Beaststories.

Sanskrit lyric

poetry.

Wilson's translations from the Vrihat-kathá will still be read with interest,1 and the Sanskrit Beast-stories now occupy an even more significant place in the history of Indo-European literature than they did then. The fables of animals familiar to the western world, from the time of Æsop downwards, had their original home in India. The relation between the fox and the lion in the Greek versions has no reality in nature; but it was based upon the actual relation between the lion and his follower the jackal, in the Sanskrit stories.2 Weber thinks that complete cycles of Indian fables may have existed in the time of Panini (350 B.C. ?). It is known that the Sanskrit Panchatantra, or Book of Beast Tales, was translated into the ancient Persian as early as the 6th century A.D., and from that rendering all the subsequent versions in Asia Minor and Europe have been derived. The most ancient animal fables of India are at the present day the nursery stories of England and America. The graceful Hindu imagination delighted also in fairy tales; and the Sanskrit compositions of this class are the original source of many of the fairy stories of Persia, Arabia, and Christendom. The works of fiction published in the native languages in India in 1877 numbered 196.

In medieval India, a large body of poetry, half-religious, halfamorous, grew up around the legend of the youthful Krishna (the eighth incarnation of Vishnu) and his loves with the shepherdesses, the playmates of his sweet pastoral life. Kálidása, according to Hindu tradition, was the father of the erotic lyric, as well as a great dramatic and epic poet. In his Megha-dúta, or 'Cloud Messenger,' an exile sends a message by a wind-borne cloud to his love, and the countries beneath its long aerial route are made to pass like a panorama before the reader's eye. The Gita Govinda, or Divine Herdsman of Jayadeva, is a Sanskrit 'Song of Solomon,' not earlier than the 12th century A.D. A festival once a year celebrates the birthplace of this mystical love-poet, in the Birbhum District of Lower Bengal; and many less famous compositions of the same class now issue from the vernacular press throughout India. In 1877, no fewer than 697 works of poetry were published in the native languages in India.

1 Oriental Quarterly Magazine, Calcutta, March 1824, pp. 63-77. Also vol. iii. of Wilson's Collected Works, pp. 156-268. London, 1864.

2 See, however, Weber's elaborate footnote, No. 221, for the other view, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 211. Max Müller's charming essay on the Migration of Fables (Chips, vol. iv. pp. 145-209, 1875) traces the actual stages of a well-known story from the East to the West.

Puránas,

Puránas.

The medieval Bráhmans displayed a marvellous activity in The theological as well as in lyric poetry. The Puránas, literally 8th to 16th "The Ancient Writings,' form a collection of religious and philo- century sophical treatises in verse, of which the principal ones number A.D. eighteen. The whole Puránas are said to contain 1,600,000 lines. The really old ones have either been lost or been incorporated in new compilations; and the composition of the existing Puránas probably took place from the 8th to the 16th century A.D. As the epics sang the wars of the Aryan heroes, so the Puránas recount the deeds of the Bráhman gods. They Contents deal with the creation of the universe; its successive dissolu- of the tions and reconstructions; the stories of the deities and their incarnations; the reigns of the divine Manus; and the chronicles of the Solar and Lunar lines of kings who ruled, the former in the east and the latter in the west of the Middle Land (Madhya-desha). The Puránas belong to the period when the Hindus had split up into their two existing divisions, as worshippers of Vishnu or of Siva. They devote themselves to the glorification of one or other of these two rival gods, and thus embody the sectarian theology of Bráhmanism. While claiming to be founded on Vedic inspiration, Their they practically superseded the Veda, and have formed during influence. ten centuries the sacred literature on which Hinduism rests.

An idea of the literary activity of the Indian mind at the Indian present day may be formed from the fact, that 4890 works were works published published in India in 1877, of which 4346 were in the native in 1877. languages. Only 436 were translations, the remaining 4454 being original works or new editions.

of Indian

In order to understand the long domination of the Bráhmans, The and the influence which they still wield, it is necessary ever to essentials keep in mind their position as the great literary caste. Their history. priestly supremacy has been repeatedly assailed, and was during a space of nearly a thousand years overthrown. But throughout twenty-two centuries they have been the counsellors of Hindu princes and the teachers of the Hindu people. They represent the early Aryan civilisation of India; and the essential history of the Hindus is a narrative of the attacks upon the continuity of that civilisation,—that is to say, of attacks upon the Bráhmanical system of the Middle Land, and of the modifications without on and compromises to which that system has had to submit. Those attacks range themselves under six epochs. First, the century religious uprising of the half-Bráhmanized Aryan tribes on the B.C. to east of the Middle Land, initiated by the preaching of Buddha tury A.D.

The six attacks from

Brahman

ism, 6th

19th cen

ism.

2. Greeks. Hinduism about the 8th century A.D.

3. Non

Aryan tribes.

1. Buddh in the 6th century B.C., culminating in the Buddhist kingdoms about the commencement of our era, and melting into modern Second, warlike inroads of non-Bráhmanical Aryans or other races from the west, commencing with the Greek invasions in the 4th century B.C., and continuing under the Greco-Bactrian empire and its successors to probably the 3rd or 5th century A.D. Third, the influence. of the non-Aryan tribes of India and of the non-Aryan lowcastes incorporated from them; an influence ever at work— indeed by far the most powerful agent in dissolving Brahmanism into Hinduism, but represented in a special manner by the non-Aryan kingdoms about the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. 4. Hindu Fourth, the reaction against the low beliefs, priestly oppression, and bloody rites which resulted from this compromise between Bráhmanism and aboriginal worship. The reaction received an impetus from the preaching of Sankar Achárja, who founded the great Sivaite sect about 700 A.D. It obtained its full development under a line of great Vishnuvite reformers from 5. Muham- the 12th to the 16th centuries A.D. Fifth, Muhammadan invasions and the rule of Islám, 1000 to 1765 A.D. Sixth, the English supremacy, and the popular upheaval which it has produced in the 18th and 19th centuries.

sects.

madans.

6. English.

CHAPTER V.

BUDDHISM (543 B.C. TO 1000 A.D.).

THE first great solvent of Bráhmanism was the teaching of Buddhism. Gautama Buddha. The life of this celebrated man has three sides, its personal aspects, its legendary developments, and its religious consequences upon mankind. In his own person, Buddha appears as a prince and preacher of ancient India. In the legendary developments of his story, Buddha ranks as a divine teacher among his followers, as an incarnation of Vishnu among the Hindus, and apparently as a saint of the Christian church, with a day assigned to him in both the Greek and Roman calendars. As a religious founder, he left behind a system of belief which has gained more disciples than any other creed in the world; and which is now professed by 500 millions of people, or nearly one-half the human race.

The story of Buddha's earthly career is a typical one. It is The story of Buddha, based on the old Indian ideal of the noble life which we have modelled seen depicted in the Sanskrit epics. Like the Pándavas in on the epic the Mahábhárata, and like Ráma in the Rámáyana, Buddha is type. the miraculously born son of a king, belonging to one of the two great Aryan lines, the Solar and Lunar; in his case, as in Ráma's, to the Solar. His youth, like that of the epic heroes, is spent under Bráhman tutors, and like the epic heroes he obtains a beautiful bride after a display of unexpected prowess with the bow; or, as the northern Buddhists relate, at an actual swayam-vara, by a contest in arms for the princess. A period of voluntary exile follows a short interval of married happiness, and Buddha retires like Ráma to a Bráhman's hermitage in the Buddha forest. The sending back of the charioteer to the bereaved father's capital forms an episode in the story of both the young princes; and as in the Rámáyana, so in the legend of Buddha, it is to the jungles on the south of the Ganges, lying between the Aryan settlements and the aboriginal races, that the royal exile repairs. After a time of seclusion, the Pándavas, Ráma, and Buddha alike emerge to achieve great conquests, the two former by force of arms, the last by the weapons of the Spirit.

K

and Ráma.

Parentage

tama Buddha.

I-19.

His married life,

æt. 19-29.

Up to this point the outline of the three stories has followed the same type; but henceforth it diverges. The Sanskrit epics depict the ideal Aryan man as prince, hermit, and hero. In the legend of Buddha, that ideal has developed into prince, hermit, and saint.

Gautama, afterwards named Buddha, 'The Enlightened,' of Gau- and Siddhartha, 'He who has fulfilled his end,' was the only son of Suddhodana, King of Kapilavastu. This prince, the chief of the Sákya clan, ruled over an outlying Aryan settlement on the north-eastern border of the Middle Land, about a hundred miles to the north of Benares, and within sight of the snow-topped Himálayas. A Gautama Rajput of the noble Solar line, he wished to see his son grow up on the warlike model of his race. But the young prince shunned the sports of his playmates, and retired to solitary day-dreams in His lonely nooks of the palace garden. The king tried to win his son to youth, et. a practical career by marrying him to a beautiful and talented girl; and the youthful Gautama unexpectedly proved his manliness by a victory over the flower of the young Rájput chiefs at a tournament. For a while he forgot his solemn speculations on the unseen in the sweet realities of early married life. But in his drives through the city he deeply reflected on the types of old age, disease, and death which met his eye; and he was powerfully impressed by the calm of a holy man, who seemed to have raised his soul above the changes and sorrows of this world. After ten years, his wife bore to him an only son; and Gautama, fearing lest this new tie should bind him too closely to the things of earth, retired about the age of thirty to a cave among the forest-clad spurs His Great of the Vindhyás. The story of how he turned away from the Renuncia- door of his wife's lamp-lit chamber, denying himself even a parting caress of his new-born babe lest he should wake the sleeping mother, and galloped off into the darkness, is one of the many tender episodes in his life. After a gloomy night ride, he sent back his one companion, the faithful charioteer, with his horse and jewels to his father. Having cut off his long Rájput locks, and exchanged his princely raiment for the rags of a poor passer-by, he went on alone a homeless beggar. This abandonment of earthly pomp and power, and of loved wife and new-born son, is the Great Renunciation which forms a favourite theme of the Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit, Páli, and Chinese. It has furnished, during twenty centuries, the type of self-sacrifice which all Indian reformers must follow if they are to win the trust of the people.

tion, at.

29-30.