various Peak. of primitive races. Thus, among the hill tribes of Eastern Bengal, we see the Khyoungthas, or Children of the River,' passing into Buddhists without giving up their aboriginal rites. They still offer rice and fruits and flowers to the spirits of hill In India ; and stream; and the Buddhist priests, although condemning the custom as unorthodox, do not very violently oppose it. In In Japan. Japan, a Buddhist saint visited the hill-slope of Hotoke Iwa in 767.A.D.; declared the local Shinto deity to be only a manifestation of Buddha; and so converted the ancient high-place into a Buddhist shrine. Buddhism has thus served as a link Shrines between the most ancient faiths of India and the modern common to worship of the eastern world. It has given sanctity to the centres faiths. of common pilgrimage, to which the great faiths of Asia resort. Thus, the Siva-worshippers ascend the top of Adam's Peak in Adam's Ceylon, to adore the footprint of their phallic god, the Sivapada; the Buddhists repair to the spot to adore the same symbol as the footmark of Buddha; and the Muhammadans to venerate it as the relic of Adam, the Semitic father of mankind. Many common shrines of a similar character exist in India. The famous spot of pilgrimage at Sakhi Sarwar crowns Sakhi the high bank of a hill stream at the foot of the Suláimáns, in the midst of desert scenery, well adapted to those who would mortify the flesh. To this remote place, the Muhammadans come in honour of a Musalmán saint; the Sikhs to venerate a memorial of their theistic founder, Nának; and the Hindus to perform their own ablutions and rites. The mingled architecture of such pilgrim-shrines attests the various races and creeds which have combined to give them sanctity. Buddhism, which was at first a revolt against Bráhman supremacy, has done much to maintain the continuity between the ancient and the modern religions of India. Sarwar. Hinduism, however, derived its elements not merely from NonAryan the two ancient Aryan faiths, the Bráhmanical and the Budelements in dhist. In its popular aspects, it drew much of its strength, Hinduism. and many of its rites, from the Nágá and other non-Aryan peoples of India. Buddhists and Bráhmans alike endeavoured, during their long struggle, to enlist the masses on their side. The Nágá kingdoms were divided, as we have seen, by the Chinese geographers into those which had accepted Buddhism, and those which had not. A chief feature Nágá rites, in Nágá-worship was the reverence for dragons or tailed monsters. This reverence found its way into mediæval Buddhism, and became an important element in Buddhist 1 See my Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. vi. p. 40, etc. Serpent worship in Hinduism. Phallic emblems in Hinduism. mythology. Indeed, the historian of Tree and Serpent worship goes so far as to say that 'Buddhism was little more than a revival of the coarser superstitions of the aboriginal races, purified and refined by the application of Aryan morality.' The great monastery of Nalanda owed its foundation to the supposed influence of a tailed monster, or Nágá, in a neighbouring tank. Many Hindu temples still support colonies of sacred crocodiles; and the scholar who has approached the subject from the Chinese point of view, comes to the conclusion that no superstition was more deeply embedded in the [ancient] Hindu mind than reverence for Nágás or dragons. Buddhism from the first had to contend as much against the under current of Nágá reverence in the popular mind, as against the supercilious opposition of the philosophic Bráhman in the upper current. At last, as it would seem, driven to an extremity by the gathering cloud of persecution, the Buddhists sought escape by closing with the popular creed, and endeavouring to enlist the people against the priests; but with no further success than such a respite as might be included within some one hundred years.'2 This conception of the process is coloured by modern ideas, but there can be no doubt that Hinduism incorporated many aboriginal rites. It had to provide for the non-Aryan as well as for the Aryan elements of the population, and it combined the Bráhmanism and Buddhism of the Aryans with the fetish-worship and religion of terror which swayed the non-Aryan races. Some of its superstitions seem to have been brought by Turanian or Scythian migrations from Central Asia. Serpent-worship is closely allied to, if indeed it does not take its origin in, that reverence for the symbols of human reproduction which formed one of the most widely spread religions of pre-historic man. Phallic or generative emblems are on earth what the sun is in the heavens. The sun, as the type of celestial creative energy, was a primitive object of Aryan adoration. Later Bráhmanism, and its successor Hinduism, The Hindu seem to have adopted not only the serpent, but the linga and linga and yoni, or the terrestrial organs of male and female creative yoni. 1 Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship, pp. 62, with footnote, et seq. (4to, 1868). This view must be taken subject to many limitations. Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese, pp. 415, 416. By Samuel Beal. (Trübner, 1871.) 3 I here acknowledge my obligations to General Forlong for much information on this subject, derived from the proof-sheets of his forthcoming Rivers of Life, a work which embodies the patient research of twenty years devoted to the study of phallic religions in Europe and Asia. energy, from the non-Aryan races. The early Aryan ritual of 'creative energy. Hinduism The fetish and tree worship of the non-Aryan races also Fetishentered largely into Hinduism. The first Englishman who worship in tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Bráhmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities.1 A Bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a The sálatree marked with red-lead. Sometimes a lump of clay placed grám. under a tree does for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduized low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village. 1 H. H. Wilson's Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. p. 220 (ed. 1862). Sakti; see post, pp. 199, 200. 3 The relation of these rites of the semi-Hinduized low-castes to the religion of the non-Aryan races is treated at considerable length, from personal observation, in my Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 127-136 and 194, 5th edition. Dr. Francis Buchanan, who afterwards took the name of Hamilton. His survey of the North-Eastern Districts of Bengal, 1807-13, forms a noble series of MS. folios in the India Office, much in need of a competent editor. Montgomery Martin made three printed volumes out of them by the easy process of drawing his pencil through the parts which did not interest him, or which he could not understand. These he published under the title of the History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India (3 vols., 1838). Vishnuvite We have seen how, in some Santáli hamlets, the worshippers dance round every tree; so that they may not, by any evil chance, miss the one in which the village spirits happen to dwell.1 As the non-Aryan phallic emblems were utilized by Hindusymbols. ism in the worship of Siva, the All-Destroyer and Reproducer, so the household fetish sálagrám has supplied a symbol for the rival Hindu deity Vishnu, the Preserver. The sálagrám (often an ammonite or curved stone) and the tulasi plant are the insignia of Vishnuvism, as universally as the linga is of Sivaism. In both cases the Bráhmans enriched the popular symbolism with deep metaphysical doctrines, and with admirable moral codes. The Sivaite devotee carries round his neck, or hidden about his person, a miniature phallic emblem, linga; the sálagrám and tulasi are the objects of reverence among all the Vishnuvite sects.2 The great Vishnuvite festival of Bengal, the rath-játra, when Jagannáth, The Lord of the World,' is dragged in his car to his garden-house, is of Buddhist origin.3 But it has many a humbler counterpart in the forest excursions which the Bengal villagers make in their holiday clothes to some sacred tree in the neighbouring grove or jungle. These jungle rites find special favour with the low-castes, and disclose curious survivals of the non-Hinduized element in the worshippers. Blood sacrifices and the eating of flesh have long been banished from the popular Vishnuvite sects. But on such forest festivals, the fierce aboriginal instincts even in the mixedcastes, who accept in ordinary life the restraints of Hinduism, break loose. Cowherds have been seen to feed on swineflesh, which at all other times they regard with abhorrence. The ceremonies, where they can pretend to a conscious meaning, have a propitiatory or necromantic tinge. Thus, in Birbhum District the mixed and low castes of the chief Jungle rites. Non rites merg 4 Aryan town repair once a year to the jungle, and make offerings 5 2 See, inter alia, pp. 15, 39, 50, 54, 116, 117, 140, 149, 179, 181, 246, vol. i. of H. H. Wilson's Religion of the Hindus (ed. 1862). 3 Post, pp. 208, 209. History, etc. of Eastern India, from the Buchanan MSS., vol. i. p. 194. H hold fetish, sálagrám, their village gods, grám-devatas, with the ghosts and demons that haunt so many trees, and the bloody rites of their national deity, Siva. Among the Hindus, these superstitions are isolated and unconnected with each other; among the Santals and other non-Aryan races, they form links in a ritual of fear and propitiation. founders of The development of Hinduism out of pre-existing religious Bráhman types, although a natural evolution, bears the impress of Hinduism. human guidance. Until the 12th century A.D., the Bráhmans supplied the directing energy in opposition to the Buddhists, and founded their reforms on a reassertion of the personality of God. But by that period, Buddhism had ceased to struggle for a separate existence in India; and the mass of the people began to strike out religious sects upon popular rather than on Brahmanical lines. The work of the early Brahman reformers was accordingly carried on after the 12th century, Lowin part by low-caste apostles, who gave life to the old Bráh- caste apostles. manical conception of a personal God, by infusing into it the Buddhist doctrine of the spiritual equality of man. Many of the Hindu sects form brotherhoods, on the Buddhist model, within which the classification by caste gives place to one based on the various degrees of perfection attained in the religious life. Most of the Hindu reformations since the 12th century thus preserve what was best in each of the two ancient faiths of India-namely, the personal God of the Bráhmans, and the spiritual equality of the Buddhists. Among the Hindus, every preacher who would really appeal to the popular heart must fulfil two conditions, and conform to a certain type. He must cut himself off from the world by a solemn act, like the Great Renunciation of Buddha; and he must come forth from his solemn communing with a simple message. The message need not be original, for it must consist of a reassertion, in some form, of the personality of God and the equality of men in His sight. Acta Sanc Hinduism boasts a line of religious founders stretching in The Hindu almost unbroken succession from about 700 A.D. to the present torum. day. The lives of the medieval saints and their wondrous works are recorded in the Bhakta-Málá, literally, 'The Garland of the Faithful,' compiled by Nábhájí, about three centuries This difficult Hindu work was popularized by later ago.1 1 H. H. Wilson, writing in the Asiatic Researches (Calcutta, 1828), says about 250 years ago.'-See Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society, vol. iii. p. 4. |