[ p. 117 ]
[ p. 118 ]
¶ BOOK THREE. — WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA
I. Brahmanism
1: The primitive Aryan gods — the Vedas. 2: The Aryans move to the Ganges — caste — the brahmins. 3 : The Upanishads — the Over-Soul — transmigration — Nirvana — the growth of asceticism*
II. Jainism
1 : Mahavira — his gospel. 2 : How the gospel of Mahavira was corrupted — Jainism today.
III. Buddhism
1: The story of Gautama. 2 : His gospel — its implications — the Law of Karma. 3: How Gautama spread his gospel. 4: Early history of Buddhism — deification of Buddha — Asoka — the new Buddhism in China — Tibet — Japan — India — Ceylon.
IV. Hinduism
1: The dominant religion in India today — caste — the trinity — the divisiveness in Hinduism. 2: Vishnu — the avatars — the Bhagavad-Gita — Krishna — theology in Vishnuism. 3 : Shiva — his popularity — the Tantra — sex in religion. 4: Hindu philosophy — yoga — the mystic ecstasy* 5 : The religion of the lower classes.
[ p. 119 ]
¶ BOOK THREE — WHAT HAPPENED IN INDIA
I. BRAHMANISM
NO ONE can say for certain, but it seems probable that before the first white man entered India, the land was populated entirely by a snub-nosed, black-skinned people. By what means those black savages tried to cope with the universe, by what illusions they tried to make their life livable, no one knows. Nor does anyone know, save very vaguely, the nature of India’s religion even during the first centuries after the coming of the white man. The first white invaders of India belonged to what is loosely termed the Aryan race: the stock that also produced the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, and most of the other peoples of Europe. About four or five thousand years ago they broke through the passes of the Hindu Kush Mountains, and then settled down in the fertile valley of the Indus. They were warriors and shepherds, a crude, simple folk who seemed to be only slightly less uncivilized than were the black men whom they drove before them. Their religion was a low fear of many spirits, among them being “three and thirty [ p. 120 ] gods” who were worshipped with oblations of beer — soma it was called — on a spread of straw. It was, therefore, an advanced form of animism, a nature-worship in which the more important spirits were no longer thought to animate mere sticks or stones but rather vast phenomena such as the sun and the sky.
The most important of these spirits was one called Indra, usually pictured as a boasting, gluttonous, drunken brawler controlling the wind and the rain. Besides him there were several other deities who had most seriously to be reckoned with: Dyaush Pitar (related to Zeus Pater and Jupiter), who was the sky-god; Asura, the “Wise Spirit of Heaven”; Agni, the god of fire (the Sanskrit name is related to our English word 'Ignite”) ; Mithra, a sun-god (the remote ancestor, of course, of the Roman mystery-god Mithras) ; Soma, the principle of intoxication become a god; and various others.
Certain of these gods the Aryan invaders must have brought with them from the unknown cradle-land whence they had come; others quite clearly must have been developed in the new home. Most of them, however, must have been worshipped only by single tribes, for so soon as the tribes began to merge, many of those gods disappeared. From early times there seems to have been a steady drift in Aryan India toward a synthesis, an amalgamation of the gods.
In the beginning the means by which the Aryans courted the favor of these gods was exceedingly simple. The father of each family was the priest, and the mother was the priestess. There were no temples, and indeed no permanent holy places of any kind. . . . But what [ p. 121 ] happened in the rest of the world soon happened also in India. In the hope of cajoling the gods more effectively, the ritual was gradually elaborated. Then professional sacrifices arose — priests whose services at the altar were imagined to be somehow more efficacious than the services of ordinary men. And by these priests the ritual was elaborated and complicated still further. They created a vast literature of psalms and magic spells to recite at the altars in order to get a firmer hold on the gods — a literature still preserved in what are called the Vedas. The word veda is related to the English word “wit,” and the German word “wissen.” Broadly interpreted it means “knowledge,” but refers specifically to that sort of knowledge which will aid a man to win the protection of the gods. There are more than a hundred books in existence which are called Vedas, but many of them are little known even to the most erudite scholars today. Of them all the oldest and most important is called the Rig Veda, a collection of over a thousand hymns which date back perhaps as far as 2000 B. C.
¶ 2
THIS Vedic literature — or much of it, at least — was developed while the Aryan population was still confined to the valley of the Indus. Many years passed in that fertile region before overcrowding forced the white men to penetrate further into the land; but then a heavy migration began southward toward the valley of the Ganges. There it halted for a while, and there a new civilization arose. The life of the Aryan took on an entirely new character in this changed environment. For one thing the distinctions between the various classes [ p. 122 ] of human beings had to be emphasized as never before. The white invaders grew terrified lest in time the identity of their stock might be lost in the welter of the far larger black population. It was the ancient hunger for selfpreservation manifesting itself once more, the old, old hunger for continued life for the race as well as the individual. And to satisfy that hunger the Aryans resorted to the most desperate expedient imaginable. They raised up a towering religious and social barrier of caste to protect themselves from the blacks. (In Sanskrit the one word varnu means both caste and color.) And across that barrier they forbade not merely intermarriage, but also every form of social and religious intercourse. White was white and black was black, and ne’er the twain were supposed to meet. . . .
Of course, the expedient failed to accomplish its purpose, as we can see from the fact that all Hindus today, high-caste as well as low, are black. But though it failed utterly in that direction, it proved all too successful in another. Though it could not keep whites physically separated from blacks, it was soon all too effective in keeping whites socially separated from each other. For once the idea of caste took root in the land, it began to spread like a veritable plague. Soon it began to distinguish not merely between whites and blacks, but also between white priests and white chieftains, and then between white chieftains and white farmers, and finally between white farmers and white serfs. It was natural, of course, for the priests — the brahmins they were called — to emerge at the very top of this monstrous social system. As long as they alone were deemed able to placate and cajole the gods, so long were they alone able [ p. 123 ] to command the highest respect of men. Even the rajahs, the princes, had to rank below them. . . .
With great power there came as a matter of course the opportunity of acquiring great wealth. Riches literally flooded into the coffers of the brahmins. From every sacrifice to the gods the priests were permitted to take no mean portion for themselves; and besides they did not scruple to accompany even their most poetic prayers and loftiest adorations with open bids for extra “bakhsheesh.” . . . And with great wealth came the opportunity of acquiring still greater power. In time the priests, not content with their supremacy over men, began to covet supremacy over the very gods. And they actually managed to achieve it, too! They began by exalting the importance of the ritual, saying: “The whole world was created by the sacrificial rite; from the sacrificial rite the very gods are sprung., . . Assuredly the sun would not rise if the priest did not make sacrifice.'* And from that they went to exalting themselves, saying: “The whole universe is subject to the gods, the gods to the spells, and the spells to the brahmins; therefore the brahmins are our gods!” They came to look upon the gods almost with disdain, and treated them like so many hungry tramps. “As the ox bellows for the rain,” they presumptuously declared in their holy writ, “so yearns Indra for soma.” … It was a development which had mounted so outrageously high that it had toppled over into absurdity.
Of course, such a religion could not hold sway forever. The masses, finding the protection afforded by the brahmin gods to be prohibitively costly, began to bargain instead for the much cheaper protection of unorthodox [ p. 124 ] demons. Out of the depths of their ancient savage heritage, or from the slime of the black native animism around them, they dragged up scores of fell spirits to dread or cling to. . . . And in time the priests, too, began to question the sincerity of their over-ritualized religion. In the same Brahmanas, the “Priestlies,” in which the clerics dared to assert their claims as the lords of the religion, they also had to betray their lurking doubts as to the validity of the whole religion itself. Of course, they did not dare confess those doubts openly, for that would have cut the ground from beneath their own feet. It would have put an end to their inordinate power by destroying the whole system which gave it to them. So, as always happens when men no longer believe but cannot afford openly to disbelieve, the brahmins tried to ease their consciences by developing an apologetic theology. With suspicious anxiety they tried to strip the ritual ceremonies of their obvious absurdity by interpreting them as beautiful symbols and allegories. Theology very frequently is no more than an effort to prolong the life of moribund ideas by reinterpreting words which no longer mean what they used to say — and when theology is that, it is invariably a confession of secret distrust and skepticism. Quite obviously whole sections of the Brahmanas were intended to be stout ropes of ingenious rationalism by which the priests might save themselves from drowning in doubt.
But despite the stoutness of those ropes, and the craft with which they were plaited, they nevertheless failed to be of much avail. The priests went down. Down, down they went in the dark and muddy waters of doubt and dismay. With frozen fingers they still held on to [ p. 125 ] the ropes, tugging at them again and again in vain effort to stay their sinking. But down they went nevertheless, down, down until at last their feet touched bottom in the ooze of blackest pessimism. . . .
¶ 3
PERHAPS the physical conditions of life at the time had a share in this drowning of Vedio hopefulness. Things had profoundly changed since the old days in the valley of the Indus when the Vedas had been created. The Aryans by now had become Hindus. Despite all the thickness of the wall of caste, the black blood of the aborigines had seeped into the veins of the white men. And synchronously with this coloring of the skin, the evil climate of the Ganges Valley had induced a darkening of the soul. A new spirit, a sepulchral spirit of hopelessness, took possession of the erstwhile white men. It found its expression in a new literature a vast collection of philosophic tractates called the Upanishads, the “Seances.” It is difficult to say just when the Upanishads were written, but according to the best authorities it was probably during the two centuries stretching from about SuO B. C. to about 600 B. C. Their burden was an entirely new understanding of man’s chance of ever attaining rest in the universe. In the first plate, they threw all the old gods and the old rites overboard, frankly confessing that they were quite without essential reality. Only one thing, they insisted, was real: the Brahma, the “Self,” the One, Absolute, Infinite, Impersonal Indescribable “It” And all deeds and words, all creatures, even all gods, were but fleeting manifestations of this “It” As a logical [ p. 126 ] consequence, therefore, there existed but one way by which man could ever attain ultimate peace. Obviously he had to lose himself in the “It.” He had to cease being just a mere manifestation, and become at last an integral part of Brahma.
Now all that was by no means unique. Many peoples other than the Hindus have at one time or another taken refuge in the thought that this world is but an illusion, and that salvation can be obtained only on some other plane of existence. But no other people ever carried that thought to so rigorous a length as did the Hindus. Most other folk halted with the hope that death would immediately open the door to salvation. They told themselves that, though life in this world was unutterably vain, death was approaching, and with it the assurance of real life in some other and more glorious world. But the Hindus could not cherish so easy a hope. Death seemed to them anything but a way out. In the dread valley of the Ganges, where existence meant perpetual struggle beneath a sun that seared one’s flesh and in an air that strangled one’s courage, even death did not hold out any immediate promise of peace. The fell idea of transmigration, of a weary round of endless life, had taken hold of the Hindus. Death seemed to them but the beginning of more of this same old torment which is earthly life. The souls of the dead might escape for a little while to the moon; but just as soon as the influence of their good deeds was exhausted, back they sank to the earth like so many spent balloons. And then they were reborn as persons or animals or even plants. If theii preceding life had been extraordinarily good, on their return they became perhaps as much as princes or even [ p. 127 ] brahmins; but if they had done evil, then they returned to live as dogs or pigs or even slimy weeds at the edge of swamps.
There seemed to be but one effectual way of escape from that terrible cycle of unending life, and that was by absorption into the “It.” If only a man could annihilate his individual self, could utterly destroy his little “it,” then at last could he be free of life and attain the release called Nirvana. Nirvana was not a place but a state of mind, and therefore it could be attained only by means of the mind. Mere acts, good or bad, could not help in the least; nor could even the very gods be of assistance. As the Upanishads explicitly declare: “Whoever thus knows ‘I am the Brahma!’ becomes the Brahma. Even the gods have no power to hold such a man from becoming thus, for he becomes their very Soul.” Therefore mere striving after moral perfection or even after ritual propriety could never win for man the blessedness of Nirvana; no, only the total abolition of striving itself could do it. For striving, desiring — that was the very source of all illusory life. To desire, to want, to cherish even the least flicker of a petty wish — that was the vicious stuff whereof the ever-reincarnating self was made. Without desire the individual “it” would be lost, and only the Brahma, the Over-Soul, the One Universal “It” would be left. So logically there was but one sane purpose left in life; to cease desiring! . . .
[ p. 128 ]
One wonders if this nihilistic philosophy of the Upanishads greatly influenced the life of the masses in India twenty-six hundred years ago. Probably it did not, for it must have been far beyond the comprehension of those [ p. 129 ] masses. But that it profoundly affected the learned » quite beyond doubt. The desire to end desire simply ravished the higher classes in that day. Asceticism, the voluntary slaying of appetite in all its forms, became rife in every temple and princely court. Men fled away into the mountains and far into the jungles, there to live as anchorites and strangle every last vestige of normal desire. In incredible misery they dragged out their days, hungry but for one thing — the extinction of hunger.
And then came the heresies. . . .