or schools: less than 3000 years-the Bráhmans have slowly elaborated the forces and splendid manifestations of nature into a harmonious godhead, and constructed a system of belief and worship for the Indian people. They also pondered deeply on the mysteries of life. Whence arose this fabric of the visible world, and whence came we ourselves-we who with conscious minds look out upon it? It is to these questions that philosophy has, among all races, owed her birth; and the Brahmans arranged their widely diverse answers to them in six great The six systems or darsanas, literally 'mirrors of knowledge.' I can darsanas only touch upon the vast body of speculation which thus grew up, at least 500 years before Christ. The universal insoluble problems of thought and being, of mind and matter, and of soul as apart from both, of the origin of evil, of the summum bonum of life, of necessity and freewill, and of the relations of the Creator to the creature, are endlessly discussed. The Sánkhya, founded by the sage Kapila, explains the visible (1) The world by assuming the existence of a primordial matter from Sankhya; all eternity, out of which the universe has, by successive stages, evolved itself. The Yoga school of Patanjali assumes the exist- (2) The ence of a primordial soul, anterior to the primeval matter, and Yoga; holds that from the union of the two the spirit of life (mahánátmá) arose. The two Vedanta schools ascribe the visible world (3, 4) The to a divine act of creation, and assume an omnipotent god as the cause of the existence, the continuance, and the dissolution of the universe. The Nyáya or logical school of Gautama (5) The Nyáya; enunciates the method of arriving at truth, and lays special stress on the sensations. It is usually classed together with the sixth school, the Vaiseshika, founded by the sage Kanáda, (6) The which teaches the existence of a transient world composed of shika. eternal atoms. All the six schools had the same starting-point, ex nihilo nihil fit; and their sages, as a rule, struggled towards the same end, the liberation of the human soul from the necessity of existence and from the chain of future births, by its absorption into the Supreme Soul, or the primordial essence, of the universe.1 Vedantas ; Vaise The Brahmans, therefore, treated philosophy as a branch of Summary religion. Now the universal problems of religion are to lay 1 of Bráh man Any attempt to fuse into a few lines the vast conflicting masses of religion. Hindu philosophical doctrines must be unsatisfactory. Objections may be taken to compressing the subdivisions and branching doctrines of each school into a single sentence. But space forbids a more lengthy disquisition; and I have based the above paragraphs as fairly as I can on the accounts which H. H. Wilson, Albrecht Weber, Professor Dowson, and the Rev. K. M. Banarji give of the Six Darsanas or Schools. Bráhman science. Pánini. down a rule of conduct for this life, and to supply some guide to the next. The Brahman solutions to the practical questions involved, were self-discipline, alms, sacrifice to and contemplation of the deity. But besides the practical questions of a religious life, religion has also intellectual problems, such as the compatibility of evil with the goodness of God, and the unequal distribution of happiness and misery in this life. Bráhman philosophy exhausted the possible solutions of these difficulties, and of most of the other great problems which have since perplexed Greek and Roman, medieval schoolman, and modern man of science. The various theories of Creation, Arrangement, and Development were each elaborated; and the views of physiologists at the present day are a return, with new lights, to the evolution theory of Kapila, whose Sankhya system is held by Weber to be the oldest of the six Bráhman schools, and which certainly dates not later than 500 B.C. The works on Religion published in the native languages in India in 1877, numbered 1192, besides 56 on Mental and Moral Philosophy. The Brahmans had also a circle of sciences of their own. The Science of Language, indeed, had been reduced in India to fundamental principles at a time when the grammarians of the West still treated it on the basis of accidental resemblances; Sanskrit and modern philology dates from the study of Sanskrit by grammar. European scholars. Pánini was the architect of Sanskrit grammar; but a long succession of learned men must have laboured before he reared his enduring fabric. The date of Pánini has been fixed by his learned editor Böhtlink at about 350 B.C.; but Weber, reasoning from a statement made (long afterwards) by the Chinese pilgrim Hiouen Thsang, suggests that it may have been later. The grammar of Pánini stands supreme among the grammars of the world, alike for its precision of statement and for its thorough analysis of the roots of the language and of the formative principles of words. By employing an algebraic terminology it attains a sharp succinctness unrivalled in brevity, but at times enigmatical. It arranges, in logical harmony, the whole phenomena which the Sanskrit language presents, and stands forth as one of the most splendid achievements of human invention and industry. So elaborate is the structure, that doubts have arisen whether its innumerable rules of formation and phonetic change, its polysyllabic derivatives, its ten conjugations with their multiform aorists and long array of tenses, could ever have been the spoken language of a people. It is certain that at an early date Sanskrit began to undergo simplification; and that the Aryan peasant, alike in his ancient and modern vernaculars, contented himself with narrower forms of speech. and It seems probable, indeed, that this divergence took place Sanskrit before the time of Pánini (350 B.C.), and that the spoken lan- Prákrit guage, or Prákrita-bháshá, had already assumed simpler forms speech. by the assimilation of consonants and the curtailment of terminals. The Sanskrita-bháshá, literally, the 'perfected speech,' which Pánini stereotyped by his grammar, retained the old Aryan accumulations of consonants, with an undiminished array of inflections. In this language the Bráhmans wrote. It became the literary language of India,-isolated from the spoken dialects, but prescribed as the vehicle for philosophy, science, and all poetry of serious aim or epic dignity. As the Aryan race mingled with the previous inhabitants of the land, the Indian vernaculars adopted words of non-Aryan origin, and severed themselves completely from Sanskrit, which for many hundred years has been unintelligible to the common people of India. The old synthetic Sanskrit underwent the same process as Latin did, into an analytic language, and about the same time. Each of these noble languages died, and each gave birth to a family of languages which can never die. An intermediate stage of the process can be traced in the Hindu drama, in which persons of good birth speak in Prákritised Sanskrit, and the low-castes in a bháshá, or patois, between the old Prákrit and the modern dialects. It is chiefly under the popularizing influences of British rule that the Indian vernaculars have become literary languages. Until the last century, Sanskrit, although as dead as Latin so far as the mass of the people were concerned, was the vehicle for all intellectual and artistic efforts of the Hindus, their local ballads excepted. In addition to their other sources of influence, therefore, the Bráhmans were the interpreters of a national literature written in a language unknown to the people. manu scripts. The priceless inheritance thus committed to their charge Sanskrit they handed down, to a great extent, by word of mouth. Partly from this cause, but chiefly owing to the destructive climate of India, no Sanskrit manuscripts of remote antiquity exist. A fairly continuous series of inscriptions on rocks, pillars, and copper-plates enable us to trace back the Indian alphabets to the 3rd century B.C. But even the more ancient of the Sanskrit manuscripts are only four hundred years old, very ancient few have an age exceeding five centuries, and only two date as ones. No very Sanskrit writings almost verse. far back as 1132 and 1008 A.D.1 The earliest of them (1008 A.D.) comes from the cold, dry highlands of Nepál. With regard to the origin of the Indian alphabets, the evidence is still too undigested to allow of cursory statement. Of the two characters in which the Asoka inscriptions were written (250 A.D.), the northern variety, or Ariano-Páli, is now admitted to be of Phoenician, or at any rate of non-Indian, parentage. The southern variety, or Indo - Páli, is believed by some scholars to be of Western origin, while others hold it to be an independent Indian alphabet; and an attempt has even been made to trace back its letters to an indigenous system of picture-writing, or hieroglyphics, in pre-historic India.3 Quintus Curtius mentions that the Indians wrote on leaves in the time of Alexander (326 B.C.). They do so to this hour. Sanskrit literature was the more easily transmitted by word of mouth, from the circumstance that it was entirely written in entirely in verse. A prose style, simple and compact, had grown up during the early age following that of the Vedic hymns. But Sanskrit literature begins with the later, although still ancient, stage of Aryan development, which had superseded the Vedic gods by the Bráhmanical triad, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. When Sanskrit appears definitively on the scene in the centuries preceding the birth of Christ, it adopted once and for all a rhythmic versification alike for poetry, philosophy, science, law, and religion, with the exception of the Beast Fables and the almost algebraic strings of aphorisms in the Sútras. The Buddhist legends adhered more closely to the spoken dialects of ancient India, prákrita-bháshá; and they have also retained a prose style. But in classical Sanskrit literature, prose became an 1 Footnote 198a to Weber's Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 182 (1878), quoting the report of Rájendrá Lálá Mitra (1874), and Dr. Rost's letter (1875). Mr. R. Cust, in a note to me, assigns the year 883 A.D. as the date of the earliest existing Sanskrit Ms. at Cambridge. But this is a moot point (1880). 2 I have printed and sent to the India Office Library, for public reference, a catalogue of the 332 Sanskrit Buddhist MSS. collected by Mr. B. H. Hodgson in Nepal. 3 By General Cunningham, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, pp. 52 et seq. The attempt cannot be pronounced successful. Dr. Burnell's Palæography of Southern India exhibits the successive developments of the Indian alphabet. For the growth of the Indian dialects, see Mr. Beames' Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India; Dr. Rudolph Hærnle's Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages; two excellent papers, by Mr. E. L. Brandreth, on the Gaurian Languages, in the Journ. Roy. As. Soc., vols. xi. xii. ; and Mr. R. N. Cust's Linguistic and Oriental Essays, pp. 144-171, Trübner, 1880. For a compendious view of the Indian alphabets, see Faulmann's Buch der Schrift, 119-158, Vienna, 1880. 4 Alexander in India, lib. viii. cap. 9, v. 15. arrested development; the sloka or verse reigned supreme; and nothing can be clumsier than the attempts at prose in the later romances and commentaries. Prose-writing was practically a Prose, a forgotten art. lost art in India during eighteen hundred years. Sanskrit dictionaries are a much later product than Sanskrit Sanskrit grammar. The oldest Indian lexicographer whose work sur- dictionvives, Amara-sinha, ranked among the 'nine gems' at the aries. court of Vikramaditya, one of several monarchs of the same name-assigned to various periods from 56 B.C. to 1050 A.D. This dictionary furnishes data which certainly belong to a later period than the 1st century B.C.; probably to many hundred years later. The other Sanskrit lexicons which have come down belong to the 11th, 12th, and subsequent centuries. Those centuries, indeed, seem to mark an era of industry in dictionary-making; and there is no inherent evidence in Amara-sinha's work (the Amara-kosha) to show that it was separated from them by any wide interval. The number of works on language, published in 1877 in India, was 604. astro dent period, to 300 B.C. The astronomy of the Brahmans has formed alternately the Bráhman subject of excessive admiration and of misplaced contempt. nomy. The truth is, that there are three periods of Sanskrit astronomy (Jyoti-sástra). The first period belongs to Vedic times, and has Indepenleft a moderate store of independent observations and inferences worked out by the Bráhmans. The Vedic poets had arrived at a tolerably correct calculation of the solar year; which they divided into 360 days, with an intercalary month every five years. They were also acquainted with the phases of the moon; they divided her pathway through the heavens into 27 or 28 lunar mansions; and had made observations of a few of the fixed stars. The order in which the lunar mansions are enumerated is one which must have been established 'somewhere between 1472 and 536 B.C.' (Weber). The planets were also an independent, although a later discovery, bordering on the Vedic period. At first seven, afterwards nine in number, they bear names of Indian origin; and the generic term for planet, graha, the seizer, had its source in primitive Sanskrit astrology. They are mentioned for the first time, perhaps, in the Taittiriya-Aryanaka. The Laws of Manu, however, are silent regarding them; but their worship is inculcated in the later code of Yajnavalkya. The zodiacal signs and the Jyotisha, or so-called Vedic Calendar, with its solstitial points referring to 1181 B.C., or to a period still more remote,—seem to have been constructed, or at any rate completed, in an age long subsequent to the Veda. The influence of the Chinese |