I1

CHAPTER XII

RELIGION-ANIMISM

T is the accepted belief that it is in the literature of the brahmins that we find the evidence as to the religious beliefs of the peoples of India in the sixth and seventh centuries, B.C. This seems to me more than doubtful. The priests have preserved for us, not so much the opinions the people actually held, as the opinions the priests wished them to hold. When we consider the enormous labour of keeping up and handing down the priestly books— and this had to be done, as we have seen,' entirely through learning the books by heart-we are filled. with admiration for the zealous and devoted students who have thus preserved for us a literature so valuable for the history of human thought. The learned brahmin, and not only in this respect, is a figure of whom India is justly proud. And when we consider how vague and inaccurate are the accounts preserved in the writings of the Christian fathers of any views except those they themselves considered to be orthodox, we see how unreasonable 1 Above, p. 110, Chapter VII.

it would be to expect that the brahmins, whose difficulties were so much greater, should have been able to do more. What they have done they have done accurately and well. But the record they have saved for us is a partial record.

What had happened with respect to religious belief is on a par with what had happened with respect to language. From Takka-silā all the way down to Champā no one spoke Sanskrit. The living language, everywhere, was a sort of Pali. Many of the old Vedic words were retained in more easily pronounceable forms. Many new words had been formed, on analogy, from the existing stock of roots. Many other new words had been adopted from nonAryan forms of speech. Many Aryan words, which do not happen to occur in the Vedic texts, had nevertheless survived in popular use. And meanwhile, in the schools of the priests, and there only, a knowledge of the Vedic language (which we often call Sanskrit) was kept up. But even this Sanskrit of the schools had progressed, as some would say, or had degenerated, as others would say, from the Vedic standard. And the Sanskrit in actual use in the schools was as far removed from the Vedic dialect as it is from the so-called classical Sanskrit of the post-Buddhistic poems and plays.

So with the religion. Outside the schools of the priests the curious and interesting beliefs recorded in the Rig Veda had practically little effect. The Vedic thaumaturgy and theosophy had indeed never been a popular faith, that is, as we know it. Both its theological hypotheses and its practical magic (in

the ritual) show already a stage very much advanced beyond the simpler faith which they, in fact, presup pose. The gods more usually found in the older systems-the dread Mother Earth, the dryads and the dragons, the dog-star, even the moon and the sun-have been cast into the shade by the new ideas (the new gods) of the fire, the exciting drink, and the thunderstorm. And the charm of the mystery and the magic of the ritual of the sacrifice had to contend, so far as the laity were concerned, with the distaste induced by its complications and its expense.

I am aware that these views as to Vedism are at variance with opinions very widely, not to say commonly, held. Professor Max Müller insisted to the last on the primitive nature of the beliefs recorded. in the Rig Veda. Those beliefs seem to us, and indeed are, so bizarre and absurd, that it is hard to accept the proposition that they give expression to an advanced stage of thought. And one is so accustomed to consider the priesthood as the great obsta cle, in India, in the way of reform, that it is difficult to believe that the brahmins could ever, as a class, have championed the newer views.

But a comparison with the general course of the evolution of religious beliefs elsewhere shows that the beliefs recorded in the Rig Veda are not primitive. A consideration of the nature of those beliefs, so far as they are not found elsewhere, shows that they must have been, in the view of the men who formulated them, a kind of advance on, or reform of, the previous ideas. And at least three lines of

evidence all tend to show that-certainly all the time we are here considering, and almost certainly at the time when the Rig Veda was finally closedthere were many other beliefs, commonly held among the Aryans in India, but not represented in that Veda.'

The first of these three lines is the history of the Atharva Veda. This invaluable old collection of charms to be used in sorcery had been actually put together long before Buddhism arose. But it was only just before that time that it had come to be acknowledged by the sacrificial priests as a Veda— inferior to their own three older ones, but still a Veda. This explains why it is that the Atharva is never mentioned as a Veda in the Buddhist canonical books. They are constantly mentioning the three Vedas and the ancient lore connected with the three. They are constantly poking fun at the hocus-pocus of witchcraft and sorcery, and denying any efficiency either to it, or to the magic of the sacrifice. But in the view of the circles in which these books arose the Atharva collection had not yet become a Veda.

Yet it is quite certain that the beliefs and practices to which the Atharva Veda is devoted are as old, if not older, than those to which the three other Vedas refer; and that they were commonly held and followed by the Aryans in India. The things recorded in the Rig may seem to us as absurd as

1 On religious ideas popular among the people, but only incidentally referred to in the Veda, and not admitted into it as part of the priestly system of belief, see Kirste in the Vienna Oriental Journal, 1902, pp. 63, foll.

See Dialogues of the Buddha, i. 109.

those in the Atharva. But we cannot avoid the conclusion that the priests who made the older collection were consciously exercising a choice, that they purposely omitted to include certain phases of current belief because those phases did not appeal to them, did not suit their purposes, or did not seem to them worthy of their deities. And when we remember that what they shut out, or nearly shut out, was the lowest kind of savage superstition and sorcery, it is not easy to deny them any credit in doing so.

The second is the general view of religious beliefs, as held by the people, given to us in the Epics, and especially in the Maha Bhārata. It is, in many respects, altogether different from the general view as given in the Vedic literature. We do not know as yet exactly which of the conceptions in the Maha Bhārata can be taken as evidence of the seventh century B.C. The poem has certainly undergone one, if not two or even three, alterations at the hand of later priestly editors. But though the changes made in the poems are due to the priests, they were so made because the priests found that ideas not current in their schools had so much weight with the people that they (the priests) could no longer afford to neglect them. They must have recast the poem with two main objects in view-in the first place to insist on the supremacy of the brahmins, which had been so much endangered by the great popularity of the anti- priestly views of the Buddhists and others; and in the second place to show that the brahmins were in sympathy with, and had formally