Brahman discomfitures.

The Bráh

man su

premacy estab

lished.

They

make a wise use

of it.

fallen races we read the name afterwards applied to the Ionians or Greeks (Yavanas). The Brahmans of the Middle Land had not only to enforce their supremacy over the powerful warriors of their own kingdoms, but to extend it among the outlying Aryan tribes who had never fully accepted their caste system. This must have been the slow work of ages, and it seems to have led to bitter feuds.

There were moments of defeat, indeed, when Bráhman leaders acknowledged the superiority of the warrior caste. 'None is greater,' says the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, than the Kshattriya; therefore the Bráhman, under the Kshattriya, worships at the royal sacrifice (rájasúya).'1 It seems likely that numbers of the Vaisyas or cultivators would take part with the Kshattriyas, and be admitted into their caste. That the contest was not a bloodless one is attested by many legends, especially that of Parasu-Ráma, or 'Ráma of the Axe.' This hero, who was divinely honoured as the sixth Incarnation of Vishnu, appeared on the scene after alternate massacres by Bráhmans and Kshattriyas had taken place. He fought on the Bráhman side, and covered India with the carcases of the warrior caste. 'Thrice seven times,' says the Sanskrit epic, did he clear the earth of the Kshattriyas,' and so ended in favour of the Bráhmans the long and bloody struggle.

In

It is vain to search into the exact historical value of such legends. They suffice to record an opposition among the early Aryan kingdoms to the claims of the Bráhmans, and the mingled measures of conciliation and force by which that opposition was overcome. The Brahman caste, having established its power, made a wise use of it. From the ancient Vedic times its leaders recognised that if they were to exercise spiritual supremacy, they must renounce earthly pomp. arrogating the priestly function, they gave up all claim to the royal office. They were divinely appointed to be the guides of nations and the counsellors of kings, but they could not be kings themselves. As the duty of the Súdra was to serve, of the Vaisya to till the ground and follow middle-class trades or crafts, so the business of the Kshattriya was with the public enemy, and of the Bráhmans with the national gods.

1 It is easy to exaggerate the significance of this passage, and dangerous to generalize from it. I have to thank Dr. John Muir and Prof. Cowell for notes upon its precise application. Weber describes the rájasúya as 'the consecration of the king.'-Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 54 (1878).

Brahman's

the

House

While the Brahman leaders thus organized the occupations Four of the commonwealth, they also laid down strict rules for their stages of a own caste. They felt that as their functions were mysterious life. and above the reach of other men, so also must be their lives. Each day brought its hourly routine of ceremonies, studies, and duties. Their whole life was mapped out into four clearly defined stages of discipline. For their existence, in its full 1st stage: religious significance, commenced not at birth, but on being Learner invested at the close of childhood with the sacred thread (brahmachári). of the Twice-Born. Their youth and early manhood were to be entirely spent in learning by heart from some Bráhman the inspired Scriptures, tending the sacred fire, and serving their preceptor. Having completed his long studies, the Bráhman (2) The entered on the second stage of his life, as a householder. He holder married and commenced a course of family duties. When he (grihastha). had reared a family, and gained a practical knowledge of the world, he retired into the forest as a recluse, for the third period (3) The Forestof his life; feeding on roots or fruits, and practising his reli- Recluse gious duties with increased devotion. The fourth stage was (vánathat of the ascetic or religious mendicant, wholly withdrawn from prastha). (4) The earthly affairs, and striving to attain a condition of mind Ascetic which, heedless of the joys, or pains, or wants of the body, is (sanintent only on its final absorption into the deity. The Brahman, "yási). in this fourth stage of his life, ate nothing but what was given to him unasked, and abode not more than one day in any village, lest the vanities of the world should find entrance into his heart. Throughout his whole existence, he practised a strict temperance; drinking no wine, using a simple diet, curbing the desires, shut off from the tumults of war, and having his thoughts ever fixed on study and contemplation. What is this world?' says a Bráhman sage.

'It is even as the bough of a tree, on which a bird rests for a night, and in the morning flies away.'

ideal of

life.

It may be objected that so severe a life of discipline could Brahman never be led by any large class of men. And no doubt there have been at all times worldly Bráhmans; and the struggle for existence in modern times has compelled the great majority of the Brahmans to betake themselves to more practical pursuits. But the whole body of Sanskrit literature bears witness to the fact that this ideal life was constantly before their eyes, and that it served to the whole caste as a high standard in its two really essential features of self-culture and self-restraint. Incidents in the history of Buddha, in the 6th century before Christ, show that numbers of Bráhmans at that time lived

H

Brahman rule of

life.

Its hereditary results on the caste.

The work

done by the Bráhmans for India.

according to its rule; and three hundred years later, the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, found the Bráhmans discoursing in their groves, chiefly on life and death. The Chinese travellers, down to the 10th century A.D., attest the survival of the Bráhmanical pattern of the religious life. The whole monastic system of India, and those vast religious revivals which have given birth to the modern sects of Hinduism, are based on the same withdrawal from worldly affairs. At this day, Bráhman colleges, called tols, are carried on without fees, on the old model, at Nadiyá in Bengal, and elsewhere. I can testify, from personal visits, to the stringent self-discipline, and to the devotion to learning for its own sake, often protracted till past middle-life, and sometimes by grey-haired students, in these

retreats.

The Brahmans, therefore, were a body of men who, in an early stage of this world's history, bound themselves by a rule of life the essential precepts of which were self-culture and selfrestraint. As they married within their own caste, begat children only during their prime, and were not liable to lose the finest of their youth in war, they transmitted their best qualities in an ever-increasing measure to their descendants. The Brahmans of the present day are the result of 3000 years of hereditary education and self-restraint; and they have evolved a type of mankind quite distinct from the surrounding population. Even the passing traveller in India marks them. out, alike from the bronze-cheeked, large-limbed, leisureloving Rajput or warrior caste of Aryan descent; and from the dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low-castes of non-Aryan origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Bráhman stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely modelled lips and nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoa-nut shaped skull-the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by the vigour of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept across India after another, dynasties have risen and fallen, religions have spread themselves over the land and disappeared. But since the dawn of history, the Bráhman has calmly ruled; swaying the minds and receiving the homage of the people, and accepted by foreign nations as the highest type of Indian mankind.

The paramount position which the Bráhmans won, resulted, in no small measure, from the benefits which they bestowed. For their own Aryan countrymen, they developed a noble language and literature. The Bráhmans were not only the

priests and philosophers, but also the lawgivers, the administrators, the men of science, and the poets of their race. Their influence on the aboriginal peoples, the hill and forest races of India, was even more important. To these rude remnants of the flint and bronze ages they brought, in ancient times, a knowledge of the metals and the gods. Within the historical period, the Bráhmans have incorporated the mass of the backward races into the social and religious organization of Hinduism. A system of worship is a great comfort to a tropical people, hemmed in by the uncontrolled forces of nature, as it teaches them how to propitiate those mysterious powers, and so tends to liberate their minds from the terrors of the unseen. The reflective life of the Middle Land (Madhya-desha) led the Brahmans to see that the old gods of the Vedic hymns were in reality not supreme beings, but poetic fictions. For when they Brahman theology. came to think the matter out, they found that the sun, the aqueous vapour, the encompassing sky, the wind, and the dawn, could not each be separate and supreme creators, but must have all proceeded from one First Cause. They did not shock the religious sense of the less speculative castes by any public rejection of the Vedic deities. They accepted the old 'Shining Ones' of the Veda as beautiful manifestations of the divine power, and continued to decorously conduct the sacrifices in their honour. But among their own caste, the Bráhmans distinctly enunciated the unity of God. To the Veda, the Brahmanas, and the Sútras, they added a vast body of theological literature, composed at intervals between 800 B.C. and The Upanishads, meaning, according to their great Brahman expounder, 'The Science of God,' and His 'identity with the soul;' the Aranyakas, or 'Tracts for the ForestRecluse; and the much later Puránas, or 'Traditions from of Old,'-contain mystic and beautiful doctrines regarding the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, mingled with less noble dogmas, popular tales, and superstitions. The mass of the people were left to believe in four castes, four Vedas, and many deities. But the higher thinkers among the Brahmans recognised that in the beginning there was but one caste, one Veda, and one God.

1000 A.D.

The old Shining Ones' of the Vedic singers were, indeed, Rise of the no longer suitable deities, either for the life which the Aryans post-Vedic gods. led after they advanced into Southern Bengal, or for the country in which they lived. The Vedic gods were the good 'friends' of the free-hearted warring tribes in Northern India, settled on the banks of fordable streams or of not overpowering rivers.

In Central and South-Eastern Bengal, the Bráhmans required deities whose nature and attributes would satisfy profoundly reflective minds, and at the same time would be commensurate with the stupendous forces of nature amid which they dwelt. The storm-gods (Maruts) of the Veda might suffice to raise the dust-whirlwinds of the Punjab, but they were evidently deities on a smaller scale than those which wielded the irresistible cyclones of Bengal. The rivers, too, had ceased to be merely bountiful givers of wealth, as in the north. Their accumulated waters came down in floods, which buried cities and drowned provinces; wrenching away the villages on their banks, destroying and reproducing the land with an equal balance. The High-born Dawn, the Genial Sun, and the Friendly Day, with the other kind but confused old groups of Vedic deities, gave place to the conception of one god in his three solemn maniThe Hindu festations as Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and triad: Siva the Destroyer and Reproducer. Each of these had his prototype among the Vedic deities; and they remain to this Brahma; hour the three persons of the Hindu triad. Brahma, the Creator, was too abstract an idea to be a popular god; and in my journeys through India, I have only come across a single great seat of his worship at the present day, on the margin of the sacred lake PUSHKARA, near Ajmere. One day of Brahma is 2160 millions of man's years. Vishnu, the Preserver, was a more useful and practical deity. In his ten incarnations, especially in his seventh and eighth as Ráma and Krishna, under many names and in very varied forms, he took the place of the old bright Vedic gods. Siva, the third person of the triad, embodied as Destroyer and Reproducer the profound conception of death as a change of state and an entry into new life. He thus obtained, on the one hand, the special reverence of the mystic and philosophic sects among the Bráhmans; while, on the other, his terrible aspects associated him alike with the Rudra, or 'God of Roaring Tempests,' of the Veda, and with the blood-loving deities of the non-Aryan tribes. Vishnu and Siva, in their diverse male and female shapes, now form, for practical purposes, the gods of the Hindu population.

Vishnu ;

Siva.

Bráhman philosophy.

The truth is, that the Aryans in India worshipped-first, as they felt; then, as they admired; and finally, as they reasoned. Their earliest Vedic gods were the stupendous phenomena of the visible world; their deities became divine heroes in the epic legends; and were spiritualized into abstractions by the philosophical schools. From the Vedic era downward that is to say, during a period which cannot be estimated at