Working of the tradeguild. employment for all, no man should be allowed to work extra time. The decisions of the guild are enforced by fines. If the offender refuses to pay, and the members of the guild all belong to one caste, the offender is put out of caste. If the guild contains men of different castes, the guild uses its influence with other guilds to prevent the recusant member from getting work. The guild also acts in its corporate capacity against other crafts. For example, in 1872, the Ahmedábád cloth - dealers resolved among themselves to reduce the rates paid to the sizers or tágiás. The sizers' An Indian guild refused to prepare cloth at the lower rates, and 'strike.' Guild funds. remained six weeks on strike. At length a compromise was arrived at, and both guilds signed an agreement on stamped paper. Besides its punitive fines, the guild draws an income from fees on persons beginning to practise its craft. This custom prevails at Ahmedábád in the cloth and other industries. But no fee is paid by potters, carpenters, and inferior artisans. An exception is made, too, in the case of a son succeeding to his father, when nothing has to be paid. In other cases, the amount varies, in proportion to the importance of the trade, from £5 to £50. The revenue derived from these fees and from fines is expended in feasts to the members of the guild, in the support of poor craftsmen or charities. their orphans, and in charity. A favourite device for raising money in Surat is for the members of a trade to agree to keep a certain date as a holiday, and to shut up all their shops except one. The right to keep open this one shop is let by auction, and the amount bid is credited to the guild-fund. Guild Trade caste : in trade centres; Within the guild, the interests of the common trade interests v. sometimes overpower the race element of the caste. Thus, in Surat, each class of craftsmen, although including men of different castes and races, combine to form a guild, with a council, a head-man, and a common purse for charity and entertainments. But indeed, in Ahmedábád, Broach, and many industrial centres, the trade organization into guilds exists side by side with the race-structure of caste. A twoin the vil- fold organization also appears in the village community. lage com- Caste regulates the theoretical position of any family within. it; but the low-castes often claim the headship in the village government. In the Bárásat Sub-district in Bengal, of 5818 enumerated village heads, only 15 were Bráhmans or Rajputs, 4 were Kayasths, while 3524 belonged to the Súdra or inferior castes, down to the detested cow-skinners and corpse-bearers; munity. ince being Muhammadans, with 13 native Christians. uthern India, the village head is sometimes of so low a te that he cannot sit under the same roof with his colleagues n the village government. He therefore hands up his staff, which is set in the place of honour, while he himself squats on the ground outside. The trade-guild in the cities, and the Caste and village community throughout the country, act, together with insurance.' caste, as mutual assurance societies, and in ordinary times allow none of their members to starve. Caste and the trading No poor. law' in or agricultural guilds concurrent with it, take the place of a India. poor-law in India. mutual rewards. ishments. It is obvious that such an organization must have some Caste weapons for defending itself against lazy or unworthy members. The responsibility which the caste discharges with regard to feeding its poor, would otherwise be liable to abuses. As a matter of fact, the caste or guild exercises a surveillance over each of its members, from the close of childhood until death. If he behave well, he will rise to an honoured place in his community, and the desire for such local distinction amounts to an important influence in the life of a Hindu. But the caste has its punishments as well as its rewards. Those punishments consist of fine and excommunication. The fine usually takes the form of a compulsory feast to the male members of the caste. This is the ordinary means of purification, or of making amends for breaches of the caste code. Excommunication inflicts three penalties: First, an interdict against eating with the fellow- Caste punmembers of the caste. Second, an interdict against marriage within the caste. This practically amounts to debarring the delinquent and his family from respectable marriages of any sort. Third, cutting off the delinquent from the general community, by forbidding him the use of the village barber and washerman, and of the priestly adviser. Except in very serious cases, excommunication is withdrawn upon the submission of the offender, and his payment of a fine. But the caste punishments exercise an efficacious restraint upon the unworthy members of the community, precisely as the caste rewards supply a powerful motive of action to the good ones. A member who cannot be controlled by this mixed discipline of punishment and reward is eventually expelled; and, as a rule, an 'out-caste' is really a bad man. Imprisonment in jail carries with it, ipso facto, that penalty; but may be condoned after release, by heavy expiations. Such is a brief survey of the nature and operation of caste. N lation of caste. Recapitu. But the cross-divisions on which the institution rests; its conflicting principles of classification according to race, employment, and locality; the influence of Islám in Northern India; of the 'right-handed' and 'left-handed' branches in the south;1 and the modifications everywhere effected by social or sectarian movements, render a short account of caste full of difficulties. The reli gious basis of Hin Hinduism is, however, not only a social organization resting upon caste; it is also a religious federation based upon worship. As the various race elements of the Indian people have been welded into caste, so the simple old beliefs of the Veda, the mild doctrines of Buddha, and the fierce rites of the non-Aryan tribes have been thrown into the melting-pot, and poured out thence as a mixture of alloy and dross to be worked up into the Hindu gods. In the religious as in the social structure, the Bráhmans supplied the directing brainpower. But both processes resulted from laws of human evolution, deeper than the workings of any individual will; and in both the product has been, not an artificial manufacture, but a natural development. Hinduism merely forms one link in the golden chain of Indian religions. I have shown that the earthly career of Buddha was but a spiritualized rendering of the heroic Aryan life as recorded in the Indian epics. Indeed, the discipline of the Buddhists organized so faithfully the prescribed stages of a Bráhman's existence, that it is difficult to decide whether the Sarmanai of Megasthenes were Buddhist clergy or Bráhman recluses. If accurate scholarship cannot accept Buddhism as simply the Sánkhya philosophy turned into a national religion, it readily admits that Buddhism and Bráhmanism are united by intermediate links. An early set of these links is found in the darsanas, or philosophical systems between the Vedic period and the establishment of Buddhism as a national religion under Asoka (1400? to 250 B.C.). A later set is preserved in the compromises effected during the final struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism, ending in the reassertion of the latter in its new form as the religion of the Hindus (300 to 1000 A.D.). Buddhism not only breathed into the new birth its noble spirit of charity, but bequeathed to Hinduism many of its institutions unimpaired, together with its scheme of religious life, and the material fabric of its worship. At this day, the 1 The Valankei and Yedankei, ante, p. 182. See Crole's Chingleput District, pp. 33-34 (1879). 2 Ante, p. 151. mahájan or bankers' guild, in Surat, devotes part of the Beast fees that it levies on bills of exchange to animal hospitals; hospitals. true survivals of Asoka's second edict, which provided a system of medical aid for beasts, 250 years before Christ. The cenobitic life, and the division of the people into laity and clergy, have passed almost unchanged from Buddhism into some of the Hindu sects. teries. gious life. The Hindu monasteries in our own day vie with the Buddhist Monasconvents in the reign of Síláditya; and Purí is, in many respects, a modern unlettered Nalanda. The religious houses of the Orissa delta, with their revenue of £50,000 a year,1 are but the Hindu developments of the Buddhist cells and rock monasteries, whose remains still honeycomb the adjacent hills. If we examine the religious life of the Vishnuvite communities, we find their rules are Buddhistic, with Bráhmanical reasons attached. Thus the moral code of the Kabir The reliPanthís consists of five rules: 2 First, life, whether of man or beast, must not be violated; because it is the gift of God. Second, humanity is the cardinal virtue; and the shedding of blood, whether of man or beast, a heinous crime. Third, truth is the great principle of conduct; because all the ills of life and ignorance of God are due to original falsehood (máyá). . Fourth, retirement from the world is desirable; because the desires of the world are hostile to tranquillity of soul, and to the undisturbed meditation on God. Fifth, obedience to the spiritual guide is incumbent on all. This last rule is common to every sect of the Hindus. But the Kabir Panthís direct the pupil to examine well his teacher's life and doctrine before he resigns himself to his control. If we did not know that Buddhism was itself an outgrowth from primitive Bráhmanism, we might hold this code to be simple Buddhism, with the addition of a personal God. But knowing as we do that Brahmanism and Puddhism were themselves closely connected, and that they combined to form Hinduism, it is impossible to discriminate exactly how far the last was made up by direct transmission from either of the other two. I have already alluded to the influence of Buddhism on the Buddhist Christianity of the western world.3 Whatever uncertainties influences may still obscure that question, the effect of Buddhism upon religions. the present faiths of Eastern Asia admits of no doubt. The 1 Report by the Committee of native gentlemen appointed to inquire into the Orissa maths, dated 25th March 1869, par. 15. * H. H. Wilson's Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. p. 94 (ed. 1862). 3 Ante, pp. 149, 150. on later best elements in the teaching of Buddha have survived in modern Hinduism; and Buddhism carried with it many A Japanese essential doctrines of Bráhmanism to China and Japan. It is temple; difficult to enter a Japanese temple without being struck its analogies to by the analogies to the Christian ritual on the one hand, and Hinduism to Hinduism on the other. The chantings of the priests, and Chris tianity. their bowing as they pass the altar, their vestments, rosaries, bells, incense, and the responses of the worshippers, remind one of the Christian ritual. The temple at Rokugo,' writes a recent traveller to a remote town in Japan, 'was very beautiful, and, except that its ornaments were superior in solidity and good taste, differed little from a Romish church. The low altar, on which were lilies and lighted candles, was draped in blue and silver; and on the high altar, draped in crimson and cloth of gold, there was nothing but a closed shrine, an incense burner, and a vase of lotuses.' 1 Serpent ornamen tation: In a Buddhist temple at Ningpo, the Chinese goddess of mercy, Kwan-yin, whose resemblance to the Virgin Mary and Child has already been mentioned, is seen standing on a serpent, bruising his head with her heel. The snake ornamentation, which figures so universally in the religion of India, is said to have been carried by Buddhism alike to the east and Hinduism; the west. Thus, the canopy or baldachino over Buddha's head In In Buddhism; delights in twisted pillars and wavy patterns. These wave-like ornaments are conventionalized into cloud curves in most of the Chinese and Japanese canopies; but some of them still exhibit the original figures thus symbolized as undulating serpents or Nágás. A serpent baldachino of this sort may be seen in a monastery at Ningpo. It takes the place of the cobraheaded canopy, which in India shelters the head of Siva, or of Vishnu as he slept upon the waters at the creation of the world. In Chris. The twisted columns which support the baldachino at St. Peter's in Rome, and the fluted ornamentation so common over Protestant pulpits, are said to have a serpentine origin, and an eastern source. The association of Buddha with two other figures, in the Japanese temples, perhaps represents a recollection of the Bráhman triad. The idea of trinity, as Buddha, Dharma (the Law), and Sangha (the Congregation), deeply penetrates the faith. The Sacred Tooth at Ceylon is a reproduction of the phallic linga of India. tian art. Coalition of Buddhism with earlier religions: Buddhism readily coalesced with the pre-existing religions 1 Miss Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, vol. i. p. 295 (ed. 1880). 3 My authority is an unpublished drawing by Miss Gordon Cumming. |