S.F-, A-jf fa)
EX BIBLIOTHECA
COLLECTED WORKS
OF
THE RIGHT HON. F. MAX MULLER
xviii
LAST ESS A KS
II. ESSAYS ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
LAST ESSAYS
BY THE
Right Hon. Professor F. MAX MULLER, K.M.
LATE FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE
SECOND SERIES
ESSAYS ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1901
[. A/l rights reserved ]
2i r*. ''Ufa)
PREFACE
In the preface to the First Series of my father’s Last Essays, I expressed the hope that I should be able, at the expiration of a year from the date of publication of the last of his articles on the Religions of China, to bring out a further volume of his Essays not hitherto republished.
Thanks to the kindness of the editors of the various reviews in which these articles first appeared, I am enabled to offer to the public a Second Series of Last Essays, dealing exclu- sively with subjects connected with the Science of Religion, the favourite study of my father during the latter part of his literary career.
But besides this obligation to the editors of the Nineteenth Century and other periodicals, I am further indebted to the kindness of Mr. Archibald Douglas, who not only gave me permission to include his article on his visit to the Monastery of Himis in connexion with Notovitch’s Unknown Life of Christ, but also
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PREFACE.
supplied me with a supplementary note giving- further details of his investigations.
The essay on Ancient Prayers has never, as far as I can ascertain, been published before. On looking through my father’s papers I dis- covered it among several unfinished essays, and as it was apparently ready for press I have included it in the present volume.
The last essay, c Is Man Immortal ? ’ has also never been published in England, though it appeared in several American newspapers some years ago under the auspices of the American Press Association. I am very grateful to that Association for supplying me with the manuscript which enables me to give it here as originally written. I have placed this article at the end of the volume, as it seemed to me that, whether they agree with its reasoning or not, every reader of my father’s writings will feel that the last paragraph forms a beautiful ending to his literary work, a fitting farewell to the world which he was always trying to instruct and improve.
W. G. Max Muller.
San Sebastian,
October 12, 1901.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Forgotten Bibles (1884) 1
Ancient Prayers ......... 36
Indian Fables and Esoteric Buddhism (1893) . . . 79
Esoteric Buddhism (a Reply by Mr. A. P. Sinnett) . 1 34
Esoteric Buddhism (a Rejoinder) . . . . .156
The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India (1894). . . 171
Statement of the Chief Lama of Himis, by Mr. J. A.
Douglas . . . . . . , . .184
Postscript by F. M. M 202
Supplementary Note by Mr. J. A. Douglas . . . 203
The Kutho-Daw (1895) 210
Buddha’s Birthplace (1898) 231
Mohammedanism and Christianity (1894) .... 240
The Religions of China (1900) : —
(1) Confucianism 259
(2) Taoism . . . . . . . . . .278
(3) Buddhism and Christianity 300
The Parliament of Religions at Chicago (1894) . . .324
Why I am not an Agnostic (1894) ..... 346
Is Man Immortal ? 357
LAST ESSAYS.
FORGOTTEN BIBLES \
THE first series of Translations of the Sacred Books of the East 2, consisting of twenty-four volumes, is nearly finished, and a second series, which is to comprise as many volumes again, is fairly started. Even when that second series is finished, there will be enough material left for a third, and fourth series, and though I shall then long have ceased from my labours as editor, I rejoice to think that the reins when they drop out of my hands will be taken up and held by younger, stronger, and abler conductors.
I ought indeed to be deeply grateful to all who have helped me in this arduous, and, as it seemed at first, almost hopeless undertaking. 'VV'here will you get the Oriental scholars, I was asked, willing to give up their time to what is considered the most tedious and the most ungrateful task, translating difficult texts that have never been translated before, and not being allowed to display one scrap of recondite learn- ing in long notes and essays, or to skip one single passage, however corrupt or unintelligible ?
1 Nineteenth Century , June, 1884.
2 Forty-eight volumes are now printed. — Ed.
B
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LAST ESSAYS.
And if you should succeed in assembling such a noble army of martyrs, where in these days will you find the publisher to publish twenty-four or forty- eight portly volumes, volumes which are meant to be studied, not to be skimmed, which will never be ordered by Mudie or Smith, and which conscientious reviewers may find it easier to cut up than to cut open ?
It was no easy matter, as I well knew, to find either enthusiastic scholars or enthusiastic publishers, but I did not despair, because I felt convinced that sooner or later such a collection of translations of the Fathers of the Universal Church would become an absolute necessity. My hope was at first that some very rich men who are tired of investing their money, would come forward to help in this undertaking, but though they seem willing to help in digging up mummies in Egypt or oyster-shells in Denmark, they evidently do not think that much good could come from digging up the forgotten Bibles of Buddhists or Fire-worshippers. I applied to learned Societies and Academies, but, of course, they had no disposable funds. At last the Imperial Academy of Vienna- all honour be to it — was found willing to lend a helping hand. But in 1875, just when I had struck my tent at Oxford to settle in Austria, the then Secretary of State for India, Lord Salisbury, and the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. Liddell, brought their combined influence and power of persuasion to bear on the Indian Council and the University Press at Oxford. The sinews of war were found for at least twenty-four volumes. In October, 1876, the under- taking was started, and, if all goes well, in October,
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3
1884, the first series of twenty-four volumes will stand on the shelves of every great library in Europe, America, and India. And more than that. Such has been the interest taken in this undertaking by the students of ancient language, religion, and philo- sophy, that even the unexpected withdrawal of the patronage of the India Office under Lord Salisbury’s successor1 could not endanger the successful continua- tion of this enterprise, at least during the few years that I may still be able to conduct it.
But while personally I rejoice that all obstacles which were placed in our way, sometimes from a quarter where we least expected it, have been removed, and that with the generous assistance of some of the best Oriental scholars of our age, some at least of the most important works illustrating the ancient religions of the East have been permanently rescued from oblivion and rendered accessible to every man who understands English, some of my friends, men whose judgement I value far higher than my own, wonder what ground there is for rejoicing. Some, more honest than the rest, told me that they had been great admirers of ancient Oriental wisdom till they came to read the translations of the Sacred Books of the East. They had evidently expected to hear the tongues of angels, and not the babbling of babes. But others took higher ground. What, they asked, could the philosophers of the nineteenth century expect to learn from the thoughts and utterances of men who had lived one, two, three, or four thousand years ago? When I humbly suggested that these
1 The expense of the Second Series has been entirely defrayed by the Oxford University Press.— Ed.
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LAST ESSAYS.
books bad a purely historical interest, and that the history of religion could be studied from no other documents, I was told that since Comte’s time it was perfectly known how religion arose, and through how many stages it had to pass in its development from fetishism to positivism, and that whatever facts might be found in the Sacred Books of the East, they must all vanish before theories which, like all Comtian theories, are infallible and incontrovertible. If any- thing more was to be discovered about the origin and nature of religion, it was not from dusty historical documents, but from psycho-physiological experiments, or possibly from the creeds of living savages.
I was not surprised at these remarks. I had heard similar remarks many years ago, and they only convinced me that the old antagonism between the historical and theoretical schools of thought was as strong to-day as ever. This antagonism applies not only to the study of religion, but likewise to the study of language, mythology, and philosophy, in fact of all the subjects to which my own labours have more specially been directed for many years, and I therefore gladly seize this opportunity of clearly defining once for all the position which I have deliberately chosen from the day that I was a young recruit to the time when I have become a veteran in the noble army of research.
There have been, and there probably always will be, two schools of thought, the Historical and the Theore- tical. Whether by accident or by conviction I have been through life a follower of the Historical School, a school which in the study of every branch of human knowledge has but one and the same principle,
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5
namely, 1 Lecvrn to understand what is by learning to understand what has been.'
That school was in the ascendent when I began life. It was then represented in Germany by such names as Niebuhr for history, Savigny for law, Bopp for language, Grimm for mythology ; or, to mention more familiar names, in Trance by Cuvier for natural history ; in England by a whole school of students of history and nature, who took pride in calling them- selves the only legitimate representatives of the Baconian school of thought.
W hat a wonderful change has come over us during the last thirty or forty years ! The Historical School which, in the beginning of our century, was in the possession of nearly all professorial chairs, and wielded the sceptre of all the great Academies, has almost dwindled away, and its place has been taken by the Theoretical School, best known in England by its eloquent advocacy of the principles of evolution. This Theoretical School is sometimes called the synthetic , in opposition to the Historical School, which is analytic. It is also characterized as con- structive, or as reasoning a priori. In order to appreciate fully the fundamental difference between the two schools, let us see how their principles have been applied to such subjects as the science of language, religion, or antiquities.
The Historical School, in trying to solve the problem of the origin and growth of language, takes language as it finds it. It takes the living language in its various dialects, and traces each word back from century to century, until from the English now spoken in the streets, we arrive at the Saxon of
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LAST ESSAYS.
Alfred, the Old Saxon of the Continent, and the Gothic of Ulfilas, as spoken on the Danube in the fifth century. Even here we do not stop. For finding that Gothic is hut a dialect of the great Teutonic stem of language, that Teutonic again is but a dialect of the great Aryan family of speech, we trace Teutonic and its collateral branches, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Persian, and Sanskrit, back to that Proto-Aryan form of speech which contained the seeds of all we now see before us, as germs, plants, flowers, fruits in the languages of the Aryan race.
After having settled this historical outline of the growth of our family of speech, the Aryan, we take any word, or a hundred, or a thousand words, and analyse them, or take them to pieces. That words can be taken to pieces, every grammar teaches us, though the process of taking them to pieces scienti- fically and correctly, dissecting limb from limb, is often as difficult and laborious as any anatomical preparation. Well, let us take quite a modern word— the American cute, sharp. We all know that cute is only a shortening of acute, and that acute is the Latin acutus, sharp. In acutus, again, we easily recognize the frequent derivative his, as in cornutus, horned, from cornu, horn. This leaves us acu, as in cicu-s, a needle. In this word the u can again he separated, for we know it is a very common deriva- tive, in such words as pec-u, cattle, Sanskrit pasti, from PA S, to tether ; or tanu, thin, Greek ravv, Lat. tenu-i-s, from TAN, to stretch. Thus we arrive in the end at AK, and here our analysis must stop, for if we were to divide AIv into A and Iv, we should get. as even Plato knew (Theaetetws, 205), mere letters, and
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no longer significant sounds or syllables. Now what is this AK ? We call it a root, which is, of course, a metaphor only. What we mean hy calling it a root is that it is the residuum of our analysis, and a residuum which itself resists all further analysis. But what is important is that it is not a mere theoretic postulate, but a fact, an historical fact, and at the same time an ultimate fact.
With these ultimate facts, that is, with a limited number of predicative syllables, to which every word in any of the Aryan languages can be traced back, or, as we may also express it, from which every word in these languages can be derived, the historical school of comparative philology is satisfied, at least to a certain extent ; for it has also to account for certain pronouns and adverbs and prepositions, which are not derived from predicative, but from demon- strative roots, and which have supplied, at the same time, many of those derivative elements, like tus in acu-tus, which we generally call suffixes or terminations.
After this analysis is finished, the historical student has done his work. AK, he says, conveys the concept of sharp, sharpness, being sharp or pointed. How it came to do that we cannot tell, or, at least, we cannot find out by historical analysis. But that it did so, we can prove by a number of words derived from AK in Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic speech. For instance : Sanskrit asu, quick (originally sharp), Greek wkvs, Lat. oc-ior, Lat. ac-er , eager, acus, acuo, acies, acumen ; Greek; the highest point, our edge, A.-S. ecg ; also to egg on ; aKcov, a javelin, acidus, sharp, bitter, ague, a sharp
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LAST ESSAYS.
fever, ear of corn, Old High German ahir, Gothic aks, Lat. acus , aceris, husk of grain, and many more.
Let us now look at the Theoretical School and its treatment of language. How could language arise? it says ; and it answers, Why, we see it every day. We have only to watch a child, and we shall see that a child utters certain sounds of pain and joy, and very soon after imitates the sounds which it hears. It says Ah ! when it is surprised or pleased ; it soon says Baa ! when it sees a lamb, and Bow-wow ! when it sees a dog. Language, we are told, could not arise in any other way ; so that interjections and imitations must be considered as the ultimate, or rather the primary facts of language, while their transition into real words is, we are assured, a mere question of time.
This theory seems to be easily confirmed by a number of words in all languages, which still exhibit most clearly the signs of such an origin; and still further, by the fact that these supposed rudiments of human speech exist, even at an earlier stage, in the development of animal life, namely, in the sounds uttered by many animals ; though, curiously enough, far more fully and frequently by our most distant ancestors, the birds, than by our nearest relation, the ape.
It is not surprising, therefore, that all who believe in a possible transition from an ape to a man should gladly have embraced this theory of language. The only misfortune is that such a theory, though it easily explains words which really require no explanation, such as crashing, cracking, creaking, crunching, scrunching, leaves us entirely in the lurch when we come to deal with real words — I mean words expressive
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of general concepts, such as man, tree, name, law — in fact, nine-tenths of our dictionary.
I certainly do not wish to throw unmerited contempt on this Theoretical School. Far from it. We want the theorist quite as much as the historian. The one must check the other, nay, even help the other, just as every government wants an opposition to keep it in order, or, I ought perhaps to say, to give it from time to time new life and vigour. I only wished to show by an example or two, what is the real differ- ence between these two schools, and what I meant when I said that, whether by temperament, or by education, or by conviction, I myself had always belonged to the Historical School.
Take now the science of religion, and we shall find again the same difference of treatment between the historian and the theorist.
The theorist begins by assuring us that all men were originally savages, or, to use a milder term, children. Therefore, if we wish to study the origin of religion, we must study children and savages.
Now at the present moment some savages in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere are supposed to be fetish- worshippers. Therefore we are assured that five thousand or ten thousand years ago religion must have begun with a worship of fetishes — that is, of stones, and shells, and sticks, and other inanimate objects.
Again, children are very apt not only to beat their dolls, but even to punish a chair or a table if they have hurt themselves against it. This shows that they ascribe life and personality — nay, something like human nature — to inanimate objects, and hence we
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are told that savages would naturally do the same. A savage, in fact, is made to do everything that an anthropologist wishes him to do ; but, even then, the question of all questions, why he does what he is supposed to do, is never asked. We are told that he Avorships a stone as his god, but how he came to possess the idea of God, and to predicate it of the stone, is called a metaphysical question of no interest to the student of anthropology — that is, of man. If, however, we press for an answer to this all-important question, we are informed that animism, personifica- tion, and anthropomorphism are the three well-known agencies which fully account for the fact that the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Italy believed that there was life in the rivers, the mountains, and the sky ; that the sun, and the moon, and the dawn were cognizant of the deeds of men, and, finally, that Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus, had the form and the beauty, the feelings and passions of men. We might as well be told that all animals are hungry because they have an appetite.
We read in many of the most popular works of the day how, from the stage of fetishism, there was a natural and necessary progress to polytheism, monotheism, and atheism, and after these stages have been erected one above the other, all that remains is to fill each staije with illustrations taken from every race that ever had a religion, whether these races were ancient or modern, savage or civilized, genealogically related to each other, or perfect strangers.
Again, I must guard most decidedly against being supposed to wish to throw contempt or ridicule on
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this school. Far from it. I differ from it ; I have no taste for it ; I also think it is often very misleading. But to compare the thoughts and imaginations of savages and civilized races, of the ancient Egyptians, for instance, and the modern Hottentots, has its value, and the boldest combinations of the Theoretic School have sometimes been confirmed in the most unexpected manner by historical research.
Let us see now how the Historical School goes to work in treating of the origin and growth of religion. It begins by collecting all the evidence that is accessible, and classifies it. First of all, religions are divided into those that have sacred books, and those that have not. Secondly, the religions which can be studied in books of recognized or canonical authority, are arranged genealogically. The New Testament is traced back to the Old, the Koran to both the New and Old Testaments. This gives us one class of religions, the Semitic.
Then, again, the sacred books of Buddhism, of Zoroastrianism, and of Brahmanism are classed together as Aryan, because they all draw their vital elements from one and the same Proto-Aryan source. This gives us a second class of religions, the Aryan.
Outside the pale of the Semitic and Aryan religions, we have the two book-religions of China, the old national traditions collected by Confucius, and the moral and metaphysical system of Lao-tse. This gives us a class of Turanian religions. The study of those religions which have sacred books is in some respects eas}’-, because we have in these books authoritative evidence on which our further reasonings and conclusions can be safely based. But, in other
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respects, the very existence of these books creates new difficulties, because, after all, religions do not live in books only, but in human hearts, and where we have to deal with Vedas, and Avestas, and Tripitakas, Old and New Testaments, and Korans, we are often tempted into taking the book for the religion.
Still the study of book-religions, if we once have mastered their language, admits, at all events, of more definite and scientific treatment than that of native religions which have no books, no articles, no tests, no councils, no pope. Any one who attempts to describe the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans — I mean their real faith, not their mythology, their ceremonial, or their philosophy — knows the immense difficulty of such a task. And yet we have here a large literature, spread over many centuries, we know their language, we can even examine the ruins of their temples.
Think after that, how infinitely greater must be the difficulty of forming a right conception, say, of the religion of the Red Indians, the Africans, the Australians. Their religions are probably as old as their languages, that is, as old as our own language ; but we know nothing of their antecedents, nothing but the mere surface of to-day, and that immense surface explored in a few isolated spots only, and often by men utterly incapable of understanding the language and the thoughts of the people. And yet we are asked to believe by the followers of the Theoretic School that this mere surface detritus is in reality the granite that underlies all the religions of the ancient world, more primitive than the Old
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Testament, more intelligible than the Veda, more instructive than the mythological language of Greece and Rome. It may be so. The religious map of the world may show as violent convulsions as the geological map of the earth. All I say to the enthusiastic believers in this contorted evolution of religious thought is, let us wait till we know a little more of Hottentots and Papuans ; let us wait till we know at least their language, for otherwise we may go hopelessly wrong.
The Historical School, in the meantime, is carrying on its more modest work by publishing and translating the ancient records of the great religions of the world, undisturbed by the sneers of those who do notfind in the Sacred Books of the East what they, in their ignorance, expected — men, who, if they were geologists would no doubt turn up their noses at a kitchen- midden, because it did not contain their favourite lollypops. Where there are no sacred texts to edit and to translate, the true disciples of the Historical School — men such as, for instance, Bishop Caldwell or Dr. Hahn in South Africa., Dr. Brinton or Horatio Hale in North America
do not shrink from the drudgery of learning the dialects spoken by savage tribes, gaining their con- fidence, and gathering at last from their lips some records of their popular traditions, their ceremonial customs, some prayers, it may be, and some confession of their ancient faith. But even with all these materials at his disposal, the historical student does not rush at once to the conclusion that either in the legends of the Eskimos or in the hymns of the Vedic Aiyas, we find the solution of all the riddles in the science of religion. He only says that we are not
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likely to find any evidence much more trustworthy, and that therefore we are justified in deriving certain lessons from these materials. And what is the chief lesson to be learnt from them ? It is this, that they contain certain words and concepts and imaginations which are as yet inexplicable, which seem simply irrational, and require for their full explanation ante- cedents which are lost to us ; but that they contain also many words and concepts and imaginations which are perfectly intelligible, which presuppose no antecedents, and which, whatever their date may be, may be called primary and rational. However strange it may seem to us, there can be no doubt that the perception of the Unknown or the Infinite was with many races as ancient as the perception of the Known or the Finite, that the two were, in fact, inseparable. To men who lived on an island, the ocean was the Unknown, the Infinite, and became in the end their God. To men who lived in valleys, the rivers that fed them and whose sources were unapproachable, the mountains that protected them, and whose crests were inaccessible, the sky that overshadowed them, and whose power and beauty were unintelligible, these were their unknown beings, their infinite beings, their bright and kind beings, what they called their Devas, their £ Brights/ the same word which, after passing through many changes, still breathes in our Divinity.
This unconscious process of theogony is historically attested, is intelligible, requires no antecedents, and is, so far, a primary process. How old it is, who would venture to ask or to tell ? All that the Historical School ventures to assert is that it explains one side of the origin of religion, namely, the gradual process
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of naming or conceiving the Infinite. While the Theoretic School takes the predicate of God, when applied to a fetish, as granted, the Historical School sees in it the result of a long-continued evolution of thought, beginning with the vague consciousness of something invisible, unknown, and unlimited, which gradually assumes a more and more definite shape through similes, names, myths, and legends, till at last it is divested again of all names, and lives within us as the invisible, inconceivable, unnameable — the infinite God.
I need hardly say th^rt though in the science of religion as in the science of language, all my sympathies are with the Historical School, I do not mean to deny that the Theoretical School has likewise done some good work. Let both schools work on, carefully and honestly, and who knows but that their ways, which seem so divergent at present, may meet in the end.
Nowhere, perhaps, can we see the different spirit in which these two schools, the Historical and the Theoretical, set to work, more clearly than in what is called by preference the Science of Man, Anthropology ; or the Science of People, Ethnology ; or more generally the science of old things, of the works of ancient men, Archaeology. The Theoretic School begins, as usual, with an ideal conception of what man must have been in the beginning. According to some, he was the image of his Maker, a perfect being, but soon destined to fall to the level of ordinary humanity. According to others, he began as a savage, whatever that may mean, not much above the level of the beasts of the field, and then had to work his way up through sue-.
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cessive stages which are supposed to follow each othei by a kind of inherent necessity. First comes e stage of the hunter and fisherman then that of the
breeder of cattle, the tiller of the soil, and lastly that of the founder of cities.
As man is defined as an animal which uses tools, we are told that according to the various materials of which these tools were made, man must again by necessity have passed through what are called the t stages or ages of stone, bronze, and non, reusing by means of these more and more perfect tools to what we might call the age of steel and steam and electricity, in which for the present civilization seems to culminate. Whatever discoveries are made by excavating the ruins of ancient cities by opening tombs, by ransacking kitchen-middens, by explon once more the flint-mines of prehistoric races, all must submit to the fundamental theory, and each specimen of bone or stone or bronze or iron must take the place drawn out for it within the lines and limits of an
infallible system. .
The Historical School takes again the very opposite line It begins with no theoretical expectations with no logical necessities, but takes its spade and shovel to see what there is left of old things - it describes them, arranges them, classifies them, and thus hopes in the end to understand and explain them. W hen a Schliemann begins his work at Hissarl.k he >g away, notes the depth at which each relic has been found, places similar relics side by side, unconcern whether iron comes before bronze, or bronze before flint. Let me quote the words of a young and very careful archaeologist, Mr. Arthur Evans, in describing
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this kind of work, and the results which we obtain from it h
‘ I'1 the topmost stratum of Hissarlik,’ lie writes ‘(which some people like to call Troy), extending six feet down, we find remains of the Roman and Macedonian Ilios, and the Aeolic colony ; and the fragments of archaic Greek pottery discovered (hardly dis- tinguishable from that of Sparta and Mykenai) take us back already to the end of the first millennium before our era.
Below this, one superposed above the other, lie the remains of no less than six successive prehistoric settlements, reaching down to over fifty feet below the surface of the hill. The formation of this vast superincumbent mass by artificial and natural causes must have taken a long series of centuries ; and yet, when we come to examine the lowest deposits, the remains of the first and second cities, we are struck at once with the relatively high state of civilization at which the inhabitants of this spot had already arrived.
The food-remains show a people acquainted with agriculture and cattle-rearing, as well as with hunting and fishing. The use of bronze was known, though stone implements continued to be used for certain purposes, and the bronze implements do not show any of the refined forms — notably th e fibulae — characteristic of the later Bronze Age.
Trade and commerce evidently were not wanting. Articles de luxe of gold, enamel, and ivory were already being imported from lands more directly under Babylonian and Egyptian influence, and jade axelieads came by prehistoric trade-routes from the Kuen- Lun, in China. The local potters were already acquainted with the use of the wheel, and the city walls and temples of the second city evince considerable progress in the art of building.’
Such is the result of the working of the Historical School. It runs its shaft down from above ; the Theoretical School runs its shaft up from below. It may be that they are both doing good work, but such is the strength of temperament and taste, even among scientific men, that you will rarely see the same person working in both mines ; nay, that not seldom 37°u hear the same disparaging remarks made by one
1 Academy, December 29, 1883.
C
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party and the other, which you may he accustomed to hear from the promoters of rival gold-mines in
India or in the south of Africa.
I might show the same conflict between Historical and Theoretical research in almost every branch of human knowledge. But, of course, we are all most familiar with it through that important controversy, which has occupied the present generation more than anything else, and in which almost every one of us has taken part and taken sides— I mean the con- troversy about Evolution.
It seems almost as if I myself had lived m pre- historic times, when I have to confess that, as a young student, I witnessed the downfall of the theory of Evolution which, for a time, had ruled supreme m the Universities of Germany, particularly m the domain of Natural History and Biology. In the school of Oken, in the first philosophy of Schelling,. in the eloquent treatises of Goethe, all was Evolution, De- velopment, or as it was called in German, Das 11 erden, the Becoming. The same spirit pervaded the philo- sophy of Hegel. According to him, the whole world was an evolution, a development by logical necessity, to which all facts must bow. If they would not, taut pis 'pour les f aits.
I do not remember the heyday of that school, but I still remember its last despairing struggles. I still remember at school and at the University rumours of Carbon, half solid, half liquid, the famous TJrscMeim now called Protoplasm, the Absolute Substance out of which everything was evolved. I remember the more or less amusing discussions about the less of the tail, about races supposed to be still in possession of that
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ancestral relic. I well remember my own particular teacher, the great Greek scholar Gottfried Hermann 1, giving great offence to his theological colleagues by publishing an essay in 1840 in which he tried to prove the descent of man from an ape. Allow me to quote a few extracts from this rare and little noticed essay. As the female is always less perfect than the male, Hermann argued that the law of development required that Eve must have existed before Adam, not Adam before Eve. Quoting the words of Ennius —
‘ Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis,’ he goes on in his own peculiar Latin : —
Ex hac nobili gente quid dubitemus unam aliquando simiam exortam putare, quae paullo minus belluina facie et indole esset ? Ea, sive illam Evam sive Pandoram appellare placet, quum ex alio simio gravida facta esset, peperit, ut saepenumero fieri constat, filium matri quam patri similiorem, qui primus homo fuit.
Haec ergo est hominis generisque humani origo, non ilia quidem valde honesta, sed paullo tamen honestior multoque probabilior, quam si ex luto aqua permixto, cui anima fuerit inspirata, genus duceremus.’
Surely Gottfried Hermann was a bolder man than even Darwin, and to me who had attended his lectures at Leipzig in 1841, Darwin’s Descent of Man, pub- lished in 1871, was naturally far less novel and startling by its theory than by the facts by which that theory was once more supported. Kant’s philo- sophy also had familiarized students of Anthropology with the same ideas. For he, too, towards the end of his Anthropologie, had spoken of a third period in the development of nature, when an Oran-Utano- or
O
Evam ante Adamum creatam fuisse, sive de quodam communi apud Mosen et Hesiodum errore circa creationem generis humani,’ in Ilgen s Zeitschrift fur die histor. Theologie , 1840, B. X. pp. 61-70.
20
LAST ESSAYS.
Chimpanzee may develop his organs of locomotion, touch, and speech to the perfection of human organs, raise his brain to an organ of thought, and slowly elevate himself by social culture.
But this was not all. Oken (1779-1851) and his disciples taught that the transition from inorganic to organic nature was likewise a mere matter of deve- lopment. The first step, according to him,, was the formation of rising bubbles, which he called infusoria, and the manifold repetition of which led, as he taught, to the formation of plants and animals. The plant was represented by him as an imperfect animal, the animal as an imperfect man. To doubt that the various races of men were descended from one pair was considered at that time, and even to the. days ot Prichard, not only a theological, but a biological heresy. All variety was traced back to unity am in the beginning there was nothing but Being ; which Being, coming in conflict with Not-being, entered upon& the process of Becoming, of development,, of evolution. While this philosophy, was still being preached in some German universities, a sharp re- action took place in others, followed by the quick ascendency of that Historical School of which I spoke before. It was heralded in Germany by such men as Niebuhr, Savigny, Bopp, Grimm, Otfried Muller, Johannes Muller, the two Humboldts, and many others whose names are less known in England,, bu who did excellent work, each in his own special line.
I have tried to describe the general character 01 that school, and I have to confess that during the whole of my life I have remained a humble disciple of it. I am not blind to its weak points. It fixes
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its eye far too much on the individual; it sees differences everywhere, and is almost blind to simi- larities. Hence the bewildering mass of species which it admitted in Botany and Zoology. Hence its strong piotest against the common origin of mankind ; hence its still stronger protest against the transition from inorganic to organic life, from the plant to the beast, from the beast to the man. Hence, in the science of language, its reluctance to admit even the possibility of a common origin of human speech, and, in the science of religion, its protest against deriving the reli- gion of civilized races from a supposed anterior stage of fetishism. Hence in Geology its rejection of Plutonic and Volcanic theories, and its careful obser- vation of the changes that have taken place, or are still taking place, on the surface of the earth, within, or almost within, the historical recollection of man.
In the careful anatomy of the eye by Johannes Muller, and his philosophical analysis of the condi- tions of the process of seeing, we have a specimen of what I should call the best work of the Historical School, even in physical science. In Mr. Herbert Spencer’s account of the origin of the eye, we have a specimen of what I call the best work of the Theoretical School. Mr. Spencer tells us that what we now call the eye consisted originally of a few pigmentary grains under the outermost dermal layer, and that rudimentary vision is constituted by the wave of disturbance which a sudden change in the state of these pigmentary grains propagates through the body ; or, to put it into plain English, that the eye began with some sore place in the skin, sensitive to light, which smarted or tickled, and thus developed
LAST ESSAYS.
22
in time into what is now the most wonderful mechan- ism, as described by Johannes Muller, Helmholtz, and others.
Now I have little doubt that many of my readers who have patiently followed my argument up to this point, will say to themselves : ‘ What then about Darwinism V Is that historical 01 theoretic 1 Is it a mere phase in the evolution of thought, 01 is it something permanent, and beyond the reach of further development ? Such a question is not easy to answer. Nothing is so misleading as names— I mean, even such names as materialism, idealism, lealism, and all the rest— which, after all, admit of some kind of definition. But when we use a proper name— the name of a philosopher— and then speak of all he has been and thought and taught, as his ism , such as Puseyism or Darwinism, the confusion becomes quite chaotic. And with no one is this more the case than with Darwin. The difference between Darwin and many who call themselves Darwinians, is as great at least as that between the horse and the mule. But Darwin himself is by no means a man who can he easily defined and classified. The very greatness and power of Darwin seem to me to consist in his com- bining the best qualities of what I have called the Historical and Theoretical Schools. So long as he observes and watches the slow transition of individual peculiarities into more or less permanent varieties ; so long as he exhibits the changes that take place before our very eyes by means of artificial breeding, as in the case of pigeons ; so long as he shows that many of the numberless so-called species among plants or animals share all that is essential in
FORGOTTEN BIBLES.
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common, and differ by accidental peculiarities only ; so long as be traces living species back to extinct species, the remains of which have been preserved to us in the geological archives of our globe ; so long, in fact, as he goes backward, step by step, and opens to us page after page in the forgotten book of life, he is one of the greatest and most successful representa- tives of the Historical School. But when his love of systematic uniformity leads him to postulate four beginnings for the whole realm of organic life, though not yet one, like his followers ; when he begins to sketch a possible genealogical tree of all generations of living things, though not yet with the heraldic minuteness of his pupil, Professor Haeckel ; when he argues that because natural selection can account for certain very palpable changes, as between the wolf and the spaniel, it may also account for less palpable differences, as between the ape and the man, though no real man of science would venture to argue in that way ; when, in fact, he allows his hopes to get the better of his fears, he becomes a follower and a very powerful supporter of the Theoretic School.
It may be the very combination of these two characters which explains the enormous influence which Darwin’s theories have exercised on the present generation ; but, if so, we shall see in that combina- tion the germs of a new schism also, and the con- ditions of further growth. Great as was Darwin’s conscientiousness, we cannot deny that occasionally his enthusiasm, or his logical convictions, led him to judge of things of which he knew nothing, or very little. He had convinced himself that man was genealogically descended from an animal. That
24
LAST ESSAYS.
was as yet merely a theoretical conviction, as all honest zoologists — I shall only mention Professor Vii- ch o w — now fully admit. As language had been pointed out as a Rubicon which no beast had ever crossed, Darwin lent a willing ear to those who think that they can derive language, that is, real logos , from interjections and mimicry, by a process of spontaneous evolution, and produced himself some most persuasive arguments. We know how able, how persuasive a pleader Darwin could be. When he wished to show how man could have descended from an animal which was born hairy and remained so during life1, he could not well maintain that an animal without hair was fitter to survive than an animal with hair. He there- fore wished us to believe that our female semi-human progenitors lost their hair by some accident, were, as Hermann said, ‘ minus belluina facie et indole,, and that in the process of sexual selection this partial or complete baldness was considered an attraction, and was thus perpetuated from mother to son. It was difficult, no doubt, to give up Milton’s Eve for a semi- human progenitor, suffering, it may be, from lepiosy or leucoderma, yet Darwin, like Gottfried Hermann, nearly persuaded us to do so. However, in defending so hopeless, or, at all events, so unfortified a position as the transition of the cries of animals into the language of man, even so great a general as Darwin undoubtedly was will occasionally encounter defeat, and, I believe I may say without presumption, that, to speak of no other barrier between man and beast, the barrier of language remains as unshaken as ever,
1 Beseem of Man, ii. p. 377, where more details maybe found as to the exact process of baldness or denudation in animals.
FORGOTTEN BIBLES.
25
and renders every attempt at deriving man genealogi- cally from any known or unknown ape, for the present at least, impossible, or, at all events, unscientific.
After having described, however briefly and imper- fectly, the salient features of the two great schools of thought, the Historical and the Theoretical, I wish in a few words to set forth the immense advantage which the followers of the Historical School enjoy over the mere theorist, not only in dealing with scientific pro- blems, but likewise in handling the great problems of our age, the burning questions of religion, philosophy, morality, and politics.
History, as I said before, teaches us to understand what is by teaching us to understand what has been. All our present difficulties are difficulties of our own making. All the tangles at which we are pulling were made either by ourselves, or by those who came before us. Who else should have made them ? The Historical School, knowing how hopeless it is to pull and tear at a tangled reel by main force, quietly takes us behind the scenes, and shows us how first one thread and then another and a third, and in the end hundreds and thousands of threads went wrong, but how in the beginning they lay before man’s eyes as even and as regular as on a weaver’s loom.
Men who possess the historical instinct, and who whenever they have to deal with any of the grave problems of our age always ask how certain difficul- ties and apparent contradictions first arose, are what we should call practical men, and, as a rule, they are far more successful in unravelling knotty questions than the man who has a theory and a remedy ready for everything, and who actually prides himself on
26
LAST ESSAYS.
his ignorance of the past. I think I can best make my meaning’ clear by taking an instance. W hethei Dean Stanley was what is now called a scientific historian, a very laborious student of ancient chroni- cles and charters, is not for me to say ; but if I weie asked to define his mind, and his attitude towards all the burning questions of the day, whether in politics, or morality, or religion, I should say it was historical. He was a true disciple of the Historical School.
I could show it by examining the position he took in dealing with some of the highest questions of theology. But I prefer, as an easier illustration, to consider his treatment of one of the less exciting questions, the question of vestments. Incredible as it may seem, it is a fact nevertheless that not many years ago a controversy about surplices, and albs, and dalmatics, and stoles raged all over England. The question by whom, at what time, and in what place, the surplice should be worn, divided brothei fiom brother, and father from child, as if that piece of white linen possessed some mysterious power, or could exercise some miraculous influence on the spirit of the wearer. Any one who knew Stanley would know how little he cared for vestments or garments, and how difficult he would have found it to take sides, either right or left, in a controversy about millinery or ritual. But what did he do 1 ‘ Let us look at the
surplice historically ,’ he said. What is a surplice 1 —and first of all, what is the historical origin or the etymology of the word. Surplice is the Latin super- pelliciuvi. Super -pellicium means what is worn over a fur or fur-jacket. Now this fur-jacket was not worn by the primitive Christians in Rome, or Constanti-
FORGOTTEN BIBLES.
27
nople, or Jerusalem, nor is there any mention of such a vestment at the time of the Apostles. What, then, is the history of that fur-jacket ? So far as we know, it was a warm jacket worn by German peasants in the colder climate of their country, and it was worn by laity and clergy alike, as in fact all garments were which we now consider exclusively ecclesiastical. As this fur-jacket was apt to get dirty and unsightly, a kind of smock-frock, that could be washed from time to time, was worn over it — and this was called the super-pellicium , the surplice.
Stanley thought it sufficient gently to remind the wearer of the surplice that what he was so proud of was only the lineal descendant of a German peasant’s smock-frock ; and I believe he was right, and his historical explanation certainly produced a better effect on all who had a sense of history and of humour than the most elaborate argument on the mystical meaning of that robe of purity and inno- cence.
He did the same with other vestments. Under the wand of the historian, the alb turned out to be the old Roman tunic or shirt, and the deacon officiating in his alb was recognized as a servant working in his shirt- sleeves. The dalmatic, again, was traced back to the shirt with long sleeves worn by the Dalmatian peasants, which became recognized as the dress of the deacon about the time of Constantine. The cassoclc and chasuble turned out to be great coats, worn originally by laity and clergy alike — while the cope, descended from the copa or capa , also called pluviale, was translated by Stanley as a ‘waterproof.’ The mitre was identified with the caps and turbans worn
28
LAST ESSAYS.
in the East by princes and nobles, and to this day by the peasant women. The division into two points was shown to be the mark of the crease which is the consequence of its having been folded and canied under the arm, like an opera-hat. The stole, lastly, in the sense of a scarf, had a still humbler origin. It was the substitute for the ovarium or handkerchief, used for blowing the nose. No doubt, the possession and use of a handkerchief was in early times restricted to the ‘ higher circles.’ It is so to the present day in Borneo, for instance, where only the king is allowed to carry a handkerchief and to blow his nose. In like manner then as in Borneo the handkerchief became the insignia of royalty, it rose in the Roman Church to become the distinctive garment of the deacon.
I know that some of these explanations have been contested, and rightly contested, but the general drift of the argument remains unaffected by such reserva- tions. I only quote them in order to explain what I meant by Stanley’s historical attitude, an attitude which all who belong to the Historical School, and are guided by an historical spirit, like to assume when brought face to face with the problems of the day.
But what applies to small questions applies likewise to great. Instead of discussing the question whether the mystic mari'iage between Church and State can ever be dissolved, the historian looks to the register and to the settlements, in order to find out how that marriage was brought about. Instead of discussing the various theories of inspiration, the historian asks, who was the first to coin the word? In what sense
FORGOTTEN BIBLES.
29
did he use it? Did he claim inspiration for himself or for others ? Did he claim it for one book only, or for all truth? How much light can be thrown on this subject by a simple historical treatment may be seen in some excellent lectures, delivered lately before a Secularist audience by Mr. Wilson1, the Head Master of Clifton College, in the presence of the Bishop of Exeter, and published under the title, The Theory of Inspiration, or, Why men do not Believe the Bible.
And this historical treatment seems to me the best, not only for religious and philosophical, but also for social problems. Who has not read the eloquent pages of Mr. Henry George on Progress and Poverty ? Who has not pondered on his social panacea, the nationali- zation of the land ? It is of little use to grow angry about these questions, to deal in blustering rhetoric, or hysterical invective. So long as Mr. Henry George treats the question of the tenure of land historically, his writings are extremely interesting, and, I believe’ extremely useful, as reminding people that a great portion of the land in England was not simply bought for investment, but was granted by the sovereign on certain conditions, such as military service, for instance, those who held the land had to defend the land, and it may well be asked why that duty, or why the taxes lor army and navy, should now fall equally on the whole country. It might be said that all this happened a long time ago. But the reign of Charles the Second does not yet belong so entirely to the realm of fable that the nation might not trace its privileges back to that time quite as much as certain families 1 Now the Archdeacon of Rochdale.
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LAST ESSAYS.
whose wealth dates from the same period. Again, if Mr. Henry George shows that in more recent times common land was enclosed in defiance of historical right, he is doing useful work, if only by reminding lords of the manor that they should not court too close an inspection of their title-deeds.. If there are historical rights, there are historical rights on both sides, on the side of those who have no land quite as much as on the side of those who have, and surely we are all of us most thankful that at the time of Charles the Second, and earlier still, at the time of Henry the Eighth, some large tracts of land were nationalized— were confiscated, in fact— that is, trans- ferred from the hands of former proprietors to the fiscus, the national treasury. What would our national Universities be without nationalized land ? They would have to depend, as in Germany, on taxation, and be administered, as in Germany, by a Government Board. If, at the same time, some more land had been nationalized in support of schools, hospitals, almshouses, aye, even in support of army and na\ y, instead of being granted to private individuals, should we not all be most grateful? But though we may regret the past, we cannot ignore it, and, to quote Mr. Henry George’s own words, ‘ instead of weakening and confusing the idea of property, we should surround it with stronger sanctions.’
So far all historical minds would probably go with Mr. Henry George. But when he joins the Theoretical School, and tells us that every human being born into this world has a divine right to a portion of Gods earth, it is difficult to argue with him, for how does he know it? Again, how does he know how much it
FORGOTTEN BIBLES.
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should be, and, what is more important still, in what part of the world it should be ? An acre of land in the city of London is very different from an acre of land in Australia. Besides, what is the use of land unless it has been cleared ? An old Indian lawgiver says very truly, ‘ The deer belongs to him who sticks his arrow into him, and the land to him who dio-s the stumps out of it V If a man by his spade has made a piece of waste land worth having, surely it belongs to him as much as a sheet of paper belongs
to the man who has made it worth having; by his pen. ° J
But, though I do not see how, with any regard for the rights of property, which Mr. Henry ° George regards as sacred, the nationalization of the land could ever be carried out in an ancient country, such as England, without fearful conflicts, or without a religious revival, nor how it could effect, by itself alone, the cure of the crying evils of the present state ol our society, I admire Mr. Henry George for the truths, the bitteT truths, which he tells us, and it seems to me sheer intellectual cowardice to say that his ideas are dangerous, and should not be listened to. The facts which he places before us are dan- gerous but there is far less danger in his theories even if we all accepted them. We all hold theories which might be called dangerous, if we ever thought of carrying them out. We all hold the theory that we ougnt to love our neighbour exactly as our-
1 In Australia, if two or more spears are found in the same
Lst Mcokv f ? th6 Pr°perty of him who threw the
1879 p, u y’ AcC0Unt the of Western Australia, Perth.
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LAST ESSAYS.
selves ; but no one seems afraid that we should ever do so.
One more question still waits for an answei. Although the historical treatment may he the best, and the only efficacious treatment of all problems affecting religion, philosophy, morality, and politics, should we not follow up our tangles in a straight line, from knot to knot, from antecedent to antece- dent ? And if so, what can be the use of the Sacred Books of the East for the religious problems of the West 1 What light can the Rig-veda or the Vedanta philosophy of India throw on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ? How can the Koran help us in facing modern problems of morality ? How can the Laws of Manu, applicable to the village system of ancient India, help us in answering the social problems ot
Mr. Henry George1? _ .
Perhaps the readiest answer I can give, is— Look at the sciences of Language, of Mythology, of Religion. What would they be without the East? They would not even exist. We have learnt that history does not necessarily proceed from the present to the past m one straight line only. The stream of history runs in many parallel branches, and each generation has not only fathers and grandfathers, but also uncles and great-uncles. In fact, the distinguishing character of all scientific research in our century is comparison. We have not only comparative philology, but also comparative jurisprudence, comparative anatomy, com- parative physiology. Many points in English Law become intelligible only by a comparison with German Law. Many difficulties in German Law are removed by a reference to Roman or Greek Law. Many even
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of the most minute rules of German, Roman, and Greek Law become intelligible only by a reference to
e ancient customs and traditions preserved in the Law-books of India.
This being so, it follows that a real historical study ot the ancient language, the ancient philosophy, and the ancient religion of the East, and, more particularly ot India, may have its very important bearing on the questions nearest to our own hearts. The mere lesson that we are not the only people who have a Bible, that our theologians are not the only theologians who claim for their Bible a divine inspiration, that our Church is not the only Church which has declared that those who do not hold certain doctrines cannot
be saved, may have its advantages, if rightly under- stood.
These indirect lessons are often far more impressive than any more direct teaching. We see them our- selves, or we must draw them for ourselves, and that is always a better discipline than when we have simply to accept what we are told. It may seem a roundabout way, and yet it often leads to the end ar more rapidly than a more direct route, nay, in some cases it is the only practicable route.
Let us take comparative anatomy as an illustration.
V\ e all of us want to know what our bodily or- ganism is like, how we ^ee or hear, how we breathe ow we digest— m fact, how we live. But for a Iona time people shrank from dissecting a human body! They then took a mollusk, or a fish, or a bird, or a og or even so man-like an animal as an ape, am they soon grew accustomed to the idea that the muscles, bones, nerves, or even brains in the
II. n
34
LAST ESSAYS.
anatomical preparations correspond to their own muscles, their own bones, their own nerves, even their own brains. They gladly listened to an explanation how all these organs work together in the bodies of animals, and produce results very similar to those which they know from their own experience. Their mind thus grew stronger, larger, and more compre- hensive— it may be, more tolerant.
If after a time you go a step further, and bring a dead human body before them to dissect it before their eyes, there will be at first a little shudder creeping over them, something like the feeling which a young curate might have when recognizing for the first time the smock-frock of a German peasant as the prototype of his own beloved surplice. However, even that shudder might possibly be overcome, and in the end some useful lesson might be learned from
seeing ourselves as we are in the flesh.
But now suppose some bold vivisectionist were to venture beyond, and to dissect before our eyes a living man, in order to show us how we really breathe, and digest, and live, or in order to make us see what is right and wrong in his system. We should all say it was horrible, intolerable. We should turn away, and stop the proceedings.
If we apply all this, mutatis mutandis , to a study of religion, we shall readily understand the great advantages not only of an historical study of our own religion, but also of a comparative study of Eastern religions as they can be studied now in the translations of the Sacred Books of the East. I hose who are willing to learn may learn from a compara- tive study of Eastern religions all that can be known
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about religions— how they grow, how they decay, and how they spring up again. They may see all that is good and all that is bad in various forms and phases of ancient faith, and they must be blinder than blind if they cannot see how the comparative anatomy of those foreign religions throws light on the questions of the day, on the problems nearest to our own hearts, on our own philosophy, and on our own faith.
D 2
ANCIENT PRAYERS h
THERE are few religions, whether ancient or modern, whether elaborated by uncivilized or civilized people, in which we do not find tiaces of prayer. Hence, if we consult any work on the science or on the history of religion, we generally find prayer represented as something extremely natuial, as something almost inevitable in any leligion. It may seem very natural to us, but was it really so
very natural in the beginning ?
What was the meaning of prayer? It is always best to begin with the etymology of a word, R we want to know its original or its most ancient meaning. It is generally supposed that prayer was at first what its name implies in English, a petition. Our own word prayer is derived from a mediaeval Latin word precar ict, literally a bidding-prayer. In Latin we have precari, to ask, to beg, but also to pi ay in a more general sense ; for instance, in such expressions as 'precari ad deos, to pray to the gods, which does not necessarily mean to ask for any special favours. We have also the substantive prex, mostly used in the plural preces, meaning a request, but more particularly a request addressed to the gods, a prayer or suppli- cation. Procus, also, a wooer or suitor, and procax, a shameless beggar, both come from the same source.
1 Not published before.
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
3 7
Oiiginally the root from which these Latin words are derived had the more general meaning of asking or inquiiing. It occurs in this sense in Sanskrit prasna, question, and. in pri/c/cMmi, to ask. We have the same element in Gothic fraihnan, and in the modern German fragen, to ask. Even the German forschen, to inquire, which gives us Forschung, Forscher, and bprachf or scher, a student of language, was derived from the same root. If, then, by prayer was meant originally a petition, we ask once more, Was it really so very natural that people in all parts of the world, in ancient as well as in modern times, should have asked beings whom they had never seen to give them certain things, something to eat or something to drink, though, as a matter of fact, they knew that they had never directly received anything of the kind from these invisible hands?
It used to be said that prayers were originally addressed to the spirits of the departed, and not to gods. This opinion has been revived of late, but without much success. Historical evidence there is of course none, and no one would say that it was moie natural to ask these departed spirits for valuable gifts than the gods. As a matter of fact, they had never been known to bestow a single tangible gift on their worshippers. Of course, there may have been cases where, as soon as a man had prayed to the spirit of his father to send rain on the parched fields, ram came down from the sky ; but the fact that even we call such fulfilments precarious , that is prayer-like or uncertain (for precarious is likewise derived from precari), shows that we cannot call a belief in the efficacy of prayer very natural.
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LAST ESSAYS.
Prayer becomes in reality more natuial and in- telligible when it is addressed, not to ancestral spirits, who are often conceived as troublesome beggars rather than as givers, but to certain phenomena of nature in which men had recognized the presence of agents who became everywhere the oldest gods.
As the rain came from the sky, and as the sky was called Dyaus in Sanskrit, Zeus in Greek, we may indeed call it natural that the Athenians when they saw their harvest— that is, their very life, ^destroyed by drought, should have said : vaov vaov, £ Zev, KOtTOt T/js apovpas tS)V A.9r}VCUU)V Kell TU)V 7T€8iCOV.
‘ Rain, rain, O dear Sky, down on the land of the Athenians and on the fields h
So natural is this Athenian prayer that we find it repeated almost in the same words among the Hottentots. Georg Schmidt, a Moravian missionary sent to the Cape in 1737, tells us that the natives at the return of the Pleiades assemble and sing together, according to the old custom of their ancestors, the following prayer: ‘O Tiqua, our Father above our heads, give rain to us, that the fruits may ripen and that we may have plenty of food, send us a good year-.
But though prayers like these may, in a certain sense, be called natural and intelligible, they pre- suppose nevertheless a long series of antecedents. People must have framed a name for sky, such as Dyaus, which originally meant Bright or Light, or rather the agent and giver of light ; they must have extended the sphere of action assigned to this agent so that he would be conceived not only as the giver
1 Science of Language, New Edition, 1892, ii. p. 546.
3 Introduction to the Science of Religion p. 282.
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
89
of light and warmth, but likewise as the giver of rain, and at the same time as the lord of the thunderstorm, as the wielder of the thunderbolt, as the most powerful among the actors behind the other phenomena of the sky. Only after all this had been done, could they think of calling that Zeus or that Dyaus, dear (<fn'A os) ; and you perceive how that one word dear at once changes the sky into a being endowed with human feelings, a being dear to human beings and not altogether unlike them.
INow with regard to the belief of the ancient people in the efficacy of prayer and the fulfilment of then- petitions, we must remember that the chances between rain and no rain are about equal. If, then, after days of drought a prayer for rain had been uttered, and there came rain, what was more natural than that those who had prayed to the sky for rain should offer thanksgiving to the sky or to Zeus for having heard their prayer, and that a belief should gradually grow up that the great gods of nature would hear prayers and fulfil them. Nor was that belief likely to be shaken if there was no rain in answer to prayer ; for there was always an excuse. Either it might be said that he who offered the prayer had committed a mistake — this was a very frequent explanation— or that he was no favourite with the gods ; or, lastly, that the gods were angry with the people, and there- fore would not fulfil their prayers.
It might seem that it would have been just the same with prayers addressed to the spirits of the departed. But yet it was not quite so. The ancient gods of nature were representatives of natural powers, and as Zeus, the god of the sky, was naturally implored
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LAST ESSAYS.
for rain, the divine representatives of the sun would be implored either to give heat and warmth or to withhold them. Lunar deities might be asked for the return of many moons, that is to say, for a long life, the gods of the earth for fertility, the gods of the sea for fair wind and weather, the gods of rivers for protection against invaders, or against the invasion of their own floods. But there was nothing special that the spirits of the departed would seem able to grant. Hence the prayers addressed to them are mostly of a more general character. In moments of danger children would, by sheer memory, be reminded of their fathers or grandfathers who had been their guides and protectors in former years when threatened by similar dangers. A prayer addressed to the departed spirits for general help and protection might, therefore, in a certain sense be called natural ; that is to say, even we ourselves, if placed under similar circumstances, might feel inclined to remember our parents and call for their aid, as if they were still present with us, though we could form no idea in what way they could possibly render us any assistance.
Let us see, then, what we can learn about prayers from the accounts furnished to us of the religions of uncivilized, or so-called primitive, people. We ought to distinguish between three classes of religion, called ethnic , national, and individual. The religions of unorganized tribes, in the lowest state of civilization, have been called ethnic, to distinguish them from the religions of those who had grown into nations, and
O ° .
whose religions are called national, while a third class comprises all religions which claim individual
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
41
foundeis, and have therefore been called individual religions.
Nowhere can we find the earliest phase of prayer more clearly represented than among the Melanesian tribes, who have been so well described to us by the Rev. Dr. Codnngton. It is generally supposed that the religion of the inhabitants of the Melanesian islands consists entirely in a belief in spirits. No- thing can be more erroneous. We must distinguish, however, between ghosts and spirits. Ghosts, as’ Dr. Codrington tells us, are meant for the souls of the departed, while spirits are beings that have never been men. The two are sometimes mixed up together, but they are quite distinct in their origin. It seems that the spirits were always associated with physical phenomena, and thus were more akin to the gods of the Greeks and Romans. We hear of spirits of the sea, of the land, of mountains and valleys ; and though we are told that they are simply ghosts that haunt the sea and the mountains, there must have been some reason why one is connected with the sea, another with the mountains ; nay, their very abode would have imparted to each a physical character, e\en if in their origin they had been mere ghosts of the departed. These spirits and ghosts have different names in different, islands, but to speak of any of them as missionaries are very apt to do, as either gods or devils, is clearly misleading.
The answers given by natives when suddenly asked what they mean by their spirits and ghosts are naturally very varying and very unsatisfactory.
V\ hat should we ourselves say if we were suddenly asked as to what we thought a soul, or a spirit, or
42
LAST ESSAYS.
a ghost to be 1 Still, one thing is quite clear, that these spiritual and ghostly beings of the Melanesians are invisible, and that nevertheless they receive worship and prayers from these simple-minded people. Some of their prayers are certainly interesting. Some of them seem to be delivered on the spur of the moment, others have become traditional and are often supposed to possess a kind ot miraculous power, probably on account of having proved efficacious on former occasions.
There is a prayer used at sea and addressed to Daula, a ghost, or, in their language, a tindalo : —
< Do thou draw the canoe, that it may reach the land : speed my canoe, grandfather, that I may quickly reach the shore whither 1 am bound. Do thou, Daula, lighten the canoe, that it may quickly gain the land and rise upon the shore.’
Sometimes the ancestral ghosts are invoked to- gether, as —
‘ Save us on the deep, save us from the tempest, bring us to the shore.’
To people who live on fish, catching fish is often a matter of life and death. Hence we can well under- stand a prayer like the following : —
‘ if thou art powerful, 0 Daula, put a fish or two into this net and let them die there.’
We can also understand that after a plentiful catch thanks should have been offered to the same beings, if only in a few words, such as —
< Powerful is the tindalo of the net.’
This is all very abrupt, very short, and to the point. They are invocations rather than real prayers.
Some of these utterances become after a time charms handed down from father to son, nay, even taught to
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
43
others for a consideration. They are then called
lehungai x.
Again, if a man is sick, the people call out the name of the sick man, and if a sound is heard in response, they say, £ Come back to life,’ and then run to the house shouting, ‘ He will live.’
All this to a strict reasoner may sound very un- i easonable ; still, that it is in accordance with human natuie, in an uncivilized and even in a civilized age, can easily be proved by a comparison of the prayers
of other people, which we shall have to consider hereafter.
If it is once believed that the ghosts can confer benefits and protect from evil, it is but a small step to call on them to confound our enemies. Thus we read that in Mota when the oven is opened for piepaiing a meal, a leaf ol cooked mallow is thrown in for some dead person. His ghost is addressed with the following words : —
‘ 0 Tataro ! * (another name for the ghosts) < this is a lucky bit or your eating ; they who have charmed your food, or have clubbed you— take hold of their hands, drag them away to hell, let them be dead ! ’
And if, after this, the man against whom this im- precation is directed meets with an accident, they cry out: —
‘ Oh, oh ! my curse in eating has worked upon him— he is dead.’
In Fiji prayer generally ends with these malignant requests : —
‘ Let us live, and let those that speak evil of us perish ! Let the enemy be clubbed, swept away, utterly destroyed, piled in heaps ! Let their teeth be broken. May they fall headlong in a pit. Let us live, and let our enemies perish ! ’
Codrington, The Melanesians , chap. ix.
44
LAST ESSAYS.
We must not be too bard on these pious savages, for with them there was only the choice between eating or being eaten, and they naturally preferred the former.
Before eating and drinking, the ghosts of the de- parted were often remembered at the family meal. Some drops of Kava were poured out, with the words : —
‘ Tataro, grandfather, this is your lucky drop of Kava ; let boars come to me ; let rawe come in to me : the money I have spent, let it come back to me : the food that is gone, let it come back hither to the house of you and me ! ’
On starting on a voyage they say : —
1 Tataro, uncle ! father ! Plenty of boars for you, plenty of rawe, plenty of money ; Kava for your drinking, lucky food for your eating in the canoe. I pray you with this, look down upon me, let me go on a safe sea ! ’
Prayers addressed to spirits who are not mere ghosts or departed souls, but connected with some of the phenomena of nature, seem to enter more into detail. Thus the Melanesians invoke two spirits (vui), Qat and Marawa : —
• Qat ! you and Marawa/ they say, ‘cover over with your hand the blow-hole from me, that 1 may come into a quiet landing- place ; let it calm well down away from me. Let the canoe of you and me go up in a quiet landing-place ! Look down upon me, prepare the sea of you and me, that I may go on a safe sea. Beat down the head of the waves from me ; let the tide-rip sink down away from me ; beat it down level, that it may go down and roll away, and I may come into a quiet landing-place. Let the canoe of you and me turn into a whale, a flying fish, an eagle ; let it leap on end over the waves, let it go, let it pass out to my land.'
If all went well, need we wonder that the people believed that Qat and Marawa had actually come and held the mast and rigging fast, and had led the canoe home laden with fish ! If, on the contrary,
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
45
the canoe and its crew were drowned, nothing could be. said against the spirits, Qat and Marawa, and the priests at home would probably say that the crew had failed to invoke their aid as they ought to have done, so that, as you see, the odds were always in favour of Qat and Marawa.
Nowhere is a belief and a worship of ancestral spirits so widely spread as in Africa. Here, therefore, we find many invocations and petitions addressed to the spirits. Some of these petitions are very short. Sometimes nothing is said beyond the name of the spirits.. They simply cry aloud, £ People of our house.’ Sometimes they add, like angry children, what they want, People of our house ! Cattle ! ’ Sometimes there is a kind of barter. ‘ People of our house,’ they say, ‘ I sacrifice these cattle to you, I pray for more cattle, more com, and many children ; then this your home will prosper, and many will praise and thank you.’
A belief in ancestral spirits or fathers leads on, very naturally, to a belief in a Father of all fathers, the Great Grandfather as he is sometimes called. He was known even to so low a race as that of the Hottentots, if we may trust Dr. Hahn, who las ■written down the following prayer from the mouth of a Hottentot friend of his : —
‘Thou, O Tsui-goa,
Thou Father of Fathers,
Thou art our Father !
Let stream the thunder-cloud !
Let our flocks live !
Let us also live !
I am very weak indeed From thirst, from hunger.
Oh, that I may eat the fruits of the field !
46
LAST ESSAYS.
Art thou not our Father,
The Father of Fathers,
Thou, Tsui-goa?
Oh, that we may praise thee,
That we may give thee in return,
Thou Father of Fathers,
Thou, O Lord,
Thou, O Tsui-goa ! ’
This is not a bad specimen of a savage prayer; nay, it is hardly inferior to some of the hymns of the Veda and Avesta.
The negro on the Gold Coast, who used formerly to be classed as a mere fetish-worshipper, addresses his petitions neither to the spirits of the departed nor to his so-called fetish, but he prays, * God, give me to-day rice and yams ; give me slaves, riches ; and health ! Let me be brisk and swift ! 1 When taking medicine, they say, ‘ Father - Heaven (Zeu -narep ) ! bless this medicine which I take.’ The negro on Lake Nyassa offers his deity a pot of beer and a basketful of meal, and cries out, ‘ Hear thou, 0 God, and send rain, while the people around clap their hands and intone a prayer, saying, ‘ Hear thou, O God.’
The idea that the religion of these negro races consists of fetish-worship is wellnigh given up. It has been proved that nearly all of them address their prayers to a Supreme Deity, while these fetishes are no more than what a talisman or a horse-shoe would be with us. Oldendorp, a missionary of large experi- ence in Africa, says : —
<■ Among all the black natives with whom I became acquainted, even the most ignorant, there is none who does not believe in God, give Him a name, and regard Him as a maker of the world. Besides this supreme beneficent deity, whom they all worship, they believed in many inferior gods, whose powers appear in serpents, tigers, rivers, trees, and stones. Some of them are
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
47
malevolent, but the negroes do not worship the bad or cruel gods : they only try to appease them by presents or sacrifices. They pray to the good gods alone. The daily prayer of a Watja negress was, *‘God, I know Thee not, but Thou knowest me. I need Thy help ! ” *
This is a prayer to which an Agnostic need not object.
A Roman Catholic Missionary, Father Loyer, who studied the habits of the natives of the Gold Coast, says the same.
‘It is a great mistake,’ he wrote, ‘to suppose that the negroes regard the so-called fetishes as gods. They are only charms or amulets. The negroes have a belief in one powerful being, to whom they offer prayers. Every morning they wash in the river, put sand on their head to express their humility, and, lifting up their hands, ask their God to give them yams and rice and other blessings V
So much for the prayers of races on the very lowest stage of civilization. Dr. Tylor, whose charming works on Primitive Culture we never consult in vain, tells us, ‘that there are many races who dis- tinctly admit the existence of spirits, but are not certainly known to pray to them, even in thought V I doubt whether there are many ; I confess I know of none ; and we must remember that, in a case like this, negative evidence is never quite satisfactory. Still, on the other hand, Mr. Freeman Clarke seems to me to go too far when, in his excellent work on The Ten Great Religions (part ii, p. 222), he calls the custom of prayer and worship, addressed to invisible powers, a universal fact in the history of man. It may be so, but we are not yet able to prove it, and in these matters caution is certainly the better part
1 Clarke, Ten Religions, ii. p. 1 1 c.
3 Primitive Culture, ii. p. 330.
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LAST ESSAYS.
of valour. Nothing can well be lower in the scale of humanity than the Papuans. Yet the Papuans of Tanna offer the first-fruits to the ghosts of their ancestors, and their chief, who acts as a kind of high priest, calls out : —
‘ Compassionate Father ! there is some food for you ; eat it, and be kind to us on account of it ! ’
And this the whole assembly begins to shout together1.
The Indians of North America stand decidedly higher than the Papuans ; in fact, some of their religious ideas are so exalted that many students have suspected Christian influences 2. The Osages, for instance, worship Wohkonda, the Master of Life, and they pray to him : —
‘0 Wohkonda, pity me, I am very poor ; give me what I need ; give me success against my enemies, that I may avenge the death of my friends. May I be able to take scalps, to take horses ! ’
John Tanner tells us that when the Algonquin Indians set out in their frail boats to cross Lake Superior, the canoes were suddenly stopped when about two hundred yards from land, and the chief began to pray in a loud voice to the Great Spirit, saying
‘You have made this lake, and you have made us, your children ; you can now cause that the water shall remain smooth, while we pass over in safety.’
He then threw some tobacco into the lake, and the other canoes followed his example. The Delawares invoke the Great Spirit above to protect their wives and children that they may not have to mourn for
1 Compare Turner, Polynesia , p. S8 ; Tylor, Primitive Culture , ii. P- 33r-
2 M. M., Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 195.
ANCIENT PKAYEBS.
49
them. The Peruvians soar much higher in their prayers. M. Reville, in his learned work on the -Religion of Mexico, tells us that prayers are very rare among the Peruvians. Mr. Brinton, on the
contrary, in his Myths of the New World, p. 298, speaks of perfectly authentic prayers which had been collected and translated in the first generation after the conquest. One addressed to Viracocha Pachacamac is very striking, but here we can certainly perceive Christian influences, if only on the part of the translator : —
‘0 Pachacamac,’ they say, ‘thou who hast existed from the beginning and shalt exist unto the end, powerful and pitiful ; who createdst man by saying, Let man be ; who defendest us from evil, and preservest our life and health ; art thou in the sky or in the earth, in the clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice of him who implores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give us life everlasting, preserve us, and accept this our sacrifice.’
The specimens of ancient Mexican prayers collected by Sahagun are very numerous, and some of them are certainly very thoughtful and even beautiful
‘ Is ifc possible,’ says one of them, ‘ that this affliction is sent to us, not for our correction and improvement, but for our destruc- tion?’ Or, ‘0 merciful Lord, let this chastisement with which thou hast visited us, the people, be as those which a father or mother inflicts on their children, not out of anger, but to the end that they may be free from follies and vices.’
With regard to these Mexican prayers we must neither be too credulous nor too sceptical. Our first impulse is, no doubt, to suspect some influence of Christian missionaries, but when scholars who have made a special study of the South American literatures assure us that they are authentic, and go back to generations before the Spanish conquest, we must try to learn, as well as we can, the old lesson that God
ir. E
50
LAST ESSAYS.
has not left Himself without witness among any people. To me, I confess, this ancient Mexican literature, and the ancient Mexican civilization, as attested by architecture and other evidence of social advancement, have been a constant puzzle. In one sense it may be said that not even the negroes of Dahomey are more savage in their wholesale butcheries of human victims than the Mexicans seem to have been, according to their own confession. Not dozens, but hundreds, nay, thousands of human beings were slaughtered at one sacrifice, and no one seems to have seen any harm in it. The Spaniards assure us that they saw in one building 136,000 skulls, and that the annual number of victims was never less than 20,000. It was looked upon almost as an honour to be selected as a victim to the gods, and yet these people had the most exalted ideas of the Godhead, and at the time of the conquest they were in possession of really beautiful and refined poetry. There are collections of ancient Mexican poems, published in the original, with what professes to be a literal translation l. No doubt, whoever collected and wrote down these poems was a Spaniard and a Christian. Such words as Dios for God, Angel for angel, nay, even the names of Christ and the Virgin Mary occurring in the original poems, are clear evidence to that effect. But they likewise prove that no real fraud was intended. Some poems are professedly Christian, but the language, the thought, and the style of the majority of them seem to me neither Christian nor Spanish. I shall give a few specimens, particularly as some of them may really be called prayers: —
1 Ancient Poetry, by Brinton, 1887.
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
51
‘ Where shall ray soul dwell ? Where is my home ?
Where shall be my house ? I am miserable on earth.
We wind and we unwind the jewels, the blue flowers are woven over the yellow ones, that we may give them to the children
Let my soul be draped in various flowers, let it be intoxicated bj them ; for soon must I weep, and go before the face of our mother.
This only do I ask : thou Giver of Life, be not angry, be not severe on earth, let us live with thee on earth, and take us to thy heavens.
But what can I speak truly here of the Giver of Life ? We only dream, we are plunged in sleep. I speak here on earth, but never can we here on earth speak in worthy terms.
Although it may be jewels and precious ointments of speech, yet of the Giver of Life one can never speak here in worthy terms.’
Or again : —
• How much, alas ! shall I weep on earth? Truly I have lived in vain illusion. I say that whatever is here on earth must end with our lives. May I be allowed to sing to thee, the Cause of all, theie in the heaven, a dweller in thy mansion ; then may my soul lift its voice and be seen with thee and near thee, thee by whom we live, ohuaya ! ohuaya? ’
There is a constant note of sadness in all these Mexican songs; the poet expresses a true delight in the beauty of nature, in the sweetness of life, but he feels that all must end ; he grieves over those whom he will never see again among the flowers and jewels of this earth, and his only comfort is the life that is to come. That it was wrong to dispatch thousands of human beings rather prematurely to this life to come nay, to feed on their flesh — seems never to have struck the mind of these sentimental philosophers. In one passage of these prayers the priest says : —
Thou shalt clothe the naked and feed the hungry, for remember their flesh is thine, and they are men like thee.’
But the practical application of this commandment is seen in their sacrifices in all their ghastly hideous- ness.
52
LAST ESSAYS.
All the prayers which we have hitherto examined belong to the lowest stage of civilization, and imply the very simplest relation between man and some unseen powers. If addressed to the ghosts of the departed, these invocations are not much more than a continuation of what might have passed between children and their parents while they were still alive. If addressed to the spirits of heaven or other prominent powers of nature, they are often but petulant, childish requests, or mean bargains between a slave and his master. Yet, with all this, they prove the existence of a belief in something beyond this finite world, something not finite, but infinite, something invisible, yet real. This belief is one of the many proofs that man is more than a mere animal, though I am well aware that believers in the so-called mental evolution of animals have persuaded themselves that animals also worship and pray. And what is their evidence”? Certain monkeys in Africa, they say, turn every morning towards the rising sun, exactly like the Parsees or sun-worshippers. If they do not utter any sound, it is supposed that their feelings of reverence are too much for them ; if they do not beg, it is, perhaps, because they know that the lilies of the field are clothed and fed without having to pray. It is no use arguing against such twaddle. It is perfectly true, however, that in many cases the unuttered prayer stands higher than the uttered prayer, and that there comes a time in the history of religion when prayer in the sense of begging is con- demned. A silent inclination before the rising sun may lift the mind to a more sublime height than the most elaborate litany, but whether it is so in the case
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
53
of these monkeys who turn their faces to the rising sun, we must leave to Dr. Gamier to decide, who is now studying the language of the gorillas in Africa. I have often quoted the words of a poor Samoyede woman, who, when she was asked what her prayer was, replied : ‘ Every morning I step out of my tent and bow before the sun and say: “When thou risest, I too rise from my bed.” And every evening I say : “ When thou sinkest down, I too sink down to rest.” ’ Even this utterance, poor as it may seem to us as a piayer, was to her a kind of religious worship. Every morning and evening it lifted her thoughts from earth to heaven, it expressed a silent conviction that her life was bound up with a higher life. Her not asking for anything, for any special favour, even foi hei daily bread, showed likewise somewhat of that wonderful trust that the fowls of the air are fed, though they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns.
We have hitherto examined the incipient prayers of uncivilized or semi-civilized races. For even the Mexicans and Peruvians, whose prayers and literature as well as their architectural remains point to what may be called civilization before their conquest by the Spaniards, stand nevertheless lower than many savages when we consider the wholesale slaughter of human victims at their sacrifices, and the un- deniable traces of cannibalism to the latest period of their national existence.
We have now to consider some of the religions which are called ncitioTicil. They have grown up at a time when scattered tribes had grown into compact nationalities, while their founders are unknown and
54
LAST ESSAYS.
never appealed to as authorities. The most important among them are the religions of China, of India, of Persia, of Greece and Home.
When we speak of the ancient religion of China, sometimes called Confucianism, we often forget that Confucius himself protests most strongly against being supposed to have been the author or founder of that religion. Again and again he says that he has only collected and restored the old faith. In the sacred books of China which he collected there are hardly any prayers. It is not till quite modern times that we meet with prayer as an essential part of public worship. It does not follow from this that the Chinese people at large were ignorant of private prayers, whether addressed to their ancestors, or to the gods of nature, or to the Supreme Spirit, in whom they believed ; but it is curious to observe even in Confucius a certain reserve, a certain awe that would prevent any familiar intercourse between man and God. Thus he says : ‘ Reverence the spirits, but keep aloof from them.’
There is a curious prayer recorded as having been offered by an Emperor of China in the year 1538. It was on a memorable occasion when the name of the Supreme Deity was to be altered. The old name for God in China was Tien, which means heaven, just as Dyaus and Zeus, according to their etymology, meant heaven. Even we can still say, ‘ I have offended against heaven’; and what do we mean by saying, for instance, ‘He lives, heaven knows how’? In the ancient books Shang-Tien also is used for Tien. This means high heaven, and makes it quite clear that it was intended as a name of the Supreme Deity.
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
55
Another name for spirit was Ti, and this name by itself, or with Slicing prefixed, became the recognized name for God as the Supreme Spirit, used often in the same sentences as interchangeable with Tien'. When the appointed day came, the Emperor and his court assembled around the circular altar. First they prostrated themselves eleven times, and then addressed the Great Being as he who dissipated chaos and formed the heavens, earth, and man.
The proclamation was as follows : —
‘ I, the Emperor, have respectfully prepared this paper to inform the spirit of the sun, the spirit of the moon, the spirits of the five planets, of the stars, of the clouds, of the four seas, of the great rivers, of the present year, &e., that on the first of next month we shall reverently lead our officers and people to honour the great name of Shang ti. We inform you beforehand, 0 ye celestial and terrestrial spirits, and will trouble you on our behalf to exei’t your spiritual power, and display your vigorous efficacy, commu- nicating our poor desire to Shang ti, praying him to accept our worship, and be pleased with the new title which we shall reverently present to him.’
We see here how the Chinese recognized, between man and the Supreme Ti, a number of intermediate spirits or ti’s, such as the sun, moon, stars, seas, and rivers, who were to communicate the prayer of the Emperor to the Supreme Being. That prayer ran as follows : —
‘Thou, O Ti, didst open the way for the form of matter to operate ; thou, O Spirit, didst produce the beautiful light of the sun and moon, that all thy creatures might be happy.
Thou hast vouchsafed to hear us, O Ti, for thou regardest us as thy children. I, thy child, dull and ignorant, can poorly express my feelings. Honourable is thy great name.’
Then food was placed on the altar, first boiled meat,
1 Legge, Sacred Books of the East, iii. p. 24.
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LAST ESSAYS.
and cups of wine, and Ti was requested to receive them with these words : —
‘The Sovereign Spirit deigns to accept our offering. Give thy people happiness. Send down thy favour. All creatures are upheld by thy love. Thou alone art the parent of all things.
The service of song is now completed, but our poor sincerity cannot be expressed aright. The sense of thy goodness is in our heart. We have adored thee, and would unite with all spirits in honouring thy name. We place it on this sacred sheet of paper, and now put it in the fire, with precious silks, that the smoke may go up with our prayers to the distant blue heavens. Let all the ends of the earth rejoice in thy name.’
I doubt whether even in a Christian country any archbishop could produce a better official prayer. It is marked by deep reverence, but it also implies a belief that the close relationship between father and son exists between the Supreme Spirit and man. It is a hymn of praise rather than a prayer, and even when it asks for anything, it is only the divine favour.
When we now turn from China to the ancient religion of India, we find there a superabundance of prayers. The whole of the Rig-veda consists of hymns and prayers, more than a thousand ; the Sama- veda contains the same piTiyers again, as set to music, and the Yajur-veda contains verses and formulas employed at a number of ceremonial acts. Were these hymns spontaneous compositions, or were they composed simply and solely for the sake of the sacrifices, both public and private ? There has lately been a long and somewhat heated controversy, carried on both by Aryan and Semitic scholars, as to the general question whether sacrifice comes first or prayer. It is one of those questions which may be argued ad infinitum, and which in the end pro-
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
57
duce the very smallest results. You remember bow the Algonquins, when crossing Lake Superior, ad- dressed certain prayers to Wohkonda, the Master of Life, and then threw a handful of tobacco into the lake. Now suppose we asked them the question, What was your first object? to throw tobacco into the lake or to invoke Wohkonda? What answer could they possibly give ? Still that is the question which we are asked to answer in the name of the ancient poets of Vedic India.
Again, the Peruvian prayer addressed to Pacha- camac is said to be recited at certain seasons. Suppose it was recited at a festival connected with the return of spring ; we are asked once more, Was the festival instituted first, and then a prayer composed for the occasion, or was the prayer composed to express feelings of gratitude for the return of spring, and afterwards repeated at every spring festival ?
No doubt, when we have such a case as the Emperor of China offering an official address to the Deity, we may be sure that the festival was ordained first and the official ode ordered afterwards ; but even in such an advanced state of civilization, we never hear that the meat and the wine were placed on the altar by themselves and as an independent act, and without anything being said. On the contrary, they were placed there as suggested by the poem.
If, then, we find a Vedic hymn used at the full- inoon or new-moon sacrifices, are we to suppose that the mysterious phases of the moon elicited at first nothing but a mute libation of milk, and that at a later time only hymns were composed in praise of the solemn festival? That there are Vedic hymns
58
LAST ESSAYS.
which presuppose a very elaborate ceremonial and a very complete priesthood, I was, I believe, the first to point out ; but to say that all V edic hymns were composed for ceremonial purposes is to say what can- not be proved. At a later time they may all have been included as part of the regular sacrifices, just as every psalm is read in church on appointed days. But we have only to look at some of the best-known Vedic hymns and prayers, and we shall soon perceive that they are genuine outpourings of personal feelings, which had not to wait for the call of an officiating priest before they could make their appearance. One poet says : —
‘ Let me not yet, 0 Varuwa, enter into the house of clay ’ (the grave) ; ‘ have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
If I go along trembling, like a cloud driven by the wind, have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
Through want of strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone to the wrong shore ; have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
Thirst came upon thy worshipper, though he stood in the midst of the waters ; have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
Whenever we men, 0 Varuwa, commit an offence before the heavenly host, whenever we break thy law through thoughtless- ness, have mercy. Almighty, have mercy ! ’
Now, I ask, had a poet to wait till a poem was wanted for a funeral service, or for the sacrifice of a horse, before he could compose such verses'? Is there a single allusion to a priest, or to a sacrifice in them ? That they, like the rest of the Rig-veda, may have been recited during certain ceremonies, who would deny ? But if we see how verses from different hymns, and from different Masalas, or collections of hymns, have to be patched together before they become serviceable for sacrificial purposes, we can easily see that the hymns must have existed as poems before
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
59
they were used by the priests at certain sacrifices. Why should there have been a Rig-veda at all, that is to say, a collection of independent hymns, if the hymns had been composed simply to fit into the sacrificial ceremonial ? The hymns and verses as fitted for that purpose are found collected in the Ya(/ur and Sama- vedas. What then was the object of collecting the ten books of the Rig-veda, most of them the heirlooms of certain old families, and not of different classes of priests? Then, again, there is what the Brahmanic theologians call tiha, that is, the slight modification of certain verses so as to make them serviceable at a sacrifice. Does not that show that they existed first as independent of ceremonial employment ? However, the strongest argument is the character of the hymns themselves. As clearly as some, nay, a considerable number, of them were meant from the first to be used at well-established sacrifices, others were clearly unfit for that purpose. At what sacrifice could there be a call for the de- spairing song of a gambler, for the dialogue between Sarama and the robbers, for the address of Visvamitra to the rivers of the Penjab, for the song of the frogs, or for the metaphysical speculations beginning with ‘There was not nought, there was not ought’? As part of a sacred canon any verse of the Rig-veda might afterwards have been recited on solemn occa- sions, but the question is, Did the inspiration come from these solemn occasions, or did it come from the heart? It is extraordinary to see what an amount of ingenuity has been spent both by Vedic and Biblical scholars on this question of the priority of ceremonial or poetry ! But what has been gained by it in the
60
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end? For suppose that in Yedic India a completely mute ceremonial had reached as great a perfection and complication as the Roman Catholic ceremonial in our time, would that prove that no one could then or now have composed an Easter hymn or Christmas carol spontaneously, and without any reference to ecclesiastical employment ? When there is so much real work to be done, why waste our time on dis- entangling such cobwebs ?
When we consider that the Rig-veda contains more than a thousand hymns, you will understand how constant and intimate the intercourse must have been between the Yedic poets and their gods. Some of these hymns give us, no doubt, the impression of being artificial, and in that sense secondary and late, only we must not forget that what we call late in the Veda cannot well be later than 1000 B.c. Here are some more verses from a hymn addressed to Vanina, the god of the all-embracing sky, the Greek Ouranos : —
1 However we break thy laws from day to day, men as we are, 0 god, Vanina.
Do not deliver us unto death, nor to the blow of the furious, nor to the wrath of the spiteful !
To propitiate thee, O Varuna, we unbend thy mind with songs, as the charioteer unties a weary steed.
When shall we bring hither the man who is victory to the warriors? when shall we bring Varuna the far-seeing to be pro- pitiated ?
He who knows the place of the birds that fly through the sky, who on the waters knows the ships ;
He, the upholder of order, who knows the twelve months, with the offering of each, and knows the month that is engendered afterwards’ (evidently the thirteenth or intercalary month) :
‘ He who knows the track of the wind, the wide, the bright, the mighty, and knows those who reside on high ;
He, the upholder of order, Varuna, sits down among his people ; he, the wise, sits down to govern.
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From thence, perceiving all wondrous things, he sees what has been and what will be.
May he, the wise, make our paths straight all our days ; may he prolong our life !
Vanina, wearing golden mail, has put on his shining cloak, the spies sat down around him.’ (Here you see mythology and anthropomorphism begin.)
‘ The god whom the scoffers do not provoke, nor the tormenters of men, nor the plotters of mischief ;
He who gives to men glory, and not half glory, who gives it even to ourselves.
Yearning for him, the far-seeing, my thoughts move onward, as kine move to their pastures.
Let us speak together again, because my honey has been brought : that thou mayest eat what thou likest, like a friend.’ (Now, here people would probably say that there is a clear allusion to a sacri- ficial offering of honey. But why should such an offering not be as spontaneous as the words which are'uttered by the poet ?)
‘ Did I see the god who is to be seen by all, did I see the chariot above the earth ? He must have accepted my prayers.’ (This implies a kind of vision, while the chariot may refer to thunder and lightning.)
‘ 0 hear this my calling, Varuwa, be gracious now ! Longing for help, I have called upon thee.
Thou, 0 wise god, art lord of all, of heaven and earth ; hasten on thy way.
That I may live, take from me the upper rope, loose the middle and remove the lowest.’ (These ropes probably refer to the ropes by which a victim is bound. Here, however, they are likewise intended for the ropes of sin by which the poet, as he told us, felt himself chained and strangled.)
These translations are perfectly literal ; they have not been modernized or beautified, and they certainly display before our eyes buried cities of thought and faith, richer in treasures than all the ruins of Egypt, of Babylon, or Nineveh.
Even what are called purely sacrificial hymns are by no means without a human interest. One of the earliest sacrifices consisted probably in putting a log of wood on the fire of the hearth. The fire was called
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Agni, in Sanskrit, and we find the same name again, not indeed in Greek, but in the Latin Ignis. If any other gift was thrown into the fire the smoke seemed to carry it up to heaven, and thus Agni became the messenger and soon the mediator between men and gods. He was called the youngest among the gods, because he was new every morning. Here is a hymn addressed to him : —
< Agni, accept this log which I offer thee, accept this my service ; listen well to these my songs.
With this log, 0 Agni, may we worship thee, the son of strength, conqueror of horses ! and with this hymn, thou high-born !
May we, thy servants, serve thee with songs, 0 granter of riches, thou who lovest songs and delightest in riches.
Thou lord of wealth and giver of wealth, be thou wise and powerful ; drive away from us the enemies !
He gives us rain from heaven, he gives us inviolable strength, he gives us food a thousandfold.
Youngest of the gods, their messenger, their invoker, most deserving of worship, come, at our praise, to him who worships thee and longs for thy help.
For thou, 0 sage, goest wisely between these two creations (heaven and earth, gods and men), ‘like a friendly messenger between two hamlets.
Thou art wise, and thou hast been pleased : perform thou,
intelligent Agni, the sacrifice without interruption, sit down on this sacred grass.’
That this hymn contains what may be called secondary ideas, that it requires the admission of considerable historical antecedents, is clear enough. Agni is no longer a mere visible fire, he is the invisible agent in the fire ; he has assumed a certain dramatic personality; he is represented as high-born, as the conqueror of horses, as wealthy and as the giver of wealth, as the messenger between men and gods. Why Agni, the fire, should be called the giver of rain is not quite clear, but it is explained by the fire
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ascending in a cloud of smoke, and by the cloud sending down the prayed-for rain. The sacred grass on which Agni is invited to sit down is the pile of grass on the hearth or the altar of the house which surrounds the fire, and the log of wood is the fuel to keep the fire burning. All this shows an incipient ceremonial which becomes more and more elaborate, but there is no sign that it had begun to fetter the wings of poetical inspiration.
The habit of praying, both in private and in public, continued through all the periods of the history of Indian religion. One phase only has to be excepted, that of Buddhism, and this will have to be considered when we examine what are called individual in contradistinction to national religions. We need not dwell here on those later prayers of the Brahmans, v hich we find scattered about in the epic poems, in the Purarias, and in the more modern sects established in every part of the country. They are to us of infeiior interest, though some of them are decidedly beautiful and touching.
According to Schopenhauer every prayer addressed to an objective deity is idolatrous. But it is important to remark how much superior the idolatry of prayer is to the idolatry of temple- worship. In India, more particularly, the statues and images of their popular gods are hideous, owing to their unrestrained symbolism and the entire disregard of a harmony with nature, let the prayers addressed to S'iva and Durga are almost entirely free from these blemishes, and often show a concept of Deity of which we ourselves need not be ashamed.
Nor need we dwell long on the prayers of the
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ancient Greeks and Romans, because they are well known from classical literature. We know how Priam prays before he sets out on his way to the Greek camp to ask for the body of his son. We know how Nestor prays for the success of the embassy sent to Achilles, and how Ulysses offers prayers before approaching the camp of the Trojans. We find in Homer penitential prayers , to confess sins and to ask for forgiveness ; bidding prayers , to ask for favours ; and thanksgiving prayers, praising the gods for having fulfilled the requests addressed to them. We never hear, however, of the Greeks kneeling at prayer. The Greeks seem to have stood up while praying, and to have lifted up their hands to heaven, or stretched them forth to the earth. Before praying it was the custom to wash the hands, just as the Psalmist says (xxvi. 6) : ‘ I will wash mine hands in innocency : so will I compass Thine altar, 0 Lord.’
That prayer, not only public, but private also, was common among the Greeks we may learn from Plato when he says that children hear their mothers every day eagerly talking with the gods in the most earnest manner, beseeching them for blessings. He also states, in another place, that every man of sense before beginning any important work will ask help of the gods. Men quite above the ordinary superstitions of the crowd, nay, men suspected of unbelief, were known to pray to the gods. Thus Pericles is said, before he began his orations, always to have prayed to the gods for power to do a good work. May I mention here what I have not seen mentioned elsewhere, and what the widow of Sir Robert Peel told Baron Bunsen, who told it me, that on the day
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when Peel was going to deliver his decisive speech on Tree Trade, she found him in his dressing-room on his knees praying, before going to Parliament.
Most impressive are some of the prayers composed by Greek thinkers, whose religion was entirely absorbed m philosophy, but whose dependence on a higher power remained as unshaken as that of a child. What can be more reverent and thoughtful than the prayer o Simplicius, at the end of his commentary on Epictetus : —
.1 beseech Thee, O Lord, the Father, Guide of our reason to make us mindful of the noble origin Thou hast thought worthy to confer upon us ; and to assist us to act as becomes free agents ; that we may be cleansed from the irrational passions of the body
inaTtW aUd §T'n thG Same’ USi*e them as instruments m a fitting manner ; and to assist us to the right direction of the
liahtof S' th n itS Participati0n in what is real by the
light of truth. And thirdly, I beseech Thee, my Saviour entirely
wemTT dal;kfneSSir0m the eyes of our bouIs, in order thlt p 7 know aright> as Homer says, both God and men.’ (Farrar Paganism and Christianity, p. 44.) v ’
Equally wise are the words of Epictetus himself (Discourses, ii. p. 16): —
Tho^wV0 T°0k Upr t0 God and say: 1)0 with henceforth as
nothinT th f am °ne, “ind With Thee- 1 am Th‘no- I decline nothing that seems good to Thee. Send me whither Thou wilt
f nH .“Ur • WilL Wilt Th0U that 1 take office or live
I J i ff Xiemam at h°me 0r g0 int0 exile> he poor or rich,
I will defend Thy purpose with me in respect of all these.’
,, The ^Romans were more religious and more prayerful han the Greeks, but they were less fluent in expressing their sentiments. It is very characteristic that the Komans, when praying, wrapped the toga round their heads, so that they might be alone with their o-0d undisturbed by the sights of the outer world. That
tells more than many a long prayer. That in praying
II. pi
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they turned the palms of their hands backward and upward to heaven, shows that the Romans wished to surrender themselves entirely to the will and pleasuie of their gods. In later times the Romans became the pupils of the Greeks in their religious as well as in their philosophical views, so that when we lead a prayer of Seneca it is difficult to say whethei it breathes Greek or Roman thought. Seneca prays (Clarke, The Great Religions, p. 333)
‘ We worship and adore the framer and former of the universe ; governor, disposer, keeper ; Him on whom all things depend ; mind and spirit of the world ; from whom all things spring ; by whose spirit we live ; the divine spirit, diffused through all ; God all-powerful ; God always present ; God above all other gods ; thee we worship and adore.’
The religion of the Assyrians and Babylonians, as far as we know it from inscriptions, must likewise be classed as one of the national religions, whose founders are unknown. Many of their prayers have been deciphered and translated, but one almost hesitates to quote them or to build any theories on them, because these translations change so very rapidly from year to year. Here is a specimen of an Assyrian prayer,
assigned to the year 650 B.c. :
‘ May the look of pity that shines in thine eternal face dispel my griefs.
May I never feel the anger and wrath of the God.
May my omissions and my sins be wiped out.
May I find reconciliation with him, for I am the servant of his
power, the adorer of the great gods.
May thy powerful face come to my help ; may it shine like heaven, and bless me with happiness and abundance of riches.
May it bring forth in abundance, like the earth, happiness and
every sort of good.’
If this is a correct translation, it shows much deeper feelings and much more simplicity of thought than
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the ordinary Babylonian prayers, which have been translated by some of the most trusted of Cuneiform scholars. They are so very stiff and formal, and evidently the work of an effete priesthood, rather than of sincere believers in visible or invisible gods. Here follows one short specimen: —
‘0 my God, who art violent (against me), receive (my sun- plication). v j v
0 my Goddess, thou who art fierce (towards me), accept (my pra}Ter). v J
Accept my prayer (may thy liver be quieted).
0 my Lord, long-suffering (and) merciful (may thy heart be appeased).
By day, directing unto death that which destroys me, 0 my God, interpret (the vision).
0 my Goddess, look upon me and accept my prayer.
May my sin be forgiven, may my transgression be cleansed.
Let the yoke be unbound, the chain be loosed.
May the seven winds carry away my groaning.
May I strip off my evil so that the bird bear (it) up to heaven. along7 Ule fiSh Cany aWaJ my trouble> maY the river carry (it)
May the reptile of the field receive (it) from me ; may the waters of the river cleanse me as they flow.
Make me shine as a mask of gold.
May I be precious in thy sight as a goblet of glass.’
You see bow advanced and artificial the surround- ings are in which the thoughts of these Babylonian prayers move. There are cities and palaces, and golden masks and goblets of glass, of all of which we see, of course, no trace in really ancient or primitive prayers, such as those of the Veda.
We have now even Accadian prayers, older than those of Nineveh or Babylon, but even they smell of temples and incense rather than of the fresh air of the morning.
A more simple Accadian prayer is the following
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‘ God, my Creator, stand by my side,
Keep thou the door of my lips, guard thou my hands,
O Lord of Light.'
The following recommendation to pray is also remarkable -
‘Pray thou, pray thou! Before the couch, pray!
Before the dawn is light, pray ! By the tablets and books, pray ! By the hearth, by the threshold, at the sun-rising,
At the sun-setting, pray1!’
We enter into a different atmosphere when we step into the ruined temples of Egypt. Here, too, the thoughts strike us as „the outcome of many periods of previous thought, but they possess a massiveness and earnestness which appeal to our sympathy. Here is a specimen
‘Hail to thee, maker of all beings, ‘Lord of law, Father of the Gods ; maker of men, creator of beasts ; Lord of grains, making food for the beasts of the field. . . . The One alone without a second.
. . . King alone, single among the Gods ; of many names, unknown is their number.
I come to thee, 0 Lord of the Gods, who has existed from the beginning, eternal God, who hast made all -things that are. Thy name be my protection; prolong my term of life to a good age, may my son be in my place (after me) ; may my dignity remain with him (and his) for ever, as is done to the righteous, who is glorious in the house of the Lord.
Who then art thou, 0 my father Amon? Doth a father forget his son ? Surely a wretched lot awaiteth him who opposes Thy will ; but blessed is he who knoweth thee, for thy deeds proceed from a heart of love. I call upon thee, my father Amon ! behold me in the midst of many peoples unknown to me ; all nations are united against me, and I am alone ; no other is with me. My many warriors have abandoned me, none of my horsemen hath looked towards me ; and when I called them, none hath listened to my voice. But I believed that Amon is worth more to me than a million of warriors, than a hundred thousand horsemen, and ten thousands of brothers and sons, even were they all gathered together. The work of many men is nought, Amon will prevail over them.’
1 W. Tallack, The Inward Light and Christ’s Incarnation, p. 4.
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This is a prayer full of really human feelings, and it theiefore reminds us of ever so many passages in other prayers. The desire that the son may outlive the father, or that the older people may not weep over the j oungei , meets us in a hymn of the Veda when the poet asks— as who has not asked ?— that ‘ the gods may allow us to die in order so that the old may not weep over the young.’
The idea that. the help of Amon is better than a thousand horsemen is re-echoed in many a psalm, as when we read (Ps. cxviii. 9, 10), ‘It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes. All nations compassed me about : but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them.’
If. we now turn our eyes from what we called ethnic and national religions to those religions which claim to be the work of an individual founder, and are therefore called individual religions, we must not imagine that they really came ready made out of the brain of a single person. If the name individual religion is used in that sense, the term would be misleading, for every religion, like every language, carries with it an enormous amount of accumulated thought which the individual prophet may reshape and revive, but which he could not possibly create fr°m the beginning. The great individual religions are Zoroastrianism, Mosaism, Christianity , Moham- medanism, and Buddhism . They are all called after the name of their supposed founders, and the fact that they can appeal to a personal authority imparts to them, no doubt, a peculiar character. But if we take the case of Moses, the religion which he is supposed to have founded sprang from a Semitic soil
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prepared for centuries for the reception of his doctrines. We know now that even such accounts as that of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel have their parallels in the clay tablets of Assyria, as deciphered by George Smith and others, and that as there is a general Semitic type of language which Hebrew shares in common with Babylonian, Ai'abic, and Syriac, there is likewise a general type of Semitic religion which forms the common back- ground of all. In the case of Christianity, we know that Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil ; and in the case of Mohammedanism we may safely say that without Judaism and without Christianity it would never have sprung into existence. The ancient religion of Persia, which is called Zoroastrianism, after its reputed author, is in many respects a continuation, in some a reform, of the more ancient Vedic religion ; and exactly the same applies to Buddhism, which has all its roots, even those with which it breaks, in the earlier religion of the Brahmans. In one sense, there- fore, I quite admit that the classification into ethnic, national, and individual religions may be misleading, unless it is carefully defined.
The first individual religion in India is Buddhism, which sprang from Brahmanism, though on many points it stands in opposition to it. This is par- ticularly the case with regard to prayer. There comes a time in the life of religions as in the life of individuals when prayer in the sense of importunate asking and begging for favours and benefits has to cease, and when its place is taken by the simple words, ‘ Thy will be done.’ But in Buddhism there are, as we shall see, even stronger reasons why pra^ ei
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in the ordinary sense of the word had to be surrendered. I had some years ago two Buddhist priests staying with me at Oxford. They had been sent from Japan, which alone contains over thirty millions of Buddhists, to learn Sanskrit at Oxford. As there was no one to teach them the peculiar Sanskrit of the Buddhists, and I did not like their going away to a German university, I offered them my services. Of course, we had many discussions, and I remember well their strong disapprobation of prayer, in the sense of petitioning. They belonged to the Mahayana Bud- dhism, and though they did. not believe in a Supreme Deity or a creator of the world, they believed in a kind of deified Buddha, while the Hlnayana Buddhists think of their Buddha as neither existent nor non- existent. The Mahayanists adore their Buddha, they worship him, they meditate on him, they hope to meet him face to face in Paradise, in Sukhavati. But such was their reverence for Buddha, and such was their firm belief in the eternal order of the world, or in the working of Karma, that it seemed to them the height of impiety to pray, and to place their personal wishes before Buddha. I asked one of them whether, if he saw his child dying, he would not pray for its life, and he replied, No, he could not; it would be wrong, because it would show a want of faith ! ‘And yet,’ I said to him, ‘you Buddhists have actually prayer-wheels. What do you consider the use of them?’
‘ O no,’ he said, c those are not prayer- wheels ; they only contain the names and praises of Buddha, but we ask for nothing in return.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘are not some of these wheels driven
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by the wind like a wind-mill, others by a river like a water-mill % ’
My friend looked somewhat ashamed at first. But he soon recovered himself, and said —
‘ After all, they remind people of Buddha, the law, and the Church, and if that can be done by machines driven by wind or water, is it not better than to employ human beings who, to judge from the way in which they rattle off their prayers in your chapels, seem sometimes to be degraded to mere praying- wheels 1 ’
But while we look in vain for bidding prayers in the sacred literature of the Buddhists, we find in it plenty of meditations on the Buddha and the Buddhas, on saints, past and future. While Pallas (ii. p. 168) tells us that the Buddhists in Mongolia have not even a word for prayer, he gives us (ii. p. 386) specimens which in other religions would certainly be included under that name 1.
‘Thou, in whom innumerable creatures believe, tho\i Buddha, conqueror of the hosts of evil ! Thou, omniscient above all beings, come down to our world ! Made perfect and glorified in in- numerable bygone revolutions ; always pitiful, always gracious, lo, now is the right time to confer loving blessings on all creatures ! Bless us from thy throne, which is firmly established on a truly divine doctrine, with wonderful benefits ! Thou, the eternal redeemer of all creatures, incline thy face with thy immaculate company towards our kingdom ! In faith we bow before thee. Thou the perfecter of eternal welfare, dwelling in the reign of tranquillity, rise and come to us, Buddha and Lord of all blessed rest ! ’
Very different from Buddhism with regard to prayer is Zoroastrianism. It encourages prayer in every form, whether addressed to the Supreme Spirit,
1 Koeppen, Religion ties Buddha, i. p. 555.
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Ahuramazda, or to subordinate deities. All that we know of ancient Zoroastrian literature is, in fact, more or less liturgical and full of prayers, whether actual petitions or hymns of praise, or confessions of sin or expressions of gratitude for favours received. Some of these prayers belong to the most ancient period of Zend literature, and are in consequence difficult to interpret. In giving a translation of the following specimens, I have availed myself of the most recent and most valuable work on the Yasna by M. Darmesteter : —
1. ‘ This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Fulfil my desire as I fulfil yours, 0 Mazda ! I wish to resemble thee, and teach my friends to resemble thee, in order to give thee pious and friendly help. 0 to be with Vohu Mano ! (the good spirit).
2. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! What is the first of things in the world of good, the good which fulfils the desires of him who pursues it ? For he who is friend to thee, O Mazda, always changes evil to good, and rules spiritually in both worlds.
3. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Who was the creator, the first father of Asha (Right)? Who has opened a way for the sun and the stars? Who makes the moon to wax and wane ? These are the things and others which I wish to know
0 Mazda !
4* This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura 1 WIio without supports has kept the earth from falling? Who has made the waters and the plants ? Who has set winds and clouds to run quickly ? Who is the creator of Vohu Mano, O Mazda ?
5; This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! What good artist has made light and darkness ? What good artist has made sleep and waking ? Who has made the dawn, noon, and night ? Who has made the arbiter of justice ?
6. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Who has created with Khshatlira (royal power) aspiration for perfect piety ? Who has placed love in the heart of a father when he obtains a son ?
1 wish to help thee powerfully, 0 Mazda, 0 beneficent spirit
creator of all things ! ’—(From Gatlm Vshtavaitt, Darmesteter, Yasna’ p. 286.) ’
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And again : —
1. 1 Towards what country shall I turn? Where shall I go to offer my prayer? Relations and servants leave me. Neither my neighbours nor the wicked tyrants of the country wish me well. How shall I succeed in satisfying thee, 0 Mazda Ahura?
2. I see that I am powerless, 0 Mazda ! I see that I am poor in flocks, poor in men. I cry to thee, look at me, O Ahura ! I expect from thee that happiness which friend gives to friend. To the teaching of Vohu Mano (belongs) the fortune of Asha.
3. When will come to us the increasers of days? When will the thoughts of the saints (the Saoshyants) arise, in order to support by their works and their teaching the good world ? To whom will Yohu Mano come for prosperity ? As to me, 0 Lord, I desire thy instruction.
4. In the district and in the country the wicked prevents the workers of holiness from offering the cow, but the violent man will perish by his own acts. Whoever, 0 Mazda, can prevent the wicked from ruling and oppressing makes wise provision for the flocks.’ — (From Gatha Ushtavaiti, Darmesteter, Yasna, p. 30.)
In the Zoroastrian religion prayer is no longer left to the sudden impulses of individuals. It has become part of the general religious worship, part of the constant fight against the powers of darkness and evil, in which every Zoroastrian is called upon to join. A person who neglects these statutable prayers, whether priest or layman, commits a sin. Every Parsi has to say his prayer in the morning and in the evening, besides the prayers enjoined before each meal, and again at the time of a birth, a marriage, or a death. Three times every day the Parsi has to address a prayer to the sun in his various stations, while the priest, who has to rise at midnight, has four such prayers to recite. These three prayers, at sun- rise, at noon, and at sunset, and possibly at midnight, were not unknown to the people of the Veda, and they became more and more fixed in later times.
Mohammed gave great prominence to prayer as an
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outward form of religion. After the erection of the first mosque at Medinah he ordained the office of the crier or muezzin, who from the tower had to call the faithful five times every day to the recital of their prayers. The muezzin cried: —
‘ God is great ! (four times). I bear witness that there is no god but God (twice). I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of God (twice). Come hither to prayers (twice). Come hither to salvation (twice). God is great. There is no other god but God.’
In the early morning the crier adds : —
‘ Prayer is better than sleep.’
The five times for this official prayer are : — (i) Between dawn and sunrise. (2) After the sun has begun to decline. (3) Midway between this. (4) Shortly after sunset. (5) At nightfall.
These prayers are farz, or incumbent ; all others are 7 xafi, supererogatory, or sunnah, in accordance with the practices of the prophet.
Besides these public prayers, private devotions are often recommended by Mohammed, but we possess few specimens of these personal prayers. Mohammed, when speaking of the birds in the air, says that each one knoweth its prayer and its praise, and God knoweth what they do. He recommends his followers to be instant in prayer and almsgiving. ‘ When the call to prayer soundeth on the day of congregation (Friday), then hasten to remember God,’ he says,
‘ and abandon business ; that is better for you, if ye only knew ; and when prayer is done, disperse in the land, and seek of the bounty of God.’ The following may serve as a specimen of a simple Mohammedan prayer. It has sometimes been called Mohammed’s Paternoster : —
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‘ Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds !
The compassionate, the merciful !
King of the day of judgement !
Thee we worship, and Thee we ask for help.
Guide us in the straight way,
The way of those to whom Thou art gracious,
Not of those upon whom is Thy wrath, nor of the erring ! ’
The only two of the individual religions whose prayers we have not yet examined are the Jewish and Christian, and they are so well known that little need be said about them here. Little of any im- portance is said in the Old Testament about ceremonial prayer, as a recognized part of the public religious service, but private prayer is everywhere taken for granted. When we read in Isa. i. 15, ‘And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you : yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear,’ this seems to refer to public rather than to private prayers ( brj^oaCq ). At a later time we find among the Jews, as among Persians, Brahmans, and Egyptians also, certain times fixed for prayer, generally morning, noon, and evening. This is so natural a thought that there is no need to imagine that one nation borrowed the twofold, threefold, or even the fourfold prayer from another. The Jews were gene- rally, like the Greeks, standing while saying their prayers, but we also hear of cases where they bent their knees, threw themselves on the ground, lifted up their hands, smote their breasts, or in deep mourning placed their head between their knees. The proper place for private prayer was the small chamber in the house, but we know how, when prayer had become purely ceremonial, pious people loved to pray standing in the synagogues and the
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corners of the streets. The Hebrew Psalms, most of which are prayers, stand out quite unique among the prayers of the world by their simplicity, their power, and majesty of language, though, like all collections of prayers, the collection of the Psalms too contains some which we could gladly spare. There are other prayers put into the mouth of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and other prominent characters by the authors of the historical books of the Old Testament, but hardly one of them approaches the highest standard of the Psalms. In substance the prayer of Elijah, for instance, is but little superior to the prayer1 of the priests of Baal, and the slaughter of the priests of Baal by Elijah’s own hand, after his prayer had been granted, seems indeed more worthy of a priest of Baal than of the priest and prophet of the all- merciful Jehovah. Some of the private prayers of the Jews have been preserved in the Talmud. They are very beautiful, and the Rabbis often pride themselves on being able to match every petition of the Lord’s prayer in the Talmud. Why should they not ? People who are at all inclined to pray have all much the same to say, so much so that there are few prayers in the Sacred Books of the non-Christian religions in which, with certain restrictions, a Christian is not able to join with perfect sincerity. The language changes, but the heart remains the same. We do not deny that there is progress, that there is what is called evolution, or, more correctly, historical con- tinuity, in the different religions of the world. Another important element is the parallelism of various religions, which helps us to understand what is obscure and seemingly without antecedents in one
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religion by the fuller light derived from others. So powerful is the stream of religious development that it often seems to land our boat on the very opposite shore from where it started. While the ancient prayers seem to say, Let our will be done, the last and final prayer of the world is, Let Thy will be done. And yet we can watch every step by which the human mind or the human heart changed from the one prayer to the other. Here it is where an his- torical or comparative study of religions bears its most precious fruit. It teaches the followers of different religions to understand each other, and if we can but understand each other, we can more easily bear with each other. My Buddhist pupil would not pray even for the life of his child. What did he mean by this, if not, ‘ Thy will be done ’ ? Many a Christian mother will say, ‘ Thy will be done,’ yet she will add complainingly, ‘ If Thou hadst been here, he would not have died.’
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM1.
NO country has, I believe, suffered so much from what are called ‘ travellers’ tales ’ as India. Before it had been discovered or invaded by Alexander the Great, it seemed to the rest of the world surrounded by a halo of fable and mystery. And even after it had been brought within the horizon of other nations of antiquity, it still continued to be looked upon as a land of wonders and fairy-tales. Almost anything that was told of its natural products, or of the primaeval wisdom of its inhabitants, was readily believed, repeated, and even exaggerated by successive writers. The ancient Greek writers knew really very little about India, but almost all they have to say of it bears this mysterious and marvellous stamp.
Homer probably knew nothing about India. If some scholars hold that his twofold Ethiopians were meant for the inhabitants of India, all we can say is, that, like so many other things, it is possible, but that, from the very nature of the case, it can neither be proved nor disproved. The Homeric name Aithiops is no doubt connected with aitko = ‘ to burn,’ and may have been meant originally for people with burnt or dark faces, while aithops, as applied to metal and
1 Nineteenth Century, May, 1893.
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wine, may be translated by ‘fiery ’ or ‘ ruddy.’ Knowing that India was the richest source of fables, which in later times were spread over the whole world, Welcker1 has put forward a conjecture that Aisopos, the fabulous inventor of fables, was originally Aithdpos , a black man, possibly from India. The change of th into s is, no doubt, irregular, but, with all respect for the sacredness of phonetic laws, we ought not to shut our eyes to the fact that in proper names, and more particularly in names of mythology and fable, anomalies and local dialectic varieties occur which would not be tolerated in ordinary words. The change of th into s would be perfectly legitimate, for instance, in the Aeolic 2 and in the Doric 3 dialects, and it can easily be understood how a proper name, formed according to the phonetic rules of one dialect, might be taken over and remain unchanged in others, even if their phonetic laws were different.
In Germany, for instance, if a man is called Schmidt at Berlin, he would not be called Smid at Hamburg, nor should we call him Smith in England. We call the composer Wagner, not Waggoner. If, therefore, the old fable poet Aithdpos became first known in Greece under his Aeolic name of Aisopos, there would have been little inducement to change his name back into Aithdpos. This is a consideration that has been far too much neglected in the treatment of mythological and other proper names, and thei'e is no phonetic bar against Aesdpos having meant originally the same as Aithiops, burnt or dark-faced. If we might go a step further, and take Aithiops as an old name of the inhabitants of India or the far East, this would, no
3 Ahrens, § 36, 2. 3 Ibid. § 7.
1 Rhein. Mus. , vi. p. 366 seq.
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doubt, be a great help in enabling us to account for the piesence of certain fables in Greece which are nearly identical with ancient fables in India, but occur in Greek literature long before Alexander’s expedition bad opened a road for intellectual and literary intercourse between India and Greece. It is a well-established fact that many of our fables, more paiticularly the animal fables, had their cradle in India, and were exported on well-known historical high roads from the East to the West. But there are some which, unless we claim them as common Aryan pioperty, or as the natural outcome of our common humanity, must somehow have found their way from India to Persia and Greece, long before a Greek soldier had set foot on the sacred soil of Aryavarta.
W e find lor instance, that Plato, when speaking of all the gold that goes into Sparta, while nothing comes out of it, shows himself perfectly familiar with the Aesopian myth or fable— Kara rdv AlaA-nov M vdov — of the fox declining to enter the lion’s cave because he saw how all the footsteps went into the cave but none came out of it. The same old fable appears in the Sanskrit Pa/i&atantra, only told there of a jackal instead of a fox. If the Aesopian fables had come from India, this coincidence would be accounted for, though, of course, the Pa«/catantra, in which it is found, is only a modern collection of far more ancient Indian fables. But we must never forget that what is possible in one place is possible in other places also. The observation of footprints going into a cave and none coming out of it was one that could hardly have escaped shepherds and hunters in any country, and 1 Select Essays , i. 509.
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we actually find the same application of nulla vestigia retrorsum in a fable related by the Kaffirs in South Africa.
Plato seems well acquainted also with the fable of the donkey in a lion’s skin1. The Greek proverb ovos irapa Kvixaiovs seems to be applied to men boasting before people who have no means of knowing their character or testing their statements. It presupposes the existence of some kind of fable of a donkey appearing in a lion’s skin. In the Pa«&atantras the fable is told of a dyer who, being too poor to feed his donkey, put a tiger’s skin over him and sent him into his neighbour’s field. Here he browsed unmolested till one day he saw a female donkey. Thereupon the disguised tiger began to bray, and the owner of the field, now summoning up courage, came and killed him.
Here the coincidences ai'e so minute that one feels more inclined to admit an actual borrowing, always supposing that Aesop could have introduced some of the Eastern fables from India to the Greeks of Asia Minor before the time of Alexander the Great.
After Homer’s time, the first Greek traveller, or rather sailor, who knew anything about India from personal experience was Sky lax, who, at the command of Darius, undertook his voyage of discovery to the mouth of the Indus about 509 B.c. Unfortunately the account of his expedition which he is said to have written is lost to us, but Hekataeos of Miletos, who died in 486 B.c., knew it and relied on it in his own account of India.
This work of Hekataeos too is lost, but it served as 1 Kratyl, p. 41 1.
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM 83
an authority to Herodotus, who in what he has to say of India relies chiefly on him and on the information which he himself could gain from people in Persia.
Herodotus tells us the first traveller's tale about India.. A traveller’s tale, however, need not be an intentional falsehood. Travellers’ tales arise from vdy. different sources. There is in many people an irresistible tendency not only to admire, but also to magnify. This may be called a very pardonable weakness. It is quite right that we should never lose the power of admiring ; it is quite right that we should always look up to things and to men also, and have eyes for what is great and noble in them rather than for what is small and mean. A traveller who has lost the gift of admiring would far better stay at home. But we may admire and yet praise with discrimination and moderation. There are people with whom everything is grand, awfully grand, tiemendous, colossal, or, as the French say, pyramidal ; m fact, to use a more homely expression, all their geese are swans. I do not speak of people who admire because what they admire is somehow connected with themselves. When parents admire their children or grandchildren, when teachers praise their pupils, when every one declares his own college, it may be, his own boat, his own university, his own country, the best in the world, we may call it parental love, appreciation of rising merit, loyalty and patriotism, and all the rest, though in the end we cannot help suspecting that there is in all this a minute dash of selfish- ness.
But even apart from all selfish motives, there are people who cannot resist giving a high colouring to
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all they have seen or heard, who delight in the marvel] ous, if only to make people stare, and who enjoy that subtle sense of superiority which arises from having seen or heard what nobody else has seen or is ever likely to see or hear. Nearly all ghost stories of which we hear so much at present arise, I believe, from that source. We all know perfectly well that no one has ever seen a ghost ; for a ghost that can be seen, that is, produce vibrations which impinge on our eyes, must be something material, and ceases ipso facto to be a ghost. But there seems to be something distinguished and aristocratic in having seen a ghost. It is like having been presented to the Pope or the Sultan, or like having seen the sea-serpent. To express any doubt or to attempt anything like cross-examination is considered as almost rude, if not unorthodox. Here lies the real danger of travellers, and here is one source of what we call travellers’ tales. But there is another source, namely simple misapprehension. Unless a traveller is familiar with the language of the people whom he undertakes to describe, misunderstandings are inevitable. We all know the mistakes which Frenchmen make when describing the manners and customs of the English, and if we have our laugh at them, we may be quite sure that they have their laugh at us. I remember a distinguished friend of mine whose book on England has become classical in France, expressing his surprise to me that his English landlady had brought him a beef-steak with buttered toast. To him this was but another proof of the low state ot culinary art in England. The fact was, the poor woman had taken his pronunciation of the word jiotatoes for buttered
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toast, and bad carried out his orders as well as she could, (in pied de la lettre. If that happens in our days of tiee international intercourse, how much more must an ancient Greek, when travelling alone in Egypt or Persia, have been liable to misunderstand what he heard and saw, and what could hardly be explained to him except by signs and gestures? Nor must we forget that there are people who take a mischievous pleasure in telling strangers what is supposed to amuse them, but what they are hardly intended to believe. If a F f enchman were to ask an Englishman whethei husbands may still sell their wives in Smithfield market, I should not be at all surprised if, from sheer delight in mischief, he were told by some wag to go to the market and convince himself of the cruelty of the English law and of English husbands. It happened to me only the other day that a most intelligent German professor, who had been dining in several colleges, assured me that in Oxford men and women went about in the streets ringing a bell to summon the undergraduates from the streets to their dinners in Hall. Some friend had told him so, he had carefully entered it in his note-book, and I had the greatest difficulty in persuading him that he had been chaffed, and that the men who rang the bell in the streets were simply trying to sell the Oxford Times. lien were much the same thousands of years ago as they are now, and there is no disrespect in supposing that what happened to a German professor in Oxford might have happened to Herodotus in Egypt or to Ctesias in Persia.
Herodotus was not himself in India, nor had he any books on India which he could have consulted except
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those of Skylax and Hekataeus. But though he did not reach India he was in Persia, and Persia and India were such near neighbours that there were probably many commercial travellers from India in Persia, and from Persia in India. Certainly some of the things he tells us about India sound very much like stories of commercial travellers, possibly misunderstood by Herodotus himself, or palmed off on him by a waggish fellow traveller. He probably asked how it came to pass that India was so rich in gold, and he was told (iii. 102) that in the desert north of Kashmir there were ants larger than foxes, who dug up the gold. He believed it. How an animal can be an ant with six legs, and yet as large as a fox with four legs, he does not explain. Some of these ants, however, he tells us, and had probably been told so himself, were caught and brought to Persia. These fox-like ants, or ant-like foxes, he says, make themselves dwellings beneath the earth, and in doing so dig up the sand, which is full of gold. In order to collect this gold the Indians tie three camels together, a female in the middle, one that has just had a foal, and two males on each side. The rider sits on the female camel, and after he has filled his bags with gold he rides away full gallop, followed by the ants, who, it seems, want to recover their gold. The female camel, wishing to get home to her young one, runs so fast that the rider escapes from the pursuit of the ants, and brings home his bags full of gold.
Many explanations have been proposed of these ants. A recent traveller suggested that the ants were simply the inhabitants of the country who lived in caves and were clothed in a peculiar way. But many
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years ago, in 1843 Professor Wilson bad called attention to the gold mentioned in the Mahabharata, and brought as tribute to Yudbishi/dra from the Tibetan borderlands. This gold is called in Sanskrit ant-gold, because it is dug up by ants which are called pipilikas in Sanskrit 2.
Now here we clearly see that the poet of the Mahabharata believed that the so-called ant-gold was dug up by ants. Everything else must have been added by the Indians who told the Persians, or by the Persians who told Herodotus. But we may go even a step further. Pipilika, or ant-gold, need not have meant gold dug up by ants, but gold found almost on the surface, so that ants might dig it up. Travellers’ tales could easily have supplied all the rest. When we speak of virgin-gold, we do not mean that it was dug up by virgins, but that it is as pure as a virgin. In the same manner, gold lying so near the surface that it might be dug up by ants could well have been called ant-gold.
The Greek writer who is responsible for most travellers tales about India is Ctesias, who lived in Persia as physician to the king Artaxerxes Mnemon. His books on India and Persia are lost, but they have often been quoted, and there is a large collection of fragments. He had a very bad reputation even among the ancient Greeks on account of the incredi- ble stories which he told. In fact he is simply called a liar. But it should be stated that many of his in- credible stories are not pure inventions, but were due
1 Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc., vii. p. 143.
2 Tad vai pipilikam nama uddhn'taw yat pipilikaU ffMarupaw dronamayam aharshu/i pungraso rm'pa/t.
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to such misunderstandings as are almost inevitable between people speaking different languages. We know, for instance, that the Hindus were very fond of describing hostile neighbours as evil spirits or Rakshasas. All the hideous features which their imagination had conjured up in describing uncanny spirits, ghosts, ogres, and goblins were afterwards transferred to the more or less savage tribes with whom they came in contact in India, or on the frontiers of India. It is not unusual, even with us, to hear the Kafirs talked of as black devils. No wonder that travellers who heard these descriptions of half-imaginary beings, or of black devils, should have taken them for descriptions of real beings in India. Anyhow, we can prove in several cases that what Ctesias and others represent as real monsters living in some part of India correspond with the devils of Hindu folklore. He tells us, for instance, of a real race of men who lived on the mountains where the Indian reed grows, and where their number, he says, is no less than 30,000. Their wives bear offspring once only in their whole lifetime. Their children have teeth of perfect whiteness, both the upper set and the under, and the hair both of their head and of their eyebrows is from their infancy quite grey, whether they be boys or girls. Indeed, every man among them, till he reaches his thirtieth year, has all the hair on his body white, but from that time forward it begins to turn black, and by the time they are sixty there is not a hair to be seen upon them but what is black. These people, both men and women alike, have eight fingers on each hand and eight toes on each foot. They are a very warlike
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people, and five thousand of them, armed with bows and spears, follow the banners of the king of the Indians. Their ears, he adds, are so large that they cover their arms as far as the elbows, while at the same time they cover all the back, and the one ear touches the other.
Now this is clearly a traveller’s tale, and yet it is not a mere invention, but, like most fables, it has a kernel ot truth surrounded by a film of misunder- standing. I mean, the Indians themselves had imagined monsters of that description, and had intro- duced them into their popular poetry as either hostile and fiendish powers, or, in some cases, as helpful spirits also. We find exactly the same in our own mediaeval poetry, and while there is a certain same- ness and tameness about the angels which human imagination has called into existence, the brood of devils, whether in poetry or in painting, displays a, most wonderful wealth and variety of imagination. It seems to admit of no doubt that Ctesias or his friends, whether Persians or Indians— he tells us that he actually saw Indians, two women and five men,
and states that their complexion was fair, not black
mistook these more or less legitimate creations of a wild fancy for real beings. Some of their features can be clearly traced back to their true source, while others may or may not be embellishments, due to his witnesses, or to his own excited brain. The Indians are, for instance, perfectly well acquainted with a race called Ekagarbhas, of which the Greek kvorU rovres may be a literal translation. Their women, according to the Purauas, have offspring once only in their whole life, but instead of living on the Indus or
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Ganges, they are located by the Hindu poets in a division of the terrestrial heaven. In the epic poetry of India 1 another race is mentioned called Kamapravarana (lit. those who used their ears as a covering), who dwelt in the southern region. Skylax already had mentioned a race whom he calls ’UtoXikvoi, having shovel-sized ears, and at a later time Mega- sthenes also speaks of ’ Evootokoltcu , that is, people who slept in their ears. It is possible that these were races who had artificially distended their ears, a custom which we find among other savages also, but it is possible also that what are called ears were originally lappets, made of skins or metal, protecting the ears in battle ; nay, it has been suggested that, as in the case of the god Ganesa, some of these imaginary races were represented with elephant-heads, in which the ears would naturally form a very prominent feature.
However that may be, I think we are justified in saying that Ctesias was not a simple liar, or a traveller who thought he could say anything as long as it amused his readers. It seems that he simply lent a willing ear to the more or less imaginative Orientals with whom he came in contact. He had a taste for the marvellous, he seized on it, and allowed himself to magnify what had caught his own fancy. The temptation was much greater in his time, as there was no one likely to control his statements or to contradict him. This, I believe, is the genesis of most travellex-s’ tales ; and what is curious is, that there has always been a large public delighting in what is marvellous and absurd, nay, taking an actual pride in their ability to believe it all.
1 Maliabli. iii. 297; v. 16137.
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Marvellous stories about India continued to be told, not only in ancient times, when there was little chance of checking them, hut during the whole of the Middle Ages. Even Marco Polo cannot be quite absolved from the charge of romancing, and it is curious to observe how some of the very stories which we see in Ctesias turn up again in Marco Polo’s Travels. Ctesias speaks, for instance, of people with heads of dogs, the Kynohephaloi, and he states that they have large and hairy tails, both men and women. The story of the tails may possibly be traced back to such names as VunaZ/sepa, $unaApu/c&Aa, $unolangula, all meaning Dog-tail, and belonging to persons mentioned in the Veda. We have lately heard a good deal of how it came to pass that during the Middle Ages the French believed that Englishmen had tails °(Angli caudati). That the heads of certain savage races were like the heads of dogs is, no doubt, within the limits of possibility, and that they were black, had teeth, tails, and voices of dogs, would soon follow. Some baboons are called Kynokephaloi, and as we know from the Ramayana that the army of Rama included baboons or Vaneevas, who, however, like the Kynokephaloi of Ctesias, understood and spoke the language of the people (p. 35), we see here, too, some vague elements from which Ctesias could well have framed his fairy-tales. What is curious is, that Marco Polo, when describing the Andaman Islanders, should use the same expression, and describe them as people having heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are, he says, just like big mastiff-dogs — they are no better than wild beasts.
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The persistence of these stories is extraordinary. Not long ago Babu Sohari Das, in his book on the manners and customs of the Hindus, related that an old woman once told him that her husband, a sepoy in the British army, had told her that he had himself seen a people who slept on one ear and covered them- selves with the other L But I must linger no longer on these early travellers’ tales about India, and proceed to those of more recent origin.
One would have thought that after the discovery of the sea road to India in the sixteenth century, and still more after the discovery of the ancient literature of India, through Sir William Jones and his fellow workers, these tales would have ceased. And so they did to a certain extent. We hear no more of races with dogs’ heads, with one eye, or with one leg on which they managed to run faster than anybody else, nor of people with one foot so large that they were able to use it as a parasol when lying on their backs in hot weather. But a new and equally strange class of fables has taken their place. India continued to be considered as the home of a people possessed of mysterious wisdom. As it had been proved that Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, was clearly related to Greek, Latin, and the other Aryan lan- guages, it was supposed that all these languages were derived from Sanskrit, and came from India; and, as some of the Greek deities had been traced back to Vedic deities, India was believed to have been the birthplace of all the Greek gods. India was, in fact,
1 Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindus. Benares, 1S60. Ind. Ant. (May, 1877), p. 133, n.
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looked upon as a kind of primaeval paradise, and people felt thoroughly convinced that if the Brahmans would only be more communicative we should find in their ancient literature the germs of all the wisdom and religions of the world, Judaism and Christianity not excluded. The Pandits were sent for. They were told what, according to the Old Testament, the history of the world had really been, how there had been an Adam and Eve, and a Deluge, and a Noah, with his three sons ; and afterwards an Abraham and his wife Sarah, and all the rest. They were flattered by being assured that all these things must occur in their own sacred writings, and that otherwise they would not be true. They were actually offered rewards if they would only communicate what was wanted. And here, as elsewhere, demand created supply, and a very able scholar, Lieutenant Wilford, sent a number of articles to be published in the Asiatic Researches, in which Adam and Eve, and the Deluge, and Noah, with his sons, Abraham and Sarah, nay, even Isaac' appeared all in due order. These articles produced a great consternation all over Europe. Sir William Jones was asked to examine the Sanskrit originals, and his decision was in favour of their genuineness’ What more could be required? There were the Sanskrit MSS., and in them there were Adam and Eve, and Noah, and Abraham, and all the rest. It was no use to remonstrate and to say that such things were impossible, quite as impossible as when some years ago Shapirah offered the original MSS. of the Pentateuch, written by Moses himself. Scholars might say that Moses did not write, that no cursive Hebrew alphabet existed at that early time; the majority
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were, as usual, in favour of the impossible— viz. of our possessing at last the original scrolls written by the hand of Moses. So it was here. Scholars might show that after the Semitic nations had once become Semitic, and the Aryan nations Aryan, there was no community of language and religion possible between them. The more incredible things are, the more ready people seem to be to believe them. However, the Nemesis came at last. The MSS. of Lieutenant "Wilford were examined once more, and it was found that the leaves containing the Old Testament stories had all been skilfully foisted in. Of course, Pandits are able to write Sanskrit even now, and tar better than our classical scholais can write Latin. However, the curious part is, that even after the whole matter had been cleared up, alter Sir William Jones had openly declared that he had been deceived, after Lieutenant Wilford had in the most honourable way expressed his regret for what had happened, these articles crop up again and again, like Australian rabbits. They continue to be quoted, they are quoted even now, till it seems almost im- possible ever to exterminate them.
Another more recent case is that of a Frenchman, M. Jacolliot. He was President of the Court of Justice at Chandernagore, and, being a judge, I need not say how constantly he is quoted by his admirers as a judge, and as the highest authority in judging of evidence. He has written a number of books . I saw the other day an advertisement of his works in twenty-five volumes. The best known is his La Bible dans VInde. In it his object is to show that our civilization, our religion, our legends, our gods,
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lia\e come to us from India, after passing in succession through Egypt, Persia, Judaea, Greece, and Italy. This statement, we are told, has been admitted by almost all Oriental scholars. This is a strange as- sertion. I do not know of a single Oriental scholar who has admitted this statement. Even Professor Whitney in America calls M. Jacolliot ‘a bungler and a humbug V The Old and New Testaments, we are told by M. Jacolliot, are found in the Vedas, and the texts quoted by the French judge in support of his assertion are said to leave it without doubt. Brahma created Adima — i.e. Adam — and gave him for com- panion Heva. He appointed the island of Ceylon lor their residence. Then he gives us a most charmino- idyll of the life of Adima and Heva in paradise^ extracts from which may be read in Selected Essays n. p. 479.
No one acquainted with Sanskrit or Pali literature can doubt for a single moment that all the so-called translations from ancient Sanskrit texts are mere invention, whatever M. Jacolliot’s friends may say to the contrary. All that can possibly be said for him is what I said about Herodotus and Ctesias. He may have misunderstood what was told him, he may have received buttered toast instead of potatoes, or he may have been taken in as Ctesias was, nay’ as Lieutenant Wilford was. He confesses as much himself. ‘ One day,’ he writes 2, ‘ when we were read- ing the translation of Manu by Sir W. Jones, a note ed us to consult the Indian commentator, Kulhika Bhatta, when we found an allusion to the sacrifice of a son by his father prevented by God Himself Isis> '• P- 47- 2 Selected Essays, ii. p. 474.
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after He had commanded it. We then had only one idee fixe — namely, to find again in the dark mass of the religious books of the Hindus the original account of°that event. We should never have suc- ceeded but for “ the complaisance ” of a Brahman with whom we were reading Sanskrit, and wTho, yielding to our request, brought us from the library of his pagoda the works of the theologian Ramatsariar, which have yielded us such precious assistance in this
volume.’
Now I say again there is no scholar who knows Sanskrit or Pali, whether he has lived in India or not, who would not simply smile at all this. I said so when Jacolliot’s book first appeared, and I am sorry to say I was in consequence insulted and almost assaulted in my own house by an irate admirer of Jacolliot’s. However, even Jacolliot has been outbid by M. Edouard Schuri, whose eloquent article on the Legend of Krishna was actually accepted and pub- lished by the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1888,
pp. 285-321. .
You can easily understand that it is represented as the height of professional conceit that scholars like myself, who have never been in India, should venture to doubt statements made by persons who have spent many years in that country. This has always been a very favourite argument. If Sanskrit scholars differ from writers who have been twenty years iD India, they are told that they have no right to speak ; that there are MSS. in India which no one has ever seen, and that there are native scholars in possession of mysteries of which we poor professors have no 1 Nineteenth Century, May, 1893.
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conception. When asked for the production of those ifeb., 01 for an introduction to these learned Mahatmas tor India is not so difficult to reach in these days as it was. in the days of Marco Polo-they are never forthcoming Nay, the curious thing is that real bansknt scholars who have spent their lives in India and who know Sanskrit and Pali well, know abso- lutely nothing of such MSS., nothing of such teachers
0 mysteiies. They are never known except to people who are ignorant of Sanskrit or Pali. That seems to be the first condition for being admitted to the esoteric wisdom of India. The fact is, that there is no longer any secret about Sanskrit literature, and
believe that we in England know as much about it as most native scholars. Anyhow, such extracts as M. Jacolliot produces from MSS. brought to him are what every Sanskrit scholar would call at once the horns of a hare, or the children of a barren woman.
1 hey have no existence ; they are pure inventions.
late years the treasures of Sanskrit MSS. still
thit Ti8hm \ndm haVe beCn S0 thorougMy ransacked hat It has become quite useless to appeal to hidden
,SS: suPP°s«l to contain the ancient mysteries of the religion of India. If a new text is discovered, there is joy among all true Sanskrit scholars in India and Europe. But the very idea that there are secret and sacred MSS., or that there ever was any myZy about the rekgwn of the Brahmans, is by this time thoroughly exploded. Whatever there was of secret religious doctrines in India consisted simply of doctrines or the reception of which a certain previous trainino- was required. Every member of the three upper caste! had free access to the Vedas, and if the fourth clals
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were not allowed to learn the Veda by heart, this arose from a social far more than from a religious prejudice. Again, it is quite true that the doctrines of the Vedanta or the Upamshads were sometimes called Raha&ya, that is, secret ; but this, too mean no more than that teachers should not teach these portions of the Veda except to persons of a certain age and properly qualified for these higher studies. When we hear Aristotle called the Smaller Mysteries and Plato the Greater Mysteries, this does not mean a their writings were kept secret. It only meant t students must first have learnt a certain amount of Greek and have qualified themselves for these more advanced studies, Vet as students at Oxford advance step by step from the smaller to the greater mysteues, S is. from Smalls to Mods., and from Moc s fo Greats. Greats may be great mysteries to a tie man, but no one is excluded from participation in them, if only he feels inclined to be initiated.
But if there was nothing mysterious about Biali- manism, it is sometimes thought there mig e so“® mysteries hidden in Buddhism. A schoiarhke study of Buddhism came later in Europe than ^ scholailike study of Brahmanism, and the amount of iu i \ <■
was written on Buddhism before the knowle ge o Pili and Sanskrit enabled scholars to read the sacie texts of the Buddhists for themselves is simply ap- palling Buddhism was declared to be the original Sion of mankind, more ancient than Brahmanism, more ancient than the religion of the Teutonic races, for who could doubt that Buddha was the same name as that of Wodan ? Christianity itself was represented as a mere plagiarism, its doctrines and legends weie
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTEEIC BUDDHISM. 99
supposed to have been borrowed from Buddhism and we were told that the best we could do in order to ecome real Christians was to become Buddhists, eie exists at present a new sect of people who call themselves Christum Buddhists, and they are said to
/LTT?UV!'; En«land and ™ France. The Journal
Z ,ft i °f~ V.oth °f MaF' i89°' sPea^ of 3°>°oo BouAdHstes Chretiens at Paris. In India, more par- ticularly ,n Ceylon, their number is supposed to be much larger.
These are serious matters, and cannot be treated merely as bad jokes or crazes. It is, indeed, very important to observe that there is some foundation for all these crazes, nay, that there is method in that adness. There is, for instance, a tradition of a
Rtlglm it v V” T11 “ “ the 01d Testament ; there is in tie Veda the story of a father willing, at
command of the god Varuna, to sacrifice his son.
or can it be denied that there is a very great likeness
between some moral doctrines and certain legends of
this ’ t tr trd Gh,rlstlanity- W« ought to rejoice at this with aU our heart, but there is no necessity for
admitting anything like borrowing or stealing on one si e or the other. A comparative study of the re- ligions of antiquity has widened our horizon so much and has so thoroughly established the universality of
the Tenacr°Unt f reIigi°US “'nth> that if we found the ten Commandments in the sacred books of the
uddhists we should never think of theft and robbery
the D?1 iuherit““- We actually find
the Dasasila, the Ten Commandments, in Buddhism
Moses Vis d°ff ^ fal' ?* Ten Commaudments of OSes. It is different when we come to facts and
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100
Wends. When it is pointed out that with regard to these also there are great similarities between the 1 e of Christ and the life of Buddha, I feel bound to acknowledge that such similarities exist and tha , though many may be accounted for by the common springs of human nature, there are a few left which are startling, and which as yet remain a riddle.
It is owing, no doubt, to these coincidences that a very remarkable person, whose name has lately become familiar in England also, felt strongly attracted to the study of Buddhism. I mean of course, the late Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Esoteric Buddhism. I have never met her, though she often promised, or rather threatened, she would meet me face to face at Oxford. She came to Oxford and preached, I am told, for six hours before a number of young men, but she did not inform me of her presence. At first she treated me almost like a Mahatma, but when there was no response I became, like all Sanskrit scholars, a very untrustwoit y authority. I have watched her career for many years from her earliest appearance in America to her death in London last year. She founded her Theosophic Society at New York in 1875. The object of that society was to experiment practically in the occu powers of Nature, and to collect and disseminate amono- Christians information about Oriental religious philosophies. Nothing could be said against sue objects, if only they were taken up honestly, an with the necessary scholarly preparation Latei , however, new objects were added, namely to spread among the benighted heathen such evidences as to the practical results of Christianity as will at least give
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 101
both sides of the story to the communities among which missionaries are at work. With this view the society undertook to establish relations with associa- tions and individuals throughout the East, to whom it furnished authenticated reports of the ecclesiastical crimes and misdemeanours, schisms, heresies, con- troversies and litigations, doctrinal differences and Biblical criticisms and revisions with which the press of Chiistian Europe and America constantly teems. ^ ou may easily imagine what the outcome of such a society would be, and how popular its Black Book would become in India and elsewhere. However, I am quite willing to give Madame Blavatsky credit for good motrv es, at least at the beginning of her career. Like many people in our time, she was, I believe, in search of a religion which she could honestly embrace. She was a clever, wild, and excitable girl, and anybody who wishes to take a charitable view of her later hysterical writings and performances should read the biographical notices, lately published by her own sister, in the Nouvelle Revue. It is the fault of those who guide the religious education of young men and women, and who simply require from them belief in certain facts and dogmas, without ever explaining what belief means, that so many, when they beo-in to think about the different kinds of human know- ledge, discover that they possess no religion at all.
Religion, in order to be real religion, a man’s own leligion, must be searched for, must be discovered, must be conquered. If it is simply inherited or accepted as a matter of course, it often happens that in latei years it falls away, and has either to be reconquered or to be replaced by another religion.
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Madame Blavatsky was one of those who want more than a merely traditional and formal faith, and, in looking round, she thought she could find what she wanted in India. We are ready to give Madame Blavatsky full credit for deep religious sentiments, more particularly for the same strong craving for a spiritual union with the Divine which has inspired so many of the most devout thinkers among Christians, as well as among so-called heathen. Nowhere has that craving found fuller expression than among the philosophers of India, particularly among the Vedanta philosophers. Like Schopenhauer, she seems to have discovered through the dark mists of imperfect transla- tions some of the brilliant rays of truth which issue from the Upanishads and the ancient Vedanta philo- sophy of India. .
To India, therefore, she went with some friends, but, unfortunately, with no knowledge of the lan- guage, and with very little knowledge of what she might expect to find there, and where she ought to look for native teachers who should initiate her in the mysteries of the sacred lore of the countiy. That such lore and such mysteries existed she never doubted ; and she thought that she had found at last what she wanted in Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder of the Arya-Samaj. His was, no doubt, a remarkable and powerful mind, but he did not understand English ; nor did Madame Blavatsky understand either the modern or the ancient languages of the country. Still there sprang up between the two a mutual though mute admiration, and a number of followers soon gathered round this interesting couple. However, this mute admiration did not last long, and when the two
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 103
began to understand each other better they soon dis- covered that they could not act together. I am afraid it can no longer be doubted that Dayananda Sarasvati was as deficient in moral straightforwardness as his American pupil. Hence they were both disappointed in each other, and Madame Blavatsky now determined to found her own religious sect — in fact, to found a new religion, based chiefly on the old religions of India.
Unfortunately, she took it into her head that it was incumbent on every founder of a religion to perform miracles, and here it can no longer be denied that she often resorted to the most barefaced tricks and im- positions in order to gain adherents in India. In this she succeeded more than she herself could have hoped for. The natives felt flattered by being told that they were the depositaries of ancient wisdom, far more valuable than anything that European philosophy or the Christian religion had ever supplied. The natives are not often flattered in that way, and they naturally swallowed the bait. Others were taken aback by the assurance with which this new prophetess spoke of her intercourse with unseen spirits, of letters flying- through the air from Tibet to Bombay, of showers of flowers falling from the ceiling of a dining-room, of saucers disappearing from a tea-tray and being found in a garden, and of voices and noises proceeding from spirits through a mysterious cabinet. You may ask how educated people could have been deceived by such ordinary jugglery ; but with some people the power of believing seems to grow with the absurdity of what is to be believed. When I expressed my regret to one of her greatest admirers that Madame
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Blavatsky should have lowered herself by these vulgar exhibitions, I was told, with an almost startling frankness, that no religion could be founded without miracles, and that a religion, if it was to grow, must he manured. These are the ipsissima verba of one who knew Madame Blavatsky better than anybody else ; and after that it was useless for us to discuss this subject any further.
But, as I said before, I am quite willing to allow that Madame Blavatsky started with good intentions, that she saw and was dazzled by a glimmering of truth in various religions of the world, that she believed in the possibility of a mystic union of the soul with God, and that she was most anxious to discover in a large number of books traces of that theosophic intuition which re- unites human nature with the Divine. Unfortunately, she was without the tools to dig for those treasures in the ancient literature of the world, and her mistakes in quoting from Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin would be amusing if they did not appeal to our sympathy rather for a woman who thought that she could fly though she had no wings, not even those of Icarus.
Her book, called Isis Unveiled , in two volumes of more than 600 pages each, bristling with notes and references to every kind of authority, both wise and foolish, shows an immense amount of drudgery and misdirected ingenuity. To quote her blunders would be endless. Of what character they are will be seen when I quote what she says about the serpent being the good or the evil spirit b ‘In this case,’ she writes, ‘the serpent is the Ayathodaimon, the good spirit; in its opposite aspect it is the Kahothodai-
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 105
mon, the bad one.’ I believe that this mistake, when I pointed it out to an undergraduate friend of mine at Oxford, saved him from enrolling himself as an Esoteric Buddhist. Again, speaking as if she knew the whole of Vedic literature, she says1: ‘Certainly, nowhere in the Veda can be found the coarseness and downright immorality of language that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.’
It is very difficult, when you deal with ancient races who go about almost naked, to decide what is immodest and what is not. But, speaking not alto- gether without book, I may say that the Veda does contain certain passages which would not bear transla- tion into English.
Again, what shall we say to the argument that the Vedas must have been composed before the Deluge, because the Deluge is not mentioned in them2? Now, first of all, the Deluge is mentioned in the Brahmawa ot the Yai/ur-veda, and Madame Blavatsky knows it ; and secondly, are we really to suppose that every book which does not mention the Deluge was written before the Deluge ? What an enormous library of antediluvian books we should possess ! M. Jacolliot, as usual, outbids Madame Blavatsky. He writes :
‘ The Vedas and Manu, those monuments of old Asiatic thought existed far earlier than the diluvian period ; this is an incontro- vertible fact, having all the value of an historical truth, for, besides the tradition which shows Vishnu himself as saving the Vedas from the Deluge a tradition which, notwithstanding its legendary form must certainly rest upon a real fact -it has been remarked that neither of these sacred books mentions the cataclysm, while the PurAnas and the Mahabharata describe it with the minutest detail which is a proof of the priority of the former. The Vedas certainly
1 ii. p. So.
2 ii. p. 727.
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would never have failed to contain a few hymns on the terrible disaster which, of all other natural manifestations, must have struck the imagination of the people who witnessed it.’
Such hymns could only have been written by Noah or by Manu, and we possess, unfortunately, no poetic relics of either of these poets, not even in the Yeda.
I must quote no more, nor is more evidence wanted, to show that Madame Blavatsky and her immediate followers were simply without bricks and mortar when they endeavoured to erect the lofty structure which they had conceived in their minds. I give full credit to her good intentions, at least at first. I readily acknowledge her indefatigable industry. She began life as an enthusiast ; but enthusiasts, as Goethe says, after they have come to know the world, and have been deceived by the world, are apt to become deceivers themselves.
The number of her followers, however, has become so large in India, and particularly in Ceylon, that the movement started by her can no longer be ignored. There are Esoteric Buddhists in England also, in America, and in France ; but I doubt whether in these countries they can do much harm. To her followers Madame Blavatsky is a kind of inspired prophetess. To me it seems that she began life as an enthusiast, though not without a premature acquaintance with the darker sides of life, nor without a feminine weak- ness for notoriety. After a time, however, she ceased to be truthful both to herself and to others. But although her work took a wrong direction, I do not wish to deny that here and there she caught a glimpse of those wonderful philosophical intuitions which are treasured up in the sacred books of the East. Un-
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 107
fortunately she had fallen an easy prey to some persons whom she consulted, whoever they were, whether Mahatmas from Tibet, or Panditammanyas in Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras. Disappointed in Dayananda Sarasvati and his often absurd interpreta- tions of the Veda, she turned to Buddhism, though again without an idea how or where to study that religion.
No one can study Buddhism unless he learns Sanskrit and Pali, so as to be able to read the canonical books, and at all events to spell the names correctly. Madame Blavatsky couid do neither, though she was quite clever enough, if she had chosen, to have learnt Sanskrit or Pali. But even her informants must have been almost entirely ignorant of these languages, or they must have practised on her credulity in a most shameless manner. W hether she herself suspected this or not, she certainly showed great shrewdness in withdraw- ing herself and her description of Esoteric Buddhism from all possible control and contradiction. Her Buddhism, she declared, was not the Buddhism which ordinary scholars might study in the canonical books ; hers was Esoteric Buddhism. ‘ It is not in the dead letter of Buddhistical sacred literature/ she says, ‘ that scholars may hope to find the true solution of the meta- physical subtleties of Buddhism. The latter weary the power of thought by the inconceivable profundity of its ratiocination : and the student is never farther from truth than when he believes himself nearest its discovery1. We are told, also2, that there was a pre- historic Buddhism which merged later into Brahman- ism, and that this was the religion preached by Jesus
1 i. p. 289. 2 ii. p. 123.
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and the early Apostles. After we have been told that there was a Buddhism older than the Vedas — and we might say with the same right that there was a Christianity older than Moses — we are told next ofapre-Vedic Brahmanism, and, to make all contro- versy impossible, Madame Blavatsky tells us that ‘ when she uses the term Buddhism she does not mean to imply by it either the exoteric Buddhism instituted by the followers of Gautama Buddha, nor the modern Buddhistic religion, but the secret philosophy of $akyamuni, which, in its essence, is identical with the ancient wisdom religion of the sanctuary, the pre- Vedic Brahmanism.’ ! Gautama,’ we are assured, ‘ had a doctrine for his “ elect,” and another for the outside masses.’ Then she adds apologetically, ‘ If both Buddha and Christ, aware of the great danger of furnishing an uncultivated populace with the double- edged weapon of knowledge which gives power, left the innermost corner of the sanctuary in the pro- foundest shade, who that is acquainted with human nature can blame them for it ? ’ Then why did she, being evidently so well acquainted with human nature, venture to divulge these dangerous esoteric doctrines ? Though I must say what she does divulge seems very harmless.
With such precautions Madame Blavatsky’s Esoteric Buddhism was safe against all cavil and all criticism. As no one could control the statements of Ctesias as to a race of people who used their ears as sheets to sleep in, no one could control the statements of the Mahatmas from Tibet as to a Buddhism for Madame Blavatsky to dream in. I do not say that no Mahatmas exist in India or in Tibet. I simply say that modern
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 109
India is the worst country for studying Buddhism. India is, no doubt, the birthplace of Buddha and of Buddhism. But Buddhism, as a popular religion, has vanished from India, so that the religious census of the country knows hardly of any Buddhists, except in Ceylon and in some districts bordering on Tibet or Burmah. As no Buddhist teachers could be found in Bombay or Calcutta, some imaginary beings had to be created by Madame Blavatsky and located safely in Tibet, as yet the most inaccessible country in the world. Madame Blavatsky’s powers of creation were very great, whether she wished to have intercourse with Mahatmas, astral bodies, or ghosts of any kind. Heie is a list of the ghosts for whose real existence she vouches : ‘ peris, devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves, dwarfs, trolls, norns, nisses, kobolds, brownies, necks, stromkarls, undines, nixies, salamanders, goblins, banshees, kelpies, pixies, moss people, good people, good neighbours, wild women, men of peace, white ladies, and many more.’ Shall we, then, concede, she asks, that all who have seen these creatures were hallucinated ? It is difficult to answer such a question without seeming rude. I should certainly say they weie hallucinated, and that they were using words of which they knew neither the meaning nor, what is even better, the etymology. So long as Madame Blavatsky placed her Mahatmas beyond the Himalayas both she and her witnesses were quite safe from any detectives or cross-examining lawyers. I saw, how- evei, in the papers not long ago that even the believers in Madame Blavatsky begin to be sceptical about these trans-Himalayan Mahatmas. At the annual Theo- sophical Convention, held at Chicago in 1892, a lady
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asked why outsiders were always told that the Mahatma sages dwelt beyond the Himalayan moun- tains. Mr. Judge, who is now the head of the American Theosophists, replied that it was for seclu- sion. ‘ If they were anywhere in the United States,’ he said, ‘ they would be pestered and interviewed by reporters.’ This admitted of no reply, particularly in America.
We, the pretended authorities of the West, are told to go to the Brahmans and Lamaists of the Far Orient, and respectfully ask them to impart to us the alphabet of true science. But she gives us no addresses, no letters of introduction to her Tibetan friends, though in another place she tells us
< that travellers have met these adepts on the shores of the sacred Ganges, brushed against them in the silent ruins of Thebes, and in the mysterious deserted chambers of Luxor. Within the halls upon whose blue and golden vaults the weird signs attract attention, but whose secret meaning is never penetrated by the idle gazers, they have been seen, but seldom recognized. Historical memoirs have recorded their presence in the brilliantly illuminated salons of European aristocracy. They have been encountered again on the arid and desolate plains of the Great Sahara, as in the caves of Elephanta. They may be found everywhere, but make them- selves known only to those who have devoted their lives to unselfish study, and are not likely to turn back ’ (p. 17).
We see that Madame Blavatsky might have achieved some success if she had been satisfied to follow in the footsteps of Eider Haggard, Sinnet, or Marion Crawford ; but her ambition was to found a religion, not to make money by writing new Arabian Nights.
But when we come to examine what these deposi- taries of primaeval wisdom, the Mahatmas of Tibet and of the sacred Ganges, are supposed to have taught her we find no mysteries, nothing very new, nothing very
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. Ill
old, but simply a medley of well-known though generally misunderstood Brahmanic or Buddhistic doctrines. There is nothing that cannot be traced back to generally accessible Brahmanic or Buddhistic sources, only everything is muddled or misunderstood. It I were asked what Madame Blavatsky’s Esoteric Buddhism really is. I should say it was Buddhism mis- understood, distorted, caricatured. There is nothing- in it beyond what was known already, chiefly from books that are now antiquated. The most ordinary terms are misspelt and misinterpreted. Mahdtma, for instance, is a well-known Sanskrit name applied to men who have retired from the world, who, by means of a long ascetic discipline, have subdued the passions of the flesh and gained a reputation for sanctity and knowledge. That these men are able to perform most startling feats and to suffer the most terrible tortures is perfectly true. Some of them, though not many, are distinguished as scholars also ;
so much so that Mahatma — literally ‘great-souled ’
has become an honorary title. I have myself had the honour of being addressed by that name in many letters written in Sanskrit, and sent to me — not, indeed, through the air, but through the regular post- office— from Benares to Oxford. That some of these so-called Mahatmas are impostors is but too well known to all who have lived in India. I am quite ready, therefore, to believe that Madame Blavatsky and her friends were taken in by persons who pre- tended to be Mahatmas, though it has never been explained in what language even they could have communicated their Esoteric Buddhism to their Euro- pean pupil. Madame Blavatsky herself was, according
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to her own showing, quite unable to gauge then- knowledge or to test their honesty, and she naturally shared the fate of Ctesias, of Lieutenant Wdford, and
of M. Jacolliot. . .
That there are men in India, knowing a certain amount of Sanskrit and a little English, who will say yes to everything you ask them, I know from sad experience ; and it would be very unfair to say that such weaklings exist in India only. If people wish to he deceived, there are always those who are rear y to deceive them. This, I think, is the most charitable interpretation which we can put on the beginnings so that extraordinary movement which is known y >e name of Esoteric Buddhism, nay, which, on account of the similarities which exist between Buddhism and Christianity, claims in some places the name ot Christian Buddhism. On this so-called Christian Buddhism, and on the real similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, I may have something to say at another time. At present I only wish to