Brahman

rule of

life.

Its hereditary results on

the caste.

The Brahman type.

Incidents in the history of Buddha, in the 6th century before Christ, show that numbers of Bráhmans at that time lived according to this rule of life. Three hundred years later, the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, found the Brahmans discoursing in their groves, chiefly on life and death. The Chinese travellers, down to the 10th century A.D., attest the survival of the Bráhmanical pattern of the religious life. The whole monastic system of India, and those vast religious revivals which have given birth to the modern sects of Hinduism, are based on the same withdrawal from worldly affairs. At this day, Bráhman colleges, called tols, are carried on without fees on the old model, at Nadiyá in Bengal, and elsewhere. The modern visitor to these retreats can testify to the stringent self-discipline, and to the devotion to learning for its own sake, often protracted till past middle-life, and sometimes by grey-haired students.

The Brahmans, therefore, were a body of men who, in an early stage of this world's history, bound themselves by a rule of life the essential precepts of which were self-culture and selfrestraint. As they married within their own caste, begat children only during their prime, and were not liable to lose the finest of their youth in war, they transmitted their best qualities in an ever-increasing measure to their descendants. The Brahmans of the present day are the result of nearly 3000 years of hereditary education and self-restraint; and they have evolved a type of mankind quite distinct from the surrounding population. Even the passing traveller in India marks them out, alike from the bronze-cheeked, large-limbed, leisureloving Rajput or warrior caste of Aryan descent; and from the dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low-castes of non-Aryan origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman stands apart from both; tall and slim, with finely modelled lips and nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and somewhat cocoa-nut shaped skull-the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by the vigour of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept across India after another, dynasties have risen and fallen, religions have spread themselves over the land and disappeared. But since the dawn of history, the Bráhman has calmly ruled; swaying the minds and receiving the homage of the people, and accepted by foreign nations as the highest type of Indian mankind.

The paramount position which the Bráhmans won, resulted, in no small measure, from the benefits which they bestowed.

WORK DONE BY THE BRAHMANS.

97

done by

India.

For their own Aryan countrymen, they developed a noble The work language and literature. The Brahmans were not only the the Brahpriests and philosophers. They were also the lawgivers, the mans for statesmen, the administrators, the men of science, and the poets of their race. Their influence on the aboriginal peoples, the hill and forest races of India, was not less important. To these rude remnants of the flint and bronze ages they brought in ancient times a knowledge of the metals and of the gods. Within the historical period, the Bráhmans have incorporated the mass of the backward races into the social and religious organization of Hinduism. A system of worship is a great comfort to a tropical people, hemmed in by the uncontrolled forces of nature, as it teaches them how to propitiate those mysterious powers, and so tends to liberate their minds from the terrors of the unseen.

teric sides.

The reflective life of the Middle Land (Madhya-desha) led Bráhman the Brahmans to see that the old gods of the Veda were in theology. reality not supreme beings, but poetic fictions. For when they came to think the matter out, they found that the sun, the aqueous vapour, the encompassing sky, the wind, and the dawn, could not each be separate and supreme creators, but must have all proceeded from one First Cause. They did not shock the religious sense of the less speculative castes by any public rejection of the Vedic deities. They accepted the old Its esoteric 'Shining Ones' of the Veda as beautiful manifestations of the and exodivine power, and continued to decorously conduct the sacrifices in their honour. But among their own caste, the Brahmans distinctly enunciated the unity of God. To the Veda, the Brahmanas, and the Sútras, they added a vast body of theological literature, composed at intervals between 800 B.C. and 1000 A.D. The Upanishads, meaning, according to their great Brahman expounder, 'The Science of God,' and His ' identity with the soul;' the Aranyakas, or Tracts for the ForestRecluse; and the much later Puránas, or Traditions from of Old,'-contain mystic and beautiful doctrines inculcating the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, mingled with less noble dogmas, popular tales, and superstitions. The mass of the people were left to believe in four castes, four Vedas, and many deities. But the higher thinkers among the Brahmans recognised that in the beginning there was but one caste, one Veda, and one God.

The old 'Shining Ones' of the Vedic singers were, indeed, Rise of the no longer suitable deities, either for the life which the Aryans post-Vedic gods led after they advanced into Southern Bengal, or for the country

VOL. VI.

G

The vast forces of nature,

in which they lived. The Vedic gods were the good 'friends' of the free-hearted warring tribes in Northern India, settled on the banks of fordable streams or of not overpowering rivers. In Central and South-Eastern Bengal, the Bráhmans required. deities whose nature and attributes would satisfy profoundly reflective minds, and at the same time would be commensurate with the stupendous forces of nature amid which they dwelt. The storm-gods (Maruts) of the Veda might suffice to raise the dust-whirlwinds of the Punjab, but they were evidently deities on a smaller scale than those which wielded the irresistible cyclones of Bengal. The rivers, too, had ceased to be merely bountiful givers of wealth, as in the north. Their accumulated in Bengal. waters came down in floods, which buried cities and drowned

The Hindu

Vishnu ;

provinces; wrenching away the villages on their banks, destroying and reproducing the land with an equal balance. The High-born Dawn, the Genial Sun, the Friendly Day, and the kindly but confused old groups of Vedic deities, accordingly gave place to the conception of one god in his three solemn manifestations as Brahmá the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer and Reproducer.

Each of these highly elaborated gods had his prototype. Triad : among the Vedic deities; and they remain to this hour the Brahmá; three persons of the Hindu Triad. Brahmá, the Creator, was too abstract an idea to be a popular god; and in a journey through India, the traveller comes on only one great seat of his worship at the present day, on the margin of the sacred lake PUSHKARA, near Ajmere. A single day of Brahmá is 2160 millions of man's years. Vishnu, the Preserver, was a more useful and practical deity. In his ten incarnations, especially in his seventh and eighth, as Ráma and Krishna, under many names and in varied forms, he took the place of the bright Vedic gods. Siva, the third person of the Triad, embodied, as Destroyer and Reproducer, the profound Bráhmanical conception of death as a change of state and an entry into new life. He thus obtained, on the one hand, the special reverence of the mystic and philosophic sects among the Bráhmans; while, on the other, his terrible aspects associated him alike with the Rudra, or 'God of Roaring Tempests' of the Veda, and with the blood-loving deities of the non-Aryan tribes. Vishnu and Siva, in their diverse male and female shapes, now form, for practical purposes, the gods of the Hindu population.

Siva.

Brahman

philoso.

phy.

The truth is, that the Aryans in India worshipped-first, as they feared; then, as they admired; and finally, as they reasoned. Their earliest Vedic gods were the stupendous phenomena of

SIX SCHOOLS OF BRAHMAN PHILOSOPHY. 99

the visible world; these deities became divine heroes in the epic legends; and they were spiritualized into abstractions by the philosophical schools. From the Vedic era downwardthat is to say, during a period which cannot be estimated at less than 3000 years-the Brahmans have slowly elaborated the forces and splendid manifestations of nature into a harmonious godhead, and constructed a system of belief and worship for the Indian people. They also pondered deeply on the mysteries of life. Whence arose this fabric of the visible world, and whence came we ourselves-we who with conscious minds look out upon it? It is to these questions that philosophy has, among all races, owed her birth; and the Brahmans arranged their widely diverse answers to them in six great systems or darsanas, literally mirrors of knowledge.'

darsanas

The present sketch can only touch upon the vast body of The six speculation which thus grew up, at least 500 years before Christ. or schools; The universal insoluble problems of thought and being, of mind and matter, and of soul as apart from both, of the origin of evil, of the summum bonum of life, of necessity and freewill, and of the relations of the Creator to the creature, are in the six schools of Bráhmanical philosophy endlessly discussed.

The Sankhya system of the sage Kapila explains the visible (1) The Sánkhya ; world by assuming the existence of a primordial matter from all eternity, out of which the universe has, by successive stages, evolved itself. The Yoga school of Patanjali assumes the exist- (2) The ence of a primordial soul, anterior to the primeval matter, and Yoga; holds that from the union of the two the spirit of life (mahánátmá) arose. The two Vedanta schools ascribe the visible world (3, 4) The Vedantas ; to a divine act of creation, and assume an omnipotent god as the cause of the existence, the continuance, and the dissolution of the universe. The Nyaya or logical school of Gautama (5) The Nyáya; enunciates the method of arriving at truth, and lays special stress on the sensations as the source of knowledge. It is usually classed together with the sixth school, the Vaiseshika, (6) The founded by the sage Kanáda, which teaches the existence of a shika. transient world composed of eternal atoms. All the six schools had the same starting-point, ex nihilo nihil fit. Their sages, as a rule, struggled towards the same end, namely the liberation. of the human soul from the necessity of existence and from the chain of future births, by its absorption into the Supreme Soul, or primordial Essence of the universe.1

1

Any attempt to fuse into a few lines the vast conflicting masses of Hindu philosophical doctrines must be unsatisfactory. Objections may be taken to compressing the sub-divisions and branching doctrines of each

Vaise

Summary of Bráh

man

religion.

Brahman science.

grammar.

The Brahmans, therefore, treated philosophy as a branch of religion. Now the universal functions of religion are to lay down a rule of conduct for this life, and to supply some guide to the next. The Bráhman solutions to the problems of practical religion, were self-discipline, alms, sacrifice to and contemplation of the deity. But besides the practical questions of the spiritual life, religion has also intellectual problems, such as the compatibility of evil with the goodness of God, and the unequal distribution of happiness and misery in this life. Bráhman philosophy exhausted the possible solutions of these difficulties, and of most of the other great problems which have since perplexed Greek and Roman sage, medieval schoolman, and modern man of science. The various hypotheses of Creation, Arrangement, and Development were each elaborated; and the views of physiologists at the present day are a return, with new lights, to the evolution theory of Kapila. His Sánkhya system is held by Weber to be the oldest of the six Bráhman schools, and certainly dates from not later than 500 B.C. The works on Religion published in the native languages in India in 1877 numbered 1192, besides 56 on Mental and Moral Philosophy. In 1882, the totals had risen to 1545 on Religion, and 153 on Mental and Moral Philosophy.

The Brahmans had also a circle of sciences of their own. The Science of Language, indeed, had been reduced in India to fundamental principles at a time when the grammarians of the West still treated it on the basis of accidental resemblances ; and modern philology dates from the study of Sanskrit by Sanskrit European scholars. Pánini was the architect of Sanskrit grammar; but a long succession of grammarians must have laboured before he reared his enduring fabric. The date of Pánini has been assigned by his learned editor Böhtlink to about 350 B.C. Weber, reasoning from a statement made (long afterwards) by the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang, suggests that it may have been later. The grammar of Pánini stands supreme among the grammars of the world, alike for its precision of statement, and for its thorough analysis of the roots of the language and of the formative principles of words. By employing an algebraic terminology it attains a sharp succinctness unrivalled in brevity, but at times enigmatical. It arranges, in logical harmony, the whole phenomena. school into a single sentence. But space forbids a more lengthy disquisition. The foregoing paragraphs endeavour to fairly condense the accounts which H. H. Wilson, Albrecht Weber, Professor Dowson, and the Rev. K. M. Banarji give of the Six Darsanas or Schools.

Pánini.