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it assigns

to women.

Chaitanya has become a sort of family worship throughout Orissa. The landed gentry worship him with a daily ritual in household chapels dedicated to his name. After his death, a sect arose among his followers, who asserted the spiritual independence of women.1 In their monastic enclosures, male and female cenobites live in celibacy; the women shaving their heads, with the exception of a single lock of hair. The two sexes chant the praises of Vishnu and Chaitanya together, in hymn and solemn dance. One im- The place portant doctrine of the Vishnuite sects is their recognition of the value of women as instructors of the outside female community. For long, their female devotees were the only teachers admitted into the zanánas of good families in Bengal. Fifty years ago, they had effected a change for the better in the state of female education, and the value of such instruction was assigned as the cause of the sect having spread in Calcutta.2 Since that time, Vishnuite female ascetics of various sorts have entered the same field. In some instances the bad crept in along with the good, and an effort made in 1863 to utilize them in the mechanism of Public Instruction failed.3 The analogy of woman's position in the Vishnuite sects Modern to that assigned to her by ancient Buddhism is striking. But the analogy becomes more complete when the comparison is made with the extra-mural life of the modern Buddhist nun on the Punjab frontier. Thus, in LAHUL (Lahaul) some of the nuns have not, as in Tibet, cloisters of their own. They are attached to monasteries, in which they reside only a few months of the year; and which they may permanently quit, either in order to marry or for other sufficient reasons. In 1868, there were seventy-one such Buddhist nuns in Lahul, able to read and write, and very closely resembling in their life and discipline the better orders of Vishnuite female devotees in Bengal. One of them was sufficiently skilled in astronomy to calculate eclipses.

Buddhist

nuns.

The death of Chaitanya marked the beginning of a spiritual Vallabhadecline in Vishnu-worship. About 1520, Vallabha-Swámi Swami, circ. 1520

preached in Northern India that the liberation of the soul A.D.
did not depend upon the mortification of the body; and that
The Spashtha Dayakas.

Wilson's Religion of Hindus, vol. i. p. 171 (ed. 1862).

The official details of this interesting and once promising experiment at Dacca will be found in Appendix A. to the Report of the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal, for 1863-64, pp. 83-90; for 1864-65, pp. 155-158; and in each subsequent Annual Report to 1869.

Sherring's Hindu Tribes, vol. ii. p. 9 (4to, Calcutta).

Childworship.

Krishnaworship.

God was to be sought, not in nakedness and hunger and solitude, but amid the enjoyments of this life. An opulent sect had, from an early period, attached itself to the worship of Krishna and his bride Rádhá; a mystic significance being, of course, assigned to their pastoral loves. Still more popular among women is the modern adoration of Krishna as the Bála Gopála, or the Infant Cowherd,—a faith perhaps unconsciously stimulated by the Catholic worship of the Divine Child. The sect, however, deny any connection of their Infant god with the babe Jesus, and maintain that their worship is a legitimate and natural development of Vishnuite conceptions. Another influence of Christianity on Hinduism may possibly be traced in the growing importance assigned by the Krishna sects to bhakti, or faith, as an ail-sufficient instrument of salvation.

Vallabhi-Swámí was the apostle of Vishnuism as a religion of pleasure. When he had finished his life's work, he descended into the Ganges; a brilliant flame arose from the spot; and, in the presence of a host of witnesses, his glorified form ascended to heaven. The special object of his homage was Vishnu in his pastoral incarnation, in which he took the form of the divine youth Krishna, and led an arcadian life in the forest. Shady bowers, lovely women, exquisite viands, and everything that appeals to the sensuousness of a tropical race, are mingled in his worship. His daily ritual consists of eight services, in which Krishna's image, as a beautiful boy, is delicately bathed, anointed with essences, splendidly attired, and sumptuously fed. The followers of the first Vishnuite reformers dwelt together in secluded monasteries, or went about scantily clothed, living upon alms. But the Vallabhi-Swámí sect performs its devotions arrayed in costly apparel, anointed with oil, and perfumed with camphor or sandal. It seeks its converts, not among weavers, or leatherdressers, or barbers, but among wealthy bankers and merchants, who look upon life as a thing to be enjoyed, and upon pilgrimage as a holiday excursion, or an opportunity for trade.

A religion In a religion of this sort, abuses are inevitable. It was a of pleasure. revolt against a system which taught that the soul could approach its Maker only by the mortification of the body. It declared that God was present in the cities and marts of men, not less than in the cave of the ascetic. Faith and love were its instruments of salvation, and voluptuous contemplation its approved spiritual state. It delighted to clothe the deity in a beautiful human form, and mystical amorous poems make a

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large part of its canonical literature. One of its most valued theological treatises is entitled The Ocean of Love, Prem Love Ságar; and although its nobler professors always recognised Poems. its spiritual character, to baser minds it has become simply a religion of pleasure. The loves of Rádhá and Krishna, that woodland pastoral redolent of a wild-flower aroma as ethereal as the legend of Psyche and Cupid, are sometimes materialized into a sanction for licentious rites.

chief

A few of the Vishnuite sects have been particularized in order Numerous Vishnuite to show the wide area of religious thought which they cover, sects. and the composite conceptions of which their beliefs are made up. But any attempt at a complete catalogue of them The is beyond the scope of this work. H. H. Wilson divided twenty them into twenty principal sects, and the branches or lesser Vishnuite brotherhoods number not less than a hundred. Their series sects. of religious founders continued until the present century, when they began to merge into the more purely theistic movements of our day. Indeed, the higher Vishnuite teachers have always Theistic been theistic. The Statistical Survey of India has disclosed ments. many such reformations, from the Kartábhajás1 of the Districts around Calcutta, to the Satnámis 2 of the Central Provinces.

move

1469.

Some of these sects are poor local brotherhoods, with a single religious house; others have developed into widespread and wealthy bodies; while one theistic church has grown into a great nation, the Sikhs, the last military power The Sikhs. which we had to subdue in India.3 Nának Shah, the spiritual Nának founder of the Sikhs, was nearly contemporary with Kabir, and Shah, taught doctrines in the Punjab but little differing from those of the Bengal apostle. The Vishnuite sects now include almost the whole population of Lower Bengal, excepting the very highest and the very lowest castes. In many of their communities, caste is not acknowledged. Such sects form brother- Brotherhoods which recognise only spiritual distinctions or degrees; and a new social organization is thus provided for the unfortunate, the widow, or the out-caste. In lately Hinduized Provinces like Assam, Vishnu-worship has become practically the religion of the people.

hoods.

The Car Festival of Jagannath is perhaps the most typical Jagannath. 'See Hunter's Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 73-75 (TWENTYFOUR PARGANAS); vol. ii. pp. 53-55 (NADIYA).

2 See The Imperial Gazetteer of India, article CENTRAL PROVINCES.

3 See The Imperial Gazetteer of India, articles AMRITSAR and PUNJAB. For the theological aspects of the Sikhs, see Wilson's Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. pp. 267-275 (ed. 1862).

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manical

and

ceremony of the Vishnuite faith. Jagannáth, literally The Lord of the World,' represents, with unmistakeable clearness, that coalition of Bráhman and Buddhist doctrines which forms the basis of Vishnu - worship. In his temple are three rude images, unconsciously representing the Brahmanical triad. His Bráh His Car Festival is probably a once-conscious reproduction of the Tooth Festival of the Buddhists, although its original Buddhist significance has dropped out of sight. The Chinese pilgrim origin. Fa-Hian gives an account of the yearly procession of Buddha's Sacred Tooth from its chapel to a shrine some way off,1 and of its return after a stay there. This was in the 5th century A.D.; but the account applies so exactly to the Car Festival at the present day, that Fergusson pronounces the latter to be 'merely a copy.' 2

Car Festival of Jagannath.

English

A similar festival is still celebrated with great rejoicing in Japan. As in the Indian procession of Jagannáth, the Japanese use three cars; and Buddha sits in his temple, together with two other figures, like the Jagannáth triad of Orissa. It is needless to add, that while Jagannath is historically of Buddhist or composite origin, he is to his true believers the one supreme 'Lord of the World.'

The calumnies in which some English writers have indulged with regard to Jagannath, are exposed in Hunter's work on Orissa. That work carefully examined the whole evidence on the subject, from 1580, when Abul Fazl wrote, through a long series of travellers, down to the police reports of 1870. It came to the conclusion which H. H. Wilson had arrived at

calumnies. from quite different sources," that self-immolation was entirely

Self-immolation

not practised.

opposed to the worship of Jagannáth, and that the deaths at the Car Festival were almost always accidental. In a closelypacked, eager throng of a hundred thousand men and women at Puri, numbers of them unaccustomed to exposure or hard labour, and all of them tugging and straining to the utmost at the car, under a blazing sun, deaths must occasionally occur. There were also isolated instances of pilgrims throwing themselves under the wheels in a frenzy of religious excitement. At one time, several unhappy people were killed or injured every year, but they were almost invariably cases 1 From the chapel at Anuradhapura to Mehentele.

2

History of Architecture, vol. ii. p. 590 (ed. 1867).

3 See, among many interesting notices by recent travellers, Miss Bird's

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, vol. i. pp. 111, 115, etc. (ed. 1880).

4 Hunter's Orissa, vol. i., particularly pp. 306-308; also pp. 132–136. Namely, the descriptions of the Car Festival or Rath-Játra in the work of Krishna Dás.

LIBELS OF JAGANNATH.

225

of accidental trampling. At an early period, indeed, the priests at Purí, probably by permitting a midnight sacrifice once a year within their precincts to the wife of Siva, had fallen under suspicion of bloody rites.2 But such rites arose from the ambition of the priests to make Purí the sacred city of all worships and all sects. The yearly midnight offerings to the Dread Goddess within Jagannáth's sacred precincts represent the efforts made from time to time towards a coalition of the Sivaite and Vishnuite worship, like the chakra or sacred disc of Vishnu which surmounts the pre-historic temple to Kálí at Tamluk.3

worship.

Such compromises had nothing to do with the worship of the His true Jagannáth. A drop of blood even accidentally spilt in bloodless his presence pollutes the officiating priests, the people, and the consecrated food. The few suicides that occurred at the Car Festival were for the most part those of diseased and miserable objects, who took this means to put themselves out of pain. The official returns now place the facts beyond doubt. Nothing could be more opposed to Vishnu-worship than self-immolation. Any death within the temple of Jagannath renders the place unclean. The ritual suddenly stops, and the polluted offerings are hurried away from the sight of the offended god. According to Chaitanya, the Orissa apostle of Jagannáth, Evidence the destruction of the least of God's creatures is a sin about Jagannáth; against the Creator. Self-slaughter he would have regarded with abhorrence. The copious literature of his sect frequently describes the Car Festival, but makes no mention of self-sacrifice, and contains not a single passage which could be twisted into a sanction for it.5 Abul Fazl, the minister of Akbar, who conducted the survey of India for the Mughal Emperor, is silent about self-immolation to Jagannáth, although, from the context, it is almost certain that had he heard of the practice he would have mentioned it. In 1870, the present author compiled an index to all accounts by travellers and others of self-immolation at the Car Festival, against from the 14th century downwards.6 It proved that such self

1 Bimalá, the 'Stainless One.'

See statement from the Haft-iklim (1485-1527 A.D.) in Hunter's Orissa, vol. i. p. 306.

3 See The Imperial Gazetteer, article TAMLUK.

See authorities quoted in Hunter's Orissa, vol. i. p. 134; Stirling's account, Asiatic Researches, vol. xv. p. 324; Calcutta Review, vol. x. p. 235; Report of Statistical Commissioner to the Government of Bengal, 1868, part ii. p. 8; Purí Police Reports; Lieut. Laurie's Orissa, 1850. 'H. H. Wilson's Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. p. 155 (ed. 1862). 6 Hunter's Orissa, vol. i. pp. 305-308.

VOL. VI.

P

slaughter.

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