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 — —

" I>r. Newton has had ^iv«ii to him the spiritual

sense of what people wanted, and this he has rer-
erently, elearlj and definitely furnished." Boiton —
ffgraJdy March 17.

THE RIGHT AND WRONG

SES I BIB jjIj,

By Kevo R. Heber Ne"wton
No. 83. **
Loybll's Library," Paper Ooybrs, 20 Cekts; Also
IN Cloth, Rbd Sdges, 75 Cents.

** Dr. Newton has not separated

his heart from his head in these
and has thus been preserYed from the mis
religious studies,
which a purely critical mind might haYe been led."— JTo T. jme»,
March 12.

"Those who wish to abuse Br. Newton should do so before

reading his lectures, as, after reading them, they may find it quite
impossible to do so." N, T. Sta/r, March 11.

**
It is impossible to read these sermons without high admiration
of th« author's courage ; of his honesty, his reverential spirit, his
wide and careful reading, and his true conserYatism," Ameriean
IMwmy Ghv/rchman.

For sale by all Newsdealers and Booksellers.

JOHN W. LOVELLCO., Publishers.

14 & 16 Vesey St., Ne-w York.

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 INDIA:
What Can it Teach us?

BY

U MAX MiJLLER.
//

NEW YORK:
JOHN \Y. LOVELL COMPANY,
14 AND 16 Vesey Street.
Vf,^ <h CV
1>
'b
 DEDICATION.

MV DEAR COWELL,
As these Lectures would never have been written
or delivered but for your hearty encouragement, I

hope you will now allow me to dedicate them to you,

not only as a token of my sincere admiration of your
great achievements as an Oriental scholar, but also as
a memorial of your friendship now more than thirty
years old, a friendship which has grown from year to
year, has weathered many a storm, and will last, I

trust, forwhat to both of us may remain of our short

passage from shore to shore.
I must add, however, that in dedicating these
Lectures to you, I do not wish to throw upon you any
responsibilities for the views which I have put for-
ward in them. I know that you do not agree with
some of my views on the ancient religion and litera-
ture of India, and I am well aware that with regard to
the recent date which! have assigned to the whole
of what is commonly called the Classical Sanskrit Lit-
erature, I stand almost alone. No, if friendship can
claim any voice in the courts of science and litera-
ture, let me assure you that I shall consider your out-
spoken criticism of my Lectures as the very best
proof of your truth and honest friendship. I have
4
DEDICATION,

through life considered it the greatest honor if real

scholars, I mean men not only of learning, but of

judgment and character, have considered my writings
worthy of a severe and searching criticism, and I have
cared far more for the production of one single new
fact, though it spoke against me, than for any amount
of empty praise or empty abuse. Sincere devotion to
his studies and an unswerving love of truth ought to
furnish the true scholar with an armor impermeable
to flattery or abuse, and with a vizor that shuts out
no ray of light, from whatever quarter it may come.
More light, more truth, more facts, more combination
of facts, these are his quest. And if in that quest he
fails, as many have failed before him, he knows that
in the search of truth failures are sometimes the con-
dition of victory, and the true conquerors often those
whom the world calls the vanquished.
You know better than anybody else the present
state of Sanskrit scholarship. You know that at pres-
ent and for some time to come Sanskrit scholarship
means discovery and conquest. Every one of your
own works mark a real advance, and a permanent
occupation of new ground. But you know also how
small a strip has as yet been explored of the vast
continent of Sanskrit literature, and how much still

remains terra incognita. No doubt this exploring

work is troublesome, and often disappointing, but
young students must learn the truth of a remark lately
made by a distinguished member of the Indian
Civil Service, whose death we all deplore, Dr. Burnell,
" that nc trouble is thrown away which saves trouble

to otheri." We want men who will work hard, even

at the risk of seeing their labors unrequited ; we
 DEDICA TIOiV, 5

want strong and bold men who are not afraid of

storms and shipwrecks. The worst sailors are not
those who suffer shipwreck, but those who only dab-
ble in puddles and are afraid of wetting their feet.
It is now to criticise the labors of Sir William
easy
Jones, Thomas Colebrooke, and Horace Hayman Wil-
son, but what would have become of Sanskrit scholar-
ship if they had not rushed in where even now so
many fear to tread ? and what will become of Sanskrit
scholarship if their conquests are for ever to mark the
limits of our knowledge. You know best that there is

more to be discovered in Sanskrit literature than Nalas

and Sakuntalas, and surely the young men who every
year go out to India are not deficient in the spirit of en-
terprise or even of adventure } Why then should it be
said that the race of blood explorers, who once ren,
dered the name of the Indian Civil Service illustrious
over the whole world, has well-nigh become extinct,
and that England, which offers the strongest incen-
tives and the most brilliant opportunities for the
study of the ancient language, literature, and history
of India, is no longer in the van of Sanskrit scholar-
ship }

If some of the young Candidates for the Indian Civil

Service who Hstened to my Lectures, quietly made
up theirminds that such a reproach shall be wiped out^
if a few of them at least determined to follow in the

footsteps of Sir William Jones, and to show to the

world that Englishmen who have been able to achieve
by pluck, by perseverance, and by real political genius
the material conquest of India, do not mean to leave
the laurels of its intellectual conquest entirely to other
PQuntries, then I §hall indeed rejoice, and feel that I
g VEDJCATJON.

have paid back, however small a degree, the large

in
debt of gratitude which I owe to my adopted country
and to some of its greatest statesmen, who have given
me the opportunity which I could find nowhere else of
reahsing the dreams of my life —the publication of the
text and commentary most ancient
of the Rig-veda, the
book of Sanskrit, aye of Aryan literature, and now the
edition of the translations of the " Sacred Books of the
East."
I have left my Lectures very much as I delivered
them Cambridge. I am fond of
at of Lec- the form
tures, because it seems to me the most natural form
which in our age didactic composition ought to take.
As Greece the dialogue reflected most truly
in ancient
the intellectual life of the people, and as in the Middle
Ages learned literature naturally assumed with the
recluse in his monastic cell the form of a long mono-
logue, so with us the lecture places the writer most
readily in that position in which he is accustomed to
deal with his fellow-men, and to communicate his
knowledge to others. It has no doubt certain disad-
vantasces. In a lecture which is meant to be didactic
we have, for the sake of completeness, to say and to
repeat certain things which must be familiar to some
of our readers, while we are also forced to leave out
information which, even in its imperfect form, we
should probably not hesitate to submit to our fellow-
students, but which we feel we have not yet suffi-

ciently mastered and matured to enable us to place it

clearlyand simply before a larger public.

But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
A lecture, by keeping a critical audience constantly
before our eyes, forces us to condease our subject, tQ
 DEDTCA TfOJ^, f

discriminate between what is important and what is

not, and often to deny ourselves the pleasure of display-

ing what may have cost us the greatest labor, but is

of little consequence to other scholars. In lecturing

we are constantly reminded of what students are so
apt to forget, that their knowledge is meant not for
themselves only but for others, and that to know well
means to be able to teach well. I confess I can
never write unless I think of somebody for whom I
write, and I should never wish for a better audience
to have before my mind than the learned, brilliant,
and kind-hearted assembly by which I was greeted
in 3'our University.

Yours affectionately,
F. MAX MULLER,
Oxford,
December i6, 1882.
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

When I received from the Board of Historical

Studies at Cambridge the invitation to deliver a course

of lectures, specially intended for the Candidates for
the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some time feel-
ing extremely doubtful whether in a few public dis-
courses could say anything that would be of real
I

use to them in passing their examinations. To enable

young men to pass their examinations seems now to
have become the chief, if not the only object of the
Universities and to no class of students is it of great-
;

er importance to pass their examinations, and to pass

them well, than to the Candidates for the Indian
Civil Service.
But although I was afraid that attendance on a
few public lectures, such as I could give, would hardly
benefit a Candidate who was not already fully prepared
to pass through th$ fiery ordeal of the three Lon-
don examinations, I could not on the other hand shut
my eyes completely to the flct that, after all, Univer-
sitieswere not meant entirely, or even chiefly, as
stepping stones to an examination, but that there is
 i# WJ/A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
something else which Universities can teach and
—
ought to teach nay, which I feel quite sure they
were originally meant to teach-something that may
not have a marketable value before a Board of Exa-
miners, but which has a permanent value for the
whole of our life, and that is a real interest in our
work, and more than that, a love of our work and,
more than that, a true joy and happiness in our
work. If a University can teach that, if it can
engraft that one small living germ
minds of the
in the
young men who come here to study and to prepare
themselves for the battle of life, and for what is still
more difficult to encounter, the daily dull drudgery
of life, then, I feel convinced, a University has done
more, and conferred a more lasting benefit on its
pupils than by helping them to pass the most diffi-
cult examinations, and to take the highest place among
Senior Wranglers or First-Class men.
Unfortunately that kind of work which is now
required for passing one examination after another,
that process of cramming and crowding which has
of late been brought to the highest pitch of perfec-
tion, has often the very opposite effect, and instead
of exciting an appetite for work, it is apt to produce
an indifference, if not a kind of intellectual nausea,
that may last for life.
And nowhere is this so much to be feared as in
the case of Candidates for the Indian Civil Service.
After they have passed their examination for ad-
first

mission to the Indian Civil Service, and given proof

that they have received the benefits of a liberal educa-
tion and acquired that general information in classics*
history^'.and mathematics, which is provided at our
Public Schools, and forms no doubt the best and
 f

WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US il

surest foundation for all more special and professional

studies in later life, they suddenly find themselves
torn away from their old studies and their old friends
and compelled to take up new subjects which to many
of them seem strange, outlandish, if not repulsive.
Strange alphabets, strange languages, strange names
strange literatures and laws have be faced, *^to be got
up " as it is called, not from choice, but from dire
necessity. The whole course two years
of study during
is determined for them, the subjects fixed, the books

prescribed, the examinations regulated, and there is no

time to look either right or left, if a candidate wishes
to make sure of taking each successive fence in good
style,and without an accident.
I know quite well that it cannot be helped. I am

not speaking against the system of examinations in

general, if only they are intelligently conducted nayi ;

as an old examiner myself, I feel bound to say that

the amount of knowledge produced ready-made at
these examinations is to my mind perfectly astound-
ing. But while the answers are there on paper,
strings of dates, lists of royal names and battles,
irregular verbs, statistical figures and whatever else
you like, how seldom do we find that the heart of the
candidates is in the work which they have to do.
The results produced are certainly most ample and
voluminous, but they rarely contain a spark of original
thought, or even a clever mistake. It is work done
from necessity, or, let us be just, from a sense of duty,
but it is seldom, or hardly ever, a labor of love.
•Now, why should that be Why should a study of
.^

Greek and Latin,—of the poetry, the philosophy, the

laws and the art of Greece and Italy,-— seem congenial
,to us, why should it excite even a certain enthusiasm,
 IVHA T CAN INDIA TEACH US f
and command general respect, while a study of San-
skrit, and the ancient poetry, the philosophy, the laws,

and the art of India is looked upon, in the best case,

as curious, but is considered by most people as useless,
tedious, if not absurd.
And, strange to say, this feeling exists in England
more than in any other country. In France, Germany*
and Italy, even in Denmark, Sweden, and Russia,
there is a vague charm connected with the name of
India. One of the most beautiful poems in the Ger-
man language is the Weisheit der Brahmaneii, the
" Wisdom of the Brahmans," by Ruckert, to my mind
more rich in thoughtand more perfect in form than
even Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan. A
scholar who
studies Sanskrit in Germany is supposed to be
initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of ancient
wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India, even
if he has only discovered Calcutta, or Bombay, or

Madras, is listened to like another Marco Polo. In

England a student of Sanskrit is generally considered
a bore, and an old Indian Civil servant, if he begins
to describe the marvels of Elephanta or the towers
of Silence, runs the risk of producing a count-out.
There are indeed a few Oriental scholars whose
works are read, and who have acquired a certain
celebrity in England, because they were really men
of uncommon genius, and would have ranked among
the great glories of the country, but for the misfor-
tune that their energies were devoted to Indian
literature — I mean Sir William. Jones, " one of the
most enlightened of the sons of men," as Dr. Johnson
called him, and Thomas Col ebrooke. But the names
of others who have done good work in their day also,
men such as Ballantyne, Buchanan, Carey, Crawfurd,
 "

miAT CAN INDIA 7^1^ ACII US? 13

Davis, Elliot, Ellis, Houghton, Leyden, Mackenzie,

Marsden, Muir, Prinsep, Rennell, Turnour, Upham,
Wallich, Warren, Wilkins, Wilson, and many others,
are hardly known beyond the small circle of Oriental
scholars, and their works are looked for in vain in
libraries which profess to represent with a certain
completeness the principal branches of scholarship
and science in England.
How many times when I advised young men, can-
didates for the Indian Civil Service, to devote them-
selves before all things to a study of Sanskrit, have I
been told, " What is the use of our studying Sanskrit ?
There are translations of ^akuntald, Manu, and the
Hitopadei'a, and what else is there in that literature
that is worth reading ? K^liddsa may be very pretty,
and the Laws of Manu are very curious, and the fa-
bles of the Hitopadej'a are very quaint but you would ;

not compare Sanskrit literature with Greek, or recom-

mend us to waste our time in copying and editing
Sanskrit texts which either teach us nothing that we
do not know already, or teach us something which
we do not care to know ?
This seems to me a most unhappy misconception,
and it will be the chief object of my lectures to try to re-
move it, or at all events to modify it, as much as pos-
sible. I shall not attempt to prove that Sanskrit litera-

ture good as Greek literature. Why

is as we should
always compare A study of Greek literature has its
.'*

own purpose, and a study of Sanskrit literature has its

own purpose but what I feel convinced of, and hope to
;

xonvince you of, is that Sanskrit literature, if studied

only in a right spirit, is full of human interests, full
of lessons which even Greek could never teach us, a
i 4 ^fV/TA T CAN IIVDIA TEA CI/ US f
subject worthy to occupy the leisure, and more than
the leisure, of every Indian Civil servant ; and certainly
the best means of making any young man who has to
spend five-and-twenty years of his life in India, feel
at home among the Indians, as a fellow-worker among
fellow-workers, and not as an alien among aliens.
There will be abundance of useful and most interesting
work for him to do, if only he cares to do it, work such
as he would look for in vain, whether in Italy or in
Greece, or even among the pyramids of Egypt or the
palaces of Babylon.
You- willnow understand why I have chosen as
the title ofmy lectures, What can India teach tis ? True
there are many things which India has to learn from
us ; but there are other things, and in one sense, very
important things, which we, too, many learn from
India.
If I were to look over the whole world to find out
the country most richly endowed with all the wealth,
power, and beauty that nature can bestow — in some
parts a very paradise on earth — I should point to
India, were asked under what sky the human
If I

mind has most fully developed some of its choicest

gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest pro-

blems of life, and has found solutions of some of

them which well deserve the attention even of those
—
who have studied Plato and Kant T should point to
India. And if I were to ask myself from what
literature we, here in Europe, we who have been
nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks
and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may
draw that corrective which is most wanted in order"'
to make our inner life more perfect, more com-
 W.^AT CAN iS'btA f&ACtr Vsf tj

prehehsive, more universal, in fact more truly human,

a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and
eternal life —again I should point to India.
know you will be surprised to hear me say this.
I

I know that more particularly those who have spent

many years of active life in Calcutta, or Bombay, or

Madras, will be horror-struck at the idea that the hu-
manity they meet with there, whether in the bazaars
or in the courts of justice, or in so-called native
society, should be able to teach ils any lessons.
Let me therefore explain at once to my friends
who may have lived in India for years, as civil servants,
or officers, or missionaries, or merchants, and who
ought to know a great deal more of that country than
one who has never set foot on the soil of Arydvarta,
that we are speaking of two very different Indias. I

am thinking chiefly of India, such as it was a thous-

and, two thousand, it may be three thousand years
ago they think of the India of to-day.
;
And again,
when thinking of the India of to-day, they remember
chiefly the India of Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras, the
India of the towns. I look to the India of the village
communities, the true India of the Indians.
What I wish to show to you, I mean more espe-
cially the candidates for the India Civil Service, is

that this India of a thousand, or two thousand, or

three thousand years ago, aye the India of to-day also,
if only you know where to look for it, is full of pro-

blems the solution of which concerns all of us, even

us in this Europe of the nineteenth century.
If you have acquired any special tastes here in

England, you will find plenty to satisfy them in India;

and whoever has learnt to take an interest in any of
 V

to ^//^ T CAN INDIA TEACH US f

the great problems that occupy the best thinkers and
workers at home, need certainly not be afraid of India
proving to him an intellectual exile.
you care for geology, there is work for you from
If

the Himalayas to Ceylon.

If you are fond of botany, there is a flora rich

enough for many Hookers.

If you are a zoologist, think of Haeckel, who is just
now rushing through Indian forests and dredging in
Indian seas, and to whom his stay in India is like the
realization of the brightest dream of his life.

If you are interested in Ethnology, why India is

like a living ethnological museum.

If you are fond of Archaeology, you have ever
if

assisted at the opening of a barrow in England, and

know the delight of finding a fibula, or a knife, or a
flint in a heap of rubbish, read only '
General Cunn-
ingham's Annual Reports of the Archaeological Survey
and you will be impatient for the time when
of India,'
you can take your spade and bring to light the ancient
Vihdras or Colleges built by the Buddhist monarchs
of India.
If ever you amused yourselves with collecting
coins, why the soil of India teems with coins, Persian,
Carian, Thracian, Parthian, Greek, Macedonian,
Scythian, Roman* and Mohammedan. When Warren
Hastings was Governor-General, an earthen pot was
found on the bank of a river in the province of Be-
nares, containing 172 gold Darics.f Warren Hastings
* Pliny (VI. 26) tells us that m his day the annual drain of bullion
into India, in return for her valuable produce, reached the immense
amount of five hundred and fifty millions of sesterces. See E.
*

Thomas, The Indian Balhard, p. 13.

t Cunningham, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1S81,
 !

W//A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ? j t

considered hiroself as making the most munificent

present to his masters that he might ever have it in
his power to send them, by presenting those ancient
coins to the The story is that
Court of Directors.
they were sent to the melting pot. At all events
they had disappeared when Warren Hastings returned
to England. It rests with you to prevent the revival
of such Vandalism.
In one of the last numbers of the 'Asiatic Journal
of Bengal you may read
' of the discovery of a treasure
as rich in gold almost as some of the tombs opened
by Dr. Schliemann at Mykenae, nay I should add, per-
haps not quite unconnected with some of the treas.
ures found at Mykenae yet hardly any one has taken
;

notice of it in England
The study of Mythology has assumed an entirely
new character, chiefly owing to the light that has
been thrown on it by the ancient Vedic Mythology
of India. But though the foundation of a true Science
of Mythology has been laid, all the detail has still to
be v\rorked out, and could be worked out nowhere bet-
ter than in India.
Even the study of fables owes its new life to India,
from whence the various migrations of fables have
been traced at various times and through various
channels from East to West, f Buddhism is now
known to have been the principal source of our legends
and parables. But here too, many problems still

wait for their solution. Think, for instance, of the

allusion % to the fable of the donkey in the lion's

t See Selected Essays, vol. i, 'The Migration of Fables.*

p. 509,
I Cratylus 411 A, *' still, have put on the lion's skin, I must
as I

not be faint-hearted." Possibly, however, this may refer to

iS WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us f
skin, which occurs in Plato's Cratylus. Was that
borrowed from the East ? Or take the fable of the
weasel changed by Aphrodite into a woman who,
when she saw a mouse, could not refrain from making a
spring at it. This, too, is very like a Sanskrit fable,
but how then have been brought into Greece
could it

early enough to appear in one of the comedies of

Strattis, about 400 b. c. ? * Here, too, there is still
plenty of work to do.
We may go back even further into antiquity, and
still find strange coincidencesbetween the legends
of India and the legends
of the West, without as yet
being able to say how they travelled, whether from
East to West, or from West to East. That at the
time of Solomon, there was a channel of communica-
tion open between India and Syria and Palestine is
established beyond doubt, I believe, by certain Sanskrit
words which occur in the Bible as names of articles
of export from Ophir, articles such as ivory, apes,
peacocks, and sandalwood, which, taken together,
could not have been exported from any country but
India f .Nor is there any reason to suppose that the
commercial intercourse between India, the Persian
Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was ever

Hercules, and not to the fable of the donkey in the lion's or the tiger's
skin. In the Hitopade.fa, a donkey, being nearly starved, is sent by
his master into a cornfield to feed. In order to shield him he puts a
tiger's skin on him. All goes well till a watchman approaches, hiding
himself under his grey coat,'-and trying to shoot the tiger. Thedonke}
thinks it is a grey female donkey, begins to bray, and is killed. On a
similar fable in^sop, see Benfey, Pantschatantra, vol. I, p, 463; ^

M. M., Selected Essays, vol. I, p. 513.

* See Fragmenta Comic. (Didot) p. 302 Benfey, 1. c. vol,
; I p. 374.
t Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. I. p. 231.
 5

IVI/A T CAN INDIA TEA CH USf 1

completely interrupted, even at the time when the

Book of Kings is supposed to have been written.
Now, you remember the judgment of Solomon, which
has always been admired as a proof of great legal
wisdom among the Jews.* I must confess that, not
having a legal mind, I never could suppress a certain
shudder when reading the decision of Solomon :

" Divide the living child in two, and give half to the
one, and half to the other."
Let me now you the same story as it is told by
tell

the Buddhists, whose sacred Canon is full of such

legends and parables. In the Kanjur, which is the
Tibetan translation of the Buddhist Tripi/aka, we
likewise read of two women who claimed each to be
the mother of the same child. The king, after listen-
ing to their quarrels for a long time, gave it up as
hopeless to settle who was the real mother. Upon
this Vi.rakha stepped forward and said :
" What is the
use of examining and cross-examining these women.
Let them take the boy and settle it among themselves."
Thereupon both women fell on the child, and when
the fight became violent, the child was hurt and began
to cry. Then one of them let him go, because she
could not bear to hear the child cry.
That settled the question. The king gave the child
to the true mother, and had the other beaten with a
rod.
This seems to me, if not the more primitive, yet the
more natural form of the story showing a deeper —
knowledge of human nature, and more wisdom than
even the wisdom of Solomon.f
* I Kings iji. 25.

t See some excellent remarks on this subject in Rhys Davids. B»4d-

 2 o ^IJ'A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
you may have studied not only languages,
Many of
but also the Science of Language, and is there any
country in which some of the most important problems
of that science, say only the growth and decay of
dialects, or the possible mixture of languages, with re-
gard not only to words, but to grammatical elements
also, can be studied to greater advantage than among
the Aryan, the Dravidian and the Mu/^da inhabitants
of India, when brought in contact with their various
invaders and conquerors, the Greeks, the Yue-tchi,
the Arabs, the Persians, the Moguls, and lastly the
English.
Again, if you are a student of Jurisprudence, there
is a history of law to be explored in India, very differ-
ent from what is known of the history of law in Greece,
in Rome, and in Germany, yet both by its contrasts
and by its similarities full of suggestions to the stu-
dent of Comparative Jurisprudence. New materials
are being discovered every year, as, for instance, the
so-called Dharma or Samaya>^arika Sz^tras, which have
supplied the materials for the later metrical law-books,
such as the famous Laws of Manu. What was once
called "The Code of Laws of Manu," and confidently
referred to 1200, or at least 500 b. c, is now hesita-
tingly referred to perhaps the fourth century a. d., and
called neither a Code, nor a Code of Laws, least of all,

the Code of Laws of Manu.

: you have learnt to appreciate the value of recent
If

researches into the antecedents of all laws, namely the

hist Birth Stories, vol. i, pp. xiii and xliv. The learned scholar
gives another version of the story from a Singhalese translation ©f the
Gataka,dating from the fourteenth century, and he expresses a hope that
11. I'ausboll will soon publish the Pali original.
 limA T CAN WDIA TEA CIT t7S9 a
foundation and growth of the simplest political com-
munities —and nowhere could you have had better
opportunities for it than here at Cambridge you will —
find a field of observation opened before you in the
still existing village estates in India that will amply re-

pay careful research.

And take that which, after all, whether we con-
fess or deny it, we care for more in this life than for
—
anything else nay, which is often far more cared for
by those who deny than by those who confess take —
that which supports, prevades, and directs all our
acts and thoughts and hopes —
without which there
can be neither village community nor empire, neither
custom nor law, neither right nor wrong take that —
which, next to language, has most firmly fixed the
specific and permanent barrier between man and beast
— which alone has made life possible and bearable,
and which, as it is the deepest, though often hidden
springs of individual life, is also the foundation of all

national life, —the history of all histories, and yet the

mystery of all mysteries — take religion, and where
can you study its true origin, its natural growth, and
its inevitable decay better than in India, the home of

Brahmanism, the birthplace of Buddhism, and the

refuge of Zoroastrianism, even now the mother of
new superstitions — and why not, in the future, the
regenerate child of the purest faith, if only purified
from the dust of nineteen centuries ?
You will find yourselves everywhere in India be.
tween an immense past and an immense future, with op-
portunities such as the old world could but seldom, if
ever, offer you. Take any of the burning questions
of the day —popular education, higher education, par-
^4 IVI/AT CAA^ hvDlA TKACH VS't

liamentary representation, codification oflaws,fjnaricej

emigration, poor-law, and whether you have anything
to teach and to try, or anything to observe and to
learn, India will supply you with a laboratory such as
exists nowhere That very Sanskrit, the study
else.

of which may at first seem so tedious to you and so

useless, if only you will carry it on as you may carry
it on here at Cambridge better than anywhere else,

will open before you large layers of literature, as yet

almost unknown and unexplored, and allow you an in-

sight into strata of thought deeper than any you
have known before, and rich in lessons that appeal to
the deepest sympathies of the human heart.
Depend upon it, if only you can make leisure, you
will find plenty of work in India for your leisure
hours.
India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange,
or, at the very utmost, a curious country. India for
the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the
Indo-European world, it has its place in our own his-

tory, and in what is the very life of history, the history

of the human mind.
You know how some of the best talent and the
noblest genius of our age has been devoted to the
study of the development of the outward or material
world, the growth of the earth, the first appearance of
living cells, their combination and differentiation
leading up to the beginning of organic life, and its

steady progress from the lowest to the highest stages.

Is there not an inward and intellectual world also
which has to be studied in its historical develop-
ment, from the first appearance of predicative and
demonstrative roots, their combination and differen*
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us 1 35

tiatipn, leading up to the beginning of rational thoughts

in its steady progress from the lowest to the highest
stages ? And in that study of the history of the
human mind, in that study of ourselves, of our
true selves, India occupies a place second to no other
country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you
may select for your special study, v^hether it be Ian"
guage, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy,
whether be laws or customs, primitive art or primi-
it

tive science, everywhere, you have to go to India,

whether you like it or not, because some of the most
valuable and most instructive materials in the history
of man are treasured up in India, and India only.
And while thus trying to explain to those whose
lot will soon be cast in India the true position which
that wonderful country holds or ought to hold in uni-
versal history, I may perhaps be
same time
able at the
to appeal to the sympathies of other members of this
University, by showing them how imperfect our know-
ledge of universal history, our insight into the develop-
ment of the human intellect, must always remain, if
we narrow our horizon to the history of Greeks and
Romans, Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of
Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon, and leave out of sight
our nearest intellectual relatives, the Aryans of India,
the framers of the most wonderful language, the San-
skrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our
fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most natural
of natural religions, the maker of the most trans-
parent of mythologies, the inventors of the most
subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate
laws.
Jhere at-e many things which we think essential in
24 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH C/Sf

a liberal education, whole chapters of history which we

teach in our schools and universities, that cannot for
one moment compare with the chapter relating to
India, if only properly understood and freely inter-
preted.
In our time, when the study of history threatens to
1
become almost an impossibility —
such is the mass of
detailswhich historians collect in archives and pour
out before us in monographs —
it seems to me more

than ever the duty of the true historian to find out

the real proportion of things, to arrange his materials
according to the strictest rules of artistic perspec-
tive, and to keep completely out of sight all that may
be rightly ignored by us in our own passage across
^the historical stage of the world. It is this power of
discovering what is really important that distinguishes
the true historian from the mere chronicler, in whose
eyes everything is important, particularly if lie has
discovered it himself. I think it was Frederick the
Great who, when sighing for a true historian of his
reign, complained bitterly that those who wrote the
history of Prussia never forgot to describe the but-
tons on his uniform. And it is probably of such his-
toricalworks that Carlyle was thinking when he said
that he had waded through them all, but that nothing
should ever induce him to hand even their names and
titles down to posterity. And yet how much is there
even in Carlyle's histories that might safely be con-
signed to oblivion !

Why do we want to know history } Why does

history forma recognized part of ourliberal education }
Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought
|0 knovy how we have conie to be what we are, so
 tP'ITAJ' CAN INDIA TMACII l/Sf ^^

that each generation need not start again from the

same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profit-
ing by the experience of those who came before, may
advance towards higher points and nobler aims. As
a child when growing up, might ask his father or
grandfather, w/w had built the house they lived in,
or who had cleared the field that yielded them their
food, we ask the historian whence we came, and how
we came into possession of what we call our own.
History may tell us afterwards many useful and
amusing things, gossip, such as a child might like to
hear from his mother or grandmother but what his-
;

tory has to teach us before all and everything, is our

own antecedents, our own ancestors, our own descent.
Now our principal intellectual ancestors are, no
doubt, the yews, the GreekSy the Romajts, and the
Saxons, and we, here in Europe, should not call a
man educated or enlightened who was ignorant of
the debt which he owes to his intellectual ancestors in
Palestine, Greece, Rome, and Germany. The whole
past history of the world would be darkness to him,
and not knowing what those who came before him
had done for him, he would probably care little to do
anything for those who are to come after him. Life
would be to him a chain of sand, while it ought to be
a kind of electric chain that makes our hearts tremble
and vibrate with the most ancient thoughts of the
past, as well as with the most distant hopes of the
future.
Let us begin with our religion. No one can under-
stand even the historical possibility of the Christian
religion without knowing something of the Jewish
race, which must be studied chiefly in the pages of
 26 ti^^A T CAN INDIA TEA CH ITSf

the Old Testament. And in order to appreciate the

true relation of the Jews to the rest of the ancient
world, and to understand what ideas were peculiarly
their own arid what ideas they shared in common
with the other members of the Semitic stock, or what
moral and religious impulses they received from their
historical contact with other nations of antiquity, it
is absolutely necessary that we should pay some
attention to the history of Babylon, Nineveh, Phioenicia,
and These may seem distant countries and
Persia.
forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say,
" Let the dead bury their dead what are those mum- ;

mies to us }
''
Still, such is the marvellous continuity
of history, that I could easily show you many things
which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to
Babylon, to Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia.
Every one who carries a watch, owes to the Baby-
lonians the division of the hour into sixty minutes.
Itmay be a very bad division, yet such as it. is, it has
come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it
came to them from Babylon. The sexagesimal divi-
sion is peculiarly Babylonian. Hipparchos, 150 B.C..
adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 a.d., gave it
wider currency, and the French, when they 'de
cimated everything else, respected the dial plates
of our watches, and left them with their sixty Baby
Ionian minutes.
Everyone who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to
the Romans and Greeks the Greeks owed thili* alpha-
;

bet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it

in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet —as
all the students of phonetics will tell you ;
yet, such
as it is, and has been, we owe it to the old Phoenicians
 WHA T CAN INDIA TBA C^ VS9 27

and Egyptians, and in every letter we trace, there lies

imbedded the mummy of an ancient Egyptian hiero-
glyphic.
What do we owe to the Persians ? It does not seem
to be much, for they were not a very inventive race,
and what they knew, they had chiefly learnt from
their neighbors, the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Still, we owe them something. First of all, we owe
them a large debt of gratitude for having allowed
themselves to be beaten by the Greeks for think ;

what the world would have been, if the Persians had

beaten the Greeks at Marathon, and had enslaved,
that means, annihilated, the genius of ancient Greece.
However, this may be called rather an involuntary
contribution to the progress of humanity, and I men-
tion it only in order to show, how narrowly, not only
Greeks and Romans, but Saxons and Anglo-Saxons
too, escaped becoming Parsis or Fire-worshippers.
But I can mention at least one voluntary gift which
came to us from Persia, and that is the relation of
silver to gold in our bi-metallic currency. That re-
lation was, no doubt, first determined in Babylonia,
but it assumed its practical and historical importance
in the Persian empire, and spread from there to the
Greek colonies in Asia, and thence to Europe, where
it has maintained itself with slight variation to the
present day.
A talent* was divided into sixty mince, a mina into
sixty shekels. Here we have again the Babylonian
sexagesimal system, a system which owes its origin

* See Cunningham, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1S81,

pp. 162 — 168,
23 U^^A T CAN INDIA TEA CU t/S f

and popularity, I believe, to the fact that sixty has

the greatest number of divisors. Shekel was trans-
lated into Greek by Stater^ and an Athenian gold
stater, like the Persian gold stater, down to the
times of Croesus, Darius, and Alexander, was the
sixtieth part of a mina of gold, not very far therefore
from our sovereign. The proportion of silver to gold
was fixed as 13 or 13^ to i and if the weight of a
;

silver shekel was made as 13 to 10, such a coin

would correspond very nearly to our florin.* Half a
silver shekel was a drachma, and this was therefore
the true ancestor of our shilling.
Again you may say any attempt at fixing the
that
relative value of silver and gold is, and always has
been, a great mistake. Still it shows how closely

the world is held together, and how, for good or for

evil, we are what we are, not so much by ourselves

as by the toil and moil of those who came before us,

our true intellectual ancestors, whatever the blood
may have been composed of that ran through their
veins, or the bones which formed the rafters of their
skulls.
And if it is true, with regard to religion, that no
one could understand and appreciate its full pur-
it

port without knowing its origin and growth, that is

without knowing something of what the cuneiform
inscriptions of Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphic and
hieratic texts ofEgypt, and the historical monuments
of Plioenicia and Persia can alone reveal to us, it is
equally true, with regard to all the other elements
that constitute the whole of our intellectual life. If

* Sim^ the Persian word for silv«r, has also the meaning ©f one.
thirteenth J Cunningham, i. c. p. 165.
 JVJ^A T CAN INDIA TEA CH USf 29

we are Jewish or Semitic in our religion, we are

Greek in our philosophy, /?^;«^;? in our politics, and
Saxon in our morality, and it follows that a know-
ledge of the history of the Greeks, Romans, and
Saxons, or of the flow of civilization from Greece to
Italy, and through Germany to these isles, forms an

essential element in what is called a liberal, that is,

an historical and rational education.

But then it might be said. Let this be enough
Let us know by all means, all that deserves to be
known about our real spiritual ancestors in the great
historical kingdoms of the world ; let us be grateful
for all we have inherited from Egyptians, Babylonians,
Phoenicians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons. But
why bring in India } Why
add a new burden to
what every man has to bear already, before he can
call himself fairly educated What have we in-.?

herited from the dark dwellers on the Indus and the

Ganges, that we should have to add their royal names
and dates and deeds to the archives of our already
overburdened memory ?
There is some justice in this complaint. The
ancient inhabitants of India are not our intellectual
ancestors in the same direct way as Jews, Greeks,
Romans, and Saxons are ; but they represent, never-
theless, a collateral branch of that family to which we
belong by language, that is, by thought, and their
historical records extend in some respects so far
beyond all other records and have been preserved to
us in such perfect and such legible documents, that
we can learn from them lessons which we can learn
nowhere else, and supply missing links in our intel-
lectual ancestry far more important than that missing
30 ^//-^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
link (which we can well afford to miss), the link
*
between Ape and Man.
I am not speaking as yet of the literature of India
as it is, but of something far more ancient, the
language of India, or Sanskrit. No one supposes
any longer that Sanskrit was the common source of
Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This used to be
said, but it has long been shown that Sanskrit is
only a collateral branch of the same stem from which
spring Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon ; and not only
these, but all the Teutonic, all the Celtic, all the
Slavonic languages, nay, the languages of Persia and
Armenia also.
What, then, is it that gives to Sanskrit its claim on
our attention, and its supreme importance in the eyes
of the historian ?

First of all, its antiquity, —for we know Sanskrit at

an earlier period than Greek. But what is far more
important than its merely chronological antiquity is
the antique state of preservation in which that Aryan
language has been handed down to us. The world
had known Latin and Greek for centuries, and it was
felt, no doubt, that there was some kind of similarity

between the two. But how was that similarity to be

explained ? Sometimes Latin was supposed to give
the key to the formation of a Greek word, sometimes
Greek seemed to betray the secret of the origin of a

Latin word. Afterwards, when the ancient Teutonic

languages, such as Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, and the
ancient Celtic and Slavonic languages too, came to be
studied, no one could help seeing a certain family
likeness among 'them all. But how such a likeness
between these languages came to be, and how, what
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1 31

is far more difficult to explain, such striking differ-

ences between these languages came to be,

too
remained a mystery, and gave rise to the most
gratuitous theories, most of them, as you know,
devoid of all scientific foundation. As soon, however,
as Sanskrit stepped into the midst of these languages,
there came and warmth and mutual recognition.
light
They all ceased to be strangers, and each fell of its
own accord into its right place. Sanskrit was the
eldest sister of them all, and could tell of many things
which the other members of the family had quite
forgotten. Still, the other languages too had each

their own tale to tell and it is out of all their tales

;

together that a chapter in the human mind has been

put together which, in some respects, is more import-
ant to us than any of the other chapters, the Jewish,
the Greek, the Latin, or the wSaxon.
The process by which that ancient chapter of his-
tory was recovered is very simple. Take the words
which occur in the same form and with the same
meaning in all the seven branches of the Aryan family,
and you have in them the most genuine and trust-
worthy records in which to read the thoughts of our
true ancestors, before they had become Hindus, or
Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Celts, or Teutons,
or Slaves. Of course, some of these ancient charters
may have been lost in one or other of these seven
branches of the Aryan family, but even then, if they
are found in six, or five, or four, or three, or even two
only of its original branches, the probability remains,
unless we can prove a later historical contact between
these languages, that these words existed before the
great Aryan Separation, If we find ag7ii, meaning
 ;

„ WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

fire, in Sanskrit, and meaning fire, in Latin, we

ignis,

may safely conclude that fire was known to the

un-
the same name of
divided Aryans, even if no trace of
fire occurred anywhere
else. And why ? Because
there no indication that Latin remained longer
is
other Aryan
united with Sanskrit than any of the
such a
languages, or that Latin could have borrowed
word from Sanskrit, after these two languages had
once become distinct. We have, however, the
Lithu-

anian tignls, and the Scottish ingle, to show

that the

Slavonic and possibly the Teutonic languages

also,

knew the same word for fire, though they replaced it

in time by other words. Words, like all other things,
will die, and why they should
live on in one soil and
not always easy
wither away and perish in another, is
to say. What has become of ignis, for instance, in all
the Romanic languages.? It has withered away and
final un-
perished, probably because after losing
its

accentuated syllable,became awkward to pronounce

it

meant fire-
and another word focus, which in Latin
place.
place, hearth, altar, has taken its
ancient
Suppose we wanted to know whether the
Aryans before their separation knew the mouse we :

should only have to consult the principal

Aryan dic-
tionaries, and we should find in
Sanskrit mush, in
Old
Greek ^t)?, in Latin mtis, in Old Slavonic myse, in
High German m^is, enabling us to say that, at a time
so distant from us that we feel inchned to measure it

by Indian rather than by our own chronology,

the

mouse was known, that is, was named, was conceived

and recognized as a species of its own, not to be
con-

founded with any other vermin.

And if we were to ask whether the enemy of the
 WHAl" CAN lADIA TEACH US f Z2>

mouse, the cat, was known at the same distant time,

we should feel justified in saying decidedly, No. The
cat is called in Sanskrit mar^ara and vi^ala. In Greek
and Latin the words usually given as names of the
cat, yaXei] and aiXovpo?^ mustella and feles, did not

originally signify the tame cat, but the weasel or

marten. The name for the real cat in Greek was
Kar r a in 'La.tin cattis, and these words have supplied
the names for cat in all the Teutonic, Slavonic, and
Celtic languages. The animal itself, so far as we
know at present, came
Europe from Egypt, where
to
it had been worshipped for centuries and tamed and ;

as this arrival probably dates from the fourth century

A.D., we can well understand that no common name
for it could have existed when the Aryan nations
separated.
In this way a more or less complete picture of the
state of civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation,
can be and has been reconstructed, like a mosaic put
together with the fragments of ancient stones and I ;

doubt whether, in tracing the history of the human

mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than
that which is revealed to us by the converging rays of
the different Aryan languages.
Noris that all for even that Proto-Aryan language,
;

as it has been reconstructed from the ruins scattered

about in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, is clearly
the result of a long, long process of thought. One
shrinks from chronological limitations when looking
into such distant periods of life. But if we find
Sanskrit as a perfect literary language, totally differ-
ent from Greek and Latin, 1500 B. c, where can those
34 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we

trace them back to their common source ? And then,
when we have followed these mighty national streams
back to their common meeting point, even then that
common language looks like a rock washed down and
smoothed for ages by the ebb and flow of thought,
We find in that language such a compound, for
instance, as asini, I am, Greek fV/tz. What would
other languages give for such a pure concept as /
am ? They may say, I stand, or I live, or I grow, or
I turn, but it is given to few languages only to be
able to say I am. To us nothing seems more natural
than the auxiliary verb / am : but, in reality, no work
of art has required greater efforts than this little word

/ am. And all those efforts lie beneath the level of

the common Proto-Aryan speech. Many different
ways were open, were tried, too, in order to arrive at
such a compound as asmi, and such a concept as /
a^n- But all were given up, and this one alone
remained, and was preserved for ever in all the lan-
guages and all the dialects of the Aryan family. In
as-mi, as is the root, and in the compound as-mi, the
predicative root as, to be, is predicated of mU I. But
no language could ever produce at once so empty, or
if you like, so general a root as as, to be. As meant
originally to breathe, and from it we have asu, breath,
spirit, life, also as the mouth, Latin ds, oris. By con-
stant wear and tear this root^.f, to breathe, had first
to lose all signs of its original material character
before it could convey that purely abstract meaning
of existence, without any quaUfication, which has
rendered to the higher operations of thought the same
service which the nought, likewise the invention of
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us 1 3^

Indian genius, has to render in arithmetic. Who will

say how long the friction lasted which changed as, to

breathe, into •
as, to be ? And even a root as, to
breathe, was an Aryan root, not Semitic, not Turan-
ian. It possessed an historical individuality — it was
the work of our forefathers, and represents a thread
which unites us in our thoughts and words with
those who first thought for who first
us, with those
spoke for us, and whose thoughts and words men are
still thinking and speaking, though divided from them
by thousands, it may be by hundreds of thousands of
years.
Thiswhat I
is call history in the true sense of the
word, something really worth knowing, far more so
than the scandals of courts, or the butcheries of
nations, which fill so many pages
Manuals of of our
History. And all this work is only beginning, and
whoever likes to labor in these the most ancient of
historical archives will find plenty of discoveries to
make —and yet people ask, what is the use of learning
Sanskrit ?

We get accustomed to everything, and cease to

wonder at what would have startled our fathers and
upset all their stratified notions, like a sudden earth-
quake. Every child now learns at school that English
isan Aryan or Indo-European language, that it be-
longs to the Teutonic branch, and that this branch,
together with the Italic, Greek, Celtic, Slavonic,
Iranic, and Indie branches, all spring from the same
stock, and form together the great Aryan or Indo-
European family of speech.
But this, though it is taught now in our elementary
schools, was really, but fifty years ago, like the open-
36 IV^A T CAN INDIA TEACH US f
ing of a new horizon of the world of the intellect,
and the extension of a feeling of closest fraternity
that made us feel at home where
before we had been
and changed millions of so-called barbarians
strangers,
into our own kith and kin. To speak the same
language constitutes a closer union than to have
drunk the same milk and Sanskrit, the ancient
;

language of India, is substantially the same language

as Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This is a lesson
which we should never have learnt but from a study
of Indian language and Hterature, and if India had
taught us nothing else, it would have taught us more
than almost any other language ever did.
It is quite amusing, though instructive also, to

read what was written by scholars and philosophers

when this new light first dawned on the world.
They would not have it, they would not believe that
there could be any community of origin between the
people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers
of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and
I myself still remember the time, when I was a
student at Leipzig and began to study Sanskrit, with
what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or compara-
tive grarnmiar were treated by my teachers, men such
as Gottfried Hermann, Haupt, Westermann, Stall-
baum, and others. No one ever was for a time so com-
pletely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first
pubhshed his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were
against him ; and if in comparing Greek and Latin
with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he
happened to have placed one single accent wrong,
the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek
 —
WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US} ^h

and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dic-

tionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would
never end. Dugald Stewart, rather than admit a
relationship between Hindus and Scots, would rather
believe t^at the whole Sanskrit language and the
—
whole of Sanskrit literature mind, a literature ex-
tending over three thousand years and larger than
the ancient literature of either Greece or Rome,
was a forgery of those wily priests, the Brahmans.
,

I remember too how, when I was at school at Leipzig,

(and avery good school it was, with such masters as
Nobbe, Forbiger, Funkhaenel, and Palm, an old —
school too, which could boast of Leibniz among its
former pupils) I remember, I say, one of our masters
('Dr. Klee) telling us one afternoon, when it was too

hot to do any serious work, that there was a language

spoken in India, which was much the same as Greek
and Latin, nay, as German and Russian. At first
we thought it was a joke, but when one saw the
parallel columns, of Numerals, Pronouns, and Verbs
in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin written on the black
board, one felt in the presence of facts, before which
one had to bow. All one's ideas of Adam and Eve,
and the Paradise, and the tower of Babel, and Shem,
Ham, and Japhet, with Homer and ^neas and Viro-il
too, seemed to be whirling round and round, till at

last one picked up the fragments and tried to build

up a new world, and to live with a new historical
consciousness.
Here you will see why I consider a certain knowledge
of India an essential portion of a liberal or an historical
education. The concept of the -European man has
been changed and widely extended by our acquain-
 t

38 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

tance with India, and we know now that we are

something different from what we thought we were.
Suppose the Americans, owing to some cataclysmal
events, had forgotten their EngHsh origin, and after
two or three thousand years found themselves in
possession of a language and of ideas which they
could trace back historically to a certain date, but
which, at that date, seemed, as from
it were, fallen
the sky, without any explanation of their origin and
previous growth, what would they say if suddenly the
existence of an English language and literature were
revealed to them, such as they existed in the eigh-
teenth century— explaining all that seemed before
almost miraculous, and solving almost every question
that could be asked! Well, this is much the same as
what the discovery of Sanskrit has done for us. It
has added a new period to our historical consciousness,
and revived the recollections of our childhood, which
seemed to have vanished for ever.
Whatever else we may have been, it is quite clear now
that, many thousands of years ago, we were something
that had not yet developed into an Englishman, or a
Saxon, or a Greek, or a Hindu either, yet contained
in itself the germs of all these characters. A strange
being, you may say. Yes, but for all that a very real
being, and an ancestor to of whom we must learn to
be proud, far more than of any such modern ancestors,
as Normans, Saxons, Celts, and all the rest.
And this is not all yet that a study of Sanskrit and
the other Aryan languages has done for us. It has
not only widened our views of man, and taught us to
embrace millions of strangers and barbarians as mem-
bers of one family, but it has imparted to the whole
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US"^
3^

ancient history of man a reality which it never pos-

sessed before.
We speak and write a great deal about antiquities, -

and if we can lay hold of a Greek statue or an Egyptian

Sphinx or a Babylonian Bull, our heart rejoices, and
we build museums grander than any Royal palaces to
receive the treasures of the past. This is quite right.
But are you aware that every one of us possesses
what may be called the richest and most wonderful
Museum of Antiquities, older than any statues, sphin.
xes, or bulls ? And where ? Why, in our own language.
When I use such words 2i^ father or mother, heart or
tear, one, two, three-, here and there, I am handling

coins or counters that were current before there was

one single Greek statue, one single Babylonian Bull,
one single Egyptian Sphinx. Yes, each of us carries
about with him the richest and most wonderful
Museum of Antiquities ; and if he only knows how to
treat those treasures, how to rub and polish them till

they become translucent again, how to arrange them

and read them, they will tell him marvels more
marvellous than all hieroglyphics and cuneiform in-
scriptions put together. The stories they have told
us are beginning to be old stories now. Many of
you have heard them before. But do not let them
cease to be marvels, like so many things which cease
to be marvels because they happen every day. And
do not think that there is nothing left for you to do.
There are more marvels still to be discovered in
language than have ever been revealed to us nay, ;

there is no word, however common, if only you know

how to take it to pieces, like a cunningly contrived
work of art, fitted together thousands of years ago by
 ^ —
45 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

the most cunning of artists, the human mind, that

will not make you listen and marvel more than any
chapter of the Arabian Nights.
But I must not allow myself to be carried away
from my proper subject. All I wish to impress on
you by way of introduction is that the results of the
Science of Language, which, without the aid of San-
skrit, would never have been obtained, form an essen-

tial element of what we call a liberal, that is an his-

torical education, —
an education which will enable a
man to do what the French call s' orienter, that is, " to
find his East," " his true East," and thus to determine
his real place in the world to know, in fact, the port
;

whence man started, the course he has followed, and

the port towards which he has to steer.
—
We all come from the East all that we value most
has come to us from the East, and in going to the
East, not only those who have received a special
Oriental training, but everybody who has enjoyed the
advantages of a liberal, that is, of a truly historical
education, ought to feel that he going to his " old
is

home," full of memories, if only he can read them.

Instead of feeling your hearts sink within you, when
next year you approach the shores of India, I wish
that every one of you could feel what Sir William
Jones felt, when, just one hundred years ago, he came
to the end of his long voyage from England, and saw
the shores of India rising on the horizon. At that
time young men going to the wonderland of India,
were not ashamed of dreaming dreams, and seeing
visions and this was the dream dreamt and the vision
:

seen by Sir William Jones, then simple Mr. Jones :

" When I was at sea last August (that is in August,

 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US ? 41

1783), on my voyage to this country (India), I had

long and ardently desired to visit, I found one even-
ing, on inspecting the observations of the day, that
India lay before us, Persia on our left, whilst a breeze
from Arabia blew nearly on our stern. situation A
so pleasing in itself and to me so new, could not fail
to awaken a train of reflections in a mind, which had
early been accustomed to contemplate with delight
the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this
Eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to
find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre,
almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which
has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the in-
ven tress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of
glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human
genius, and infinitely diversified in the forms of re-
ligion and government, in the laws, manners, customs,
and languages, as well as in the features and com-
plexions of men. I could not help remarking how im-

portant and extensive a field was yet unexplored, and

how many solid advantages unimproved."
India wants more such dreamers as that young
Mr. Jones, standing alone on the deck of his vessel
and watching the sun diving into the sea with the —
memories of England behind and the hopes of India
before him,, feeling the presence of Persia and its
ancient monarchs, and breathing the breezes of Arabia
and its glowing poetry. Such dreamers know how to
make their dreams come true, and how to change
their visions into realities.
And as itwas a hundred years ag«, so it is mow ;

or at least, so it may be now. There are many bright

dreams to be dreamt about India, and many bright
42 'WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

deeds to be done in India, if only you will do them.

Though many great and glorious conquests have been
made in the history and literature of the East, since
the days when Sir William Jones landed at Calcutta*
depend upon it, no young Alexander here need despair
because there are no kingdoms left forhim to con-
quer on the ancient shores of the Indus and the
Ganges.
 ®;rutf)fitl Cljaratter of tf)e ^inbu0*

In my first Lecture I remove the

endeavored to
prejudice that everything in India is strange, and so
different from the intellectual life which we are accus-
tomed to in England that the twenty or twenty-five
years which a Civil servant has to spend in the East
seem often to him a kind of exile that he must bear
as well as he can, but that severs him completely
from all those higher pursuits by which life is made
enjoyable at home. This need not be so and ought
not to be so, if only it is clearly seen how almost
every one of the higher interests that make life v/orth
living here in England, may find as ample scope in
India as in England.
To-day I shall have to grapple with another pre-
judice which even more mischievous, because it
is

forms a kind of icy barrier between the Hindus and

their rulers,and makes anything like a feeling of true
fellowship between the two, utterly impossible.
That prejudice consists in looking upon our stay in
India as a kind of moral exile, and in regarding the
Hindus as an inferior race, totally different from our-
selves in their moral character, and, more particularly
 —
44 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US1

in what forms the very foundation of the English

chiaracter, respect for truth.
I believe there is
nothing more disheartening to
any high-minded young man than the idea that he
will have to spend his life among human beings
whom he can never respect or love— natives, as they
are called, not to use even more offensive names
men whom he is taught to consider as not amenable
to the recognised principles of self-respect, upright-
ness, and veracity, and with whom therefore any com-
munity of interests and action, much more any real
friendshiiD, is supposed to be out of the question.
So often has that charge of untruthfulness been
repeated, and so generally is it now accepted, that it
seems almost Quixotic to try to fight against it.

Nor should I venture to fight this almost hopeless

battle, if I were not convinced that such a charge,
like all charges brought against a whole nation, rests
on the most flimsy induction, and that it has done,
is doing, and will continue to do more mischief than

anything that even the bitterest enemy of English

dominion in India could have invented. If a young
man who goes to India as a Civil servant or as a
military officer, goes there fully convinced that the
people whom he is to meet with are all liars, liars
by nature or by national instinct, never restrained
in their dealings by any regard for truth, never to be
trusted on their word, need we wonder at the feelings
of disgust with which he thinks of the Hindus, even
before he has seen them the feelings of distrust with
;

which he approaches them, arid the contemptuous way,

in which he treats them when brought intd contact
with them f6r the transaction of public or private
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 45

business ? When such tares have once been sown by

the enemy, be difficult to gather them up.
it will

It has become almost an article of faith with every

Indian Civil servant that all Indians are liars ; nay,
I know I shall never be forgiven for my heresy in
venturing to doubt it.

Now, quite apart from India, I feel most strongly

that every one of these international condemnations
is be deprecated, not only for the sake of the self-
to
conceited and uncharitable state of mind from which
they spring, and which they serve to strengthen and
confirm, but for purely logical reasons also, namely
for the reckless and slovenly character of the induc-
tion on which such conclusions rest. Because a man
has travelled in Greece and has been cheated by his
dragoman, or been carried off by brigands, does it
follow that all Greeks, ancient as well as modern, are
cheats and robbers, or that they approve of cheating
and robbery t And because in Calcutta, or Bombay,
or Madras, Indians who are brought before Judges,
or who hang about the law courts and the bazaars,
are not distinguished by an unreasoning and uncom-
promising love of truth, is it not a very vicious
induction to say, in these days of careful reasoning*
that all Hindus are liars —particularly if you bear in
mind that, according to the latest census, the num-
ber of inhabitants of that vast country amounts to 253
millions. Are all these 253 millions of human beings
tobe set down as liars, because some hundreds, say
even some thousands of Indians, when they are
brought to an English court of law, on suspicion of
having committed a theft or a murder, do not speak
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ?
4.6 WHAT CAN lA'BIA TEACH US\

Would an English sailor, if brought before a dark-

skinned judge, who spoke English with a strange
accent, bow down before him and confess at once
any misdeed that he may have committed and ;

would all his mates rush forward and eagerly bear

witness against him, when he had got himself into
trouble ?

The depend
rules of induction are general, but they
on the subjects to which they are applied. We may,
to follow an Indian proverb, judge of a whole field of
rice by tasting one or two grains only, but if we
apply this rule to human beings, we are sure to fall

into the same mistake as the English chaplain who

had once, on board an English vessel christened a
French child, and who remained fully convinced for
the rest of his life that all French babies had very
long noses.
I can hardly think of anything that you could
safely predicate of all the inhabitants of India, and
I confess to a little nervous tremor whenever I see a

sentence beginning with " The people of India," or

even with "All the Brahmans," or "All the Buddhists."
What follows is almost invariably wrong. There is a
greater difference between an Afghan, a Sikh, a Hin-
dustani, a Bengalese,and a Dravidian than between
an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and a Rus-
sian —
yet all are classed as Hindus, and all are
supposed to fall under the same sweeping condem-
nation.
Let me read you what
John Malcolm says about
Sir
the diversity of character to be observed by any one
who has eyes to observe, among the different races
whom we promiscuously call Hindus, and whom we
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 47

promiscuously condemn as Hindus. After describing

the people of Bengal as weak in body and timid in

mind, and those below Calcutta as the lowest of our

Hindu subjects, both in character and appearance, he
continues :
*'
But from the moment you enter the dis-

trict of Behar, the Hindu inhabitants are a race of

men, generally speaking, not, more distinguished by
their lofty stature and robust frame than they are for
some of the finest qualities of the mind. They are
brave, generous, humane, and their truth is as remark-
able as their courage."
But because I feel bound to protest against the
indiscriminating abuse that has been heaped on the
people of India from the Himalaya to Ceylon, do not
suppose that it is my wish or intention to draw an
ideal picture of India, leaving out all the dark shades,
and giving you nothing but *' sweetness and light."
Having never been in India myself, I can only claim
for myself the right and duty of every historian,
namely, the right of collecting as much information
as possible, and the duty to sift it according to the
recognized rules of historical qriticism. My chief
sources of information with regard to the national
character of the Indians in ancient times will be the
works Greek writers and the literature of the
of
ancient Indians themselves. For later times we must
depend on the statements of the various conquerors of
India, who are not always the most lenient judges of
those whom they may find it more difficult to rule
than to conquer. For the last century to the present
day, I shall have to appeal, partly to the authority of
those who, after spending an active life in India and
among the Indians, have given us the benefit of their
 4^ JVHAT CAN INDIA TEACH t/S f

experience in published works, partly to the testi-

mony of a number of distinguished Civil servants
and of Indian gentlemen also, whose personal
acquaintance I have enjoyed in England, in France,
and in Germany.
As I have chiefly to address myself to those who
will themselves be the rulers and administrators of
India in the future, allow me to begin with the
opinions which some of the most eminent, and, I
believe, themost judicious among the Indian Civil
servants of the past have formed and deliberately
expressed on the point which we are to-day discussing
namely, the veracity or want of veracity among the
Hindus.
And here I must begin with a remark which has
been made by others also, namely, that the Civil ser-
vants who went to India in the beginning of this
century, and under the auspices of the old East-India-
Company, many of whom I had the honor and pleasure
of knowing when I first came to England, seemed to
have seen a great deal more of native life, native
manners, and native character than those whom I had
to examine five-and-twenty years ago, and who are
now, after a distinguished career, coming back to
England. India is no longer the distant island which
it was, where each Crusoe had to make a home for

himself as best he could. With the short and easy

voyages from England to India and from India to
England, with the frequent mails, and the telegrams,
and the Anglo-Indian newspapers, official life in India
has assumed the character of a temporary exile rather,
which even English ladies are now more ready to
share than fifty years ago. This is a difficulty which
 * ;

TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS, 49

cannot be removed, but must be met, and which, I

beUeve, can best be met by inspiring the new Civil
servants with new and higher interests during their
stay in India.
I knew the late Professor Wilson, our Boden Pro-
fessor of Sanskrit at Oxford, for many years, and
often listened with deep interest to his Indian remini-
scences.
Let me read you what he. Professor Wilson, says
of his native friends, associates,and servants :
—
" I lived, both from necessity and choice, very much

amongst the Hindus, and had opportunities of be-

coming acquainted with them in a greater variety of
situations than those in which they usually come
under the observation of Europeans. In the Calcutta
mint, for instance, I was in daily personal communi-
cation with a numerous body of artificers, mechanics,
and laborers, and always found amongst them cheerful
and unwearied industry, good-humored compliance
with the will of their superiors, and a readiness to
make whatever exertions were demanded from them
there was among them no drunkenness, no disorderly
conduct, no insubordination. It would not be true to

say that there was no dishonesty, but it was compara-

tively rare, invariably petty, and much less formidable
than, I believe, it is necessary to guard against in other
mints in other countries. There was considerable
skill and ready docility. So far from there being any
servility, there was extreme frankness, and I should

say that where there is confidence without fear, frank-

ness is one of the most universal features in the Indian
character. Let the people feel sure of the temper
* Mill's History 01 British India, ed. Wilson, vol. i. p. 375.
go WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

and good-will of their superiors, and there is an end

of reserve and timidity, without the slightest departure
from respect ."
. . .

Then, speaking of the much-abused Indian Pandits,

he says " The studies which engaged my leisure
:

brought me into connection with the men of learning,

and in them I found the similar merits of industry,
intelligence, cheerfulness, frankness, with others
peculiar to their avocation. A very common charac-
teristic of these men, and of the Hindus especially,
was- a simplicity truely childish, and a total unac-
quaintance with the business and manners of life.

Where that feature was lost, it was chiefly by those

who had been long familiar with Europeans. Amongst
the Pandits, or the learned Hindus, there prevailed
great ignorance and great dread of the European
character. There is, indeed, very little intercourse
between any class of Europeans and Hindu scholars
and it is not wonderful, therefore, that mutual mis-
apprehension should prevail.'

Speaking, lastly, of the higher classes in Calcutta

and elsewhere, Professor Wilson says that he wit-
nessed among them polished manners, clearness and
'

comprehensiveness of understanding, liberality of

feeling and independence of principle that would
have stamped them gentlemen in any country in the
world.' With some of this class,' he adds, I formed
' '

friendships which I trust to enjoy through life.'

I have often heard Professor Wilson speak in the

same, and in even stronger terms of his old friends

in India, and his correspondence with Ram Comul
Sen, the grandfather of Keshub Chunder Sen, a most
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 31

orthodox, not to say bigoted, Hindu, which has lately,

been published, shows on what intimate terms Eng-
lishmen and Hindus may be, if only the advances are
made on the English side.
There is another Professor of Sanskrit, of whom
your University may well- be proud, and who could
speak on this subject with far greater authority than
I can. He too will tell you, and I have no doubt has
often told you, that if only you look out for friends
among the Hindus, you will find them, and you may
trust them.
There one book which for many years I have
is

been in the habit of recommending, and another

against which I have always been warning those of
the candidates for the Indian Civil Service whom I

happened to see at Oxford and I believe both the

;

advice and the warning have in several cases borne

the very best fruit. The book which I consider most
mischievous, nay, which I hold responsible for some
of the greatest misfortunes that have happened to
India, is Mill's History of British India, even with
the antidote against its poison, which is supplied by
Professor Wilson's notes. The book which
I recom-

mend, and which I wish might be published again in

a cheaper form, so as to make it more generally acces-
sible, is Colonel Sleeman's Rambles and Recollec-
tions of an Indian Official, published in 1844, but
written originally in 1 835-1 836.
Mill's History, no doubt, you
know, particularly
all

the Candidates for the Indian Civil Service, who, I

am sorry to say, are recommended to read it and are
examined in it. Still, in order to substantiate my
 — §

^2 . WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US ^.

Strong condemnation of the book, I shall have to give

a few proofs :

Mill in his estimate of the Hindu character is chiefly

guided by Dubois, a French missionary, and by Orme
and Buchanan, Ten nan t, and Ward, all of them neither
very competent nor very u-nprejudiced judges. Mill,*
however, picks out all that is most unfavorable from
their works, and omits the qualifications which even
these writers bound to give to their wholesale
felt

condemnation of the Hindus. He quotes as serious,

for instance, what was said in joke,t namely, that " a
Brahman is an ant's nest of lies and impostures."
Next to the charge of untruthfulness, Mill upbraids
the Hindus for what he calls their litigiousness. He
writes '.% "As often as courage fails them in seeking
more daring gratification to their hatred and revenge*
their malignity finds a vent in the channel of litiga-
tion." Without imputing dishonorable motives, as
Mill does, the same fact might be stated in a different
way, by saying, " As often as their conscience and re-
spect of law keep them from seeking more daring
gratification to their hatred and revenge, say by murder
or poisoning, their trust in English justice leads them
to appeal to our Courts of Law." Dr. Robertson, in
his " Historical Disquisitions concerning India,"
seems to have considered the litigious subtlety of the
Hindus as a sign of high civilization rather than of
barbarism, but he is sharply corrected by Mr. Mill,
who tells him that " nowhere is this subtlety carried
higher than among the wildest of the Irish." That
courts of justice, like the English, in which a verdict
* Mill's History, ed. Wilson, vol. i, p. 368.

t Mill's History, vol. i, p. 325. :j: L. c. vol. i, p. 329. § P. 217

 tkUTHFUL CHARACTER OP' THE HINDUS. 53

was not to be obtained, as formerly in Mohammedan

courts, by bribes and corruption, should at first have
proved very attractive to the Hindus, need not surprise
us. But is it really true that the Hindus are more
fond of litigation than other nations ? If we consult
Sir Thomas Munro, the eminent Governor of Madras,
and the powerful advocate of the Ryotwar settlements,
he tells us in so many words \^ '* I have had ample

opportunity of observing the Hindus in every situation,

and I can affirm, that they are not litigious." f
But Mill goes further still, and in one place he
actually assures his readers % that a " Brahman may
put a man to death when he lists." In fact, he repre-
sents the Hindus as such a monstrous mass of all

vices that, as Colonel Vans Kennedy § remarked,

society could not have held together, if it had really
consisted of such reprobates only. Nor does he seem
to see the full bearing of his remarks. Surely, if a
Brahman might, as he says, put a man to death when-
ever he would be the strongest testimony in
lists, it

their favor that you hardly ever hear of their availing

themselves of such a privilege, to say nothiqg of the
fact — —
and a fact it is that, according to statistics, the
number of capital sentences was one in every 10,000
in England, but only one in every million in Bengal. ||

Colonel Sleeman's Rambles are less known than

they deserve to be. To give you an idea of the man,
I must read you some extracts from the book.
* Mill's History, ed. Wilson, vol. i. p. 329.
t Manu, VIII. " Neither a King himself nor his officers
43, says :

must ever promote litigation; nor ever neglect a lawsuit instituted by

others." % Mill's History, vol. i. p. 327. § L. c. p. 368.
See Elphinstone, History of India, ed. Cowell, p. 219 note.
II "Of
the 232 sentences of death 64 only were carried out in England, while
the 59 sentences of death in Bengal were all carried out."
 .

f CAN IxhiA TEACH USf

His sketches being originally addressed to his sistef

this is how he writes to her :—

'*
My dear Sister,
" Were anyone to ask your countrymen in India,

what had been their greatest source of pleasure while

there, perhaps, nine in ten would say, the letters
which they receive from their sisters at home ....
And while thus contributing so much to our happi-
ness, they no doubt tend to make us better citizens
of the world, and servants of government, than we
should otherwise be ; for in our '
struggles through
life ' in India, we have all, more or less, an eye to
the approbation of those circles which our kind
sisters represent, —who may therefore be considered
in the exalted light of a valuable species of tmpaid
magist7'acy to the government of India."
There is a touch of the old English chivalry even
in these few words addressed whose appro- to a sister
bation he values, and with whom he hoped to spend
the winter of his days. Having been, as he confesses,
idle in answering letters, or rather," too busy to find
time for long letters, he made use of his enforced
leisure, while on his way from the Nerbuddah river
to the Himmaleh mountains, in search of health, to
give to his sister a full account of his impressions
and experiences in India. Though what he wrote
was intended at first "to interest and amuse his sister
only and the other members of his family at home,"
he adds in a more serious tone " Of one thing I :

must beg you to be assured, that I have nowhere in-

dulged in fiction, either in the narrative, the recollec-

tions, or the conversations. What I relate on the

 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 55

testimony of others, I believe to be true ; and what

I relate on my own, you may rely upon as being
so."
When placing his volumes before the public at
large in 1844, he expresses a hope that they may
" tend to make the people of India better understood
by those of our countrymen whose destinies are cast
among them, and inspire more kindly feelings towards
them."
You may ask why I consider Colonel Sleeman so
trustworthy an authority on the Indian character,
more trustworthy, for instance, than ever so accurate
and unprejudiced an observer as Professor Wilson,
—
My answer is because Wilson lived chiefly in Cal-
cutta, while Colonel Sleeman saw India, where alone
the true India can be seen, namely, in the village-
communities. For many years he was employed as
Commissioner for the suppression of 'Thuggee. The
Thuggs were professional assassins, who committed
their murders under a kind of religious sanction.
They were originally " all Mohammedans, but for a
long time past Mohammedans and Hindus had been
indiscriminately associated in the gangs, the former
class, however, still predominating." *
In order to hunt up these gangs, Colonel Sleeman.
had constantly to live among the people in the
country, to gain their confidence, and to watch the
good as well as the bad features in their character. *
Now what Colonel Sleeman continually insists on
is that no one knows the Indians who does not know
them in their village-communities —-what we should
now call their comimuies. It is that village-life which In
India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian
* Sir Ch, Trevelyan, Christianity and Hinduism, 1882. p. 42,
 5 i

2
WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us

character, more so than in any other country we know.

When in Indian history we hear so much of kings
and emperors, of rdjahs and maharajahs, we are apt
to think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a
central power, and without any trace of that self-
government which forms the pride of England. But
those who have most carefully studied the political
life of India tell you the very opposite.
The political unit, or the social cell in India has
always been, and, in spite of repeated foreign con-
quests, is still the village-community. Some of these
political units will occasionally combine, or be com-
bined for common purposes (such a confederacy being
called a grama^ala), but each is perfect in itself. When
we read in the laws of Manu* of officers appointed to
rule over ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand of
these villages, that means no more than that they
were responsible for the collection of taxes, and gene-
rally for the good behavior of these villages. And
when, in later times, we hear of circles of 84 villages,
the so-called Chourasees (iTaturajitif), and of 360
villages, this too seems to refer to fiscal arrangements
only. To the ordinary Hindu, I mean to ninety-nine
in every hundred, the village was his world, and the
sphere of public opinion, with its beneficial influences
on individuals, seldom extended beyond the horizon
of his village. J

* Manu VII. 115.

t H. M. Elliot, Supplement to the Glossary of Indian Terms, p.

X I see from Dr. Hunter's whole

latest statistical tables that the
number of towns and villages in British India amounts to 493,429.
Out of this number 448,320 have less than 1000 inhabitants, and may
be called villages. In Bengal, where the growth of towns has been
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 57

Colonel Sleeman was one of the first who called

attention to the existence of these village-communities
in India, and their importance in the social fabric of
the whole country both in ancient and in modern
times and though they have since become far better
;

known and celebrated through the writings of Sir

Henry Maine, it is still both interesting and instruc-
tive to read Colonel Sleeman's account. He writes
as a mere observer, and uninfluenced as yet by any
theories on the development of early social and politi-
cal lifeamong the Aryan nations in general.
I do not mean to say that Colonel Sleeman was the

first who pointed out the palpable fact that the whole

of India is parcelled out into estates of villages. Even

so early an observer as Megasthenes* seems to have
been struck by the same fact when he says that " in
India the husbandmen with their wives and children
live in the country, and entirely avoid going into
town." What Colonel Sleeman was the first to point
out was that all the native virtues of the Hindus are
intimately connected with their village-life.
That village-life, however, is naturally the least
known to English officials, nay, the very presence of
an English official is often said to be sufficient to drive
away those native virtues which distinguish both the
private life and the public administration of justice

most encouraged through Government establishments, the total num-

ber of homesteads is 117,042, and more than half of these contain less

than 200 inhabitants. Only 10,077 towns in Bengal have more than
1000 inhabitants, that is, no more than about a seventeenth part of
all the settlements are anything but what we should call substantia^

villages. In the North-Western Provinces the last census gives us

105,124 villages, against 297 towns. See Times, 14th Aug., 1882.
* Ancient India as described by Megasthene* and Arrian, by
McCrindle, p. 42.
58 WNA T CA N IA -I) /A -J 'EA CH US f

and equity an Indian village.* Take a man out of

in

his village-community, and you remove him from all

the restraints of society. He is out of his element,
and, under temptation, is more likely to go wrong
than to remain true to the traditions of his home-life-
Even between village and village the usual restraints
of public morality are not always recognized. What
would be called theft or robbery at home, is called a
successful raid or conquest if directed against distant
villages and what would be falsehood or trickery in
;

private life is honored by the name of policy and

diplomacy if successful against strangers. On trie
other hand, the rules of hospitality applied only to
people of other villages, and a man of the same village
could never claim the right of an Atithi, or guest.f
Let us hear now what Colonel Sleeman tells us
about the moral character of the members of these
village-communities, and let us not forget that the
Commissioner for the suppression of Thuggee had
ample opportunities of seeing the dark as well as the
bright ideas of the Indian character.
He assures us that falsehood or between
lying
members of the same village is almost unknown.
Speaking of some of the most savage tribes, the
Gonds, for instance, he maintains that nothing would

* " Perjury seems to be committed by the meanest and encouraged

by some of the better sort among the Hindus and Mussuhnans, with
as little remorse as if it were a proof of ingenuity, or even a merit."
Sir W. Jones, Address to Grand Jury at Calcutta, in Mill's History
of India, vol. i.The longer we possess a province, the
p. 324. ''

more common and grave does perjury become." Sir G. Cam.pbell^

quoted by S. Johnson, Oriental Religions, India, p. 288.

t Vasish/ha, translated by Bahler, VIII. 8.

 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 59

induce them to tell a lie, though they would think

nothing of lifting a herd of cattle from a neighboring
plain.
Of these men might perhaps be said that they have
it

not yet learned the value of a lie yet even such ;

blissful ignorance ought to count in a nation's charac-

ter. But I am not pleading here for Gonds, or Bhils,
or Santhals, and other non-Aryan tribes. I am speak-

ing of the Aryan and more or less civilized inhabitants

of India. Now amono* them, where ri2:hts, duties
and interests begin to clash in one and the same
village, public opinion, in its limited sphere, seems

strong .enough to deter even an evil-disposed person

from telling a falsehood. The fear of the gods also
has not yet lost its power *. In most villages there
is a sacred tree, a pipal-tree ( Ficus Indica), and the
gods are supposed to delight to sit among its leaves,
and listen to the music of their rustlinsf.
cs
The de-
(

ponent takes one of these leaves in his hand, and

invokes the god, who sits above him, to crush him, or
those dear to him, as he crushes the leaf in his hand,
ifhe speaks anything but the truth. He then plucks
and crushes the leaf, and states what he has to
say.
The pipal-tree is generally supposed to be occupied
by one Hindu deities, while the large cotton-tree,
of the
particularly among the wilder tribes, is supposed to be
the abode of local gods, all the more terrible, because
entrusted with the police of a small settlement only.
In their punchdyets, Sleeman tells us, men adhere
habitually and religiously to the truth, and " I have
had before me hundreds of cases," he says, " in which
* Sleeman, vol. ii. p. iii.
 6o WHA 7' CAN INDIA TEACH US f
a man's property, liberty, and life has depended upon
his telhno; a lie, and he has refused to tell it,"
Could many an English judge say the same ?
In their own tribunals under the pipal-tree or cot-
ton-tree, imagination commonly did what the deities,
who were supposed to preside, had the credit of doing.
If the deponent told a he believed that the god
lie,

who sat on his sylvan throne above him, and searched

the heart of man, must know it and from, that ;

moment he knew no rest, he was always in dread of

his vengeance. any accident happened to him, or
If

to those dear to him, it was attributed to this offended

deity and if no accident happened, some evil was
;

brought about by his own disordered imagination. *

It was an excellent superstition, inculcated in the

ancient law-books, that the ancestors watched the an-

swer of a witness, because, according as it was true or
false they themselves would go to heaven or to hell, f
Allow me to read you the abstract of a conversa-
tion between an English official and a native law-
officer as reported by Colonel Sleeman. The native
lawyer was asked what he thought would be the effect
of an act to dispense with oaths on the Koran and
Ganges-water, and to substitute a solemn declaration
made in the name of God, and under the same penal
liabilities as if the Koran or Ganges-water had been

in the deponent's hand.

"'
have practised in the courts," the native said,
I
" for thirty years,
and during that time I have found
only three kinds of witnesses two of whom would, —
by such an act, be left precisely where they were,
while the third would be released by it from a very
salutary check."
* Sleeraan, vel. ii. p. n6. Vasi3h/*/5« XVII. 32.
 " " "1

TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS, 6

" And, pray, what are the three classes into which
you divide the witnesses in our courts ?

" First, Sir, are those who will always tell the truth,
whether they are required to state what they know in
the form of an oath or not."
Do you think this a large class ?
'•

" Yes, I think it is and I have found among them

;

many whom nothing on earth could make to swerve

from the truth. Do what you please, you could
never frighten or bribe them into a deliberate
falsehood.
The second are those who will not hesitate to tell
"

a lie when they have a motive for it, and are not re-
strained by an oath. In taking an oath, they are
afraid of two things, the anger of God, and the odium
of men.
Only three days ago," he continued, " I required a
"

power of attorney from a lady of rank, to enable me to

act for her in a case pending before the court in
this town. It was given to me by her brother, and

two witnesses came to declare that she had given it.

" Now," said I, " this lady is known to live under the

curtain, and you will be asked by the judge whether

you saw her give this paper what will you say ?
They both replied —
:

" If the judge asks us the question

without an oath we will say " Yes " it will save —
much trouble," and we know that she did give the
paper, though we did not really see her give it but ;

if he puts the Koran into our hands, we must say

" iV^," for we should otherwise be pointed at by all

the town as perjured wretches— our enemies would
soon tell everybody that we had taken a false oath."
" Now," the native lawyer went on, ''
the form of an
oath is a great check on this sort of persons.
(32 WHAT CAN INJ:)IA TEACH USf

" The third class consists of men who will tell lies
whenever they have a sufficient motive, whether
they have the Koran or Ganges-water in their hand
or not Nothing will ever prevent their doing so ;

and the declaration which you propose would be just

as well as any other for them."
" Which class do you consider the most numerous
"
of the three ?

" I consider the second the most numerous^ and wish

the oath to be retained for them.''
That is, of all the men you see examined in our
"

courts, you think the most come under the class of

those who will, under the influence of strong motives,
tell lies, if they have not the Koran or Ganges-water
in their hands .-^ " '

''Yes."
" But do not a great many of those whom you
consider to be included among the second class come
frorn the village-communities, — the peasantry of the
country V
''Yes."
" And
do you not think that the greatest part of
those men who will tell lies in the court under the
influence of strong motives, unless they have the
Koran or Ganges-Vv^ater in their hands, would refuse
to tell lies, if questioned before the people of their vil-
"
liages, among the circle in which they live .'*

" Of course I do ; three-fourths of those who do

not scruple to lie in the courts, would be ashamed to
lie before their neighbors, or the elders of their vil-

lage."
" You think that the people of the village-commu-
nities are more ashamed to tell lies before their
''
neighbors than the people of towns ?
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS, 63

" —
Much more there is no comparison."
" And the people of towns and cities bear in India

Dut a small proportion to the people of the village-

"
communities ?

" I should think a very small proportion indeed."

" Then you think that in the mass of the population
of India, outof our courts, the first class, or those who
speak truth, whether they have the Koran or Ganges-
water in their hands or not, would be found more
numerous than the other two } "
" Certainly I do ; if they were always to be ques-
tioned before their neighbors or elders, so that they
could feel that their neighbors and elders could know
what they say."
It was from a simple sense of justice that I felt
bound to quote this testimony of Colonel Sleeman as
to the truthful character of the natives of India, when
left to themselves. My interest lies altogether with
the people of India, when left to themselves^ and his-
torically I should like to draw a line after the year
one thousand after Christ. When you read the
atrocities committed by the Mohammedan conquerors
of India from that time to the time when England
stepped in and, whatever may be said by her envious
critics, made, at all events, the broad principles of our

common humanity respected once more in India, the

wonder, to my mind, is how any nation could have
survived such an Inferno without being turned into
devils- themselves.
Now, it is quite true that during the two thousand
years which precede the time of Mahmud of Gazni,
India has had but few foreign visitors, and few foreign
critics ; still it is surely extremely strange that when-
 $

64 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US J

€ver, either in Greek, or in Chinese, or in Persian, or

in Arab writings, we meet with any attempts at des-
cribing the distinguishing features in the national
character of the Indians, regard for truth and justice
should always be mentioned first.

Ktesias, the famous Greek physician of Artaxerxes

Mnemon (present at the battle of Cunaxa, 404 b. c),
the first Greek writer who tells us anything about
the character of the Indians, such as he heard it des-
cribed at the Persian court, has a special chapter *
On
the justice of the Indians.'*
Megasthenes,^ the ambassador of Seleucus Nicator
at the court of Sandrocottus in Palibothra (Pa/aliputra,
the modern Patna), states that thefts were extremely
rare, and that they honored truth and virtue.
Arrian (in the second century, the pupil of Epic-
tetus) when speaking of the public overseers or super-
intendents in India, says : § " They oversee what goes
on in the country or towns, anH report everything to
the king, where the people have a king, and to the
magistrates, where the people are self-governed, and
it is against use and wont for these to give in a false
report ; but indeed no Indian accused of lying.
is ||

The Chinese, who come next in order of time, bear

the same, I believe, unanimous testimony in favor of
the honesty and veracity of the Hindus. Let me
quote Hiouen-thsang, the most famous of the Chinese
Buddhist pilgrims, who visited India in the seventh
*Ktesiae Fragmenta (ed. Didot), p. 8i.

t See Indian Antiquary, 1876, p. 333.

X Megasthenis Fragmenta (ed. Didot) in Fragm. Histor. Grace, vol.
ii. p. 426 b : ^AXiipBidiv te o/ioiaoi Hal apEzr/v ditodaxovTca,
§ Indica, cap. xii. 6.
y See McCrindle in Indian Antiquary, 1876, p. 92,
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OP THE HUNBUS. 55

century^. " Though the Indians," he writes, " are of

a light temperament, they are distinguished by the
straightforwardness and honesty of their character.
With regard to riches, they never take anything un-
justly ; with regard to justice, they make even excessive
concessions .... Straightforwardness is the dis-
tinguishing feature of their administration."
If we turn to the accounts given by the Mohamme-
dan conquerors of India, we find Idrisi, in his Geo-
graphy (written in the nth century), summing up
their opinion of the Indians in the following words if
" The Indians are naturally inclined to justice, and

never depart from it in their actions. The good faith,

honesty, and fidelity to their engagements are well
known, and they are so famous for these qualities that
people flock to their country from every side."
In the thirteenth century we have the testimony of
Marco Polo, J who thus speaks of the Abraiamajt, a
name by which he seems to mean the Brahmans who,
though not traders by profession, might well have
been employed for great commercial transactions by
the king. This was particularly the case during the
times which the Brahmans would call times of distress,
when many things were allowed which at other times
were forbidden by the laws. "You must know,"
Marco Polo says, " that these Abraiaman are the best
merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for
they would not tell a lie for anything on earth."
In the fourteenth century we have Friar Jordanus,
who goes out of his way to tell us that the people of

* Vol. ii. p. 83. t Elliot, History of India, vol. i. p. 8S.

X Marco Polo, ed. H. Yule, vol. ii. p. 350.
66 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US}

Lesser India (South and Western India), are true in

speech and eminent in justice.*

In the fifteenth century Kamal-eddin Abd-errazak
Samarkandi (141 3-1482), who went ambassador of
as
the Khakan to the prince of Kalikut and to the King
of Vidyanagara (about 1440-1445), bears testimony to
the perfect security which merchants enjoy in that
country.f
In the sixteenth century, Abu Fazl, the minister of
theEmperor Akbar, says in his Ayin Akbari :
'*
The
Hindus are rehgious, affable, cheerful, lovers of just-

ice, given to retirement, able in business, admirers of

truth, grateful and of unbounded fidelity and their ;

soldiers know not what it is to fly from the field of

battle.' $
And even in quite modern times Mohammedans
seem willing to admit that the Hindus, at all events in
their dealings with Hindus, are more staightforward
than Mohammedans in their dealings with Moham-
medans.
Thus Meer Sulamut Ali, a venerable old Mussulman,
and, as Colonel Sleeman says, a most valuable public
servant, was obliged to admit that " a Hindu may feel

himself authorised to take in a Mussulman, and might

even think it meritorious to do so but he would never ;

think it meritorious to take in one of his own religion.

There are no less than seventy-two sects of Moham-
mendans and every one of these sects would not only
;

take in the followers of every other religion on earth,

* Marco Polo, ed. H, Yule, Vol ii.

t Notices des Manuscrits, xiv. p. 436.

torn. He seems to have
been one of the first to state that the Persian text of the Kalilah and
Dimna was derived from the wise people of India.
X Samuel Johnson, India, p, 294,
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. Qy

but every member one of the other seventy-

of every
one sects ; and the nearer that sect is to his own^ the
greater the merit of taking in members." * its

So I could go on quoting from book after book, and

again and again we should see how it was love of truth
that struck all the people who came in contact with
India, as the prominent feature in the national character
of its inhabitants. No one ever accused them of false-
hood. There must surely be some ground for this, for
it is not a remark that is frequently made by travellers
in foreign countries, even in our time, that their in-
habitants invariably speak the truth. Read the ac-
counts of English travellers in France, and you will
find very little said about French honesty and veracity,
while French accounts of England are seldom without
a fling at Perfide Albion!
But if all this is true, how is it, you may well ask,
that public opinion in England is so decidedly un-
friendly to the people of India at the utmost tolerates ;

and patronizes them, but v/ill never trust them, never

treat them on terms of equality .-^

I have already hinted at some of the reasons. Public

opinion with regard to India is made up in England
chiefly by those who have spent their lives in Calcutta,
Bombay, Madras, or some other of the principal towns
in India. The native element in such towns contains
mostly the most unfavorable specimens of the Indian
population. An insight into the domestic life of the
more respectable classes, even in towns, is difficult
to obtain ; and, when it is obtained, it is extremely
difficult. to judge of their manners according to our
standard of what is proper, respectable, or gentleman-
* Sleeman, Rambles, vol. i. p, d-^, ^
68 ^VI/A r CAN INDIA TEA CII US f

like. The misunderstandings are frequent and often

most grotesque; and such, we must confess, is human
nature, that when we hear the different and often most
conflicting accounts of the character of the Hindus, we
are naturally sceptical with regard to unsuspected
virtues among them, while we are quite disposed to ac-
cept unfavorable accounts of their character.
Lest I should seem to be pleading too much on
the native side of the question and to exaggerate
the difficulty of forming a correct estimate of the
character of the Hindus, let me appeal to one of the
most distinguished, learned, and judicious members
of the Indian Civil Service, the author of the History
of India, Mountstuart Elphinstone. "
Englishmen in
India*," he says, " have less opportunity than might be
expected of forming opinions of the native character.
Even in England, few know much of the people
beyond their own class, and what they do know, they
learn from newspapers and publications of a descrip-
tion which does not exist in India. In that country
also, religion and manners put bars to our intimacy

with the natives, and limit the number of transactions

as well as the free communication of opinions. We
know nothing of the interior of families but by report,
and have no share in those numerous occurrences of
life in which the amiable parts of character are most

exhibited." "Missionaries- of a different religion,

judges, police-magistrates, officers of revenue or cus-
toms, and even diplomatists, do not see the most vir-
tuous portion of a nation, nor any portion, unless when
influenced by passion, or occupied by some personal
interest. What we do see we judge by our own
* Elphinstone's History of India, ed. Cowell, p. 213,
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HIAWUS. 69

Standard. We conclude that a man who cries like a

child on slight occasions, must always be incapable of

acting or suffering with dignity and that one who
;

allows himself to be called a liar would not be

ashamed any baseness. Our writers also confound
of
the distinctions of time and place they combine in ;

one character the Maratta and the Bengalese and ;

tax the present generation with the crimes of the

heroes of the Mahabharata. It might be argued, in

opposition many unfavorable testimonies, that

to
those who have known the Indians longest have
always the best opinion of them ; but this is rather a
compliment to human nature than to them, since it is

true of every other people. It is more in point, that

all persons who have from India think better
retired
of the people they have left, after comparing them
with others, even of the most justly admired nations."
But what is still more extraordinary than the
ready acceptance of judgments unfavorable to the
character of the Hindus, is the determined way in
which public opinion, swayed by the statements of
certain unfavorable critics, has persistently ignored
the evidence which members of the Civil Service,
officers and statesmen— men of the highest authority
— have given again and again, in direct opposition to
these unfavorable opinions. Here, too, I must ask to
be allowed to quote at least a few of these witnesses
on the other side.
Warren Hastings thus speaks of the Hindus in
general They are gentle and benevolent, more sus-
:
''

ceptible of gratitude for kindness shown them, and

less prompted to vengeance for wrongs inflicted than
 § f

^o WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us

any people on the face of the earth ; faithful, affec-

tionate, submissive to legal authority."
Bishop Heber said :
*'
The Hindus are brave>
courteous, intelligent, most eager for knowledge and
improvement ; sober, industrious, dutiful to parents,
affectionate to their children, uniformly gentle and
patient, and more easily affected by kindness and
attention to their wants and feelings than any people
I ever met with/'*
Elphin stone states :
" No set of people among the
Hindus are so depraved as the dregs of our own great
towns. The villagers are everywhere amiable, affec-
tionate to their families, kind to their neighbors, and
towards all but the government honest and sincere.
Including the Thugs and Dacoits, the mass of crime
is less in India than in England. The Thugs are
almost a separate nation, and the Dacoits are desperate
ruffians in gangs. The Hindus are mild and gentle
people, more merciful to prisoners than any other
Asiatics. Their freedom from gross debauchery is the
point in which they appear to most advantage ; and
their superiority in purity of manners is not flattering
t"
to our self-esteem.
Yet Elphinstone can be most severe on the real
faults of the people of India. He states that, at pre-
sent, want one of their prominent vices,
of veracity is
but he addsj " that such deceit is most common in
people connected with government, a class which
spreads far in India, as, from the nature of the land-
revenue, the lowest villager is often obliged to resist
force by fraud.
* Samuel Johnson, 1. c. p. 293.
t See History of India, pp. 375-381.
X L. c. p. 215, § L. c. p. 218,
 .

TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. yi

John Malcolm writes '^

Sir I have hardly ever *'

known where a person did understand the language,

or where a calm communication was made to a native
of India, through a well-informed and trustworthy-
medium, that the result did not prove, that what had
at first been stated as falsehood, had either proceeded
from fear, or from misapprehension. I by no means
wish to state that our Indian subjects are more free
from this vice than other nations that occupy a nearly
equal positi-on in society, but I am positive that they
are not more addicted to untruth."
Sir Thomas Munro bears even stronger testimony.
He writes " If a
good S3^stem of agriculture, unri-
:t

valled manufacturing skill, a capacity ta produce what-

ever can contribute to either convenience or luxury,
schools established in every village for teaching read-
ing, writing, and arithmetic,^ the general practice of
hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above
all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence,
respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which de-

* Mill's History of India, ed. Wilson, vol. i. p. 370.

t Mill's History, vol. i. p. 371.
\ Sir Thomas Munro estimated the children educated at public
schools in the Madras presidency as less than one in three. But low
as it was, it was, as he justly remarked, a higher rate than existed till

very lately in most countries of Europe. Elphinstone, Hist, of India,

p. 205.
In Bengal there existed no less than 80,000 native schools, though,
most part, of a poor quality. According to a Gov-
doubtless, for the
ernment Report of 1835, there was a village school for every 400 per-
sons. Missionary Intelligencer, IX. 183-193. ^.

Ludlow (British India, I. 62) writes: "In every Hindu village which
has retained its old form I am assured tbat the children generally are
able to read, write, and cipher; but where we have swept away the
village system, as in Bengal, there the vilJage school has also dis-
appeared. .., -
^2 tVHAT CAN- INDIA TEACH U^f

note a civilized people — then the Hindus are not in.

ferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to

become an between England and India,

article of trade
I am convinced that England will gain by the import
careo."
My own experience with regard to the native
character has been, of course, very limited. Those
Hindus whom I have had the pleasure to know per
sonally in Europe may be looked upon as exceptional,
as the best specimens, it may be, that India could
produce. Also, my intercourse with them has natu-
rally been such that it could hardly have brought
out the darker sides of human nature. During the
last twenty years, however, I have had some ex-
cellent opportunities of watching a number of native
scholars under circumstances where it is not difficult
to detect a man's true character, I mean in literary

work and, more particularly, in literary controversy. I

have watched them carrying on such controversies
both among themselves and with certain European
scholars, and I feel bound to say that, with hardly one
exception, they have displayed a far greater respect
for truth, and a far more manly and generous spirit
than we are accustomed to even in Europe and
America. They have shown strength, but no rude-
ness ;nay I know that nothing has surprised them
so much as the coarse invective to which certain San-
have condescended, rudeness of speech
skrit scholars
being, according to their view of human nature, a
safe sign not only of bad breeding, but of want of
knowledge. When they were wrong, they have readily
admitted their mistakes ; when they were right, they
have never sneered at their European adversaries.
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 73

There has been, with few exceptions, no quibbling, no

special pleading, no untruthfulness on their part, and
certainly none of that low ^cunning of the scholar who
writes down and publishes what he knows perfectly
well to be false, and snaps his fingers at those who
still value truth and self-respect more highly than

victory or applause at any price. Here, too, we might

possibly gain by the import cargo.
Let me add that I have been repeatedly told by
English merchants that commercial honor stands
higher in India than in any other country, and that
a dishonored bill is hardly known there.
I have left to the last the witnesses who might
otherwise have been suspected — I mean the Hindus
themselves. The whole from one
of their literature
end to the other is pervaded by expressions of love
and reverence for truth. Their very word for truth
is full of meaning. It is s a t or s a t y a, sat being the

participle of the verb as, to be. True, therefore,

was with them simply that which is. The English
sooth is connected with sat, also the Greek 6V for Eaov.,
and the Latin seits, in prcesens.
We are all very apt to consider truth to be what
is trowed by others, or believed in by large majorities.

That kind of truth is easy to accept. But whoever

has once stood alone, surrounded by noisy assertions,
and overwhelmed by the clamor of those who ought
to know better, or perhaps who did know better — call
him Galileo or Darwin, Colenso or Stanley, or any
other name — he knows what a real delight it is to
feel in his heart of hearts, this is true — this is — this
is sa t —whatever daily, weekly, or quarterly papers,
 f

74 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

whatever bishops, archbishops, or popes, may say to

the contrary.
Another name for truth is the Sanskrit r/ta, which
originally seems to have meant straight, direct, while
a.nrit3. is untrue, false.
"
Now one of the highest praises bestowed upon the
gods in the Veda is that they are s a t y a, true, truthful,
trustworthy ;
* and it is well known that both in
modern and ancient times, men always ascribe to God
or to their gods those qualities which they value
most in themselves.
Other words applied to the gods as truthful beings,
are a d r o g h a, lit. not deceiving.! A d r o g h a-v a /§
means, he whose word is never broken. Thus Indra, the
Vedic Jupiter, is said to have been praised by the
fathers J "as reaching -the enemy, overcoming him,
standing on the summit, true of speech, most powerful
in thought."
Droghava>^,§ on the contrary, is used for deceit-
fulmen. Thus Vasish^ha, one of the great Vedic poets,
says " If I had worshipped false gods, or if I believed
:

in the gods vainl)' —

but why art' thou angry with us,
"
O 6"atavedas } May liars go to destruction !

Satyam, as a neuter, is often used as an abstract,

and is then rightly translated by truth. But it also
means that which is, the true, the real ; and there are
several passages in the Rig-veda where, instead of
truth, I think we ought simply to translate satyam by
the true, that the
ro ovrcD? ov. It
is, real, sounds, no
doubt, very well to translate Satyena uttabhita bhlimi/^,

* Rig-veda I. 87, 4 ; I45» 5 ; ^74> i ; V. 23, 2.

t Rig-veda III. 32, 9; VI. 5, i.

I Rig-veda VI 22, 2. § Rig-veda III. 14, 6,

 : :

TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 75

by " the earth is

founded on truth " and I believe ;

every translator has taken satya in that sense here.

Ludwig translates, " Von der Wahrheit ist die Erde
gestiitzt." But such an idea, if it conveys any tangible
meaning at all, is far too abstract for those early poets
and philosophers. They meant to say " the earth,
such as we see it, is held up, that is, rests on some-
thing though we may not see it, on something
real,

which they called the Real,* and to which, in course

of time, they gave many more names, such 2iS R it a,
the right. Brahman, etc.

Of course where there is that strong reveience for

truth, there must also be the sense of guilt arising
from untruth. And thus we hear one poet pray that
the waters may wash him clean, and carry off all his
sins and all untruth :

" Carry away, ye waters,f whatever evil there is in

me, wherever I may have deceived, or may have cursed,
and also all untruth (an/'rtam)."J
Or again, in the Atharva-veda IV. 16
" May all thy fatal snares, which stand spread out
seven by seven and threefold, catch the man who tells
a lie, may they pass by him who tells the truth " !

From the Brahma/^as, or theological treatises of the

Brahmans, I shall quote a few passages only

* Sometimes they trace even tliis Satya or Riiz, the Real or Right^

to a still higher cause, and say (Rig-veda X. 190, i ) :

" The Right and Real was born from the Lighted Heat ; from
thence was born Night, and thence the billowy sea. From the sea
was born Sa:^zvatsara, the year, he who ordereth day and night, the
Lord of all that moves (winks). The Maker (dhatrz) shaped Sun
and Moon in order he shaped the sky, the earth, the welkin, and the
;

highest heaven." t Rig-veda L 23, 22.

t Or it may mean, "Wherever I may have deceived, or sworn false."
 "

y6 WHAT CAN- INDIA TEACH US f

" Whosoever* speaks the makes the fire on truth,
his own altar blaze up, as
he poured butter into the
if

lighted fire. His own light grows larger, and from

to-morrow to to-morrow he becomes better. But
whosoever speaks untruth, he quenches the fire on
his altar, as if he poured water into the lighted fire
;

his own light grows smaller and smaller, and from to-
morrow to to-morrow he becomes more wicked. Let
man therefore speak truth only.
And again :% " A man becomes impure by uttering
falsehood."
And again :
§ " As a man who steps on the edge of
a sword placed over a pit cries out, I shall slip, I shall
slip into the pit, so let a man guard himself from
falsehood (or sin).

In later times we see the respect for truth carried

to such an extreme, that even a promise, unwittingly
made, considered to be bindins:.
is

In the Ka^'/^a-Upanishad, for instance, a father is

introduced offering what is called an ^//-sacrifice,
where everything supposed to be given up. His
is

son, who standing by, taunts his father with not

is

having altogether fulfilled his vow, because he has

not sacrificed his son. Upon this, the father, though
angry and against his v/ill, is obliged to sacrifice his
son. Again, when the son arrives in the lower world,
he is allowed by the Judge of the Dead to ask for
three favors. He -then asks to be restored to life,
to be taught some sacrificial mysteries, and, as the
third boon, he asks to know what becomes of man
* ^atapatha BrS,hma«a II. 2, ^, 19.
t Cf. Muir, Metrical Translations, p. 268.
t S3.t. Br. III. I, 2, 10. § Taitt. Ara«yaka X. 9.
 fkVTHFUL CBARACTEk OF THE lilNDUS. >jj

after he is dead. Yama, the lord of the Departed,

tries in vain to be let off from answering this last
question. But he, too, is bound by and
his promise,
then follows a discourse on life after death, or immortal
life which forms one of the most beautiful chapters in

the ancient literature of India.

The whole one of the great Epic poems,
plot of
the Ramaya/^a, rests on a rash promise given by
Dai-aratha, king of Ayodhya, to his second wife,
Kaikeyi, that he would grant her two boons. In
order to secure the succession to her own son, she
asks that Rama, the eldest son by the king's other
wife, should be banished for fourteen years. Much
as the king repents his promise, Rama, his eldest son,
would on no account let his father break his word,
and he leaves his kingdom to wander in the forest
with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshma/^a. After
the father's death, the son of the second wife declines
the throne, and comes to Rama to persuade him to
accept the kingdom of his father. But all in vain.
Rama will keep his exile for fourteen years, and never
disown his father's promise. Here follows a curious
dialogue between a Brahman Gahali and Prince Rama,
of which I shall give some extracts :*
''The Brdhman, who is a priest and courtier, says,
" Well, descendant of Raghu, do not thou, so noble

in sentiments, and austere in character, entertain

like a common man, this useless thought. What man
is a kinsman of any other.'' What relationship has
anyone with another ? A man is born alone and
dies alone. Hence he who is attached to anyone as
his father or his mother, is to be regarded as if he

X Muir, Metrical Translations, p. 218.

 ;

78 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

were insane, for no one belongs to another. Thoii

oughtest not to abandon thy father's kingdom and
stay here in a sad and miserable abode, attended
with many trials. Let thyself be inaugurated king
in the wealthy Ayodhya. Daj-aratha, thy father is
nothing to thee, or thou to him the king is one ;

and thou another,- do therefore what is said Then . . .

offer oblations to the departed spirits (of thy fore-

fathers) on prescribed days ; but see what a waste
of food ! For what can a dead man eat } If what is

eaten by one here enters into the body of another

(viz., of the 5raddhas be offered to
departed), let
those who are travelling they need not then get
;

food to eat on their journey. These books (the,

Vedas), (which enjoin men to) sacrifice, give, con-
secrate themselves, practise austerities, and forsake
the world, are composed by clever men to induce
others to bestow gifts. Authoritative words do not
fallfrom heaven. Let me, and others like yourselves,
embrace whatever assertion is supported by reason.
Adhere to what is apparent to the senses, and reject
what is invisible. . . . This world is the next world
do thou therefore enjoy pleasure, for every virtuous
man does not gain it. Virtuous men are greatly dis-
tressed, while the unrighteous are seen to be happy.'"
These sound strange, particu-
positivist sentiments
larly from the mouth of a Brahman. But the poet
evidently wishes to represent a Brahman living at court,
who has an argument ready for anything and every-
thing that is likely to please his king.
But what does Rama answer } " The words," he

says, " which you have addressed to me, though they

recommend what seefns to be right and salutary, advise,
 r'RUTHFUL CHARACTEk OP THE mNDtJS. ifg

in fact, the contrary. The sinful transgressor, who

lives according to the rules of heretical systems, obtains
no esteem from good men. It is good conduct that
marks a man to be noble or ignoble, heroic or a pre-
tender to manliness, pure or impure. Truth and mercy
are immemorial characteristics of a king's conduct.
Hence royal rule is in its essence truth. On truth the
world is based. Both sages and gods have esteemed
truth. The man who speaks truth in this world attains
the highest imperishable state. Men shrink with fear
and horror from a liar as from a serpent. In this world
the chief element in virture is truth it is called the ;

basis of everything. \ Truth is lord in the world virtue ;

always rests on truth. All things are founded on truth

nothing is higher than it. ^
Why, then, should I not
be true to my promise
and faithfully observe the truth;
ful injunction given by my father.? Neither through
covetousness, nor delusion, nor ignorance, will I, over-
powered by darkness, break through the barrier of
truth, but remain true to my promise to my father.
How shall I, having promised to him that I would thus
reside in the forest, transgress his injunction, and do
what Bharata recommends } "
The other epic poem too, the Mahabharata, is full of
episodes showing a profound regard for truth and an
almost lavish submission to a pledge once given. The
death of Bhishma, one of the most important events
in the story of the Mahabharata, is due to his vow
never to hurt a woman. He is thus killed by Sik-
handin, whom he takes to be a woman.^
Were I to quote from all the law-books, and from

Holtzmann Das alte indische Epos, p 21, note 83^

 :

8o ^//-^ T CAN 1MbIA TEA cM t/S ?

still everywhere you would hear the same

later works,
keynote of truthfulness vibrating through them all.
We must not, however, suppress the fact that, under
certain circumstances, a lie was allowed, or, at all
events, excused by Indian lawgivers. Thus Gautama
says :
* " An untruth spoken by people under the in-
fluence of anger, excessive joy, fear, pain, or grief, by
infants, by very old men, by persons laboring under a
delusion, being under the influence of drink, or by mad
men, does not cause the speaker to fall, or as we should
say, is a venial, not a mortal sin."
This is a large admission, yet even in that open ad-
mission there amount of honesty. Again
is a certain
and again in the Mah^bharata is this excuse pleaded. %
Nay there is in the Mahabharata § the well-known
story in Kaui"ika, called Satyavadin, the Truth-speaker,
who goes to hell for having spoken the truth. He
once saw men flying into the forest before robbers
(dasyu). The robbers came up soon after them, and
asked Kaujika, which way the fugitives had taken.
He them the truth, and the men were caught by
told
the robbers and killed. But Kaujika, we are told,
went to hell for having spoken the truth.
The Hindus may seem to have been a priest-ridden
race, and their devotion to sacrifice and ceremonial is
well known. Yet this is what the poet of the Maha-
bharata dares to say
" Let a thousand sacrifices (of a horse) and truth
be weighed in the balance —truth will exceed the
thousand sacrifices." ||

* V. 24.
X I3412. Ill 13844 VII. 8742 VIII. 3436 3464.
; ;

§ Mahabbarata VIII. 3448.

Muir, 1. c. p. 268 Mahabharata I. 3095.
II
;
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS. 8l

These are words addressed by 5akuntala, the

deserted wife, to King Dushyanta, when he decHned
to recognize her and his son. And when he refuses
to Hsten to her appeal, what does she appeal to as
the highest authority ? The voice of conscience,
" If you think I am alon*e," she says to the king,
" you do not know that wise man within your heart.
He knows of your evil deed in his sight you commit —
sin. A man who has committed sin may think that
no one knows it. The gods know it and the old man
within."*
This must suffice. I say once more that I do not
wish to represent the people of India as 253 millions
of angels, but I do wish it to be understood and to be
accepted as a fact, that the damaging charge of
untruthfulness brought against that people is utterly
unfounded with regard to ancient times. It is not
only not true, but the very opposite of the truth. As
to modern times, and I date them from about 1000
after Christ, I can only say that, after reading the
accounts of the terrors and horrors of Mohammedan
rule, my wonder is that so much of native virtue and
truthfulness should have survived. You might as
well expect a mouse to speak the truth before a cat,
as a Hindu before a Mohammedan judge. If you
frighten a child, that child will tell a lie — if you ter-
rorise millions, you must not be surprised if they try
to escapefrom your fangs. Truthfulness is a luxury,
perhaps the greatest, and let me assure you, the most
expensive luxury in our life —
and happy the man who
has been able to enjoy it from his very childhood. It

* Mahibharata I. 3015-16.
82 JVHA T CAN- INDIA TEA CH US ?

may be easy enough in our days and in a free country,

like England, never to tell a lie — but the older we
grow, the harder we find it to be always true, to
speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. The Hindus too had made that discovery.
They too knew how hard, nay how impossible it is,

always to speak the truth, the whole truth and

nothing but the truth. There is a short story in the
5atapatha Brahma/^a, to my mind full of deep mean-
ing, and pervaded by the real sense of truth, the real
sense of the difficulty of truth. His kinsman said to
Aru;/a Aupave^i, "Thou art advanced in years,
establish thou the sacrificial fires." He replied:
" Thereby you tell me henceforth to keep silence.
For he who has established the fires must not speak
an untruth, and only by not speaking at all, one
speaks no untruth. To that extent the service of the
sacrificial fire consists in truth."*

doubt whether in any other of the ancient litera-

I
tures of the world you will find traces of that extreme
sensitiveness of conscience which despairs of our ever
speaking the truth, and which declares silence gold,
and speech silver, though in a much higher sense
than our proverb.
What I should wish to impress on those who will
soon find themselves the rulers of millions of human
beings in India, is the duty to shake off national pre-
judices, which are apt to degenerate into a
kind of
madness. I have known people with a brown skin
whom I could look up to as my betters. Look for
them in India, and you will find them, and if you

* 5atapatha Brahniawa, taarislated by Eggeling, Sacred Books of

the East, vol. xii. p. 313, § 20.
 TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS, 83

meet with disappointments, no doubt you wilV,

as,

think of the people with white skins wliom you have

trusted, and whom you can trust no more. We are
all apt to be Pharisees in international judgments. I

read only a few days ago in a pamphlet written by an

enlightened politician, the following words :

" Experience only can teach that nothing is so

truly astonishing to a morally depraved people as the
phenomenon of a race of men in whose word perfect
confidence may be placed ^ . . . . The natives are
conscious of their inferiority in nothing so much as
in this.They require to be taught rectitude of con-
duct much more than literature and science."
If you approach the Hindus with such feelings,
you will teach them neither rectitude, nor science,
nor literature. Nay, they might appeal to their own
Uterature, even to their law-books, to teach us at least
one lesson of truthfulness, truthfulness to ourselves,
or, in other words, —humility.
What does Yao-;lavalkya sayf t

" It is not our hermitage," he says —our religion

we might say — " still less the color of our skin, that
produces virtue ; virtue must be practised. There-
fore let no one do to others what he would not have
done to himself."
And the Laws of the Manavas, which were so
much abused by what do they teach t %
Mill,
" Evil doers think indeed that no one sees them
;

but the gods see them, and the old man within.''
" Self is the witness of Self, Self is the refuge of
Self. Do not despise thy own Self, the highest wit-
ness of men."
* Sir Charles Trevelyan, Christianity and Hinduism, p. 81.
t IV. 65. X VIII. 85. § VIII. 90.
84 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

"If, friend, thou thinkest thou art self-alone, re-

member there isthe silent thinker (the Highest Self)
always within thy heart, and he sees what is good,
and what is evil."
*
" O whatever good thou mayest have done
friend,
from thy very birth, all will go to the dogs if thou
speak an untruth."
Or in VasishZ/m, XXX. i :

" Practise righteousness, not unrighteousness ;

speak truth, not untruth ; look far, not near ; look up

towards the Highest, not towards anything low."
No doubt, there is moral depravity in India, and
where, is there no moral depravity in this world ^'

But to appeal to international statistics would be'

I believe, a dangerous game. Nor must we forget
that our standards of morality differ, and, on some
points, differ considerably from those recognized in
India and we must not wonder, if sons do not at
;

once condemn as criminal what their fathers and grand-

fathers considered right. Let us hold by all means
to our sense of what is right and what is wrong but ;

in judging others, whether in public or in private life,

whether as historians or politicians, let us not forget
that a kindly spirit will never do any harm. Certainly
I can imagine nothing more mischievous, more
dangerous, more fatal to the permanence of English
rule in India, than for the young Civil Servants to go
to that country with the idea that it is a sink of moral
depravity, an ant's nest of lies ; for no one is so sure
to go wrong, whether in public or in private life, as he
who says in his haste ;
" All men are liars."
* VIII. $2.
^uman Kntcre^t of Sanakrit Citerature*

My first Lecture was intended to remove the pre-

judice that India is and always must be a strange
country to us, and that those vvrho have to live there
will find themselves stranded, and far away from that
living stream of thoughts and interests which carries
us along in England and in other countries of Europe.
My second Lecture was directed against another
prejudice, namely, that the people of India with whom
the young Civil Servants will have to pass the best
years of their life are a race so depraved morally, and
more particularly so devoid of any regard for truth,

that they must always remain strangers to us, and

that any real fellowship or friendship with them is

quite out of the question.

To-day have to grapple with a third pre-
I shall

judice, namely, that the literature of India, and more

especially the classical Sanskrit literature, whatever
may be its interest to the scholar and the antiquarian,
has little which we cannot learn better
to teach us
from other sources, and that at all events it is of
little practical use to young civilians. If only they

learn to express themselves in Hindustani or Tamil,

that is considered quite enough ; nay, as they have
 B6 iVHA T cAAT India Tea Ch us f

to deal with men and

with the ordinary affairs of
life, andbefore everything else, they are
as,
to be
men of the world and men of business, it is
everi
supposed to be dangerous, if they allowed
themselves
to become absorbed
in questions of abstruse
scholar-
ship or in researches on ancient
religion, mythology,
and philosophy.
I take the
very opposite opinion, and I
should
advise every yoiing man who
wishes to enjoy his life
in India, and to spend his
years there with profit to
himself and to others, to learn
Sanskrit, and to learn
it well.
I know it will be said. What can be the use of
Sanskrit at the present day } Is ,not Sanskrit adead
language.? And are not
the Hindus themselves
ashamed of their ancient literature.? Do they not
learn English, and do they not prefer Locke,
and
Hume and Mill to their ancient
poets and philoso-
phers ?

No
doubt Sanskrit, in one sense,
is a dead language
it was, I believe, a dead
language more than two
thousand years ago. Buddha,
about 500 b. c com
manded his disciples to preach in
the dialects of the
people and King A^roka, in
; the third century b c
when he put up his Edicts, which
were intended to be
read or, at least, to be
understood by the people had
them engraved on rocks and
pillars in the various
local dialectsfrom Cabul* in the North to
Ballabhi in
the South, from the
sources of the Ganges and
the
Jumnah to Allahabad and Patna, nay
even down to
Urissa.^ These various dialects are as diffierent
from
Sanskrit as Italian is from Latin, and we have there-
• See Cunningham, Corpus Inscriptionum
Indicarum, vol. i, ,877.,
, HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 87

fore good reason to suppose that, in the third century

B. c, if not earlier, Sanskrit had ceased to be the
spoken language of the people at large.
There is an interesting passage in the ^ullavagga,
where we are told that, even during Buddha's life-
time, some of his pupils, who were Brahmans by
birth, complained that people spoiled the words of
Buddha by every one repeating them in his own
dialect (nirutti). They proposed to translate his
words into Sanskrit ; but he declined, and comiUianded
that each man should learn his doctrine in his own
language.*
And there is another passage, quoted by Hardy in
his Manual Buddhism, p. 186, where we read that
of
at the time of Buddha's first preaching each of the
countless listeners thought that the sage was looking
towards him, and was speaking to him in his own
tongue, though the language used was Magadhi.f
Sanskrit,' therefore, as a language spoken by the
people at large, had ceased to exist in the third cen-
tury B. c.

Yet such is the marvellous continuity between the

past and the present in India, that in spite of repeated
social convulsions, religious reforms, and foreign
invasions, Sanskrit may be said to be still the only
language that is spoken over the whole extent of that
vast country.
Though the Buddhist sovereigns published their
edicts in the vernaculars, public inscriptions and
«t

* ^ullavagga V. 33, i. The expression used is A'/^andaso arope-

ma 'ti.
* See Rhys Davids, Buddhist Suttas, Sacred Books of the East,
yol. xi. p. 142,
gg WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USi

documents continued to be composed

private official
in Sanskrit during the last two thousand yeafs. And
though the language of the sacred writings of Bud-
dhists and (9ainas was borrowed from the vulgar
dialects, the literature of India never ceased to be
written in Pawinean Sanskrit, while the few excep-
tions, as, for instance, the use of Prakrit by women
and inferior characters in the plays of Kalidasa and
others, are themselves not without an important his-
torical significance.
Even at the present moment, after a century of
English rule and English teaching, I believe that
Sanskrit is more widely understood in India than Latin
was in Europe at the time of Dante.
Whenever I receive a letter from a learned man in
India, it is written in Sanskrit. Whenever there is a
controversy on questions of law and religion, the
pamphlets published in India are written in Sanskrit.
There are journals written in Sanskrit which must
entirely depend for their support on readers who
prefer that classical language to the vulgar dialects.
There is The Pandit, published at Benares, containing
not only editions of ancient texts, but treatises on
modern subjects, reviews of books published in Eng-
land,and controversial articles, all in Sanskrit.
Another paper of the same kind is the Pratna
Kamra-nandini, " the Delight of lovers of old things,'
published likewise at Benares, and full of valuable
materials.
There is Rise of Know-
also the Vidyodaya, " the
ledge," a Sanskrit journal published at Calcutta, which
sometimes contains important articles. There are
probably others, which I do not know.
HUMAN- INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 89

There is a Monthly Serial published at Bombay,

by M. Moreshwar Kunte, called the Shad-darshana-
Chintanikd., or " Studies in Indian Philosophy," giving
the text of the ancient systems of philosophy, with
commentaries and treatises, written in Sanskrit,
though in this case accompanied by a Marathi and an
English translation.
Of the Rig-veda, the most ancient of Sanskrit books,
two editions are now coming out in monthly numbers,
the one published at Bombay, by what may be called
the Hberal party, the other at Prayaga (Allahabad) by
Dayananda Sarasvati, the representative of Indian
orthodoxy. The former gives a paraphrase in San-
skrit, and a Marathi and an English translation ; the
latter a full explanation in Sanskrit, followed by a
vernacular commentary. These books are published
by subscription, and the list of subscribers among the
natives of India is very considerable.
There are other journals, which are chiefly written
in the spoken dialects, such as Bengali, Marathi, or
Hindi but they contain occasional articles in San-
;

skrit, as, for instance, the Harii'A^andra/^andrika, pub-

lished at Benares, the lattvabodhin% published at
Calcutta, and several more.
Itwas only the other day that I saw in the Liberal,
the journal of Keshub Chunder Sen's party, an account
of a meeting between Brahmavrata Samadhyayi, a
Vedic scholar of Nuddea, and Kashinath Trimbak
Telang, a M.A. of the University of Bombay. The
one came from the east, the other from the west, yet
both could converse fiftently in Sanskrit.*
Still more extraordinary is the number of Sanskrit
* The Liberal, March I2, 1882.
 ;

90 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US1

texts, issuing from native presses, for which there

seems tobe a large demand, for if we write for copies
to be sent to England, we often find that, after a year
or two, all the copies have been bought up in India
itself. That would not be the case with Anglo-Saxon
texts in England, or with Latin texts in Italy !

But more than this, we are told that the ancient

epic poems of that Mahabharata and Ramayaz/a are
still recited in the temples for the benefit of visitors, and
that in the villages large crowds assemble around the
Kathaka, the reader of these ancient Sanskirt poems
often interrupting his recitations with tears and sighs,
when the hero of the poem is sent into banishment,
while when, he returns to his kingdom, the houses of
the village are adorned with lamps and garlands. Such
a recitation of the whole of theMahabharata is said to
occupy ninety days, or sometimes half a year. * The
people at large required, no doubt, that the Brahman
narrator (Kathaka) should interpret the old poem, but
there must be some few people present who understand,
or imagine they understand, the old poetry of Vyasa
and Valmiki.
There are thousands of Brahmans f even now, when
so inducement exists for Vedic studies, who know
little

the whole of the Rig-veda by heart and can repeat it

and what applies to the Rig-veda applies to many
other books.
But even if Sanskrit were more of. a dead lansfuao-e
* See R. G. Bhandarkar, Consideration of the date of the Maha-
bharata, Journal of the R. A. S. of Bombay, i872; Talboys Wheeler,
History of India, ii. 365, 572 ; Holtzmanli, Uber das alte indische
Epos 1881, p. I ; Phear, The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon, P.
19.

t Hibbert Lectures, p. 157. .

 HUMAN IN TERES T OF SANSKRIT LITER A TURE. 9j

than it really is, ail the living languages of India, both

Aryan and Dravidian, draw their very life and soul from
Sanskirt. ^ On this point, and on the great help that
even a limited knowledge of Sanskrit would- render in

the acquisition of the vernaculars, and others being

I,

better qualified than I am, have spoken so often, though

without any practical effect, that I need not speak again.
Any Candidate who knows but the elements of San-
skirt grammer will well understand what I mean,
whether his special vernacular may be Bengali, Hindu-
stani, or even Tamil. To a classical scholar I can only
say that between a Civil Servant who knows San-
skrit and Hindustani, and another who knows Hindu-
stani only, there about the same difference in their
is

power of forming an intelligent appreciation of

India and its inhabitants, as there is between a traveller
who visits Italy with a knowledge of Latin, and a party
personally conducted to Rome by Messrs. Cook and
Co.
Let us examine, however the objection that San-
skrit literature is a dead or an artificial literature, a
more carefully, in order
little to see whether there is

not some kind of truth init. Some people hold that

the literary works which we possess in Sanskirt never
had any real life at all, that they were altogether schol-
astic productions, and that therefore they can teach us
* " Every person acquainted with the spoken speech of India knows
perfectly well that its elevation to the dignity and usefulness of
written speech has depended, and must still depend, upon its borrow-
ing largely from its parent or kindred source that no man who is
;

ignorant of Arabic or Sanskrit can write Hindustani or Bengali with

elegance, purity, or precision, and that the condemnation of the classi-
cal languages to oblivion would consign the dialects to utter helpless-
ness and irretrievable barbarism." H. H. Wilson, Asiatic Journal^
Jan. 1836; vol. xix. p. 15.
g2 tVHAT CAN INDIA TEACH tJSf

nothing of what we really care namely the histori-for,

cal growth of the Hindu mind. Others maintain that

to the present moment, at all events, and after a cen-
tury of English rule, Sanskirt literature has ceased to
be a motive power in India, and that it can teach us
nothing of what is passing now through the Hindu
mind and influencing it for good or for evil.
Let us look at the facts. Sanskrit literature is a
wide and a vague term. If the Vedas, such as we now
have them, were composed about 1500 b. c, and if it
is a fact that considerable works continue to be written

in Sanskrit even now, we have before us a stream of

literary activity extending over three thousand four
hundred years. With the exception of China there is

nothing like this in the whole world.

It is difficult to give an idea of the enormous extent
and variety of that literature. We are only gradually
becoming acquainted with the untold treasures which
still exist in manuscripts, and with the titles of that

still large number of works which must have existed

formerly, some of them being still quoted by writers

of the last three or four centuries."*
The Indian Government has of late years ordered a
kind of biblographical survey of India to be made and
has sent some learned Sanskrit scholars, both European
and native, to places where collections of Sanskrit
MSS. are known to exist, in order to examine and
catalogue them. Some of these catalogues have been
published, and we learn from them that the number of
separate works in Sanskrit, of which MSS. are still

* would be a most useful word for any young scholar to draw up

It

a list books which are quoted by later writers, but have not
of Sanskrit
yet been met with in Indian libraries.
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 93
in existence, amounts about 10,000.*
to This is
more, I believe than the whole classical literature of
Greece and Italy put together. Much of it, no doubt,
will be called mere rubbish but then you know that
;

even in our days the writings of a very eminent philo-

sopher have been called " mere rubbish." What I
wish you to see is this, that there runs through the
whole history of India, through its three or four thou-
sand years, a high road, or, it is perhaps more accurate
to say, a high mountain-path of literature. It may be
remote from the turmoil of the plain, hardly visible
perhaps to the millions of human beings in their daily
struggle of life. It may have been trodden by a few
solitary wanderers only. But to the historian of the
human race, to the student of the development of the
human mind, those few solitary wanderers are after all
the true representatives of India from age to age. Do
not let us be deceived. The true history of the world
must always be the history of the few and as we ;

measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest,

we must take the true measure of India from the poets
of the Vepa, the sages of the Upanishads, the found-
ers of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosphies and the
authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the
millions who are bom
and die in their villages, and
who have never for one moment been roused out of
their drowsy dream of life.
To large multitudes no doubt, Sanskrit
in India,
literature was not merely a dead literature, it was
simply non-existent ! but the same might be said of
almost every literature, and more particularly of the
literature of the ancient world.
* Hibbert L,ectures, p, 133,
94 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US1

Still, even beyond this, I am quite prepared to

acknowledge to a certain extent the truth of the state-
ment, that a great portion of Sanskrit literature has
never been living and national, in the same sense in
which the Greek and Roman literatures reflected at
times the life of a whole nation and it is quite true;

besides, that the Sanskrit books which are best known

to the public at large, belong to what might correctly
be called the Renaissance period of Indian literature,
wheR those who wrote Sanskrit had themselves to
learn the language, as we learn Latin, and were
conscious that they were writing for a learned and
cultivated public only, and not for the people at
large.
This will require a fuller explanation.
We may divide the whole of Sanskrit literature,
beginning with the Rig-veda and ending with Daya-
nanda's Introduction to his edition of the Rig-veda,
his by no means uninteresting Rig-veda-bh?hiiika, into
two great periods that preceding the great Turanian
:

invasion, and that following it.

The former comprises the Vedic literature and the
ancient literature of Buddhism, the latter all the
rest.

If I call the invasion which is generally called the

invasion of the 6"akas, or the Scythians, or Indo-Scy-
thians, or Turushkas, the Turanian invasion^ it is

simply because I do not as yet wish to commit myself

more than I can help as to the nationality of the
tribes who took possession of India, or, at least, of the
government of India, from about the first century b. c.

to the third century a.d.

They are best known by the name of Yueh-chi, this
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 95

being the name by which they are called in Chinese

chronicles. These Chinese chronicles form the prin-
cipal source from which we derive our knowledge of
these tribes, both before and after their invasion of
India. Many theories have been started as to their
relationship with other races. They are described as
of pink and white complexion and as shooting from
horseback and as there was some similarity between
;

their Chinese name Yueh-chi and the Gothi or Goths,

they were identified by Remusat* with those German
tribes, and by others with the Getae, the neighbors of
the Goths, Tod went even a step urther, and traced
the (9ats in India and the Rajputs back to the Yueh-
chi and Qetae.'\ Some light may come in time out
of all this darkness, but for the present we must be
satisfied with the fact that, between the first century
before and the third century after our era, the
greatest political revolution took place in India owing
to the repeated inroads of Turanian, or, to use a still

less objectionable term, of Northern tribes. Their

presence in India, recorded by Chinese historians, is

fully confirmed by coins, by inscriptions, and by the

traditional history of the country, such as it is ; but
to my mind nothing attests the presence of these
foreign invaders more clearly than the break, or, I

could almost say, the blank in the Brahmanical litera-

ture of India from the first century before to the
third century after our era.
If we consider the political and social state of that
* Recherches sur les langues Tartares, 1820, vol. i. p. 327
Lassen, I. A., vol. ii. p. 359.
t Lassen, who at first rejected the identification of 6^^ts and Yueh-
chi, was afterwards inclined to accept it.
 i

96 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us

country, we can easily understand what would happen

in a case of invasion and conquest by a warlike race.
The invaders would take possession of the strongholds
or castles, and either remove the old Rajahs, or make
them their vassals and agents. Everything else
would then go on exactly as before. The rents
would be paid, the taxes collected, and the life of the
villagers, that is, of the great majority of the people
of would go on almost undisturbed by the
India,
change of government. The only people who might
suffer would be, or at all events, might be the priestly
caste, unless they should come to terms with the new
conquerors. The priestly caste, however, was also to
a great extent the literary caste, and the absence of
their old patrons, the native Rajahs, might well pro-
duce for a time a complete cessation of literary
activity. The rise of Buddhism and its formal
adoption by King Aj"oka had already considerably
shaken the power and influence of the old Brah manic
hierarchy. The Northern conquerors, whatever their
religion may have been, were certainly not believers
in the Veda. They seem to have made a kind of com-
promise with Buddhism, and it is probably due to that
compromise, or to an amalgamation of 6'aka legends
with Buddhist doctrines, that we owe the so-called
—
Mahayana form of Buddhism, and more particularly
the Amitabha worship, —
which was finally settled at
the Council under Kanishka, one of the Turanian
rulers of India in the first century a.d.
If then we divide the whole of Sanskrit litera-
ture into these two periods, the one anterior to the
great Turanian invasion, the other posterior to it, we
may call the literature of the former period ancie7it
 HUMAN IN TEREST OF SANS^IT LITERA TURE. g^

and natural, that of the latter '^nodern and artu

fieial.

Of the former period we possess, first, what has

been called the Veda, i. e. Knowledge, in the widest
—
sense of the word a considerable mass of literature,
yet evidently a wreck only, saved out of a general
deluge secondly, the works collected in the Buddhist
;

Tripi/aka, now known to us chiefly in what is called

the Pali dialect, the Gatha dialects, and Sanskrit, and
probably much added to in later times.
The second period of Sanskrit literature compre-
hends everything else. Both periods may be sub-
divided again, but this does not concern us at presen^t.
Now I am quite willing to admit that the literature
of the second period, the modern Sanskrit literature,
never was a living or national literature. It here
and' there contains remnants of earlier times, adapted
to the literary, religious, and moral tastes of a later
period ; and whenever we are able to disentangle
may serve to throw light
those ancient elements, they
on the past, and, to a certain extent, supplement
what has been lost in the literature of the Vedic
times. The metrical Law-books, for instance, contain
old materials which existed during the Vedic period,
partly in prose, as Sutras, partly inmore ancient
metres, as Gathas. The Epic poems, the Mahabha-
rata and Ramaya?/a, have taken the place of the old
Itihasas and Akhyanas. The Pura^as, even, may
contain materials, though much altered, of what was
called in Vedic literature the Pura«a.* ^

But the great mass of that later literature is artifi-

cial or scholastic, full of interesting compositions, and
* Hibbert Lectures, p. 154, note.
98 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US I

by no means devoid of originality and occasional

beauty ;
yet, with all that, curious only, and appealing
to the interests of the Oriental scholar far more than
the broad human sympathies of the historian and the
philosopher.
It is different with the ancient literature of India,
the literature dominated b}^ the Vedic and the Bud-
dhistic religions. That literature opens to us a chapter
in what has been called the Education of the Human
Race, to which we can find no parallel anywhere else.
Whoever cares for the historical growth of our lang-
uage, that is, of our thoughts whoever cares for the
;

first intelligible development of religion and my-

thology whoever cares for the first foundation of
;

what in later times we call the sciences of astronomy,

metronomy, grammar, and etymology whoever cares ;

for the first intimations of philosophical thought, for

the first attempts at regulating family life, village
life,and state life, as founded on religion, ceremonial,
tradition and contract (samaya) must in future pay —
the same attention to the literature of the Vedic period
as to the literatures of Greece and Rome and Germany.
As which the early literature of
to the lessons
Buddhism may teach us, I need not dwell on them
at present. If I may judge from the numerous

questions that are addressed to me with regard to

that religion and its striking coincidences with Chris-
tianity,Buddhism has already become a subject of
general interest, and will and ought to become so
more and more. On that whole class of literature,
however, it is not my intention to dwell in this short
course of Lectures, which can hardly suffice even for
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITER A TURE, go

a general survey of Vedic literature, and for an

elucidation of the principal lessons which, I think,
we may learn from the Hymns, the Brahma;^as, the
Upanishads, and the Sutras.
It was a real misfortune that Sanskrit literature
became first known to the learned public in Europe
through specimens belonging to the second, or, what
I called, the Renaissance period. The Bhagavadgita,
the plays of Kalidasa, such as 5akuntala or Urvai-f,
a few episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramaya;^a»
such as those of Nala and the Ya^/ladattabadha, the
fables of the Hitopa'deja, and the sentences of Bhartr/-
hari are, no doubt, extremely curious and as, at the ;

time when they first became known in Europe, they

were represented to be of extreme antiquity, and the
work of a people formerly supposed to be iquite
incapable of high literary efforts, they naturally
attracted the attention of men such as Sir William
Jones in England, Herder and Goethe in Germany,
who were pleased to speak of them in terms of highest
admiration. was the fashion at that time to speak
It
of Kalidasa, as, for instance, Alexander von Humboldt
did even in so recent a work as his Kosmos, as " the
great contemporary of Virgil and Horace, who lived
at the splendid Court of Vikramaditya, this Vikra-
maditya being supposed to be the founder of the
Sam vat era, 56 B.C. But all this is now changed.
Whoever who is supposed to
the Vikramaditya was
have defeated the ^akas, and to have founded another
era, the Tamvat era, 56 B.C., he certainly did not live in
the first century B.C. Nor are the Indians looked
upon any longer as an illiterate race,and their poetry as
popular and artless. On the contrary, they are judged
lOO WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US}

now by the same standards as Persians and Arabs,

Italians or French ; and, measured by that standard,
such works as Kalidasa's plays are not superior to
many plays that have long been allowed to rest in dust
and peace on the shelves of our libraries. Their an-
tiquity is no longer believed in by any critical San-
skrit scholar. Kalidasa is mentioned v/ith Bhdravi as
a famous poet in an inscription* dated a.d. 585-6 (507
Saka era), and for the present I see no reason to place
him much earlier, as to the Laws of Manu, which used
to be assigned to a fabulous antiquity,! and are so still
sometimes by those who write at random or at second-
hand, I doubt whether, in their present form, they can
be older than the fourth century of our era, nay I am
quite prepared to see an even later date assigned to
them. I know this will seem heresy to many San-

skrit scholars, but we must try to be honest to our-

selves. Is there any evidence to constrain us to assign
the Manava-dharma-i"astra, such as we now possess it,
written in continuous vSlokas, to any date anterior to
300 A.D, 1 And if there is not, why should we not
openly state it, challenge opposition, and feel grateful
if our doubts can be removed }

That Manu was a name of high legal authority be-

and that Manu and the Manavam are
fore that time,
frequently quoted in the ancient legal Sutras, is quite
true ; but this serves only to confirm the conviction
that the literature which succeeded the Turanian in-

* Published by Fleet in the Indian Antiquary, 1876, pp. 68-73, ^'"'^

firstmentioned by Dr. Bhao Daji, Journal Asiatic Society, Bombay
Branch, vol. ix.

t Sir William Jones fixed their date at 12S0 B.C.; Elphinstone as

900 B.C. It has recently been stated that they could not reasonably
be placed later than the fifth century s.c.
HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE. loi

vasion is full of wrecks saved from the intervening

deluge. what we call the Laws of Maim had really
If

existed as a Code of Laws, like the Code of Justinian,

during previous centuries, is it likely that it should
nowhere have been quoted and appealed to ?
Varahamihira I'who died 587 a.d.) refers to Manu
several times, but not to a Manava-dharma-jastra
and the only time where he seems actually to quote a
number of verses from Manu, these verses are not to
be met with in our text.*

* A very useful indication of the age of the Dharma-sutras, as com-

pared with the metrical Dharma-jastras or Sa7;^hitas, is to be found in
the presence or absence in them of any reference to written documents.
Such written documents, if they existed, could hardly be passed over

in silence in law books, particularly when the nature of witnesses is

discussed in support of loans, pledges, etc. Now v*?e see that in treat-
ing of the law of debt and debtors,^ the Dharma-sutras of Gautama,
Baudhayana, and Apastamba never mention evidence in writing.
Vasish/^a only refers to written evidence, but in a passage which may
be interpolated,- considering that in other respects his treatment of
the law of debt is very crude. Manu's metrical code shows here again
its usual character. It is evidently based on ancient originals, and
when it simply reproduces them, gives us the impression of great
antiquity. freely admits more modern ingredients, and does so
But it

in our case. speaks of witnesses, fixes their minimum number at

It
three, and discusses very minutely their qualifications and disqualifi-
cations, without saying a word about written documents. But in one
place (VIII. 168) it speaks of the valuelessness of agreements
v/ritten
obtained by force, thus recognizing the practical employment of
writing for commercial transactions. Professor Joly,"^ it is true,
suggests that this verse may be a later addition, particularly as it

occurs totidem verbis in Narada (IV. 55) ; but the final composition of
Manu's Sa;«hita, such as we possess it, can hardly be referred to a
period when writing was not yet used, at all events for commercial
purposes. Manu's Law-book is older than Ya^«avalkya's, in which

^ Uber das Indische Schuldrecht von J. Jolly, p. 29 [.

* -
Jolly, 1. c. p-. 322. L. c. p' 2Q0
 ^

102 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

I believe be found that the century in which

it will

Varahamihara lived and wrote was the age of the

literary Renaissance in India. That Kalidasa and
Bharavi were famous at that time, we know from the
evidence of inscriptions. We also know that during
that century the fame of Indian literature had reached
Persia, and that the King of Persia, Khosru Nushir-
van, sent his physician, Barzoi, to India, in order to
translate the fables of the Pa?1/^atantra, or rather their
original, from Sanskrit into Pahlavi. The famous
" Nine Gems," or ''the nine classics," as we should
say, have been referred, at least in part, to the same
age,* and I doubt whether we shall be able to assign
a much earlier date to anything we possess of San-
skrit literature, excepting always. the Vedic and Bud-
dhistic writings.
Although the specimens of this modern Sanskrit

literature, when they first became known, served to

arouse a general interest, and serve even now to keep
alive a certain superficial sympathy for Indian litera-
ture, more serious students had soon disposed of these
compositions, and while gladly admitting their claim
to be called pretty and attractive, could not think of
allowing to Sanskrit literature a place among the

writing has become a familiar subject. Vislvm often agrees literally

with Ya^^zavalkya, while Narada, as showing the fullest development

of the law of debt, is most likely the latest.*
See Br/hatsa;;^hita, ed. Kern, pref. p. 43; Journal of the R. A. S.
1875, p. 106.
* Kern, Preface to Brmatsa;/^hita, p. 20.

* Jolly, 1. c. p. 322. He places Katyayana and B/'/haspati after

Narada, possibly Vyasa and Harita also. See ^Iso Stenzler, Z. d, D.

M, G. ix. 664.
 MmAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 103

world-literatures, a place by the Greek and

side of
Latin, Italian, French, English or German.
There was indeed a time when people began to
imagine that all that was worth knowing about Indian
literature was known, and that the only ground on
which Sanskrit could claim a place among the recog-
nized branches of learning in a University was its
usefulness for the study of the Science of Language.
At that very time, however, now about forty years
ago, a new start was made, which has given to San-
skrit scholarship an entirelynew character. The
chief author of that movement was Burnouf, then
Professor at the College de France in Paris, an excel-
lent scholar, but at the same time a man of wide views
and true historical instincts, and the last man to waste
his life on mere Nalas and 5akuntalas. Being brought
up in the old traditions of the classical school in
France (his father was the author of the well-known
Greek Grammar), then for a time a promising young
barrister, with influential friends such as Guizot,
Thiers, Mignet, Villemain, at his and with a
side,
brilliant future before him, he was not likely to spend
his Irfe on pretty Sanskrit ditties. What he wanted
when he threw himself on Sanskrit was history, human
history, world-history, and with an unerring grasp he
laid hold of Vedic literature and Buddhist literature,
as the two stepping-stones in the slough of Indian
literature. He died young, and has left a few arches
only of the building he wished to rear. But his spirit
lived on and his friends,
in his pupils and few would
deny that the first impulse, directly or indirectly, to
all that has been accomplished since by the students
104 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US^

ofVedic and Buddhist literature, was given by Burnouf

and his lectures at the College de Fra?tce.
What then, you may ask, do we find in that ancient
Sanskrit literature and cannot find anywhere else ?
My answer is. We find there the Aryan man, whom
we'know in his various characters, as Greek, Roman,
German, Celt, and Slave, in an entirely new charac-
ter. Whereas in his migrations northward his active
and political energies are called out and brought to
their highest perfection, we find the other side of the
human character, the "passive and meditative, carried
to its fullest growth in India. In some of the hymns
of the Rig-veda we can still watch an earlier phase.
We see the Aryan tribes taking possession of the
land,and under the guidance of such warlike gods as
Indra and the Maruts, defending their new homes
against the assaults of the black-skinned aborigines
as well as against the inroads of later Aryan colonists.
But that period of war soon came to an end, and when
the great mass of the people had once settled down
in their homesteads, the military and political duties
seem to have been monopolized by what we call a
caste"^, that is by a small aristocracy, while the great

* During times of conquest and migration, such as are represented

to us in the hymns of the Rig-veda, the system of castes, as it is

described, for instance, in the Laws ofManu, would have been a

simple impossibility. It is doubtful whether such a system was
ever more than but even for such an ideal the
a social ideal,
materials would have been wanting during the period when the
Aryas were first taking possession of the land of the Seven Rivers.
On the other hand, even during that early period, there must have
been a division of labor, and hence we expect to find and do find in
the gramas of the Five Nations, warriors, sometimes called nobles,
leaders, kings counsellors^
; sometimes called priests, prophets,
judges ; and vjorking men, whether ploughers, or builders, or road-
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITER A TURE. 103

majority of the people were satisfied with spending

their days within the narrow spheres of their villages,
concerned about the outside world, and content
little

with the gifts that nature bestowed on them, without

much labor. We read in the Mahabharata (XI 1 1.
22) :

" There is fruit on the trees in every forest, which

every one who likes may pluck without trouble.
There is cool and sweet water in the pure rivers here
and there. There is a soft bed made of the twigs of
beautiful creepers. And yet wretched people suffer
!

pain at the door of the rich

At first sight we may feel inclined to call this
quiet enjoyment of life, this mere looking on, a
degeneracy rather than a growth. It seems so dif-
ferent from what we think life ought to be. Yet,
from a higher point of view it may appear that those
Southern Aryans have chosen the good part, or at
least the part good for them, while we, Northern
Aryans, have been careful and troubled about many
things.
It is at all events a problem worth considering
whether, as there is in nature a South antl a North,
there are not two hemispheres also in human nature,
both worth developing— the active, combative, and
political on one side, the passive, meditative, and
philosophical on the other; and for the solution o^
that problem no literature furnishes such ample
materials as that of the Veda, beginning with the
Hym.ns and ending with the Upanishads. We enter
into a new world — not always an attractive one, least

makers. These three divisions we can clearly perceive even in the

early hymns of the Rig-veda.
 1 06 ^^^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
•

of all to us ; but it possesses one charm, it is real, it

is of natural growth, and like everything of natural

growth. I believe it had a hidden purpose, and was
intended to teach us some kind of lesson that is

worth learning, and that certainly we could learn no-

where else. We are not called upon either to admire
or to despise that ancient Vedic literature we have ;

simply to study and to try to understand it.

There have been silly persons who have represented
the development of the Indian mind as superior to any
other, nay, who would make us go back to the Veda or
to the sacred writing of theBuddhists in order to find
there a truer religion, a purer morality, and a more
sublime philosoph}^ than our own. I shall not even

mention the names of these writers or the titles of their

works. But I feel equally impatient when I see other
scholars criticising the ancient literatures of India as if
it were the work of the nineteenth century, as if it re-

presented an enemy
must be defeated and that can
that
claim no mercy at our hands. That the Veda is full of
childish, silly, even to our minds monstrous concep-
tions, who would deny } But even these monstrosities
are interesting and instructive nay, many of them,
;

if we can but make allowance for different ways of

thought and language, contain germs of truth and
rays of light, all the more striking, because breaking
upon us through the veil of the darkest night.
Here lies the general, the truly human interest which
the ancient literature of India possesses, and whicli
gives it a claim on the attention, not only of Oriental
scholars or of students of ancient history, but of every
educated man and woman.
There are problems which we may put aside for a
HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE. 107

time, aye, which we must put aside while engaged

each in our own hard struggle for life, but which will
recur for all that, and which, whenever they do recur,
will stir us more deeply than we like to confess to

others, or even to ourselves. It is true that with us one

day only out of seven is set apart for rest and medita-
tion, and for the consideration of what the Greeks
called r<^ /ie;/z(rr<^,— " the greatest things." It is true

that the seventh day also is passed by many of us

either inmere church-going routine or in thoughtless
rest. But whether on week-days or on Sundays,
whether in youth or in old age, there are moments,
rare though they be, 3^et for all that the most critical
moments of our life, when the old simple questions
of humanity return to us in all their intensity, and we
ask ourselves. What we }
are What is this life on
earth meant for .-*
Are we to have no rest here, but
to be always toiling and building up our own happiness
out of the ruins of the happiness of our neighbors }

And when we have made our home on earth as com-

fortable as it can be made with steam and gas and
electricity, are we really so much happier than the
Hindu in his primitive homestead }
With us, as I said just now, in these Northern
climates, where life is and always must be a struggle,
and a hard struggle and where accumulation of
too,
wealth has become almost a necessity to guard against
the uncertainties of old age or the accidents inevitable
in our complicated social life, with us,
and in our
I say,

society, hours of rest and meditation are but few and

far between. was the same as long as we know
It
the history of the Teutonic races it was the same ;

even with Romans and Greeks. The European climate

io8 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

with its long cold winters, in many places also the

difficulty of cultivating the soil, the conflict of inter-
ests between small comunities has developed the in-

stinct of self-preservation (not to say, self-indulgence)

to such an extent that most of the virtues and most
of the vices European society can be traced
of the
back to that source. Our own character was formed
under these influences, by inheritance, by education,
by necessity. We all lead a fighting-life our highest ;

ideal of life is a fighting-life. We work till we can

work no longer, and are proud, like old horses, to die
in harness. We point with inward satisfaction to
what we and our ancestors have achieved by hard
work, in founding a family, or a business, a town or a
state. We point to the marvels of what we call
civilization —
our splendid cities, our high-roads and
bridges, our ships, our railways, our telegraphs, our
electric light, our pictures, our statues, our music,
our theatres. We imagine we have made life on
earth quite perfect ; in some cases so perfect that we
are almost sorry to leave it again. But the lesson
which both Brahmans and Buddhists are never tired
of teaching is that this life is but a journey from one
village to another, and not a resting-place. Thus we
read :
*
" As a man journeying to another village may enjoy
a night's rest in the open air, but, after leaving his
resting-place, proceeds again on his journey the next
day, thus father, mother, wife, and wealth are. all but
like a night's rest to jus —wise people do not cling to
them for ever."
Instead of sirtiply despising this Indian view of

life, might we not pause for a moment and consider

* Eochtlingk, Sprliche, 5101.
 MmAN- iMTkREST OF SANSKIRT LITE kA TURK, 109

whether their philosophy of life is entirely wrong,

and ours entirely right whether this earth was
;

really meant for work only (for with us pleasure also

has been changed into work), for constant hurry and
flurry or whether we, sturdy Northern Aryans, might
;

not have been satisfied with a little less of work, and

a little less of so-called pleasure, but with a little more
of thought, and amore of rest For, short as
little

our life is, we are not mere Mayflies that are born in
the morning to die at night. We have a past to look
back to and a future to look forward to, and it may
be that some of the riddles of the future find their
solution in the wisdom of the past.
Then why should we always fix our eyes on the
present only ? Why should we always be racing,
whether for wealth or for power or for fame ? Why
should we never rest and be thankful ?
I do not deny that the manly vigor, the silent

endurance, the public spirit, and the private virtues

too of the citizens of European states represent one
may be
sid«, it a very important side, of the destiny
which man has to fulfil on earth.
But there is surely another side of our nature, and
possible another destiny open to man in his journey
across this which should not be entirely ignored.
life,

If we turn our eyes to the East, and particularly to

India, where life is, or at all events was, no very

severe struggle, where the climate was mild, the soil
fertile, where vegetable food in small quantities
sufficed to keep the body in health and strength,
where the simplest hut or cave in a forest was
all the shelter required, and where social never
life

assumed the gigantic, aye monstrous proportions of

X Io ^//^ ^ CA N INDIA TEA CH US f

a London or Paris, but fulfilled itself within the

narrow boundaries of village communities, —was it

not, I say, natural there, or, if you like, was it not

intended there, that another side of human nature
should be developed — not the active, the combative
and acquisitive, but the passive, the meditative and
reflective Can we wonder that the Aryans who
?

stepped as strangers into some of the happy fields

and valleys along the Indus or the Ganges should
have looked upon life as a perpetual Sunday or
Holyday, or a kind of Long Vacation, delightful
so long as it lasts, but which must come to an end
sooner or later ? Why should they have accumulated
wealth ? why should they have built palaces ? why
should they have toiled day and night ? After hav-
ing provided from day to day for the small necessi-
ties of the body, they thought they had the right, it

may be the duty, to look round upon this strange

exile, to look inward upon themselves,- upward to
something not themselves, and to see whether they
could not understand a little of the true purport of
that mystery which we call life on earth.
Of course zve should call such notions of life dreamy,
unreal, unpractical, but may not they look upon our
notions of life as short-sighted, fussy, and, in the end,
most unpractical, because involving a sacrifice of life

for the sake of life ?

Nodoubt these are both extreme views, and they

have hardly ever been held or realized in that extreme
form by any nation, whether in the East or in the
West. We are not always plodding we sometimes —
allow ourselves an hour of rest and peace and thought
—nor were the ancient people of India always dream-
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKIRT LITERA TUkh. n i
iiigand meditating on roc jikyiara on the great
problems of life, but, when called upon, we know that
they too could fight like heroes, and that, without
machinery, they could by patient toil raise even the
meanest handiwork into a work of art, a real joy to
maker and to the buyer.
All then that I wish to put clearly before you is
this, that the Aryan man, who had to fulfil his mission

in India, might naturally be deficient in many of the

practical and fighting virtues, which were developed in
the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without
which they could not have survived, but that his life
on earth had not therefore been entirely wasted. His
very view of life, though we cannot adopt it in this
Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and a warn-
ing to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the
highest objects of life.

The greatest conqueror of antiquity stood in silent

wonderment before the Indian Gymnosophists, regret-
ting that he could not communicate with them in
their own language, and that their wisdom could not
reach him except through the contaminating channels
of sundry interpreters.
That need not be so at present. Sanskrit is no
longer a difficult language, and I can assure every
young Indian Civil Servant that if he will but go to
the fountain-head of Indian wisdom, he will find there,
among much that is and useless, some
strange
lessons of life which are worth learning, and which
we in our haste are too apt to forget or to despise.
Let me read you a few sayings only, which you
may still hear repeated in India when, after the heat
of the day, the old and the. young assemble together
ti2 WI^AT CAN tNblA TEACH t/Sf

under the shadow of their village tree— sayings which

to them seern truth, to us, I fear, mere truism !

As all have
" low in the earth,
to sleep together laid
why do foolish people wish to injure one another ?*
" A man seeking for eternal happiness (moksha)
might obtain it by a hundredth part of the suffer-
ings which a foolish man endures in the pursuit of
riches.
" Poor men eat more excellent bread than the rich ;

for hunger gives it sweetness.

" Our body is like the foam of the sea, our life like
a bird, our company with those whom we love does
not last for ever ; why then sleepest thou, my son ?
§
*'
As two logs of wood meet upon the ocean and then
separate again, thus do living creatures meet.li
" Our meeting with wives, relations, and friends,
occurs on our journey. Let a man therefore see clearly
where he is, whither he will go, what he is, why tarry-
ing here, and why grieving for anything.^
"Family, wife, children, our very body and our
wealth, they all pass away. They do not belong to us.
What then is ours 1 Our good and our evil deeds.**
" When thou goest away from here, no one will

follow thee. Only thy good and thy evil deeds, they
will follow thee wherever thou goest.tt
" Whatever act, good or bad, a man performs, of that
by necessity he receives the recompense.ft
"According to the Veda §§ the soul (life) is eternal,
but the body of all creatures is perishable. When
* Mahabh XL 121. t Pan^at. II. 127 (117).

X Mahabh. V. 1144. § Mahabh. XII. 12050.

1! L. c. XII. 869. IT L. c. XII. 872.
** L. c. XII. 12453. tt L. c. XIL 12456.
n L. c. III. 13846 (239). §§ L. c. III. 13864.
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE, 113

the body is destroyed, the soul departs elsewhere,

fettered by the bonds of our works.
If I know that my own body is not mine, and yet
''

that the whole earth is mine, and again that it is both

mine and thine, no harm can happen then.^
" As a man puts on new garments in this world,

throwing aside those which he formerly wore, even so

the Self of man puts on new bodies which are in
accordance with his acts.f
" No weapons
will hurt the Self of man, no fire will
burn no water moisten it, no wind will dry it up.
it,

"It is not to be hurt, not to be burnt, not to be

moistened, not to be dried up. It is imperishable,

unchanging, immoveable, without beginning.

" It is said to
be immaterial, passing all understand-
ing, and unchangeable. If you know the Self of man

to be all this, grieve not.

"
There is nothing higher than the attainment of
the knowledge of the Self.$
" All living creatures are the dwelling of the Self
who lies enveloped in matter, who is immortal, and

spotless. Those who worship the Self, the immove-

able, living in a moveable dwelling, become immortal.
^'
Despising everything else, a wise man should
strive after the knowledge of the Self/"'
We shall have to return to this subject again, for
this knowledge of the Self is really the Veddnta, that
is, the end, the highest goal of the Veda. The highest
wisdom of Greece was " to know ourselves ;
" the
highest wisdom of India is " to know our Self."

* Kam. Nitis, i, 33 (Boehtlingk, 918).

% Vish«u-sAtras XX. 50-53.
t Apastamba Dharma-sutras I. 8, 22.
1 14 WHA T CAN- INDIA TEA CH US ?

If I were asked to indicate by one word the dis-

tinguishing feature of the Indian character, as I have

here tried to sketch it, I should say it was a transcen-
dent, using that word, not in its strict technical
sense, as by Kant, but in its more general
fixed
acceptation, as denoting a mind bent on transcending
tke limits of empirical knowledge. There are minds
perfectly satisfied with empirical knowledge, a knowl-
edge of facts, well ascertained, well classified, and
well labelled. knowledge may assume very
Such
vast proportions, and, if knowledge is power, it may
impart great power, real intellectual power to the
man who can wield and utilize it. Our own age is
proud of that kind of knowledge, and to be content
with it, and never to attempt to look beyond it, is, I
believe, one of the happiest states of mind to be in.
But, for all that, there is a Beyond, and he who
has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has
—
gazed at the sun wherever he looks, everywhere he
sees the image of the sun. Speak to him of finite
things, and he will tell you that the Finite is impossi-
ble and meaningless without the Infinite. Speak to
him of death, and he will call it birth speak to him ;

of time, and he will call it the mere shadow of eter-

nity. To us the senses seem to be the organs, the
tools, the most powerful engines of knowledge to ;

him they are, if not actually deceivers, at all events

heavy fetters, checking the flight of the spirit. To
us this earth, this life, all that we see, and hear, and
touch is certain. Here, we feel, is our home, here lie

our duties, here our pleasures. To him this earth is

a thing that once was not, and that again will cease
to be this life is a short dream from which we shall
;
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRJT LITER A TURE. 115

soon awake. Of nothing he professes greater ignor-

ance than of what to others seems to be most certain,
namely that we see, and hear, and touch and as to ;

our home, wherever that may be, he knows that cer-

tainly it is not here.
Do not suppose that such men are mere dreamers.
Far from it ! And we can only bring ourselves to
if

be quite honest to ourselves, we shall have to confess

that at times we
have been visited by these trans-
all

cendental aspirations, and have been able to under-

stand what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of
those
'
Obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things.
Fallings from us, vanishings ;

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in virorlds not realised.'

The transcendent temperament acquired no doubt

a more complete supremacy in the Indian character
than anywhere else but no nation, and no individual,
:

is entirely without that " yearning beyond ;"

indeed
we all know it under a more familiar name —namely,
Religion.
It is necessary, however, to distinguish between
religion and a religion, quite as much as in another
branch of philosophy we have to distinguish between
language and a language or many languages. A
man may may be converted to
accept a religion, he
the Christian religion, and he may change hiis own
particular religion from time to time, just as he may
speak different languages. But in order to have a
religion, a man must have religion. He must once
at least in his life have looked beyond the horizon of
1 1 WIIA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US t
this world, and carried away in his mind an impres-
sion of the Infinite, which will never leave him again.
A being satisfied with the world of sense, unconscious
of its finite nature, undisturbed by the limited or
negative character of all perceptions of the senses,
would be incapable of any Only
religious concepts.
when the finite character of all human knowledge
has been perceived is it possible for the human mind
to conceive that which is beyond the Finite, call it
what you like, the Beyond, the Unseen, the Infinite,
the Supernatural, or the Divine. That step must
have been taken before religion of any kind becomes
possible. What kind of religion it will be, depends
on the character of the race which elaborates it, its
surroundings in nature, and its experience in history.
Now we may seem to know a great many religions
— J speak here, of course, of ancient religions only, of
what are sometimes called national or autochthonous
religions — not of those founded in later times by in-
dividual prophets or reformers.
Yet, among those ancient religions we seldom
know, what after all is the most important point, their
origin and their gradual growth. The Jewish religion
is represented to us as perfect and complete from the

very first, and it is with great difficulty that we can

discover its real beginnings and its historical growth.
And take the Greek and the Roman religions, take
the religions of the Teutonic, Slavonic or Celtic tribes,
and you will find that their period of growth has al-
ways passed, long before we know them, and that
from the time we know them all their changes are
purely metainorpkie^-'C\iZx\%<t^ in form of substances
ready at hand.
 BtlMAN- INTEREST OP SANSKRIT LITERA tURE, 1 1 y

Now let us look to the ancient inhabitants of India.

With them, was not only one inter-
first of all, religion
est by the side of many. It was the all-absorbing in-

terest it embraced not only worship and prayer, but

;

what we call philosophy, morality, law, and govern-

—
ment, all was pervaded by religion. Their whole
life was to —
them a religion everything else was, as it
were, a mere concession made to the ephemeral re-
quirements of this life.

What then can we learn from the ancient religious

literature of India —
from the Veda }
or
It requires no very profound knowledge" of Greek
religion and Greek language to discover in the Greek
deities the original outlines of certain physical phe-
nomena. Every schoolboy knows that in Zeits there is
something of the sky, in Poseidon of the sea, in Hades
of the lower world, in Apollo of the sun, in Artemis of
the moon, in Heplmstos of the fire. But for all that,
there from a Greek point of view, a very consider-
is,

able difference between Zens and the sky, between

Poseidon and the sea, between Apollo and the sun,
between Artemis and the moon.
Now what do we find in the Veda t No doubt here
and there a few philosophical hymns which have been
quoted so often that people have begun to imagine
that the Veda is a kind of collection of Orphic hymns.
We some purely mythological hymns, in
also find
which the Devas or gods have assumed nearly as
much dramatic personality as in the Homeric hymns.
But the great majority of Vedic hymns consists in
simple invocations of the fire, the water, the sky, the
sun, and the storms, often under the
same names which
afterwards became the proper name of Hindu deities,
tl8 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

but as yet nearly free from all that can be called irra-
tional or mythological. There is nothing irrational,

nothing I mean we cannot enter into or sympathize

with, in people imploring the storms to cease, or
the sky to rain, or the sun to shine. I say there
is nothing irrational in it, though perhaps it

might be more accurate to say that there is nothing

in it that would surprise anybody who is acquainted
with the growth of human reason, or, at all events, of
childish reason. It does not matter how we call the
tendency of the childish mind to confound the mani-
festation with that which manifests itself, effect with
cause, act with agent. Call it Animism, Personifica-
tion, Metaphor, or Poetry, we all know what is meant

by it, in the most general sense of all these names;

we all know that it exists, and the youngest child who
beats the chair against which he has fallen, or who
scplds his dog, or who sings, " Rain, rain, go to Spain,"
can teach us that, however irrational all this may
seem to us, it is perfectly rational, natural, aye in-
evitable in the first periods, or the childish age of the
human mind.
Now it is exactly this period in the growth of
ancient religion, which was always presupposed, or
postulated, but was absent everywhere else, that is

clearly put before us in the hymns of the Rig-veda.

It is this ancient chapter in the history of the human
mind which has been preserved to us in Indian litera-
ture, while we look for it in vain in Greece or Rome
or elsewhere.
It has been a favorite idea of those who call them*
selves "students of man," or anthropologists, that in
order to know the earliest or so-called prehistoric
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERA TURE. 1 19

phases in the growth of man, we should study the life

of savage nations, as we may watch it still in some
parts of Asia, Africa, Polynesia and America.
There is much truth in this, and nothing can be
more useful than the observations which we find col-
lected in the works of such students as Waitz, Tylor,
Lubbock, and many others. But let us be honest,
and confess, first of all, that the materials on which
we have here to depend are often extremely untrust-
worthy.
Nor is this all. What do we know of savage tribes
beyond the last chapter of their history.-^ Do we
ever get an insight into their antecedents Can we t

understand, what after all is everywhere the most

important and the most instructive lesson to learn,
how they have come to be what they are t There is

Indeed their language, and in it we see traces of

growth that point to distant ages, quite as much as
the Greek of Homer, or the Sanskrit of the Veda's.
Their language proves indeed that these so-called
heathens, with their complicated systems of mytho-
logy, their artificial customs, their unintelligible
whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day
or yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for
these savages, they must be as old as the Hindus,
the Greeks and Romans, as old as we ourselves. We
may assume, of course, if we like, that their life has
been stationary, and that they are to-day what the
Hindus were no longer 3000 years ago. But that is
a mere guess, and is contradicted by the facts of
their They may have passed through
language.
ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as
primitive may be, for all we know, a relapse into
I30 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

savagery, or a corruption of something that was more

rational and intelligible in former stages. Think
only of the rules that determine marriage among the
lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes
all understanding, seems a chaos of prejudice,
all

superstition, pride, vanity and stupidity. And yet we

catch a glimpse here and there that there was some
reason in most of that unreason we see how sense ;

dwindled away into nonsense, custom into ceremony,

ceremony into farce. Why then should this surface
of savage life represent to us the lowest stratum of
human life, the very beginnings of civilization, simply
because we cannot dig beyond that surface ?

Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do

not claim for the ancient Indian literature any more
than I should willingly concede to the fables and
traditions and songs of savage nations, such as we can
study at present in what we call a state of nature.
Both are important documents to the students of the
Science of Man. I simply say that in the Veda we
have a nearer approach to a beginning, and an in-
telligible beginning, than in the wild invocations of
Hottentots or Bushmen, But when
I speak of a be-

ginning, I do not mean an absolute beginning, a

beginning of all things. Again and again the question
has been asked whether we could bring ourselves to
believe that man, as soon as he could stand on his
legs, instead of crawling on all fours, as he is sup-
posed to have done, burst forth into singing Vedic
hymns But who has ever maintained this 1 Surely
}

whoever has eyes to see can see in every Vedic

hymn, aye, in every Vedic word? as many rings within
 HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKR/T LITERA TURE. 121

rings as is in the oldest tree that was ever hewn

down in the forest.
I shall even more, and I have said it before,
say
namely, that supposing that the Vedic hymns were
composed between 1500 and 1000 B. C, we can hardly
understood how, at so early a date, the Indians had
developed ideas which to us sound decidedly modern.
I should give anything if I could escape from the
conclusion that the collection of the Vedic Hymns,
a collection in ten books, existed at least 1000 B. C,
that about 500 years before the rise of Buddhism,
is

I do not mean to say that something may not be

discovered hereafter to enable us to refer that col-
lection to a later date. All I say is that, so far as
we know at present, so far as all honest Sanskrit
scholars know at present, we cannot well bring our
pre-Buddhistic literature into narrower limits than
five hundred years.
What then is to be done ? We must simply keep
our pre-conceived notions of what people call primi-
tive humanity in abeyance for a time, and if we find
that people three thousand years ago were familiar
with ideas that seem novel and nineteenth-centuiy-
like to us, well, we must somewhat modify our con-
ceptions of the primitive savage, and remember that
things hid from the wise and prudent have sometimes
been revealed to babes. ...^^

I maintain then that for a study of man, or, if you

like, for a study of Aryan humanity, there is nothing
in the world equal in importance with the Veda,
I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself,
for his ancestors, for his history, or for his intellectual
development, a study of Vedic literature is in indis-
122 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

pensable and that, as an element of liberal education,

;

it is far more important and far more irhproving than

the reigns of Babylonian and Persian kings, aye even

than the dates and deeds of many of the kings of
Judah and Israel.

It is curious to observe the reluctance with which

these facts are accepted, particularly by those to
whom they ought to be most welcome, I mean the
students of anthropology. Instead of devoting all

their energy to the study of these documents, which

have come upon us like a miracle, they seem only
bent on inventing excuses why they need not be
studied. Let it not be supposed that, because there
are several translations of the Rig-veda in English,
French and German, therefore all that the Veda can
teach us has been learned. Far from it. Every one
of these translations has been put forward as tentative
only. I myself, though during the last thirty years I

have given translations of a number of the more im-

portant hymns, have only ventured to publish a speci-
men of what I think a translation of the Veda ought
to be and that translation, that traduction raisonnie
;

as I ventured to call it, of twelve hymns or.iy, fills a

whole volume. We
on the mere surface of
are still

Vedic literature, and yet our critics are ready with

ever so many arguments why the Veda can teach us
nothing as to a primitive state of man. If they mean
by primitive that which came absolutely first, then
they ask for something which they will never get, not
even if they discovered the private correspondence of
Adam and Eve, or of the first Homo and Femina
sapiens. We mean by primitive the earliest state of
man of which, from the nature of the case, we can
HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE. 123

hope to gain any knowledge and here, next to the

;

archives hidden away in the secret drawers of language

in the treasury of words common to, all the Aryan
tribes, and in the radical elements of which each word
is compounded, there is no literary relic more full of

lessons to the true anthropologist, to the true student

of mankind, than the Rig-veda.
ii4

®bjecti0U0.

It may be quite true that controversy often does

more harm than good, that it encourages the worst of
all talents, that of plausibility, not to say dishonesty,
and generally leaves the world at large worse con-
founded than it was before. It has been said that no
clever lawyer would shrink from taking a brief to prove
that the earth forms the centre of the world, and, with
all respect for English Juries, it is not impossible that

even in our days he might gain a verdict against

Galileo. Nor do I deny that there is a power and
vitality in truth, which in the end overcomes and sur-
vives all opposition, as shown by the very doctrine of
Galileo which at present is held by hundreds and thou-
sands who would find it extremely difficult to advance
one single argument in its support. I am ready to
admit also that those who have done the best work,
and have contributed most largely toward the advance-
ment of knowledge and the progress of truth, have
seldom wasted their time in controversy, but have
marched on straight, little concerned either about ap-
plause on the right or abuse on the left. All this is

true, perfectly true, and yet I feel that I cannot escape

from devoting the whole of a lecture to the answering
of certain objections which have been raised against the
views which I have put forward with regard to the cha-
racter and the historical importance of Vedic litera-
 OBJECTIONS. 125

ture. We
must not forget that the whole subject is
new, the number of competent judges small, and
mistakes not only possible, but almost inevitable.
Besides, there are mistakes and mistakes, and the
errors of able men are often instructive, nay one
might say sometimes almost indispensable for the
discovery of truth. There are criticisms which may
be safely ignored, criticisms for the sake of criticism,
if not inspired by meaner motives. But there are
doubts and which suggest them.selves
difficulties
naturally, objections which have a right to be heard,
and the very removal of which forms the best
approach to the stronghold of truth. Nowhere has
this principle been so fully recognized and been acted
on as in Indian literature. Whatever subject is
started, the rule is that the argument should begin
with the purvapaksha, with all that can be said against
a certain opinion. Every possible objection is wel-
come, if only it is not altogether frivolous and absurd,
and then only follows the uttarapaksha, with all that
can be said against these objections and in support of
the original opinion. Only when this process has been
fully gone through is it allowed to represent an opin-
ion as siddhanta, or established.
Therefore, before opening the pages of the Veda,
and giving you a description of the poetry, the reli-
gion, and philosophy of the ancient inhabitants of
India, I thought it right and necessary to establish,
first of all, certain points without which it would be
impossible to form a right appreciation of the histo-
rical value of the Vedic hymns, and of their import-

ance even to us who live at so great a distance from

those early poets.
126 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1

'Y\i^ first point was purely preliminary, namely that

the Hindus in ancient, and in modern times also, are
a nation deserving of our interest and sympathy,
worthy also of our confidence, and by no means guilty
of the charge so recklessly brought against them — the
charge of an habitual disregard of truth.
Secondly, that the ancient literature of India is not
to be considered simply as a curiosity and to be
handed over to the good pleasure of Oriental scholars,
but that, both by its language, the Sanskrit, and by
its most ancient literary documents, the Vedas, it

can teach us lessons which nothing else can teach, as

to the origin of our own language, the first formation
of our own concepts, and the true natural germs of
all that is comprehended under the name of civiliza-
tion, at least the civilization of the Aryan race, that
race to which we. and all the greatest nations of the
world — the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and
Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and last, not least, the
Teutons, belong. A man may be a good and useful
ploughman without being a geologist, without know-
ing the stratum on which he takes his stand, or the
strata beneath that give on
support to the soil

which he lives and works, and from which he draws

his nourishment. And a man may be a good and
useful citizen, without being an historian, v/ithoul
knowing how the world in which he lives came
about, and how many phases mankind had to pass
through and philosophy, before
in language, religion,
it could supply him with that intellectual soil on
which he lives and works, and from which he draws
his best nourishment.
But there must always be an aristocracy of those
 OBJECTIONS. I2y

who know, and who can trace back the best which
we possess, not merely to a Norman Count, or a
Scandinavian Viking, or a Saxon Earl, but to far
older ancestors and benefactors, who thousands of
years ago were toiling for us in the sweat of their
face, and without whom we should never be what
we are, —the ancestors of the whole Aryan race,
the first framers of our words, the first poets of our
thoughts, the first givers of our laws, the first pro-
phets of our gods, and of Him who is God above
all gods.
That aristocracy of those who know, di color che
sanno, — or try to know, is open to all who are willing
to enter, to all who have a feeling for the past,
an interest in the genealogy of our thoughts, and a
reverence for the ancestry of our intellect, who are in
fact historians in the true sense of the word, i. e. in-
quiries into that which is past, but not lost.

Thirdly-, having explained to you why the ancient

literature of India, the really ancient literature of
that country, I mean that of the Vedic period, de-
serves the careful attention, not of Oriental Scholars
only, but of every educated man and woman who
wishes to know how we, even we here in England
and in this nineteenth century of ours, came to be
what we are, I tried to explain to you the difference,
and the natural and inevitable difference, between the
development of the human character in such different
climates as those of India and, Europe. And while
admitting that the Hindus were deficient in many
of those manly virtues and practical achievements
which we value most, I wished to point out that
there was another sphere of intellectual activity in
1 23 WHA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
meditative and
which the Hindus excelled-^the
learn from
transcendent— and that here we might
ourselves are but
them some lessons of life which we
too apt to ignore or to despise.
raised too high
Fourthly, fearing that I might have
expectations of the ancient wisdom,
the religion and
it my duty to
philosophy of the Vedic Indians, I felt
state that,though primitive in one sense, we must
not expect the Vedic religion to
be primitive in the
containing the
anthropological sense of the word, as
who had just broken their shells,
utterances of beings
for the first time
and were wonderingly looking out
upon this strange world. The Veda may be called
literary document
primitive, because there is no other
than it but the language, the mytho-
more primitive :

logy, the religionand philosophy that meet us m

the Veda open vistas of the past
which no one would
venture to measure in years. Nay, they contain, by
thoughts, many
the side of simple, natural, childish
or secondary and
ideas which to us sound modern,
tertiary, as I called them, but
which nevertheless are
document, and^ give
older than any other literary
period in the history
us trustworthy information of a
of human thought of which we knew absolutely
Vedas.*
nothing before the discovery of the
clear. Other
But even thus our path is not yet
the Veda as an
objections have been raised against
historicaldocument. Some of them are important ;

Others are
and I have at times shared them myself.
the cylinders of Babylon
*If we applied the name of literature to
have admit that some of these
and the papyri of Egypt, we should
to

any date we dare as yet assign to

documents are more ancient than
collected in the ten books of the Rig-veda,
the hymns
 OBJECTIONS, 129

at least instructive, and' will give us an opportunity

of testing the foundation on which we stand.
The first objection then against our treating the
Veda as an historical document is that it is not truly
national in its character, and does not represent the
thoughts of the whole of the population of India, but
only of a small minority, namely of the Brahmans, and
not even of the whole class of Brahmans, but only of
a small minority of them, namely of the professional
priests.
Objections should not be based on demands which,
from the nature of the case, are unreasonable. Have
those who maintain that the Vedic hymns do not re-
present the whole of India, that is the whole of its

ancient population, in the same manner as they say

that the Bible represents the Jews or Homer the
Greeks, considered what they are asking for.? So far
from denying that the Vedic hymns represent only a
small and, it may be, a priestly minority of the ancient
population of India, the true historian would probably
feel inclined to urge the same cautions against the Old
Testament and the Homeric poems also.
No doubt, after the books which compose the Old
Testament had been collected as a Sacred Canon, they
were known to the majority of the Jews. But when
we speak of the primitive state of the Jews, of their
moral, intellectual, and religious status while in Meso-
potamia or Canaan or Egypt, we should find that the
different books of the Old Testament teach us as little
of the whole Jewish race, with all its local character-
istics and social distinctions, as the Homeric poems do
of all the Greek tribes, or the Vedic hymns of all the
inhabitants of India. Surely, ev«n wh«ci we «p®ak of
130 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

the history of the Greeks or the Romans, we know that

we shall not find there a complete picture of the social
intellectual, and religious life of a whole nation. We
know very little of the intellectual life of a whole nation,
even during the Middle Ages, aye even at the present
day. We may know something of the generals, of the
commanders-inchief, but of the privates, of the millions,
we know next to nothing. And what we do know
of kings or generals or ministers is mostly no more
than what was thought of them by a few Greek poets
or Jewish prophets men who were one in a million
among their contemporaries.
But might be said that though the writers were
it

feAV, the readers were many. Is that so I believe

.'*

you would be surprised to hear how small the number

of readers is even in modern times, while in ancient
times reading was restricted to the very smallest class
of privileged persons. There may have been listeners
at public and private festivals, at sacrifices, and later
on in theatres, but readers, in our sense of the word,
are a very modern invention.
There never has been so much reading, spread
over so large an area, as in our times. But if
you asked publishers as to the number of copies sold
of books which are supposed to have been read by
everybody, say Macaulay's History of England, the
Life of the Prince Consort, or Darwin's Origin of
Species, you would find that out of a population of
thirty-two millions not one million has possessed itself
of a copy of these works. The book which of late has
probably had the largest sale is the Revised Version
of the New Testament and yet the whole number of
;

copies sold among the eighty millions of English-speak-

 OBJECTIONS, £31

ing people is probably not more than four millions.

Of ordinary books which are called books of the season,
and which are supposed to have had a great success,
an edition of three or four thousands copies is not con-
sidered unsatisfactory by publishers or authors in Eng-
land. But
you look to other countries such for
if

instance as Russia, it would be very difficult indeed

to. name books that could be considered as represent-
ative of the whole nation, or as even known by more
than a very small minority.
And if we turn our thoughts back to the ancient
nations of Greece and Italy, or of Persia and Baby-
lonia, what book is there, with the exception perhaps
of the Homeric poems, which we could say that
of
it had been read or even heard of by more than a
few thousand people ? We think of Greeks and
Romans as literary people, and so no doubt they were,
but in a very different sense from what we mean by
this. What we call Greeks and Romans are chiefly
the citizens of Athens and Rome, and here again
those who could produce or who could read such
works as the Dialogues of Plato or the Epistles of
Horace constituted a very small, intellectual aristo-
cracy indeed. What we call history — the memory of
the past —has always been the work of niinorities.
Millions and millions pass away undeeded, and the
few only to whom has been given the gift of fusing
speech and thought into forms of beauty remain as
witnesses of the past.
If then we speak of times so distant as those repre-
sented by the Rig-veda, and of a country so disin-
tegrated, or ratiier as yet so little integrated as India
was three thousand years ago, surely it requires 'but
1 32 WHA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f

little reflection to know that what we see in the Vedic

poems are but a few snow-clad peaks, representing to
us, from a whole mountain-range of
far distance, the
a nation, completely lost beyond the horizon of his-
tory. When we speak of the Vedic hymns as re-
presenting the religion, the thoughts and customs of
India three thousand years ago, we cannot mean by
India more than some unknown quantity of which
the poets of the Veda are the only sjx)kesmen left.
When we now speak of India, we think of 250
millions, a sixth part of the whole human race, peo-
pling the vast peninsula from the Himalayan moun-
between the arms of the Indus and the Ganges,
tains
down to Cape Comorin and Ceylon, an extent of
country nearly as large as Europe. In the Veda the
stage on which the life of the ancient kings and poets
is acted, is the valley of the Indus and the Punjab,
as it is now called, the Sapta, Sindhasa//, the Seven
Rivers of the Vedic poets. The land watered by the
Ganges is hardly known, and the whole of the Dekkan
seems not yet to have been discovered.
Then again, when these Vedic hymns are called the
lucubrations of a few priests, not the outpourings of
the genius of a whole nation, what does that mean ?

We may no doubt call these ancient Vedic poets

priests, if we like, and no one would deny that their
poetry is pervaded not only by religious, mytho-
logical, and philosophical, but likewise by sacrificial

and ceremonial conceits. Still a priest, if we trace

him back far enough, is only 2i prsbytejvs or an elder,
and, as such, those Vedic poets had a perfect right to
speak in the name of a whole class, or of the village
colnmunity to which they belonged. Call Vasish///a
 OBJECTIONS. 133

a priest by means, only do not let us imagine that

all

he was therefore very like Cardinal Manning.

After we have made every possible concession to
arguments, most of which are purely hypothetical,
there remains this great fact that here, in the Rig-
veda, we have poems, composed in perfect language,
in elaborate metre, telling us about gods and men,
about sacrifices and battles, about the varying aspects
of nature and the changing conditions of society,
about duty and pleasure, philosophy and morality —
articulate voices reaching us from a distance from
which we never heard before the faintest whisper ;

and instead of thrilling with delight at this almost

miraculous discovery, some critics stand aloof and
can do nothing but find fault, because these songs do
not represent to us primitive men exactly as they
think they ought to have been ; not like Papuas or
Bushmen, with arboraceous habits and half-animal
clicks, not as worshipping stocks or stones, or be-
lieving in fetishes, as according to Comte's inner
consciousness they ought to have done, but rather, I
must confess, as beings whom we can understand
with whom to a certain extent we can sympathize,
and to whom, in the historical progress of the human
intellect, we may assign a place, not very far behind
the ancient Jews and Greeks.
Once more then, if we mean by primitive, people
who inhabited this earth as soon as the vanishins: of
the glacial period made this earth inhabitable, the
Vedic were certainly not primitive. If we
poets
mean by primitive, people who were without a know-
ledge of fire, who used unpolished flints, and ate raw
flesh, the Vedic poets were not primitive. \i we
J 24
JVIfA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US 1
mean by primitive, people who did not cultivate the
soil, had no fixed abodes, no kings, no sacrifices, no
laws, again, I say, the Vedic poets were not primi-
tive. But if we mean by primitive the people who
have been the first of the Aryan race to leave behind
literary relics of their existence on earth, then I say
the Vedic poets are primitive, the Vedic language is

primitive, the Vedic religion is primitive, and, taken

as a whole, more primitive than anything else that
we are ever likely to recover in the whole history of
our race.
When all these objections had failed, a last trump
was played. The ancient Vedic poetry was said to be,
if not of foreign origin, at least very much infected
by and more particularly by Semitic influ-
foreign,
ences. It had always been urged by Sanskrit
'

scholars as one of the chief attractions of Vedic lite-

rature that it not only allowed us an insight into a
very early phase of religious thought, but that the
Vedic religion was the only one the development of
which took place without any extraneous influences,
and could be watched through a longer series of cen-
turies than any other religion. Now with regard to
the first point, we know how perplexing it is in the
religion of ancient Rome to distinguish between
Italian and Greek ingredients, to say nothing of
Etruscan and Phoenician influences. We know the
difficulty of finding out in the religion of the Greeks
what is purely home-grown, and what is taken over
from Egypt, Phoenicia, it may be from Scythia or at ;

all by those foreign rays of

events, slightly colored
thought. Even in the religion of the Hebrews, Baby-
lonian, Phoenician^ and at a later time Persian influ-
 -
OBJECTION^, i^
eiiceshave been discovered, and the more we advance
towards modern times, the more extensive becomes
the mixture of thought, and the more difficult the
task of assigning to each nation the share which i£

contributed to the common intellectual currency oi

the world. In India alone, and more particularly in
Vedic India, we see a plant entirely grown on native
soil, and entirely nurtured by native air. For this
reason, because the religion of the Veda was so com-
pletely guarded from all strange infections, it is full

of lessons which the student of religion could learn

nowhere else.
Now what have the critics of the Veda to say against
this } They say that the Vedic poems show clear
traces of Babylonian infl uences.
must enter into some details, because, small as
I

they seem", you can see that they involve very wide
consequences.
There is one verse in the Rig-veda, VIII. 78, 2,*
which has been translated as follows " O Indra, :

bring to us a brilliant jewel, a cow, a horse, an orna-

ment, together with a golden Mana."t
Now what is a golden Mana } The word does not
occur again by itself, either in the Veda or anywhere
else, and it has been identified by Vedic scholars with

the Latin minay the Greek /tr^^ the Phoenician ma7iah

n.5^ % the well-known weight which we actually
* A na/% bhara vya«^nam gam axvam abhya«oanam Sa/^a mana
hirawyaya.
t Grassman translates, " Zugleich mit goldenem Gearth ; " Ludwig,
" Zusammt mit goldenem Zierrath ; " Zimmer, *' Und eine Mana gold."
The Petersburg Dictionary explains mana by " ein bestimrates Gerath
Oder Gewicht" (Gold).
\ According to Dr. Haupt, Die Suraerisch-akkadische Sprachc, p.
272, mana is an Accadian word.
136 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us f

possess now among the treasures brought from fia-

bylon and Nineveh to the British Museum.*
If this were would be irrefragable evidence of
so, it

at all events a commercial intercourse between Babv-

Ion and India at a very early time, though it would in no
way prove a real influence of Semitic on Indian thought.
But is it so t If we saH, mana^ hira;^yaya by
translate
"with a mina of .gold," we must take mana hira«-
yaya as instrumental cases. But saM never gov-
erns an instrumental case. This translation there-
fore is impossible, and although the passage is diffi-
cult, because mana does not occur again in the Rig-
veda, I should think we might take mana hira;2yaya
for a dual, and translate, " Give us also two golden
armlets." To suppose that the Vedic poets should
have borrowed this one word and this one measure
from the Babylonians, would be against all the rules
of historical criticism. The word mana never occurs
again in the whole of Sanskrit literature, no other Ba-
bylonian weight occurs again in the whole of Sanskrit
literature, and it is not likely that a poet who asks for
a cow and a horse, would ask in the same breath for
a foreign weight of gold, that is, for about sixty
sovereigns.
But this is not the only loan that India has been
supposed to have negotiated in Babylon. The twenty-
seven Nakshatras, or the twenty-seven constellations,
which were chosen in India as a kind of lunar Zodiac,
were supposed to have come from Babylon. Now
* According to the weights of the lions and ducks preserved in the
BritishMusuem, an Assryian mina was=»7,747 grains. The same
difference is still preserved to the present day, as the man of Shiraz
and Bagdad is just double that of Tabraz and Bushir, the average of
the former being 14.0 and that of the latter only 6.985. See Cun-
ningham, Journal of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 1881, p. 163.
 OBJECTIOl^S. 137

the Babylonian Zodiac was solar, and, in spite of re

pealed researches, no trace of a lunar Zodiac has been
found, where so many tilings have been found, in
the cuneiform inscriptions. But supposing even that
a lunar Zodiac had been discovered in Babylon, no
one acquainted with Vedic literature and with the
ancient Vedic ceremonial would easily allow himself
to be persuaded that the Hindus had borrowed that
simple division of the sky from the Babylonians. It
is well known that most of the Vedic sacrifices depend

on the moon, far more than on the sun.* As the

Psalmist says, '
He appointed the moon for seasons ;

the sun knoweth his going down,' we read in the Rig-

veda X. 85, 18, in a verse addressed to sun and
moon, '
They walk by their own power, one after the
other (or from east to west), as playing children they
go round the sacrifice. The one looks upon all the
worlds, the other is born again and again, deter-
mining the seasons.
" He becomes new and new, when he is born as ;

the herald of the days, he goes before the dawns. By

his approach he determines their share for the gods,
the moon increases a long life."
The moon, then, determines the seasons, the //tus,
the moon fixes the share, that is, the sacrificial obla-
tion for all the gods. The seasons and the sacrifices
were in connected together in the
fact so intimately
thoughts of the ancient Hindus, that one of the com-
monest names for priest was ntv-i^, literally, the
season-sacrificer.
Besides the which have to be performed every
rites

day, such as the fiv« Mahiya^^as, and the Agnih©trft

* Preface to the fourth volume of my edition of the Rig- Veda, p. li.
 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?
'

138

in the morning and the evening, the important sacri-

fices in Vedic times were the Full and New-moon
sacrifices (dar^ap<ir;2amasa)the Season-sacrifices (/^a-
;

turmdsya), each season consisting of four months * ;

and the Half-yearly sacrifices, at the two solstices.

There are other sacrifices (agraya/^a, etc.) to be per-
formed in autum and summer, others in winter and
spring, whenever rice and barley are ripen ing.f
The regulation of the seasons, as one of the funda-
mental conditions of an incipient society, seems in
fact to have been so intimately connected with the
worship of the gods, as the guardians of the seasons
and the protectors of law and order, that it is some-
times difficult to say whether in their stated sacrifices
the maintenance of the calendar or the maintenance
of theworship of the gods was more prominent in the
minds of the old Vedic priests.
The twenty-seven Nakshatras then were clearly
suggested by the moon's passage.^ Nothing was
more natural for the sake of counting days, months,
or seasons than to observe the twenty-seven places
which the moon occupied in her passage from any
point of the sky back to the same point. It was far
easier than to determine the sun's position either
from day to day, or from month to month for the ;

stars, being hardly visible at the actual rising and

setting of the sun, the idea of the sun's conjunction
with certain stars could not suggest itself to a listless
observer. The moon, on the contrary, progressing
'^
Valrvadevara on th« full-moon of Phalguna, Varu;?apragh§,sl^ on
the full-moon cA Asha^/Sa, SS/kamedhS«/^ on the fuli-moon of Kr/ttika;
s^ Baehtlingk, Dictionary, 3. v.
tS©e Vish^/u-sm;^'ti, sd. Jolly LIX. 4; Aryabhafe, Introduction.
t See Preface to vol. iv. of Rig-veda, p. li. (1S62).
 OBJECTIONS. 139

from night and coming successively in con-

to night,
tact with certain stars, was like the finger of a clock,
moving round a circle, and coming in contact with
one figure after another on the dial plate of the sky.
Nor would the portion of about one-third of a
lunation in addition to the twenty-seven stars from
new moon to new moon, create much confusion in
the minds of the rough-and-ready reckoners of those
early times. All they were concerned with were the
twenty-seven celestial stations which, after being
only traced out by the moon, were fixed, like so
many mile-stones, for determining the course of all

the celestial travellers that could be of any interest

for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years.
A circle divided into twenty-seven sections, or any
twenty-seven poles planted in a circle at equal dis-
tances round a house, would answer the purpose of a
primitive Vedic observatory. All that was wanted
to be known was between which pair of poles the
moon, or afterwards the sun also, was visible at their
rising or setting, the observer occupying the same
central position on every day.
Our notions of astronomy cannot in fact be too crude
and too imperfect if we wish to understand the first
beginnings in the reckoning of days and seasons and
years. We cannot expect in those days more than
what any shepherd would know at present of the sun
and moon, and stars and seasons. Nor can we expect
any observations of heavenly phenomena unless they
had some bearing on the practical wants of primitive
society.
If then w@ can watch in India the natural, nay
inevitable, growth of the division of the heaven into
1 40 JVHA T CAN INDIA l^EACII US f

twenty-seven equal divisions, each division marked

by stars, which may have been observed and named
long before they were used for this new purpose — if,

on the other hand, we could hardly understand the

grpwth and development of the Indian ceremonial
except as determined by a knowledge of the lunar
asterisms, the lunar months, and the lunar seasons,
surely it would be a senseless hypothesis to ima-
gine that the Vedic shepherds or priests went to
Babylonia in search of a knowledge which every
shepherd might have acquired on the banks of the
Indus, and that, after their return from that country
only, where a language was spoken which no Hindu
could understand, they set to work to compose their
sacred hymns, and arrange their simple ceremonial.
We must never forget that what is natural in one
place is natural in other places also, and we may
sum up without fear of serious contradiction, that no
case has been made out in favor of a foreign origin
of theelementary astronomical notions of the Hindus
*
as found or presupposed in the Vedic hymns.
The Arabs, as is well known, have twenty-eight
lunar stations, the Manzil, and I can see no reason why
Mohammed and his Bedouins in the desert should
not have made the same observation as the Vedic
poets in India, though I must admit at the same
time that Colebrooke has brought forward very
cogent arguments to prove that, in their scientific
employment at least, the Arabic Manzil were really
borrowed from an Indian source, f
The Chinese, too, have their famous lunar stations,

*See Zimmer, Altindisofees L«ben, pp. 352—357

* L. c. p.lxx.
t
 b^jEcrioks. 141

the S eUy originally twenty-four in number, and after-

wards raised to twenty-eight. * But here again there
is no necessity whatever for admitting, with Biot,

Lassen and others, that the Hindus went to China

to gain their simplest elementary notions of lunar
chrononomy. First of all, the Chinese began with
twenty-four,and raised them to twenty-eight the ;

Hindus began with twenty-seven, and raised them to

twenty-eight. Secondly, out of these twenty-eight
asterisms, there are seventeen only which can really be
identified with the Hindu stars (taras). Now if a scien-
tificsystem is borrowed, it is borrowed complete.
But, in our case, I see really no possible channel
through which Chinese astronomical knowledge could
jhave been conducted to India so early as 1000 before
our era. In Chinese literature India is never men-
tioned before the middle of the second century before
Christ and if the isTinas in the later Sanskrit litera-
;

ture are meant for Chinese, which is doubtful, it is

important to observe that that name never occurs in
Vedic literature.

* L. c p. xlvii.
t In the Mahabharata and elsewhere the i^inas are mentioned
among Dasyus or non- Aryan races in the North and in the East
the
of India. King Bhagadatta is said to have had an army of A*inas
and Kiratas,^ and the Pa;z^avas are said to reach the town of the
King of the Kulindas, after having passed through the countries of
Alnas, Tukharas, and Daradas. All this is as vague as ethnological
indications generally are in the late epic poetry of India. The only
possibly real element is and K\x\.z. soldiers are called
that Kirata
kawiana, gold or yellow colored,^ and compared to a forest of Kar«i-
karas, which were trees with yellow flowers.* In Mahabh. VI. 9, v.

^ Lassen, i. p. 1029; Mahabh. III. 117, v. 12350; vol. i. p. 619.

2 Mahabh. V. 18, v. 584 ; vol. ii. p. 106.
2 See Vaiaspatya s. v. ; Kaj/^it Karwikragaura^.
i42 What CAN INDIA teach us f

When therefore the impossibility of so early 1

communication between China and India had at last
been recognized, a new theory was formed, namely
" that the knowledge of Chinese astronomy was not
imported straight from China to India, but was
carried, together with the Chinese system of division
of the heavens into twenty-eight mansions, into
Western Asia, at a period not much later than iioo
B. c, and was then adopted by some Western people,

either Semitic or Iranian. In their hands it was

supposed to have received a new form, such as adapted
it to a ruder and less scientific method of observation,
the limiting stars of the mansions being, converted
into zodiacal groups or constellatibus, and in some
instances altered in position, so as to be brought
nearer to the general planetary path of the ecliptic.
In this changed form, having become a means of
roughly determining and describing the places and
movements of the planets, it was believed to have
passed into the keeping of the Hindus,^very probably
along with the first knowledge of the planets them-
selves, and entered upon an independent career of
history in India. It still maintained itself in its old

373, vol. ii. p. 344, the ^inas occur in company with Kambo^as and
Yavanas, which again conveys nothing definite*

Chinese scholars tell us that the name of China is of modern origin,

and only dates from the Thsin dynasty or from the famous Emperor
Shi-hoang-ti, 247 B. C. But the name itself, though in a more
restricted sense, occurs in earlier documents, and may, as Lassen
thinks,* have become known to the Western neighbors of China. It
is certainly strange that the Sinim too, mentioned in Isaiah xlix. 12,

have been taken by the old commentators for people of China, visit-
ing Babylon as merchants and travellers.

* Lassen, vol. i. p. 1029, n. 2.

 dBjECTIONS. 14^

seat, leaving its traces later in the Bundahash ; and

made its way so far westward as finally to become
known and adopted by the Arabs." With due respect
for the astronomical knowledge of those who hold this
view, all I can say is that this is a novel, and nothing
but a novel, without any facts to support it, and that
the few facts which are known to us do not enable a
careful reasoner to go beyond the conclusions stated
many years ago by Colebrooke, that the Hindus had **

undoubtedly made some progress at an early period in

the astronomy cultivated by them for the regulation
of time. Their calendar, both civil and religious, was
governed chiefly, not exclusively, by the moon and
the sun and the motions of these luminaries were
:

caiefully observed by them, and with such success,

that their determination of the moon's svnodical re-
volution, which was what they were principally con-
cerned with, is a much more correct one than the
Greeks ever achieved. They had a division of the
ecliptic into twenty-seven and twenty-eight parts,
suggested evidently by the moon's period in days, and
seemingly their own it was certainly borrowed by the
;

Arabians."
There is one more argument which has been adduced
in support of a Babylonian, or, at all events, a Semitic
influence to be discovered in Vedic literature which
we must shortly examine. It refers to the story of
the Deluge.
That you know, has been traced in the
story, as
traditions of many races, which could not well have
borrowed it from one another and it was rather a
;

surprise that no allusion even to a local deluge should

occur in any of the Vedic hymns, particularly as very
 i44 WirAr CAN INDIA TEACil VSi

elaborate accounts of different kinds of deluges are

found in the later Epic poems, and in the still later
Pura;/as, and form in fact a very familiar subject in
the religious traditions of the people of India.
Three of the Avatdras or incarnations of Vish;m
are connected with a deluge, that of the Fish, that of
the Tortoise, and that of the Boar, Vish;m in each case
rescuing mankind from destruction by water, by as-
suming the form of a fish, or a tortoise, or a boar.
This being seemed a very natural conclusion
so, it

to make that, as there was no mention of a deluge in

the most ancient literature of India, that legend had
penetrated into India from without at a later time.
When, however, the Vedic literature became more
generally known, stories of a deluge were discovered,
if not in the hymns, at least in the prose writings, be-

longing to the second period, commonly called the

Brahma;^ period. Not only the story of Manu and
the Fish, but the stories of the Tortoise and of the
Boar also,were met with there in a more or less com-
plete form, and with this discovery the idea *of a
foreign importation lost much of its plausibility. I
shall readyou at least one .of these accounts of a
Deluge which is found in the 5atapatha Brahma/^a,
and you can then judge for yourselves whether the
similarities betweenand the account in Genesis are
it

really such as to require, nay as to admit, the hypo-

thesis that the Hindus borrowed their account of the
Deluge from their nearest Semitic neighbors.
We read in the ^'atapatha Brahma;/a I. 8, i :

" In the morning they brought water to Manu for

washing, as they bring it even now for washing our
hands.
 OBJECTIONS. .145
**
While he was thus washing, a fish came into his
hands.
" 2. The fish spoke this word to Manu :
" Keep me,
and I shall save thee."
" Manu said :
*
From what wilt thou save me .^'

" The fish said :

" A flood will carry away all these
creatures, and I shall save thee from it."
"
" Manu said :
" How canst thou be kept ?

" The fish said " So long as we are small, there

3. :

is much destruction for us, for fish swallows fish.

Keep me therefore first in a jar. When I outgrow

that, dig a hole and keep me in it. When outgrow I

that, take me to the sea, and I shall then be beyond

the reach of destruction."
" 4. He became soon a large fish (^/^asha), for such
a fish grows largest. The fish said :
" In such and
such a year the flood will come. Therefore when
thou hast built a ship, thou shalt meditate on me.
And when the flood has risen, thou shalt enter into
the ship, and I will save thee from the flood."
Having thus kept the fish, Manu took him to
''
5.

the sea. Then in the same year which the fish had
pointed out, Manu, having built the ship, meditated
on the fish. And when the flood had risen, Manu
entered into the ship. Then the fish swam towards
him, and Manu fastened the rope of the ship to the
fish's and he thus hastened towards * the
horn,
Northern Mountain.
" 6. The fish said " I have saved thee bind the
: ;

ship to a tree. May the water not cut thee off, while

* I prefer now tih« reading of the Kl/«va-^k!ifej abljidudrSiva.

Instead of atidudrava or adhidudr^va of the other MSS. See
Weber, Ind. Streifen, i. p. 11.
1 46 IVIIA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
thou art on the mountain. As the water subsides
do thou gradually slide down with it." Manu then
slid down gradually with the water, and therefore
this is called ''
the Slope of Manu " on the Northern
Mountain. Now the flood had carried away all these
creatures, and thus Manu was left there alone.
" 7. Then Manu went about singing praises and
toiling, wishing for offspring. And he sacrificed
there also with a Paka-sacrifice. He poured clarified
butter, thickened milk, whey,
and curds in the water
as a libation. In one year a woman arose from it.
She came forth as if dripping, and clarified butter
gathered on her step. Mitia and Varu;/a came to
meet her.
" 8. They said to her " Who art thou " She said
: .?
:

"The daughter of Manu." They rejoined: "Say

that thou art ours." " No," she said, " he who has

begotten me, his I am."

" Then they wished her to be their sister, and she

half agreed and half did not agree, but went away,
and came to Manu.
" 9. Manu said to her :
" Who art thou }
" She said
" I am thy daughter," " How, lady, art thou my
daughter .?
" he asked.
" She replied ;
" The libations which thou hast
poured into the water, clarified butter, thickened milk,
whey and curds, by them thou hast begotten me. I

am a benediction —perform (me) this benediction at

the sacrifices. If thou perform (me) it at the sacri-
fice, thou wilt be rich in offspring and cattle. And
whatever blessing thou wilt ask by me, will always
accrue to thee." He therefore performed that bene-
diction in the middle of the sacrifice, for. the middle
 OBJECTIONS, 14^

of the sacrifice is that which comes between the in-

troductory and the final offerings.

" 10. Then Manu went about with her, singing
praises and toiling, wishing for offspring. And with
her he begat that offspring which is called the off-
spring of Manu
and whatever blessing he asked
;

with her, always accrued to him. She is indeed I<^a

and whosoever, knowing this, goes about (sacrifices)
with \dky begets the same offspring which Manu
begat, and whatever blessing he asks with her, always
accrues to him."
This, no doubt, is the account of a deluge, and
Manu acts in some respects the same part which is

assigned to Noah in the Old Testament. But if

there are similarities, think of the dissimilarities,

and how they are to be explained. It is quite
clear that, if was borrowed from a Semitic
this story
source, it was not borrowed from the Old Testament,
for in that case it would really seem impossible to
account for the differences between the two stories.
That it may have been borrowed from some un-
known Semitic source cannot, of course, be dis-
proved, because no tangible proof has ever been pro-
duced that would admit of being disproved. But if
it were, it would be the only Semitic loan in ancient

—
Sanskrit literature and that alone ought to make us
pause !

The story of the boar and the tortoise too, can be .

traced back to the Vedic literature. For we read in

the Taittiriya Sawhita :*

'•'
At first this was water, fluid. Pra/apati, the lord
of creatures,' having become wind, moved on it.' He
VII. I, 5, I seq.; Muir. i. p. p.\ Colebrooke, Essays, i. 75.
1 43 WIIA T CAN INDIA TEA CII US f
saw this earth, and becoming a boar, he took it up.
Becoming Vii'vakarman, the maker of all things, he
cleaned it. It spread and became the wide-spread

Earth, and this is why the Earth is called Pnthivi the

wide-spread."
And we find in the 5atapatha Brahma;^at the fol-
lowing slight: allusion at least to the tortoise myth
" Pra^apati, assuming the form of a tortoise (Kur-
ma), brought forth all creatures. In so far as he
brought them forth, he made them (akarot), and be-
cause he made them he was (called) tortoise (Kurma).
A tortoise is (called Ka.fyapa, and therefore all crea-
tures are called Ka^yapa, tortoise like. He who was
this tortoise (Kurma) was really Aditya, (the sun)."
One other allusion to something like a deluge,$ im-
portant chiefly on account of the name of Manu
occurring in it, has been pointed out in the Ka///aka
(XL 2), where this short sentence occurs :
" The waters
cleaned this, Manu alone remained."
All this shows that ideas of a deluge, that is, of a
submersion of the earth by water and of its rescue
through divine aid, were not altogether unknown in
the early traditions of India, while in later times they
were embodied Avataras of Vish;m.
in several of the
When we examine the numerous accounts of a
deluge among different nations in almost every part
of the world, we can easily perceive that they do not
one single historical event, but to a natural
refer to
phenomenon repeated every year, namely the deluge
or flood of the rainy season or the winter.§

t ,VII. 5, I, 5; Muir, Origmal Sanskrit Texts, I, p. 54.

I Weber, Indische Streifen, i. p. 11. § See Lecture V,p. 152.
 OBJECTIONS. 149

Thisnowhere clearer than

is in Babylon. Sir
Henry Rawlinson was the first to point out that
the twelve cantos of the poem of Izdubar or Nirarod
refers to the twelve months of the year and the
twelve representative signs of the Zodiac. Dr.
Haupt afterwards pointed out that Eabani, the wise
bull-man in the second canto, corresponds to the
second month, Ijjar, April-May, represented in the
Zodiac by the bull; that the union between Eabant
and Nimrod in the third canto corresponds to the
third mouth, Sivan, May -June represented in the
Zodiac by the twins that the sickness of Nimrod
;

in the seventh canto corresponds to the seventh

month, Tishri, September- October, when the sun
begins to wane ; and that the flood in the eleventh
canto corresponds to the eleventh month, Shaba/u,
dedicated to the storm-god Rimmon, represented in
the Zodiac by the waterm.an.*
If that is so, we have surely a right to claim the
same natural origin for the story of the Deluge in In-
dia which we are bound to admit in other countries.
And even could be proved that in the form in
if it

which these legends have reached us in India they

show traces of foreign influences,! the fact would still

remain that such influences have been perceived in

comparatively modern treatises only, and not in the
ancient hymns of the Rig-veda.
Other conjectures have been made with even less
foundation than that which would place the ancient
poets of India under the influence of Babylon. China
has been appealed to, nay even Perisa, Parthia, and

*See Haupt, Der KeilinschriftHche Sintfluthbericht, 1881, p.io.

t See M. M., Genesis and Avesta (German translation;, i. p. 148.
i^O ^VHAT CAN INDIA TEACH VS /

Bactria, countriesbeyond the reach of India at thai

early time of which we are here speaking, and por-
bably not even then consolidated into independent
nations or kingdoms. I only wonder that traces of

the lost Jewish tribes have not been discovered in

the Vedas, considering that Afghanistan has so often
been pointed out as one of their favorite retreats.
After having thus carefully exmined all the traces*
of supposed foreign influences that have been brought
forward by various scholars, I think I may say that
there really is no trace whatever of any foreign influ-
ence in the language, the religion, or the ceremonial
of the ancient Vedic literature of India. As it stands
before us now, so it has grown up, protected by the
mountain ramparts in the North, the Indus and the
Desert in the West, the Indus or what was called
the sea in the South, and the Ganges in the East.
It presents us with a home-grown poetry, and a
holne-grown religion ;and history has preserved tc
us at least this one relic, in order to teach us what
the human mind can achieve if left to itself, sur-
rounded by a scenery and by conditions of life that
might have made man's life on earth a paradise, if
man did not possess the strange art of turning even
a paradise into a place of misery.
 ^\)t Ce00ons0ft()e beba*

Although there is hardly any

department of
learning which has not received new light and new
life from the ancient literature of India, yet nowhere

is the light that comes to us from India so important,

so novel, and so rich as in the study of religion and
mythology. It is to this subject therefore that I
mean to devote the remaining lectures of this course.
I do so, partly because I feel myself most at home in
that ancient world of Vedic literature in which the
germs of Aryan religion have to be studied, partly
because I believe that for a proper understanding of
the deepest convictions, or if you like, the strongest
prejudices of the modern Hindu, nothing is so useful
as a knowledge of the Veda. It is perfectly true that
nothing would give a falser impression of the actual
Brahmanical religion than the ancient Vedic litera-
ture, supposing we were to imagine that three
thousand years could have passed over India without
producing any change. Such a mistake would be
nearly as absurd as to deny any difference between
the Vedic Sanskrit and the spoken Bengali. ,But
no one will gain a scholarlike knowledge or a true
insight into the secret springs of Bengali who is ig-

norant of the grammar of Sanskrit ; and no one will

^ver understand the present religious, philosphical,
 1 53 IV//A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US 1
legal, and Hindus who is unable
social opinions of the
to trace them back to their true sources in the Veda.
I still remember how, many years ago, when I

began to publish for the first time the text and the
commentary of the Rig-veda, it 'was argued by a
certain, perhaps not quite disinterested party, that
the Veda was perfectly useless, that no Man in India,
however learned, could read and that it was of no
it,

use either for missionaries or for any one else who

wished to study and to influence the native mind.
It was said that we ought to study the later San-

skrit, the Laws of Manu, the epic poems, and, more

particulalarly, the Pura;^as. The Veda might do very

well for German students, but not for Englishmen.
There was no excuse for such ignorant assertions
even thirty years ago, for in these very books, in the
Laws of Manu, in the Mahabharata, and in the
Pura;^as, the Veda is everywhere proclaimed as the
highest authority in all matters of religion.* " A Brah-
man." says Manu, " unlearned in holy writ, is ex-
tinguished in an instant like dry grass on fire."
''
A twice-born man (that is a Brahama^^a a Kshatriya
anda Vaii-ya) not having studied the Veda, soon
falls, even when living, to the condition of a 5udra,
and his descendants after him."
How far this license of ignorant assertion may be
carried is shown by the same authorities who denied
the importance of the Veda for a historical study of
Indian thought, boldly charging those wily priests,
the Brahmans, with having withheld their sacred
literature from any but their own caste. Now so far
from witholding it, the Brahmans have always been
* Wilson, Lectures, p. 9,
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA, 153

Striving, and often striving in vain, to make the

study of their sacred literature obligatory on all

castes, except the and 5udras, the passages just

quoted from Manu show what penalties were threat-
ened, if children of the second and third castes, the
Kshatriyas and Vaii-yas, were not instructed in the
sacred literature of the Brahmans.
At present the Brahmans themselves have spoken,
and the reception they have accorded to ray edition
of the Rig-veda* and its native commentary, the zeal
with which they have themselves taken up the study
of -Vedic literature, and the earnestness with which
different sects are still discussing the proper use that
should be made of their ancient religious writings,
show abundantly that a Sanskrit scholar ignorant of,

or, I should rather say, determined to ignore the

Veda, would be not much better than a Hebrew
scholar ignorant of the Old Testament.
I shall now proceed
you some characteristic
to give
specimens of the religion and poetry of the Rig-
veda. They can only be few, and as there is
nothing hke system or unity of plan in that collec-
* As it has been doubted, and even denied, that the publication of
the Rig-veda and its commentary has had some important bear-
native
ing on the resuscitation of the religiouslife of India, I feel bound to

give at least one from the many testimonials which I have received
from India. It comes from the Adi Brahma Samaj, founded by Ram
Mohun Roy, and now represented by its three branches, the Adi
Brahma Samaj, the Brahma Samaj of India, and the Sadharano
Brahma Samaj. " The Committee of the Adi Brahma Samaj beg to
offer you their hearty congratulations on the completion of the gigan-
tic task which has occupied you for the last quarter of a century. By
publishing the Rig- Veda at a time when Vedic learning has by some
sad fatality become almost extinct in the land of its birth, you havt
conferred a boon upon us Hindus, f©r which we cannot but ]»e *t«r-
naliy gratȣul.''
154 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US "^

tion of 1017 hymns, which we call the Saz/^hita of

the Rig-veda, I cannot promise that they will give
you a complete panoramic view of that intellectual
world in which our Vedic ancestors passed their life
on earth.
I could not even answer the question, you were
if

to ask it, whether the religion of. the Veda was poly-
theistic, or monotheistic. Monotheistic, in the usual
sense of that word, it is decidedly not, though there
are hymns that assert the unity of the Divine as fear-
lessly as any passage of the Old Testament, or the
New Testament, or the Koran. Thus one poet says
(Rig-veda I. 164,46) :
" That which is ^;2^, sages name it
—
ways they call it Agni, Yama, Matarii-van."
in various
Another poet says " The wise poets represent by
:

their words Him who is one with beautiful wings,

in many ways,"*
And again we hear of a being called Hira;/ya-
garbha, the golden germ (whatever the original of
that name may have been), of whom the poet says :
f
" In the beginning there arose Hira/^yagarbha he ;

was the one born lord of aH this. He established

the earth and this sky. Who is the god to whom
we shall offer our sacrifice 1
" That Hira/^yagarbha,
the poet says, " is alone God above all gods ''
(ya//
deveshu adhi deva>^ eka/^ asit) an assertion of the —
unity of the Divine which could hardly be exceeded
in strength by any passage from the Old Testament.
But by the side of such passages, which are few
in number, there are thousands in which ever so
many divine beings are praised and prayed to. Even
their number is sometimes given as " thrice eleven " %
* Rig-veda X. 114. 5. f Rig-veda X. 121. % Muir, iv.9.
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. 155

or thirty-three, and one poet assigns eleven gods

to the sky, eleven to the earth, and eleven to the
waters,* the waters here intended being those of the
atmosphere and the clouds. These thirty-three gods
have even wives apportioned to them,f though few
of these only have as yet attained to the honor of
a name. J
These thirty-three gods, however, by no means
include all the Vedic gods, for such important deities
as Agni, the fire, Maruts or Storm-
Soma, the rain, the

gods, the Ai-vins, the gods of Morning and Evening,

the Waters, the Dawn, the Sun are mentioned sepa-
rately and there are not wanting passages in which
;

the poet isaway carried into exaggerations, till he

proclaims^ the number of his gods to be, not only
thirty-three, but three thousand three hundred and
thirty-nine. §
If therefore there must be a name for the religion
of the Rig-veda, polytheism would seem at first sight
the most appropriate. Polytheism, however, has as-
sumed with us a meaning which renders it totally
inapplicable to the Vedic religion.
Our ideas of polytheism being chiefly derived from
Greece and Rome, we understand by it a certain more
or less organized system of gods, different in power
and rank, and all subordinate to a supreme God, a

* Rig-veda I. 139, ii. t Rig- Veda III. 6, 9.

'
X The following names
Devapatnis or wives of the gods are
of
given in the Vaitana Sutra XV. 3 (ed. Garbe) Pr/thivi, the wife
:

of Agni, Ykk of Vata, Sena of Indra, Dhena of Br/haspati, Pathya

of Pushan, G^yatri of Vasu, Trish/ubh of Rudra, 6^agati of Aditya,
Anush^ubh of Mitra, Vira^ of Varu«a, Pankti of Vishnu, Diksha of
Soma.
§ Rig-veda III. 9, 9.
. i%6 W-HA T CAjV INDIA TEACH US ?
Zeus of Jupiter. The Vedic polytheism differs from
the Greek and Roman polytheism, and, I may add,
likewise from the polytheism of the Ural-Altaic, the
Polynesian, the American, and most of the African
races, in the same manner as a confederacy of village
communities differs from a monarchy. There are
traces of an earlier stage of village-community life
to be discovered in the later republican and monar-
chical constitutions,and in the same manner nothing
can be clearer, particularly in Greece, than that the
monarchy Zeus was preceded by what may be
of
called the septarchy of several of the great gods of
Greece. The same remark applies to the mythology
of the Teutonic nations also.* In the Veda, however,
the gods worshipped as supreme by each sept stand
still side by side. No one is first always, no one is
last always. Even gods of a decidedly inferior and
limited character assume occasionally in the eyes
of a devoted poet a supreme place above all other
gods.f It was necessary, therefore, for the purpose
of accurate reasoning to have a name, different from
polytheism^ to signify this worship of single gods, each
occupying for a time a supreme position, and I pro-

* Grimm showed that Th6rr is sometimes the supreme god, while

at other times he is the son of Odimi. This, as Professor Zimmer
tiuly remarks, need not be regarded as the result of a revolution, or
even of gradual decay, as in the case of Dyaus and Tyr, but simply as
inherent in the character of a nascent polytheism. See Zeitschrift
fiir D. A., vol. xii. p. 174.
Among not yet civilized races prayers are addressed to a god
t
'*

with a special object, and to that god who is supposed to be most

powerful in a special domain. He becomes for tte moment the
highest god to whom all others must give place. He may be in*
invoked as the highest and the only god, without any slight liting
intended f«r the other gods." Zimmer, 1. c, p. 175.
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. 157

posed for it the name of Kathenotheism, that is a

worship of one god after another, or of Henotkeism,
the worship of single gods. This shorter name of
Henotheism has found more general acceptance, as
conveying more definitely the opposition between
Monotheism, the worship of one only God, and He^to-
theism, the worship of single gods and, if but ;

properly defined, it- will answer its purpose very

well. However, in researches of this kind we can^
not be too much on our guard against technical
terms. Th'ey are inevitable, I know; but they are
almost always misleading. There is, for instance,
a hymn addressed to the Indus and the rivers that
fall into it, hope to read you a transla-
of which I

tion, because it determines very accurately the geo-

graphical scene on which the poets of the Veda passed
their life. Now native scholars call these rivers d e-
vatas European translators too speak
or deities, and
ofthem as gods and goddesses. But in the language
used by the poets with regard to the Indus and the
other rivers, there is nothing to justify us in saying
that he considered these rivers as gods ^.m^ goddesses,
unless we mean by gods and goddesses something very
differentfrom what the Greeks called River-gods and
River-goddesses, Nymphs, Najades, or even Muses.
And what applies to these rivers, applies more or
less to all the objects ofVedic worship. They all are
still oscillating between what is seen by the senses,

what is created by fancy, and what is postulated by the

understanding; they are things, persons, causes, ac-
cording to the varying disposition of the poets and :

if we them gods or goddesses, we must remember

call

the remark of an ancient native theologian^ who re^

158 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

minds us that by de vatd or deity he means no more

than the object celebrated in a hymn, while i?/shi or
seer means no more than the subject or the author
of a hymn.
It is difficult gods cele-
to treat of the so-called
brated in the Veda according any system, for the
to
simple reason that the concepts of these gods and the
hymns addressed to them sprang up spontaneously
and without any pre-established plan. It is best
perhaps for our purpose to follow an ancient Brah-
manical writer, who is supposed to have lived about
400 B.C. He tells us of the students of the Veda, before
his time, who admitted three deities only, viz. Agni
or whose place is on the earth V a y u or I n d r a,
fire, ;

the wind and the god of the thunderstorm, v.-hose

place is in the air and S u r y a, the sun, whose place
;

is in the sky. These deities, they maintained, re-

ceived severally many appellations, in consequence
of their greatness, or of the diversity of their functions,
just as a priest, according to the functions which he
performs at various sacriiices, receives various names.
This is one view of the Vedic gods, and though too
narrow, it cannot be denied that there is some truth
in it. A
very useful division of the Vedic gods
might be made, and has been made by Yaska, into
and celestial, and if the old Hindu
terrestrial^ aerial^

theologians meant no more than that all the mani-

festations of divine power in nature might be traced
back to three centres of force, one in the sky, one in
the air, and one on the earth, he deserves great credit
for his sagacity.
But he himself perceived evidently that this gene-
ralisation was not quite applicable to all the gods, and
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA, i^q

he goes on to say, " Or, it may gods are all

be, these
distinct beings, for the praises addressed to them are
distinct, and their appellations also." This is quite
right. It is the very object of most of these divine

names to impart distinct individuality of the maini-

festations of the powers of nature and though the
;

philosopher or the inspired poet might perceive that

these numerous names were but names, while that
which was named was one and one only, this was
certainly not the idea of most of the Vedic i?/shis
themselves, still less of the people who listened to
their songs at fairs and festivals. It is the pecuhar
character of that phase of religious thought which
we have to study in the Veda, that in it the Divine
is conceived and represented as manifold, and that
many functions are shared in common by various
gods, no attempt having yet been made at organising
the whole body of the gods, sharply separating one
,

from the other, and subordinating all of them to

several or, in the end, to one supreme head.
Availing ourselves of the division of the Vedic
gods into terrestrial, aerial, and celestial, as proposed
by some of the earliest Indian theolgians, we should
have to begin with the gods connected with the earth.
Before we examine them, however, we have first
to consider one of the earliest objects of worship and
adoration, namely Earth mid Heaven^ or Heaven
and Earth, conceived as a divine couple. Not only
in India, but among many other nations, both
savage, half-savage, or civilised, we meet with
Heaven and Earth as one of the earliest objects,
pondered on, transfigured, and animated by the early
poets and more or less clearly conceived by early
1 6o ^^A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
philosophers. It is surprising that it should be so,

for the conception of the Earth as an independent

being, and of Heaven as an independent being, and
then of both together as a divine couple embracing
the whole universe, requires a considerable effort of
abstraction, far more than the concepts of other
divine powers, such as the Fire, the Rain, the Light-
ning, or the Sun.
Still so it is, and as it may help us to under-
stand the ideas about Heaven and Earth, as we find
them in the Veda, and showusatthe same time the
strong contrast between the mythology of the Aryans
and that of real savages (a contrast of great im-
portance, though I admit very difficult to explain).

I shall read you from a book,

first some extracts
published by a friend of mine, the Rev. William
Wyatt Gill, for many years an active and most
successful missionary in Mangaia, one of those Poly-
nesian islands, that form a girdle round one quarter
of our globe,* and all share in the same language,
the same religion, the same mythology, and the same
customs. The book is called " Myths and Songs
from the South Pacific,! and it is full of interest to
the student of mythology and religion.
The story, as told him by the natives of Mangaia,
runs as follows.
* Es handelt sich hier nicht um amerikanische oder afn'kanische
'*

Zersplitterung, sondern eine iiberraschende Gleichartigkeit dehnt sich

durch die Weite und Breite des Stillen Oceans, und wenn wir Oceanien
in der vollenAuffassung nehmen mit Einschluss Mikround, Mela-nes-
iens (bis Malaya^ selbst weiter. Es lasst sich sagen, dass ein einheit-
licher Gedankenbau, in etwa 120 Langen und 70 Breitegraden, ein
Viertel unsers Erdglobus iiberwblbt." Bastian, Die Heilige Sage der
Polynesier, p. 57.
t Henry S. King & Co., London, 1S76, % P. 58.
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. i6i

The sky is built of solid blue. At one time

it almost touched the earth ; resting upon the stout
broad leaves of the teve (which attains the height of
about six feet) and the delicate indigenous arrow-root
(whose slender stem rarely exceeds three feet)
In this narrow space between earth and sky the inha-
bitants of this world were pent up. Ru, whose usual
residence was in Avaiki, or the shades, had come up
for a time to this world of ours. Pitying the wretched
confined residence of the inhabitants, he employed
himself in endeavoring to raise the sky a little. For
this purpose he cut a number of strong stakes of dif-
ferent kinds of trees, and firmly planted them in the
ground at Rangimotia, the centre of the island, and
with him the centre of the world.This was a con-
siderable improvement, as mortals were thereby
enabled to stand erect and to walk about without
inconvenience. Hence Ru was named " The sky-sup-
porter." Wherefore Teka sings (1794):

" Force up the sky, O Ru,

And let the space be clear !
"

" One day when the old man was surveying his
work, his graceless son Maui contemptuously asked
him what he was doing there. Ru replied, " Who
told youngsters to talk t Take care of yourself, or I
will hurl you out of existence."
* "Do it, then," shouted Maui.
" Ru was as good as his word, and forthwith seized
Maui, who was small of stature, and threw him to a
great height. In falling Maui assumed the form of
a bird, and lightly touched the ground, perfectly un-
harmed. Mdui, now thirsting for revenge, in a
1 6 ^//-^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH US
moment resumed his natm-al form, but exaggerated to
gigantic proportions, and ran to his father, saying :

" Ru, who supportest the many heavens,

"
The third, even to the highest, ascend I

Inserting his head between the old man's legs, he

exerted all his prodigious strength, and hurled poor
Ru, sky and tremendous height, so high,
all, to a —
indeed, that the blue sky could never get back again.
Unluckily, however, for the sky-supporting Ru, his
head and shoulders got entangled among the stars.
He struggled hard, but fruitlessly, to extricate him-
self. Maui walked off well pleased with having raised
the sky to its present height, but left half his father's

body and both his legs ingloriously suspended between

heaven and earth. Thus perished Ru. His body
rotted away, and his bones came tumbling down from_
time to time, and were shivered on the earth into
countless fragments. These shivered bones of Ru
are scattered over ever hill and valley of Mangaia, to
the very edge of the sea."
What the natives call " the bones of Ru " (t e i vi o
Ru) are pieces of pumice-stone.
Now let us consider, first of all, whether this story,
which, with slight variations is told all over the
Polynesian islands,* is pure non-sense, or whether
there was originally some sense in it. My conviction
is that non-sense is everywhere the child of sense,
only that unfortunately many children, like that
youngster Maui, consider themselves much wiser than
their fathers, and occasionally succeed in hurling them
out of existence.
* There is a second version of the story even in the small island
of Mangaia; see Myths and Songs, p. 71.
 THE, LESSONS OF THE VEDA. 16^

It is a peculiarity of many of the ancient myths

that they represent events which happen every day,
or every year, as having happened once upon a time.*
The daily battle between day and night, the yearly
battle between winter and spring, are represented
almost like historical events, and some of the episodes
and touches belonging originally to these constant
battles of nature, have certainly been transferred
into and mixed up with battles that took place at
^ certain time, such as, for instance, the siege of
Troy. When historical recollections failed, legendary
accounts of the between Night
ancient battles
and Morning, Winter and Spring, were always at
hand and, as in modern times we constantly hear
;

*'
good stories," which we have known from our child-
hood, told again and again of any man whom they
seem to fit, in the same manner, in ancient times, any
act of prowess, or daring, or mischief, originally told
of the sun, " the orient
Conqueror of gloomy Night,"
was readily transferred to and believed of any local
hero who might seem to be a second Jupiter, or Mars,
or Hercules.
I have little doubt therefore that as the accounts
of a deluge, for instance, which we find almost every-
where, are originally recollections of the annual tor-
rents of rain or snow that covered the little worlds
within the ken of the ancient village-bards, this
tearing asunder of heaven and earth too was ori-
ginally no more than a description of what might
be seen every morning. During a dark night the
sky seemed to cover the earth the two seemed to ;

be one, and could not be distinguished one from the

t See before, p, 138.
1 64 ^^A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
other. Then came the Dawn, which with its bright

rays lifted the covering of the dark night to a certain

point, till at last Maui appeared, small in stature,
a mere child, that is, the sun of the morning thrown —
up suddenly, as it were, when his first rays shot
through the sky from beneath the horizon, then
falling back to the earth, like a bird, and rising in
gigantic form on the morning sky. The dawn now
was hurled av/ay, and the sky was seen lifted high
above the earth and Maui, the sun, marched on
;

well pleased with having raised the sky to its present

height.
Why pumice-stone should be called the bones of
Ru, we cannot tell, without knowing a great deal more
of the language of Mangaia than we do at present.
It is most likely an independent saying, and was
afterwards united with the story of Ru and Maui.
Now I must quote at least a few extracts from a
Maori legend as written down by Judge Manning * :

" This is the Genesis of the New Zealanders

" The Heavens which are above us, and the Earth

which lies beneath us, are the progenitors of men,

and the origin of all things.
" Formerly the Heaven lay upon the Earth, and all

was darkness. ...

And the children of Heaven and Earth sought to
''

discover the difference between light and darkness,

between day and night. . . .

" So the sons of Rangi (Heaven) and of Papa

(Earth) consulted together, and said Let us seek :

'

means whereby to destroy Heaven and Earth, or to

separate them from each other."
* Bastian, Heilige Sage der Polynesier, p. 36.
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. 165

" Then Tumatauenga (the God of War), Let

said *

us destroy them both.'

" Then said Tane-Mahuta (the Forest God), Not '

so ; let them be separated. Let one of them go up-

wards and become a stranger to us let the other ;

remain below and be a parent for us.'

" Then four of the gods tried to Separate Heaven

and Earth, but did not succeed, while the fifth, Tan e,
succeeded.
''
After Heaven- and Earth had been separated, great
storms arose, or, as the poet expresses it, one of their
god of the winds, tried to
sons, Tawhiri-Matea, the
revenge the outrage committed on his parents by
his brothers. Then follow dismal dusky days, and
dripping chilly skies, and arid scorching blasts. AH
the gods fight, till at last Tu only remains, the god
of war, who had devoured all his brothers, except
the Storm. More fights follow, which the greater
in
part of the earth was overwhelmed by the waters,
and but a small portion remained dry. After that,
light continued to increase, and as the light increased,
so also the people who had been hidden between
Heaven and Earth increased. And so generation
. . .

was added to generation down to the time of Maui-

Potiki, he who brought death into the world.
" Now in these latter days Heaven remains far re-

moved from his wife, the Earth but the love of the;

wife rises upward in sighs towards her husband. These

are the mists which fly upwards from the mountain-
tops and the tears of Heaven fall downwards on his
;

"
wife behold the dew-drops
; !

So far the Maori Genesis.

Let us now return to the Veda, and compare these
1 66 ^^-4 T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
crude and somewhat grotesque legends with the
language of the ancient Aryan poets. In the hymns
of theRig-veda the separating and keeping apart of
Heaven and Earth is several times alluded to, and
here too it is represented as the work of the most
valiant gods. In I. 6"/^ 3 it is Agni, fire, who holds
the earth and supports the heaven ; in-X. 89, 4 it is

Indra who keeps them apart ; in IX. loi, 15 Soma is

celebrated for thesame deed, and in III. 31, 12 other

gods too share the same honor.*
In the Aitareya Brahma;/a read t " These two we :

worlds (Heaven and Earth) were once joined together.

They went asunder. Then it did not rain, nor did
the sun shine. And the five tribes did not agree
with one another. The gods then brought the two
(Heaven and Earth) together, and when they came
together, they performed a wedding of the gods."
Here we have in a shorter form the same funda-
mental ideas first, that formerly Heaven and Earth
;

were together that afterwards they were separated

; ;

that when they were thus separated there was war

throughout nature, and neither rain nor sunshine :

that, lastly. Heaven and Earth were conciliated, and

that then a great wedding took place.
Now I need hardly remind those who are acquainted
with Greek and Roman literature, how familiar these
and similar conceptions about a marriage between
Heaven and Earth were in Greece and Italy. They
seem to possess there a more special reference to the
annual reconciliation between Heaven and Earth,
which takes place in spring, and to their former
* Bergaigne, La Religion V^dique, p. 240.
^ Ait. Br. IV. 27 Muir,
; iv, p. 23.
 tBE LESSONS Op' THE VEDA. 167

estrangement during winter. But the first cosmo-

logical separation of the two always points to the
want of and the impossibility of distinction
light
during the night, and the gradual lifting up of the
blue ^y through the rising of the sun.*
In the Homeric hymns t the Earth is addressed as
" Mother of Gods, the wife of the starry Heaven." %

and the Heaven or ^Ether is* often called the father.

Their marriage too is described, as, for instance, by
Euripides, when he says :

" There is the mighty Earth, Jove's iEther :

He (the ^ther) is the creator of men and gods ;

The earth receiving the moist drops of rain.

Bears mortals.
Bears food, and the tribes of animals.
Hence she is not unjustly regarded
As the mother of all."§

And what is more curious still is that we have

evidence that Euripides received this doctrine from
his teacher, the philosopher Anaxagoras. For Dio-
nysius of Halicarnassus||, tells us that Euripides
frequented the lectures of Anaxagoras. Now, it was
the theory of that philosopher that originally all
things were in all things, but that afterwards they be-
come separated. Euripides later in life associated with
* See Muir, iv. p. 24. t Homer, Hymn xxx. 17.
5 ICalpe Bewv jxrjrrjp, aXolC Ovpavov ddtepoevTo'o.
§ Euripides, Dhrysippus, 6 (edit. Didot, p. 824) :

Faia Hcd ^idi aiB7}p,

iJ.e'yi6r7]

6 jukv (XvSpGOTtcov Kai QecSv yevEroDp^

7)
5' vypofSoXoVi drayova'i voriov^
Ttapads^ajuevTj tihtei Bvarov'sy
riKTEi dk ftopdVy (pvA-d rs Brip(2v,
oQev ovk ddixoo'^
/if/rrip TcdvTGDv revojutdrat.
t Dionysius Halic. vol. v. p. 355 Muir, ; v. p. 27.
 1 68 WHA T CAN INDIA TEA CB t/S f

Sokrates, and became doubtful regarding that theory^

He accordingly propounds the ancient doctrine by
the mouth of another, namely Melanippe, who says
This saying (myth) is not mine, but came from
*'

my mother, that formerly Heaven and Earth were

one shape but when they were separated from each
; .

other they gave birth and brought all things into the
light, trees, birds, beas*ts, and the fishes whom the
sea feeds, and the race of mortals."
Thus we have met with the same idea of the ori-
ginal union, of a separation, and of a subsequent
re-union of Heaven and Earth in Greece, in India,
and in the Polynesian islands.
Let us now see how the poets of the Veda address
these two beings, Heaven and Earth.
They mostly addressed in the dual, as two
are
beings forming but one concept. We meet, however,
with verses which are addressed to the Earth by
herself, and which speak of her as " kind, without
thorns, and pleasant to dwell on,"* while there are clear
traces in some of the hymns that at one time Dyaus,
the sky, was the supreme When invoked
deity. f
together they are called Dyavapr/thivyau, from
dyu, the sky, and prithivi, the broad earth.
If we examine their epithets, we find that many
ofthem reflect simply the physical aspect of Heaven
and Earth. Thus they are called uru, wide, uru-
vysy^as, widely expanded, dure-ante, with limits
far apart, gabhira, deep, ghntavat, giving fat,

madhudugha, yielding honey or dew, payasvat,

full of milk, bhiiri-retas, rich in seed.
* Rig-veda. P. 22, 15.
* Sec Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 468
 THE LESSONS OF THE VED4. 169

Another class of epithets represents them already

as endowed with certain human and superhuman
qualities, such as a s a^>^ a t, never tiring a^ a r a, not
decaying, which brings us very near to immortal
adr u h , not injuring, or not deceiving, pra/^etas,
provident, and then pit a-m a t a, father and mother,
devaputra, having the gods for their sons, ? i

t a v r / d h and ri\.z.N2i\., protectors of the ^^'ta, of

what is right, guardians of eternal laws.

Here you see what is so interesting in the Veda,
the gradual advance from the material to the spi-
ritual, from the sensuous to the supersensuous, from

the human to the superhuman and the divine.

Heaven and Earth were seen, and, according to our
notions, they might simply be classed as visible and
finite beings. But the ancient poets were more honest
to themselves. They could see Heaven and Earth, but
they never saw them in their entirety. They felt
that there was something beyond the purely finite
aspect of these beings, and therefore they thought of
them, not as they would think of a stone, or a tree,
or a dog, but as something not-finite, not altogether
visible or knowable, yet as something important to
themselves, powerful,- strong to bless, but also strong
to hurt. Whatever was between Heaven and Earth
seemed to be theirs, their property, their realm, their
dominion. They held and embraced all ; they seemed
to have produced all. The Devas or bright beings,
the sun, the dawn, the fire, the wind, the rain, were
all and were called therefore the offspring of
theirs,
Heaven and earth. Thus Heaven and Earth became
the Universal Father and Mother.
Then we ask at once, '^
Were then these Heaven
i^o WHA T CAN INDIA TEACH US f
and Earth gods ? But gods in what sense ? In our
sense of God ? Why, in our sense, God is altogether
incapable of a plural. Then in the Greek sense of
the word No, certainly not, for what the Greeks
?

called gods was the result of an intellectual growth

totally independent of the Veda or of India. We
must never forget that what we call gods in ancient
mythologies are not substantial, living, individual
beings, of whom we can predicate this .or that.
Deva, which we translate by god, is nothing but an
adjective, expressive of a quality shared by heaven
and earth, by the sun and the stars and the dawn
and the sea, namely brightness ; and the idea of god,
at that early time, contains neither more nor less
than what is shared in common by all these bright
beings. That •is to say, the idea of god is not an
idea ready-made, which could be applied in its abstract
purity heaven and earth and other such like
to
beings but it is an idea, growing out of the con-
;

cepts of heaven and earth and of the other bright

beings, slowly separating itself from them, but never
containing more than what was contained, though
confusedly, in the objects to which it was successively
applied.
Nor must it be supposed that heaven and earth,
having once been raised to the rank of undecaying
or immortal beings, of divine parents, of guardians
of the laws, were thus permanently settled in the
religious consciousness of the people. Far from it.
When th« ideas of other gods, and of more active
and more distinctly personal gods had been elabo-
rated, the Vedie i?ishis asked without hesitation,
Who then has made heaven and earth } not exactly
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA, 171

Heaven and Earth, as conceived before, but heaven

and earth as seen every day, as a part of what began
to be called Nature or the Universe.
Thus one poet says * :

" He was indeed among the gods the cleverest

workman who produced the two brilliant ones

(heaven and earth), that gladden all things, he who
measured out the two bright ones (heaven and earth)
by his wisdom, and established them on everlasting
supports."
And again :f " He was a good workman who pro-
duced heaven and earth the his ; wise, who by
might brought together these two (heaven and earth),
the wide, the deep, the well-fashioned in the bottom-
less space."
Very soon this great work of making heaven and
earth was ascribed, like other mighty works, to the
mightiest of their gods, to Indra. At first we read
that Indra, originally only a kind of yupiter pluvinSy
or god of rain, stretched out heaven and earth, like
a hide % that he held them in his hand, § that he
;

upholds heaven and earth, and that he grants heaven ||

and earth to But very soon Indra

his worshippers. \
is praised for having made. Heaven and Earth ** and ;

then, when the poet remembers that Heaven and

Earth had been praised elsewhere as the parents
of the gods, and more especially as the parents of
Indra, he does not hesita;te for a moment, but §ays ft :

'*
What poets living before us have reached the end
of all thy greatness ? for thoii hast indeed begotten

*Rig-Veda I. 160, 4.' t Rig-Veda vi. 56, 3. % L. e. VIII. 6, 5,

§L. c. 111.30,5. ilL. 0.111,32,8.
IT L. c. III. 34, 8. ** L. c. VIII. 36, 4. tt L. c. X. 54 3.
1 72 ^//^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f

thy father and thy mother together ^ from thy own

!
body
That is a strong measure, and a god who once
could do that, was no doubt capable of anything
afterwards. The same idea, namely that Indra is
greater than heaven and earth, is expressed in a less
outrageous way by another poet, who says f that
Indra is greater than heaven and earth, and that
both together are only a half of Indra. Or again } :

"The Dyaus bowed before Indra, before Indra

divine
the great Earth bowed with her wide spaces.' " At

the birth of thy splendor Dyaus trembled, the Earth

trembled for fear of thy anger." §
Thus, from one point of view, Heaven and Earth
were the greatest gods, they were the parents of
everything, and therefore of the gods also, such as
Ind and others.
" But, from another point of view, every god that

was considered as supreme at one time or other,

must necessarily have made heaven and earth, must
at all events be greater than heaven and earth, and
thus the child became greateV than the father, aye,
became the father of his father. Indra was not
the only god that created heaven and earth. In one
hymn ||
that creation is ascribed to Soma and Pushan,
by no means very prominent characters in another ^ ;

to Hira/^yagarbha (the golden germ) in another ;

again to a god who is simply called Dhatn, the

Creator, ** or Fijvakarman,tt the maker of all things.
Other gods, such as Mitra and Savitr^, names of
* Cf. IV. 17, 4, where Dyaus is the father of Indra ; see however
Muir iv. 31, note. t Rig-veda VI. 30, i.

X Rig-veda I. 131, i. § L. e. IV. 17, 2. || L. c. II, 4©? '•

IT L. c. X. 131, 9. ** L. c. X. 190, 3. tt L. c. X. 81, 2.

 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. t*l%

the sun, are praised for upholding Heaven and Earth,

and the same task is sometimes performed by the
old god Varu;/a * also.^
What I wish you to observe in all this is the
perfect freedom with which these so-called gods or
Devas are handled, and particularly the ease and
naturalness with which now the one, now the other
emerges as supreme out of this chaotic theogony.
This is the peculiar character of the ancient Vedic
religion, totally different both from the Polytheism
and from the Monotheism as we see it in the Greek
and the Jewish religions and if the Veda had taught
;

us nothing else but this honotheistic phase, which

must everywhere have preceded more highly the
organized phase of Polytheism which we see in
Greece, in Rome, and elsewhere, the study of the
Veda would not have been in vain.
It may be quite true that the poetry of the Veda
is neither beautiful, in our sense of the word, nor
very profound ; but it is instructive. When we see
those two giant spectres of Heaven and Earth on
the background of the Vedic religion, exerting their
influence for a time, and then vanishing before the
light of younger and more active gods, we learn a
lesson which it is well to learn, and which we can
—
hardly learn anywhere else the lesson how gods were
made and unmade-^\iov^ the Beyond or the Infinite
was named by different names in order to bring it
near to the mind of man, to make it for a time com-
prehensible, until, when name after name had proved
of no avail, a nameless God was felt to answer best
the restless cravings of the human heart.
*L. c. VI. 70, i»
1 74
WNA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
I shall next translate to you the hymn to which 1

referred before as addressed to the Rivers. If the

Rivers are to be called deities at all, they belong to

the class of terrestrial deities. But the reason why
I single out this hymn is not so much because it

throws new light on the theogonic process, but

because it may help to impart some reality to the
vague conceptions which we form to ourselves of the
ancient Vedic poets and their surroundings. The
rivers invoked are, as we shall see, the real rivers of
the Punjab, and the poem shows a much wider geo-
graphical-horizon than we should expect from a mere
village bard.*
1. " Let the poet declare, O Waters, your exceeding
greatness, here in the seat ofVivasvat.t By seven
and seven they have come forth in three courses, but
the Sindhu (the Indus) exceeds all the other wander-
ing rivers by her strength.
2. "Varu^^a dug out paths for thee to walk on,
when thou rannest to the race. $ Thou proceedest
*Rig-veda X. 75. See Hibbert Lectures, Lect. iv.

t Vivasvat is a name of the sun, and the seat or home

of Vivasvat
can hardly be anything but the earth, as the home of the sun, or, in a
more where a sacrifice is offered.
special sense, the place
vagan abhi adrava-^ tvam by *' when
X I formerly translated yat
thou rannest for the prizes." Grassman had translated similarly.
" When thou, O Sindhu, rannest to the prize of the battle," while Lud-
wig wrote, "When thou, O Sindhu, wast flowing on to greater powers."
Va^a, cornected with vegeo, vigeo, vigil, wacker (see Curtius, Grund-
ziige, No. i5Q),is one of the many difficult words in the Veda the

general meaning of which maybe guessed, but in many places cannot

yet be determined with certainty. Va^a occurs very frequently, both
in the singular and the plural, and some of its meanings are clear
enough. The Petersburg Dictionary gives the following list of them
—swiftness, race, prize of race, gain, treasure, race-horse, etc. Here
we perceive at once the difiiculty of tracing all these meanings back
 THE LESSONS OF THk VEDA, IJ3

6n a precipitous ridge of the earth, when thou art

lord in the van of all the moving streams.
3. " The sound rises up to heaven above the earth ;

she stirs up with splendor her endless power.* As

from a cloud, the showers thunder forth, when the
Sindhu comes roaring like a bull.

4. " To thee, O Sindhu, they (the other rivers) come

as lowing mother-cows (run) to their young with their
milk.f Like a king in battle thou leadest the two
wings, when thou reachest the front of these down-
rushing rivers,
5. " Accept, O Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna (Jumna),
Sarasvati (Sursuti), Sutudri (Sutlej), Parush;/i (Ira-
to a common source, though it might be possible to begin with the
meanings of strength, strife, contest, race, whether friendly or warlike,
then to proceed to what is won in a race or in war, viz. booty, trea-
sure, and lastly to take vaga/z in a more general sense of acquisitions,
goods, even goods bestowed as gifts. We have a similar transition of
meaning in the Greek aQAo?, contest for a prize, and aOXov, the
prize of contest, reward, gift, while in the plural ra a6Aa stands again
for contest, or even the place of combat. The Vedic va^mbhara
may in fact be rendered bya6A.o<pd/3o5va^asati by dOXodvrrj.
The transition from fight to prize is seen in passages such as
Rig-veda VI. 45, 12, va^an indra jravayyan tvaya ^eshma hilam
dhdnam, " May we with thev help, O Indra, win the glorious fights
the offered prize" (cf, dBXoBsvrj's).
Rig-veda VIII. 19. 18, te it va^ebhi>^ ^"gyu/^ mahat dhdnam, " They
won great wealth by battles."
What we want for a proper understanding of our verse, are passages
where we have, as here, a movement towards va^j in the plural. Such
passages are few ; for instance; X. 53. 8, atra^ahama ye ajan ajeva/4
jivanvayam ut tarema abhi va^in, " Let us leave here those who
were unlucky (the dead), and let us get up to lucky toils." No more
probably meant here when the Sindhu is said to run towards her
v%^s, that is her struggles, her fights, her race across the mountains
with the other rivers,
* On .fushma, strength, see Rig-veda, translation, vol. i, p. 105.
We find jubhram j-ushman II. 1 1* 4 ; and iyati with jushman IV. 17, I2»

t See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v^ p. 344.

t ^6 ^^^ T CAN INDIA Tea cii us f
vati, Ravi,) my praise !
^ With the Asikni (Akesines)
listen, O Marudv;/dha, t and with the Vitasta (Hy-

daspes, Behat) O Ar^ikiaya,^ listen with the Sus-

;

homa§.
6. " First thou goest united with the Tnsh/ama
on thy journey, with the Susartu, the Rasa (Ra;;/ha,
—
Araxes ? ), and the 5vett, O Sindhn, with the Kubha
||

(Kophen, Cabul river) to the Gomati (G-omal), with

the Mehatnu to the Krumu (Kurum) — with whom
thou proceedest together.
7. " Sparkling, bright, with mighty splendor she
carries the water across the plains — the unconquered
Sindhu, the quickest of the quick, like a beautiful
—
mare a sight to see.
8. " Rich in chariots, in garments, in
horses, in
gold, in booty,^ in wool, ** and in straw,f f the Sindhu,

* " O
Marudvr/dho with Asikni, Vitasto O Ar^ikiyo, listen with;

the Sushomo," Ludwig, " Asikni and Vitasto and MarudvWdha,

with the Sushomo, hear us, O Ar^ikiyo," Grasmann.
^ t Marudvr/dho, a general name for a river. According to Roth
the combined course of the Akesines and Hydaspes, before the junc-
tion with the Hydraotes according to Ludwig the river after the
•

junction with Hydraotes. Zimmer (Altindisches Leben, p. 12) adopts

Roth's Kiepert in his maps follow's Ludwig's opinion.
X According to Y^ska the Ar^kiy^ is the Vivien de Saint-Martain
takes it for the country watered by the Suwan, the Soanos of Megas-
thenes.
§ Accordng to Yaska the Sushom^, is the Indus. Vivien de Saint-
Martin identifies it with the Suwan. Zimmer (1. c. p. 14) points out
that in Arrian, Indica, iv. 12, there is a various reading Soamos for
Soanos.
Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i, p. 157,
II

H Va^inivati is by no means an easy word. Hence all translators

vary, and none settles the meaning. Muir translates, " yielding
nutriment;" Zimmer, "having plenty of quick horses ;'* Ludwig, "like a
strong mare.'' Va^n,no doubt, means a strong horse, a racer, butva^*
ni never occurs in the Rig-veda in the sense of a mare, and the text is
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA, 177

handsome and young, clothes herself in sweet

flowers.*
9. " The Sindhu has yoked her easy chariot with

not va^inivat but va^nivati. If va^ni meant mare, we might translate

rich in mares, but that would be a mere repetition after svajva, pos-
sessed of good hcrses. Va^'nivati is chiefly applied to Ushas, Sarasvati,
and he-re to the river Sindhu. It is joined with va^ebhi/z, Rig-veda I. 3.

10, which if vao-ini meant mare, would mean *'

rich in mares through
horses." We read, Rig-veda I. 48, 16, sam (na/z mimikshva)
also
va^ai/^ va^nivati, which we can hardly translate by "give us horses, thou
who art possessed of mares " nor, Rig-veda I. 92, 15, yiikshva hi
;

va^inivati aj-van, " harness the horses , thou who art rich in mares."
In most of the passages where va§inivati occurs, the goddess thus
addressed is represented as rich, and asked to bestow wealth, and I
should therefore prefer to take va^ni, as a collective abstract noun,
like tretini, in the sense of wealth, originally booty, and to translate
vaoinivati simply by rich, a meaning well adapted to every passage
where the word occurs.
\ Ur;zavati, rich in wool, probably refers to the flocks of sheep for
which the northwest of India was famous. See Rig-veda I. 126, 7.
** Silamavati does not occur again in the Rig-veda. Muir translates,
" rich in plants " Zimmer, " rich in water " Ludwig takes it as a pro-
;
;

per name. Saya;za states that silama is a plant which is made into
ropes. That the meaning of silamavati was forgotten at an early
time we see by the Atharva-veda III. 12. 2, substituting snnr/tavati
for silamavati, as preserved in the 6'ankhS,yana Gr/hyasutras, 3, 3,
I think silama means straw, from whatever plant it may be taken, and
this would be equally applicable to a j-ala, a house, a suth;za, a post and
to the river Indus. It may have been, as Ludwig conjectures, an old

.ocal name, and in that case it may possibly account for the na^e
given in later times to the Suleiman range.
* Madhuvr/dh is likewise a word which does not occur again in
the Rig-veda. Saya^za explains it by nirguw^i and similar plants?
but it is doubtful what plant is meant. Guwafa is the name of a
grass, madhuvrzdh therefore may have been a plant such as sugar-
cane, that yielded a sweet juice, the Upper Indus being famous for
sugar-cane; see Hiouen-thsang, II, p. 105. I take adhivaste with
Roth in the sense '* she dresses herself," as we might say " the river is
dressed in heather.'* Muir translates, " she traverses a land yielding
;
"
sweetness " Zimmer, she clothes herself in Madhuv^Mh ; " Ludwig,
"the Silamavati throws herself into the increaser of the honey-sweet
 178 IVHAl CAN INDIA TEACH US ?
horses , may she conquer prizes for us in the race.
The greatness of her chariot is praised as truly
great —that chariot which is irresistible, which has
its own and abundant strength."*
glory,
This hymn does not sound perhaps very poetical,
m our sense of the word yet if you will try to realise
;

the thoughts of the poet who composed it, you will

perceive that it is not without some bold and power-
ful conceptions.

Take the modern peasants, living in their villages

by the side of the Thames, and you must admit that
he would be a remarkable man who could bring him-
self to look on the Thames as a kind of general,
riding at the head of many English rivers, and lead-
ing them on to a race or a battle. Yet it is easier
to travel in England, and to gain a commanding view
of the river-system of the country, than it was three
thousand years ago to travel over India, even over
that part of India which the poet of our hymn com-
mands. He takes in at one swoop three great river-
systems, or, as he calls them, three great armies of
rivers — those flowing from the North- West into the
Indus, those joining from the North-East, and, in
it

the distance, the Granges and the Jumnah with their

tributaries. Look on the map and you will see how
well these three armies are determined but our ;

—
poet had no map he had nothing but high moun-
tains and sharp eyes to carry out his trigonometrical
survey. Now I call a man, who for the first time
dew." All this shows how little progress can be made in Vedic
scholarship by merely translating either words or verses, without
giving at the sama time a full justifieation ®f the meaning assigned t«
every single word.
* See Petersburg Dictionary, s. v. virapjin.
 THE LESSONS CF THE VEDA. 1 79

could see those three marching armies of rivers, a

poet.
The next thing that strikes one in that hymn
if hymn we must call it — is the fact that all these
rivers, large have their own proper names.
and small,
That shows a considerable advance in civilised life,
and it proves no small degree of coherence, or what
the French between the tribes who had
call solidarity,

taken possession of Northren India. Most settlers

call the river on whose banks they settle " the rive^y

Of course there are many names for river. It may

be called the runner *, the fertiliser, the roarer or, —
with a little poetical metaphor, the arrow, the horse,
the cow, the father, the mother, the watchman, the
child,of the mountains. Many
had many names rivers
in different parts of their course, and it was only
when communication between different settlements
became more frequent, and a fixed terminology was
felt to be a matter of necessity, that the rivers of a

country were properly baptized and registered. All

this had been gone through in India before our hymn
became possible.
And now wehave to consider another, to my mind
most startling fact. We here have a number of
names of the rivers of India, as they were known to
one single poet, say about 1000 b. c. We then hear
nothing of India till we come to the days of Alex-
ander, and when we look at the names of the Indian
rivers,represented as well as they could be by Alex-
ander's companions, mere strangers in India, and by

f ^* Among *h« Hottentots, the Kunene, ®kavang» and #range

rivers, all have the name of Garib, i. e. the Runner." T>r. Theoph.
Hahn. Cape Tinnes, July 11, 1S82.
I So WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

means of a strange language and a strange alphabet,

we recognise without much difficulty, nearly all of the
old Vedic names.
In this respect the names of rivers have a great
advantage over the names of towns in India. What
we now call Dilli or Delhi was in ancient times called
Indraprastha, in later times Shahjahahdnabdd. Otide
isAyodhya, but the old name of Saketa is forgotten.
The town of Pa/aliputra, known to the Greeks as
Palhnbothra, is now called Pat.na. *
Now can assure you this persistency of the Vedic
I

river names was to my mind something so startling

that I often said to miyself. This cannot be there —
m.ust be something wrong here. I do not wonder so
much at the Indus and the Gancres
names of the

being the same. The Indus was known to early

traders, whether by sea or by land. Skylax sailed
from the country of the Paktys, i. e. the Pushtus, as
the Afghans still call themselves, down to the mouth
of the Indus. That was under Darius Hystaspes
(521-486). Even before that time India and the
Indians were known by their name, which was derived
from SindJiity the name of their frontier river. The
neighboring tribes who spoke Iranic languages all
pronounced, like the Persian, the s as an h. f Thus
Sindhu became Hindhu (Hidhu), and, as h's were
dropped even at that early time, Hindhu became
Indu. Thus' the river was called Indos, the people
[jtdoi by the Greeks, v^rho first heard of India from
the Persians.
Sindku probably meant . originally the divider,

* Cunningham Archaeological Survey of India, vqI. xii. p. 113.

t Pliny, Hist, Nat. vi. 20, 71 :
" Indus incolis Smdus appellatus.'*
 ttik lRssons of tHk VMDA, iSt

keeper, and defender, from sidh, to keep off. It was

a masculine, before it became a feminine. No more
tellings nam.e could have been given to a broad river,
which guarded peaceful settlers both against the
inroads of hostile tribes and the attacks of wild
animals. A common name for the ancient settle-
ments of the Aryans in India was " the Seven Rivers,"
" Sapta Sindhava/i!." But though s i n d h u was used
as an appellative noun for river in general (cf. Rig-
veda VI. 19, 5, samudre na sindiiava/z yadamana/2,
" like rivers lodging for the sea''), it remained though-
cut the whole history of India the name of its power-
ful guardian river, the Indus.
In some passages of the Rig-veda it has been
pointed out that s i n d h u might better be translated
by " sea " a change ofmeaning, if so it can be called
fully explained by the geographical conditions of the
country. There are places where people could swim
across the Indus, there are others where no eye
could tell whether the boundless expanse of water
should be called river or sea. The two run into each
other, as every sailor knows, and naturally the
meaning of s i n d h u, river, runs into the meaning of
s i n d h u, sea.

But besides the two great rivers, the Indus and

the Ganges,—'in Sanskrit the Ganga, literally the
Go-go, we have the smaller rivers, and many of their
names also agree with the fiames preserved to us by
the companions of Alexander.*
The Yamuna, the Jumna, was known to Ptolemy
* The history of these names has been treated by Professor Lassen,
in his " Indische Alterthumskunde," and more lately by Professor
Kaegi, in his very careful essay, "Der Rig-veda," pp. 146, 147.
i ^2 ^^^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH OS f
^isAiafxovva^ to Pliny as Jomanes, to Arriail, sotne-
what corrupted, as Jobares.f
The 5utudr!, or as it was afterwards called, ^ata-
dru, meaning running in a hundred streams," was
''

known to Ptolemy 2isZaSapdr]?ox Zapadpo^, Pliny

called it Sydrus and Megasthenes, too, was probably
;

acquainted with it 2i^ Zadap6r}<;. In the Veda J it

formed with the Vipa^ the frontier of the Punjab,

and we hear of fierce battles fought at that time, it
may be on the same spot where in 1846 the battle
of the Sutledge was fought by Sir Hugh Gough and
Sir Henry Hardinge. It was probably on the Viplf

north-western tributary of the Sut-

(later Vipa^a), a

ledge, that Alexander's army turned back. The

river was then called Hyphasis Pliny calls it ;

Hypasis,§ a very fair approximation to the Vedic

Vipa^, which means " unfettered." Its modern name
is Bias or Bejah.
The next river on the west is the Vedic Parushm,
better known as Iravati,l| which Strabo calls Hyar-
otis, while Arrian gives it a more Greek appearance
by calling it Hydraotes. It is the modern Rawi.
Itwas this river which the Ten Kings when attacking
the Tntsus under Sudas tried to cross from the
west by cutting off its water. But their stratagem
* Ptol. vii. I, 29. t Arrian, Indica, viii. 5.

Rig-veda III. 33, i

j:
the lap of the mountains VipCu and
:
" From
^utudri rush forth with their water like two lusty mares neigh-

ing, freed from their tethers, like two bright mother-cows licking

(their calf),
Ordered by Indra and waiting his bidding you run toward the
''

rise, the
sea like two charioteers running together, as your waters
;

one goes into the other, you bright ones."

§ Other classical names are

Hypanis, Bipasis, and Bibasis*
Yaska identifies it with the Ar^ikiya. Cf. Nirukta IX. 26. ||
 THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA. 183

failed, and they perished in the river (Rig-veda VII.

18, 8-9).
We then come to the Asikni, which means '
black."
That river had another name also, ^andrabhaga,
which means "streak of the moon." The Greeks,
however, pronounced that name^arc^o'/oo^oa'^/o^and
this had the unlucky meaning of " the devourer of
Alexander." Hesychius tells us that in order to avert
the bad omen Alexander changed the name of that
*'
river intOy4;^f<5'zV77?^ which would mean " the Healer ;

but he does not tell, what the Veda tells us, that
this name .r47i;e(5'zV;;? was a Greek adaptation of another
name of the same river, namely Asikni, which had
evidently supplied to Alexander the idea of calling
the Asiknt ^Amaivrji. It is the modern Chinab.

Next to the Akesines we have the Vedic Vitast^,

the last of the rivers of the Punjab, changed in Greek
into Hydaspes. It was to this river that Alexander
retired, before sending his fleet down the Indus and
leading his army back to Babylon, It is the modern
Behat or Jilam. *

I could identify more of these Vedic rivers,

still

such as, for instance, the Kubha, the Greek Cophen,

the modern Kabul river * but the names which I have
;

* " The which join the Indus before its meeting

first tributaries

with the Kubha or the Kabul river cannot be determined. All

travellers in these northern countries complain of the continual
changes in the names of the rivers, and we can hardly hope t©
find traces of the Vedic names in existence there after the lapse of
three or four thousand years. Themay be the
rivers intended
Shauyook, Ladak, Abba Seen, and Burrindu, and one of the four
rivers, the Rasa, has assumed an almost fabulous character in the
Veda. After the Indus has joined the Kubha or the Kabul river,
two names occur, the Gomati and Krumu, which I believe I was
the first to indentify with the modern rivers the Gonial and Kurrum.
(Roth, Nirukta, JErlauterungen, p. 43, Anm.) The Gomal falls
1 84 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US -

traced from the Veda to Alexander, and in many

cases from Alexander' again to our own time, seem to
me sufficient to impress upon us the real and his-
torical Suppose the Veda
character of the Veda.
—
were a forgery suppose -at least that it had been
put together after the time of Alexander how could —
we explain these names ? They are names that have
mostly a meaning in Sanskrit, they are names corre
sponding very closely to their Greek corruptions, as
pronounced and written down by people who did not
know Sanskrit. How is a forgery possible here ?

I selected this hymn for two reasons. First, because

itshows us the widest geographical horizon of the Vedic
poets, confined by the snowy mountains in the North,
the Indus and the range of the Suleiman mountains
in the West, the Indus or the sea in the Sauth, and

the valley of the Jumna and Ganges in the East.

Beyond that, the world, though open, was unknown
to the Vedic poets. Secondly, because the same
into the Indus, between Dera Ismael Khan and Paharpore, and
although Elphinstone calls it a river only during the rainy season,
Klaproth (Foe-koue-ki, p. 23) .describes its upper course as far
more considerable, and adds " Un pen a I'est de Sirmagha, le Gomal
;

traverse la chaine de montagnes de Soliman, passe devant Raghzi

et fertilise le pays liabite par les tribus de Dauletkhail et de
Gandehpour, II se desseche au defile de Pezou, et son lit ne se
remplit plus d'eau que dans la saison des pluies : alors seulement 11

re joint la droite de I'Indus, au sud-est du bourg de Paharpour."

The Kurrum falls into the Indus North of the Gomal, while, ac-

cording to the poet, we should expect it South. It might be urged

that poets are not bound by the same rules as geographers, as we
see, for instance, in the verse immediately preceding. But if it

should be taken as a serious objection, it will be better to give up

the Gomati than the Krumu, the latter being the larger of the two,
and we might then take Goraati, " rich in cattle," as an adjective
belonging to Krumu," —
From a review of General Cunningham's
•'Ancient Geography of India/' in NaticrCi 1S71, Sept. 14,
 THE LESSONS OE THE VEDA. 185

hymn gives us also a kind of historical background

to the Vedic age. These rivers, as we may see them
to-day, as they were seen by Alexander and his Mace-
donians, were seen also by the Vedic poets. Here
—
we have an historical continuity almost living wit-
nesses, to tell us that the people whose songs have
been so strangely, aye, you may almost say, so mira-
culously preserved to us, were real people, lairds
with their clans, priests, or rather, servants of their
gods, shepherds with their flocks, dotted about on
the hills and valleys, with enclosures or palisades
here and there, with a few strongholds, too, in case
of need —living their on earth, as at that
short life

time life might be lived by men, without much push-

ing and crowding and trampling on each other
spring, summer and winter leading them on from
year to year, and the sun in his rising and setting
lifting up their thoughts from their meadows and
groves which they loved, to a world in the East,
from which they had come, or to a world in the
West, to which they were gladly hastening on. They
had what I call religion, though it was very simple,
and hardly reduced as yet to the form of a creed.
" There is a Beyond," that was all they felt and knew,

though they tried, as well as they could, to give names

to that Beyond, and thus to change religion into a re-
ligion. They had not as yet a name for God^— cer-
tainly not in our sense of the word —
or even a general
name for the gods but they invented name after
;

name to enable them to grasp and comprehend by

some outward and powers whose pres-
visible tokens
ence they felt in nature, though their true and full
essence was to them? gg it is to us, invif^ible and incom-
prehensible.
 hthk S)ntte0,

The next important phenomenon of nature which

was represented in the Veda as a terrestrial deity

is Fire, in Sanskrit Agni, in Latin z^7iis. In the

worship which is paid to the Fire and in the
high praises bestowed on Agni we can clearly
perceive the traces of a period in the history
of man in which not only the most essential com-
forts of life, but life itself, depended on the know-

ledge of producing fire. To us fire has become so

familiar that we can hardly form an idea of what life

would be without it. But how did the ancient

dwellers on earth get command and possession of fire .'*

The Vedic poets tell us that fire first came to them

from the sky, in the form of lightning, but that it

disappeared again, and that then M^tarijvan, a being

to a certain extent like Promethus, brought it back
and confided it to the safe keeping of the clan of the
Bhrigus (Phlegyas)*. In other poems we hear of the
mystery of fire being produced by rubbing pieces of
wood and here it is a curious fact that the name of
;

the wood thus used for rubbing is in Sanskrit Pra-

mantha, a word which, as Kuhn has shown, would in
Greek come very near to the name of Prometheus. The
possession of fire, whether by preserving it as sacred on
* Muir, iv. p. 209.
 VEDIC DBITJMS. 1 87

the hearth, or by producing it at pleasure with the

fire-drill, represents an enormous step in early civiliza-
tion. It enabled people to cook their meat instead
of eating raw it gave them the power of carrying
ij: ;

on their work by night; and in colder climates it

really preserved them from being frozen to death.
No wonder, therefore, that the fire should have been
praised and worshipped as the best and kindest of
gods, the only god who had come down from heaven
to live on earth, the friend of man, the messenger of
the gods, the mediator between gods and men, the
immortal among mortals. He, it is said, protects
the settlements of the Aryans, and frightens away
the black-skinned enemies.
Soon, however, was conceived by the Vedic
fire

poets under the more general character of light and

warmth, and then the presence of Agni was perceived,
not only on the hearth and the altar, but in the Dawn,
in the Sun, and in the world beyond the Sun, while
at the same time his power was recognized as ripen-
ing, or as they called it, as cooking, the fruits of the
earth, and as supporting also the warmth and the
life of the human body. From that point of view
Agni, like other powers, rose to the rank of a Supreme
God.* He is said to have stretched out heaven and
earth — naturally, because without his light heaven
and earth would have been invisible and undistin-
guishable. The next poet says that Agni held
heaven aloft by his he kept the two
light, that
woilds asunder and in the end Agni is said to be
;

the progenitor and father of heaven and earth, and

the maker of all that flies, or walks, or stands, or
moves on earth.
Muir, iv, p. 214.
l88 WHAT CAM INDIA TEACH l/Sf

Here we have once more the same process before

our eyes. The human mind begins with being startled
by a single or repeated event, such as the lightning
striking a tree and devouring a whole forest, or a
spark of fire breaking forth from wood being rubbed
against wood, whether in a forest, or in the wheel of
a carriage, or at last in a fire-drill, devised on purpose.
Man then begins to wonder at what to him is a
miracle, none the less so because it is a fact, a simple
natural fact. He sees the effect of a power, but he
can only guess at its cause, and if he is to speak of
it,he can only do so by speaking of it as an agent, or
as something like a human agent, and, in some re-
spects not quite human, in others more than human
or super-human. Thus the concept of Fire grew, and
while became more and more generalised, it also
it

became more sublime, more incomprehensible, more

divine. Without Agni, without fire, light, and warmth,
lifewould have been impossible. Hence he became
the author and giver of life, of the life of plants and
animals and of men and his favor having once been
;

implored for "light and life and all things," what

wonder that in the minds of some
and in thepoets,
traditions of this or that village community, he should
have been raised to the rank of a supreme ruler, a god
above all gods, their own true god

We now proceed to consider the powers which the

ancient poets might have discovered in the air, in
the clouds, and, more particularly, in those meteoric
conflicts which by thunder, lightning, darkness,
storms, and showers of rain must have taught man
that very important lesson that he was not alone in
 VEDIC DEITIES. ig^

this world. Many philosophers, as you know, believe

that all religion arose from fear or terror, and that
without thunder and lightning to teach us, we should
never have believed in any gods or god. This is a
one-sided and exaggerated view. Thunderstorms, no
awe
doubt, had a large share in arousing feelings of
and terror, making man conscious of his weak-
and in
ness and dejoendence. Even in the Veda Indra is
introduced as saying :
" Yes, when Isend thunder and
lightning, then you believe in me." But what we
call religion would never have sprung from fear and

terror alone. Religion is trust, and that trust arose

in thebeginning from the impressions made on the
mind and heart of man by th,e order and wisdom of
nature, and more particularly, by those regularly re-
curring events, the return of the sun, the revival of
the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause
and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and
traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by
whatever name we choose to call it.

Still, the meteoric phenomena had, no doubt, their

important share in the production of ancient deities ;

and in the poems of the Vedic Rishis they naturally

occupy a very prominent place. If we were asked
who was the principal god of the Vedic period, we
should probably, judging from the remains of that
poetry which we possess, say it was Indra, the god
of the blue sky, the Indian Zeus, the gatherer of the
clouds, the giver of rain, the wielder of the thunder-
bolt, the conqueror of darkness and of all the powers
of darkness, the bringer of light, the source of fresh-
ness, vigor, and life, the ruler and lord of the whole
world. Indra is this, and much more in the Veda.
I^o WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us f

He supreme in the hymns of many poets, and may

is

have been so in the prayers addressed to him by

many of the ancient septs or village communities in
India. Compared with him the other gods are said
to be decrepit old men. Heaven, the old Heaven, or
Dyaus, formerly the father of all the gods, nay the
father of Indra himself, bows before him, and the
Earth trembles at his approach. Yet Indra never
commanded the permanent allegiance of all the 'other
gods, like Zeus and Jupiter nay, we know from the
;

Veda itself that there were sceptics, even at that

early time, who denied that there was any such thing
as Indra*.
By the side of Indra, and associated with him
in his battles, and sometimes hardly distinguish-
able from him, we find the representatives of the
wind, called Vata or Vayu, and the more terrible
Storm-gods, the Maruts, literally the Smashers.
When speaking of the Wind, a poet says if " Where
was he born ? Whence did he spring } the life of the
gods, the germ of the world That god moves about
!

where he listeth, his voices are heard, but he i-s not

to be seen."
The Maruts are more terrible than Vata, the wind.
They are clearly the representatives of such storms as
are known in India, when the air is darkened by dust
and clouds, when in a moment the trees are stripped
of their foliage, their branches shivered, their stems
snapped, when the earth seems to reel and the moun-
tains to shake, and the foam and
rivers are lashed into

fury. Then the poet sees the Maruts approaching

with golden helmets, with spotted skins on their
* Hibbert Lectures, p. 307. t X 168, 3, 4.
 VEDIC DEITIES. 191

shoulders, brandishing golden spears, whirling their

axes, shooting fiery arrows,and cracking their whips
amidst thunder and lightning. They are the comrades
of Indra, sometimes, like Indra, the sons of Dyaus or
the sky, but also the sons of another terrible god,
called Rudra, or the Howler, a fighting god, to whom
many hymns are addressed. In him a new character
is inyolved, that of a healer and saviour, — a very
natural transition in India, where nothing is so power-
ful for dispelling miasmas, restoring health, and im-
parting fresh vigor to man and beast, as a thunder-
storm, following after weeks of heat and drought.
All these and several others, such as Par^anya and
the i^/bhus, are the gods of mid-air, the most active
and dramatic gods, ever present to the fancy of the
ancient poets, and in several cases the prototypes of
later heroes, celebrated in the epic poems of India.
In battles, more particularly, these fighting gods of
the sky were constantly invoked.* Indra is the
leader in battles, the protector of the bright Aryans,
the destroyer of the black aboriginal inhabitants of
India. " He has thrown down fifty thousand black
fellows," the poet says, and their strongholds crumb-
'*

led away like an old rag." Strange to say, Indra is

praised for having saved his people from their ene-
mies, much as Jehovah was praised by the Jewish,
prophets. Thus we read in one hymn that when
Sudas, the pious king of the Tr^tsus, was pressed
hard in his battle with the ten kings, Indra changed
the flood into an easy ford, and thus saved Sudas.
In another hymn we read ;f "Thou hast restrained
the great river for the sake of Turviti Vayya : the
* See Kaegi, Rig-veda, p. 61. t Rig-veda II. 13, 12 •
IV. 19, 6.
192 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us 1

flood movedobedience to thee, and thou madest

in
the rivers easy to cross." This is not very different
from the Psalmist (Ixxviii. 13): " He divided the
sea, and caused them to pass through and he made ;

the waters to stand as an heap."

And there are other passages which have reminded
some students of the Veda of Joshua's battle,* when
the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the
people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.
For we read in the Veda also, as Professor Kaegi has
pointed out 63), that " Indra lengthened the
(1. c. p.

days into the night," and that " the Sun unharnessed
its chariot in the middle of the day."t
In some of the hymns addressed to Indra his
original connection with the sky and the thunder-
storm seems quite forgotten. He has become a
spiritual god, the only king of all worlds and all

people, X who sees and hears everything, § nay, who

inspires men with their best thoughts. No one is

equal to him, no one excels him.

The name of Indra is peculiar to India, and must
have been formed after the separation of the great
Aryan family had taken place, for we find it neither in
Greek, nor in Latin, nor in German. There are Vedic
gods, as I mentioned before, whose names must have
been framed before that separation, and which occur
therefore,though greatly modified in character, some-
times in Greek, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in the
Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic dialects. Dyaus, for
instance, is the same word as Zeus or Ju-piter, Ushas
is Eos, Nakta is Nyx, Silrya is Helios, Agni is ignis

* Joshua X. 13. t Rig-veda IV. 30 3 ; X. 138, 3.

I L. c. VIII. IT, 3. § L. c. VIII, 78, 5.
 VEDIC DEITIES. 193

Bhaga is Old Persian, Bogu. in Old Slavonic,

Baga in
Varu;^a is Uranos, Vata is Wotan, Va/^ is vox, and
in the name of the ManitSy or the storm-gods, the
germs of the Italic god of war. Mars, have been dis-
covered. Besides these direct coincidences, some
indirect been established between
relations have
Hermes and Sarameya, Dionysos and Dyunii-ya,
Prometheus and Pramantha, Orpheus and i?fbhu,
Erinnys and Sara;/yu, Pan, and Pavana.
But while the name of Indra as the god of the sky,
also as the god of the thunderstorm, and the giver of
rain, is unknown among the Northwestern members
of the Aryan family, the name of another god who
sometimes acts the part of Indra (Indra/i^ Par^an-
yatma), but is much less prominent in the Veda, I

mean Par^anya, must have existed before that of

Indra, because two at least of the Aryan languages
have carried it, as we shall see, to Germany, and to
the very shores of the Baltic.
Sometimes this Par^anya stands in the place of Dy-
aus, the sky. Thus we read in the Atharva-veda, XII.
I, 12:* "The Earth is the mother, and I am the son
of the Earth. Pa^anya is the father ; may he help
us!"
In another place (XII. i, 42) the Earth, instead of
being the wife of Heaven or Dyaus, is called the wife
of Par^anya.
Now who or what is There have
this Par^anya }

been long controversies about him,f as to whether he

is the same as Dyaus, Heaven, or the same as Indra,

II * Muir, iv., p. 23.

t Ibid. p. 142. An excellent paper on Pargranya was published by

Biihler in 1862, "Orient und Occident," Vol. i., p. 214.
194 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

the successor of Dyaus, whether he is the god of the

sky, of the cloud, or of the rain.
To me it seems that this very expression, god of
the sky, god of the cloud, is so entire an anachronism
that we could not even translate it into Vedic Sans-
krit without committing a solecism. It is true, no
doubt, we must use our modern ways of speaking when
we wish to represent the thoughts of the ancient world ;

but we cannot be too much on our guard against ac-

cepting the dictionary representative of an ancient
word for its real counterpart. Deva, no doubt, means
"gods" and "god," and Par^anya means "cloud,"
but no one could say in Sanskrit par^anyasya deva/^,
" the god of the cloud.'' The god, or the divine or
transcendental element, does not come from without,
to be added to the sky or to the earth, but it springs
from the cloud and the sky and the earth, and is
slowly elaborated into an independent concept. As
many words in ancient languages have an undefined
meaning, and lend themselves to various purposes ac-
cording to the various intentions of the speakers, the
names of the gods also share in this elastic and plas-
tic character of ancient speech. There are passages
where Par^anya means cloud, there are passages where
it means rain. There are passages where Par^anya
takes the place which elsewhere is filled by Dyaus,
the sky, or by Indra, the active god of the atmo-
sphere. .This may seem very wrong and very unsci-
entific to the scientific mythologist. But it cannot
be helped. It is the nature of ancient thought and
ancient language to be unscientific, and we must
learn to master it as well as we can, instead of finding
 vEDic deities: 1^5

fault with it, and complaining that our forefathers did

not reason exactly as we do.
There are passages Vedic hymns where Par-
in the
^nya appears as a supreme god. He is called
father, like Dyaus, the sky. He is called asura, the
living or life-giving god, a name peculiar to the oldest
and the greatest gods. One poet says,* " He rules"
as god over the whole world all creatures rest in ;

him he is the life (atma) of all that moves and

;

rests."
Surely it supreme god
is difficult to say more of a
than what is here said of Par^anya. Yet in other
hymns he is represented as performing his office,
namely that of sending rain upon the earth, under
the control of Mitra and Varu/^a, who are then con-
sidered as the highest lords, the mightiest rulers of
heaven and earth.
There are other verses, again, where par^anya
occurs with hardly any traces of personality, but
simply as aname of cloud or rain.
Thus we read % " Even by day : the Maruts (the
storm-gods) produce darkness with the cloud that
carries water, when they moisten the earth." Here
cloud is and it is evidently used as an
par^^anya,
appellative,and not as a proper name. The same
word occurs in the plural also, and we read of many
par^anyas or clouds vivifying the earth. §
When Devapi prays for rain in favor of his brother,
he says: " O lord of my prayer (Br^haspati), whether
||

thou be Mitra or Varu?^a or Pushan, come to my

* Rig-veda, VII. loi, 6. flbid V. 6^, 3-6. t L- c. I. 38, 9.

§ L. c. I. 164, 51. II
L. c. X. 9S, I.
ig6 IVHA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f
sacrifice ! Whether thou be together with the Adi-
tyas, the Vasus or the Maruts, let the cloud (par-
^anya) rain for Santanu."
And again " Stir
up the rainy cloud " (par^anya).
:

In several places it makes no difference whether we

translate par^nya by cloud or by rain, for those who
pray for rain, pray for the cloud, and whatever may be
the benefits of the rain, they may nearly all be called
ihe benefits of the cloud. There is a curious hymn,
for instance, addressed to the frogs who, at the be-
ginning of the rains, come forth from the dry ponds,
and embrace each other and chatter together, and
whom the poet compares to priests singing at a
sacrifice, remark from a
a not very complimentary
poet who is himself supposed to have been a priest.
Their voice is said to have been revived by par^anya,
which we shall naturally translate " by rain," though,
no doubt, the poet may have meant, for all we know,
either a cloud, or even the god Par^nya himself.
I shall try to translate one of the hymns addressed

to Par^anya, when conceived as a god, or at least as so

much of a god as
was possible to be at that stage
it

in the intellectual growth of the human race. *

1. " Invoke the strong god with these songs praise !

Par^anya, worship him with veneration for he, the !

roaring bull, scattering drops, gives seed-fruit to

plants.
2. " H^ cuts the trees asunder, he kills evil spirits ;

the whole world trembles before his mighty weapon.

Even the guiltless flees before the powerful, when
Par^anya thundering strikes down the evil-doers.

* Rig-veda V. 83. See Buhler, Orient und Occident, vol. i., p.

214 Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, p. 43.
;
 VEDIC DEITIES. i
^y

3. " Like a charioteer, striking his horses with a

whip, he puts forth his messengers of rain. From
afar arise the roaring of the lion, when Par^anya
makes the sky full of rain.
*
4. " The winds blow, the lightnings ' fly, plants
spring up, the sky pours. Food is produced for the
whole world, when Par^anya blesses the earth, with
his seed.
5. " O Par^anya, thou at whose work the earth
bows down, thou at whose work hoofed animals are
scattered, thou at whose work the plants assume all
forms, grant thou to us thy great protection
6. " O Maruts, give us the rain of heaven, make the
streams of the strong horse run down ! And come
thou hither with thy thunder, pouring out water, for
thou (O Par^anya) art the living god, thou art our
father.

7. " Do thou roar, and thunder, and give fruitful-

ness ! Fly around us with thy chariot full of water !

Draw forth thy water-skin, when it has been opened

and turned downward, and let the high and the low
places become level !

8. " Draw up the large bucket, and pour it out let ;

the streams pour forth freely Soak heaven and !

earth with fatness and let there be a good draught

!

for the cows

9. " O Par^anya,Vhen roaring and thundering thou

killest the evil-doers, then everything rejoices, what-
ever lives on earth.
10. "Thou hast sent rain, stop now! Thou hast

*Both Biihler (Orient und Occident, vol. i, p. 224) and Zimmer

(Z.f. D. A. vii, p. 169) say that the lightning is represented as the
spn of Par^anya in Rig-veda VII. loi, i. This seems doubtful,
I g$ WHA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US f

made th§ deserts passable, thou hast made plsant

grow for food, and thou hast obtained praise from
men."
This is a Vedic hymn, and a very fair specimen of
what these" ancient hymns are. There is nothing
very grand and poetical about them, and yet, I say,
take thousands and thousands of people living in our
villages, and depending on rain for their very life, and
not many of them be able to compose such a
will
prayer for rain, even though three thousand years have
passed over our heads since Par^anya was first in-
voked in India. Nor are these verses entirely without
poetical conceptions and descriptions. Whoever has
watched a real thunderstorm in a hot climate, will re-
cognize the truth of those quick sentences, " the
winds blow, the lightnings fly, plants spring up, the
hoofed cattle are scattered." Nor is the idea without
a certain drastic reality, that Par^anya draws a bucket
of water from and pours out skin
his well in heaven,
after skin (in which water was then carried) down
upon the earth.
There is even a moral sentiment perceptible in this
hymn. " When the storms roar and the lightnings
flash and the rain pours down, even the guiltless
trembles, and evildoers are struck down." Here we
clearly see that the poet did not look upon the storm
simply as as outbreak of the violence of nature, but
that he had a presentiment of a higher will and
power which even the guiltless fears for who, he ;

seems to say, is entirely free from guilt .^

now we ask again. Who is^Par^anya 1 or What is

If

Par^nya we can answer that Par^anya was meant

"^

originally for the cloud, so far as it gives rain ; but as

soon as the idea of a giver arose, the visible cloud
became the outward appearance only, or the body of
that giver, and the giver himself was somewhere else,
we know not where. In some verses Par^anya seems
to step into the place of Dyaus, the sky, and Pnthivi,
the earth, is his wife. In other places *, however, he
is the son of Dyaus or the sky, though no thought
is given in that early stage to the fact that thus
Par^anya might seem to be the husband of his
mother. We saw that even the idea of Indra being
the father of his own father did not startle the
ancient poets beyond an exclamation that it was a
very wonderful thing indeed.
Sometimes Par^anya does the work of Indra,f the
Jupiter Pluvius of the Veda; sometimes of Vayu, the
wind, sometimes of Soma, the giver of rain. Yet
with all this he is not Dyaus, nor Indra, nor the
Maruts, nor Vayu, nor Soma. He stands by himself,
a separate person, a separate god, as we should say
nay, one of the oldest of all the Aryan gods.
His name, par^anya, is derived from a root par^,
which, like its parallel forms par.r and parsh, must
(I think) have had the meaning of sprinkling, irri-

gating, moistening. An interchange between final g,

J, and sh may, no doubt, seem unusual, but it is not

without parallel in Sanskrit. We have, for instance,
the roots pi^^, pingere ;
pish, to rub ;
pij, to adorn
(as in pei-as, 7roz:^zAo?^ etc.) ; xarigy to rub, m^^'sh, to
rub out, to forget ; mm, mulcere.
This very root mn]g forms its participle as m;2sh-/a,
like ya^, ish^a, and vij, vish/a ; nay there are roots,

* Rig-veda VII. 102. i. * Ibid. VIII. 6, i.

2 00 ^^^ T CAN INDIA TMA CH t/S f

such as drub, which optionally take a final lingual ot"

guttural, such as dhru/' and dhruk. *

We
may therefore compare par^ in par^anya with
such words as pnshata, pnshati, speckled, drop of
water f also pari-u, cloud, pmni, speckled, cloud,
;

earth and in Greek Ttpo^^Go), nefiKvo^y etc. %

;

If derived from par^^ to sprinkle, Par^anya would

have meant originally " he who irrigates or gives rain."§

When the different members of the Aryan family
dispersed, the}' might all of them, Hindus as well as
Greeks and and Teutons and Slaves, have
Celts,
carried that name for cloud with them. But you
know that it happened very often that out of the
common wealth of their ancient language, one and the
same word was preserved, as the case might be, not
by all, but by only six, or five, or four, or three, or
two, or even by one only of the seven principal heirs
and yet, as we know that there was no historical
contact between them, after they had once parted
from each other, long before the beginning of what
we call history, the fact that two of the Aryan lan-
guages have preserved the same finished word with
the same finished meaning, is proof sufficient that
it belonged to the most ancient treasure of Aryan
thought.
Now there is no trace, at least no very clear trace>
Max Miiller, Sanskrit Grammar, § 174, 10.
* See
— —
Gobh. Grzliya S. III. 3, 15, vidyut stanayitnu ps^/shiteshu.
t Cf.

X U^valadatta, in his commentary on the Uwadi-sHtras, iii, 193,

admits the same transition of sh into g in the verb pmh, as the
etymon of par^anya.
§ For different etymologies, see Biihler, Orient und Occident, i,
p. 214 ; Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, p. 140 Grassmann, in his
;

Dictionary to the Rig- Veda, s. v. Zimmer, Zeitichrift fur Deutsches

j

Alterthum, Neue Folge, vii. p. 164.

 VEDIC DEITIES. 201

of Par^nya, in Greek or Latin or Celtic, or even in

Teutonic. In Slavonic, too, we look in vain, till we
come to that almost forgotten side-branch called the
Lettic, comprising the spoken Litimnian and Lettish^
and the now extinct Old Prussian. Lituania is no
longer an independent state, but it was once, not
more than six centuries ago, a Grand Duchy, inde-
pendent both of Russia and Poland. Its first Grand
Duke was Ringold, who ruled from 1235, and his
successors made successful conquests against the
Russians. In 1368 these grand dukes became kings
of Poland, and in 1569 the two countries were united.
When Poland was divided between Russia and I^russia,
part of Lituania fell to the former, part to the latter.
There are about one million and a half of people
still

who speak Lituania in Russia and Prussia, while

Lettish is spoken by about one million in Curland
and Livonia.
The Lituanian language, even as it is now spoken
by the common people, contains some extremely-
primitive grammatical forms — in some cases almost
identical with These forms are all the
Sanskrit.
more curious, because they are but few in number,
and the rest of the language has suffered much from
'^
the wear and tear of centuries.
Now m that remote Lituanian language we ftnd
that our old friend Par^anya has taken refuge.
There he lives to the present day, while even in
India he is almost forgotten, at least in the spoken
languages and there, in Lituania, not many cen-
;

turies back might be heard among a Christianized

or nearly Christianized people, prayers for rain,f;;ftot

very different from that which I translated to,;^ou

202 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

from the Rig-veda. In Lituanian the god of thunder

was called Perktinas * and the same word is still
used in the sense of thunder. In Old Prussian.
thwiiidQv vf?iS perctmos, and in Lettish to the present
didij perkons is thunder, god of thunder, f
It was, I believe, Grimm who for the first time
identified the Vedic Par^anya with the Old Slavonic
Perun, Piorun, the Bohemian Peraun.
the Polish
These words had formally been derived by Dobrowsky
and others from the root peru, I strike. Grimm
(Teutonic Mythology, Engl, p. 171) showed transl.,
that the fuller forms Perkunas, Pehrkons, and Per-
kunos existed in Lituanian, Lettish, Old Prussian,
and that even the Mordvinians had adopted the
name Porguini as that of their thunder-god.
Simon Grunau, who finished his chronicle in 1521,
speaks of three gods, as worshipped by the Old Prus-
sians, Patollo, Patrimpo, and Perkuno, and he states
that Perkuno was invoked " for storm's sake, that they
might have rain and fair weather at the proper time,
and thunder and lightening should not injure them." J
The following Lituanian prayer has been preserved
to us by Lasitzki § :

;
* In order to identify Perkunas with par^anya, we must go
another step backward, and look upon^ or g , in the root parg ; as a
weakening of an orginal k in park. This, however, is a frequent
phonetic process. See Biihler, in Benfey's Orient und Occident,

t Lituanian
f...
perkun-kulke, thunder-bolt, perkuno gaisis, storm.
See Voelkel, Die lettischen Sprachreste, 1879, P* 23.
"t " Perkuno, war der dritte Abgot und man in anruffte limbs
gewitters willen, domit sie Regen hatten und schon wetter zu
seiner Zeit, und
in der Donner und blix kein schaden thett." Cf.
" Gottesides bei den alten Preussen," Berlin, 1870, p. 23. The triad
of the gods is called Triburti, Tryboze 1. c. p. 29.
;

§Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 175 and Lasitzki (Lasicius^

;
 VEDIC DEITIES. 203

"Check thyself, O Percuna, and do not send mis-

fortune on my field ! and I shall give thee this flitch."
Among the neighbors of the Lets, the Esthonians,
who, though un-Aryan in language, have evidently
learnt much from their Aryan neighbors, the follow-
ing prayer was heard, "^
addressed by an old peasant
to their god Picker or Pickejt, the god of thunder and
rain, as late as the seventeenth century f :

Dear Thunder (woda Picker), we offer to thee an

"

ox that has two horns and four cloven hoofs we ;

would pray thee for our ploughing and sowing, that

our straw be copper-red, our grain golden-yellow.
Push elsewhere all the thick black clouds, over
great fens, high forests, and wildernesses. But unto
us, ploughers and sowers, give a fruitful season and

sweet rain. Holy Thunder (poha Picken), guard our

seed-field, that it bear good straw below, good ears"
above, and good grain within, if"
Now, I say again, I do not wish you to admire
this primitive poetry^ primitive whether it is repeated
in the Esthonian fens in the seventeenth century of
our era, or sung in the valley of the Indus in the
seventeenth century before our era. Let aesthetic
critics say what they like about these uncouth poems.
I only ask you, Is it not worth a great many poems,

Joannes, De Russorum, Moscovitarum et Tartarorum religione,

sacrificiis, nuptiarum et funerum ritu, Spirse Nemetum, 1582 ; idem,
De Diis Samagitarum.
* Grimm, 1. c. p. 176, quoting from Joh. Gutslaff, Kurzer Bericht
und Unterricht von der falsch heilig genandten bache in Liefland
Wohhanda, Dorpat, 1644, pp. 362 364. —
t In modern Esthonian Pitkne, the Finnish Pitcainen( ?).

X On foreign influences in Esthonian stories, see Ehstnische

Marchen, vonT. Kreutzwald, 1869, Vorw®rt (by Schiefner), p. iv.
204 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US

to have established this fact, that the same god

Par^nya, the god and thunder and light-
of clouds
ning and rain, who was invoked in India a thousand
years before India was discovered by Alexander,
should have been remembered and believed in by
Lituanian peasants on the frontier between East
Prussia and Russia, not more than two hundred
years ago, and should have retained its old name
Par^anya, which in Sanskrit meant ''showering,'' under
the form of Perkuna, v/hich in Lituanian is a name
and a name only, without any etymological meaning at
all ; nay, should live on, as some scholars assure us,
in an abbreviated form in most Slavonic dialects,
namely, in Old Slavonic as Penin, in Polish as Pioriin^
in Bohemian as PerauUy all meaning thunder or
thunder-storm ?

Such facts strike me as if we saw the blood

suddenly beginning to flow again through the veins
of old mummies ; or as if the Egyptian statues of
black granite were suddenly to begin to speak again.
Touched by the rays of modern science the old words
call them mummies or statues begin indeed to live—
again, the old names of gods and heroes begin indeed
to speak again. All that is old becomes new, all that
is new becomes old, and that one word, Par^anya,

se«ms, like a charm, to open before our eyes the cave

or cottage in which the fathers of the Aryan race, our
own fathers, —whether we live on the Baltic or on the
Indian Ocean, — are seen gathered together, taking
refuge from the buckets of Par^anya, and saying
" Stop now, Par^anya ; thou hast sent rain ; thou hast
 VED/C DEI TIBS. 2 0^

tliade the deserts passable, and hast made the plants

to grow ; and thou hast obtained praise from man."

We have still to consider the third class of gods, in

addition to the gods of the earth and the sky, namely
the gods of the highest heaven, more serene in their
character than the active and fighting gods of the air
and the clouds, and more remote from the eyes of
man, and therefore more mysterious in the exercise
of their power than the gods of the earth or the air.
The principal deity is here no doubt the bright
sky itself, the old Dyaus, worshipped as we know
by the Aryans before they broke up into separate
people and languages, and surviving in Greece as
Zeus, in Italy as Jupiter, Heaven-father, and among
the Teutonic tribes as Tyr and Tiic. In the Veda we
saw him chiefly invoked in connection with the earth,
as Dyava-pr/thivi, Heaven and earth. He is invoked
by himself also, but he is a vanishing god, and his
place is taken in most of the Vedic poems by the
younger and more active god, Indra,
Another representative of the highest heaven, as
covering, embracing, and shielding all things, is Var-
u;2a, a name derived from the root var, to cover, and

identical with the Greek Oitraiios. This god is one of

the most interesting creations of the Hindu mind, be-
cause though we can still perceive the physical back-
ground from which he rises, the vast, starry, brilliant
expanse above, his features, more than those of any of
the Vedic gods, have become completely transfigured,
and he stands before us as a god who watches over
the world, punishes the evil-doer, and even forgives
the sins of those who implore his pardon, ^
2o6 P^^^A T CAN- INDIA TEACH US ?
I shall read you one of the hymns addressed to
him :
*

" Let us be blessed in thy service, O Varu;^a, for

vve always think of thee and praise thee, greeting thee
day by day, like the fires lighted on the altar, at the
approach of the rich dawns." 2.
" O Varu;2a, our guide, let us stand in thy keeping,
thou who art rich in heroes and praised far and wide !

And you, unconquered sons of Adita, deign to accept

us as your friends, O gods ! 3.
" Aditya, the ruler, sent forth these rivers ; they
follow the law of Varu7/a. They tire not, they cease
not ; like birds they fly quickly everywhere." 4.
"Take from me my sin, like a fetter, and v/e shall
increase, O Varu/^a, the spring of thy law. Let not
the thread be cut while I weave my song ! Let not
the form of the workman break before the time 5. !

" Take far away from me this terror, O Varu^a !

Thou, O righteous king, have mercy on me ! Like as

a rope from a calf, remove from me my sin ; for away
from thee I am not master even of the twinkling of an
eye. 6.

"Do not strike us, Varu/^a, with weapons which at

thy will hurt the evil-doer. Let us not go where the
light has vanished ! Scatter our enemies, that we
may live. 7.
" We did formerly, O and do now, and
Varu;/a,
shall in future also, sing praises to thee, O mighty
one ! For on thee, unconquerable hero, rest all stat-
utes, immovable, as if established on a rock. 8.
Move far away from me all self-committed guilt,
'*

and may I not, O king, suffer for what others have

* Rig-veda II. 28.
 VM bic DR triES. 1 f

committed ! Many dawns have not yet dawned

grant us to live in them, O Varn/^a." 9,

You may have observed that in several verses of

this hymn Varu;^a was called Aditya, or son of Aditi.
Now Aditi means mjinitude, from dita, bound, and a^

not, that is, not bound, not limited, absolute, infinite.

Aditi. itself is now and then invoked in the Veda, as
the Beyond, as what is beyond the earth and the
sky, and the sun and the dawn, a most surprising con-
ception in that early period of religious thought.
More frequently, however, than we meet with
Aditi,
the Adityas, literally the sons of Aditi, or the gods
—
beyond the visible earth and sky, in one sense, the
infinite gods. One of them is Varu;2a, others Mitra
and Aryaman (Bhaga, Daksha, A^/^sa), most of them
abstract names, though pointing to heaven and the
solar light of heaven as their first, though almost for-
gotten source.
When Mitra and Varu/^a are invoked together, we
can still perceive dimly that they were meant origi-
nally for day and night, light and darkness. But in
their more personal and so to say dramatic aspect,
day and night appear in the Vedic mythology as the
two Aj-vins, the two horsemen.
Aditi, too, the infinite, still shows a few traces of
her being originally connected with the boundless
Dawn but again, in 'her more personal and dramatic
;

character, the Dawn is praised by the Vedic poets as

Ushas, the Greek Eos, the beautiful maid of the
morning, loved by the A.$-vins, loved by the son, but
vanishing before him at the very moment when he
tries to embrace her with his golden rays. The sun
himself, whom we saw reflected several times before
2oS What CAN INDIA Teach Vs^

in some of the divine personifications of the air and

the sky and even of the earth, appears once more in
his full personality, as the sun of the sky, under the
names of Silrya (Helios), Savitr/, Pushan, andVishwu,
and many more.
You see from all this how great a mistake it

would be to attempt to reduce the whole of Aryan

Mythology to solar concepts, and to solar concepts
only. We have seen how largely the earth, the air,
and the sky have each contributed their share to the
earliest religious and mythological treasury of the
Vedic Aryans. Nevertheless, the Sun occupied in
that ancient collection of Aryan thought, which we
call Mythology, the same central and commanding

position which, under different names, it still holds in

our own thoughts.
What we call the Morning the ancient Aryans called
the Sun or the Dawn ;
" and there is no solemnity
so deep to a rightly thinking creature as that of
the Dawn." (These are not my words, but the words
of one of our greatest poets, one of the truest
worshippers of Nature —John Ruskin.) What we
call Noon, and Evening, and Night, what we call
Spring and Winter, what we call Year, and Time,
—
and Life, and Eternity all this the ancient Aryans
called Sun. And yet wise people wonder and say,
how curious that the ancient Aryans should have'

had so many solar myths. Why, every time we

say " Good Morning," we commit a solar myth. Every
poet who sings about " the May driving the Winter
from the fields again " commits a solar myth. Every
"Christmas Number" of our newspapers ringing out —
the old year and ringing in the new— is brimful of
 VEDIC DEITIES. 209

solar myths. Be not afraid of solar myths, but when-

ever in ancient mythology, you meet with a name
that, according to the strictest phonetic rules (for
this is a sine qua can be traced back to a
fion),

word meaning sun, or dawn, or morning or night,

or spring or winter, accept it for what it was meant
to be, and do not be greatly surprised, if a story told
of a solar eponymos was originally a solar myth.
No one has more strongly protested against the ex-
travagances of Comparative Mythologists in changing
everything into solar legends, than I have; but if I
read some of the arguments brought forward against
this new science, I confess they remind me of nothing
so much as of the arguments brought forward, centuries
ago, against the existence of Antipodes People then !

appealed to what is called Common Sense, which

ought to teach everybody that Antipodes could not
possibly exist, because they would tumble off. The
best answer that astronomers could give, was, " Go

and see." And I can give no better answer to those

learned sceptics who try to ridicule the Science of
Comparative Mythology — " Go and see !
" that is, go
and read the Veda, and before you have finished the
first Ma?2<^ala, I can promise you, you will no longer

shake your wise heads at solar myths, whether in

India, or in Gfeece, or in Italy, or even in England,
where we see so little of the sun, and talk all the
—
more about the weather that is, about a solar myth.
We have thus seen from the hymns and prayers
preserved to us in the Rig-veda, how a large number
of so-called Devas, bright and sunny beings, or gods,
were called int© existence, how the whole world was
peopled with them, and every act of nature, whether
210 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

on the earth or in the air or in the highest heaven,

ascribed to their agency. When we say, it thunders,

they said Indra thunders ; when we say, it rains, they

said Par^anya pours out his buckets ; when we say,
it dawns, they said the beautiful Ushas appears like
a dancer, displaying her splendor ; when we say,
itgrows dark, they said Surya unharnesses his steeds.
The whole of nature was alive to the poets of the
Veda, the presence of the gods was felt everywhere,
and in that sentiment of the presence of the gods
there was a germ of religious morality, sufficiently
strong, would seem, to restrain people from commit-
it

ting as it were before the eyes of their gods what

they were ashamed to commit before the eyes of men.
When speaking of Varu/^a, the old god of the sky,
one poet says * :

" Varu;/a, the great lord of these worlds, sees as

if he were near. If a man stands or walks or hides,

if he goes to lie down, or to get up, what two people

sitting together whisper to each other. King Varu;/a

knows it, he is there as the third. f This earth, too,
belongs to Varu/^a, the King, and this wide sky with
itsends far apart. The two seas (the sky and the
ocean) are Varu/m's loins he is also contained in
;

this small drop of water. He who should flee far

beyond the sky, evenhe would not be rid of Varu/^a,
the King.J His spies proceed from heaven towards

* Atharva-veda IV. i6.

t Psalm cxxxix. i, 2, " O Lord, thou hast searched me and known
me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou under-
standest my thought afar off."
% Psalm cxxxix. 9,
" If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell
in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me." - -
 VEDIC DEITIES. 2 1

this world ; with thousand eyes they overlook this

earth. King Varuwa sees all this, what is between
heaven and earth, and what is beyond. He has
counted the twinklings of the eyes of men. As a
player throws down the dice, he settles all things
(irrevocably). May all thy fatal snares which stand
spread out seven by seven and threefold, catch the
man who tells a lie, may they pass by him who speaks
the truth."
You see this is as beautiful, and in some respects
as true, as anything in the Psalms. And yet we
know that there never was such a Deva, or god, or
such a thing as Varuf/a. We know it is a mere
name, meaning originally '' covering or all-embracing,"
which was applied to the visible starry sky, and
afterwards, by a process perfectly intelligible, de-
veloped into the name of a Being, endowed with
human and superhuman qualities.
And what applies to Varu;^a applies to all the
other gods of theveda and the Vedic rehgion, whether
three in number, or thirty three, or as one poet said.
" three thousand three hundred and thirty-nine gods." ^
They are all but names, quite as much as Jupiter
and Apollo and Minerva in fact, quite as much as all
;

the gods of every religion who are called by such ap-

pellative titles.
Possibly, if any one had said this during the Vedic
age in India, or even during the Periklean age in
Greece, he would have been called, like Sokrates, a
blasphemer or an atheist. And yet nothing can be
clearer or truer, and we shall see that some of the

* Rig-veda III. 9, 9 ; X, 25, 6.

2 1 WIIA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US t
poets of the Veda too, and, still more, the later Vedan-
tic philosopher, had a clear insight that it was so.
Only let us be careful in the use of that phrase
" it is a mere name." No name is a mere name.
Every name was originally meant for something only ;

it often failed to express what it was meant to express,

and then became a weak or an empty name, or what

we call " a mere name." So it was with these names
of the Vedic gods. They were all meant to express the
Beyond, the Invisible behind the Visible, the Infinite
within the Finite, the Supernatural above the Natural,
the Divine, omnipresent, and omnipotent. They failed
in expressing what, by its very nature, must always
remain inexpressible. But that Inexpressible itself re-
mained, and in spite of all these failures, it never suc-
cumbed, or vanished from the mind of the ancient
thinkers and poets, but always called for new and better
names, nay them even now, and will
calls for call for
them to the very end of man's existence upon earth.
 btha anb bthanta.

I DO not wonder that I should have been asked by

some of my hearers to devote part of my last lecture
to answering the question, how the Vedic literature
could have been composed and preserved, if writing
was unknown in India before 500 b. c, while the
hymns of the Rig-veda are said to date from 1500 B.C.

Classical scholars naturally ask what is the date of

our oldest MSS. of the Rig-veda, and what is the
evidence on which so high an antiquity is assigned
to its contents. I shall try to answer this question
as well as I can, and I shall begin with a humble
confession that the oldest MSS. of the Rig-veda,
known to us at the present, date not from 1500 b. c,
but from about 1500 a.d.
We have therefore a gap of three thousand years,
which it will require a strong arch of argument to
bridge over.
But that is not all.

You may know how, in the beginning of .this cen»

tury, when the age of the Homeric poems was dis-
cussed, a German scholar, Frederick August Wolf,
asked two momentous questions :

I. At what time did the Greeks first become

acquainted with the alphabet and use it for inscrip-
214 ^^^^ ^ ^^^ INDIA TEA CH US f
tions on public monuments, coins, shields, and for
?*
contracts, both pubhc and private
2. At what time did the Greeks first
think of using
writing for literary purposes, and what materials did
they employ for that purpose ?
These two questions and the answers they elicited
threw quite a new light on the nebulous fi^riods of
Greek literature. A fact more firmly established
than any other in the ancient history of Greece is
that the lonians learnt the alphabet from the
Phenicians. The lonians always called their letters
Phenician letters,! and the very name of Alphabet
was a Phenician word. We
can well understand
that the Phenicians should have taught the lonians
in Asia Minor a knowledge of the alphabet, partly
for commercial purposes, i. e. for making contracts,
partly for enabling them, to use those useful little

sheets, called Periphis or Circumnavigations, which

at that time were as precious to sailors as
maps
were to the adventurous seamen of the middle ages.
But from that to a written Hterature, in our sense
of the word, there is still a wide step. It is well

known Germans, particularly in the North,

that the
had their Runes for inscriptions on tombs, goblets,
pubUc monuments, but not for literary purposes. %
Even if a few lonians at Miletus and other centres
of poUtical and commercial life acquired the art of

* the early use of letters for public inscriptions, see Haymaii,

On
Journal of Fhilology, 1879, PP- ^i, 142, 150; Hicks, Manual
of

Greek Historical Inscriptions, pp. i seqq.

Herod, (v.
t says : " I saw Phenician letters on certain
59)
tripods in a temple of the Israenian Apollo at Thebes in Boeotia, the

most of them like the Ionian letters."

X Munch, Die Norisch

Germanischen Volker, p. 240.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 215

writing, where could they find writing materials ? and,

still more important, where could they find readers ?

The lonians, when they began to write, had to be satis-

fied with a hide or pieces of leather, which they called
diphthera, and until that was brought to the perfection
of vellum or parchment, the occupation of an author
cannot have been very agreeable.*
So far as we know at present the lonians began to
write about the middle of the sixth century b. c. and, ;

whatever may have been said to the contrary. Wolf's

dictum stills holds good* that with them the beginning
of a written literature was the same as the beginning
of prose writing.
Writing at that time was an effort, and such an
effort was made for some great purpose only. Hence
the first written skins were what we should call
Murray's Handbooks, called Periegesis or Periodos
or, if treating of sea- voyages, Periplus, that is, guide-
books, books to lead travellers round a country
or round a town. Connected with these itineraries
were the accounts of the foundations of cities, the
Ktisis. Such books existed in Asia Minor during
the sixth and and their writers were
fifth centuries,
called by a general term, Logogj^aphi, or Xoyiot or
XoyoTtoioi as opposed to aoidoi, the poets. They
were the forerunners of the Greek historians, and
Herodotus (444 B.C.), the so-called father of history,
made frequent use of their works.
* Herod, (v. 58) says : " The lonians from of old call
, because once, in default of the former, they used to employ
the latter. And even down to my own time, many of the barbarians
write on such diphtherae."
+ Hekatfeos and Kadmos of Miletos (520 b. c), Charon of
Lampsakos (504 B.C.), Xanthos the Lydian (463B.C.), Pherekyde«|
of I^eros (4S0 B, c), I^ellanikos of Mitylene (450 b, c), etQr
2 Q WHA T CAN INDIA TEA CH US 9
The whole of this incipient literary activity be-
longed to Asia Minor. From "
Guides through towns
and countries," literature seems to have spread at an
early time to Guides through life, or philosophical
dicta, such as are ascribed to Anaximander the
Ionian (610-547 and Pherekydes the Syrian
B. c. *),

(540 B. c). These names carry us into the broad day-

light of history, for Anaximander was the teacher of
Anaximenes, Anaximenes of Anaxagoras, and Anaxa-
goras of Perikles. At that time writing was a recog-
nized art, and its cultivation had been rendered pos-
sible chiefly through trade with Egypt and the impor-
tation oipapyros. In the time of ^schylos (500 B.C.)
the idea of writing had become so familiar that he could
use it again and again in poetical metaphors, f and
there seems little reason why we should doubt that both
Peisistratos (528 B.C.) and Polykrates of Samos (523
B.C.) were among the first collectors of Greek manu-,

scripts.
In this manner the simple questions asked by Wolf
helped to reduce the history of ancient Greek litera-

ture to some kind of order, particularly with reference

to its first beginnings.
would therefore seem but reasonable that the
It
two first questions to be asked by the students of
Sanskrit literature should have been :

1. At what time did the people of India become ac-

quainted with an alphabet ?

2. At what time did they first use such alphabet for

literary purposes ?

Curiously enough, however, these questions re-

* Lewis, Astronomy, p. 92.

t Se? Hayman, Journal of Fhilology, 1879, P* I39«
 VEDA AND VEDA NTA. 217

mained in abeyance for a long time, and, as a

consequence, it was impossible to introduce even the
first elements of order into the chaos of ancient Sans-
krit literature.*
I can here state a few facts only. There are no in-

scriptions to be found anywhere in India before the

middle of the third century B.C. These inscriptions
are Buddhist, put up during the reign of Ai-oka, the
grandson of iTandragupta, who was the contemporary
of Seleucus, and at whose court in Patalibothra Me-
gasthenes lived as ambassador of Seleucus. Here, as
you see, we are on historical ground. In fact, there is

little^ doubt that Ajoka, the king who put up these in-
scriptions in several parts of his vast kingdom, reigned
from 259-222 B. c.

These inscriptions are written two alphabets

in
one written from right to left, and clearly derived from
an Aramaean, that is, a Semitic alphabet ; the other
written from left to right, and clearly an adaptation
and an artificial or systematic adaptation, of a Semitic
alphabet to the requirements of an Indian language.
That second alphabet became the source of all Indian
alphabets, and of many alphabets carried chiefly by
Buddhist teachers far beyond the limits of India,
though it is possible that the earliest Tamil alphabet
may have been directly derived from the same Semi-
tic source which supplied both the dextrorsttm and the

sinistrorsum alphabets of India.

Here then we have the first fact, viz. that writing,
even for monumental purposes, was unknown iji India
before the third century B.C.

* See M. M., History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, pp. 497

seqq., " On the Introduction of Writing in India."
2i8 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1

But writing for commercial purposes was known

in India before that time. Megasthenes was no
douBt quite right when he said that the Indians did
not know were not written,
letters,* that their laws
and that they administered justice from memory.
But Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great,
who sailed down the Indus (325 B.C.), and was therefore
brought in contact with the merchants frequenting
the maritime stations of India, was probably equally
right in declaring that " the Indians wrote letters on
cotton that had been well beaten together." These were
no doubt commercial documents, contracts, it may be,
with Phenician or Egyptian captains, and they Avould
prove nothing as to the existence in India at that
time of what we mean by a written literature. In
fact, Nearchus himself affirms what Megasthenes said
after him, namely that "the laws of the sophists in
India were not written." If, at the same time, the

Greek travellers in India speak of mile-stones, and

of cattle marked by the Indians with various signs
and also with numbers, all this would perfectly agree
with what we know from other sources, that though
the art of writing may have reached India before the
time of Alexander's conquest, its employment for
literary purposes cannot date from a much earlier time.
Here then we are brought face to face with a most
startling fact. Writing was unknown in India before
the fourth century before Christ, and yet we are
asked to believe that the Vedic literature in its three
well-defined periods, the Mantra, Brahma;/a, and
Sutra periods, goes back to at least a thousand years
before our era.
* M. M., History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 515.
 VEDA AND VEDA NTA. 219

Now the Rig-veda alone, which contains a collec-

tion of ten books of hymns addressed to various

1017 (1028) poems, 10,580 verses,

deities, consists of
and about 153,826 words/'^ How were these poems
—
composed for they are composed in very perfect
—
metre and how, after having been composed, were
they handed down from 1500 before Christ to 1500
after Christ, the time to which most of our best
Sanskrit MSS. belong?
E^itwely by menioiy. This may sound startling,
but — what will sound still more
and yet
startling,
is a fact that can easily be ascertained by anybody

—
who doubts it at the present moment, if every
MS. of the Rig-veda were lost, we should be able to
—
recover the whole of it from the memory of the
6"rotriyas in India. These native students learn the
Veda by heart, and they learn it from the mouth of
their Guru, never from a MS., still less from my
printed edition, —
and after a time they teach it again
to their pupils.
I have had such students in my room at Oxford,
who not only could repeat these hymns, but who
repeated them with the proper accents (for the Vedic
Sanskrit has accents like Greek), nay who, when
looking through my printed edition of the Rig-veda,
could point out a misprint without the shghtest hesi-
tation.
I can tell you more. There are hardly any various
readings in our MSS. of the Rig-veda, but various
schools in India have their own readings of certain
passages, and they hand down those readings with
great care. So, instead of collating MSS., as we do
* M. M., riib])ert Lectures, p 153.
2 .? o ^VHA r CAN INDIA TEA CH US 9
in Greek and Latin, I have asked some friends of
mine to collate those Vedic students, who carry the ir
own Rig-veda in their m.emory, and to let me have
the various readings from these living authorities.
Here then we are not dealing with theories, but
with which anybody may verify. The whole
facts, of
the Rig-veda, and a great deal more, still exists at
the present moment in the oral tradition of a number
of scholars who, if they liked, could write down every
letter, and every accent, exactlv as we find them in
our old MSS.
Of course, this learning by heart is carried on
under a strict disciphne ; it is, in fact, considered as
a sacred duty. A native friend of mine, himself a
very distinguished Vedic scholar, tells me that a boy,
who is to be brought up as a student of the Rig-
veda, has to spend about eight years in the house
of his teacher. He has to learn ten books : first,

the hymns of the Rig-veda ; then a prose treatise

on sacrifices, called the Brahma;/a ; then the so-

called Forest-book or Ara;23^aka ; then the rules on

domestic ceremonies ; and lastly, six treatises on pro-
.nunciation, grammar, etymology, metre, astronomy,
and ceremonial.
These ten books it has been calculated contain
nearly 30,000 lines, each line reckoned as thirty-two
syllables.
A pupil studies every day, during the eight years
of his theological apprenticeship, except on the holi-

days, which are called " non-reading days." There

being 360 days in a lunar year, the eight years would
give him 2880
Deduct from this 384 holidays,
days.
and you get 2496 working days during the eight
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 221

years. you divide the number of lines, 30,000, by

If

the number of working days, you get about twelve

lines to be learnt each day, though much time is
taken up, in addition, for practising and rehearsing
what has been learnt before.
Now though
this is the state of things at present,
I doubt whether it will last much longer, and I
always impress on my friends in India, and therefore
impress on those also who will soon be settled as
Civil Servants in India, the duty of trying to learn
all that can still be learnt from those living libra-

ries. Much ancient Sanskrit lore will be lost for

ever when that race of .SVotriyas becomes extinct.
But now let us look back. About a thousand years
ago a Chinese, of the name of I-tsing, a Buddhist,
went to India to learn Sanskrit, in order to be able
to translate some of the sacred books of his own.
religion,which were originally written in Sanskrit,
into Chinese. He left China in 671, arrived at
Tamralipti in India in 673, and went to the great
College and Monastery of Nalanda, where he studied
Sanskrit. He returned to China in 695, and died
in 703.*
In one of his works which we still possess in
Chinese, he gives an account of what he saw in India,
not only among his own co-religionists, the Buddhists,
but likewise among the Brahmans.f
Of the Buddhist priests he says that after they
have learnt to recite the five and the ten precepts,

* See my article on the date of the Kaxika in the Indian Anti-

quary, 1880, p 305.
t The translation of the most important passages in I-tsing's
work was made for me by one of my Japanese pupils, K. Kasawara,
222 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1

they are taught the 400 hymns of Matr/yfeta, and

afterward the 150 hymns of the same poet. When
they are able to recite these, they begin the study of
the Sutras of their Sacred Canon. They also learn
by heart the (^atakamala*, which gives an account of
Buddha in former states of existence. Speaking of
what he calls the islands of the Southern Sea, which
he visited after leaving India, I-tsing says " There ;

are more then ten islands in the South Sea. There

both priests and laymen recite the 6^atakamala, as
they recite the hymns mentioned before ; but it has
not yet been translated into Chinese."
One of these stories, he proceeds to say, was versi-
fiedby a king (iTie-zhih) and set to music, and was
performed before the public with a band and^dancing
— evidently a Buddhist mystery play.
I-tsing then gives a short account of the system of
education. Children, he says, learn the forty-nine
letters, and the 10,000 compound letters when they
are six years old, and generally finish them in half a
year. This corresponds to about 300 verses, each
jloka of thirty-two syllables. It was originally
taught b}^ Mahei-vara. At eight years, children begin
to learn the grammar of Pa/ani, and know it after
about eight months. It consists of 1000 ^lokas, called
Sutras.
Then follows the list of roots (dhatu) and the three
appendices (khila), consisting again of 1000 ^lokas.
Boys begin the three appendices when they are ten
years old, and finish them in three years.

* See Bunyiu Nanjio's Catalogue of the Chinese Tripi/aka, p. 372^

where Aryaj-ura, who must have lived before 434 A.D. is meutinned ,

8S the author of t lie (7at^kamalai

 VEDA AND VEDA NTA. 22?

When they have reached the age of fifteen, they

begin to study a commentary on the grammar (Sutra)
and spend five years on learning it. And here I-tsing
gives the following advice to his countrymen, many
of whom came to India to learn Sanskrit, but seem
to have learnt it very imperfectly. " If men of China,"
he writes, " go to India, wishing to study there, they
should first of all learn these grammatical works, and
than only other subjects ; if not, they will merely
waste their labor. These works should be learn-t

by heart. But this is suited for men of high quality

only. . They should study hard day and night,
. .

without letting a moment pass for idle repose. They

should be like Confucius, through whose hard study
the binding of his Yih-king was three times cut
asunder, being worn away and like Sui-shih, who ;

used to read a book repeatedly one hundred times."

Then follows a remark, more intelligible in Chinese
then in English " The hairs of a bull are counted by
:

thousands, the horn of a unicorn is only one."

I-tsing then speaks of the high degree of perfection
to which the memory of these students attained, both
among Buddhists and heretics. Such men," he ''

says, "could commit to memory the contents of two

volumes learning them only once."
And then turning to the heretics, or what we
should call the orthodox Brahmans, he says :" The
Brahma;^as are regarded throughout the five divisions
of India as the most respectable. They do not walk
with the other three castes, and other mixed classes
of people are stillfrom them.
further dissociated
They revere their Scriptures, the four Vedas, con-
taining about 100,000 verses. The Vedas are . . .
224 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1

handed down from mouth to mouth, not written on

paper. There are in every generation some intelU-
gent Brahman s who can recite those 100,000 verses.
... I myself saw such men."
Here then we have an eye-witness who, in the
seventh century after Christ, visited India, learned
Sanskrit, and spent about twenty years in different
—
monasteries a man who had no theories of his own
about oral tradition, but, who, on the contrary, as
coming from China, was quite familiar with the idea of
a written, nay, of a printed literature and yet what
:
—
does he say ? The Vedas are not written on paper,
'*

but handed down from mouth to mouth."

Now, do not quite agree here with I-tsing. At
I

all events, we must not conclude from what he says

that there existed no Sanskrit MSS. at all during his

time. We know they existed. We know that in the
first century of our era Sanskrit MSS. were carried
from India China and translated there.
to Most
likely therefore there were MSS. of the Veda also in
existence. But I-tsing, for all that, was right in sup-
posing that these MSS. were not allowed to be used
by students, and that they had always to learn the
Veda by heart and from the mouth of a properly qual-
ified teacher. The very fact that in the later law-
books severe punishments are threatened against per-
sons who copy the Veda or learn it from a MS. shows
that MSS. existed, and that their existence interfered
seriously with the ancient privileges of the Brahmans,
as the only legitimate teachers of their sacred scrip-
tures.
If now, after having heard this account of I-tsing,

we go back for about another thousand years, we shall

 VEDA AND VEDANTA. ^25

feel less sceptical in accepting the evidence which we

find in the so-called Pratii-^khyas, that is, collections
of rules which, so far as we know at present, go back
to the fifth century before our era, and which tell us
almost exactly the same as what we can see in India
at the present moment, namely that the education of
children of the three twice-born castes, the Brahmanas,
Kshatriyas, and Vai^-yas, consisted in their passing at
least eight years in the house of a Guru, and learning
by heart the ancient Vedic hymns.
The art of teaching had even at that early time
been reduced to a perfect system, and at that time
certainly there is not the slightest trace of anything,
such as a book, or skin, or parchment, a sheet of
paper, pen or ink, being known even by name to the
people of India; while every expression connected
with what we should call literature, points to a litera-
ture (we cannot help using that word) existing in
memory only, and being handed down with the most
scrupulous care by means of oral tradition.
I had to enter into these details because I know that,
with our ideas of literature,
it requires an effort to

imagine the bare possibility of a large amount of

poetry, and still more any but a
of prose, existing in
written form. And yet here too we only see what
we see elsewhere, namely that man, before the great
discoveries of civilization were made, was able by
greater individual efforts to achieve what to us, accus-
tomed to easier contrivances, seems almost impossible.
So-called savages were able to chip flints, to get fire
by rubbing sticks of wood, w^hich baflfles our handiest
workmen. Are we to suppose that, if they wished to
preserve some songs which, as they believed, had
226 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

once secured tliem the favor of their gods, had

brought rain from heaven, or led them on to victory,
they would have found no means of doing so ? We
have only to read such accounts as, for instance, Mr.
William Wyatt Gill has given us in his " Historical
Sketches of Savage Life in Polynesia," ^ to see how
anxious even savages are to preserve the records of
their ancient heroes, kings, and gods, particularly
when the dignity or nobility of certain families de-
pends on these songs, or when they contained what
might be called the title-deeds to large estates. And
that the Vedic Indians were not the only savages of
antiquity who discovered the means of perserving a
large literature by means of oral tradition, we may
learn from Caesar, f not a very credulous witness, who
tells us that the " Druids were said to know a large

number of verses by heart ; that some of them spent

twenty years in learning them, and that they con-
sidered it wrong
commit them to writing
to ''
—exactly
the same story which we hear in India.

We must return once more to the question of

dates. We have traced the existence of the Veda,
as handed down by oral from our days
tradition,
to the days of I-tsing in the seventh century after
Christ, and again to the period of the Pratij'akhyas>
in the fifth century before Christ.
In that fifth century b. c._ took place the rise of
Buddhism, a religion built up on the ruins of the
Vedic religion, and founded, so to say, on the denial
* Wellington 1880.

"t
De Bello Gall, vi 14 ; History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,
p. 506.
 VEDA AND VEDA NTA. 227

of the divine authority ascribed to the Veda by all

orthodox Brahmans.
Whatever exists therefore of Vedic literature must
be accommodated within the centuries preceding the
rise of Buddhism, and if I tell you that there are
three periods of Vedic literature to be accommodated,
the third presupposing the second, and the second the
and that even that first period presents us with
first,

a collection, and a systematic collection of Vedic

hymns, I think you will agree with me that it is
from no desire for an extreme antiquity, but simply
from a respect for facts, that students of the Veda
have come to the conclusion that these hymns, of
which the MSS. do not carry us back beyond the
fifteenth century after Christ, took their origin in the
fifteenth century before Christ.

One fact I must mention once more, because I

think it may carry conviction even against the

stoutest scepticism.
I mentioned that the earliest inscriptions disco-
vered in India belong to the reign of King Aj-oka, the
grandson of Kandragupta, who reigned from 259-222
before Christ. What is the language of those in-
scriptions t Is it the Sanskrit of the Vedic hymns .?

Certainly not. Is it the later Sanskrit of the Brah-

ma;^as and Sutras } Certainly not. These inscriptions
are written in the local dialects as then spoken in India,
and these local dialects differ from the grammatical
Sanskrit about as much as Italian does from Latin.
What follows from this } First, that the archaic
Sanskrit of the Veda had ceased to be spoken before
the third century b. c. Secondly, that even the later
2 28 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US f

grammatical Sanskrit was no longer spoken and un-

derstood by the people at large that Sanskrit there-
;

fore had ceased, nay, we may say, had long ceased to

be the spoken language of the country when Buddhism
arose, and that therefore the youth aud manhood of
the ancient Vedic language lie far beyond the period
that gave birth to the teaching of Buddha, who,
though he may have known Sanskrit, and even Vedic
Sanskrit, insisted again and again on the duty that his
disciples should preach his doctrines in the language
of the people whom they wished to benefit.

And now, when the time allotted to me is nearly

at an end, I find, as it always happens, that I have
not been able to say one half of what I hoped to say
as to the lessons to be learnt by us in India, even
with regard to this one branch of human knowledge
only, the study of the origin of religion. I hope,
however, I may have succeeded in showing you the
entirely new aspect which the old problem of the
theogony, or the origin and growth of the Devas or gods
assumes from the light thrown upon it by the Veda.
Instead of positive theories, we now have positive
facts, such as you look for in vain anywhere else and
;

though there is still a considerable interval between

the Devas of the Veda, even in their highest form,
and such concepts as Zeus, Apollon and Athene, yet
the chief riddle is solved, and we know now at last
what stuff the gods of the ancient world were made of.
But this theogonic process is but one side of the
ancient Vedic religion, and there are two other sides
of at least the same importance and of even a deeper
interest to us.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 22,9

There arc in fact three reh'gions in the Veda, or, if

I may say so, three naves in one great temple, reared, as

itwere before our eyes by poets, prophets, and philo-
sophers. Here, too, we can watch the work and the
workmen. We have not to deal with hard formulas only,
with unintelligible ceremonies, or petrified fetishes.
We can see how the human mind arrives b;^ a per-
fectly rational process at all its later irrationalities.
This iswhat distinguishes the Veda from all other
Sacred Books. Much, no doubt, in the Veda also,
and in the Vedic ceremonial, is already old and unin-
telligible, hard and petrified. But in many cases the
development of names and concepts, their transition
from the natural to the supernatural, from the indi-
vidual to the general, is still going on, and it is for
that very reason that we find it so difficult, nay almost
impossible, to translate the growing thoughts of the
Veda into the full-grown and more than full-grown
language of our time.
Let us take one of the oldest words for god in the
Veda, such asdeva, the Latin dens. The dictionaries
tell you that d e va means god and gods, and so, no

doubt, it does. But if we always translated d eva in

the Vedic hymns by god, we should not be translating,
but completely transforming the thoughts of the Vedic
poets. do not mean only that our idea of God is
I

totally different from the idea that was intended to

be expressed by d e v a but even the Greek and
;

Roman concept of gods would be totally inadequate

to convey the thoughts imbedded in the Vedic d e v a.
D e V a meant, originally, bright, and nothing else,
Meaning bright, it was constantly used of the sky,
the starS; the sun, the dawn, the day, the spring, the
230 J^^A ^ CAN INDIA TEA CM US f
rivers, the earth and when a poet wished to speak of
;

all of these by one and the same word —

by what we
should call a general term he called—them all D e va s.

When that had been done D e v a did no longer mean

" the Bright ones," but the name comprehended all

the qualities which the sky and the sun and the
dawn shared in common, excluding only those that
were peculiar to each.
Here you see how, by the simplest process, the
D e V as, the bright ones, might become and did become
the D e va s, the heavenly, the kind, the powerful, the
invisible, the immortal —and, in the end, something
very like the^£o/(or Greeks and Romans.
dii) of

In this way one Beyond, the Beyond of Nature,

was built up in the ancient religion of the Veda, and
peopled with Devas, and Asuras, and Vasus, and
Adityas all names for the bright solar, celestial, diur-
nal, and vernal powers of nature, without altogether

excluding, however, even the dark and unfriendly

powers, those of the night, of the dark clouds, or of
winter, capable of mischief, but always destined in
the end to succumb to the valor and strength of their
bright antagonists.

We now come second nave of the Vedic

to the
temple, the second Beyond that was dimly perceived,
and grasped and named by the ancient Rishis, namely
the world of the Departed Spirits.
There was in India, as elsewhere, another very
early faith, springing up naturally in the hearts of
the people, that their fathers and mothers, when they
departed this life, departed to a Beyond, wherever it
might be, either in the East from whence all the bright
 VEDA AND VEDA NTA, ^31

bevas seemed to come, or more commonly in the West,

the land to which they seemed to go, called in the
Veda the realm of Yama or the setting sun. The idea
that beings which once had been, could ever cease to
be, had not yet entered their minds and from the ;

belief that their fathers existed somewhere, though

they could see them no more, there arose the behef in
another Beyond, and the germs of another religion.
Nor was the actual power of the fathers quite im-
perceptible or extinct even after their death. Their
presence continued to be felt in the ancient laws and
customs of the family, mostwhich rested on their
of
will and their authority. While their fathers were
alive and strong, their will was law and when, after
;

their death, doubts or disputes arose on points of law

or custom, it was but natural that the memory and the
authority of the fathers should be appealed to to settle
—
such points that the law should still be their will.
Thus Manu says {IV. 178): "On the path on which his
fathers and grandfathers have walked, on that path of
good men let him walk, and he will not go wrong.*'
In the same manner then in which, out of the
bright powers of nature, the Devas or gods had arisen,
there rose out of predicates shared in common by the
departed, such as pitns, father^ preta, gone away,
another general concept, what we should call Manes,
the kind ones. Ancestors, Shades, Spirits or Ghosts,
whose worship was nowhere more fully developed
than in India. That common name, Pitm ox Fathers,
gradually attracted towards itself all that the fathers
shared in common. It came to mean not only fathers^
but invisible, kind, powerful, immortal, heavenly
beings, and we can watch in the Veda, better perhaps
232 WBAT CAN INDIA TEACH USf

than anywhere else, the inevitable, yet most touching

metamorphosis' of ancient thought, —the love of the
child for father and mother becoming transfigured into
an instinctive belief in the immortality of the soul.
It is strange, and really more than strange, that

not only should this important and prominent side of

the ancient religion of the Hindus have been ignored,
but that of late its very existence should have been
doubted. I feel obliged, therefore, to add a few words
in support of what have said just now of the
I

supreme importance of this belief in and this worship

of ancestral spirits in India from the most ancient to
the most modern times. Mr. Herbert Spencer, who
has done so much in calling attention to ancestor-
worship as a natural ingredient of religion among all

savage nations, declares in the most emphatic man-

ner,* " that he has seen it implied, that he has heard
it and that he now has it before him
in conversation,
in print, that no Indo-European or Semitic nation, so
far as we know, seems to have made a religion of the
worship of the dead." I do not doubt his words, but
I think that on so important a point, Mr. Herbert

Spencer ought to have named his authorities. It

seems to me almost impossible that anybody who has
ever opened a book"on India should have made such a
statement. There are hymns in the Rig-veda ad-
dressed to the Fathers. There are full descriptions of
the worship due to the Fathers in the Brahma^as ano
Sutras. The epic poems, the law books, the Pura/^as,
all are brimful of allusions to ancestral offerings. The
whole social fabric of India, with its laws of inheritance

* Principles of Sociology, p. 313.

 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 2^3

and marriage on a belief in the Manes, and

*, rests —
yet we are told that no Indo-European nation seems
to have made a religion of the worship of the dead.
The Persians had their Fravashis, the Greeks their
dai}j,ov£io\: rather their^foz 7tarp(S)Oi2iXid thoir siScoXa^

iffOXoiy eTtixOovioi, g)vXaK8? Ovrjrwv avdpchitQDv

oi pa cpv\aG6ovaiv re 6iKa<; nai (TjfrAz^a: spya,
rjepa icrffa/j-svoi Ttavrrj cpoitc^vrsG in aiavy
TcXovrodorai
j5t;^>lo? ^z^Sfpa^ (Hesiodi Opera et Dies, vv. 122-126)
while among the Romans the Lares familiares and
the Divi Manes were worshipped more zealously than
any other gods.f Manu goes so far as to tell us in
one place (III. 203) " An oblation by Brahmans to
:

their ancestors transcends an oblation to the deities " :

and yet we are told that no Indo-European nation

seems to have made a religion of the worship of the
dead.
Such things ought really not to be, if there is to
be any progress in historical research, and I cannot
help thinking that what Mr. Herbert Spencer meant
was probably no more than that some scholars did not
admit that the worship of the dead formed the whole
of the religion of any Indo-European nations.
of -the
That, no doubt, is perfectly true, but it would be

equally true, I believe, of almost any other religion.

And on this point again the students of anthropology
* " The Hindu Law of Inheritance is based upon the Hindu reli-
gion, and we must be cautious that in administrating Hindu law we
do not, by acting upon our notions derived from English law, inad-
vertently wound ©r offend th* religious feelings of those who may be
affected by our iedsions." Bengal Law Reports, i®3.
t Cdoer©, Ife Leg, 9, zz, *' Decorum maniom jura sancta'sunt©
n OS let© datos divos habento.
234 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1
will learn more, I believe, from the Veda than from
any other book.
In the Veda the Y\X.rh, or fathers, are invoked to-
gether with the Devas, or gods, but they are not con-
founded with them. The Devas never become Pitns,
and though such adjectives as d e v a are sometimes
applied to the Pitr/s, and they are raised to the rank
of the older classes of Devas (Manu III. 192, 284,
Ya^;7avalkya I. 268), itjs easy to see that the Pitns
and Devas had each their independent origin, and
that they represent two totally distinct phases of the
human mind in the creation of its objects of worship.
This is a lesson which ought never to be forgotten.
Weread in the Rig-veda, VI. 52,4: "May the
rising Dawns protect me, may the flowing Rivers
protect me, may the firm Mountains protect me, may
the Fathers protect me at this invocation of the
gods." Here nothing can be clearer than the separate
existence of the Fathers, apart from the Dawns, the
Rivers, and the Mountains, though they are included
in one common Devahuti, or invocation of the gods.
We must distinguish, however, from the very first,
between two classes, or rather between two concepts
of Fathers, the one comprising the' distant, half-for-
gotten, and almost mythical ancestors of certain
families or of what would have been to the poets of .

the Veda, the whole human race, the other consisting

of the fathers who had but lately departed, and who
were still, as it were, personally remembered and
revered.
The old ancestors in general approach more nearly
to the gads. They are often represented as having
gone to the abode of Yama, the ruler of the departed.
 VEDA AND VEDA NTA. 235

and to live there in company with some of the Devas

(Rig-veda VII. 76, 4, devana?/^ sadhamada/^ ; Rig-veda
X. 16, I, devana;;^ vai-ani>^).

We sometimes read of the great-grandfathers being

in heaven, the grandfathers in the sky, the fathers on
the earth, the first in company with the Adityas, the
second with the Rudras, the last with the Vasus.
All these are individual poetical conceptions.*
Yama himself is sometimes invoked as if he were
one of the Fathers, the first of mortals that died or
that trod the path of the Fathers (the pitrzya/^a, X.
2. 7) leading to the common sunset in the West.f
Still his real Deva-like nature is never completely
lost, and, as the god of the setting sun, he is indeed
the leader of the Fathers, but not one of the Fathers
himself.J
Many of the benefits which
enjoyed on earthmen
were referred to the Fathers, as having first been
procured and first enjoyed by them. They performed
the first sacrifices, and secured the benefits arising
from them. Even the great events in nature, such
as the rising of the sun, the light of the day and the
darkness of the night, were sometimes referred to
them and they were praised for having broken open the
dark stable of the morning and having brought out
the cows, that is, the days (X. 6Z, ii)§. They were
* See Atharva-veda XVIII. 2, 49.
t Rig-veda X. 14, i 2.— He is called Vaivasvata, the solar (X.
58, I ), and even the son of Vivasvat, (X. 14, 5). In a later phase
of religious thought Yama is conceived as the first man (Atharva-
veda XVIII. 3, 13, as compared with Rig-veda X. 14, i).
X Rig-veda X. 14.
§ In the Avesta many of these things are done by Ahura Mazda with
the* help of the Fravashis.
236 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US 1

even praised for having adorned the night with stars,

while in later writings the stars are said to be the
lights of the good people who have entered into
heaven"*. Similar ideas, we know, prevailed among
the ancient Persians, Greeks, and Romans. The
Fathers are called in the Veda truthful (satya), wise
(suvidatra), righteous (n'tavat), poets (kav/), leaders
(pathikr/t), and one most frequent epithets
of their
is somyr, delighting in Soma, Soma being the
ancient intoxicating beverage of the Vedic i^^'shis,
which was believed to bestow immortalityt, but
which had been lost, or at all events had become
difficult to obtain by the Aryans, after their migration

into the Punjab. t

'
The families of the Bhngus, the Angiras, the Athar-
vans§ all have their Pitns or Fathers, who are invoked
to sit down on the grass and to accept the offerings
placed there for them. Even the name of Pitr/yagna,
sacrifice of the Fathers, occurs already in the hymns
of the Rig-veda.||
The following is one of the hymns of the Rig-veda
by which those ancient Fathers were invited to come
to their sacrifice (Rig-veda X. 15) ; —\
1. "May the Soma-loving Fathers, the lowest, the
highest, and the middle, arise. May the gentle and
righteous Fathers who have come to life (again), pro-

tect us in these invocations !

2. " May this salutation be for the Fathers to-day,

* See iS'atapatha Brahma^a I. 9, 3, 10 ; VI. 5, 4, 8.

t Rig-veda VIII. 48, 3: "We drank Soma, we became immortaU

w© went to the light, we
gods " VIII, 48, is-
fotind tiie ;

X Rig-veda IX. 97, 39. § Ibid. X. 14, 6. H Ibid, X. 16, 10.

^ A translation considerably differing from ray own is given bv

Sarvidhikari in his Tagore Lectures for 1880, p. 34.
 VkDA AND VE^ANfA. 237

for those who have departed before or after ; whether

they now dwell in the sky above the earth, or among
the blessed people.
3.
" I invited the wise Fathers .... may they
come hither quickly, and sitting on the grass readily
partake of the pou red-out draught
- 4. " Come hither to us with your help, you Fathers
who sit on the grass ! We have prepared (.hese liba-

tions for you, accept them ! Come hither with your

most blessed protection, and give us health and
wealth without fail !

5. "The have been called

Soma-loving Fathers
hither to their dear viands which are placed on the
grass. Let them approach, let them listen, let them
bless, let them protect us !

6. " Bending your knee and sitting on my right

accept all this sacrifice. Do not hurt us, O Fathers,
for any wrong that we may have committed against
you, men as we are.

7. " When you sit down on the lap of the red dawns>
grant wealth to the generous mortal ! O Fathers,
give of your treasure to the sons of this man here, and
bestow vigor here on us !

8. " May Yama, as a friend with friends, consume

the offerings according to his wish, united with those
old Soma-loving Fathers of ours, the Vasish^/^as, who
arranged the Soma draught.
9. " Come hither, O Agni, with those wise and
truthful Fathers who like to sit down near the hearth,
who thirsted when yearning for the gods, who knew
the sacrifice, and who were strong in praise with their
songs.
10. "Come, O Agni, with those ancient fathers who
238 WHAT CAN INDIA I^EACH US 9

like to sit down near the hearth, who for ever praise
the gods, the truthful, who eat and drink our obla-
tions,making company with Indra and the gods.
11. " O Fathers, you who have been consumed by

Agni, come here, sit down on your seats, you kind

guides Eat of the offerings which we have placed
!

on the turf, and then grant us wealth and strong off-

spring !

12. "O Agni, O 6^atavadas,* at our request thou

hast carried the offerings, having first rendered them
sweet. Thou gavest them to the Fathers, and they
fed on their share. Eat also, O God, the proffered
"
oblations
13. "The Fathers who are here, and the Fathers
who are not here, those whom we
know, and those
whom we know not, thou, 6^atavedas, knowest how
many they are, accept the well-made sacrifice with
the sacrifical portions
14. " To those who, whether burnt by fire or not
burnt by fire, rejoice in their share in the midst of
heaven, grant thou, O King, that their body may take
that life which they wish for "
! t

Distinct from the worship offered to these primi-

tive ancestors, is the reverence which from an early
time was felt to be due by children to their departed
father, soon also to their grandfather, and great
grandfather. The ceremonies
which these more in
personal feelings found expression were of a more
domestic character, and allowed therefore of greater
local variety.
It would be quite impossible to give here even an
* Cf. Max Miiller, Rig-veda, transl. vol. i. p. 24. t Note K.
 V£:dA and VEDA N'Ta. 2^g

abstract only of the minute regulations which have

been preserved to us in the Brahma«as, the »Srauta,
G//hya, and SamayaMrika Sutras, the Law*books,
and a mass of latter manuals on the performance of
endless rites, all intended to honor the Departed.
Such are the minute prescriptions as to times and
seasons, as to altars and offerings, as to the number
and shape of the sacrificial vessels, as to the proper
postures of the sacrificers, and the different arrange-
ments of the vessels, that it is extremely difficult to

catch hold of what we really care for, namely, the

thoughts and intentions of those who first devised all

these intricacies. Muchbeen written on this

has
class of sacrifices by European scholars also, begin-
ning with Colebrooke's excellent essays on " The Reli-
gious Ceremonies of the Hindus," first published in
the Asiatic Researches, vol. v, Calcutta, 1798. But
when we ask the simple question, What was the
thought from whence all this outward ceremonial
sprang, and what was the natural craving of the
human heart which it seemed to satisfy, we hardly
get an intelligible answer anywhere. It is true that
^raddhas continue to be performed all over India to
the present day, but we know how widely the modern
ceremonial has diverged from the rules laid down in
the old 6'astras, and it is quite clear from the descrip-
tions given to us by recent travellers that no one can
understand the purport even of these survivals of the
old ceremonial, unless he understands Sanskrit and can
read the old Sutras. We are indeed told in full detail

how made which the Spirits were sup-

the cakes were
posed to eat, how many stalks of grass were to be used
on which they had to be offered, how long each stalk
 ^40 WirA T CAN INDIA TEA Ctt t/S f

ought to be, and in what direction it should be held.

V All the things which teach us nothing are explained
to us in abundance, but the few things which the
true scholar really cares for are passed over, as if

they had no interest to us at all, and have to be dis-

covered under heaps of rubbish.
In order to gain a little light, I think we ought to
distinguish between
1. The daily ancestral' sacrifice, the Pitr/ya^la, as
one of the five Great Sacrifices (Mahaya^/^as) ;

2. The monthly ancestral sacrifice, the Pi;/</a-pitr/-

ya^;1a, as part of the New
and Full-moon sacrifice ;

3. The funeral ceremonies on the death of a house-

holder ;

4. The Agapes, or feasts of love and charity, com-

monly called 5raddhas, which food and other
at
charitable gifts were bestowed on deserving persons
in memory of the deceased ancestors. The name of
»Sraddha belongs properly to this last class only, but it
has been transferred to the second and third class of
sacrifices also, because 5raddha formed an important
part in them.
The daily Pitr/ya^a or Ancestor- worship is one of
the five sacrifices, sometimes called the Great Sacri-
fices,*which every married man ought to perform
day by day. They are mentioned in the Gnhyasla-
tras (A^v. III. i), as Devaya^;1a, for the Devas,
Bhutaya^la, for animals etc., Pitnya^;1a, for the
Fathers, Brahmaya^-^au, for Brahman, i. e. study of
the Veda, and Manushyaya^a, for men, i. e. hospital-
ity, etc.

* -S'atapatha Brahmawa XI. 5, 6, i Taitt. Ar 11. 11, 10 ; Ajvalay-

;

ana Grihya-sfitras III. i, i ; Paraskara GrzTiya-sutras II. 9, i;

Apastamba. Dharma-sAtras, translated by Biihler, pp. 47 seq.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 241

Manu (III. 70) tells us the same, namely, that a

married man has five great religious duties to per-
form :

1. The Brahma-sacrifice, i. e. the studying and

teaching of the Veda (sometimes called Ahuta).
2.The Pitn-sacrifice, e. the offering of cakes and
i.

water to the Manes (sometimes called Prai-ita).

3. The Deva-sacrifice, e. the offering of oblations
i.

to the Gods (sometimes called Huta).

4. The Bhuta-sacrifice, i. e. the giving of food to
living creatures (sometimes called Prahuta).
5. The Manushya-sacrifice. i. e. the receiving of
guests with hospitality (sometimes called Brahmya-
huta.)*
The performance of this daily Pitnya^a seems to
have been extremely simple. The householder had
to put his sacred cord on the right shoulder, to say
" Svadha to the Fathers," and to throw the remains

of certain offerings towards the South.!

The human impulse to this sacrifice, if sacrifice it
can be called, is clear enough. The five " great sacri-
fices "
comprehended in early times the v/hole duty of
man from day to day. They were connected with his
daily meal. J When this meal was preparing, and
before he could touch it himself, he was to offer some-
thing to the Gods, a Vaij-vadeva offering §, in which
the chief deities were Agni fire. Soma the VivS-ve

Devas, Dhanvantari, a kind of Aesculapius, Kuhii

and Anumati (phases of the moon), Pra^pati, lord of

* In th« Sankabyana G^&ya (I. 5) Soa;? Faika-y^riSas areraentioue-d

called Huta, ahuta, prahuta, prMiSt

t Ajv. G-rihya-siitras I. 3. 10. | Manu III. 117-11S,
§ Manu III. 85.
2 42 ^^J'A T CAN INDIA TEA CII USf

creatures, Dydvd-pnthivt, Heaven and Earth, and Svi-

slVaknt, the on the hearth.
fire

After having thus satisfied the Gods in the four

quarters, the householder had to throw some oblations
into the open air, which were intended for animals,
and in some cases for invisible beings, ghosts and such
like. Then he was to remember the Departed, the
with some offerings but even after having done
Pit^/s, ;

thishe was not yet to begin his own repast, unless he

had also given something to strangers (atithis).
When all this had been
and when, besides,
fulfilled,

the householder, as we should say, had said his daily

prayers, or repeated what he had learnt of the Veda,
then and then only was he in harmony with the world
that surrounded him, the five Great Sacrifices had
been performed by him, and he was free from all the
sins arising from a thoughtless and selfish life.
This Pitnya^^a, as one of the five daily sacrifices,
is described in the Brahma/^as, the Gn"hya and
Samaya/^arika Sutras, and of course, in the legal
Sa;;2hit^s. Rajendralal Mitra * informs us that
" orthodox Brahmans to this day profess to observe
all these five ceremonies, but that in reality only
the offerings to and manes are strictly
the gods
observed, while the reading is completed by the
repetition of the Gayatri only, and charity and feeding
of animals are casual and uncertain."
Quite different from this simple daily ancestral
offering is the Pitr^ya^^a or Pi;2<^a-pitnya^^a,
which forms part of many of the statutable sacrifices,
and, first of all, of the New and Full-Moon sacrifice.

Here again the human motive is intelligible enough.

* Taittjriya.ra«yaka, Preface, p. 23,
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 243

It was the contemplation of the regular course of

nature, the discovery of order in the coming and
going of the heavenly bodies, the growing confidence
in some ruling power of the world which lifted man's
thoughts from his daily work to higher regions, and
filled his heart with a desire to approach these
higher powers with praise, thanksgiving, and offer-
ings. And it was such moments as the waning
at
of the moon that his thoughts would most naturally
turn to those whose had waned, whose bright
life

faces were no longer visible on earth, his fathers or

ancestors. Therefore at the very beginning of the
New-Moon we
are told in the Brahma;^as f
sacrifice,
and in the 5rauta-sutras, that a Pitr2ya^;1a, a sacri-
fice to the Fathers, has to be performed. A iTaru
or pie had to be prepared in the Dakshi^^agni, the
southern fire, and the offerings, consisting of water
and round cakes were especially dedicated
(pi^^^as),

to father, grandfather and great-grandfather, while

the wife of the sacificer, if she wished for a son, was
allowed to eat one of the cakes.
Simil?;/)' ^.cestral offerings took place during other
sacrificeb ^y, of which the New and Full-Moon sacri-
ficesform the general type.
may be quite true that these two kinds of
It

ancestral sacrifices have the same object and share

the same name, but their character is different; and
if, as has often been the case, they are mixed up
together, we lose the most important lessons which

* Masi masi vo' j-anam iti stMttk\ Gobhiliya GnTipa-sfttras, p. 1055.

t See Y\nd2c^\tri'jz.ghz.t von Dr. O. Donner, 1S70. The restriction to
three ancestors, father, grandfather, and gr^-grandfather, occurs in
the Va^asaneyi-saz^hita,. XIX. 36 — 37.
244 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us f

a study of the ancient ceremonial should teach us.

I cannot describe the difference between those two
Pitr/ya^^as more decisively than by pointing out
that the former was performed by the father of a
family, or, if we may say so, by a layman, the latter
by a regular priest, or a class of priests, selectedby
the sacrificer to act in his behalf. As the Hindus
themselves would put it, the former is a gr^'hya,
a domestic, the later a j^rauta, a priestly ceremony. *
We now come to a third class of ceremonies which
are likewise domestic and personal, but which differ
from the two preceding ceremonies by their occasional
character, I mean the funeral, as distinct from the
ancestral ceremonies. In one respect these funeral
ceremonies may represent an earlier phase of worship
than the daily and monthly ancestral sacrifices. They
lead up to them, and, as it were, prepare the de-
parted for their future dignity as Pitn's or Ances-
tors. On the other hand, the conception of Ances-
tors in general must have existed before any de-
parted person could have been raised to that rank
and I therefore preferred to describe the ancestral
sacrifices first.
Nor need I enter here very fully into the character
of the special funeral ceremonies of India. I described
them in a special paper, " On Sepulture and Sacrificial

* There however, great variety in these matters, according to dif-

is

ferent jakhas. Thus, according to the GobhiUj§.khS, Ymdz. Fiirtyagua.

is to be considered as smSxta, not as jrauta (pindz-pitriya^-nzk khalv

ssm^-MAakhtiytm nlsti) ; while others maintain that an agnimat should

perform the sm§-rta, a jr$,ut4gnimat the jrauta Pit^'iya^^a; see Gobhilt-
ya S-rihya-siitras, ^.671. On page 667 we road : anagner ajnivasyJj-
raddha, n&nvS-haryambj^iidara^ztyajaa.
 t^MDA AND VEDANTA. 24^

Customs in the Veda," nearly thirty years ago. *

Their same as that of the funeral cere-
spirit is the

monies of Greeks, Romans, Slavonic, and Teutonic

nations, and the coincidences between them all are
often most surprising.
In Vedic times the people in India both burnt and
buried their dead, and they did this with a certain
solemnity, and, after a time, according to fixed
rules. Their ideas about the status of the departed,
after their body had been burnt and their ashes
buried, varied considerably, but in the main they
seem have believed in a life to come, not very
to
different from our life on earth, and in the power of
the departed to confer blessings on their descend-
ants. It soon therefore became the interest of the
survivors to secure the favor of their departed
friends by observances and offerings which, at first
were the spontaneous manifestations of human feel-
ings, but which soon became traditional, technical, in
fact, ritual.
On the day on which the corpse had been burnt,
the relatives (samanodakas) bathed and poured out
a handful of water to the deceased, pronouncing his
name and that of his family.t At sunset they re-

turned home, and, as was but natural, they were told

to cook nothing during the and to observe
first night,
certain rules during the next day up to ten days*
according to the character of the deceased. These
were days of mourning, or, as they were afterwards
called,days of impurity, when the mourners with-
drew from contact with the world, and shrank by a
* Uber Todtenbestatlung und Opfergebrauche im Veda, in Zeit-
schrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, vol. ix, 1856,
t Ajvalayana Gr/hya-siitras IV. 4, 10.
^4^ WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH li^

natural impulse from the ordinary occupations and

pleasures of life.^

Then followed the collecting of the ashes on the

nth, 13th or 15th day of the dark half of the moon.
On returning from thence they bathed, and then
offered what was called a ^raddha to the departed.
This word 6'raddha, which meets us here for the
first time, is full of interesting lessons, if only properly
understood. First of all it should be noted that it is

absent, not only from the hymns, but, so far as we

know at present, even from the ancient Brahma/zas.
Itseems therefore a word of a more modern origin.
There is a passage in Apastamba's Dharma-sutras
which betrays, on the part of the author, a conscious-
ness of the more modern origin of the .Sraddhas : —f
Formerly men and gods lived together in this
"

world. Then the gods in reward of their sacrifices

went to heaven, but men were left behind. Those
men who perform sacrifices in the same manner as
the gods did, dwelt (after death)*with the gods and
Brahman in heaven. Now (seeing men left behind)
Manu revealed this ceremony which is designated by
the word Sraddha."
Sraddha has assumed many | meanings, and Manu,§
* Manu V. 64-65.
t Biihler, Apastamba, Sacred Books of the East, vol. ii. p. 138
also ^raddh^kalpa, p. 890. Though the 6'raddha is prescribed in
the Gobhiliya Grz'hya-sutras, IV 4, 2-3, it
. is not described there, but
in a separate treatise, the ^Sraddha-kalpa.

I
As meaning the food, jraddha occurs in JiMdhabhu^ and
similar words. As meaning the sacrificial act, it is explained,
yatraitai ^/^raddhaya diyate tad eva karma jraddhaj-abdabhidheyam.
Pretam pitrims kz. nirdii-ya bho^yaz;^ yat priyam atmana/^ jraddhaya
diyate yatra tai/^^r§,ddhamparikirtitam. Gobhiliya Gr/hya-sfitras, p.
892. We also read j-raddh^nvita/z jraddhaw kurvita, "let a man per-
form the jraddha with faith j " Gobhiliya Gr^hya-sutras, p. 1053.

§ Manu III, 82.

 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 247

for instance, uses it almost synonymously with pit? /-

y2ign3.. B'ut its original meaning seems to have been

" that which is given with iraddha or faith," i.e. charity
bestowed on deserving persons, and, more particularly,
on Brahma;zas. The gift was called sraddha, but the
act itself also was called by the same name. The word
is best explained by Naraya;^a in his commentary on

the Gnhya-sutras of Asvalayana (IV. 7), " *Sraddha is

that which is given in faith to Brahmans for the sake"
of the Fathers." *
Such most naturally and
charitable gifts flowed
abundantly at the time of a man's death, or when-
ever his memory was revived by happy or unhappy
events in a family, and hence Sraddha has become
the general name for ever so many sacred acts com-
memorative of the departed. We hear of 5raddhas
not only at funerals, but at joyous events also, when
presents were bestowed in the name of the family,
and therefore in the name of the ancestors also, on
all who had a right to that distinction.

It is a mistake therefore to look upon »Sraddhas

simply as offerings of water or cakes to the Fathers.

An offering to the Fathers was, no doubt, a symbolic
part of each *Sraddha, but its more important character
was charity bestowed in memory of the Fathers.
This, in time, gave rise to much abuse, like the
alms bestowed on the Church during the Middle
Ages, But in the beginning the motive was excellent.
It was simply a wish to benefit others, arising from
the conviction, felt more strongly in the presence of
death than at any other time, that as we can carry

* Pitr^n uddijya yad dzyate br^biria??ebhya/; j-yaddhaya X2ik /^hrM-

248 WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH us f

nothing out of this world, we ought to do as much

good as possible in the world with our worldly goods.
At *Sraddhas the Brahma?/as were said to represent
the sacrificial fire into which the gifts should be
thrown.* If we translate here Brahma/^as by priests,
we can easily understand why there should have been
in later times so strong a feeling against 5raddhas.
But priest is a very bad rendering of Brahma;2a. The
Brahma;/as were, socially and intellectually, a class of
men of high breeding. They were a recognised and,
no doubt, a most essential element in the ancient
society of India. As they lived for others, and
were excluded from most of the lucrative pursuits
of life, it was a social, and it soon became a reli-
gious duty, that they should be supported by the
community at large. Great care was taken that
the recipients of such bounty as was bestowed at
.Sraddhas should be strangers, neither friends nor
enemies, and in no way related to the family. Thus
Apastamba says " The food eaten ( at a ^Sraddha ) by
:f
persons related to the giver is a gift offered to gob_
lins. It reaches neither the Manes nor the Gods.''
A man who tried to curry favor by bestowing ^Srad-
dhika gifts, was called by an opprobrious name, a
iSraddha-mitra. %

Without denying therefore that in later times the

system of *Sraddhas may have degenerated, I think
we can perceive that it sprang from a pure source^
and, what for our present purpose is even more
important, from an intelligible source.
Let us now return to the passage in the Grihya-
* Apastamba II. 16, 3, Brahma«{is tr ilhavaniy§,rthe.
t L, c. p. 142, I Manu III. 138, 140,
 VEDA AND VEDAMTA. 249

stjtras of Asavalyana, where we met for the first

time with the name of 5raddha. * It was the >Sraddha
to be given for the sake of the Departed, after his
ashes had been collected in an urn and buried, This
xSraddha is called ekoddishta, f or, as we should say,
personal. It was meant for one person only, not for
the three ancestors, nor for all the ancestors. Its
object was in fact to raise the departed to the rank
of a Pitri, and had to be achieved by ^raddha
this
offerings continued during a whole year. This at
least is the general, and, most likely, the original
rule. Apastamba says ^raddha for a de- that the
ceased relative should be performed every day during
the year, and that after that a monthly ^Sraddha only
should be performed or none at all, that is, no more
personal 5raddha, % because the departed shares hence-
forth in the regular Prava;^a-i-raddhas. § Sankayana
says the same, namely that the personal ^raddhalasts
||

for a year, and that then " the Fourth" is dropped, i. e.

the great-grandfather was dropped, the grandfather
became the great-grandfather, the father the grand-
father, while the lately Departed occupied the^father's
place among the three principal Pitris. ^ This was

* Ajv. Gr/hya-s\ltras IV. 5, 8.

§ It is discribed as a vSkri^x of the Parvawa-jraddha in Gobhiliya

Grihya-sutras, p. loii.
X One of the differences between the acts before and after the
Sapi«^ikara«a is noted by Salankayana :
— Sapi;zi/ikara«am y§.vad
rz^udarbhai/^ pitrikriya Sapi«^ikara«ad ardhvawz divigu«air vidhivad
bhavet. Gobhiliya Gr/hya-sutras, p, 930.
§ Gobhiliya Gr/hya-sutras, p. 1023.
II
G?'/hya-sntras, ed. Oldenberg, p. Z'^.
^ A pratyabdikam ekoddish/am on the annivtrsary of the deceased
is mentienad by Gobhiliya, I. c. p. loii.
250 ^f^A T CAN INDIA TMACB US f
called the Sapi«^ikara;^a, i. e. the elevating of the
departed to the rank of an ancestor.
There are here, as elsewhere, many exceptions. Go-
bhiliya allows six months instead of a year, or even a
Tripaksha,* i. e. three half-months; and lastly, any
auspicious event (vriddhi) may become the occasion
of the Sapi;^</Jkara;2a.t '

The full number

of 5raddhas necessary for the
Sapindana sometimes given as sixteen, viz. the
is

first, then one in each of the twelve months, then two

semestral ones, and lastly the Sapindana. But here
too much variety is allowed, though, if the Sapindana
takes place before the end of the year, the number
of sixteen 5raddhas has still to be made up.J
When the ^raddha is offered on account of an
auspicious event, such as a birth or a marriage, the
fathers invoked are not the father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather, who are sometimes called ai'ru-
mukha, with tearful faces, but the ancestors before
them, and they are called nandimukha, or joyful.§
Colebrooke,|| to whom we owe an excellent de-
scription of what a ^Sraddha is in tnodern times,
took evidently the same view. "The first set of
funeral ceremonies," he writes, " is adapted to effect,
by means of oblations, the re-imbodying of the soul
of the deceased, after burning his corpse. The ap-
parent scope of the second set is to raise his shade

* Gobhiliya Gr/hya-sutras, p. 1039.

t -5'ankh. G^-zhya, p. 83; Gobh. GrzTiya, p. 1024. According to
some authorities the ekoddish^fa is called nava, new, during ten
days ; navamj-ra, mixed, for six months ; and pura«a, old, after-
wards. Gobhiliya Gr/hya-sutras, p. 1020.
} Gobhiliya, c. p. 1032.

§ Gobhiliya. 1. c, p. 1047. li
Life and Essays, ii, p. 195.
 VEDA AT/D VMDANTA. 1*51

from this world, where it would else, according to

the notions of the Hindus, continue to roam among
demons and evil spirits, up to heaven, and then

deify him, as it were, among the manes of de-

parted ancestors. For this end, a ^raddha should
regularly be offered to the deceased on the day after
the mourning expires ; twelve other 6'raddhas singly
to the deceased in twelve successive months ; similar
obsequies at the end of the third fortnight, and also
in the sixth month, and in the twelfth ; and the obla-
tion called Sapi72^ana on the first anniversary of his
decease.* At this Sapi;/<^ana ^Sraddha, which is the
last of the ekoddish/a j-raddha, four funeral cakes
are offered to the deceased and his three ancestors,
that consecrated to the deceased being divided into
three portions and mixed with the other three cakes.
The portion retained is often offered to the deceased,
and the act of union and fellowship becomes complete."!
When this system of .Sraddha, had once been
started, it seems to have spread very rapidly. We
soon hear of the monthly »Sraddha, not only in
memory of one person lately deceased, but as part
of the Pitr/ya^;1a, and as obligatory, not only on
householders (agnimat), but on other persons also,
and, not only on the three upper castes, but even,
* Colebrooke adds that in most provinces the periods for these six-
teen ceremonies, and for the concluding obsequies entitled Sapi«i/ana,
are anticipated, and the whole is completed on the second- t)r third

day ; which they are again performed at the proper times, but
after
in honor of the whole set of progenitors instead of the deceased singly.
It is this which Dr. Donner, in his learned paper on the Piw^apit-

rvj2ighz. (p. ii), takes as the general rule.

t See this subject most exhaustively treated, particularly in its

bearings on the law of inheritance, in Rajkumar Sarvadahikri's Tagore

Law Lectures for 1880, p. 93.
25 ^^^ T CAN INDIA TEACH US f
without hymns, on Sf^dras,* and as to be performed,
not only on the day of New-Moon, but on other days
also, twhenever there was an opportunity. Gobhila
seems to look upon the Pi?2<^apitr/a^;1a as itself a
5raddha, % and the commentator holds that, even if
there are no pi?/(/as or cakes, the Brahmans ought
still to be fed. This ^Sraddha, however, is distin-
guished from the other, the true -5'raddha, called
Anvaharya, which follows it, § and which is properly
known by the name of Parva;2a .Sraddha.
The same difficulties which confront us when we
try to form a clear conception of the character of the
various ancestral ceremonies, were felt by the Brah-
mans themselves, as may be seen from the long dis-
cussions in the commentary on the 5raddha-kalpa ||

and from the abusive language used by iTandrakanta

Tarkalankara against Raghunandana. The question
with them assumes the form of what is pradhana
(primary) and what is anga (secondary) in these sac-
rifices, and the final result arrived at is that sometimes

the offering of cakes is pradhana, as in the Tinda-pit-

sometimes the feeding of Brahas only, as in
riya^fia.,

the Nitya-jraddha, sometimes both, as in the Sapi;/^-

ikara/za.
We may safely say, therefore, that not a day passed
* Gobhiliya Grihya.-s^itTa.s, p. 892. t L. c. p. 897.
J See p. 666, and p. 1008. Grzhyaktrak piw^apitr/ya^lasya
jraddhatvam aha.
§ Gobhiliya IV. 4, 3, itarad anvah§,ryam. But the commentators
add, anagner amavasya^raddham, nanvaharyam. According to
Gobhiliya there ought to be the Vaixvadeva offering and the Bali
offering at the end of each Pitrvawa-jraddha see Gobhiliya Gr/hya-
;

sfitras, p. 1005, but no Vaixvadeva at an ckoddish/a jT^ddha, 1. c. p.

1020.

Ii
L. c. pp. 1005-IGIO ; Nimaayasindhu, p. 27*.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 253

in the life of the ancient people of India on which they

were not reminded of their ancestors, both near and
distant, and showed their respect for them, partly by
symbolic offerings to their Manes, partly by charitable
gifts to deserving persons, chiefly Brahmans. These
offertories varied from the simplest, such as milk and
fruits, to the costliest, such as gold and jewels. The
feasts given to those who were invited to officiate or
assist at a ^Yaddha seem in some cases to have been
very sumptuous, * and what is very important, the eat-
ing of meat, which in later times was strictly forbid-
den in many sects, must, when the Sutras were writ-
ten, have been fully recognized at these feasts, even
to the killing and eating of a cow.t
This shows that these .Sraddhas, though possibly
of later date than the Pitnya^as, belong neverthe-
less to a very early phase of Indian life. And though
much may have been changed in the outward form
of these ancient ancestral sacrifices, their original
solemn character has remained unchanged. Even at
present, when the worship of the ancient Devas is
ridiculed by many who still take part in it, the wor-
ship of the ancestors and the offering of *Sraddbas
have maintained much of their old sacred character.
They have sometimes been compared to the " commu-
nion" in the ChristianChurch, and it is certainly true
that many natives speak of their funeral and ances-
tral ceremonies with a hushed voice and with real
reverence. They alone seem still to impart to their
* See Burnell, The Law of Partition, p. 31.
Kalau tavad gavalamblio mS7?;sadanaz« kdi jr^ddhe nishiddleham,
•^

Gobhilena tu madhyamash^akayaw? vflstukarmawi ia gavalatnbho

vihita/z, m&wsaiarus /C-anvash/akyajraddlie ; Gobhiliya Grihya-sutra,
cd, i^andrakS.nta Tarkalankara, Vi^apati, p. 8,
254 ^^^ ^ ^^^ INDIA TEACH US^

lifeon earth a deeper significance and a higher pros-

pect. I could go even a step further and express my

belief, that the absence of such services for the dead

and of ancestral commemorations is a real loss in our
own religion. Almost every religion recognizes them
as tokens of a loving memory offered to a father, to a
mother, or even to a child, and though in many coun-
tries they may have proved a source of superstition,
there runs through them all a deep well of living human
faith that ought never to be allowed to perish. The
early Christian Church had to sanction the ancient
prayers for the Souls of the departed, and in more
Southern countries the services on All Saints' and on
All Souls' Day continue to satisfy a craving of the
human heart which must be satisfied in every religion.
We, in the North, shrink from these open manifesta-
tions of grief, but our hearts know often a deeper bit-
terness ; nay, there would seem to be a higher truth
than we imagine in the belief of the ancients
at first
that the souls of our beloved ones leave us no rest,
unless they are appeased by daily prayers, or better
still, by daily acts of goodness in remembrance of
them.*
But there is still another Beyond that found ex-
pression in the ancient religion of India. Besides
the Devas or Gods, and besides the Pitr/s or Fathers,
there was a third world, without which the ancient
religion of India could not have become what we see
it in That third Beyond was what the
the Veda.
poets of the Veda call the Ritd^, and which I believe
meant originally no more than " the straight line."
It is applied to the straight line of the sun in its

* Note L,
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 255

daily course, to the straight line followed by day and

night, to the straight line that regulates the seasons,
to the straight line which, in spite of many moment-
ary deviations, was discovered to run through the
whole realm of nature. We call that i?/ta, that
straight, direct, or right line, when we apply it in a
more general sense, the Law
of Nature ; and when
we apply it to the moral world, we try to express
the same idea again by speaking of the Moral Law,
the law on which our life is founded, the eternal Law
of Right and Reason, or, it may be, " that which makes
for righteousness '' both within us and without. *
And thus, as a thoughtful look on nature led to
the first perception of bright gods, and in the end of
a God of light, as love of our parents was transfigured
into piety and a belief in immortality, a recognition
of the straight lines in the world without, and in
the world within, was raised into the highest faith,
a faith in a law that underlies everything, a law in
which we may trust, whatever befall, a law which
speaks within us with the divine voice of conscience,
and tells us " this is r/ta," "this is right," " this is true,"
whatever the statutes of our ancestors, or even the
voices of our bright gods, may say to the contrary.
These three Beyonds are the three revelations of
antiquity and it is due almost entirely to the dis-
;

covery of the Veda that we, in this nineteenth century

of ours, have been allowed to watch again these early
phases of thought and religion, which had passed
away long before the beginnings of other literatures.!
* See Hibbert Lectures, new ed. pp. 243-255.
I In Chinese we find that the same three aspects of religion and
their intimate relationship were recognized, as, for instance, when
Confucius says to the Prince of Sung: "Honor the sky (woi ship
3 ^6 ^ff^ T G^^ INDIA TEA CII US f
In the.Yeda an ancient cily has been laid bare before
our eyes which, in the history of all other religions,
is filled up with rubbish, and built over by new

architects. Some of the earliest and most instructive

scenes of our distant childhood have risen once more
above the horizon of our memory which, until thirty
or forty^ years ago, seemed to have vanished for ever.

Only a few words more to indicate at least how

this religious growth in India contained at the same
time the germs of Indian philosophy. Philosophy in
India is» what it ought to be, not the denial, but the
fulfilment of religion it is the highest religion, and
;

the oldest name of the oldest system of philosophy

in India is Vedant a, that is, the end, the goal, the
highest object of the Veda.
Let us return once more to that ancient theologian
who lived in the fifth century b. c, and who told us
that^ even before his time, all the gods had been dis-
covered to be but three gods, the gods of the Earth,
the gods of the Airi and the gods of the Sky, invoked
under various names. The same writer tells us that
in reality there is but 07te God, but he does not call

him the Lord, or the highest God, the Creator, Ruler

and Preserver of all things, but he calls him A t m a n,
THE Self. The one Atman or Self, he says, is praised
in many ways owing to the greatness of the godhead.
And he then goes on to say :
" The other gods are
but so many members of the one Atman, Self, and
thus it has been said that the poets compose their

of Devas)',, reverence the Manes (worship of Pitr/s) ; if you do this

sun and moon will keep their appointed time (/v'/ta)." Happel,
Altchinesische Reichsreligion, p. II.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA, ^
^
257

praises according to the mutiplicity of the nat6res of

the beings whom they praise."
It is true, no doubt, that this is the language of a
philosophical theologian, not of an ancient poet. Yet
these philosophical reflections belong to the fifth cen-
tury before our era, if not to an earlier date ; and the
first germs of such thoughts may be discovered in
some Vedic hymns also. I have quoted already
of the
from the hymns such passages as * They speak of — ^^"

Mitra, Varu;/a, Agni then he is the heavenly bird

;

Garutmat that which is and is one the poets call in

;

various ways they speak of Yama, Agni, Mdtam-

;

van.''
In another hymn, in which the sun is likened to a
bird, we read :
" Wise poets represent by their words
the bird who is one, in many ways."
f
All this is still tinged with mythology ; but there
are other passages from which a purer light beams
upon when one poet asks $
us, as :

" Who saw him when he was first born, when he

who has no bones bore him who has bones 1 Where

was the breath, the blood, the Self of the world .''

Who went to ask this from any that knew it " .-*

Here, too, the expression is still helpless, but

though the flesh is weak, the spirit is very willing.
The expression " He who has bones" is mea.nt for
that which has assumed consistency and form, the Vis-
ible, as opposed to that which has no bones, rto Body,
no form, the Invisible, while "breath, blood, and self
of the world " are but so many attempts at finding

* Rig-veda I, 164, 46 ; Hibbert Lectures, p. 311.

I Rig-veda II. 114, 5 ; Hibbert Lectures, p. 313,

X Rig-veda I. 164,4.
258 WHAT CAN Il^DIA TEACH us
names and concepts for what is by necessity incon-
ceivable, and therefore unnameable.
In the second period of Vedic literature, in the so-
called Brahma/^as, and more particularly in wliat is>
called the Upanishads, or the Vedanta portion, these
thoughts advance to perfect clearness and definite-
ness. Here the development of religious thought
which took its beginning in the hymns, attains to its
fulfilment. The circle becomes complete. Instead
of comprehending the One by many names, the many
names are now comprehended to be the One. The^
old names are openly discarded even such titles as
;

Pra_;/apati, lord of creatures, Vii"vakarman, maker of

all things, Dahtr/, creator, are put aside as inadequate..
The name now used is an expression of nothing but *

the purest and highest subjectiveness, — it is At m an,,

the Self, far more abstract than our Ego. —the Self of
all things, the Self of all the old mythological gods —
for they were not mere names, but names intended'
for something —
lastly, the Self in which each individ-

ual self must find rest, must come to himself, must

find his own true Self.
You may remember that I spoke to you in my first
lecture of a boy who insisted on being sacrificed by
his father, and who, when he came to Yama, the
ruler of the departed, was granted three boons, and
who then requested, as his third boon, that Yama
should tell him what became of man after death..
That dialogue forms part one of the Upanishads^
of
it belongs to the Vedanta, the end of the Veda, the

highest aim of the Veda. I shall read you a few ex-

tracts from it.

Yama, the King of the Departed, says
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 259
" Men who are fools, dwelling in ignorance, though
wise in their own sight, and puffed up with vain
knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and
fro, like blind led by the bHnd.
*'
The future never rises before the eyes of the
careless child, deluded by the delusions of wealth.
This is the world, he thinks ; there isno other thus ;

he falls again and again under my sway (the sway of

death).
" The who by means of meditating on his Self
wise,
recognizes the Old (the old man within) who is diffi-
cult, to see, who has entered into darkness, who is

hidden in the cave, who dwells in the abyss, as God,

he indeed leaves joy and sorrow far behind.
"
That Self, the Knower, is not born, it dies not it ;

came from nothing, it never became anything. The

Old man is unborn, from everlasting to everlasting
he is not killed, though the body be killed.
" That Self is smaller than small, greater than

great ; hidden in the heart of the creature. A man

who has no mbre desires and no more griefs, sees the
majesty of the Self by the grace of the creator.
" Though sitting still, he walks far : though lying
-down, he goes everywhere. Who save myself is able
to know that God, who
and rejoices not.?
rejoices,
" That Self cannot be gained by the Veda nor by ;

the understanding, nor by much learning. He whom

the Self chooses, by him alone the Self can be gained.
" The Self chooses him as his own. But he who
has not first turned away from his wickedness, who
is not calm and subdued, or whose mind is not at rest,
he can never obtain the Self, even by knowledge.
" No mortal lives by the breath that goes up and
2 6o ^^A T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
by the breath that goes down. We live by another^
in whom both repose.
"
Well then, I shall tell thee this mystery, the
eternal word (Brahman), and what happens to the
6"^^, after reaching death.
" Some are born again, as living beings, others
enter into stocks and stones, according to their
work, and according to their knowledge.
" But he, the Highest Person, who wakes in us
while we are asleep, shaping one lovely sight after
another, he indeed is called the Light, he is called-

Brahman, he alone is called the Immortal. All

worlds are founded on it, and no one goes beyond..
This is that.

"As the one fire, after it has entered the world,,

though one, becomes different according to what it
burns, thus the One Self within all things, becomes
different, according to whatever it enters, but it ex-
ists also apart.
" As the sun, the eye of the world, is not contami-
nated by the external impurities seen by the eye,,

thus the One Self within all things is never con-

taminated by the sufferings of the world, being him-
self apart.
*'
There isone eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal
thoughts ; he, though one, fulfils the desires of many.
The wise who perceive Him within their Self, to
them belongs eternal life, eternal peace."*
"Whatever there is, the whole world, when gone
forth (from Brahman), trembles in his breath. That
Brahman is a great terror, like a drawn sword. Those
who know it, become immortal.
* To 8k q)p6vfj/ia zov Ttvevjiiaroi ^aor) Hal, eipr'fVTj, See also
Ruskin, Sesame p. 63.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA^::-^ .261

*^
He
(Brahman) cannot be reached, by speecb;, by
mind, or by the eye. He cannot be apprehended,' ex-
cept by him who says, //i? 2i". ' '

"When all desires that dwell in the heart cease,

then the mortal becomes immortal, and obtains
Brahman.
" When all the fetters of the heart here on earth
are broken, when all that binds us to this life is un-
done, then the mortal becomes immortal :-—-here ^my
teachings end."
This is what is called Vedanta, the Veda-end, the
end of the Veda, and this is the religion or the philo-
sophy, whichever you like to call it, that has lived
on from about 500 B.C. to the present day. If the
people of India can be said to have now any system
of religion at all, —
ajDart from their ancestral isacri^

fices and their wSraddhas, and apart from mere caste-

observances,-^it is to be found in the Vedanta .philo-
sophy, the leading tenets of which are known to spme
extent in every village.* That great revival of religion,
which was inaugurated some fifty years ago by Ram-
Mohun Roy, and is now known as the Brahma-.Sama^,
under the leadership of my noble friend Keshub
Chunder Sen, was chiefly founded on the Upanishads,
and was Vedantic in spirit. There is, in fact,
an unbroken continuity between the most modern and
the most ancient phrases of Hindu thought, extending
over more than three thousand years.
To the present day India acknowledges no higher
authority in matters of religion, ceremonial, customs,
and law than the Veda, and so long as India is India,

* Major Jacob, Manual of Hindu Pantheism, Preface,

26 2 WHA T CA N INDIA TEA CH US f
nothing will extinguish that ancient spirit of VedSnt-
ism which is breathed by every Hindu from hi«
earliest youth, and pervades in various forms the
prayers even of the idolater, the speculations of the
philosopher, and the proverbs of the beggar.
For purely practical reasons therefore, — I mean for
the very practical object of knowing something of the
secret springs which determine the character, the
thoughts and deeds, of the lowest as well as of the
highest amongst the people in India, an acquaint- —
ance with their religion, which is founded on the
Veda, and with their philosophy, which is founded
on the Vedanta, is highly desirable.
It is easy to make light of this, and to ask, as some
statesmen have asked, even in Europe, What has
religion, or what has philosophy, to do with politics ?

In India, in spite of all appearances to the contrary,

and notwithstanding the indifference on religious mat-
ters so often paraded before the world by the Indians
themselves, religion, and philosophy too, are great
powers still. Read the account that has lately been
published of two native statesmen, the administrators
of two first-class states in Saurash/ra, Junagadh and
Bhavnagar, Gokulaji and Gaurij-ankara, * and you
will see whether the Vedanta is still a moral and a
political power in India or not.
* Life and Letters of Gokulaji Sampattirama Zala and his views
of the Vedanta, by Manassukharama Saryarama Tripa///i Bombay, 1881.
As a young man Gokulaji, the son of a good family, learnt
Persian and Sanskrit. His chief interest in life, in the midst of a
most successful political career, was the "Vedanta." A little
insight, we are told, into this knowledge turned his heart to
higher objects, promising him freedom from grief, and blessedness,
the highest aim of all. This was the turning-point of his inner
life. When the celebrated Vedanti anchorite, Rama Bava, visited
Jun%adh, Gokulaji became his pupil. When another anchorite.
 VEDA AND VEDANTA. 26^

But I claim even more for the Vedanta, and I

recommend its study, not only to the Candidates for

the Indian Civil Service, but to all tru6 students of
philosophy. It will bring before them a view of life,

-different from all other views of which are placed

life

before us in the History of Philosophy. You saw

bow behind all the Devas^ or gods, the authors of the
Upanisbads discovered the Atman or Self. Of that
Self they predicated three things only, that it is, that
it perceives, and that it enjoys eternal bliss. All
other predicates were negative it is not this, it is
:

—
hot. that -it is beyond anything that we can conceive
or name.
But that Self, that Highest Self, the Paramatman,
could be discovered after a severe moral and intel-
lectual discipline only, and those who had not yet-
<liscovered it, were allowed to worship lower gods,
and employ more poetical names to satisfy their
to
human wants. Those who knew the other orods to
be but names or persons personae or masks, in the
true sense of the word —
Pratikas, as they call them in
—
Sanskrit knew also that those who worshipped these
names or persons, worshipped in truth the Highest
Self, though ignorantly. This is a most character-
istic feature in the religious history of India. Even
in the Bhagavadgita, a rather popular and exoteric
exposition of Vedantic doctrines, the Supreme Lord
Paramahansa SaZ'/{'idananda, passed through Junagadh on a pil-
grimage to Girnar, Gokulaji was regularly initiated in the secrets
of the Vedanta. He soon became highly proficient in it, and
through the whole course of his life, whether in power or in dis-
grace, his belief in the doctrines of the Vedanta supported him,
and made him, in the opinion of English statesmen, the model of
what a native statesman ought to be.
264 ^^^'^ CAW INDIA TEACH US f

or Bhagavat himself is introduced as saying : "Even

those who worship idols, worship me." *
.
But that was not all. As behind the names of
Agni, Indra, and Pra^apati, and behind all the .myth-
ology of nature, the ancient sages of India had dis^
covered the Atman — let us call it the objective Self-

they perceived also behind the veil of the body, behind

the senses, behind the mind, and behind our reason
(in fact behind the mythology of the soul, which we
often call psychology), another Atman, or the sub-
jective Self.That Self, too, was to be discovered by
a severe moral and intellectual discipline only, and
those who wished to find it, who wished to know, net
themselves, but their Self, had to cut far deeper than
the senses, or the mind, or the reason, or the ordinary
Ego. All these too were Deva s, bright apparitions-

—
mere names yet names meant for something. Much
that was most dear, that had seemed for a time their
very self, had to be surrendered, before they could
find the Self, of Selves, the Old Man, the Looker-on,
a subject independent of all personality, an existence-
independent of all life.

* Professor Kuenen discovers a similar idea in the words placed'

in the mouth of Jehovah by the prophet Malachi, i. 14 *'
For :

lam a great king, and my name is feared among the heathen."

*'The reference," he says, " is distinctly to the adoration already offered
to Yahvveh by the people, whenever they serve their own gods with
true reverence and honest zeal. Even in Deuteronomy the ador-
ation of these other gods by the nations is represented as a dis-
pensation of Yahweh. Malachi goes- a step farther, and accepts
their worship as a tribute which in reality falls to Yahweh, to —
Him, the Only True. Thus the opposition between Yahweh and
the other gods, and afterwards between the one true God and the
iniaginary gods, makes room here for the still higher conceptioa
that the adoration of Yahweh is the essence and the truth of all'

religion." Hibbert Lectures, p. 181.

 VEDA AiVJD VEDANTA., : 2-6$

When that been reached, then the

point had
highest knowledge began to dawn, the Self within
(the Pratyagatman) was drawn towards the Highest
Self (the Paramatman), it found its true self in the
Highest Self, and the oneness of the subjective with
the objective Self was recognized as underlying all
reality, as the dim dream of religion,— as the pure

light of philosophy.
This fundamental idea is worked out with syste-
matic completeness in the Vedanta philosophy, and
no one who can appreciate the lessons contained in
Berkeley's philosophy, will read the Upanishads and
the Brahma-sutras and their commentaries without
feeling a richer and a wiser man.
I admit that it requires patience, discrimination

and a certain amount of self-denial before we can

discover the grains of solid gold in the dark mines of
Eastern philosophy. It is far easier and far more amus-
ing for shallow critics to point out what is absurd and
ridiculous in the religion and philosophy of the ancient
world than for the earnest student to discover truth
and wisdom under strange disguises. Some progress
however has been made, even during the short span
of life that we can remember. The Sacred Books of

the East are no longer a mere butt for the invectives

of missionaries or the sarcasms of philosophers. They
have at last been recognized as historical documents,
aye, as the most ancient documents in the history of
the human mind and as palaeontological records of an
evolution that begins to elicit wider and deeper sympa-
thies than the nebular formation of the planet on which
we dwell for a season, or the organic development of
that chrysalis which we call man.
266 ^^^ T CAN INDIA TEA CH US ?
you think that I exaggerate, let me read you in
If
conclusion what one of the greatest philosophical
critics —
and certainly not a man given to admiring the
—
thoughts of others says of the Vedanta, and more
particularly of the Upanishads. Schopenhauer writes:
" In the whole world there is no study so beneficial

and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has

—
been the solace of my life it will be the solace of my
death."*
I have thus tried, so far as it was possible in one
course of lectures, to give you some idea of ancient In-
dia, of its ancient literature, and, more particularly
of its ancient religion. My object was, not merely to
place names and facts before you, these you can find
in many published books, but, if possible, to make you
see and feel the general human interests that are in-
volved in that ancient chapter of the history of the
human race. I wished that the Veda and its religion
and philosophy should not only seem to you curious or
strange, but that you should feel that there was in
them something that concerns ourselves, something
of our own intellectual growth, some recollections,
as it were, of our own childhood, or at least of the child-
hood of our own race. I feel convinced that, placed
as we are here in this life we have lessons to learn
from the Veda, quite as important as the lessons we
learn at school from Homer and Virgil, and lessons
from the Vedanta quite as instructive as the systems
of Plato or Spinoza.
Ido not mean to say that everybody who wishes
to know how the human race came to be what it is,
* Sacred Books of the East, vol. i., The Upanishads, translated hj
M. M. ; Introduction, p. Ixi.
 :. . VEDA AND VEDANTA. 267

hotv language came to be what it is, how religion

came to be what it is, how manners, customs, laws^
and forms of government came to be what they are,
how we ourselves came to be whatmust we are,
learn Sanskrit, and must study Vedic Sanskrit. But I
do believe that not to know what a study of Sanskrit^
and particularly a study of the Veda, has already
done for illuminating the darkest passages in the
history of the human mind, of that mind on which
w^e ourselves are feeding and living, is a misfortune,
or, at all ev-ents, a loss, just as I should count it a
loss to have passed through life without knowing
something, however little, of the geological formation
of the earth, or of the sun, and the moon, and the
stars,— and of the thought, or the will, or the law
that govern their movements.
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Four lectares in reply to tlie Lenten lectores en "Woman," by the Rev.
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By Lillie Devereux Blake.
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