Section I. The Philosophy Latent in the Religion
1. Everything we know from internal evidence about Egyptian and Chaldaic wisdom comes from pyramids, tombs, and inscribed statues, whether already deciphered or still waiting to be. In Hindostan we are back in a world of books, among a people who are literary by profession. Their literature does not explain a history; it takes the place of one. We know almost nothing of what the Hindoo has done, and a great deal of what he has thought.
2. The English scholar must still wait for an accurate knowledge of the Hindoo Vedas. Until recent years even the most accomplished Sanscrit scholars shrank from translating them. We must take their great beauty of style and language on the word of those competent to judge, whose judgment cannot be wholly warped by love of their subject. But the specimens we have show their general design and character. They are invocations. Powers of air, earth, or fire are implored for help in different emergencies. It is assumed that these powers are related to man and can hear his cries. It is even hoped that they may have fellowship with him and come to share his food and wine. The worshipper does not doubt that they will be pleased with his offerings and may be swayed by his sacrifices.
3. So we find ourselves at once in a priestly world. The priest prescribes the method of invocation and the kind of sacrifice, and presents them, so he is the leading man of the community. The orders and ranks of priests will naturally be defined first, and all other callings will be measured by the offices they perform. At this stage of Hindoo life the objects of worship must also have been many, determined by the different influences that powers in nature exert over man, with the priest defining and arranging those influences.
4. Yet the worshipper feels a communion with the beings he addresses, and this distinguishes Hindoo adoration from the merely physical idolatry of the Egyptians. From the first the Hindoo seems to seek friendship with his divinities, not just help. Soon we find that the help he seeks is not only for feeding his cattle or defeating his enemies, and that the friendship of the wine-cup does not satisfy his idea of intercourse with the Divine. He invokes a Purifier and desires purification for himself. His ceremonies and sacrifices, whatever other lesser ends they have, seem gradually to point more and more to this one.
5. As they do, one Being gradually seems to dawn on him through the different objects that had divided his attention. The name Agni stands out more and more among the forms the Vedas seek to propitiate. You feel that he is becoming the special object of Brahminical service, that he may soon displace all the others and be acknowledged as the Being whom all the rest were bringing to light. We believe such a unity is latent in these early books, strictly polytheistic as they are. It seems to be the result of the worshipper’s own experiments and discoveries, or at any rate it reveals itself in the course of his thought and devotion. It stands in strange contrast to the variety which he must still acknowledge as real, and which he had taught others, as well as himself, to regard as divine.
6. Here begins the distinction between the priestly and the popular faith of the Hindoos. It has often been put down to wilful imposture, and imposture has no doubt upheld it, but its origin may have been less culpable. The wish for purification implies a sense of something in ourselves that does not belong to this earth and may be separated from it. When the man asks himself what this is, he finds with wonder that the very effort of asking suggests the answer. He thinks; he thinks of all the things around him. Surely his thought makes him superior to them. If he can become a purely thinking being, he is no longer one of them, and he has gained what he wanted. But who can make him such a being? The God he calls on must himself be of this kind. He must be the thinker, close to the thinking man as his patron, friend, and fellow-worker. Where can the union with him stop? Not until they become identical, until the man sinks into the God and is lost.
7. So in the next stage of Hindooism Agni has become Brahm. A priest-god now stands clearly before us, and no other name fits him. He is emphatically the God of the priest as distinct from other men: the priest himself, raised and transfigured. The priest’s great effort and privilege is to be absorbed in him.
8. But has the priest himself not changed in the process? Is he still the director of invocations and orderer of sacrifices? Has he not become the thinker, the intellectual man, whose business is to use powers the common man lacks or has never cultivated? The priest is now the philosopher, the seeker after wisdom hidden from others. More than ever he must keep aloof from those who follow the ordinary crafts and occupations of the world. The man who merely acts, even the greatest hero or warrior, must rank far beneath the thinker. The thinker must guard the privileges he has been given and pass them on to an order of successors.
9. In such a scheme, what place is left for his old work? What is the purpose of sacrifices and offerings if thinking is all in all? There are several possible answers besides the vulgarest and wickedest, to which the Brahmin was always inclined: that such a religion is needed for the fool but not for the wise man. First, by concentrating divinity in Brahm, the universe did not lose its sacredness. Every part of nature was a thought of Brahm’s. The cow, the elephant, the flower were all portions of him, so there was no wrong in paying them homage; it could be counted part of the service of Brahm. Second, a devout mind finds something inexpressibly awful in its nearness to Brahm, in the confusion between worshipper and object of worship. Solemn invocations, the habitual pronouncing of the name Om or Light, and rites of purification might well serve to remind the priest-student that he was calling on some being, and not merely adoring himself or an image thrown off from himself. Third, if storms and convulsions in nature showed dark thoughts in Brahm, sacrifice or propitiation might be needed to remove them, even though the direct worship of dark beings had not yet become part of the mythology, or was denounced by those who held the purer conception. Still, contradictions lay hidden in the attempt to reconcile the Brahmin’s philosophical and priestly positions. They were certain to show themselves in his later history, and were as likely to cause conflicts of opinion within his own schools as any resistance from the people.
Section II. The Philosophy Developed—the Bhagavad Gita
1. Another great problem, or set of problems, also of the highest interest, occupied the Brahmin. Contemplation was his tribe’s business, yet something had to be done. He himself had to act, and the other castes existed for the sake of action. How were action and contemplation related? How was the bond between the Brahmin and the other tribes to be kept up if their worship differed from his and they aimed at a wholly different object? We cannot learn what forced this question on the Hindoo mind. But we know that at some time it became a very practical part of his reflections and gave shape and colour to all his philosophy, because of that remarkable poem, the Bhagavad Gita. Its unity and completeness entitle it to be called a poem, though it is only an episode of a much longer one. Scholars still debate its date. A. W. Schlegel, its late Latin translator, never finished his promised essay on the subject. But he made his opinion clear, formed after reflecting on its poetic structure, spirit and language: that it deserves precedence over all the efforts of Greek speculation. Hindoos claim a still earlier origin. Some authorities have imagined a much later one, after the Christian era, not far from the many commentaries written on it in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. My general inclination favours Schlegel, but it must yield to strong external evidence. Even if the poem is ultimately excluded from the records of the old world, it is admitted to contain the very essence of Brahminical philosophy and to set out vividly questions that must have stirred the Hindoo mind in every age. So it is a fit subject for this sketch. I shall give an abstract of it, believing it will lead readers into the heart of the subject and save them many pages of wearisome discourse.
2. The scene opens on a battlefield. The Kooroos and the Pandoos, kindred tribes, are about to fight a deadly war. Arjoon, one of the Pandoo heroes, stands in a chariot drawn by white horses. Beside him is the divine Kreeshna, who for now is only the prince’s mysterious counsellor; he will tell us his own nature and offices later.
Arjoon looks on with horror at a battle in which uncles, tutors, cousins, sons, brothers and close friends stand on both sides. He thinks he can have no happiness hereafter if he murders his own people. Such a crime is likely to destroy the virtue of a whole family or tribe, and the Sankar threatens hell to those who fall and those who survive. He sits down in the chariot between the two armies and throws away his bow and arrows.
3. His divine adviser rebukes his weakness: it is his duty to fight. “Tell me what I shall do,” the young man cries. “I am confounded between two duties. I am overcome with dread of sin, and nothing could appease my grief, though I ruled the earth or the hosts of heaven.” Kreeshna then teaches him the nature of the soul, and says he may go to the fight because the soul neither kills nor is killed. You cannot say of it that it has been, is about to be, or will be hereafter. It is without birth, ancient, constant, eternal. As a man throws away old garments and puts on new, so the soul leaves its old mortal frames and enters new ones. Weapon, fire, water and wind cannot divide, burn, corrupt or dry it. It is indivisible, inconsumable, incorruptible, universal, permanent, immoveable. Our former state of being is unknown, the middle state is plain, the future cannot be discovered. The duty of Arjoon’s tribe is to fight; a soldier of the Kshatree tribe has no higher.
4. So belief in the soul’s immortality is tied to the practice of life. But is Arjoon’s dread of the future consequences of his action not reasonable? Kreeshna suggests it is not. People who hold out reward and punishment in that way look for passing enjoyment in heaven, not for eternal absorption. The Veds, which seem to encourage such notions, are suited to men in a threefold condition. Turn to spiritual things and hold firm to the higher path, and you will be free from care about the future as well as the present. Consider the deed, not the outcome, and let hope of reward not be the motive for action. Yet do not spend your life in inaction. Do your duty, give up all thought of consequence, and take refuge in wisdom alone. Men with true wisdom are unmindful of good and evil in this world. Those who have abandoned thought of the fruit of their actions are freed from the chains of birth and go to the regions of eternal happiness.
5. Arjoon asks to know more about the Moonee, the thoroughly wise man. Kreeshna answers: “The wisdom of that man is established who, like the tortoise, can draw in all his members and restrain them from their usual purposes. The tumultuous senses carry off by force even the heart of one who strives to restrain them. The inspired man, trusting in me, may quell them and be happy. Such a man walks in the night when all things go to rest and sleeps in the day when all things wake. A man who trusts in the Supreme does not go astray; at the hour of death he shall mix with the incorporeal nature of Brahm.”
6. The relation of action to thought still troubles Arjoon and prompts another lecture from Kreeshna. In it Arjoon asks how man is led to commit offences, since he seems compelled against his wishes by some secret force. “It is the enemy, lust or passion,” the teacher replies, “insatiable and full of sin, by which this world is covered as flame by smoke, a sword by rust, or the unborn child by its membrane. This old foe, in the shape of desire, raging like fire and hard to appease, darkens the understanding even of the wise. This destroyer of wisdom and knowledge must be subdued, and it can be; for though the organs are great, the mind is greater; the Resolution is greater than the mind, and there is One greater than that. When thou hast resolved what is superior to the resolution, and fixed thyself by thyself, then determine to abandon inclination or desire, thy great enemy.”
7. There is a deep mystery in that last sentence. Who is this that is superior to the resolution in man? All the discipline seems to depend on the question. Kreeshna says he taught this to one and another in former days, that it was handed down to the Rajarshees, and lost. Arjoon asks how this can be, since Kreeshna came later into life than some of those he taught. “Both I and thou,” says Kreeshna, “have passed many births; mine are known to me, thou knowest not thine. Though I am not by nature subject to birth or decay, yet I have command over my own nature and am made evident by my power. When virtue declines in the world, I make myself manifest; I appear from age to age to preserve the just, destroy the wicked, and re-establish virtue.” Two kinds of worship are pointed out. Those who acknowledge Kreeshna do not, on leaving their mortal frames, enter another, but enter into him. On the other hand, those who seek success for their works in this life worship the Devatas (demons or angels). The true Kreeshna worshipper sees rest in action and action in rest; he performs all duties yet, as it were, does nothing; he seeks no reward and is pleased with whatever chance brings; he is freed from the bonds of action and is the same in prosperity and adversity. God is attained by the man who makes God alone the object of his works. There are various modes of worship, all purifying, but worship of spiritual wisdom is far better than worship with offerings of things. In wisdom every work is found. Seek it with prostrations, questions and attention, and you will not fall again into folly; you will see all nature in me. Though you were the greatest of offenders, you can cross the gulf of sin in the bark of wisdom. Nothing in this world compares with wisdom and purity. He who is perfected by practice finds it in due time in his own soul. He who has faith finds wisdom; the ignorant man, and the man full of doubt, is lost. Those whose understandings, souls and refuge are in the Deity are purified from their offences by wisdom and go where they shall never return. The learned see him alike in the reverent Brahmin perfected in knowledge, in the ox, the elephant, the dog, and the man who eats dogs’ flesh. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world.
8. The next lecture, on the exercises of the soul, works out the same idea in many forms. To the Yogi, or devout man, gold, iron and stones are the same; he is the same to those who love and those who hate, in the company of saints or sinners. He delights in his own soul; he is in God and free from sin; he believes in unity, worships me present in all things, and dwells in me altogether, even on this earth. In this conversation Arjoon asks, “Whither, O Kreeshna, doth the man go after death, who, although he be endued with faith, hath not obtained perfection in his devotion: because his unsubdued mind wandered from the discipline, does he come to nothing?” Kreeshna answers, “No man who hath done good goeth unto an evil place. A man whose devotions have been broken off by death, having enjoyed for many years the reward of his virtues in the region above, is at length born again in some holy family. He is endued with the same degree of application that he held in his former body, and he begins again to labour for perfection.”
9. But after all, who is Kreeshna? The question has already arisen in Arjoon’s mind, and he has reached the stage of discipline at which it can be answered. The teacher says: I am the creation and dissolution of the whole universe. Nothing is greater than I; all things hang on me like precious gems on a string. I am moisture in water, light in the sun and moon, invocation in the Veds, sound in the firmament, sweet savour in the earth, glory in the source of light. I am life in all things and zeal in the zealous. I am the eternal seed of nature, the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free from lust and anger. A supernatural influence bewilders the wicked, the foolish and the low-minded and keeps them from coming to me. I am not in these, though they proceed from me. Many seek me, but the wise man is constantly engaged in my service; I esteem him as myself, for his spirit depends on me alone. Those who worship the Devatas go to them; those who worship me alone go to me. The ignorant, who do not know my supreme nature, which is above all things, believe that I, who am invisible, exist in the visible forms in which they see me. I know all beings that have been, are, and shall be, but not one of them knows me. Those who trust in me know Brahm, the supreme and incorruptible; they know the emanations from which natural things are generated; they know the destroying nature. In this body I am the teacher of worship. He who thinks constantly of me will find me, and he who finds me does not return to mortal birth. The universe exists, dissolves, is reproduced; there is an incorruptible abode which is my mansion. The supreme Being is obtained by him who worships no other gods; in him all nature is included, and by him all things are spread abroad. I, continues Kreeshna, am the sacrifice, the worship, the spices, the fire, the victim, the father and mother of this world; I am the road of the good, the comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum and the friend. Those who serve other gods with firm belief involuntarily worship me. I am the same to all mankind. Those who serve me in adoration are in me. If one of ever such evil ways serves me alone, he becomes virtuous in spirit and obtains eternal happiness. Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the supreme journey if they take sanctuary with me; how much more my holy servants the Brahmins and the Rajarshees! Consider this world finite and joyless, and serve me.
10. Arjoon begins to regard his teacher with wonder and adoration. He is taught that reason, knowledge, clear judgment, patience, truth, humility, meekness, birth, death, fear, courage, zeal, renown and infamy all come from him. He is the soul standing in the bodies of all beings; he is the chief of warriors, floods and animals; the Himmalaya among mountains, the Ganges among rivers; the science in science, the spring among seasons, gaming among frauds, the rod and policy among rulers. “Amongst the secret I am silence, amongst the wise I am wisdom.”
11. All these are forms of Kreeshna. Arjoon longs to see his never-failing spirit, and a mysterious revelation is granted. The pupil is overwhelmed with rapture and terror. He sees all creation proceeding from Kreeshna and swallowed up in him. With this vision is mingled one of the army around him. As troops of insects rush faster and faster into flaming fire, and as rapid rivers roll on to the ocean’s bed, so these heroes are rushing toward the flaming mouth of the Divine Being. The whole world is filled with his grandeur. Kreeshna is the destroyer as well as the creator! Of all these warriors, none but Arjoon is to live; they are already destroyed by the Divine power. Let him put forth his hand and be the immediate agent of their death. On to the battle!
12. But Arjoon’s terror grows. He bows down before him whom he had called Kreeshna and friend. I was ignorant of thy greatness, he says; I was blinded by affection and presumption; I have trifled with thee; I ask thy forgiveness. Thou art the Father of all things, animate and inanimate, the sage instructor of the whole, worthy to be adored. Bear with me as a father with his son, a friend with a friend, a lover with his beloved. I am pleased to see things never seen before, but my mind is in awful fear. He is told not to be disturbed or let his faculties be confounded. The god takes again his kindly human shape, and Arjoon is at peace.
13. After this wonderful self-disclosure, and some discourse on how he is to be served in his visible and invisible nature, Kreeshna answers some of his pupil’s harder questions. First, what is Kshetra, or body? It consists of the five elements (earth, water, fire, air and æther), consciousness, understanding, spirit, the eleven organs, the powers of the five senses, love and hatred, pleasure and pain, sensibility and firmness. Secondly, what is Wisdom? It is freedom from self-esteem, hypocrisy and injustice; patience, rectitude, respect for masters and teachers; freedom from attachment and affection to children, wife and home; evenness of temper whatever happens, longed for or not; freedom from pride, worship paid to Kreeshna alone, love of solitude, constant study of the superior spirit. Thirdly, what is Gnea, the object of Wisdom? It is that which has no beginning and is supreme, which can be called neither being nor not being. It is all hands and feet, all faces, heads and eyes, all ear; it sits in the midst of the world. Without organs, it is the reflected light of every faculty of the organs; connected with nothing, it contains all things; without quality, it partakes of every quality. It is the inside and outside, the moveable and immoveable, of all nature. It stands at a distance yet is present; it is undivided, yet stands divided in all things. It is the ruler of all things, the light in light, declared to be free from darkness.
14. Kreeshna declares two other principles to be without beginning: Prakreetee and Pooroosh. The former seems to be the mere instrument or agent in man, the latter the directing power in him. All things, animate and inanimate, are said to be produced from the union of Kshetra and Kshetra-gna. I, says Kreeshna, am the Kshetra-gna in every mortal frame, the living power which directs it.
15. From Prakreetee, or nature, proceed three Goon, or qualities: the truth quality, the passionate quality, the dark quality. The Satwa-goon, or truth quality, leads to wisdom; the Raja-goon, or passionate quality, to ambition and covetousness; the Tama-goon, or dark quality, to madness, distraction and ignorance. Those ruled by the first mount on high, those ruled by the second stay in the middle, and those ruled by the last sink below. But the soul must rise above all these qualities into a Being superior to them before it can drink the water of immortality. How this ascent is made, how a man is to rise above the particular Pooroosh, or soul, into the Poorooshottama, or supreme soul, is Kreeshna’s next subject. I need not speak of it, as earlier lectures have anticipated it.
16. An important subject remains. Belief in three different qualities presumes a different destiny for the creatures endued with them, and this is now plainly affirmed. The Divine destiny is absorption into the Divine nature; the evil destiny confines the soul to mortal birth. Those born under the evil destiny do not know what it is to advance in virtue or fall back in vice. They say the world is without beginning and end, without an Eeswar, or Divine light, and that all things are conceived by the union of the sexes. They say the gratification of sensual appetite is the supreme good, and “This to-day hath been acquired by me, and this I shall have also; I am powerful, I am happy, I am rich; I am endued with precedence among men. Where is there another like me? I will make presents at the feast, and be merry.” Such men are self-conceited, stubborn, ever in pursuit of wealth and pride. They worship in name only, and hypocritically. They trust in pride and power; they hate me in themselves and others, so I cast them down into the wombs of evil spirits and unclean beasts. They go from birth to birth, and at length, not finding me, go into the most infernal regions. There are three ways to these: lust, anger and avarice. Avoid these gates of sin and thou wilt go the journey of the Most High.
17. Distinction of qualities leads to distinction in kinds of faith or worship. All worship, but the nature and object of the worship are set by their different qualities. Worship directed by Divine precept, without desire of reward and with an attentive mind, is of the Satwa-goon. Worship performed irregularly, without regard to the precepts of the law, without distribution of bread, without the usual invocations, without gifts to the Brahmins at the end, and without faith, is of the Raja-goon. Worship performed with a view to the fruit, and with hypocrisy, is of the Tama-goon. Whatever is done without faith, whether sacrifices, deeds of charity or mortification of the flesh, is called Asat and is not for this world nor the one above. The same qualities show themselves in works. He who has the Satwa-goon forsakes the fruit of action but not action itself; he who has the Raja-goon forsakes the work because it is painful; he who has the Tama-goon neglects action through folly and distraction of mind. So with Wisdom: that of the Satwa-goon sees one infinite principle in nature; that of the Raja-goon sees manifold principles; that of the Tama-goon sees only self-interest in all things. So with Pleasure. The pleasure a man enjoys from his labour, in which he finds the end of his pains, which is poison at the beginning and the water of life at the end, is of the Satwa-goon; it arises from the consent of the understanding. The pleasure arising from the mere meeting of the organs with their objects, sweet as the water of life at first and poison at last, is of the Raja-goon. The pleasure that tends from beginning to end to stupefy the soul is of the Tama-goon. Nothing, Kreeshna declares, in heaven or earth is free from the influence of these three qualities.
18. On these qualities depend the duties of the four tribes: Brahmin, Kshatree, Visya and Soodra. The natural duties of the Brahmin are peace, self-restraint, zeal, purity, patience, rectitude, learning, theology. Those of the Kshatree are bravery, glory, rectitude, not fleeing from the field, generosity, princely conduct. The natural duty of the Visya is to cultivate land, tend cattle, and buy and sell; that of the Soodra is servitude. A man content with his own lot and duty obtains perfection, for he offers his works to that Being from whom the principles of all beings proceed. The duty of a man’s own calling is far better than another’s, however well the other is done. A man’s own calling, with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken. With thy heart place all thy works in me, and thou shalt surmount every difficulty. But if through pride thou wilt not hear my words, thou wilt surely be lost. From self-confidence thou mayest think thou wilt not fight; that is a false resolve, for the principles of thy nature will drive thee, and thou wilt do from necessity what thou seekest through ignorance to avoid.
19. This conclusion fits the opening of the story and gives it unity, but it may seem inconsistent with what has been said of the special glory of the Brahmin. Kreeshna adds, “Eeswar resideth in the bosom of every mortal being, revolving with his supernatural power the universal wheel of time. Take sanctuary with him upon all occasions, oh! offspring of Bahrat; by his divine pleasure thou shalt obtain supreme happiness, and an eternal abode.”
20. It would have been easy to pick sentences from this poem and other Hindoo books and build a scheme of Hindoo philosophy out of them. But such a scheme would not represent the actual thoughts and conflicts in the minds of those to whom it was attributed. We might form a high or low notion of this remarkable people or their teachers, but we should know nothing of either. The occasion of the poem, its scenery, and the way its thoughts work themselves out are at least as important as the results Arjoon, Kreeshna or the narrator reach. The final moral, which shows the Kshatree tribe to have its own work and dignity, not incompatible with the Brahmin’s superior glory, evidently runs through the poem. All its dramatic interest and speculation are linked to it. Arjoon’s darkness comes from fancying that the work which belongs to the priest also belongs to the warrior, or that the only escape from this is to suppose a different standard for each, a different object to pursue, a different God to adore. Such an opinion had doubtless been taught in the Brahminical schools and seemed a natural inference from the idea of Brahminism. The author of the poem evidently felt how opposed it was to what he regarded as pure Brahminism: it must force the Brahmin himself to acknowledge many objects when his business was to search for unity, and it must lead to a hopeless division of castes that should be bound together in obedience to what was most refined and spiritual. So the book is evidently the work of a reformer who wished to make the Brahminical tribe conscious of its vocation as the guide, not the tyrant, of the rest. In pursuing this aim he brings out the highest form of Hindooism, a form that never was and never could be realised, but by which we may understand its lower and more vulgar manifestations far better than by looking at them alone.
21. This form differs from what we find in the Veds, and many have concluded that the poem is throughout a hidden protest against the belief embodied in them. But I see no sufficient reason to doubt that the author is sincere in the respect he professes for them, and that he believed he was drawing out the sense latent in them. Nor was he perhaps wholly wrong. The writers of the Veds would have been quite unable to follow him in a single step of his philosophical speculation, and there is no reason to doubt that they really meant to ask Indra and the other gods they invoked to come and drink with them. Yet their cries for communion and friendship with the gods, and for purification, grounded as they are on religious aspirations of the creature and not on a revelation of the Creator, do contain implicitly the ideas developed in the Bhagavad Gita. In one respect the poet returns from the more exclusive Brahminism to the earlier teaching of the Vedas: his hero is Kreeshna, not Brahm. It is true that Kreeshna is Brahm and claims the name; but he presents himself first in human shape, as the warrior and not merely the thinker. This difference belongs to the whole conception of the poem. The sudden manifestation of his spiritual and divine glory, which overwhelms Arjoon, does not swallow up his human form or prevent his appearing in it again. However great the difficulty, the Hindoo philosopher sees that this union must somehow be realised, and that no teacher of man’s spirit is sufficient in whom both conditions do not meet.
22. But for all the depth and sincerity of this acknowledgment of such a teacher, the soul of man is still the ultimate object of this poem, as much as of the narrower, merely meditative religion. In both it is equally true that the soul, or spiritual part of man, is always unawares becoming the God, even while there is the strongest effort to escape this identification: a really earnest struggle of the man to sink in awe, to confess One mightier than himself, to become nothing in his presence. What is his presence? Where is it? Here the Hindoo is lost; he sees images of himself everywhere, and he is sure there is something that is not the image of himself. To discover what it is is worth the toil and sorrow of a life, and to know it must be the great reward hereafter. But while he is working out that difficult problem and devising the best means of complete fruition, Earth goes on with her processes of growth, decay and destruction; the man himself is born, has to live, fight and die. Nothing connects himself or Nature with God, unless he worships himself or Nature and makes the God include both. This is the downward result to which everything in Hindoo life and society has always tended.
23. The Hebrew was forbidden to connect God with anything in heaven above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. He was taught to look up to the Lord as his God, the God of his fathers, the King of his land, the Creator of things, the Lawgiver of himself. He was taught to wage war on the tendencies to worship natural gods that he found in himself and saw in others. He was taught to acknowledge the Lord as the ever-present guide, ruler and teacher of his whole nation: every Jew in the covenant, and priests, lawgivers and prophets God’s ministers to them. This is what is called their narrow, exclusive faith. But out of it, as we have seen, grew a philosophy: the recognition of a Divine teacher of man, and of a wisdom to be the object of his search and love. The Hindoo starts from the discovery to which the Hebrew was led by long and painful discipline. He is conscious of a mysterious Teacher near him, one who works on his spirit and is at the same time ruler over nature. But his search begins from himself, and, despite his conviction that it ought not to be so, it ends in himself. The purification of his own soul becomes in practice the highest end he can pursue or conceive; he must make it his aim, and must separate from the society to which he nevertheless feels bound, in order to pursue it. The more he learns about himself, the more he finds he must get rid of himself, yet that demon always pursues him. To sink and be lost is his only hope, to sink in Brahm. But is Brahm anything except a projection from himself? Does sinking in him mean the same as being nothing?
24. Reflections like these, on which the whole condition of Hindoo society for thousands of years is the commentary, might raise doubts in those who think that acknowledging a wisdom received hinders the search for it, and that the soul of man is most likely to be free when it works out its freedom for itself, or under a set of wise men. But we who acknowledge the Hebrew principle, and have that vantage-ground for viewing the history of the universe, need not rest in this merely negative conclusion. We are bound to look on the whole course of human thought as directed by a wisdom above man’s, by One who, as the Apostle says, “orders the times before appointed and the bounds of men’s habitations, that they may seek Him, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him.” To one holding this faith, the seekings of the Bhagavad Gita and of the whole Hindoo world must be of the profoundest interest. He must see that they were continually baffled, but he sees it with sympathy, not exultation, certain that they were struggling with questions which belong to him and to the whole universe, to which he too must seek an answer and cannot rest till he finds one. Far from seeing only contradictions in the method or result of the search, he will be repeatedly humbled to see how much was made known to these inquirers: what glimpses of light they caught, what visions of good cheered their dreary path, what strength was given them for thought, for suffering, even at times for manly action. If he feels even a wish to deny or explain away this fact, he will suspect himself of a secret atheism, and of having studied the Hebrew books to no profit.
25. These remarks belong especially, but not only, to the subject now before us. Modern inquiries have made it clear that Sanscrit is the source of most European languages. So we have a right to expect that the habit of thought and feeling in the Sanscrit books may be traced, under different modifications, in the nations we shall speak of later. These Hindoo books may prove the beginning of a course of inquiry we shall follow through many windings in Greek and modern philosophy. The spirit of man, which in the Hebrew books we saw under a Divine discipline and education, will now be seen asking a multitude of questions about itself, its destiny, and its relations to the visible and invisible world. It will be feeling after some object near it that might guide or help it in the search, losing that object again and again, and questioning earth and heaven where it has gone and how it may be recovered. Whether this Indo-Germanic course of inquiry ever meets the Semitic teaching we have been hearing; whether the unity revealed to the Hebrew will explain or contradict the unity the Brahmin seeks: our future history may show. Meanwhile I note that the problems we shall meet among Ionian, Eleatic and Platonic philosophers will perplex us far less if we have listened attentively to the dialogue between Arjoon and Kreeshna.
Section III. The Philosopher Separating Himself from the Priest
1. I will leave any discussion of the formal schools of Hindoo philosophy to the second part of this sketch. But there is one great Eastern revolution, placed by most authorities in the fifth or sixth century B.C., that is closely bound up with the history of philosophy. The few glimpses we have of the outward facts of this conflict, which led to such surprising results, would be unintelligible to us without some prior knowledge of Hindoo speculations.
2. Hindoo books constantly speak of the Buddhist as a member of a philosophical sect. We know him as the follower of a religion held by nearly a third of the world’s people. To reconcile these two descriptions, we must recall what was said about the seemingly unsociable characters joined in the Brahmin, and about the nature of Brahm himself. The priest is the man who uses his soul or intellect, unlike the mass of men, who use only their senses. Brahm is the Intellect, or Buddha. It could easily have been guessed that a sect of Brahmins would dwell on the idea of intelligence in man until they suspected that their claim to a monopoly of it denied Brahm’s presence. It is likely, too, given what we found in the Bhagavad Gita, that they would put the meditative side of religion above the sacrificial. But there came a memorable and critical period in the history of mankind generally, connected with the rise of reformers and legislators in various countries, and perhaps marking the beginning of European society and civilization. Then Brahminism was shaken to its centre in Hindostan, and the worship of the One Intelligence was proclaimed aloud as incompatible with the claims of an hereditary caste.
3. It was not the original Hindoo doctrine that became the inspiring idea of whole countries, as some have said, in plain contradiction to both the letter and spirit of the Veds. It was the idea hidden in that doctrine, which had again and again threatened to break loose from it. The philosophy, freeing itself from the old faith, became a faith itself. Buddhism is the most surprising effort of the human intellect to assert its own supremacy that has ever been recorded, or perhaps ever will be. European sages in the last century and this one have asked when philosophy will break free of the fetters priests put on it. Philosophy in Asia did that two thousand years ago. It threw off an intolerable yoke, affirmed that man’s soul can expand without limit, and claimed for that soul the homage due to a divinity. This was no idle boast: it actually won the allegiance of multitudes.
4. Is the result one that a lover of wisdom, or of his kind, can delight to dwell on? Every form in which the intellect can express belief in itself and its powers has been found and tried. The Buddhist sometimes worships the pure, absolute unity; sometimes he sees a soul above his own, himself transfigured; sometimes he adores men who did great works on earth, the one Buddha spread among many Buddhas. Now he denies all symbols; now everything is symbolical. He is the purest of theists and the most complete of atheists. He thinks nothing too vast for human wisdom, yet sees it all gathered up in an infant. He is always fleeing from himself, yet finds nothing but images of himself. The philosophy that began by freeing itself from religion has made itself a religion, one especially narrow, artificial, and material. Those who would not be priests or have priests practise every priestly imposture and are slavishly priestridden. The adored intellect makes no progress; the seeker after wisdom has no resource but to identify the search with the object and to confess that he finds nothing. Can this be the process destined to free mankind?