who have no idea, that any such personage exists as Devi, or the goddess, and only mean to express allegorically the power of God, exerted in creating, preserving, and renovating this universe, we cannot with justice infer, that the dissenters admit no deity but visible nature: the Pandit who now attends me, and who told Mr. Wilkins, that the Saugatas were atheists, would not have attempted to resist the decisive evidence of the contrary, which appears in the very instrument on which he was consulted, if his understanding had not been blinded by the intolerant zeal of a mercenary priesthood. 66 The moralists of the east have in general chosen to deliver their precepts in short, sententious maxims, to illustrate them by sprightly comparisons, or to inculcate them in the very ancient form of agreeable apclogues. Our divine religion has no need of such aids as many are willing to give it, by asserting, that the wisest men of this world were ignorant of the two great maxims, that we must act in respect of others, as we should wish them to act in respect to ourselves, and that, instead of returning evil for evil, we should confer benefits even on those who injure us; but the first rule is implied in a speech of Lysias,* and expressed in distinct phrases by Thales+ and Pittacus ;+ and I have even seen it, word for word, in the original of Confucius, which I carefully compared with the Latin translation.—If the conversion therefore of the Pandits, in this country, shall ever be attempted by Protestant missionaries, they must beware of asserting, while they teach the gospel of truth, what those Pandits would know to be false, and who would cite the beautiful Arya couplet, which was written at least * A native of Syracuse. He was a famous orator and teacher of eloquence at Athens, and flourished in the time of Socrates. + Of Miletus; he appeared about 640 years before Christ, and should properly be considered as the chief of the Ionian school, though that honour has been given to his disciple Anaximander. Born at Mitylene, on the island of Lesbos, about 650 years before the Christian æra. three centuries before our æra, and which Frinounces the duty of a good man, even in the moment of his destruction. to consist not only in forgiving, but even in a desire or benefiting his destroyer, as the Sandal-tree. in the instant of its overthrow, sheds reppure on the are, which fells it."* The same learned writer, in an advertisement to a translation of the Hitopadesa, says:- The Indians in moral wisdom were certainly eminent: the Niti Sastra, or system of ethics, is yet preserved; and the fables of Vishnusarman, whom we ridiculously call Pilpay,+ are the most beauti * See Asiatic Res. Svo. edit. vol. iv. p. 177, and the Works of Sir William Jones, Sro. edit. vol. iii. pp. 212, 213. + Sir William Jones supposes the mistake to have arisen from a misconception of the Sanscrit word, bedpci, "which some ignorant copyist has mistaken for pilpay. In Persian, the word bedpci means willow-fected, which would be nonsense, and pilpay, elephant-footed, which is not much better; Lut Cahafi savs, that in Sanscrit, the word signifies loved, the beloved, or favourite physician." ful, if not the most ancient collection of apologues in the world: they were £rst translated from the Sanscrit, in the sirú century, by the order of Buzenchumihn, or bright as the sun, the chief physician, and afterwards Vizir of the great Anushirevan, and are extant under various names in more than twenty languages; but their original tide is Hitopadesa, or amitable struction: and, as the very existence of Esop, whom the Arabs believe to have been an Abyssinian, appears rather doubtful, I am por disinclined to suppose, that the first moral fables, which appeared in Europe, were of Indian, or Ethiopian origin. He continues:- I have already had occasion to touch on the Indian metaphysics of natural bodies, according to the most celebrated of the Asafe schools, from which the Pythagoreans are supposed to have borrowed many of their opinions; and, as we learn from Cicero, that the cld sages of Europe had an idea of centripetal * Works of Sir William Jones, vol zi. force, and a principle of universal gravitation (which they never indeed attempted to demonstrate); so I can venture to affirm, without meaning to pluck a leaf from the neverfading laurels of our immortal Newton, that the whole of his theology, and part of his philosophy, may be found in the Vedas, and even in the works of the Sufis; that most subtil spirit, which he suspected to pervade natural bodies, and, lying concealed in them, to cause attraction and repulsion; the emission, reflection, and refraction of light; electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion; is described by the Hindus as a fifth element, endued with those very powers, and the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly ascribe to the sun, thence called Aditya, or the attractor, a name designed by the mythologists to represent the child of the goddess Aditi; but the most wonderful passage on the theory of attraction occurs in the charming allegorical poem of Shirin and Ferhad, or the divine spirit, and a human soul disin |
