DS THE EAST: A PAPER READ BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. D. C, On. Saturday Evening, March 20, 1880. BY M. F MORRIS, ESQ, WASHINGTON, D. C. 1880. LIBRA RY OF CONG RESS. UNITED STATES OF AMEKIOA. THE EAST: A PAPER READ BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON, D. C, On Saturday Evening, March 20. 1880. ;f! •w ' . BV M. F. MORRIS, ESQ. ii'iir'''i' v'^"'^"'im. iii. .. WASHINGTON, D. C. 1880. To the Literary Society of Washington, D. this Paper is respectfully Dedicated. IN response to repeated requests, both from members of the Society and friends outside of it, the writer has re- luctantly consented to commit this Paper to print. As it was not intended for an elaborate essay, but merely as a contribution to the evening entertainment of the Society, he hopes that the kindness with which its first reading was received, will now be extended to it when it appears in a shape for severer criticism. Some explanatory notes are added, which, it is hoped, will enhance the value of the Paper. THE EAST. LET me ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to turn for a few brief moments from our busy Western World to the calm, contemplative, conservative East. The East ! It is the land of the sun and of romance, the source of all philosophy and of all religion, the cradle of our traditions and of our race ; and from its teeming hives the successive swarms of human popu- lation have gone forth over the earth. Land of the Crusader and the Saracen, of Abraham and Guatama, of Mohammed and Confucius, of the Magian and the Zoroastrian, — how many memories of our childhood, recalling the childhood of our race, cling round that primal home of our Aryan forefathers ! And now, when the course of empire, that has rolled westward full five thousand years, has found its Ultima Thule by the Golden Gates of our Californian Ophir, we seem at last to have fully realized the dream of Co- lumbus, and moving West to have found the East. The Aryan and the Mongolian, who separated fifty centuries ago under the shadow of the mighty peaks of the Himalayas, have met again on the broad bosom of the Pacific, and have renewed the contest for supremacy which severed them first on the high lands of Afghanistan.* The cycle of the ages begins anew. * See Note i. Appendix.' (5) O THE EAST. The mystery of the Asian question is throwing its darkening shadow over the politics of the world. While we are rudely summoned to meet one phase of it in California, our mother country is confronting another on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges. Even now, amid the mountain fastnesses of Cabul, the soldiers of Britain are occupying the native seats of their Aryan ancestors, and bearing back to its primeval altars the sacred fire first kindled in those regions when the sevenfold arch of omnipotence spanned the retreating waters of the last great mun- dane cataclysm.* Encircling the globe with their Briarean arms, two great Powers of Europe stand ready to encounter each other in deadly conflict on the central plains of Asia ; and at the same time the Mongolian race has awoken fi'om its long lethargy, and boldly questions the persistently asserted su- premacy of the Caucasian. The Red race of America is rapidly passing away before the encroachments of the European. We can easily foresee in the annals of coming time the doom of Africa. The inferior races are gradually clearing the world's great battle-field for the mighty contest that must inevitably come between the Caucasian and the Mongolian ; and while we may flatter ourselves that we can anticipate the result of that contest, too, it would be delusion to suppose that it does not in- volve elements of serious doubt. But little more than a quarter of a century has passed since a small naval force, flying the flag of our *See Note 2. THE EAST. 7 young Republic, and bearing the broad pennant of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, sailed into the harbor of Yokohama, in Japan, and compelled that Island Empire of the East to enter the family of nations. What a wonderful transformation that Island Empire has exhibited to us in the intervening period ! Do the annals of time show another instance of develop- ment so extraordinary within so brief a span ! Who will presume to limit the capabilities of a nation of thirty millions of people, so keenly alive to the value of our western civilization ? And look at China, with its vast population of one quarter of the human race, industrious, patient, intel- ligent, inventive and imitative to a degree that aston- ishes our own inventive and imitative nation — ^edu- cated, in its own peculiar way, yet educated as no other nation on earth ever has been — possessed of resources most abundant — and who will say, that not- withstanding some unfortunate experiences in the past, China may not some day prove a dangerous adversary to the Caucasian nations ? The Mongolian races have more than once proved their ability to cope successfully with the Caucasian. Timur the Tartar captured and plundered Moscow, and found no such source of disaster there as did his Corsican imitator, when he dashed his soul in vain against its ramparts of fire and ruin. Before Timur, Mongolian armies, led by the sons of Genghis Khan, had invaded and desolated Russia, Poland and Hun- gary, and threatened Germany. Earlier still, that terrible Mongolian chief, Attila, the " Scourge of God," ranged with his victorious Huns from the 8 THE EAST. Great Wall of China to the plains of Chalons and the rich fields of Lombardy. Separated far from the great body of the race, a people of Mongolian lineage settled as conquerors in the heart of Europe ; and a braver, more intelligent, or more talented nation there does not exist than the Magyars of Hungary. The Turks are largely of Mongolian origin ; and most of the tribes that have held sway in Southern Asia dur- ing the last three hundred years derive more or less of their blood from the same source. No abler gen- eral than Genghis Khan ever organized mankind for systematic slaughter ; and competent military critics have expressed the opinion that, since the " Sun of Austerlitz," there has been no more brilliant cam- paign than that of the Chinese general who, in 1878 led his forces through the tremendous mountain de- files of Eastern Bokhara, and terminated one of the most arduous marches on record with the triumphant storming of Kashgar.* It is not safe for us to underrate the powers and capabilities of the Mongolian race. But it is not so much of Mongolian Asia that I would speak, as of a part of that great Eastern World tenanted by a branch of our own Aryan race — Hindustan — a country more unknown, perhaps, and more unappreciated than Mongolia; yet possessed of a language, a literature, a history, an intellectual de- velopment, and a power of action, scarcely second to any nation on earth. Three great events, great above all others, charac- * See Note 3. THE EAST. 9 terized the eighteenth century; namely, our own Revolution, that of France, and the conquest of Hin- dustan by Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. Of the three, the last may not, perhaps, prove the least mo- mentous in its results. And certainly it was a most extraordinary event, when that magnificent Indian v/orld, which Alexander of Macedoii had sighed to conquer, and could not, became an appanage of an English trading company.* Of all the many prov- inces of that great Empire of Britain on which the sun never sets, she values none more dearly than she does Hindustan; and it has even been suggested that the gorgeous Oriental imagination of Benjamin D'Israeli has more than once brooded over a scheme to transfer the seat of English dominion from the banks of the Thames to the banks of the Ganges, and to renew in that morning land the power which in Europe has been threatened with dissolution. He would like to make the title of " Empress of Hindus- tan," which he has created for his royal mistress, something more than an empty phrase. How little we realize what elements of greatness there are in that vast peninsula of India, what a his- tory it has had, what grand traditions cluster around it, what mighty kingdoms and nations have existed there, what superbly intellectual races have erected their seats of empire within its borders, what works of art and of science have adorned its annals, what powerful influence its religious and political revolu- tions have exercised over the other nations of the world ! We have had some vague ideas of the power *See Note 4. lO THE EAST. and riches of the Great Mogul, and of the diamonds of Golconda, and of the grandeurs of Benares, and of the caverned wonders of Elephanta and Ellora. The poetry of our youth has painted in its most bril- hant dyes that Eden of Edens, the Valley of Cash- mere. Alas, that the serpent should have entered that Eden, too ! And we have read the story of the beautiful Nurmahal, the Light of the Harem, the conqueror of him who called himself, "the world's conqueror." And that same poetry has told us the episode of the fierce Mahmud of Gazni, laying waste the honored shrines of Hindu idolatry. We are more or less familiar with the fact, that contests long and bloody have been waged there between the votaries of Buddha and the worshipers of Brahma, and be- tween the children of Brahma and the followers of Mohammed. We have known that Timur bedewed the Indian plains with blood ; that his descendants erected there the Great Mogul (or Mongolian) Em- pire ; that the ruthless Persian Nadir Shah tore from the eyes of the idol of Vishnu the brilliant Kohinur, which now adorns the diadem of Victoria ; and that successive conquerors, from Semiramis to Ahmed Abdallah, have striven for the possession of its wealth. One of the most interesting chapters to be found in the history of modern discovery, is that which tells the story of Portuguese adventure in the East, and shows us Vasco de Gama, and the great Albuquerque, and the sainted Francis Xavier, planting the standard of Christianity and of European civilization on the shores of Bombay and Malabar. But all these are only a small part of the history of Hindustan.* *See Note 5. THE EAST. " I I That remarkable man Warren Hastings, the first EngHsh Governor- General of India, and whose trial on impeachment before the English House of Lords, for alleged crimes and misdemeanors in the con- duct of his high office, is one of the most noted trials on record — lasting as it did through nine years, and giving occasion in the speeches of his prosecutors, Burke and Sheridan, for some of the most splendid bursts of eloquence in the English language — ren- dered an imperishable service to the cause of literature and human knowledge by the establishment at Cal- cutta of the Asiatic Society, whose object was the in- vestigation of the history, literature, antiquities, man- ners and customs of Eastern Asia, and especially of Hindustan. With what magnificent success this object was pursued, students of Oriental literature can appre- ciate. The Asiatic Society has opened to us a new world of ideas ; and in the writings of Sir William Jones, its most illustrious member, and probably the most accomplished scholar of all the world; in the works of Todd, Wilford, Wilson, Colebrook and others ; and in the numerous publications and trans- lations that have emanated from the Asiatic Society, the scholars of Europe, wearied with the repetition of Greek forms and classical ideas, have been equally startled and pleased to discover a literature more luxuriant than any in Europe.* It is now known that the Sanscrit language, the ancient language of Hindustan, now unspoken and sacred, was the oldest sister — for a time it was even deemed the parent — of the great European tongues, * See Note 6. ,12 THE EAST. Greek, Latin, Sclavonic, Celtic and Teutonic; that it is rich in poetry and philosophy ; and that it tends to explain many things that have hitherto been obscure in the history of our race. From this knowledg'" the science of the Comparative Analysis of Language has arisen, and the brotherhood of the Aryan nations has been manifested. Many legends and myths have been resolved into history. History has been freed from many of its obscurities. The tradition has been vindicated which deduced the human race from some mountain region, some inadequately recog- nized Ararat, of Central Asia. The evidence has been found that all the great branches of the race, extending from the Bay of Bengal to the Western Isles of the Atlantic, originally radiated from the table lands of Pamir on the northwestern frontier of India, and carried thence, through all their wan- derings and through all their migrations, distinctive traces of the language, religion, and manners of the parent family. On the plains of Hindustan, ruins of cities have been found that were old before Romulus and Remus were suckled, of kingdoms and empires that were mighty when Moses crossed the Red Sea. There have been discovered there, too — old, but not in ruins — the remains of a literature that flourished before Homer sung; of a philosophy that sounded all the heights and depths of immortal thought, and sought in vain to fathom the mystery of existence, long before Plato taught his divine subtleties in the groves of Academus, or Pythagoras applied logic to politics in his socialistic republic at Crotona. As old THE EAST. 13 at least as the Pentateuch of Moses — older, perhaps — are the Vedas of the Hindus, the four sacred books which contain the doctrines, the prayers, and the liturgical formulas, that constituted the expression of the religious life of the oldest branch of the Aryan race, and which are certainly superior, as a religious system, to aught else on record than the sublime precepts of the Hebrew Scriptures. Eighteen books of commentaries, known as the Puranas — also of very great antiquity — supplement the Vedas with an exposition of the Brahminical the- ology and philosophy. To the Vedas they are what the Talmud is to the Koran of Mohammed.* More than three hundred years before *' the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle" sung "the tale of Troy divine" to his Hellenic countrymen on the JEgcan shores, Valmika wrote in Sanscrit the epic story of the Ramayuna, commemorative of the contest of Rama, the hero of the so-called Solar Race of Hin- dustan, with the gigantic Ravan of Lanca, in which all the powers of nature, heaven, earth, and hell, par- ticipated. The Ramayuna is a poem as long as Homer's Iliad — and as grand, if we can only look at it, not from the point of Grecian taste, but with the fervid eyes of a tropical imagination. As in the story of the lUiad, the contest celebrated in the Rama- yuna was occasioned by the unlawful abduction of a woman of marvelous beauty, "a daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair." But it is greatly to the credit of the morality of Hindustan and the moral grandeur of the poem, that Sita, the ^See Note 7. 14 THE EAST. wife of Rama and heroine of the Ramayuna, was not a wanton Hke the Homeric Helen, but a faithful wife and pure-minded woman, who resisted alike the threats and blandishments of her abductor, and re- turned such to her husband, when the rock-ribbed ramparts of Lanca had fallen before his terrible enginery. Lanca, the Hindu Troy, was on the Island of Ceylon ; and the natural scenery around that island and the neighboring continent gave the Hindu poet opportunities for description not less magnificent than those of Homer. It is, perhaps, Worth while to mention that the earliest recorded statement of the ordeal by fire, familiar enough to us in the history of the Middle and Dark Ages of Europe, is to be found in the Ramayuna. The ordeal was undergone by Sita, after her deliverance and return to her husband, to prove her innocence of any complicity with the tyrant Ravan in the affair of her abduction. Later than Valmika, yet still apparently much an- terior to Homer, another great Epic Poet of Hindus- tan, Vyasa, a worthy disciple and successor of Val- mika, wrote the Mahabharata, or Story of the Great War. The war referred to was the contest, memor- able in Hindu history, between the Pandu and the Kuru princes, rival and nearly related families of the so called Lunar Race, for the possession of the im- perial crown of Hindustan, which seems to have occurred about thirteen centuries before the Christian Era, and consequently some time before the Trojan War. It was the epoch of the appearance of the hero Chrishna, the eighth avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, THE EAST. i^ who, in his human form, mingled actively in the war as the champion of the Pandus, and whose exploits more than rival those of Achilles before Troy. The war is stated to have culminated in a tremendous battle of eighteen days' duration on the plains of Agra, and to have resulted in the almost total ex- termination of one party, and ultimately in the vol- untary withdrawal of the other from the country. The poem of the Mahabharata is nearly as long as Milton's "Paradise Lost." Like the Ramayuna, it is not, in all respects, consistent with our canons of lit- erary taste. Yet it is a wonderful poem, in which the manners and customs of the time are as vividly delin- eated as are those of the heroic ages of Greece in the pages of Homer ; and beautiful episodes of deeds of love and war alternate with profound speculations on the problems of philosophy and religion. To make the parallel with Homer and Milton com- plete, there is a tradition, apparently as unsupported by testimony as in the case of the Greek poet, that Vyasa became blind in his old age. The remarkable similarity between the Homeric legends and the poems of the Ramayuna and Mah- abharata, together with some other curious coinci- dences between early Greece and Hindustan, has given occasion for a theory that the heroes of the Trojan War, and Troy itself, were but figments of Homer's brain ; and that his poems were but the echoes of events of earlier date and far distant regions, the memories of which had been brought westward by the self-exiled heroes of the Great War. But this theory, like many others, not utterly devoid of foun- 1 6 THE EAST. dation, has been very substantially refuted by the discoveries of Schliemann on the hill of Hissirlik, and the unveiling to the light of day of the long-buried city of Hector and Priam. The similarity is, in all probability, mainly due to the sameness of human thought in all ages and all nations.* The drama is not unknown in Hindustan. But a few months ago, a paragraph may have been noticed in some one of the newspapers, to the effect that the play of Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring, had been brought out and successfully represented before an admiring audience of Hindus and European scholars, in a new Hindu theatre just opened at Calcutta. The play is older than the Christian Era, and its story is one of the numerous legends connected with Rama and Sita, the hero and heroine of the Ramayuna, and, after Chrishna, the most favorite themes of Hindu song and romance. It is probably the masterpiece of Hindu dramatic literature. Indeed, it approaches more nearly in form and manner, as well as in style, to our modern standard, than do the productions of the Greek dramatists. Calidasa, the author of the Sacontala, and of several other similar works, was the Shakspere of Hindustan ; or, perhaps, we might more appropriately say, its Calderon : he reminds us more of the great Spanish dramatist than of any other of our western writers. He was the contempo- rary of Cicero and Virgil, and of the Augustan age of Rome ; and his epoch was also an Augustan age for Hindustan. Vicramaditya, the monarch who then occupied the imperial throne, was as munificent * See Note 8. THE EAST. 17 a patron of literature and of literary men as his western contemporary, Augustus Caesar, and no less famous in the civil and military administration of the affairs of his country, from which he expelled the numerous invaders by whom it had been harassed.* The Ramayuna, the Mahabharata, and the Sacon- tala, are the most prominent works of their kind, but by no means the only ones, in the literature of Hin- dustan. Other epics there are less noted, other dramas less popular, besides lyric poems innumer- able, hymns to the gods, didactic pieces, philo- sophical disquisitions, and even mathematical treatises in verse. The Muse of Hindustan can scarcely be said to be less prolific than her sister of Greece. In the poetry of no other land are the images of external nature so frequently reproduced. Attention has been called of late to the fact, that the ancient Greeks and Romans, as far as we can judge from their writings that have survived to us, had very little appreciation of natural beauty and the charms of scenery; and that the descriptions of nature, which constitute so large and so important a feature in modern poetry, are almost entirely of modern growth. But the poetry of the Hindus is full of them, — full to an extent which we would be disposed to consider superabundant. And it is only natural to expect abundant inspiration from external nature in a land of soil and climate so varied, ranging from those culminating peaks of all the world, the snow-clad Himalayas, to the eternal summers of Ceylon; in a land of wealth and resources unsurpassed, where the Ganges flows through an *See Note 9. 2 i8 THE EAST. alluvial soil almost as rich as the Valley of the Mis- sissippi ; where the effort of man often is to contend with a vegetation too luxuriant; where the tiger in his jungle and the lion in his lair contend with man for the dominion of the land. I would notice here one other remarkable Hindu poem — the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva, a lyric compo- sition of extraordinary character. The Gitagovinda, or Loves of Chrishna and Rhadha, has for its subject, as its second title implies, the amours of the hero of the Mahabharata with the fair young shepherd prin- cess whom he made his bride. It is a mystical poem in the style of the Song of Solomon, or Canticle of Canticles, in which the intercourse of the soul with the divinity is set forth in terms and figures more sensuous and more highly wrought than in that singular production of the famous monarch of Israel. It is especially noticeable for its luxuriant appreciation of the beauty of external nature, its constantly re- curring references to the brilliant flora of Agra and Bengal, and most of all for the remarkably respectful deportment of the hero towards the heroine, akin to worship, which is the general characteristic of Hindu literature, and which manifests a reverence for woman that is to be found in no other nation outside of the pale of Christianity, and not in all nations within it. Jayadeva, the author of the Gitagovidna, is styled by Sir William Jones, the Pindar and "the sublime lyric poet of Hindustan." We sometimes flatter ourselves, that we have ex- plored all the realms of thought and investigated all THE EAST. 19 the domain of philosophy, and that, outside of Europe and America, there is no philosophy worthy of the name. But we have been anticipated in all our spec- ulations by the Hindus. There is nothing new in the pantheism of Spinoza, or in the idealism of Berkeley and Malebranche, or in the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte, or in the evolutionism of Darwin and Huxley and Tyndal. They were all discussed three thousand years ago by brilliant intellects at Agra and Benares. The Vedas contain the first germs of the Panthe- istic philosophy. Kapila elaborated it into a system long before Greece emerged from its native barbarism. From him Pythagoras borrowed it ; and he, in turn, transmitted it to the Gnostics of the first centuries of the Christian Era, and they to Averroes and Spinoza. The basis of Buddhism, as enunciated by its founder Guatama or Gotama, is pure and simple idealism — the theory of the non-existence of matter, and that soul or spirit is the only actual existence. Bishop Berkeley, who sustained this theory in the last century with a course of reasoning most difficult to be answered, is far behind Guatama. Aristotle was anticipated in his system of logic by an intellect as acute and brilliant as his own, the Hindu Kanada, who was also the author of the atomic philosophy. Democritus, of Abdera, who, like his countryman, Pythagoras, traveled in the East, and very probably visited India, became acquainted there with the theories of the Hindu philosopher, and from thence introduced the atomic philosophy into Greece, with its logical consequence, the doctrine of evolution. 20 THE EAST. From him Epicurus took up the theory, and Lucre- tius enshrined it in stately verse, long before it was resuscitated by D'Holbach, and illustrated by Darwin.''' . To the educated Hindu there is nothing new in our philosophy, nor is there much that is new to him in our religion or in our irreligion. He is equally familiar with the great principles that underlie the one, and the want of principle that characterizes the other. A triad or trinity of Godhead is as prominent a feature of his creed as it is of the Christian. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer — are, in his mythology, threefold emanations of the one, eter- nal, uncreated, incomprehensible First Principle ; and their functions in the system of the Hindu religion, though differing very much from those of the three Sacred Persons of the Christian Trinity, plainly evince that the idea of a Triune God is one of the primeval traditions of our race. And as to manifestations of the divinity in human form — another primeval tradi- tion which finds its earliest expression in the promise contained in the third chapter of the book of Genesis of a Redeemer to come — the Hindus are not satisfied with one incarnation. They record twenty-four in- carnations, or, as they call them, avatars of Vishnu, the second person of the Hindu Triad ; of which ten are regarded as of paramount importance, and are de- nominated the great avatars. The three first of these are conjectured to have reference to the phenomena of the Noachian Deluge, the fourth to the story of Nimrod, and the fifth to that of the Babylonian Belus. * vSee Note lo. THE EAST. 21 The sixth commemorates some notable, though now unknown, event in the early history of Hindustan. In the seventh, Vishnu became incarnate in Rama, the hero of the Ramayuna ; in the eighth, in Chrishna, the hero of the Mahabharata. Buddha was the ninth and last; for the tenth is yet to come. And it seems strange enough that the author of the Buddhistic Re- formation should be regarded by the Brahmins as an incarnation of Vishnu, while the followers of Buddha have been driven from Hindustan, and compelled to take refuge in regions beyond its limits, where, how- ever, their doctrines have succeeded in drav\ ing to their profession the greater part of the Mongolian race, and of the people of the Malaysian Islands. The tenth avatar, it has been stated, is yet to come. It symbolizes the advent of Vishnu riding on a white steed, and armed with a blazing scimitar, to destroy the world — a figure strongly suggestive of the similar one in the Apocalypse of St. John.* The theory of successive incarnations of the God- head, so prominent a feature in the mythology of Hindustan, was occasionally borrowed from the Brahmins by religious and revolutionary propa- gandists of other nations. Traces of it are found in Gnosticism, which gave so much trouble to the Christian Church of the first ages; and various sects among the Mohammedans have adopted it, especially among the the votaries of Ali. Readers of Lalla Rookh will remember that the "Veiled Prophet of Khorasan" claimed to be such an incarnation, and induced his deluded followers such to believe him : ^"See Note ii. 22 THE EAST. and it is a fact that the Mokanna of history — for the "Veiled Prophet" was a historical personage — actually propagated that doctrine, which undoubtedly he received from the Hindus. In his speech to young Azirn, he is represented as saying: " Beinofs the most divine Thus deign through dark mortality to shine. Such was the essence that in Adam dwelt, To which all heaven, except the proud one, knelt: Such the refined intelligence that glowed In Moussa's frame — and thence descending, flowed Through many a prophet's breast — in Issa shone, And in Mohammed burned ; till, hastening on, (As a bright river, that, from fall to fall, In many a maze descending, bright through all, Finds some fair region, where, each labyrinth passed. In one full lake of light it rests at last,) That Holy Spirit, settling calm and free From lapse or shadow, centres all in me." One of the most remarkable doctrines of the Hindu theology — one which, however, it shares with the religion of ancient Egypt, to which it was probably communicated from the East — is that of metempsy- chosis, or the transmigration of souls. This is one of the numerous theories which Pythagoras brought back with him from his Oriental travels, and intro- duced into Greece and Italy; though the idea seems never to have taken root among the western nations, and perished with the immediate school of that phil- osopher. The doctrine of the transmigration of the human soul through different bodies, is the comple- ment of the doctrine of successive incarnations of the divinity, and is not entirely unwarranted by traditions of a similar character. And there are physical and THE EAST. 23 psychological theories entertained by not a few in our own age and country, which give countenance to this wildest speculation of the Hindu brain. To Hindustan we are indebted, not only for many of our ideas in philosophy, but also for many things that enter into our daily life, and the origin of which is generally very little suspected. The sip-ns of the Zodiac, and the curious and hitherto unaccountable astronomical names and de- vices, with which, for our convenience, we have mapped out the starry firmament of night, together with very much of the substance of our astronomy, are distinctly of Hindu origin, and came to us from the banks of the Ganges. Our common Arabic numerals, so called, are Hindu, and not Arabic at all; and were used by the Brahmins long before the rise of the Arabs or the birth of Mohammed. They were not known to the Arabs themselves until after their first invasion of Hindustan in the eighth century of our Era; and we call them Arabic, because they were introduced into Europe about three centuries afterwards, by or through the Arabs of Spain. Only those who have had occasion to use the Roman or Greek numerals, can fully appreciate the vast im- portance of the Hindu figures to our science and our daily life, and what a debt of gratitude we owe to the inventors of them. If Hindustan had done naught else but invent our numerals, it would deserve to stand in the very front rank of human civilization. The game of chess is of Hindu origin: it is referred to in the Mahabharata. Playing cards were not first 24 THE EAST. invented to amuse the insane Charles VI. of France, as is commonly stated. It is now tolerably clear that they were known in P^urope some time before the reign of that unfortunate monarch; and that, indeed, they were introduced from the East during the Cru- sades, or shortly after their termination. Like the numerals, they came to the West directly through the Saracens or Arabs ; but like the numerals, the Arabs themselves procured them from the Hindus, in v/hose books mention is frequently made of them before the Saracens became known to history. To the same source we can now trace many of our myths and legends, and much of what is called the folk-lore of Europe. Even our nursery tales, from Cinderella and Little Red Riding-Hood to William Tell, find their counterparts in the Sanscrit language, and in the Hindustani, its more modern successor; and we may justly suppose that they find there their originals, also — since that language supplies the ex- planation of many of them. For it seems that, after all, many of these stories of our childhood are not the meaningless narratives they appear to be. but are, in fact, expressions of familiar natural phenomena — highly figurative illustrations of the phases of the sun and moon, of the dawn, the morning star, the winds, and of the spirits that were supposed to reside in the air and in the celestial bodies. With such fanciful impersonations of natural phenomena our primeval fathers beguiled the evening leisure of their first off- spring on the highlands of ancient Arya ; and the stories which they told, and which with them were readily recognized S};mbolisms of daily occurrences, THE EAST. 25 became with their descendants mere traditions, recitals whose true meanings were gradually lost-— -recitals without a moral, or with a very different one from that which gave them birth. Our very superstitions are many of them of Hindu origin. What is there to which superstition clings more desperately than to the horse-shoe as an emblem of good-luck ? Our ancestors hung it over their doors: some of their descendants persist in hanging it there yet. Lord Nelson sailed into the battle ot the Nile with one nailed to the mast-head of his vessel. Latterly, the use of the horse-shoe seems to have received a new lease of vitality. Beauty sets it with diamonds, and wears it on her wrist, or suspends it around her neck. So do her sisters of Hindustan : so have they done for unnumbered ages. But who can tell what it means, or why it should mean any- thing? As a horse-shoe, it does not mean anything. But the emblem was not a horse-shoe originally, but either a representation of the crescent moon, or an adaptation of a symbol of nature-worship quite familiar to the devotees of Siva in Hindustan. The one ex- planation is suggested by the worshipers of Siva, the other by those of Vishnu. Either will account for it with a reasonable degree of satisfaction ; while no one ever has been able to explain why the horse-shoe, as such, should be regarded as an omen or symbol of good luck. It may be that some of us have been witnesses of a custom that prevailed some years ago, and possibly yet prevails, in some parts of Ireland and of the Highlands of Scotland, of kindling fires from hill to 26 THE EAST. hill throughout the country on the night preceding Midsummer Day, or St. John's Day, the 24th of June. To this custom reference is made more than once by Sir Walter Scott. The people who kindle thesQ fires know not for what reason they do so ; though it is sometimes said to be in honor of St. John. But why St. John should be so honored, does not appear. Of course, it is almost unnecessary to say that the custom has nothing to do with St. John. We now know that those fires were first lit on the summits of the Hindu Kush Mountains in honor of the God of Day, by the worshipers of Agni, the first demoralizers of the purer Vedic religion of the early Aryans ; and that the custom itself is a superstitious remnant of the old Asiatic worship of Sun and Fire. I have no doubt that a great many of our supersti- tious customs and usages can be traced to a similar remote source. The Hindus are intimately skilled in the use of drugs and herbs and potions, oftentimes of wonderful power; but of their medical science we know as yet comparatively little. If the occasional indications that are given to us of their knowledge of the mys- terious secrets of nature — such, for example, as their power of suspending animation for a considerable period of time — are to be taken as a criterion of their acquaintance with the therapeutic art, there may be much for us to learn from them in the domain of medicine. In the domain of jurisprudence, the Hindus point with pride to the Laws of Menu, earlier in all probability than the laws of Solon or Lycurgus, or the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables : and the THE EAST. 27 code, known as the Gentu Code, founded upon the Laws of Menu, and which is in a great measure the civil law of Hindustan to-day, was of so enlightened a character as to elicit the admiration of a lawyer as eminent as Sir William Jones. But it is impossible, within the scope of a paper hke the present, to give a satisfactory idea either of the jurisprudence or of the medical science of Hin- dustan ; and much that has been here said in refer- ence to the intellectual development of its people in other respects, is necessarily very crude and super- ficial. ' History shows us no example of a nation, once fallen, that has ever again risen to glory and power. The Assyrian fell, and the city of his pride vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Great Babylon fell, and the sands of the desert have entombed its very ruins. When the last of the Pharaohs was borne to rest amid the granite hills of the Thebaid, the glory of his people was folded in his winding sheet. No second instalment of imperial power has been granted to Athens or Rome. Alien races, it is true, have sometimes re-erected the fallen fabric of empire in its former seats. So the Macedonian Ptole- mies restored the kingdom of Egypt; and the Arabs, when they became lords of Asia, built at Bagdad a capital for their dominions of which Nebuchadnezzar in his marble tomb, deep beneath the ruins of neigh- boring Babylon, might have been proud. But only alien races have so rebuilt the ruined structure of empire. The people who first dwelt in it, dwell there 28 THE EAST. no more for ever. The life of nations is like the life of individuals; it knows no second prime. But as the course of empire has now found its ut- most western limit, it must be renewed, if renewed at all, in the East. Even if there is no resurrection from the dead for fallen nations, and the chldren of Brahma, therefore, may never hope to recover the sovereignt}^ that was theirs three thousand years ago, it would not be unreasonable, to expect that, mingled with the blood of Britain, guided by the strong arm, and steady resolve, and earnest purpose of that most energetic representative of the Aryan races, and armed with appliances unknown to the old civilization, the most ancient of those races should again enter on " the world's broad field of battle." A people of more acute intellect and higher sense of honor, a people of finer forms and more beautifully moulded features, a people more fitted for resolute en- durance and heroic effort, there does not exist, than the Hindus; and it would be difficult to determine the limit of their capabilities under favorable auspices. I refer, of course, merely to the Hindus proper, and not to the twenty millions and upwards of the descend- ants of heterogenerous invaders and foreign settlers, mostly professing Mohammedanism, who have estab- lished themselves in the country. Let but some new Rama rise — some adventurous and daring English- man, perhaps, with the spirit of Clive and the ambition of Napoleon — and the genius of Hindustan may tower once more among the nations. Only three years ago, the transfer of a few Hindu regiments in the English service from Hindustan to Malta, to meet the possible THE EAST. 29 emergencies of the Russo-Turkish war, then in pro- gress, aroused the susceptibiHties of England and of Europe, and set the minds of men to thinking of the possibiHties of that great Oriental dependency of the British crown. (When the *' Man of Destiny" arises for Hindustan — as it seems to us arise he must — a new light may dawn from the Orient to usher in a new cycle of time. APPENDIX. NOTES. Note I. The earliest traditions, both of Persia and of Hindustan, show ^us the Iranian and Turanian, the Aryan and the Mongohan races in deadly conflicts: and the Aryans were not always the conquerors. See FirdousVs Shah Nameh, or Book of Kings, and Mirkhond' s History of Persia. Note 2. Arya, Aria, or Ariana, the ancient name of the country now designated as Bokhara and Afghanistan, including the great table-land of the Parapomisus or Hindu Kush Mountains, and the regions extending to the north and south of that range, is now generally regarded as the parent home of all the Aryan — or, as they were formerly with less propriety called, the Caucasian — nations. And in the same region, and probably in the elevated land of Pamir, north of the valley of Cashmere, we are to look for the cradle of the whole human race. The Ararat of the Mosaic writings, which is generally identified with the great mountain peak of Armenia would seem to have really been intended to designate the whole range of the Parapomisus, the back-bone of Asia and of the globe : and the tradition recorded in the Book of Genesis is not, there- fore, antagonistic to the result of modern researches. The word or syllable Ar, which is the basis of the words Aria, Aryans, Armenia, Ararat, Aram, Arphaxad, Arba- ces, Artaphernes , and so many other well-known eastern (30) APPENDIX. 31 names, has evidently a significance importing that some primitive idea is embodied in it; and yet philologists have thus far been unable to ascertain its meaning with any degree of certainty. Some consider it to mean man (Irish far); others regard it as equivalent \o great (Celtic, ard — high") ; while there is reason to suppose that the Latin word ^r^_to plough, to cultivate the soil — is derived from the same root, and consequently that Ar has some reference to the earth. Note 3. Whenever the Mongolians have exerted their power, they have always proved formidable. As already intimated in the first Note, Attila and Genghis Khan and Timur were not their first or only great conquerors. The Zendavesta of Zoroaster, the sacred book of the ancient Persians and of their descendants, the modern Parsis of Hindustan, refers to tremendous struggles in the very earliest days between Turan and Iran; and Firdusi, the epic poet of Persia, and Mirkhond and Khondemir, its histor- ians, relate in their books the repeated conquests of the Iranian Empire of Persia by the two Afrasiabs, father and son, or grandfather and grandson, monarchs of Turan, Turkestan or Mongolia, before the accession of Cyrus the Great to the Persian throne. It is a mistake to suppose that Genghis Khan and Timur were mere barbarians, who bore down their more civilized neighbors with simple force of numbers. Genghis Khan, at least, was an accomplished general, a wise sovereign, and a prudent legislator; and he stands forth in the Asiatic system with the same prominence as Charlemagne in that of mediaeval Europe. The empire erected by him and his sons was the largest that ever existed, not even excepting the empires of Russia and Great Britain ; it included nearly the whole of Asia, and a large part of Europe. The cele- 32 THE EAST. brated Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, visited Cambalu, the capitol of the Mongolian Empire, during the reign of Octai Khan, the son and immediate successor of Genghis ; and the accounts which he gives of the wealth and power of the empire, though for a long time deemed gross exaggerations, have now been found correct almost to the minutest detail. Marco Polo was present at the siege and capture of Pekin by Octai, in A. D. 1230; and his description of the event is the first in which distinct mention is made of gunpowder and cannon as implements of war. As far as we know at present, the Mongolian race was the inventor of that most potent engine of destruction and civilization ever invented. Timur (or Tamerlane) was a more ferocious warrior than Genghis Khan, and by far the most rapid and energetic on record. Napoleon Bonaparte's marches were slow, com- pared to those of the Tartar conqueror. From Moscow to Delhi, from Samarcand to the borders of Egypt, from Ana- tolia to the Great Wall of China, he moved with a rapidity never known before or since in the annals of war. Europe and civihzation owe him a debt of gratitude, notwithstand- ing his many cruelties, for his defeat of the Turkish Sultan, Bayazid, at the tremendous battle of Angora, in 1402— a battle which saved Constantinople from the Turks for half a century. Attila, or Etzel, known as "The Scourge of Godj" was by far the most formidable of all the barbarian leaders who contributed to the overthrow of the Roman Empire of the West ; and yet he was more easily swayed by sentimental considerations than most of the others. Pope St. Leo was successful in his effort to divert him from his threatened march on Rome. One of the most dramatic scenes in his- tory is the meeting of the aged chief of the Western church with the fiery leader of the Huns in the tent of the latter, before the walls of Aquileia. APPENDIX. 33 It is a remarkable fact that, in the great battles of the world in which the Monoglians have taken part, more men have been engaged than in any other of the numerous con- flicts between the nations. In the battle on the plains of Durocatalaunum or Chalons in France, in the year 451, between Attila and the combined forces of the Romans and Visigoths, commanded by Aetius and Theodoric, the opposing armies are estimated to have numbered a million and a half of men, almost equally divided between the two sides. It is stated that, at the battle of the Jaxartes, in A. D. 1220, Genghis Khan commanded 700,000 men, against 500,000 led by Mohammed of Karasm. The battle of An- gora, between Timur and Sultan Bayazid, in A. D. 1402, lasted three days; 800,000 men were engaged in it under Timur, while the Turkish Sultan is said to have commanded 400,000. No doubt these numbers are very much exaggerated. We know how very difficult it is, even in our own day, to pro- cure exact estimates of the forces engaged in the different battles with which we are familiar. It is the interest of commanders of armies to magnify their numbers before battle, and afterwards very often to underestimate them, especially in the event of defeat. Yet, making all due allowance for exaggeration, it must be admitted that, when- ever the Mongolian races have exerted themselves to display their military power, they have been able to bring into the field a greater number of troops than any of the Aryan nations. Reference is made to the recent campaign of the Chinese, under Liu-Sho, against the Mohammedan kingdom at- tempted to be set up at Kashgar by Yakub Khan, in defiance of the sovereignty of the Chinese Empire. This campaign has equally surprised and astonished Europe with the dis- play of power and strategy evidenced by it. 3 34 THE EAST. Note 4. Until the year 1857, the Hindu possessions of England were not directly the property of the Enghsh gov- ernment, but were actually controlled and owned by the famous East India Company. This noted corporation was chartered in A. D. 1599, by Queen Elizabeth. In A. D. t6t2, it obtained permission from the great Mogul Emperor Selim Jehanghir, the famous lover of Nurmahal, to establish a factory or trading post at Surat, on the western coast of India. In A. D. 1676, a similar concession was obtained from the Emperor Aurungzib to establish a factory on the river Hoogly, one of the branches of the Ganges, which, was the foundation of Calcutta. The company was contented with commercial privileges until A. D. 1748, when, in the confusion that attended the breaking up of the great Mogul Empire, it began to make territorial acquisitions. In its service Robert CUve, one of the greatest and most erratic of English generals, commenced his remarkable career at the early age of twenty-three, in the year 1748; and he soon conquered for it Madras, Tanjore, and Bengal, and established the English dominion on a firm basis. He returned to England in 1767, and died by his own hand in 1774, at the age of forty-nine, Warren Hastings was appointed the first Governor Gen- eral of all the provinces of British India in 1773, and ruled until 1786, contemporaneously with the period of our Rev- olutionary War. He extended and consolidated the British sway. His successor was Lord Cornwallis, whose previous surrender at Yorktown had not served to diminish the esteem in which he was held at home. His administration, both civil and military, of the affairs of Hindustan, was much more successful than his career in America. Among other distinguished Enghshmen who attained eminence in India was Sir Philip Francis, now generally recognized as the author of the famous "■ Letters of Junius," APPENDIX. 35 and the bitter and unrelenting enemy of Hastings. He was a member of the Council of Bengal, under the latter, from 1774 to 1780. Sir William Jones, the able lawyer, the honored judge, the profound scholar, the refined and amiable gentleman, the friend of America as well as of Hindustan, and one of the most accomplished men that ever existed, was a judge of the supreme court of judicature of Bengal from 1783 to his death in 1794. To him more than any other one man, we are indebted for our knowledge of Hindustan and its literature. All these men received their commissions directly from the East India Company, and not from the Government; though, in 1783, the Government deemed it necessary to reorganize the Company, and thereafter exercised a control- ling influence in the management of its affairs. The control became gradually more and more direct ; and finally, in 1857, in consequence of the Sepoy War, the pohtical power of the famous corporation was abolished, and Hindustan became directly subject to the crown. The Company lasted until 1873, when its charter expired. Note S- Only fragmentary notices of Hindu history come to us through the ancient classical writers. The invasions of the country by Semiramis, Cyrus, Darius Hys- taspes, Alexander the Great, and Seleucus Nicator, consti- tute nearly all that we know of its affairs from that source ; and these invasions do not seem to have penetrated far into the country. From native sources, however, we are now enabled to obtain some idea of its internal history; though the peculiarly mystical system of the Hindu theology has contrived to involve it in a considerable degree of nebu- lousness. Certain events, such as the contest between the sacerdotal and the warrior castes, signalized by the avatar 36 THE EAST. of Parasu Rama ; the contest between Rama Chandra, the hero of the Solar Race, and Ravan of Lanca, apparently the champion of the primitive races of southern India ; the Mahabharata, or Great War of the Lunar Race ; the propa- gation of Buddhism ; its subsequent expulsion ; and the glorious reign of Vicramaditya, constitute notable epochs in the annals of Hindustan, which are now recognized as most important in their bearing on the history of other nations. Mention has been made of the Solar and Lunar Races of Hindustan. These designations are given to different fam- ilies of the Hindu Kings, apparently an older and a younger line of princes. The princes of the so-called Solar Race were the first rulers of the country, deriving their descent directly from Menu, the traditional ancestor of the nation, probably identical with Noah. The hero of the race was Rama, the hero of the Ra may una. The younger or Lunar line seem to have borne a rela- tion to the Solar Race somewhat similar to that which the Hellenes held to the Pelasgi in ancient Greece. The strife between the princes of this line, which culminated in the Mahabharata, or Great War, was as famous in India as the War of Troy was in Greece. The contest between the sacerdotal and the warrior castes, to which reference has been made, is assigned to a period anterior to the year B. C. 1500, the era of Rama Chandra and the Ramayuna, to about B. C, 1400; the epoch of the Mahabharata to about B C. 1300; the propa- gation of Buddhism to about B. C. 1000; and the age of Vicramaditya to B. C. 56. The modern history of Hindustan may be said to begin with the first Mohammedan invasion of the country, in A. D. 708, by Mohammed Ibn Kasim, one of the generals of the Caliph Al Walid. This was nearly contemporaneous APPENDIX. 37 with the invasion of Spain by two other generals of the same Caliph, Musa and Tarik (A. D. 711). But little im- pression seems to have been made upon India at this time by the Mohammedans. Mahmud of Gazni, Sultan of Afghanistan, about A. D. 1000, was the first to effect a permanent establishment of Mohammedan power in Hin- dustan, which he accomplished by fierce warfare and un- relenting persecution of the Brahminical religion. From that time to the present century, though the Moham- medans number but a small portion of the population, the greater part of Hindustan has been under Mohammedan sway. The conquest of the country by England has been greatly facihtated by the enmity existing between the Mohammedans, who are mostly of alien origin, and the native Hindus. The most important and best known of the Moham- medan sovereignties of Hindustan was that denominated the Great Mogul Empire, which was established A. D. ^5255 by Mohammed Baber, a lineal descendant of Tirnur, who presents almost the only instance on record of a prince driven from his own country (Bokhara), and founding an empire in another land. It was called the Mogul or Mon- gol Empire, generally with the epithet Great prefixed, on account of the MongoKan origin of the family of Timur. A succession of able rulers, Baber, Homaiun, Akbar, Selim Jehanghir, Shah Jehan, and Aurungzib, raised the Great Mogul Empire to power and fame, and extended its sway over nearly all Hindustan, notwithstanding that it was Mohammedan in religion and alien in race, and that the vast majority of its subjects remained devoted adherents of the old Brahminical worship. But the sons and successors of Aurungzib were weak and incompetent. Ambitious chiefs, both Hindu and Mohammedan, set up for them- selves in various parts of the country. The Empire fell to 38 ^ THE EAST. pieces. It was the opportunity of England; and she availed herself of it. The man for the occasion, Lord Clive, was on hand for the purpose. One of the best known episodes in the history of the Great Mogul Empire, one which has been enshrined in song arid romance, is the story of Nurmahal, the '^ Light of the Harem" — or, as her lover prefered to call her, Nurjehan, the ** Light of the World." She is said to have been of Persian origin, and a woman of extraordinary beauty and accomplishments. She made her appearance, with her father and brother, at the court of the Great Mogul Empe- ror Jehanghir (Conqueror of the World), about A. D. 1606 ; and the monarch immediately fell in love with her. He made her his wife, and it would seem his mistress and sove- reign, too ; for she ruled monarch and court with absolute sway and much ability, and held the destinies of Hindustan in her hands for twenty years, from A. D. 1607 to 1627, or nearly the whole reign of Jehanghir. The last Oriental invader of India was Ahmed Abdallah, chief of Afghanistan. He was one of the principal officers in the service of Nadir Shah, the Persian conqueror, who had invaded India and plundered Delhi in 1739. On the death of Nadir Shah in 1747, Ahmed Abdallah made him- self master of the territories of Cabul and Herat, and ulti- mately of all Afghanistan ; and founded the dynasties until recently existing in that country. The decay of the Great Mogul Empire, and the contests of the Mohammedan chiefs between themselves, gave occasion to some of the Hindu States to reassert themselves; and the Mahrattas, a brave and warlike people from the western mountains, rose to im- portance, and threatened to become the ruling power in the country. Against them, Ahmed Abdallah organized a league of the Mohammedan powers ; and he defeated them, in A. D. 1 761, in a great battle at Panniput, near Agra, APPENDIX. 39 the old battle field of the Mahabharata. The power of the Mahrattas, however, was only checked, not broken ; and Hindustan remained divided into many hostile camps, which greatly facilitated the ultimate conquest of the country by England. England was not the first or only European nation that contended fi^r power, and wealth, and supremacy in India. Portugal, Holland and France, were her formidable rivals and competitors. Spain and Portugal, and not England and France, were the nations that, at the end of the fif- teenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, gave promise of the possession of vast colonial empire ; and while the New World was abandoned to Spain, Portugal claimed a monopoly of East Indian commerce and discovery. Vasco de Gama was the first European to sail the Indian Ocean. The Cape of Good Hope had already been doubled by Bartholemew Diaz in i486. De Gama passed through the channel of Mozambique, steered northeastward towards the Equator, and made the harbor of Calicut, on the coast of Malabar, in 1497. Tlie Portuguese gradually acquired territory. Alphonso de Albuquerque, one of the few great geniuses of the world, and a man of the highest integrity of character, was viceroy of the East Indian possessions of Portugal from A. D. 1505 to A. D. 1515. He conquered Ormus, with its almost fabulous wealth, the whole coast of Malabar, Ceylon, the Sunda Isles, the Peninsula of Malac- ca, and numerous other territories ; made favorable alliances with the monarchs of Siam, Pegu, and Abyssinia; and threatened the conquest of Egypt. Under him, Goa, on the coast of Malabar, became the capital of the East Indian Empire of Portugal. It now remains the sole remnant of that once vast dominion. The famous Hispano-Portuguese Jesuit, Francis Xavier, arrived at Goa in 1542, and until his death in 1552, 40 THE EAST. preached the Christian rehgion with extraordinary success on all the coasts of the Indian seas from Cape Comorin to China and Japan. Luis de Camoens, the epic poet of Portugal, was in India for sixteen years, from 1553 to 1569 ; and it was there that he ' composed the Lusiad (Os Lusiados), one of the four great epic poems of modern times, in which he commem- orates the daring expedition of Vasco de Gama, and no doubt drew much of his inspiration from the novel scenes of the Eastern seas; though he does not seem to have acquired any considerable acquaintance with the literature of Hindustan. The domestic troubles of Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth century gave opportunity to her bitter enemies and indefatigable rivals, the Hollanders, to break down her power in the East, without being able to substitute their own in its place, except in Java and a few of the smaller Malaysian islands. About A. D. 1672, France undertook the estabhshment of colonial trade and power in the East by the purchase of Pondicherry, on the eastern coast of the Deccan. This was four years before the establishment of the English at Cal- cuttai Louis XIV. was then monarch of France, and Aurungzib, the great Mogul Emperor of India — rulers not very unlike in their history and their personal characteristic^. During the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe (i 740-1 745), and up to the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years' War between England and France (i 756-1 763), in which our American Colonies took so memorable a part, Joseph Dupleix was governor of the French possessions in the East Indies — a man of extraordinary ability, and the contemporary and worthy compeer of the great Marquis de Montcalm. The designs of the latter in America found their counterpart in the gigantic plans of Dupleix to build APPENDIX. 41 u^ a great colonial empire for France in India. But the inefficiency of the French home government was equally fatal to both ; and as the hopes of France in America went down forever on the plains of Abraham before the intrepidity of General Wolfe, the schemes of Dupleix failed before the genius of Lord Clive and the rising star of England. Pon- dicherry, her first possession, remains her last, like Goa to Portugal, and the sole remnant of a once mighty empire. For many ages Benares has been the Holy City of the Hindus. It became doubly dear to them when their an- cient capital, Indraprestha, now Delhi, passed into the hands of the Mohammedans. Benares suffered much in the numerous Mohammedan invasions of Hindustan ; yet it re- retains considerable traces of its ancient glory and mag- nificence. Many of its temples and public buildings were projected on a grand scale ; and the influence of its archi- tecture on that of the Arabs, as subsequently introduced into southern Europe under the name of Saracenic, is quite apparent, Elephanta and Ellora constitute the Pantheon or Valhalla of Hindustan. Elephanta, so called from its resemblance at a distance to the profile of an elephant, is a small island near Bombay, remarkable for its wonderful cave -temples, hewn from the solid rock, and adorned with statues of the Hindu gods cut in the same way. Ellora is a small town in the Deccan or Southern India, where there are several simi- lar cave-temples and statues in them carved from the solid rock. Mention has been made of Golconda, in the Deccan. It was for a long time a rich and powerful kingdom, among the rulers of which are enumerated several queens. It was once the great diamond field of the world, and has not yet entirely lost its reputation in that respect. From it the famous Kohinur (Mountain of Light), and most of the noted diamonds of Europe, were originally brought. 42 THE EAST. The history of the Kohinur is somewhat remarkable. It and another stone of equal size and brilliancy are said to have once served as eyes for an idol of Vishnu in one of the temples of the Deccan. One of the briUiants, it is stated, was stolen by a soldier, and was never recovered. The other, the Kohinur, passed into the possession of the Mogul Emperors Shah Jehan (162 7-1666) and Aurun- gizib (1666-1707). In 1739, the Persian Conqueror Nadir Shah seized it, with other treasures, at the capture and sack of Delhi, and gave it the name it now bears. By some it is said that Nadir Shah plucked the diamond from the idol of Vishnu. Others attribute this act to the Emperor Shah Jehan, or to some earlier prince. Accounts equally differ as to the time when the stone was first taken from the earth. Some say it was found before the Chris- tian era; others place its discovery as late as A. D. 1550. Its later history is better known. At the death of Nadir Shah in 1747, in the confusion consequent thereon, Ahmed Abdallah, the Afghan, one of his generals, of whom mention has already been made, plundered his palace, seized the Kohinur, and retired into Afghanistan. Abdallah's grandson, Shah Sujah, gave the diamond to Runjeet Smgh, chief of the Punjaub, as the price of the assistance of the latter to enable him . to recover the throne of Cabul, from which he had been ex- pelled. This was about A. D. 1808. Runjeet transmitted it, upon his death in 1839, to his son and successor Dhulip Singh ; from whom, on the conquest of the Punjaub by the English in 1849, i^ passed to the crown of Great Britain. The Hindus believe that the possession of the Kohinur brings disaster in its train — a belief which is not altogether unwarranted by the history of its several successive owners. Note 6. The Asiatic Society was established in 1784, APPENDIX. 43 with Sir William Jones, its chief promoter, as the first president. Most of Sir William's valuable papers on Oriental subjects were read before it. Twenty volumes of the ''^Asiatic Researches," which contain the transactions of the Society from 1784 to 1836, testify to the greatness of the work accomplished by it, besides numerous publica- tions that were made under its auspices. The ''Asiatic Re- searches" were followed by the "Journal of the Asiatic Society." > Note 7. The antiquity of the Vedas and Puranas, of the Ramayuna and Mahabharata, and the events celebrated in those poems, and of the literary and philosophical develop- ment generally of the Hindus, has been a subject of some controversy. By Sir William Jones, the composition of the Vedas is assigned to the sixteenth century before Christ, which would make them nearly contemporaneous with the age of Moses. Mr. Henry T. Colebrooke, a distinguished East Indian scholar, and the worthy successor of Sir Wil- liam Jones in the Asiatic Society, and on the bench of the high court of judicature of Bengal, assigns them to the fourteenth century before our era. The Ramayuna is sup- posed to have been written about B. C. 1400; the Mahab- harata about B. C. 1300. The promulgation of the laws of Menu, a most remarkable system of legislation, Sir William Jones places about the year B. C. 800, the era of Lycurgus in Greece. Schlegel regards it as of much earlier date. Colebrooke contends for the very high antiquity of the Hindu philosophy; while Ritter, in his History of Ancient Philosophy, attributes to it a much more modern origin. The probability seems to be that, though these several pro- ductions of Hindu genius may have been revised in com- paratively recent times, as the Homeric poems were revised and re-edited by Pisistratus, they are substantially entitled 44 THE EAST. to the high antiquity claimed for them ; and the progress of investigation justifies this conclusion. It may be stated that the arrangement of the Vedas in their present shape is usually attributed to Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata; though there is reason to suppose that the ' name Vyasa is a generic one, like Caesar or Ptolemy, and not necessarily that of an individual. Note 8. The war of the Mahabharata was an epoch in the history of Hindustan as notable as that of the Trojan war with the Greeks, and equally remarkable in its influence upon the Hterature and intellectual development of subse- quent ages. The writer of the Mahabharata writes as an eye-witness of the events which he relates, and those events can scarcely be more recent than the year B. C. 1300. The story, in brief, is this : Pandu, the son of Vichi- travirya, monarch of Hindustan, had been excluded from the succession to the throne on some suspicion of illegiti- macy, and his younger brother, Dhertarasbtra, was pro- moted in his stead. In course of time, the five sons of Pandu, known as the Pandava brothers, and whose names were Yudisthira, Arjuna, Baldeva, Bhima and Sudeva, asserted the right of their chief Yudisthira to the imperial throne. They had estabhshed themselves at Indaprestha ; while Duryodan and his hundred brothers, of the younger line of Dhertarasbtra, who had taken the name of Kurus from one of their ancestors, made Hastinapur their seat of government. All the princes of India took part on one side or the other. Chief among the allies of the Pandavas, was Chrishna of Guzzerat, the bosom friend of Arjuna, and who proved to be an avatar of Vishnu. The strife culmi- nated, as stated, in the great battle at Panniput, on the plains of Agra, in which, with the aid of Chrishna, the Pandavas triumphed. Duryodan, of Hastinapur, and all his APPENDIX. 45 brethren, were slain. Grieved at the dreadful slaughter, the Pandavas, it is said, retired from India; and their after fate remains untold. Chrishna was accidentally killed some years afterwards in a thicket by a hunter ; and his sons were driven out of India. Woman plays no such important part in the Mahabharata, as she does in the Ramayuna. Yet much of the beauty of Vyasa's great poem is due to the intervention of his heroines, Rhadha, the favorite mistress of Chrishna, and Drupdevi, the queen of the Pandava brothers. Drupdevi was the wife at once of all the five brothers, an instance of polyandria not unusual among the professors of Buddhism, but the first to be found in the annals of Hindustan. Such is the simple groundwork of the story of the Maha- bharata, which seems to have been founded upon actual occurrences. But how far the numerous episodes of the poem, the exploits of Chrishna and Arjuna, and the great catastrophe, are historical, it is difficult to say. Tliere are evidences of an element of religious controversy in the struggle ; and one of the most remarkable portions of the poem is a discourse of Chrishna with Arjuna, before the great battle, full of the profoundest religious and philos- ophical speculations. The Pandavas, it is said, after their withdrawal from the country, disappeared from history. But it is somewhat startling to find them reappear, on the theory of Tod, Pococke and Wilford, as the Heracleidse of Greece and Western Asia ; and it must be confessed that the theory does not seem to be without some foundation. Examined in the light of it, the events of immediately succeeding centuries in the Assyro-Babylonian Empire, Asia Minor, and Greece, evince a connection at this time between Eastern and Western Asia, that can no longer be ignored in the investigation of their respective antiquities. 46 THE EAST. Note p. There seems to be good reason to believe, that Hindustan exercised much greater influence than is com- monly supposed on Europe and Western Asia, in the earlier ages of the world. The "Annals of Rajahstan " by Col. James Tod, of the British Army (London, 1829, 1861), and Pococke's ''India in Greece" (London, 1852), con- tain some curious and interesting reflexions on this point, which commend themselves quite forcibly to all classical scholars. Burnouf's '■'■ Introduction a /' Histoire du Bud- dhisme Indien^' (Paris, 1844), and Lacroix-Marles' ^^ His- toire de r Inde ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1828), suggest similar reflections. Sir WiUiam Jones himself was struck with the similarities existing between the mythology of In- dia and that of Greece and Italy, which he illustrated in a special paper on the subject, to be found among his works. His successors in the Asiatic Society have developed much in the same line of thought. Note 10. The Sacontala of Calidasa was translated into English by Sir William Jones ; and the translation is to be found in his published works. A translation of it, and of several other Hindu dramas, is to be found in the " Theatre of the Hindus," by Henry Hayman Wilson, who has also published translations of the Puranas, and of parts of the Ramayuna and Mahabharata. Parts of these two poems were also translated by Sir WiUiam Jones, as was likewise the Gitagoninda of Jayadeva. Note II. Tyndall, in his famous address at Belfast, is candid enough to admit that the philosophy of evolution is not new ; that it is the legitimate outgrowth of the atomic theory in physics ; and that it was taught by several of the ancient philosophers. He falls into an error, however, no doubt unconsciously, in attributing the promulgation of APPENDIX, , 47 the atomic theory to Zeno of Elea, instead of Democritus of Abdera. The philosophy of Zeno was quite the reverse of evolution : it was a development of Pythagorean panthe- ism in the direction of idealism ; while the tendency of the philosophy of evolution is unquestionably materialistic. Democritus of Abdera is entitled to be regarded as the father of the doctrine of evolution. And yet he undoubt- edly derived his ideas from the East. It is a noticeable fact, that those Greek philosophers who are known to have traveled in Asia, as Pythagoras, Democritus of Abdera, and Plato, are those whose philo- sophical tenets most nearly resemble those of the Hindus — a strong argument, by the way, for the priority and an- tiquity of the Hindu philosophy. Note 12. Serving as an introduction to the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva, of which mention has been made, is to be found an enumeration by the poet of the ten great avatars of Vishnu, which the curious in such matters may be grati- fied to find here transcribed. The appellations Heri and Kesava, which frequently recur in it, are names of Vishnu, of which the former is supposed to mean Lord, and to be derived from the same root as Aria ; and the latter signi- fies Conqueror of Kesi (one of the bitter enemies of Chrishna). The translation is by Sir William Jones. ODE TO VISHNU. I, Thou recoverest the Veda in the water of the ocean of destruction, placing it joyfully in the bosom of an ark fab- ricated by thee, O Ke^sava, assuming the body of a fish. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 48 THE EAST. 2. The earth, placed on the point of thy tusk, remains fixed Hke the figure of a black antelope on the moon, O Ke^sava, assuming the form of a boar. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 3. The earth stands firm on thy immensely broad back, which grows larger from the callus occasioned by bearing that vast burden, OKe'sava, assuming the body of a tor- toise. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 4. The claw with a stupendous point on the exquisite lotos of thy lion's paw, is the black bee that stung the body of the embowelled Hiranyacasipu, O Ke^sava, assuming the form of a man -lion. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 5. By thy power thou beguilest Bali, O thou miraculous dwarf, thou purifier of men with the water (of Ganga) springing from thy feet, O Ke'sava, assuming the form of a dwarf. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 6. Thou bathest in pure water, consisting of the blood of Cshatriyas, the world, whose offenses are removed, and which is relieved of the pain of other births, O Ke'sava, assuming the form of Parasu Rama. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 7. With ease to thyself, with delight to the genii of the eight regions, thou scatterest on all sides, in the plain of combat, the demon with ten heads, O Ke'sava, assuming the form of Rama Chandra. Be victorius, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 8. Thou wearest on thy bright body a mantle shining like a blue cloud, or like the water of Yamuna tripping toward thee through fear of thy furrowing ploughshare, O Ke'sava, assuming the form of Chrishna. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 9. Thou blamest (oh, wonderful power) ! the whole Veda, whe.n thou seest, oh kind-hearted, the slaughter of APPENDIX. 49 cattle prescribed for sacrifice, O Ke'sava, assuniing the body of Buddha. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! lo. For the destruction of all the impious, thou drawest thy cimiter^ blazing like a comet (how tremendous !), O Ke'sava, assuming the body of Calci. Be victorius, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! As already stated, the first three avatars probably have reference to the Noachian Deluge. The first, the Matsya (or fish) avatar, represents Vishnu, in the form of a fish, preserving a a virtuous family during the incursion of a great deluge, and recovering the sacred books lost during its continuance. In the second, or Vara (Boar) avatar, Vishnu is repre- sented in human form, with a boar's head, supporting on his tusks the earth, which he has rescued from the abyss of water, in which it had been submerged by a demon, and trampling the demon under his feet. In the third or Courma (Tortoise) avatar, Vishnu, in the form of a tortoise, the Hindu symbol of strength, supports on his back the earth that is about to sink in the waters, and which has heen convulsed by the assaults of demons. In the fourth, or Nara-Singh (Man-Lion ) avatar, Vishnu appears as a man with a hon's head, to overthrow and tear to pieces the tyrant Hiranyacasipu (supposed to be Nim- rod). The god is represented as breaking forth on the tyrant from a shattered pillar, an idea suggestive of the tower of Babel and the dispersion of mankind from the plains of Shinar, as related in Genesis. The fifth, or Dwarf avatar, was intended to confound another tyrant, Bali (or Belus), king of Mahabalipur (Great Babylon). The sixth avatar is supposed to have reference to some early contest between the Kshatriyas or warrior class, and 50 THE EAST. the sacerdotal caste for supremacy ; in which the latter, under the lead of Parasu Rama, himself apparently a Ksha- triya, but in reality an incarnation of Vishnu, ultimately triumphed, with great slaughter of their opponents. This was probably one of the earliest contests in the history of Hindustan. The ''Demon with ten heads," conquered by Rama Chandra (Moon Rama), the hero of the Ramayuna, was Ravan of Lanca. The enemies of Hindustan, it will be noticed, are always represented as demons or incarnations of the evil principle ; while its heroes are avatars of Vishnu. The number of heads is merely indicative of power. The favorite avatar of the Hindus is the eighth, in which Vishnu became incarnate as Chrishna, the hero of the Mahabharata, and the Apollo and Achilles of Hindustan. Chrishna is usually represented as clad in blue robes. His favorite color is blue ; his favorite flower is the blue lotos or water-lily. His favorite haunts were the meadows of Agra and the banks of the blue Yamuna or Jumna, which he is said to have once compelled to come out of its channel to" him by a threat to run his ploughshare into its stream. A prominent characteristic of Buddhism, as first promul- gated, was its opposition to the practice of animal sacrifice, which had been sanctioned by the Vedas ; and hence, in the ninth avatar, Vishnu condemns that which he had before authorized. Calci is the name given to the white horse of the tenth avatar, which is yet to come. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS D0DESDSS4flE