_. Quoted by W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 343.]

[Footnote 391: Vitthal or Vittoba is a local deity of Pandharpur in the Deccan (perhaps a deified Brahman of the place) now identified with Krishna.]

[Footnote 392: _Life and Sayings of Ramakrishna_. Trans. F. Max Mueller, pp. 137-8. The English poet Crashaw makes free use of religious metaphors drawn from love and even Francis Thompson represents God as the lover of the Soul, _e.g._ in his poem _Any Saint._]

[Footnote 393: Though surprising, it can be paralleled in modern times for Kabir (_c._ 1400) was identified by his later followers with the supreme spirit.]

[Footnote 394: Mahabhar. Sabhap. XIV. Vishnu Pur. v. xxxiv. The name also occurs in the Taittiriya Aranyaka (i. 31) a work of moderate if not great antiquity Nazayanaya vidmahe Vasudevaya dhimahi.]

[Footnote 395: See. Vishnu Pur. VI. V. See also Wilson, _Vishnu Purana_, I. pp. 2 and 17.]

[Footnote 396: Thus the Saura Purana inveighs against the Madhva sect (XXXVIII.-XL.) and calls Vishnu the servant of Siva: a Puranic legal work called the Vriddha-Harita-Samhita is said to contain a polemic against Siva. Occasionally we hear of collisions between the followers of Vishnu and Siva or the desecration of temples by hostile fanatics. But such conflicts take place most often not between widely different sects but between subdivisions of the same sect, _e.g._, Tengalais and Vadagalais. It would seem too that at present most Hindus of the higher castes avoid ostentatious membership of the modern sects, and though they may practise special devotion to either Vishnu or Siva, yet they visit the temples of both deities when they go on pilgrimages. Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya in his _Hindu Castes and Sects_ says (p. 364) that aristocratic Brahmans usually keep in their private chapels both a salagram representing Vishnu and emblems representing Siva and his spouse. Hence different observers vary in their estimates of the importance of sectarian divisions, some holding that sect is the essence of modern Hinduism and others that most educated Hindus do not worship a sectarian deity. The Kurma Purana, Part I. chap. XXII. contains some curious rules as to what deities should be worshipped by the various classes of men and spirits.]

[Footnote 397: Bhag.-gita, XL. 23-34.]

[Footnote 398: See Srisa Chandra Vasu, _Daily practice of the Hindus_, p. 118.]

[Footnote 399: II. 1 and I. 1.]

[Footnote 400: See Maitrayana Up. V. 2. It is highly probable that the celebrated image at Elephanta is not a Trimurti at all but a Mahesamurti of Siva. See Gopinatha Rao, _Hindu Iconog._ II. 382.]

CHAPTER XXVI

FEATURES OF HINDUISM: RITUAL, CASTE, SECT, FAITH

1

In the last chapter I traced the growth of the great gods Siva and Vishnu. The prominence of these figures is one of the marks which distinguish the later phase of Indian religion from the earlier. But it is also distinguished by various practices, institutions and beliefs, which are more or less connected with the new deities. Such are a new ritual, the elaboration of the caste system, the growth of sects, and the tendency to make devotion to a particular deity the essence of religion. In the present chapter I shall say something of these phenomena.

Hinduism has often and justly been compared to a jungle. As in the jungle every particle of soil seems to put forth its spirit in vegetable life and plants grow on plants, creepers and parasites on their more stalwart brethren, so in India art, commerce, warfare and crime, every human interest and aspiration seek for a manifestation in religion, and since men and women of all classes and occupations, all stages of education and civilization, have contributed to Hinduism, much of it seems low, foolish and even immoral. The jungle is not a park or garden. Whatever can grow in it, does grow. The Brahmans are not gardeners but forest officers. To attempt a history or description of Indian creeds seems an enterprise as vast, hopeless and pathless as a general account of European politics. As for many centuries the life of Europe has expressed itself in politics, so for even longer ages the life of India, which has more inhabitants than western Europe,[401] has found expression in religion, speculation and philosophy, and has left of all this thought a voluminous record, mighty in bulk if wanting in dates and events. And why should it chronicle them? The truly religious mind does not care for the history of religion, just as among us the scientific mind does not dwell on the history of science.

Yet in spite of their exuberance Hinduism and the jungle have considerable uniformity. Here and there in a tropical forest some well-grown tree or brilliant flower attracts attention, but the general impression left on the traveller by the vegetation as he passes through it mile after mile is infinite repetition as well as infinite luxuriance. And so in Hinduism. A monograph on one god or one teacher is an interesting study. But if we continue the experiment, different gods and different teachers are found to be much the same. We can write about Vishnuism and Sivaism as if they were different religions and this, though incomplete, is not incorrect. But in their higher phases both show much the same excellences and when degraded both lead to much the same abuses, except that the worship of Vishnu does not allow animal sacrifices. This is true even of externals. In the temples of Madura, Poona and Benares, the deities, the rites, the doctrines, the race of the worshippers and the architecture are all different, yet the impression of uniformity is strong. In spite of divergences the religion is the same in all three places: it smacks of the soil and nothing like it can be found outside India.

Hinduism is an unusual combination of animism and pantheism, which are commonly regarded as the extremes of savage and of philosophic belief. In India both may be found separately but frequently they are combined in startling juxtaposition. The same person who worships Vishnu as identical with the universe also worships him in the form of a pebble or plant.[402] The average Hindu, who cannot live permanently in the altitudes of pantheistic thought, regards his gods as great natural forces, akin to the mighty rivers which he also worships, irresistible and often beneficent but also capricious and destructive. Whereas Judaism, Christianity and Islam all identify the moral law with the will and conduct of the deity, in Hinduism this is not completely admitted in practice, though a library might be filled with the beautiful things that have been said about man and God. The outward forms of Indian religion are pagan after the fashion of the ancient world, a fashion which has in most lands passed away. But whereas in the fourth century A.D. European paganism, despite the efforts of anti-Christian eclectics, proved inelastic and incapable of satisfying new religious cravings, this did not happen in India. The bottles of Hinduism have always proved capable of holding all the wine poured into them. When a new sentiment takes possession of men's souls, such as love, repentance, or the sense of sin, some deity of many shapes and sympathies straightway adapts himself to the needs of his worshippers. And yet in so doing the deity, though he enlarges himself, does not change, and the result is that we often meet with strange anachronisms, as if Jephthah should listen appreciatively to the Sermon on the Mount and then sacrifice his daughter to Christ. Many Hindu temples are served by dancing girls who are admittedly prostitutes,[403] an institution which takes us back to the cultus of Corinth and Babylon and is without parallel in any nation on approximately the same level of civilization. Only British law prevents widows from being burned with their dead husbands, though even in the Vedic age the custom had been discontinued as barbarous.[404] But for the same legislation, human sacrifice would probably be common. What the gods do and what their worshippers do in their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary laws of right and wrong. The god is supra-moral: the worshipper when he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside.

Yet it is unfair to represent Hinduism as characterized by licence and cruelty. Such tendencies are counterbalanced by the strength and prevalence of ideas based on renunciation and self-effacement. All desire, all attachment to the world is an evil; all self-assertion is wrong. Hinduism is constantly in extremes: sometimes it exults in the dances of Krishna or the destructive fury of Kali: more often it struggles for release from the transitory and for union with the permanent and real by self-denial or rather self-negation, which aims at the total suppression of both pleasure and pain. This is on the whole its dominant note.

In the records accessible to us the transition from Brahmanism--that is, the religion of the Vedas and Brahmanas--to Hinduism does not appear as direct but as masked by Buddhism. We see Buddhism grow at the expense of Brahmanism. We are then conscious that it becomes profoundly modified under the influence of new ideas. We see it decay and the religion of the Brahmans emerge victorious. But that religion is not what it was when Buddhism first arose, and is henceforth generally known as Hinduism. The materials for studying the period in which the change occurred--say 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.--are not scanty, but they do not facilitate chronological investigation. Art and architecture are mainly Buddhist until the Gupta period (c. 320 A.D.) and literature, though plentiful, is undated. The Mahabharata and Ramayana must have been edited in the course of these 800 years, but they consist of different strata and it is not easy to separate and arrange them without assuming what we want to prove. From 400 B.C. (if not from an earlier date) onwards there grew up a great volume of epic poetry, founded on popular ballads, telling the stories of Rama and the Pandavas.[405] It was distinct from the canonical literatures of both Brahmans and Buddhists, but though it was not in its essential character religious, yet so general in India is the interest in religion that whole theological treatises were incorporated in these stories without loss, in Indian opinion, to the interest of the narrative. If at the present day a congregation is seen in a Hindu temple listening to a recitation, the text which is being chanted will often prove to be part of the Mahabharata. Such a ceremony is not due to forgetfulness of the Veda but is a repetition of what happened long before our era when rhapsodists strung together popular narratives and popular theology. Such theology cannot be rigidly separated from Brahmanism and Buddhism. It grew up under their influence and accepted their simpler ideas. But it brought with it popular beliefs which did not strictly speaking belong to either system. By attacking the main Brahmanic doctrines the Buddhists gave the popular religion its opportunity. For instance, they condemned animal sacrifices and derided the idea that trained priests and complicated rites are necessary. This did not destroy the influence of the Brahmans but it disposed them to admit that the Vedic sacrifices are not the only means of salvation and to authorize other rites and beliefs. It was about this time, too, that a series of invasions began to pour into India from the north-west. It may be hard to distinguish between the foreign beliefs which they introduced and the Indian beliefs which they accepted and modified. But it is clear that their general effect was to upset traditional ideas associated with a ritual and learning which required lifelong study.

2

It has been well said[406] that Buddhism did not waste away in India until rival sects had appropriated from it everything they could make use of. Perhaps Hinduism had an even stronger doctrinal influence on Buddhism. The deification of the Buddha, the invention of Bodhisattvas who are equivalent to gods and the extraordinary alliance between late Buddhism and Sivaism, are all instances of the general Indian view overcoming the special Buddhist view. But Buddhism is closely connected with the theory of incarnations and the development of the Advaita philosophy, and in the externals of religion, in rites, ceremonies and institutions, its influence was great and lasting. We may take first the doctrine of Ahimsa, non-injury, or in other words the sanctity of animal life. This beautiful doctrine, the glory of India, if not invented by the Buddha at least arose in schools which were not Brahmanic and were related to the Jain and Buddhist movements. It formed no part of the Vedic religion in which sacrifice often meant butchery. But in Hinduism, it meets with extensive though not universal acceptance. With the Vaishnavas it is an article of faith nor do the worshippers of Siva usually propitiate him with animal sacrifices, though these are offered by the Saktas and also by the small class of Brahmans who still preserve the Vedic ritual.[407] Hardly any Hindus habitually eat meat and most abhor it, especially beef. Yet beef-eating seems to have been permitted in Vedic times and even when parts of the Mahabharata were composed.

Apart from animal sacrifices Buddhism was the main agent in effecting a mighty revolution in worship and ritual. One is tempted to regard the change as total and complete, but such wide assertions are rarely true in India: customs and institutions are not swept away by reformers but are cut down like the grass and like the grass grow up again. They sometimes die out but they are rarely destroyed. The Vedic sacrifices are still occasionally offered,[408] but for many centuries have been almost entirely superseded by another form of worship associated with temples and the veneration of images. This must have become the dominant form of Hindu cultus in the first few centuries of our era and probably earlier. It is one of the ironies of fate that the Buddha and his followers should be responsible for the growth of image worship, but it seems to be true. He laughed at sacrifices and left to his disciples only two forms of religious exercise, sermons and meditation. For Indian monks, this was perhaps sufficient, but the laity craved for some outward form of worship. This was soon found in the respect shown to the memory of the Buddha and the relics of his body, although Hinduism never took kindly to relic worship. We hear too of Cetiyas. In the Pitakas this word means a popular shrine unconnected with either Buddhist or Brahmanic ceremonial, sometimes perhaps merely a sacred tree or stone, probably honoured by such simple rites as decorating it with paint or flowers. A little later, in Buddhist times, the Cetiya became a cenotaph or reliquary, generally located near a monastery and surrounded by a passage for reverential circumambulation.

Allusions in the Pitakas also indicate that then as now there were fairs. The early Buddhists thought that though such gatherings were not edifying they might be made so. They erected sacred buildings near a monastery, and held festivals so that people might collect together, visit a holy place, and hear sermons. In the earliest known sanctuaries, the funeral monument (for we can scarcely doubt that this is the origin of the stupa)[409] has already assumed the conventional form known as Dagoba, consisting of a dome and chest of relics, with a spire at the top, the whole surrounded by railings or a colonnade, but though the carving is lavish, no figure of the Buddha himself is to be seen. He is represented by a symbol such as a footprint, wheel, or tree. But in the later school of sculpture known as Gandhara or Graeco-Buddhist he is frequently shown in a full length portrait. This difference is remarkable. It is easy to say that in the older school the Buddha was not depicted out of reverence, but less easy to see why such delineation should have shocked an Indian. But at any rate there is no difficulty in understanding that Greeks or artists influenced by Greeks would think it obvious and proper to make an effigy of their principal hero.

In these shrines we have if not the origin of the Hindu temple, at any rate a parallel development more nearly allied to it than anything in the Vedic religion.[410] For the Buddhist shrine was a monument built over a receptacle containing relics and the essential feature of Hindu temples is a cell containing an image or emblem and generally surmounted by a tower. The surrounding courts and corridors may assume gigantic proportions, but the central shrine is never large. Images had no place in the Vedic sacrifices and those now worshipped in temples are generally small and rude, and sometimes (as at Bhuvaneshwar and Srirangam) the deity is represented by a block or carved stone which cannot be moved, and may have been honoured as a sacred rock long before the name of Vishnu or Siva was known in those regions.[411] The conspicuous statues often found outside the shrine are not generally worshipped and are merely ornaments. Buddhism did not create the type of ritual now used in Hindu temples, yet it contributed towards it, for it attacked the old Brahmanic sacrifices, it countenanced the idea that particular places and objects are holy, and it encouraged the use of images. It is strange that these widespread ideas should find no place in the Vedic religion, but even now-a-days whenever the old Vedic sacrifices are celebrated they are uncontaminated by the temple ceremonial. More than this, the priests or Pujaris who officiate in temples are not always Brahmans and they rarely enjoy much consideration.[412] This curious and marked feature may be connected with the inveterate Indian feeling that, though it is well to multiply rites and rules for neophytes, no great respect is due to men occupied with mere ceremonial. But it also testifies to a dim consciousness that modern temples and their ceremonies have little to do with the thoughts and mode of life which made the Brahmans a force in India. In many ways the Brahmans dissociate themselves from popular religion. Those of good family will not perform religious rites for Sudras and treat the Brahmans who do so as inferiors.[413]

The simplest ceremonial in use at the present day is that employed in some Sivaite temples. It consists in placing leaves on the linga and pouring holy water over it. These rites, which may be descended from prehistoric stone worship, are generally accompanied by the reading of a Purana. But the commonest form of temple ritual consists in treating the image or symbol as an honoured human being.[414] It is awakened, bathed, dressed and put to bed at the close of day. Meals are served to it at the usual hours. The food thus offered is called _prasad_ (or favour) and is eaten by the devout. Once or twice a day the god holds a levee and on festivals he is carried in procession. These ceremonies are specially characteristic of the worship of Krishna whose images receive all the endearments lavished on a pet child. But they are also used in the temples of Siva and Parvati, and no less than twenty-two of them are performed in the course of the day at the temple of Bhuvaneshwar in Orissa. It is clear that the spirit of these rites is very different from that which inspires public worship in other civilized countries at the present day. They are not congregational or didactic, though if any of the faithful are in the temple at the time of the god's levee it is proper for them to enter and salute him. Neither do they recall the magical ceremonies of the Vedic sacrifices.[415] The waving of lights (arati) before the god and the burning of incense are almost the only acts suggestive of ecclesiastical ritual. The rest consists in treating a symbol or image as if it were a living thing capable of enjoying simple physical pleasures. Here there are two strata. We have really ancient rites, such as the anointing or ornamenting of stones and offerings of food in sacred places. In this class too we may reckon the sacrifice of goats (and formerly of human beings) to Kali.[416] But on the other hand the growing idea of Bhakti, that is faith or devotion, imported a sentimental element and the worshipper endeavoured to pet, caress and amuse the deity.