LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS \ AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 291 M914P 1975 c 0 p. 2 The person charging this material is re¬ sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in^ dismissal from the University. J To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PHYSICAL RELIGION MAX MULLER AMS PRESS NEW YORK Physical Religion -»♦ ■ DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW IN 1890 F. MAX MULLER, K.M. roREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE, LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NFAV YORK : 15 EAST 16th STREET 189 1 lAll rights reserved | Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Muller, Friedrich Max, 1823-1900. Physical religion. Reprint of the 1891 ed. published by Longmans, Green, London and New York, which was issued as Gifford lectures, 1890. Includes index. 1. Religion, Primitive. 2. Natural theology. 3. Vedas. I. Title. II. Series: Gifford lectures; 1890 BL430.M83 1975 29l'.042 73-18811 ISBN 0-404-11451-2 Reprinted from the edition of 1891, London and New York First AMS edition published in 1975 Manufactured in the United States of America AMS PRESS INC. NEW YORK, N. Y. 10003 PREFACE. ^ 9 / I97S tXip‘ This volume contains my second course of Gifford Lectures, as I delivered them before the University of Glasgow in the beginning of this year, with a few additions, mostly printed at the end of the volume. In lecturing before an academic audience, I felt in duty bound to make my meaning as clear as possible, even at the risk of becomiuf^ tedious in drivino’ the nail home more than once. Nor could I avoid repeating here and there what I had written elsewhere, if I wished to place the subject before my hearers in a complete and systematic form. Attentive readers will find, however, that in re¬ stating what I had said before, I often had to modify or correct my former statements, and I liope the time may never come, when I can no longer say. We live and learn. F. MAX MULLER. Oxford, Bee. 6 , 1890 . <3 i„v *K lx'. . - .<. * "VT‘ '• ' ^rr' - \WW i" • ■■■i V^' —s' . . . 4 . ..-J 7 -.' S> 11 ^ _. ^ :-if ...^;■• '■ ■ •• W /(h''.rtli'•i.«- 4 ^'ve • ■ % .^,- a . ^^‘ •,-^_^ - . <* _ _ ' -‘j'' -'-. p 'j^; ‘" '^' • ■-'. , ; ■" ■" >■'■. ^ ‘ . ■■ ■ «•' ’■" ’ M _. *■ » A «-. ►jJC ? >-.'(I. * ' ’'■ '’^ V ■' . 1 ‘ I 'VT r*Ul'“ iecify^^r ~ ^ >- -^v • ;'> 5 * ,r -Mwwv^<,'=V' i » : • T w -!*• •*! . ^ ># ..r^'T- . 1 ? H , j ^ I ># . • •- ? L/ •*, TABLE OF CONTENTS. VAGK Peeface ........ V LECTURE L How TO STUDY Physical Religion. The three divisions of natural religion,—The three phases of religion often contemporaneous.—Physical religion.—The historical method.—Historical continuity.—Varieties of physical religion.— Physical religion best studied in India.—The Vedic period.—- Natural phenomena as viewed by nomad and agricultural people.— Physical religion outside of India.—The meaning of primitive.— Discoveries of ancient life.—Discovery of the Veda.—Unique character of the Veda ........ 1-21 LECTURE II. The Veda and the Testimonies to its eaely existence. How did the Veda become known?—No foreign nations men¬ tioned in the Veda.—The Veda not mentioned by foreign nations.— Early contact between India and Egypt, Babylon, and Persia.— Greek accounts of India.—Skylax.—Alexander’s expedition to India.—Contact with China.—Buddhist Pilgrims.—Later contact with Persia.—Al-BirClnl, 1000 a.d. —The Emperor Akbar, 1556- 1605.—Prince Dara, translator of the Upanishads.—Schopen¬ hauer ........... 22-36 LECTURE III. The Veda as studied by Eukopean Scholaes. Thread of our argument.—European missionaries in India.— European scholars acquainted with the Vedas.—Asiatic Society of Bengal.—Pnterest aroused inGermany.—Bunsen’sprojected jourtiey to India.—MSS. of the Veda brought to Europe.—Eugene Burnouf in France.—First edition of the Eig-veda .... 37-54 Vlll TABLE OF CONTEM’S. LECTUKE IV. Survey of Yeuic Literature. PACiF. Peculiar character of Indian antiquity.—Meaning of Veda.—The Rig-veda, the only true Veda.—Brahinanic view of the Vedas.— The Rig-veda.'—The ten Ma?rr?alas.—Method in the collection of the ten Mandalas.—Number of hymns.—The Prati.sakhyas.—Date of the Pratisakhya.—Minutiae of the Prathakhya.—The Anukra- mawis of >S'aunaka.—Number of verses in the Rig-veda.—The Sama- veda.—Ya^ur-veda.—The Amandas or Mantra period.—The prose Brahmanas.—The Brahmanas of the Yayur-veda.—The Brahmajias of the Sama-veda.—The Brahmajms of the Rig-veda.—^The true Veda.—The Brahma?ias of the Brahmans.—Life during the Vedic period.—Poem on trades and professions.—Poem of the gambler.— Independent speculation.—x\ra?iyakas and Upanishads.—Duration of Brahma?^a period.—The Atharva-veda .... 55-83 LECTUEE V. Age of the Veda. An accurate knowledge of the Veda necessary for a study of physical religion.—Howto fix the date of the Veda.—Aryan immi¬ gration into India.—Sindhu, cotton, mentioned 3000 B. c.—The Shtras.—The three literary pei’iods of the Vedic age.—Chronological terminus ad quern. —Sandrocottus, died 291 b. c. —Buddhism, a re¬ action against the Vedic religion.—The word Upanishad.—The word Shtra.—Relation of Buddhism to Brahmanism.—Constructive chronology.—Character of the Veda.—Simplicity of Vedic hymns.— Moral elements.—Early sacrifices.—Childish thoughts in the Veda.— More exalted ideas.—The sacrificial character of the Vedic hymns.—Yap, to sacrifice.—Hu, to pour out.—Sacrificial terms.— Other sacrificial terms.—Prayer better than sacrifice.—The primitive sacrifice.—Morning and evening meal.—Lighting and keeping of the fire.—New and full moon.—The three seasons.— The meaning of solemn ....... 84-114 LECTUEE VI. Physical Eeligion. Definition of physical religion.—God as a predicate.—Deifica¬ tion.—The natural and the supernatural.—Agni, fire, as one of the TABLE OF CONTENTS. IX rAGK Devas.—Early conceptions of fire.—The etymological meaning of Agni.—Names of fire.—Eire, named as active.—Agni as a human or animal agent.—New explanation of animism, personification, and anthropomorphism.—Mr. Herbert Spencer, against animism.—Pro¬ fessor Tiele’s theory of the gods as facteurs .—The agents in nature.—The categories of the understanding.—The categories of language.—Eire, as a Deva.—Greek and Roman gods.—Ruskin on the ancient gods.—Evolution of the word deva.—Natural revela¬ tion of God.—The biography of Agni ..... 115-143 LECTURE VII. The Biography of Agni. Eacts against theories.—Premature generalisation.—Agni in his physical character.—Agni, as the sun.—Agni, the sun, or the fire on the hearth.—Sun and fire in America.—Sun and fire among the Eins.—Agni, as lightning.—Matarisvan.—Eire from flint.—Eire from wood.—Mythological ideas connected with fire.—Agni, as deva, bright, amartya, undying, &c.—Agni, the immortal f mong mortals.—Agni, the friend, helper, fathei-.—Agni, helper in battle.—Eireless races.—Agricultural Aryas.—Agni, destroying forests.—Agni’s horses.—Agni, as sacrificial fire.—Agni, the messenger between gods and men.—Agni, as priest.—Hymn to Agni ........... 144-17 b LECTURE VIII. Agni, as divested of his Material Character. Later development of Agni.—Agni identical with other gods.— Henotheism.—Henotheism in Einland.—Early scepticism.—Ex¬ change of gods.—Dual deities.—Reconciliation of the solar and meteoric theories.—Supremacy of Agni.—The general name of deity.—Evolution of concepts.—The highest concept of deity.— Agni, as creator, ruler, judge.—The dark side of Indian religion. —Anthropomorphism.—The sage Narada.—Influence of children on religion .......... 177-203 LECTURE IX. The Usefulness of the Vedic Religion for a Comparative Study of Other Religions. Agni, fire, in other religions.—No religious literature in Greece and Italy.—Religion in Egypt.—Brugsch on Egyptian religion.—Le Page Renouf on the gods of Egypt.—Religion in X TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGK Babylon and Assyria.—Where to study the historical growth of religious ideas.—The Old Testament.—Invention of alphabetic writing.—The sixth century B. c.—The Old Testament as an his¬ torical book. — Monotheistic instinct of the Semitic race.— Abraham.—Elijah.—The god of fire in the Old Testament . 204-224 LECTURE X. Fiee as coxceived in Othee Religions. Fire widely worshipped.—Fire in the Avesta.—Ormazd, not fire. —Atar, fire.—Atar fights with A^i Dahaka.—Plurality of Atar.— Atar, son of Ormazd.—Difference between Atar and Agni.—Is the Avestic religion dualistic ?—Fire in Egypt.—Modern character of the Egyptian religion.—Ra.—Osiris.—Ptah.—Tvashi^riintheVeda. —Fire in Greece, Hephaestos.—Fire in Italy, Vulcanus.—Philo¬ sophical concepts of fire in Greece.—The fire of Herakleitos.— Zoroaster.—Fire and water in the Brahma?^as.—Fire as worshipped in Babylon.—The true antiquity of the Veda . . . 225-251 LECTURE XI. The Mythological Development of Agni. Tales about Agni.—Euhemeristic explanations of mythology.— Ancient riddles.—Brahmodya.—The disappearance of Agni.— Dialogue between Agni and Varu?ia.—Later accounts of the hiding of Agni.—The meaning or hyponoia of mythology.—Lessons of comparative mythology ........ 252-275 LECTURE XII. Religion, Myth, and Custom. Difference between religion and mythology.—Secular ideas be¬ come religious.—Lighting and keeping of fire.—Religious sanction for customs.—Baptism by water and fire.—Purification by fire.— Lustration of animals.—Need-fire.—Tinegin in Ireland.—Purpose of customs often forgotten.—Essential difference between religion, mythology, and ceremonial.—Theogonic development of Agni. —Mythological development of Agni.—Ceremonial development of Agni.—Definition of religion re-exami..ed.—The meaning of the Infinite.—The religious element ..... 276-302 TABLE OF CONTENTS. XI LECTURE XIII. Othek Gods of Nature. The development of fire.—The agents behind the other pheno¬ mena of nature.—Thetheogonic process.—Wordsworth.—The storm- wind.—The storm-wind in America.—The storm-wind in Babylon. —The storm-wind in India.—The Marus of the Buddhists.— Rudra, the father of the Maruts.—The storm-wind in Germany.— Odin, Wuotan.—The mixed character of ancient gods.—The theo- gonic development ......... 303-328 LECTURE XIV. What does it lead to ? Value of historical studies.—Lessons of natural religion.—The agents in nature.—One agent in nature.—Craving for the super¬ natural.—Miracles condemned by Mohammed.—Miracles con¬ demned by Buddha.—Miracles condemned by Christ.—The super¬ natural as natural.—Common elements of all religions; the Ten O ' Commandments.—Similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. —Divine character ascribed to the founders of religions.—Buddha’s birth.—Birth of Mahavira.—Mohammed’s birth.—Other prophets. —The birth of Christ.—Signs changed to miracles.—Dr. Robert Lee.—The highest commandments.—Conclusion . . . 329-367 APPENDICES. - 44 - Appendix I. Are Parthians, Persians, and Bactrians mentioned in the Veda ? 369 Appendix II. Skylax and the Paktyes, the Pashtu or Afghans . . . 371 Appendix III. Buddhist Pilgrims acquainted with the Veda 373 xii TABLE OP CONTENTS. PAGK Appendix IV. Sanskrit MSS. bought by Guizot . . . . . . 376 Appendix V. Date of the Prati^^khya . . . . . . . 376 Appendix VI. Minutiae of the Pratisakhya ...... 377 Appendix VII. Number of verses in the Rig-veda . . . . . 378 Appendix VIII. Brahmawas of the S4ma-veda . . . - . . 381 Appendix IX. Sanskrit words in Sumerian ....... 381 Appendix X. Technical terms borrowed by the Buddhists . . . . 382 Appendix XI. Pischel and Geldner’s ‘ Vedische Studien ’ .... 384 Appendix XII. Egyptian Zoolatry ........ 387 Appendix XIII. Writing mentioned in the Old Testament .... 388 Appendix XIV. Need-fire .......... 389 Appendix XV. Similarities between Christianity and Buddhism . . . 390 Index 397 LECTURE I. HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL llELIGION. The Three Divisions of iTatural Beli^ion. T he first course of lectures on Natural Religion which I had the honour to deliver in this Uni¬ versity was chiefly of an introductory character. It was then my object to discuss, and to answer, as far as was in my power, three principal questions : (1) What are the limits of Natural Religion ? (2) What is the proper method of studying it? and (3) What are the materials accessible for such study ? In the present course of lectures I mean to treat of Natural Religion in one of its three great manifesta¬ tions, namely, as Physical Religion. Natural Reli¬ gion, as I tried to show last year, manifests itself under three different aspects, according as its object, what I called the Infinite or the Divine, is discovered either in nature, or in man, or in the self. I shall repeat from the last lecture of my first course a short description of these three forms of religious thought. ‘ In treating of Physical Religion,’ I said, ‘ we shall have to examine the numerous names, derived from the (2) B 2 LECTURE I. phenomena of nature, by which the early inhabitants of this small planet of ours—some of them our direct ancestors—endeavoured to apprehend what lies behind the veil of nature, beyond the horizon of our sensuous perception. We shall meet there with the so-called gods of the sky, the earth, the air, the fire, the storm and lightning, the rivers and mountains, and we shall see how the god of the sky, or, in some countries, the god of the fire and of the storm-wind, assumes gradu¬ ally a supreme character, and then is slowly divested again, in the minds of his more enlightened worshippers, of what we may call his original, purely physical, or mythological attributes. When the idea had once sprung up in the human mind that nothing unworthy should ever be believed of the gods, or, at least, of the father of gods and men, this process of divestment proceeded very rapidly, and there remained in the end the concept of a Supreme Being, still called, it may be, by its ancient and often no longer intelligible names, but representing in reality the highest ideal of the Infi¬ nite, as a father, as a creator, and as a wise and loving ruler of the universe. What we ourselves call our belief in God, the Father, is the last result of this irre¬ sistible development of human thought. ‘But the Infinite has been discovered, not only behind the phenomena of nature, but likewise behind man, taking man as an objective reality, and as the representative of all that we comprehend under the name of mankind. Something not merely human, or very soon, something superhuman was discovered at a very early time in parents and ancestors, particularly after they had departed this life. Their names were preserved, their memory was honoured, their sayings HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELIGION. 3 were recorded, and assumed very soon the authority of law, of sacred law, of revealed truth. As the recollec¬ tion of fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and still more distant ancestors became vaguer and vaguer, their names were surrounded by a dim religious light. The ancestors, no longer merely human, approached more and more to the superhuman, and this is never very far removed from the divine. ‘ Offerings, similar to those that had been presented to the gods of nature, were tendered likewise to the ancestral spirits, and when the very natural question arose, who was the ancestor of all ancestors, the father of all fathers, the answer was equally natural,—it could only be the same father, the same creator, the same wise and loving ruler of the universe who had been discovered behind the veil of nature. ‘ This second sphere of thought may be compre¬ hended under the name of AnthTopological Religion. Under the form of worship of ancestral spirits it seems among some people to constitute almost the whole of their religion, but more generally we find it mixed with what we call Physical Eeligion, not only in ancient, but also in modern times. Christianity itself has been obliged to admit some remnants of that ancestral worship, and in Eoman Catholic countries the immense popularity of the Festival of All Souls seems to show that a loving homage paid to the spirits of the departed satisfies one of the deepest and oldest yearnings of the human heart. ‘ The third sphere of religious thought, the Psycho¬ logical, is filled with endeavours to discover what lies hidden in man, considered not merely as a creature, or as a part of nature, but as a self-conscious subject. 4 LECTUKE I. That self of which man became conscious, as different from his merely phenomenal, or even his personal being, has been called by many names in the different languages of the world. It was called breath, spirit, ghost, soul, mind, genius, and many more names, which constitute a kind of psychological mythology, full of interest to the student of religion as well as to the student of language and thought. It was after¬ wards called the Ego, or the person, but even these names did not satisfy man, as he became more and more conscious of his higher self. The person was discovered to be a persona only, that is a mask; and even the Ego was but a pronoun, not yet the true noun, the true word which self-conscious man was in search of. At last, the consciousness of self arose from out the clouds of psychological mythology, and be¬ came the consciousness of the Infinite or the Divine within us. The individual self found itself again in the Divine Self, not absorbed in it, but hidden in it, and united with it by a half-human and half-divine relationship. We find the earliest name for the Infi¬ nite, as discovered by man within himself, in the ancient Upanishads. There it is called Atman, the Self, or Pratyag-atman, the Self that lies behind, looking and longing for the Paramatman, the Highest Self—and yet it is not far from every one of us. So- krates knew the same Self, but he called it Daimonion, the indwelling God. The early Christian philosophers called it the Holy Ghost, a name which has received many interpretations and misinterpretations in dif¬ ferent schools of theology, but which ought to become again, what it was meant for in the beginning, the spirit which unites all that is holy within man with HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL EELIGION. 5 the Holy of Holies or the Infinite behind the veil of the Ego, or of the merely personal and phenomenal self.’ The Three Phases of Religion, often contemporaneous. It must not be supposed that these three phases of natural religion, the Physical, the Anthropological, and the Psychological, exist each by itself, that one race worships the powers of nature only, while an¬ other venerates the spirits of human ancestors, and a third meditates on the Divine, as discovered in the deepest depth of the human heart. As a general rule, physical religion everywhere comes first, and is suc¬ ceeded by anthropological, and lastly by psychological religion. Among most nations whose historical ante¬ cedents are known to us, we can see that the idea of something divine is elaborated first from elements supplied by nature, and that afterwards the spirits of the departed are raised to a fellowship with the gods of nature, while the recognition of a universal Self, underlying the gods of nature, and the spirits of the departed, and recognised as the immortal element within ourselves, comes last, nay belongs even now to the future rather than to the past. The germs of these three developments may be discovered in most religions. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, becomes more prominent. But I doubt whether any nation, whose earlier history is known to us, has been found devoted exclusively to the worship of physical deities, still less, devoted exclusively to the worship of ancestral spirits. What I call psychological religion is a phase of thought which we generally com- 6 LECTURE I. prehend under the name of philosophy rather than under that of religion, and though it may have been anticipated here and there by prophets and poets, it presupposes in its developed form the existence of religion, both physical and anthropological. The ancient Vedic religion, for instance, is pre¬ eminently a physical religion, but to maintain, as some philosophers have done, that it contained no traces of ancestor-worship, shows simply an ignorance of facts. The worship of the Fathers, the Pitaras, is presupposed by a number of Vedic hymns, and to the present day, the most truly religious ceremony of the Hindus, that which still touches their hearts, and not their eyes only, is the so-called >S^raddha, the sacrifice in memory of their ancestors. Even the third phase, the Psychological, though in its fully elaborated form it belongs to a later age, and assumes the character of a philosophy rather than of a religion, is never entirely absent in any religion. The very recognition of superior beings implies some kind of perception of man’s own being, some recogni¬ tion of what really constitutes his own self. If he calls the gods immortals, that would seem to imply that he considered himself as mortal; but when he begins to implore the favour of the immortal gods, not only for this life, but for a life to come, when he prays to be united again with those whom he loved and lost on earth, a new conception of his own self must have sprung up in his heart, and though mortal and liable to death, he must have felt himself or something within himself as eternal, and as beyond the reach of annihilation. Ancestor-worship also implies always the recogni- HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL EELIOION. 7 tion of something immortal in man, however dim that primitive belief in immortality may have been. Physical Beligion. But though we find these three roads on which a belief in the Infinite was reached by different nations, running closely parallel or even crossing each other, it is possible, and, for the sake of systematic study, almost indispensable, that we should explore each of them by itself. This present course of lectures will therefore be devoted to a study of Physical Religion, though from time to time we shall hardly be able to avoid a consideration of such influences as Anthro- jpological and Psychological ideas exercise on Physical Religion in its historical progress to higher ideas. The Historical Method. How that exploration is to be carried out I need not tell you, after what I have said in my first course of lectures. There is but one method that leads to really trustworthy and solid results, and that is the Historical Method. We must try to discover the his¬ torical vestiges of that long pilgrimage which the human race has performed, not once, but many times, in search of what lies beyond the horizon of our senses,—in search of the Infinite, in search of a true religion; and this we can only achieve by a careful study of all truly historical documents in which that pilgrimage has been recorded. Historical Continuity. There is an unbroken continuity in the religious and philosophical concepts, as there is in the Ian- 8 LECTUEE I. guages of tlie world. We know that the language spoken by Hume and Kant is substantially the same as that which was spoken by the poets of the Veda in India, four thousand years ago. And we shall see that the problem of causality which occupied the powerful minds of Hume and Kant is substantially the same as that which occupied the earliest framers of Aryan language and Aryan thought, when, driven by the very necessities of pure reason, or, as we may now call it by a better name, by the very necessities of Logos or language, they conceived and named for the first time the sky, the sun, the fire, and all the other great phenomena of nature by means of roots, expressive of agency, of force, or, in the end, of causality. Physical Eeligion owes its origin to the category of causality, or, in other words, to the pre¬ dicating of roots, expressive of agency and causality, as applied to the phenomena of nature. And this in¬ tellectual work, performed thousands of years ago by millions of human beings, deserves, it would seem, at least as much attention as the speculations of two individuals, even though they be Hume and Kant, as to the legitimacy of the concept of causality, when applied to the data of the senses. ‘ Without the doc¬ trine, the true doctrine, of substance and of cause,’ I am quoting the words of the founder of these lectures. Lord Gifibrd, ‘ philosophy would be a de¬ lusion, and religion a dream ’ (Lord Gifibrd’s Lectures, pp. 139-140), Just let me say,’ he adds, ‘and I say it with the deep seriousness of profoundest conviction, that true philosophy and true religion must stand or fall together. If philosophy be a delusion, religion can hardly escape being shown to be a dream.’ HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELIGION. 9 Varieties of Physical Iteligrion. But here, again, we must not try to attempt too much. Though we find traces of physical religion everywhere among ancient and modern, among civi¬ lised and uncivilised races, it would lead to confusion only were we to attempt to treat them all as one. Physical Religion is the same, and yet not the same at different times and in different places. The lessons which nature teaches in a small and fertile island, surrounded by a horizon, half sky and half sea, are very different from the lessons which man reads when living in narrow valleys, overawed by snow¬ decked mountains, and hemmed in by rivers which, though they are looked upon as beneficent, may at any moment bring destruction and death on what man calls his own, his home on earth. The Nile in Egypt assumes a very different aspect in the religious imagery of its worshippers from that which the river Sarasvati bears in the hymns of the Rig-veda; and the cupola of the sky, resting all around on the monotonous desert as its sole foundation, forms a very different temple from that in which the most gigantic snowy mountains support on all sides, like lofty pillars, the blue roof of heaven. For practical purposes, therefore, it will be best to study, first of all, the origin and growth of Physical Religion in one country only, and then to turn our eyes to other countries where the same ideas, though under varying outward conditions, have found ex¬ pression in mythology or religion. Fliysical Relig-ion best studied in India. And here there can be little doubt as to which 10 LECTUKE I. country is the typical country for the study of Physical Religion. In no country do we find Physical Religion in its simplest form so completely developed as in India. Not in India, as it is popularly known, not in modern India, not in mediaeval India, not even in the ancient India, as represented to us in the Epic Poems of the Mahabharata and Ramayan-a, least of all in the India of the Buddhists, whose religion, old as it is—for Buddha died 477 BoC.— was built up on the very ruins of that religion which interests us at present. No, the original, simple, and intelligible religion of India is to be found in the Vedic period only, which preceded the rise of Buddhism, just as the religion of the Old Testament preceded that of the New. Here and here only can we see Physical Religion in all its fulness, in all its simplicity, nay, I should say, in all its necessity. Suppose we had known Christianity only as it appears after the Council of Nicaea, after it had become a state-religion, and had once for all settled its dogmas and ceremonial, and then had suddenly discovered a manuscript of the Gospels— the new insight into the true nature of Christianity could not have been more startling and surprising than was the new light which the discovery of the Veda has thrown on the origin and growth of religion, not only in India, but in every part of the world. That the gods of the Greeks and the Romans, the Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic nations, that the gods of the Babylonians and Assyrians and other Semitic nations, not excepting the Jews, that the gods of Egypt and the whole of Africa, that the gods of Finland and Lapland, of Mongolia and China, of the Poly¬ nesian islands, and of the North as well as the South HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELTGTON. 11 of America, that all these gods had in the beginning something to do with the most prominent sights of nature, could hardly have escaped even the least thoughtful student of antiquity. But it was only like guessing at the former existence of a geological stratum which does not come to the surface except in scattered fragments. That Helios was originally the sun and Mine the moon, no one could have doubted, except he who is proud of his ignorance of Greek; but that Apollo too had a solar, and Lucina a lunar, origin was contested by many a classical scholar with the same eagerness with which many a theologian would fight even now against the admission of physical elements in the original character of Jehovah. The Vedic Period. With the discovery of the Veda all this has been changed. Here was the very stratum, the very period of language and thought before our eyes, the existence, nay, the very possibility of which had been so keenly contested. That Zeus was originally a name of the sky, could hardly have been denied by any Greek scholar; but it was not till the corresponding deity, Dycms, was discovered in the Veda that all opposition was silenced, and silenced for ever. How can we imagine, it used to be said again and again, that the whole of the ancient Greek religion and mythology should have consisted in talk about the sun and the moon, the sky and the dawn, day and night, summer and winter. Surely the Greeks would have been mere idiots if they had found nothing better to engage their thoughts or to supply their religious cravings. 12 LECTUKE I. Natural Phenomena as viewed by Nomad and Agricultural People. No doubt, even without the evidence supplied by the Veda, one might have asked in return what better subjects there could have been in an early state of society, to engage the thoughts and to satisfy even the higher aspirations of mankind, than the wonders of nature—the daily return of the sun, which meant the return of light and warmth, that is, the possibility of life and the joy of life,— or the yearly return of the sun, which meant again the return of spring and summer after the horrors of winter, that is, the possi¬ bility of life and the joy of life. In days when a violent storm might turn a happy homestead to wrack and ruin, when a sudden rain might sweep away a whole harvest, and bring famine and death on a prosperous village, when the hot rays of the sun might parch the fields, kill the cattle, and spread pestilence among children and servants, what subjects could there have been nearer to the heart of man than the strange and startling movements of the heavenly bodies, the apparent cause of all their happiness, the apparent cause of all their misery on earth ? What does a farmer talk about even now, before and during and after the harvest, but the weather? We have now calendars to tell us when the spring returns, when the summer heat may be expected, how long the autumn may last, and when the winter will set in with its snow and frost. But with the ancient tillers of the soil, the most highly-prized wisdom con¬ sisted in sayiugs and rules, handed down from father to son, which told when it was safe to sow, when it was time to mow, and how much provision was HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL EELIOION. 13 wanted for a long winter,, to prevent children and parents from dying of hunger. In our days, with all the experience gathered in our books, with all the precautions taken against the violent freaks of nature, with the forecasts of the. weather published in all the newspapers, we can afford to neglect the signs and warnings of nature, or leave their observation to those whom they more specially concern. But ancient superstitions connected with Physical Ke- ligion are not quite extinct even now. We may be sceptical as to the Halcyon birds having the power of quieting the sea, and unwilling to postpone our vo^mge until the return of the Pleiades. We should hardly believe that if Zeus has visited the earth with rain on a certain day, he will repeat his visits for many days to follow. But sailors still object to embark on a Friday, and farmers still believe that if St. Swithin sends rain, rain will continue for forty days. If, then, even in our own enlightened century, a simple-minded peasant may still be found here or there uttering a prayer or presenting an offering to St. Swithin, is it so very strange that in early days, when the very possibility of life depended on the success of the harvest, the thoughts of people should have been almost entirely absorbed in watching those powers of nature on whom they felt themselves dependent for life, and breath, and all things ? If these powers had to be named, they could be named, as I tried to explain in my first course of lectures, as active only, as doing deeds, as working works ; as raining, not as rain; as storming, not as storm; as feeding and protecting, like a loving father, or as punishing and chastising, like an angry father. 14 LECTUEE I. Given these few germs of thought which are found in every human heart, what is there strange or un¬ intelligible in the luxuriant growth of physical mythology and physical religion? But we need not argue this point any more. What was a mere postulate before the discovery of the Veda, has now become a fact. We have that whole primi¬ tive stratum of thought laid open before our eyes, in one, and that a very important part of the world. To those who will not see, who will put what they think ought to be in the place of what is, we can only say with all the frankness of the Hindu logician, ‘ It is not the fault of the post, if the blind man does not see it.’ Physical Religion outside of India. On the other hand, we must guard against exagger¬ ating the importance of the Veda. If we wished to study Dutch art, we should feel it our duty, first of all, to go to Holland, and to examine there on the spot, not only the master-works, but the whole school of Dutch painters. But we should not imagine that we had thus done our whole duty, and that the vast galleries in the other capitals of Europe had nothing to teach us. In the same way Physical Religion has to be studied, not only in the Veda and in India^, but almost everywhere where historical documents enable us to study the gradual growth of rehgion. A study of the Veda is the best preparation for the study of Physical Religion; but it does not claim to teach us all that can be known about the gods of nature. The meaning of Primitive. Secondly, if we call the Veda primitive, it must not HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELIGION. 15 be supposed that we imagine we can find in the Veda the earhest thoughts that ever passed through a human brain. If we call the Veda primitive, we mean two things ; first, that it is more primitive than any other literary work we are acquainted with ; secondly, that it contains many thoughts which require no antece¬ dents, which are perfectly intelligible in themselves, thoughts, in fact, which we should call primitive, even if we met with them in the works of modern poets. But it would be the greatest mistake to imagine that everything in the Veda is primitive, everything is intelhgible, everything without antecedents. The stu¬ dent of the Veda knows but too well how much there still remains in the Veda that is hard, petrified, unin¬ telligible, artificial, secondary, nay tertiary, and alto¬ gether modern in one sense of the word. The collection of hymns which we chiefly mean when we speak of the Veda in general, is a collection of various collec¬ tions, and in each of these there are relics of different ages, mixed up together. We have to search carefully for what is really primary in thought, for the later rubbish is much more abundant than the original gold. The Vedic poets themselves make no secret of this. They speak of old and of living poets, they know of ancient and recent deeds of the gods. Their very lan¬ guage bewrays the date of many of the Vedic hymns. The distances between the intellectual layers forming the collection of the Big-veda are so enormous that most scholars would hesitate to translate them into any chronological language. And yet, for all that and for all that, we possess in the whole world no literary relics intellectually older than the oldest hymns of the Kig-veda, and I doubt whether we possess any 16 LECTUKE I. literary relics chronologically older, at all events in our own, the Aryan world. Discoveries of Ancient Life. We have hved to see many discoveries, revealing to us the buried hfe of ancient nations. I still remember the amazement produced by the resurrection of Pompeii and Herculanum. If you want to realise the feelings with which the highest intellects regarded that dis¬ covery, read Schiller’s poems, or read a novel which I can still read with ,undiminished admiration, particu¬ larly when I remember that it was written in 1832 by a young man, not more than twenty-seven years of age—I mean Bulwer’s ‘ Last Days of Pompeii.’ I have seen and known the most learned and the most bril¬ liant young men whom our Universities now send out into the world—I must confess I have never met with one who, at the age of twenty-seven, could have pro¬ duced a work so full of genius and so full of learning also. Then followed the wonderful discoveries in Egypt, the Rosetta stone supplying to Champollion the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and every year adding new treasures to our museums, new materials to our Egyptian grammars and dic¬ tionaries, till now it would seem as if all Egyptian mysteries had been revealed, and the ancient language, spoken and written there thousands of years B. c., could be read with the same ease as Greek and Latin. About the same time the kingdoms of Persia, of Babylon and Nineveh shook off the shroud of sand under which they had so long been buried. And here HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELTGTON. 17 too the genius of Grotefend, of Burnouf, Lassen and Rawlinson broke the spell of those long rows of wedges or arrows, which seemed more meaningless even than hieroglyphics, and restored to us first the contempora¬ neous edicts of Darius and Xerxes, and afterwards the very archives of the ancient kings of Babylon and Nineveh. With the help of cuneiform grammars and dictionaries the Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian texts can now be read by all who possess the patience of real students. We were told at the International Congress of Orientahsts at Stockholm in 1889 that there are at present in the United States of America thirty chairs filled by professors who lecture to good audiences on Cuneiform Inscriptions, on the language, religion, and history of Persia, Babylon, Nineveh, and Accadia. This shows how rapidly a discovery can progress, and how widely-spread an interest still exists, even in our utilitarian age, in the earliest history of the human race. Discovery of the Veda. Less remarked, though certainly not less remarkable than these unexpected finds in Egypt and Babylon, was the discovery of the Veda, which took place about the same time. It was in one sense even more im¬ portant, for it revealed to us, not only inscriptions, but a real full-grown literature, and a literature con¬ taining the annals of our own, the Aryan, race. The French have a saying that it is always the unexpected that happens. And certainly, if anything was unex¬ pected, it was the discovery of a literature in India, in distant India, among dark-skinned people, of a litera¬ ture more ancient than Homer, of a language less (2) C 18 LECTURE I. changed than Latin, of a religion more primitive than that of the Germans as described by Tacitus, and yet intimately connected with all of them. It is true the hterature of ancient India had not been buried in the earth, it was never altogether lost in its own country. But so far as Europe and European science were con¬ cerned, the Veda was as good as buried, nay as non¬ existent, and what is more extraordinary still, it remained as if non-existent for, European scholars long after the discovery of India, long after the discovery of the ordinary Sanskrit hterature. The Veda has now become the foundation of all linguistic, mythological, and religious studies. Even the minutest changes of vowels in Greek and in English find their final explanation nowhere but in the accents of Vedic words. Many of the most impor¬ tant names of Greek and Homan gods and goddesses remain dumb, till they are made to speak once more, when brought face to face with the gods and goddesses of the Veda. Nay, religion itself, which seemed to some scholars so irrational and unnatural a creation ‘ that it could have been invented by one man only, and he probably a madman,’ assumes, when watched in the Veda, a character so perfectly natural and rational, that we may boldly call it now an inevitable phase in the growth of the human mind. Unique Character of the Veda. In saying this I am not afraid that I shall be charged with exaggerating the importance of the Veda. There was a time when it was thought neces¬ sary to protest against the assumption that the Veda reflected the image of the earliest phase of Aryan life, HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL RELIGION. 19 nay of all human life on earth. I am not aware that so preposterous a claim in favour of the Veda had really ever been made by any scholar. It seems only another instance of a very common practice in the republic of letters. A purely imaginary danger is con¬ jured up, in order to claim the merit of having stemmed it. I do not mean to say that there may not have been an unguarded expression here and there which could be construed as claiming for the Veda a primordial antiquity. After all, scholars write for scholars, and they take it for granted that even their somewhat enthusiastic expressions will not be misinterpreted so as to become unmeaning and absurd. Now for a scholar it would be nothing short of absurd to claim for the Vedic poetry a primordial character. Whoever the first inhabitants of our earthly Paradise may have been, they certainly did not speak the lan¬ guage of the Veda, which shows as many rings within rings as the oldest trunks in the Yosemite valley. Nor would it be less absurd to represent the Veda as a literary monument dating from the undivided Aryan period. The division of the Aryan race into its two chief branches, the North-Western and South-Eastern, belongs to a time beyond the reach of historical chro¬ nology, whereas the date claimed for the Veda does not exceed the second millennium b. c. There are misunderstandings against which one does not guard, because they seem impossible, at least ‘ within the profession.’ But, on the other hand, who can deny that the Veda is the oldest monument of Aryan speech and Aryan thought which we possess ? Who can wonder at the enthusiasm with which its discovery was 20 LECTURE I. greeted, at the eagerness with which the Vedic MSS. were seized, copied, collated, and published, and at the zeal with which its treasures have been ransacked and brought to light? What Aryan nation could produce anything to match the Veda? Beautiful as the Homeric poems are—for power of description infi¬ nitely superior to anything in the Veda—yet they exhibit a far more advanced state of society, so modern in many of its aspects that we ourselves could almost feel at home in it. Besides, they repre¬ sent chiefly the outward life, and allow us but few glimpses into those inward thoughts about gods and men, about this life and the next, which find ex¬ pression in the hymns of the Veda. And if no one would blame the historian who drew the picture of early chivalry from the Iliad, or the idyl of early domestic life from the Odyssey, why should we wonder at the student of religion drawing his most valuable lessons from the Veda? We shall certainly not find in the Veda the archives either of the first man or of the undivided Aryan race, but we do find there, and there alone, the oldest record of what one branch of that race thought about this life and its many pro¬ blems, and what it believed about the gods and another life. And if among the gods worshipped in the Veda we find some that have the same names as the gods of other Aryan nations, such as, for instance, Dyaus and Zeus, is it so wild an assumption to maintain that some of the antecedents of the Greek and Eoman gods may be discovered in the Veda ? May we not say with the Preacher, ‘ Be not righteous over much, neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself ? ’ HOW TO STUDY PHYSICAL KELIGION. 21 Neither the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt nor the cylinders of Babylon can lend us such assistance for our studies, more particularly for the study of the historical growth of that Aryan race, to which we and the greatest historical nations of the world belong, as the Veda. The first thing, therefore, which I shall have to do is to give you an account of how the Veda was discovered, and what the Veda really is. LECTURE n. THE VEDA AND THE TESTIMONIES TO ITS EAKLY EXISTENCE. How did the Veda become known? T here seems to be a general agreement among Sanskrit scholars that the Vedic hymns, as we now possess them, collected in the Rig-veda-sa» 2 hita, were composed between 1500 and 1000 b.c. Why that date has been fixed upon we shall have to consider hereafter, but it is well to say at once, that we must not expect the same kind of historical evidence for a date reaching back to 1500 b.c. which we have a right to demand for a date 1500 a. D. There are different degrees of certainty, and it is the neglect of this in¬ evitable fact which causes so much needless controversy between specialists and outsiders. The date assigned to the poetry of the Veda is and will always remain hypothetical. To critical scholars it would, I believe, be a real relief if a later date could be assigned to some portions of that sacred collection. But we can hardly hope for new evidence to enable us to fix Vedic dates. Historical dates require the evidence of con¬ temporary witnesses, and it is difficult to say where THE VEDA, ITS EARLY EXISTENCE. 23 we should look for witnesses, outside of India, and contemporary with the Vedic Rishis. ZIo Foreign ITatioiis mentioned in the Veda. We find no traces in the ancient Vedic literature of India of any contact with foreign nations. It has been supposed by some scholars that the names of the Parthians and Persians, or even of the Bactrians, were known to the poets of the Veda, but the evidence on which they rely is very uncertain The Veda not mentioned by Foreigfn Nations. Nor do we find in the annals of other nations any traces of their acquaintance with India before the sixth century B.C. Early Contact between India and Eg3rpt, Babylon, Persia. Whether there had been any intercourse, direct or indirect, between India and Greece before the sixth century B.o. we cannot tell. Some scholars imagine that Homer’s Ethiopians, who dwelt towards the rising of the sun, were meant for the people of India, but this belongs to a class of conjectures to which we can say neither yes nor no. If India was known to the Greeks at that early time, it could only have been through the Phenicians. It is well known that among the articles of merchandise brought home by the fieets of Hiram and Solomon, there were some which by their origin and name point to India. If we look at a map on which the stations are marked which were established by Phenician merchants before * See Appendix I. 24 LECTURE II. 500 B.C., we see that the whole coast of the Medi¬ terranean, from Tyre and Sidon to Gibraltar, from Carthage to Marseilles, had been explored by them. The Mediterranean was then, as it is still, the mart of the world. The Greeks in Asia Minor and in Europe, the Phenicians and the Egyptians occupied its borders, and we know now from Babylonian and Egyptian inscriptions that there was a very early diplomatic and commercial intercourse between Egypt and Babylon. We must remember also that the people on the Egyptian or Ethiopian side of the Bed Sea could hardly have been ignorant of the people on the Arabian side, or the people on the Arabian side of the Persian gulf unacquainted with the existence of people on the Persian side. Commerce was even then a magnetic force that attracted nation to nation, and merchants, less bold even than the Phenicians, would not have been frightened by a voyage from the sea that received the Tigris and Euphrates to the sea that received the Indus and the rivers of the Penjab. Yet the name of India, to say nothing of the name of the Veda, is never mentioned in the more ancient inscriptions of Egypt and Babylon. The only evidence of a possible contact between India and Egypt at that early time is the occurrence of the word kafu, ape, which is said by Professor Diimichen to be found in a text of the seventeenth century This kafu is sup¬ posed to be the same word as the Hebrew koph, ape, which occurs in the first book of Kings, x. 22. Here we read that ‘ Solomon had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram, and that once in three years ^ Die Flotte einer aegyptischen Konigin in dem 17. Jahrhundeii;, 1868 ; table II, p. 17. THE VEDA, ITS EAKLY EXISTENCE. 25 came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.’ All these articles were the products of the soil and climate of India^ and the Sanskrit name for ape is hapi. Here then the single word kapi may possibly indicate the route of commerce from India to Judaea and Phenicia, and from thence to Egypt, in the seventeenth century B. c. The same animal, the ape, is supposed to attest an early intercourse between India and Babylon also. It occurs with other animals on the black obelise from Nineveh, now in the British Museum. Though the armies of the great conquerors of Mesopotamia must have approached very near to the frontiers of India, they have left no traces of their presence there, nor have they brought any intelligence of India back to Babylon or Nineveh. The idea that the Indian division of the heavens into twenty-seven or twenty-eight Nakshatras was of Babylonian origin, and the assertion that the name of the Babylonian weight, mna or mina, occurred in the Veda as man a, rest both on no valid authority. In the half-legendary account given by Diodorus Siculus (ii. 16-19) of the expedition of Semiramis against India, possibly derived from Ctesias, the name of the Indian king who in the end repels the foreign invaders, has been supposed to bear evidence of the Sanskrit language being known to the people of Babylon. It is Stabro- &a^e8, which may represent the Sk. sthavira-pati, the strong lord; but this also is doubtful^. ^ Lassen explains Stabrobates as stLauri-pati, lord of bulls ; Bohlen as sthavara-pati, lord of the continent, both impossible. 26 LECTURE IT. Greek Accounts of India.—Skylaz. The first Greek who is supposed to have actually visited India and to have written an account of it, was Skylax. He lived before Herodotus, who tells us (iv. 44) that Darius Hystargus (512-486), wishing to know where the river Indus fell into the sea, sent a naval expedition, and with it Skylax of Karyanda in Karia ^. As soon, however, as Greek historiography begins, we find that the name of India was known. Hekataeos knows it, Herodotus knows it, both living in Asia Minor. But why did they call the country India ? Persia has formed at all times a connecting link between India and the Greeks of Asia Minor. In the ancient sacred literature of Media and Persia, in the Avesta of Zoroaster, India is mentioned under the same peculiar name which it has in the Veda. In the Veda the home of the Aryas in India is called Sapta SindhavaA, the Seven Hi vers, that is, the five rivers of the Penjab with the Sarasvati, a river which after¬ wards disappeared, and the Indus. The very same peculiar name, which is used during the Vedic age only, appears in the Avesta as Hapta He'Jidu. This cannot be a mere accident, but proves, like many other coincidences between Vedic Sanskrit and Zend, that, long after the Aryan separation, there was a continued historical contact between the Vedic poets and the people among whom at one time the Zoroastrian religion flourished. Hapta He?idu is exactly the same name as Sapta Sindhu, by a change of s into h. The name * See Appendix II. 27 THE VEDA, ITS EABLY EXISTENCE. of India must have reached the Greeks through a language in which, as in Persian, every initial s was represented by h, for it is thus only that we can account for the Greek form India, instead of what we should expect, if the Sanskrit word Sindhu had reached the Greeks directly, namely Sindia. Persia continued to serve as a bridge between India and Greece in later times also, for in the Persian cuneiform inscription at Nakshi Eustam we find among the provinces paying tribute to Darius, Hindu mentioned by the side of lonians, Spartans, Bactrians, Parthians, and Medes. Long before Alexander’s dis¬ covery of India, Greek writers, such as Hekataeos (b.c. 549-486) and Herodotus, possessed some in¬ formation about that distant country beyond its mere name. Hekataeos mentions the river Indus, Herodotus speaks of the Oandarioi, a race evidently identical with the Gandharas, mentioned in the Eig-veda, whose town Kaspapyros was known to Hekataeos. Herodotus (i. 131) knows even the name of ojie of the deities, worshipped in common by the Vedic Indians and the Persian Zoroastrians, namely Mitra ; but how superficial his knowledge was is best shown by the fact that he takes Mitra for a female deity, corre¬ sponding to the Assyrian Mylitta, the Arabian Alitta. Alexander’s Expedition to India. There seems to have been from very early times a vague impression that India, like Egypt, was the home of an ancient wisdom. Alexander himself shared that idea, and was most anxious therefore to get a glimpse of the wisdom of the Brahmans, by conversing with them through the aid of various interpreters. It is 28 LECTUEE II. quite possible that those of his companions who were entrusted with a description of Alexander’s campaigns may have written down a full account of the Brahmans, particularly of the so-called Hylobioi, the dwellers in the forest, called in Sanskrit vanaprastha^ and of the ancient literature which they possessed. But whether by accident or through the indifference of the later Greeks, scanty fragments only have been preserved of these writings. Nor do we possess more than frag¬ ments of the description of India, composed by Mega- sthenes, who stayed at Patna (Pa^aliputra = Pali- bothra) as ambassador of Seleucos to the King of the Prasii, the famous iTandragupta, about 295 B. C. ; still less of Ktesias, who, though ho did not actually live in India, gathered much information about that wonderful country, when staying at the court of Dariu^ II and Artaxerxes Mnemon, about 400 b.c. Certain it is that the name of the Veda is never mentioned in Greek literature, and that nothing but vague ideas about the wisdom of the Brahmans wmre current among the philosophers of Greece and Borne. Early Christian writers also, who speak of the religions of India, and are able to distinguish between the reli¬ gion of Brahmans and Buddhists, never refer to the sacred literature of the Brahmans under the name of Veda. Contact witli CMna. The first people who give us authentic information about the Veda, you will be surprised to hear, are the Chinese. There exists a curious prejudice against all that is Chinese. We seem to look upon the Chinese very much as they look upon us, as Outer Barbarians. THE VEDA, ITS EAKLY EXISTENCE. 29 We find it very difficult to take them, as the French say, an grand serieux. They seem to us queer, funny, not quite like other people—certainly not like Greeks and Eomans, not even like Indians and Persians. And yet when we examine their literature, whether ancient or modern, it is by no means so very difihrent from that of other nations. Their interests are much the same as ours, and there is certainly no lack of seriousness in their treatment of the highest problems of religion, morality, and philosophy. There are in China three religions, that of Confucius, that of Lao-tze, and that of Buddha. Confucius and Lao-tze lived both in the sixth century B.c. They were, however, restorers rather than founders of reli¬ gion. The religion of Buddha reached China from India about the beginning of our era. The name of Aina occurs in the epic literature of India as the name of a people on the North-Eastern frontiers of the country. But whether it was intended as a name of China is doubtful The three religions of China have had their contro¬ versies and their hostile conflicts. But all three are now regarded as recognised systems of faith in China, and the Emperor of China is expected to profess all three, and to attend their special services on great occasions. Here we are at once inclined to smile, and to doubt the seriousness of a religious faith that could thus conform to three systems, so different from each other as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. We pride ourselves on attending the services of none but our own sect or subdivision of the great divisions of ^ See Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, I^. p. 1029. 30 LECTURE ir. Christendom. We are apt to suspect indifference, latitudinarianism, or scepticism in any member of the Church of England who should attend the communion of any other Christian sect. But the official attendance of the Emperor of China in the temples of Confucian- ists, Taoists, and Buddhists admits of a different inter¬ pretation also. May it not show that the wisest of their statesmen had recognised that there was some truth, some eternal truth, in every one of these three religions ; that the amount of truth on which they all agreed was much gTeater and much more important than the points of doctrine on which they differed, and that the presence of the Emperor at the services of the three religions of his subjects was the most efficient way of preaching tolerance, humility, or, if you like, Christian charity. We are but too ready to judge heathen nations, without considering how much of charitable interpretation we have to claim for our¬ selves. Buddhist Pilgrims. How serious a Chinaman can be about his religion, you will be able to gather from the lives of those Buddhist Pilgrims to whom we owe the first authentic account of the Veda. Why did these pilgrims go from China to India—a journey which even now is con¬ sidered by geographical explorers as one of the most perilous, and as requiring no less of human endurance and bravery than Stanley’s exploration of Africa They went there for the sake of their religion. India was to them their Holy Land. Buddhism had reached China at the beginning of our era from Northern India, and to visit the holy places where Buddha had THE VEDA, ITS EAKLY EXISTENCE. 31 been born, had lived, taught, and died, was as much the dream of a devout Buddhist in China as to visit the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem was the dream of many a poor palmer and many a valiant Crusader in Christendom. We possess the descriptions of these Buddhist pil¬ grimages, extending from about 400 A. D. to 1000 A. D. The most important are those of Fa-hian, 399-414, Hiouen-thsang, 629-645, and I-tsing, 673-695. Their works have been translated into French and into Enghsh too by Stanislas Julien, Professor Legge, Dr. Beal, and others. While the companions of Alexander had no eyes to see the existence of Sacred Books, such as the Veda, in India, the Chinese pilgrims not only give us the name of the Veda, but they actually learnt Sanskrit, and they were able to point out the differences between the ordinary Sanskrit and the more ancient language used in the Veda. You know how highly Christian apologists value any mention of, or quotations from the New Testament, occurring in ancient authors, in order to prove the existence of the Gospels at a certain date, or to confirm the authenticity of certain Epistles as read in the first, second, and third centuries A. D. The critical student of the Veda has the same interest in collecting independent testimonies as to the existence and authenticity of the Veda from century to century, and here the testimony of the Chinese pilgrims stands first among those coming from people outside India, from what the Brahmans also would call ‘ Outer Bar¬ barians,’ or Mle/^A:Aas^. ^ See note in Appendix III. 32 LECTURE II. Iiater Contact with. Persia. The next people from whom we might have ex¬ pected direct information about the ancient Vedic literature of India are the Persians. I do not mean the ancient P-ersians, the subjects of Darius or Xerxes, for they have left us no information about their own sacred literature, much less about that of their neigh¬ bours. I mean the Persians of the sixth century A. D. The kings of Persia at that time, such as Khosru Nushirvan, were men of literary tastes, patrons of poets and philosophers. We know that they enter¬ tained the greatest admiration for the literature of India, and patronised the translation of several San¬ skrit works into Pehlevi, the literary language of Persia at that time. But we look in vain for any mention of the sacred books of the Brahman, and it is doubtful whether the translators of the other San¬ skrit texts were aware of their existence Al-Biruni, 1000 A. D. Some of the books which during the Sassanian ^ It is stated in the Dinkard, as translated by Mr. West, that the Sassanians collected information from Arum (the Byzantine Empire) and from Hindukdn (the Hindus). The names even of MSS. are given, but there is nothing in them that points to India. One curious coincidence, however, has been pointed out by Mr. West. The human body is apportioned between the four professions, priest¬ hood being on the head, warriorship on th« hand, husbandry on the belly, and artizanship on the foot. The names of the four castes are derived from the Avesta, but the idea itself seems to have been borrowed from the Veda. Here we read, X. 90, 12, Brahmana/i asya mukham asit, bahu ragfanya/i knta/i Uru tat asya yat vaisya/j padbhyam sudra/i aj^ayata. ‘ The Brahmawa was his mouth, the Rac/anya was made his two arms, his two legs were the Vaisya, from his two feet the Sudra was born.’ THE VEDA, ITS EARLY EXISTENCE. 33 period had been translated from Sanskrit into Pehlevi or ancient Persian were afterwards, in the eighth century, translated into Arabic, and some of them, such as the fables of Bidpai, have served to carry the fame of the wisdom of the Brahmans all over Europe. But the Vedas remained unknown to other Oriental nations till about 1000 A. D. At that time the north of India was conquered by Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, who from time to time made predatory expeditions to plunder and destroy the richest temples of India at Taneshar, Mathura, Kanoj, and Somnath \ After taking Khiva in 1017, he carried off among other prisoners and hostages a learned astronomer and astrologer, best known by the name of Al-Biruni. During thirteen years which he spent in India, 1017- 1030, Al-Biruni devoted himself sedulously to the study of Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature. It was for¬ merly supposed that he translated not only from San¬ skrit into Arabic and Persian, but likewise, what would have been a much more arduous task, from Arabic and Persian into Sanskrit. Dr. Sachau, the learned editor and translator of Al-Biruni’s great work on India, has shown that this was not the case, and that all we can say with safety is that he was able to read Sanskrit texts with the help of native Pandits. But for all that, Al-Biruni was a most remarkable and exceptional man for his time, a man of wide sympa¬ thies, a true philosopher, and an acute observer. The very idea of learning a foreign language, except perhaps Persian or Turkish, had never entered at that time the head of any Mohammedan. As to studying the religion ^ Al-Biruni, translated by Sachau, vol. i. p. xvii. D (2) 34 lecture ii. of the infidels, it would have been considered damnable. Al-Biruni showed himself free from all such prejudices, and the world owes to him the fii’st accurate and com¬ prehensive account of Indian literature and religion^. If his writings had been more widely known, and if, more particularly, European scholars had been ac¬ quainted with them at the time when Sanskrit litera¬ ture began to attract the interest of Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and others, many discoveries which taxed the ingenuity of European scholars need not have been made at all, for Al-Biruni would have told us all we wanted to know. He knew the four Vedas, the Kig-veda, Ya^ur-veda, Sama-veda, and Atharva-veda. He knew that the Vedas, even in his time, in the eleventh century, were not allowed to be written, but were handed down by oral tradition, which was con¬ sidered far safer than the pen of a ready writer (vol. i. p. 126). He tells us, what we can hardly accept as true for the whole of India, that it was not long before his time when Vasukra, a native of Kashmir, a famous Brahman, undertook the task of explaining the Veda and com¬ mitting it to writing (vol.i. p. 126), because he was afraid that it might be forgotten and entirely vanish from the memories of men. He asserts that the Hindu con¬ sider as canonical only that which is known by heart, not that which is written, and he remarks that even their scientific works were composed in metre, in order to facilitate their being learnt by heart (vol. i. p. 19). All this and a great deal more he tells us as an eye- ^ Al-Biruni’s India, An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Law, and Astrology of India, about 1030, edited and translated by Dr. Sachau. THE VEDA, ITS EAKLY EXISTENCE. 35 witness, and as one who could command the services of the best native scholars. Emperor A^bar, 1556-1605. It is strange, however, that the account he gave of the Vedas should have attracted so little attention either in the East or in the West. Five centuries passed before the Vedas were really placed in the bright light of history, and even then only a small portion of the Vedas was rendered accessible by means of translation. This took place during the reign of the great Emperor Akbar, 1556-1605. He knew of the Vedas, and in his eagerness to become acquainted with all the relicrions of t he world before fo undin or O O his own religion, he made great efforts to obtain a translation of them. But his efforts were in vain. We hear indeed of a translation of the Atharva-veda, made for Akbar. But the Atharva-veda, as we shall see. is very different from the other Vedas, and the portions of that Veda, translated for Akbar, were most likely the Upanishads only. These Upanishads are the philosophical appendices of the Veda, more par¬ ticularly of the Atharva-veda. They are deeply in¬ teresting, though as philosophy rather than as religion. Prince Daja, translator of tbe Upanisbads. One hundred years after Akbar they fascinated Dara, the unfortunate son of Shah Jehan, as they have fascinated others in later times. Prince Dara is said to have learnt Sanskrit in order to translate the Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian, and a year after he had accomplished his task, he was murdered D 2 36 LECTURE II. by his brother Aurungzebe. It was this Persian translation of the Upanishads which Anquetil Du- perron translated again into Latin in 1795, and it was Duperron’s Latin translation which inspired Schopenhauer, and furnished to him, as he himself declares, the fundamental principles of his own phi¬ losophy. Schopenliauer. Nothing shows more clearly the indefatigable in¬ dustry and at the same time the wonderful perspicacity of that great philosopher, than his being able to find his way through the labyrinth of an uncouth Latin trans¬ lation, and to discover behind the strangest disguises the sublime truths hidden in the Upanishads. Honest as he was, Schopenhauer declared openly that his own philosophy was founded on that of the Upanishads. ‘ From every sentence of these Upanishads,’ he writes, ‘deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. Indian air surrounds us, and original thoughts of kindred spirits. And oh, how thoroughly is the mind here washed clean of all early engrafted Jewish superstitions, and of all philosophy that cringes before those superstitions! In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death b’ ^ The Upanishads, translated by F. M. M., in Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. p. Ixi. LECTURE III. THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUKOPEAN SCHOLARS. Thread of our Argument. I N a course of lectures we must try never to lose our way. Where are we ? We are studying Physical Religion—the roads that led from Nature to Nature’s gods—to Nature’s God. I stated that this phase of religious growth can best be studied in the Veda. And the next question was, What is the Veda—and, How did we come to know it? Now, if you had asked the most learned Professor, not more than a hundred years ago. What is the Veda?—he would most likely have had to say, what no Professor likes to say, I dorit know. Not quite so many years ago, when Professor Wilson offered a translation of the Veda to one of our greatest publishers, he was met by the question, ‘ And pray. Sir, what is the Veda? ’ I therefore feel in duty bound to explain, first of all, how the world came to know the Veda, and who are the first people outside of India that bear witness to its existence. 38 LECTURE III. The Greeks did not mention the Veda, though no doubt it existed long before Alexander, nor the Persians, nor the Jews. The first people outside India who knew the Veda were the Chinese. Then followed Al-Birum, at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna (about 1000 A.D.), and lastly the Emperor Akbar and his literary friends, in the second half of the sixteenth century. All these bear witness to the existence of the Veda. But they are witnesses who lived in the East. We have now to see how the Veda became known in the West, how a know¬ ledge of that ancient literature reached the scholars of Europe. European Missionaries in India. At the court of Akbar, and again at the court of Aurungzebe (1658-1707), there were several European missionaries who took part in the religious and phi¬ losophical discussions of the time, and who ought to have been acquainted with the Vedas, if only by name. But it would seem as if the Brahmans, though anxious to have their literature known and appre¬ ciated by their conquerors, were more anxious still to keep their sacred literature, the Vedas, out of sight of any strangers. Their law-books are full of threaten- ings against any one who should divulge the Veda, and it seems certainly a fact that the Emperor Akbar, omnipotent as he was, did not succeed in persuading any Brahman to translate the real Veda for him It was only when Christian missionaries began themselves to learn the classical language of the Brahmans, the so-called Sanskrit, that they became ^ See a story about an attempted translation of the Veda in Science of Language, vol. i. p. 206. THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUKOPEAN SCHOLAES. 39 aware of the existence of the old sacred books, called the Veda. Francis Xavier, who went as a missionary to India in the first half of the sixteenth century, was honest enough to confess that he could not learn the language. ‘ I do not understand that people,’ he writes, ‘ nor do they understand me.’ Yet this is the same Xavier who is always mentioned as one of the first successful missionaries in India, nay to whom, under the name of St. Francis Xavier, his admirers ascribed the gift of tongues. In the second half of that century, however, a successful attempt was made by some Eoman Catholic missionaries at Goa to learn Sanskrit with the help of a converted Brahman, and early in the seventeenth century the famous missionary, Koberto de’ Nobili, had made himself thoroughly acquainted, not only with the Sanskrit language, but with Sanskrit litera¬ ture also. That he knew the Veda, and that he had learnt to appreciate its enormous authority among the higher classes in India, is best shown by the fact that he announced himself as come to preach a new Veda. Whether he actually composed such a work we do not know, but it seems quite certain that the notorious Ezour-veda was not his work. This Ezour-veda was a poor compilation of Hindu and Christian doctrines mixed up together in the most childish way, and was probably the work of a half- educated native convert at Pondicherry. A French translation of this work was sent to Voltaire, who presented it to the Boyal Library at Paris in 1761. It was published by Sainte-Croix in 1778, under the title of LEzout Vedam, ou ancien commentaire du 40 LECTURE III. Vedam, contenant Vexposition des opinions religieuses et philosophiques des Indous, traduit du Samscretani par un Brame. How a man of Voltaire’s taste could have been taken in by such a work is difficult to understand to any one who takes the trouble to read the two volumes. Yet Voltaire spoke of it as ‘the most precious gift for which the West has ever been indebted to the East,’ and he placed its date four centuries before Alexander. In plain English, the whole book is childish drivel. To us the book is chiefly interesting as showing when the name of Veda began first to be more generally known among the literary men of Europe. The Koman Catholic missionaries in India had begun to grapple with the real Veda early in the eighteenth century, but their communications in the Lettres Mifiantes attracted much less attention than the eulogies of a spurious Veda, trumpeted forth by so powerful a trumpeter as Voltaire. Father Calmette, for instance, in a letter from Carnata in the south of India, dated January, 1733, assures us that his friends were not only well grounded in Sanskrit, but were able to read the Veda. This shows decided progress, and a recognition of the fact of which Sanskrit students are painfully aware, that a man may be well grounded in Sanskrit, and yet unable to read the Veda. He also knows that there are four Vedas which, as he states, ‘ contain the law of the Brahmans, and which the Indians from time immemorial regarded as their sacred books, as books of an irrefragable authority and as coming from God Himself.’ Father Calmette was evidently quite aware of the importance of a knowledge of the Vedas for missionary purposes, and of the im-' THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUROPEAN SCHOLARS. 41 mense influence which the Vedas continued to exercise on the religious convictions of the people. ‘ From the time,’ he writes, ‘ that missionaries fii-st went to India, it has always been thought to be impossible to find this book which is so much respected by the Indians. And, indeed, we should never have succeeded, if we had not had Brahmans, who are Christians, hidden among them. For how would they have communicated this book to Europeans, and particularly to the enemies of their religion, as they do not communicate it even to the Indians, except to those of their own caste.’ He then adds what shows that his informants had been hona fide students of the Veda. ‘The most extra¬ ordinary part is that those who are the depositaries of the Veda do not understand its meaning; for the Veda is written in a very ancient language, and the Samouscroutam (that is, the Sanskrit), which is as familiar to their learned men as Latin is to us, is not sufiicient, without the help of a commentary, to ex¬ plain the thoughts as well as the words of the Veda.’ This statement is important in several respects. You will have remarked the expression, ‘those who are the depositaries of the Veda.’ He does not say that he has as yet seen or handled the books con¬ taining the text of the Veda; he speaks only of depositaries of the Veda. This shows, what we now know to have been the case always, that the Brahmans at his time, and in the south of India, did not depend on books or manuscripts for the preservation of the Veda, but that they knew it by heart, and learnt it by heart from the mouth of a teacher. It does not follow that they did not possess manuscripts also of the Veda. It is true that in their law- 4 ^ LECTURE III. books tbe copying of tke Veda and the selling of manuscripts is strictly forbidden, but the fact that it was necessary to forbid this shows, of course, that the law was broken. Manuscripts of the Veda did exist in the last century, for we possess them, and Father Calmette also succeeded after a time in procuring some of them. They may have existed as soon as the art of writing for literary purposes began to be practised in India, say a century or two before the beginning of the Christian era. But they never assumed the authority which the liter a scripta assumed in Europe. The Brahmans themselves were the true depositaries of the Veda; they were the books, and more than the books, inasmuch as an unbroken oral tradition was supposed to connect each successive generation with the original composers, or, speaking more accurately, with the original recipients of these sacred hymns. Another remark too of Father Calmette is very significant. He says, ‘ They who are the deposi¬ taries of the Veda, do not understand its meaning.’ Now this is again perfectly true. The Veda is learnt by heart at first, without any attempt at understanding it. It is only after the text has thus been mechanically engraved on the tablets of the memory, that the more learned among the Brahmans endeavour to understand it under the guidance of their teachers and with the help of ancient commentaries. All this is in accord¬ ance with their ancient law-books, and exists still as the recognised system of education in several parts of India, particularly in the south. Some schools go even so far as to maintain that a text of the Veda, if not understood, is more efficient at a sacrifice than if THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUKOPEAN SCHOLAKS. 43 it is understood by the person who recites it. I doubt whether any other priesthood has gone so far in their admiration of ignorance. However, it is quite clear that Father Calmette was one of the first who succeeded in getting hold of actual manuscripts of the Veda. Father Calmette tells us that for a long time he thought that the Vedas could not be found in manu¬ script. Other missionaries also tell the same story. Marco della Tomba, for instance, who was in India between 1757 and 1774, and who declares that he knew Sanskrit well enough to carry on disputations in it with the Brahmans, confesses that he was never allowed to see a manuscript of the Vedas. He doubts the-Very existence of the Vedas, but he speaks with the greatest admiration of the Brahmans who knew whole books by heart. At last, however. Father Calmette was successful. ‘It is only five or six years ago,’ he writes, ‘ that I was allowed to form an Oriental library for the King, and charged to seek for Indian books for that purpose. I then made discoveries of great importance for religion, among which I count that of the four Vedas or sacred books.’ And here, after Father Calmette had got actual possession of the Veda, and had succeeded with the help of some Brahmans to decipher some of its chapters, it is most instructive to watch the bent of his thoughts, and of the thoughts of many of the early missionaries in India. He is not bent on extracting from the Veda passages showing the depravity and absurdity of the ancient Indian religion, an occupation which some of our present missionaries seem to con¬ sider their principal duty. No, the very contrary. 44 LECTURE III. ‘ Since the Veda is in our hands,’ he writes, ‘ we have extracted from it texts which serve to convince them of those fundamental truths that must destroy idolatry; for the unity of God, the qualities of the true God, and a state of blessedness and condemnation, are all in the Veda. But the truths which are to be found in this book are only scattered there like grains of gold in a heap of sand.’ What would some of the present Bishops in India say to this truly Pauline sentiment, to this attempt to discover in the sacred books of other nations some grains of gold, some common ground, on which a mutual understanding and a real brotherhood might be established between Christians and non-Christians ? The Brahmans themselves are quite aware of the existence of these grains of gold, and when accused of polytheism and idolatry, they themselves quote certain verses from the Veda to show that even in ancient times their prophets knew perfectly well that the different gods invoked for different blessings were only different names of the one Supreme Being. Thus they quote from Rig-veda I. 164, 46: t Indram Mitram Varunam Agnim ahu7i, Atho divya/i sa/i suparwa/i Garutman. kkam sat vipra/i bahudlia vadanti, Agnim, Yamam, Matarisvanam ahu/i. ‘ They call Indra, Mitra, Varu'/ta, Agni, then there is that heavenly Garutmat with beautiful wings: the One that is they speak of in different ways, they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.’ This is a clear confession, if not of Monotheism, at least of Monism, for it should be remarked that the Vedic poet, when he speaks of the one that truly exists, the bearer of many divine names, does not THE VEDA A.S STUDIED BY EUKOPEAN SCHOLARS. 45 even venture to put it in the masculine gender, but calls it the Ekam Sat, the only Being that exists. Another well-known verse of a similar character, in which, however, the masculine gender and a certain amount of human metaphor are still preserved, occurs in Rig-veda X. 82, 3 : Ya/i nah pit^ granita jah vidhat^, dhamani veda, bhuvanani visva, Yah devanam namadha/i eka/i eva, tarn samprasnam bliuvana yanti anya. ‘ He who is our father that begot us, he who is the creator, He who knows all places and all creatures. He who gave names to the gods, being one only, To him all other creatures go, to ask him.’ I could add other passages, particularly from the Brahmarias and Upanishads, all confirming Father Calmette’s idea that the Veda is the best key to the religion of India, and that a thorough knowledge of it, of its strong as well as of its weak points, is in¬ dispensable to the student of religion, and more particularly to the missionary who is anxious to make sincere converts. What is extraordinary is that the announcement of Father Calmette’s discovery of the Veda passed off almost unheeded in Europe. Another French missionary. Father Pons, in 1740, sent a still more complete account of the literary treasures discovered in India. In it he describes the four Vedas, the grammatical treatises, the six systems of philosophy, and the astronomy of the Hindus. But his communications also excited no curiosity except among a few members of the French Institute. The world at large, which would have greeted the discovery of a single ancient Greek statue with shouts of applause, had nothing to say to the unearthing 46 LECTUEE III. of a whole literature, of a whole world of ancient thought. European Scholars acquainted with the Vedas. The Abbe Barth^lemy was one of the few European scholars who perceived the true import of the com¬ munications sent home from India by French mis¬ sionaries, and he asked Father Cceurdoux in 1763 to send home a Sanskrit grammar. This shows that he was in real earnest, and felt impressed with the duty which these extraordinary Indian discoveries imposed on the learned men of Europe. After a time, grammars of the Sanskrit language reached Europe, and it will always remain an honour to Rome that the first grammar of the Sanskrit language was pub¬ lished at Rome in 1790, by a Carmelite friar, Paolino da S. Bartolomeo. He was a German, by name of Johann Philip Werdin, not Wesdin, as he is often called, and had been actively employed as a mis¬ sionary in the south of India from 1776 to 1789. But after giving full credit to the labours of Paolino da S. Bartolomeo and other Roman missionaries, the fact remains that there was as yet a smouldering curiosity only for all that concerned India. The fiames of a true scientific enthusiasm for the ancient literature of that country did not burst forth till they were lighted by a spark of genius. That spark came from Sir William Jones. Sir William Jones was a man of classical culture and of wide interests. He was at home in the best literary society of the age. He could speak with authority, as a scholar to scholars, as a philosopher to philosophers, and as a man of the world to men of the world. When in THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUROPEAN SCHOLARS. 47 1789'^ he published his translation of ^akuntal^, he forced the attention of the world, not only by the unex¬ pected character of his discovery of a perfect dramatic work composed by a dark-skinned poet, but by the pure and classical style of his translation. His subsequent translation of the Laws of Manu did infinite credit to his patience and his ingenuity, and coming from the hand of a professed lawyer and a judge, it could not but attract the serious attention of all who were interested in ancient history, and more particularly, in ancient law. Of course, Sanskrit scholarship has made progress since the days of Sir William Jones, and it is easy now to point out a few mistakes in his renderings. But true scholars who, like Professor Biihler, have given us better translations of Manu, have been the first to acknowledge Sir William Jones’ great merits: whereas others who have never done a stitch of independent work, have dared to call his translations ‘ meretricious.’ Asiatic Society of Bengal. With the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, the history of Sanskrit philology begins, and after a hundred years that society still holds the fore¬ most place as the Royal Exchange between Asia and Europe. I cannot here attempt to give an account of all the brilliant work done by Sanskrit scholars during the first century of Indo-European scholarship. We are concerned with the Vedas only. And here it ^ A translation of the Bhagavadgita, Charles Wilkins, had appeared before, in 1785. Wilkins’ translation of the Hitopadesa appeared in 1787. The first original Sanskrit text published was, I believe, the Ritusamhara, in 1792, under the auspices of Sir William Jones. 48 LECTURE III. is certainly surprising that the Vedas, the supreme importance of which was so clearly perceived by men like Father Calmette, Pons, Paolino da S. Bartolomeo, and others, should have remained so long neglected. Sir W. Jones was fully impressed with their im¬ portance. He knew that the Laws of Manu, to which he assigned the extravagant antiquity of 1500 B.c. (they are now referred to about 400 a. D.), were modern in comparison with the Vedas, and derived their chief authority from them. A much greater scholar than even Sir William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who with indefatig¬ able industry had worked his way through the text and the enormous commentaries of the Veda, and whose essay on the Vedas, published in 1805, is still a work of the highest authority, so far from exciting an active interest in these works, rather damped the enthusiasm of scholars who might have wished to devote themselves to Vedic studies, by saying, as he does at the end of his essay: ‘ The Vedas are too voluminous for a complete translation of the whole, and what they contain would hardly reward the labour of the reader, much less that of the trans¬ lator.’ Interest aroused in Germany. Still the curiosity of the learned world had been roused, not only in England, but in Germany also. While Goethe admired the graceful simplicity of /Sakuntala, his friend Herder, with the true instinct of the historian, was thirsting for the Veda. While others ascribed an extreme antiquity to the Laws of Manu and even to plays like /S'akuntala, he saw THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUROPEAN SCHOLARS. 49 clearly that whatever had been hitherto published of Sanskrit literature, was comparatively modern and secondary in its character. ‘ For the real Veda of the Indians,’ he sighed, ‘ as well as for the real Sanskrit language, we shall probably have to wait a long time.’ Bunsen’s projected Journey to India. How strong a desire had been awakened in Germany at that time for a real and authentic knowledge of the Veda, I learnt from my dear old friend Bunsen, when I first made his acquaintance in London in 1846. He was then Prussian Minister in London. He told me that when he was quite a young man, he had made up his mind to go himself to India, to see whether there really was such a book as the Veda, and what it was like. But Bunsen was then a poor student at Gottingen, poorer even, I beheve, than the poorest student in England or Scotland. What did he do to realize his dream"? He became tutor to a young and very rich American gentleman, well known in later life as one of the American millionaires, Mr. Astor. Instead of accepting payment for his lessons, he stipulated with the young American, who had to return to the United States, that they should meet in Italy, and from thence proceed together to India on a voyage of literary dis¬ covery. Bunsen went to Italy, and waited and waited for his friend, but in vain. Mr. Astor was detained at home, and Bunsen, in despair, had to become private secretary to Niebuhr, who was then Prussian Minister at Rome. Brilliant as Bunsen’s career became after¬ wards, he always regretted the failure of his youthful scheme. ' I have been stranded,’ he used to say, ‘ on the sands of diplomacy; I should have been happier (2) E 50 LECTURE III. had I remained a scholar.’ This was the origin of my own friendship with Bunsen. When I called on him as Prussian Minister to have my passport vise in order to return to Germany, and* when I explained to him how I had worked to bring out an edition of the text and commentary of the Rig- veda from MSS. scattered about in different libraries in Europe, and was now obliged to return to Germany, unable to complete my copies and collations of manu¬ scripts, he took my hand, and said, ‘ I look upon you as myself, young again. Stay in London, and as to ways and means, let me see to that.’ Mind, I was then a young, unknown man. Bunsen had never seen me before. Let that be a lesson to young men, never to despair. If you have found a work to which you are ready to sacrifice the whole of your life, and if you have faith in yourselves, others will have faith in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must be done will be done. MSS. of tlie Veda brought to Europe. But I have not yet finished the account of the final discovery of the Veda. After Colebrooke’s return from India, manuscripts of the Veda and its commentaries had become acces¬ sible in London. The first who made an attempt to study these manuscripts, to copy and collate them, and prepare them for publication, was Rosen. As the result of his labours he published in 1830 his Rlgvedae idpecimen. It contained a few hymns only, but it produced a great impression, because, after all, it was the first authentic specimen of the ancient Vedic lan¬ guage submitted to the scholars of Europe. Rosen THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUKOPEAN SCHOLAKS. 51 undertook to brino; out the whole of the Ricr-veda, but he found the preliminary work, the study of SayaTia’s commentary and of all the literature pertaining to it, far more difficult than he expected. When after seven years of hard and patient labour Rosen died in 1837, all that there was to be published after his death in 1838, was the first book of the Rig-veda in Sanskrit, with a Latin translation and notes. With Rosen’s death the thread of the history of Vedic scholarship seems broken again. Many learned papers were written on the Veda, all based on Rosen’s post¬ humous volume. Bopp constantly availed himself of the Veda for his Comparative Grammar. Lassen, Benfey, Kuhn, and others, all drew as much informa¬ tion as possible out of the 121 hymns which Rosen had placed within their reach. But the only scholar in Europe who went beyond Rosen, and who really forms the connecting link between the first and the second periods of Vedic scholarship, was Eugene Burnouf at Paris. Eugene Burnouf in France. Historical justice requires that Burnouf’s merits should be fully recognised, because, owing to his being called away to Buddhistic studies, and owing to his early death, very little of his work on the Veda has come to the knowledge of the world, except through his disciples. First of all, Burnouf worked hard in collecting MSS. of the principal Vedas, of their com¬ mentaries, and of other works necessary for their elucidation. He had persuaded Guizot^, who was then ^ See Appendix IV. E 2 52 LECTUKE III. Prime Minister in France, to provide the funds neces¬ sary for the acquisition of these MSS. ; others he had acquired at his own expense. With the help of these MSS. he gained a wider acquaintance with Vedic literature than was possessed at that time by any other scholar. Scholars came from all parts of Europe to attend his lectures. These lectures were given at the College de France. They were attended by Neve, Gorresio, Both, Goldstiicker, Barthelemy St. Hilaire, Bardelli, and others, who have all done good work, though some of them have gone to rest from their labours. In these lectures Burnouf laid before us in the most generous spirit his own views on the inter¬ pretation of the Veda, his own results, and his own plans for the future. The true principles of the inter¬ pretation of the Veda, the necessity of beginning with the native commentaries, and the equal necessity of going beyond them and discovering the true meaning of the Vedic language by the same method of decipher¬ ment which Burnouf himself had so triumphantly applied to the Avesta and to the cuneiform inscrip¬ tions, were then for the first time clearly enunciated. And not only was all his knowledge freely communi¬ cated to his pupils, but his own MSS. were readily placed at their disposal, if only they would work and help in the advancement of Vedic scholarship. We were allowed to handle for the first time, not only the texts of the Vedas and their commentaries, but such books as the Nirukta, the Pratisakhyas, the Kalpa-sutras were freely placed at our disposal. There can be no question whatever that the founder of the critical school of Vedic scholarship was Burnouf, though he himself was the very last man to claim any THE VEDA AS STUDIED BY EUROPEAN SCHOLARS. 53 credit for what he had done. The seed which he had sown bore ample fruit, and that was all he cared for. In Koth’s Essays on the Veda (1846) we see the first results of Burnouf s teaching, and in his later works, his edition of the Nirukta (1852) and his valuable contributions to the Petersburg Dictionary, the same scholar has proved himself a worthy disciple of that great French savant. My edition of the Big'-veda. I had come to Paris to attend Burnouf’s lectures, and with very vague notions as to an edition of the text and the commentary of the Big-veda. You must remember that the Vedas had never been published in India, though for more than three thousand years they had held there the same place which the Bible holds with us. They existed both in oral tradition, as they still exist, and in MSS., more or less perfect, more or less correct. These MSS. therefore had to be copied, and then to be collated. This was comparatively an easy task. The real difficulty began with the commentary. First of all, that commentary was enormous, and filled about four volumes quarto of a thousand pages each. While the MSS. of the text were generally correct, those of the commentary were mostly very carelessly written, full of omissions, and often perfectly unintelligible. But the greatest diffi¬ culty of all was that Sayana, the compiler of the great commentary, who lived in the fourteenth century A.D.^, quoted largely from a literature which was at that time entirely unknown to us, which existed in ^ He became president of the College of Snngeri in 1331, and died in 1386. 54 LECTUEE III. MSS. only, and often not even in MSS. accessible in Europe. My idea was to give extracts only from this commentary, but on this point Burnouf resisted with all his might. We must have the whole or nothing, he used to say, and often when I despaired of my task, he encouraged and helped me with his advice. Before I could begin the first volume of my edition of Saya^ia’s commentary, I had to read, to copy, and to index the principal works which were constantly referred to by SayaTia—a little library by itself. However, in 1849 the first volume appeared, and twenty-five years later, in 1875, the whole work was finished. I have thus tried to give you a short sketch of the discovery of the Veda. My own task was not that of a discoverer, but that of a patient excavator only. With every new platform that was laid bare, with every new volume that was published, scholars rushed in to examine what had been found, to sift the ashes, to clear the genuine antiquities from the rubbish. Critical scholarship did not wait till the whole of Say aria’s commentary was finished. A number of excellent young scholars have been at work on the Veda in every country of Europe. In India also a new interest has sprung up in Vedic literature, and with every year new light is thrown on the enig¬ matic utterances of the Vedic Bishis. What these utterances are, what the Rig-veda really is, what the whole of Vedic literature contains^ I shall have to explain to you in my next lecture. LECTUEE IV. SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. Peculiar Character of Indian Antiquity. W E saw how the Veda was discovered, how the ancient cityofVedic thought was excavated, and how a world which had lain buried for thousands of years was called back to life in our own time. N o doubt the ruins of Carnac in Egypt look grander, the palaces of Nineveh are more magnificent, the streets and houses and temples at Pompeii are more imposing than a hundred volumes of Vedic literature. But what is it that gives life to the colossal ruins of Carnac, what allows us a real insight into the palaces of Nineveh, what imparts to the streets and houses and temples of Pompeii a meaning and a real human interest, if not the inscriptions on their walls and the rolls of papyrus and parchment which tell us of the thoughts of the ancient Egyptians, or Assyrians, or Eomans h Mere monuments, mere lists of kings, mere names of battles, what do they teach us ? But give us one thought, one truly human sentiment, and we feel at home among those ancient ruins, the Babylonian statues begin to live, the Egyptian mummies begin to speak, and the streets of ancient Pompeii swarm 56 LECTUKE IV. once more with senators, with philosophers, and the gay society of ancient Italy. Here it is where the discoveries in India assert their superiority over all other discoveries in ancient history. It is true we have no really ancient temples or palaces in that country. Massive stone buildings were probably unknown in India before the rise of Buddhism and the conquests of Alexander, and even if they had existed, they would have perished long ago in the peculiar climate of India. The Indian mind had no faith in that small immortality which the kings of Egypt and Babylon valued so much, and strove to secure for themselves by their stupendous edifices. The Hindu always felt himself a mere stranger on earth, a sojourner in a foreign land, and the idea of perpetuating his name and fame for a few thousand years by brick and mortar never entered his mind, till he had learnt it from outsiders. But if the Aryas in India have left us no stones, they have left us bread—thoughts to feed on, riddles to solve, lessons to learn, such as we find nowhere else. Meaning* of Veda. We call what they have left us Veda. Now what does Veda mean"? It means knowledge, and it is letter by letter the same word as the Greek olba, i.e. Follba, only that Veda is a noun, while olba is a verb. But the verb also exists in Sanskrit, and as we have to learn in Greek that olba is a perfect with the meaning of the present, we have to learn in Sanskrit that veda is a perfect, but means ‘I know.’ Is this a mere accident, a mere coincidence ? Cer¬ tainly not. It is one of those small facts of the SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITERATUEE. 57 Science of Language which can teach us volumes. This similarity between, or rather this identity of, Sanskrit veda and Greek olba, clenches with the force of an hydraulic hammer the original unity of the speakers of Greek and Sanskrit. If perfect San¬ skrit was spoken 1500 B. c., and if perfect Greek was spoken about the same time, then these two streams of lano;uao:e which had diverged even at that time so much that not one word in them was exactly the same, that Homer and Vasish^Aa would have been perfectly unintelligible to each other, these two streams of language, I say, must once have formed one stream, and in that one stream this so-called irregular perfect must have been formed once for all. No other explanation is possible for that simple equation veda^^otSa. But this perfect veda and otSa, with the meaning of the present, may teach us another lesson also, namely, that these early framers of language held the same, whether right or wrong, view on the nature of human knowledge which Locke held. If he said, Nihil in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu, they expressed ‘ I know ’ by ‘I have seen,’—the only saving clause being in the implied I, which may represent what Leibnitz added, nihil, nisi intellectus. But it is time now to ask what this Veda really is. The Veda has become such a power, not only in linguistic research, but in all antiquarian, religious, and philosophical studies, that no honest student can be satisfied with a vague idea of what the Veda is. I am afraid a more detailed survey of Vedic literature will prove somewhat tedious, but to a real student of religion such knowledge is absolutely indispensable. 58 LECTURE IV. The Bigf-veda, the only true Veda. It has been usual to speak of three or even of four Vedas, namely, the Kig-veda, Ya^ur-veda, S^ma- veda, to which the Atharva-veda has been added as the fourth. Now although from an Indian point of view this is perfectly correct, nothing can be more misleading from an historical point of view. From an historical point of view there is but one real Veda, the Kig-veda, and when we say the Kig-veda, what we mean is the Kig-veda-samhita only, the collection of hymns, and nothing else. When we speak of the Veda as representing the earliest phase of thought and language accessible to the historian on Aryan ground, that phase of thought must not be looked for in what are called the Ya^ur-veda and Sama-veda, but in the hymns of the Kig-veda only, to which possibly some popular verses collected in the Atharva- veda may have to be added. Whenever therefore I speak of the Veda in general, whenever I appeal to the Veda as the foundation of the science of language, mythology, and religion, what I mean is the Kig- veda, the Veda of the sacred hymns which belonged to the ancient inhabitants of the country of the Seven Kivers. Brahmanic View of the Vedas. In order to explain how the confusion between the Kig-veda and the other so-called Vedas arose, I must explain to you the view which the Brahmans them¬ selves take of their ancient sacred literature. According to them there are three Vedas (trayi vidya), or, according to later authorities, four, the Kig-veda, Ya^ur-veda, Sama-veda, and, as the fourth, the Atharva-veda. SURVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. 59 Each of these Vedas, as we now possess it, consists of two parts, called Samhita and Brahma9^a. The Samhitas, literally collections, consist of Mantras, or metrical compositions, the Brahma-zias are in prose. The Sig'-veda. Let us begin with the Big-veda. Rig, which is a modification of rik, means' a verse, originally a verse of praise, for the root ark in one of its ramifications has taken the sense of praising and celebrating. Hence ark a also, a hymn of praise. The Samhita of the Big-veda, as we find it in our MSS., is a large collection of hymns, chiefly but not exclusively of a religious character. It is really a collection of collections, for it consists of ten so-called MaTicZalas, fit. rounds or spheres, and each of these Ma?icZalas forms by itself an independent collection, and belonged originally to one or other of the great Vedic families. The Ten Manc^alas. We can distinguish between MamZalas II to VII, which are distinctly Ma'TicZalas belonging to certain families, and the remaining four Ma'TicZalas, which are less distinctly the property of Vedic families. Thus the second MamZala belongs to the family of Gmtsamada (Bhargava). The third to that of Visvamitra. The fourth „ „ Vamadeva (Gautama). The fifth „ „ Atri. The sixth „ „ Bharadv%a. The seventh „ „ VasishZ/^a. 60 LECTURE IV. The first Ma^icZala is not ascribed to any family in particular, but is called by native authorities the MaTztZala of the iS^atarHns, that is of the poets who §a-ch contributed about a hundred verses to this book. The eighth MancZala contains a large number of hymns composed in a peculiar metre, called Pra- gathas. While the eighth Ma^icZala seems to have been col- lected chiefly on the strength of the similarity of metre, the ninth was evidently intended to com¬ prehend hymns addressed to one and the same deity, namely, Soma. The families who principally contributed to these three books, the first, the eighth, and the ninth, are the Ka-^ivas and Angirasas. though other families are not excluded. Lastly, the tenth book seems to contain whatever was left over of Vedic poetry. It is called the MawZala of the long and short, or miscellaneous hymns. The poets also seem to belong promiscuously to every one of the ancient Vedic families. It was very natural on the strength of these facts to suppose that the six Family MariJalas, II to VII, were the oldest collections; that they were followed by the eighth and ninth Ma7icZalas, each having its own distinctive character and purpose, and that in the end the first and tenth MaTit/alas were added, containing the last gleanings of the ancient col¬ lectors. Method in the Collection of the Ten Manc^alas. But if we examine the character of the ten Ma^r- (Zalas more closely, we shall find that such a theory SURVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. 61 can hardly be justified. There is clearly one and the same system, according to which every one of these ten books has been collected. It is not by accident, as I pointed out long ago^, that in every one of these Ma^^cZalas, except the eighth^ and ninth, the first hymns are those addressed to Agni, and that these are followed by hymns addressed to Indra. Native students of the Veda were fully aware of this fact, and we can only account for it by admitting that the collection of all, or at least of eight of the Ma^icZalas, was carried out under the same presiding spirit. Another feature common to several of the Ma^wZalas ^ is a certain arithmetical order of the hymns. Here I should mention first of all that each MamZala is divided into a number of Anuvakas, i.e. recitations or chapters. In many of these Anuvakas the hymns follow each other according to the diminishing number of verses. This fact no one could help perceiving who looked at the tabular index printed at the end of my edition of the Kig-veda^. But the frequency with which this law was broken prevented most scholars from drawing the important lesson which, I believe, Professor Grassmann was the first to draw, namely, that whenever that rule is broken, there must have been a reason for it. The chief reason is supposed to have been that the hymns which break the rule were later additions, and that in some cases shorter hymns at the end of an Anuvaka had been ^ Rig-veda-Sanhita, translation, vol. i. p. xxv. ^ The eighth Mandala begins with hymns to Indra, not, as Prof, Weber asserts, with hymns to Agni. The tenth Mandala begins with hymns to Agni. ^ Cf, Delbriick in Jenaer Literaturzeitung, 1875, p. 867. Bergaigne, Journal Asiatique, 1886, p. 197. 62 LECTUKE IV. wrongly united into one large hymn. This has been a most useful lesson for critical purposes, though in some cases the knife of the operating critics may have been handled with too great boldness There are many characteristics, however, which all the Ma?ic?alas share in common, and which show the working of a common system on the part of the collectors. The collectors were evidently impressed with the idea that every hymn must have a poet, and that every poet must belong to a certain family. In many cases it is quite evident that these names were fanciful; still in none of the Ma?ic?alas do we find a hymn without the names of poet or deity. That hymns addressed to the same deity were generally kept together, we have seen already. There is the same tendency also to keep hymns of the same poets together. Nor can there be any doubt that the same general theory of metre had been ac¬ cepted by the compilers of all the ten Man(ialas. It seems to me quite clear from these facts that we must admit a period, it may be of one or of two generations only, during which a few individuals agreed to collect the sacred poetry that had been preserved in six of the most prominent Brahmanic ' This, as has been shown by Delbrlick, Grassmann, and others, is very clear in the seventh Mar(dala. There the hymns addressed to each deity diminish regularly in succession, except at the end of each group. (1) Hymns addressed to Agni, regular 1-14, irregular 15-17. ( 2 ) (3) (4) (5) ( 6 ) (7) Indra, ,, 18-30, ,, 31-33. the Visve, regular 34-54, irregular 55. the Marutas, regular 56-58, irregular 59. Surya, the Marutas, and Varuwa, regular 60-65, irregular 66. the Asvinau, regular 67-73, irregular 74. Ushas, regular 75-80, irregulai- 81. SURVEY OF VEDTC LITERATURE. 63 families, that the same individuals, or their immediate successors, superintended the other four collections also, which are contained in the eighth, the ninth, the first, and the tenth Ma7i(ialas, and that in this way one great collection, the Rig-veda-samhita, was finished. The whole collection of hymns is sometimes called Dasatayi, i.e. consisting of ten parts, as it were, the Decamerone. Dasatay a is an adjective, meaning what belongs to the ten Ma-TKialas. Number of Hymns.. This collection, as we now possess it, handed down in the school of the /S^akalas, consists of 1017 hymns (Mantras or Suktas), while in the school of the Bash- kalas their number amounted to 1025. There are besides eleven hymns, called the Valakhilya hymns h which were added at the end of the sixth Anuvaka of the eighth MancZala. If we count them together with the 1017 hymns of the >S'akalas, we get a sum total of 1028 Vedic hymns. There are other spurious hymns called Khilas, but they are not counted with the hymns of the Sanihita. The Fratisakbyas. These 1028 hymns became soon the subject of a most minute study, a kind of Masoretic exegesis. They had to be learnt by heart, and their exact pronuncia¬ tion was laid down with the greatest care in works called Pratisakhyas The date of these Pratisa- ^ There can be no doubt that these eleven hymns were added at a later time, and that they had existed before as a sepai’ate collec¬ tion. This is best shown by the fact that they admit Galitas from themselves only, except in one doubtful case, tarn tva vayam. ^ The Pratisakhyas form one of the six Vedangas, viz. the Siksha. Goldstiicker denied it, but he is refuted by the Aik-pratisakhya itself, which says, S. 827, that it is krGsna?w vedangam anindyam 64 LECTURE IV. khyas has been fixed with as much probability as is attainable in such matters, in about the fifth or sixth century B.c. They are certainly prior to the great grammarian Pa^iini who quotes verbatim from the Pratisakhya belonging to the ^S'akala school of the Pig-veda Date of the Pratisakhya. In this Pratisakhya we have clear proof that the author of it, commonly called iS'aunaka, knew our collection of hymns, consisting of ten Ma^icZalas. He speaks of dasatayi^ verses, i.e. verses found in the ten Ma'J^cZalas. He actually quotes a passage as coming from the tenth MamZala ^ (Sutra 313). In fact, his various rules presuppose not only the col¬ lection of the ten Ma?i(ialas, but the exact collocation also of the hymns in each Ma^icZala, such as we now possess them. It is thus and thus only that he is able to say, as he does, that a certain verse (I. 133, 6) is the longest, and another the shortest (VI. 45, 29), among all the verses of the ten MaTuialas. He goes even further, and he shows himself so certain of every consonant and vowel of the whole text of the ten Ma-T^ialas being in its right place* that he can say (S. 309) with perfect assurance and with arsham, ‘a complete Vedanga, faultless, and canonical.’ The first PrMisakhya published was that of the Rig-veda (1856-69). There are, besides the two Pratisakhyas of the Yagrur-veda, one for the Vagrasaneyi-samhita, the other for the Taittiriya, and the Atharva- pratisakhya. A Sama-pratisakhya has been published by Satyavrata Samasrami in the Usha, vol. i. No. 3 seq. ^ See Appendix V. ^ Rig-veda-pratisakhya, 997,gyesh^7;.a dasatayishu nVam,the longest of the verses among the Dasatayis. I thought that Dasatayi might here be meant as a name of Ma^idala, because the text has ri/cam, not nkshu. See, however, Sutras 946 and 993. 2 The technical term Mandala occurs first in the Aitareya-aranyaka and in the Grihya-sutras. SUKVEY OF VEDTC LITERATURE. 65 perfect correctness, that, for instance, compounds ending with the words varu-na and vrata shorten their last vowel, provided a consonant or semi-vowel follows, and this through the whole of the Rig-veda, except in thirteen hymns which are ascribed to Medha- tithi ^ (I. 12 ; I. 24). Minutiae of the Pratisakhya. Such statements occur again and again, and leave us in no doubt that not a single hymn could have been added to our collection, nor a single line be changed, after the date of the Pratisakhyas. This is a most important point, for unless our argu¬ ments can be upset, we now possess the certainty that the Masoretic studies of the sixth and fifth cen¬ turies B. c. presuppose, nay postulate the existence, not only of Vedic hymns in general, but of our collec¬ tion of these hymns in ten MaWalas; and not only of our collection in ten Manc^alas, but of every hymn exactly in that place in which we now find it, with every word in its right place, nay with every vowel, either lengthened or shortened, exactly as they are lengthened or shortened in our MSS. This means that 0 ‘ ' the text, exactly as we possess it in MSS. not more than about 500 years old, had become the subject of most minute scholastic studies about 500 b. c. The Anukramanis of /Sauuaka. And now we may advance another step. The same author, S^aunaka, to whom the authorship of one Pratisakhya is ascribed, is also mentioned as the author of certain indices to the Rig-veda, called Anu- k ram a 71 is, literally, ‘ after-steppings.’ These indices ^ See Appendix VI. F (2) 66 LECTURE IV. contain the number of Manc^alas, of Anuvakas, and of hymns, the names of the authors and the deities, and the metres. Most of these single indices have been preserved to us, or they existed at least as late as the time of Saya^ia, fourteenth century. They were superseded, however, by the more comprehensive index of Katya- yana, the Sarvanukrama^i. These indices again pre¬ suppose the text of the ten MamZalas in all its important features exactly such as we now possess it, and thus enable us to say that the bridge of our argument spans a distance of more than two thousand years, and lands us about 500 b. c. in the schools of the Brahmans, the so-called Parishads, where we see teacher and pupils learning by heart exactly the same Veda which we are studying at present. Number of Verses of the Rig'-veda. We saw that, according to the calculation of those ancient scholars, the Big-veda-samhita consisted then, as it does now, of ten Ma7^u?alas, eighty-five Anuvakas, and 1028 Suktas or hymns. But they went fur¬ ther in their calculations, and counted 10,402 verses^, 153,826 words, 432,000 syllables. These calculations, I am obliged to confess, have not yet been checked, except that of the verses, and here there is a dis¬ crepancy, but only a slight one. On an average, how¬ ever, a hymn may be said to consist of ten verses, so that the number of 10,402 verses for 1028 hymns cannot be far wrong. This will give you an idea of the extent of the real Veda, or the Big-veda-sa'j^ihita. If we take into ^ See Appendix VII. SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. 67 account the length of the Vedic verses, as compared with the Greek hexameter, the Rig-veda may be said to contain nearly as much as the Iliad and Odyssey together. This is all we have and ever shall have for studying that ancient period in the history of the Aryan race which precedes in language, mythology, and religion the Homeric period, hitherto the most ancient known period in the history of our race. The Sama-veda. If all the rest of what is called Vedic literature had been lost, we should not have been much the poorer for it. To the student of the history of Sanskrit literature the other so-called Vedas are no doubt of very high interest, as they form the connecting link between the ancient Vedic period and the later Sanskrit literature. But in the eyes of the general historian they cannot compare with what is really unique in the literature of the whole world, the hymns of the Rig-veda. What then are the other so-called Vedas'? What is called the Sama-veda-samhita is no more than a compilation of verses contained in the Rig-veda, which had to be sung at certain sacrifices, and not simply to be recited, as were the hymns of the Rig-veda. Sam an means melody. Very often single verses are taken out of the hymn to which they ori¬ ginally belonged, in order to be sung together at certain sacrifices. There are only seventy-eight out of the 1549 verses of the Sama-veda ^ Avhich have not ^ See Ludwig, Rig-veda, iii. pp. 419-426. Aufrecht, Rig-veda, second edition, vol. ii. p. xlv. 68 LECTURE IV. been found in our text of the Eig-veda. All the rest are simply the same as we find them in the Eig-veda, with slight variations, representing the various read¬ ings of different recensions (sakha), but by no means, as was once supposed a more ancient text. Yagnr-veda. What we call the Ya^ur-veda-samhita is a col¬ lection of verses and sacrificial formulas, intended for the use of the priests who, while performing the sacri¬ fice, had to mutter these verses and formulas. Ya^us ^ is the name for these sacrificial formulas, as ya^/ia is the name of sacrifice. What then is the difference between the collection of hymns of the Eig-veda and the two collections of hymns of the Ya^ur-veda and Sama-veda'? The collection of hymns of the Eig-veda represents an historical event, like the final collection of the books of the Old Testament. It arose from a desire to preserve from destruction the sacred poetry that was the property of certain families, in order to hand it down as a whole from generation to generation. The ^T/iandas or Mantra Period. I have formerly called the period during which the hymns collected in the Eig-veda were originally com¬ posed, the ifAandas period, Mandas being one of ^ This idea of Prof. Weber’s has been sufficiently refuted by Burnell, Arsheya-brahmana, p. xvi, and by Aufrecht, Eig-veda, second edition, p. xxxvii. ^ The distinction of rik, saman, and yagus is clearly laid down in the Aitareya-aranyaka, II. 3, 6, 8 : ‘ A rik verse, a gatha, a kumbya (a moral saw) are measured (metrical). A Yagrus line, an invocation (nigada), and general remarks, these are not measured. A Saman, or any portion of it (geshwa, i. e. parvan) is musical.’ SURVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. 69 the oldest names for these sacred verses, and I have tried to distinguish it from the period in which these verses were collected and studied as a whole, which I called the Mantra period, mantra being the tech¬ nical name for these hymns. But later researches have convinced me that with regard to the Big-veda the Mantra period simply represents the closing of the ifAandas period, while with regard to the Ya^ur- veda and Sama-veda it has now become clear that there never was a Mantra period at all, but that even the first collection of these hymns and formulas belongs to a later period^ that of the prose Brah- manas, and certainly did not precede that period. The Prose Brahmanas. I mentioned before that, according to Hindu autho¬ rities, every Veda consists of a collection of hymns, Samhitas, and Brahma^ias. These Brahma?ias are the earliest specimens of prose literature in India which we possess, and their object was to describe the elaborate system of sacrifices which had grown up among the Brahmans, and to show how the hymns or portions of the hymns should be used at each sacrifice. For the performance of these sacrifices, particularly of the great sacrifices, three distinct classes of priests were required. One class had to perform the manual labour, which was very considerable, the clearing of the sacrificial ground, the erection of altars, the lighting of the fire, the preparation of the offerings, &c. They were called Adhvaryus, the labouring priests, and their duties, mixed up with endless specu¬ lations, were described in the Brahmams of the 70 LECTUEE IV. Adhvaryus. They formed the Brahma^ias of the Ya^ur-veda. Another class of priests had to sing. They were called Udgatr^s, the singing priests, and their re¬ spective duties were in the same way described in the Brahma'^ias of the Udgatrzs, or, as they are also called, the A/iandogas, i. e. the singers of the A^^andas. These formed the Brahma^ias of the Sama-veda. A third class of priests had to recite certain hymns with the utmost correctness of articulation. They were called Hot7"^s, the reciting priests, and their duties were described in the Brahmarias of the Hotri^ priests. They formed the Brahmiams of the Big-veda. The Brahmawas of the Ya(/ur-veda. We can best study the historical growth of the Brahma^ias in the case of the Adhvaryu priests, the actual performers of the sacrifices. We possess for the Adhvaryus four ancient works containing explanations of the sacrifice,— (1) The KaAaka, belonging to the school of the Ka^Aas, (2) The Kapish^/itala-ka^/m Samhita, belonging to the school of the Kapishi^Aala-ka^/ias, (3) The Maitraya?!! Samhita, belonging to the school of the Maitraya'Tias, and (4) The Taittiriyaka. In these four works the verses to be used by the Adhvaryu priest are given in proper order for each sacrifice, and they are accompanied by prose portions, containing instructions and general observations. It will be observed that two of them are called Samhitas, though they would more correctly have SURVEY OF VEUIC LITERATURE. 71 been called Brahmatias. There is, in fact, no other Brahma'Jia for the Kapishi^^ala-ka^^as and the Maitra- yaTiiyas, besides what is here called their Samhita. The Taittiriyaka, however, exists in two portions, one called Samhita, the other Brahma^ia. But here again there is really no distinction between the two, the Brahma^ia being simply a continuation and appendix of the Sam¬ hita. S a mbit a, in fact, is a misnomer, as applied to the MaitrayaTiiya and the Kapish^/mla-ka^/m Samhitas, and, in spite of native tradition, it would be far better to call these collections of the Taittiriyas, Maitra- yarias, and Kapishif^ala-kait^as, Brahma^ias. After a time, however, it was felt to be useful for the priests, when performing the sacrifice, to have a separate collection of the hymns and sacrificial for¬ mulas, and another containing the rules of the sacri¬ fice and the explanatory notes. And thus we find in the school of the Ya^asaneyins a Sa77ihita, con¬ taining nothing but the hymns, and a BrahmaTia, containing nothing but the explanations. In this form the Ya^ur-veda is called the Bright Ya^ur- veda, in contradistinction from the Dark Ya^ur- veda, in which hymns and explanations are mixed. The Brahmaria of the Bright Ya^ur-veda is called the >S'atapatha-brahma'7?/a, and it exists in two texts, as handed down by the two schools of the Madhy- andinas and Ka7^vas. We are thus enabled to see how the so-called Samhita of the Ya^ur-veda, the collection of verses and formulas to be used by the Adhvaryu priest, arose. It existed first as part and parcel of a Brahma72a, and was afterwards extracted and separated from it for the benefit of the officiating priest. It is therefore 72 LECTUKE IV. really subsequent, not antecedent to the BrahmaTia. It is no more than a manual for the use of the Adh- varyus, the labouring priests, extracted from a pre¬ vious work in prose, which gave a full account of that portion of the sacrifice which this one class of priests, the Adhvaryus, had to perform, together with the necessary verses. The Brahmanas of the Sama-veda. Exactly the same seems to have taken place with the Sama-veda. Here too we have Brahmanas, such as the Ta'iidya-brahma'Tia in twenty-five books, dis¬ coursing on that portion of the sacrifice which fell to the share of the singing priests. After a time a hymn-book was felt to be useful, and a Sama-veda- sanihita was put together which we still possess in two forms, either as simple texts (Sama-veda-arHka), or as adapted to the melodies (Gramageyagana, Arari- yagana) We shall now be better able to see the difference between the collection of the hymns of the Rig-veda, the Rig-veda-sa'/7ihita, and the other collections of hymns, the Ya^ur-veda-samhita, and the Sama-veda- sauihita. The latter were collected for the special benefit of certain classes of priests, and were, so far as we can judge, put together subsequently to the composition of the prose Brahmar^as. They were mere extracts from more ancient Brahma?ias. The Rig-veda-sa77ihita_, on the contrary, has nothing to do with the sacrifice. It is true that a third class of priests, the Hotr^s, have likewise to recite many ^ See Appendix VIII. SUEVEY OF VEDIC LITEEATUEE. 73 of the hymns of the Rig-veda during the performance of the sacrifice. But there is no collection giving these hymns in the order in which they have to be recited by the Hotr^ priests. Such a collection would have been analogous to the hymn-books of the labour¬ ing and the singing priests, while the collection of the Big-veda hymns, as we possess it, is really an his¬ torical collection, carried out in common, as we saw, by a number of Brahmanic families, and by itself utterly useless for sacrificial purposes. The Brahmana of the Big'>veda. It seems that the Hotr^ priests, the reciters, were the most highly educated Brahmans. It was their duty not only to know the whole of the hymns of the Big-veda by heart, and to learn to pronounce them with the greatest accuracy, but likewise to learn from their Brahma?ias at what part of the sacrifice certain hymns and portions of hymns had to be recited. We still possess two of these Brah- ma'/ias, intended for the use of the reciting priests, (1) The Aitareya-brahmam, belonging, according to Satyavrata, to the /SAkha of the iS'akalas, (2) The Kaushitaki - brahma^ia, also called the >Sankhayana-brahma'7ia. If, according to the indications contained in these Brahma^ias, the hymns and verses to be recited by the Hotr^ priests had been collected and arranged according to the order of the different sacrifices, we should then have had a Big-veda-samhita on a level with the Samhitas of the other Vedas. As it is, the Big-veda-samhita stands by itself. It had a different, not a purely priestly origin, and, so far as we can 74 LECTUEE IV. judge at present, it was anterior, not posterior, to the Brahma'na period. The true Veda. What is the result of all this ? It is this, that we really possess one collection only of ancient hymns which by itself represents the earliest period of Indian language, mythology, and religion. This is called the Kig-veda-samhita, and can alone be sp6ken of as the true Veda. Between the period represented by these hymns, the duration of which may have been many cen¬ turies, and the period which gave rise to the prose works called Br^mawas, there is a complete break. How it came about we cannot tell, but it is a fact that the authors of the Brahmanas had completely lost the true meaning of the Vedic hymns. Their interpretations^ or rather misinterpretations, of these ancient hymns are perfectly astounding. Their one idea is the sacrifice, which had assumed such pro¬ portions, and had been elaborated with such hair¬ splitting minuteness that we may well understand how the Brahmans had no thoughts left for anything else. The hymns had become in time a merely subor¬ dinate portion of the sacrifice. The proper position of a log of wood or of a blade of grass round the sacrificial fire, seemed of more consequence than the expressions of gratitude, the prayers for forgiveness of sin, or the praises of the mighty deeds of the gods, contained in the hymns of their ancestors. The Brahiuanas of the Brahmans. I think, therefore, that we may speak of a period of BrahmaT^as following on the period of the hymns. SUEVEY OF VEDIC LITERATURE. 75 and the very name of Brahma'^ia period would fully characterise it. The name BrahmaTia has nothing to do with brahman, in the special sense of prayer, or sacrificial formula and ceremony. These are not the principal or exclusive objects of the BrahmaTias. The name Brahma^ia was derived either from brah¬ man, neuter, meaning the clergy or priesthood, just as kshatram means the nobility, or directlyTrom brahman, nom., brahma, masc., the priest, and more especially the superintending priest. For it should be remembered that, in addition to the three classes of priests whom I mentioned before, the labouring, the singing, and the reciting priests, there was a fourth class who had to watch the progress of the sacrifice and see that all was done and spoken and sung correctly and in proper order. For that purpose the priests who performed the office of the Brahman had to be acquainted with the other Vedas also, and especially with the rules laid down in the works which were called BrahmaTias. These BrahmaTias could hardly have been so called except because they were the books of the Brahman, neut., the clergy in general, or of the Brahman, masc., the superintending priest. Brahma-T^a, the Brahman, is a derivative of brahman, masc. We possess at present a limited number of these Brahma^ias only, but the number of Brahma^ias quoted is very large. We also know of numerous schools who followed the same Brahma^ia, though with slight variations—variations which may seem small to us, but which seemed very important in the eyes of the Vedic priesthood. That there were ancient and modern Brahmar?.as we know from un- 76 LECTUEE IV. impeachable authorities of the fourth century B.C., for instancOj the great grammarian, Pa?iini. We saw before how the separation of the hymns from the Brahma^ias, a work ascribed to Y%;iavalkya, led to the introduction of a new Brahma?ia for the Ya^ur- veda, viz. the /S'atapatha-brahma'na, and this very Brahma^ia, ascribed to Ya^;Tavalkya, is reckoned among those which were not old Life during" the Vedic Period. It ought not to be supposed, however, that what we call the Brahma7ia period represents to us the whole of the intellectual, or even of the religious life of India. It would be fearful to think that millions of people should for generations have fed on such stuff as we find in the Brahma?ias, and on nothing else. All we can say is that these Brahmanas represent to us the only pillars left standing in a vast field of ruins, but that they need not have been the pillars of the only temples which once stood there. Besides, every temple presupposes a vast surrounding of busy life, without which a priesthood would find itself stranded high and dry. Even in the hymns of the Big-veda we find a great deal more than merely religious sentiments. We find in them traces of a busy life in all its phases, peace and war, study and trade. Thus we read in hymn IX. 112 : Poem on Trades and Professions. ‘ Different indeed are our desires, different the works of men. The carpenter looks for something that is ' Pa9^. IV. 3,105, vartt., IV. 2, 66, vartt. History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p, 329. SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITEKATURE. 77 broken, the leach for something that is sprained, the priest for one who offers oblations. . . . The smith with his dry sticks, with his wings of birds (in place of bellows), and his stones (anvil), looks day after day for a man who possesses gold. ... I am a poet, my father is ak leach, my mother works the mill; with different desires, all striving for wealth, we are as if running after cows Poem of the Gambler. The next hymn, if hymn it can be called, contains the lamentations of a gambler. That gambling is not a modern invention, but one of the oldest, one of the most universal vices of the human race, has been clearly proved, not only from ancient literature, but likewise from the study of the customs of uncivilised races. Still it is startling when we meet in this poem, not only with dice and public gambling places, but with all the miseries entailed on wife and mother and brothers by the recklessness of a gambler. Some people who know all about primitive society declare without hesitation that such verses cannot be genuine. If they would prove it, we should feel most grateful. As it is, we must simply take note of them; we must live and learn. ^ ‘ Nananam vai u nah dhiya^ vi vratani g^ananam ; takslia rish^am rutam bhishak brahma sunvantam ikkhati . . . Craratibhi/i oshadhibhiTi parnebhi7^ sakunanam karmara/i asmabhi/i dyubhi/i hiranyavantam ikkhati . .. Karu/i aham tataTi bhishak upalaprakshini nana ; nanadhiya/i vasuyava/i anu gah iva tasthima’... Rig-veda IX. 112, 1-3. 78 LECTUEE IV. X. 34. 1. These dice that have grown in the air on the great (Vibhidaka) tree, drive me wild when they roll about on the board. This Vibhidaka seems to me intoxicating like a draught of Soma, that has grown on mount Mu^avat. 2. She (my wife) never troubled or xhid me, she was kind to me and to my friends. But I, for the sake of these only-beloved dice, have spurned my devoted wife. 3. My mother-in-law hates me, my wife avoids me, the miserable finds no one to pity him; nor do I see what is the use of a gambler, as little as of an old horse, offered for sale. 4. Others pet his wife, while his war-horse, the dice, thirsts for booty. Father, mother, and brothers say of him, ^ We do not know him, lead him away bound.’ 5. And when I think that I shall not play with them again, then I am left by my friends who run away. But when the brown dice are thrown down and utter speech, then I rush to their rendezvous, like a love¬ sick maiden. 6. The granbler goes to the assembly, his body glowing, asking. Shall I win'? Alas, the dice cross his desire, handing over to his opponent all that he has made. 7. These dice hook, prick, undo, burn, and inflame. After giving childish playthings they ruin the winner; yet to the gambler they are all covered with honey. 8. Their company of fifty-three plays about, like the bright Savitr^^, whose laws are never broken. SUKVEY OF VEDIO LITERATUKE. 79 They do not bend before the anger of the mighty, even the king bends down before them. 9. They roll down, they jump up; though having- no hands themselves, they resist him who has hands. These playing^ coals, though cold, when thrown on the board, burn the heart through and through. 10. The wife of the gambler mourns forlorn, so does the mother of the son who is gone away, she knows not whither. In debt, trembling, longing for money, the gambler goes to the house of others by night. 11. It grieves the gambler when he sees his wife, and the wives of others and their well-ordered house. In the fore-noon he has harnessed his brown horses (the dice) ; and when the fire is out, the wretch sinks down. 12. He who is the general of your large company, the king of the troop, the first, to him I stretch forth my ten fingers to swear,—I do not refuse my stake,— I now speak the truth : 13. ‘Do not play with dice, plough thy field, enjoy what thou hast, consider it much. There are thy cows, 0 gambler, there thy wife—this is what the noble Savit?"'^ has told me. 14. ‘ Make (other) friends, O dice, have mercy on us, do not bewitch us with powerful enchantment. May your wrath abate, and your enmity; let some one else be held in the snare of the brown dice.’ Independent Speculation. In the Brahma?ias, particularly in the legends scat¬ tered about in them, we get many a glimpse of active life, and we see at all events that the Brahmans did not constitute the whole of India. On the contrary, ^ Read divya/i for divya/i. 80 LECTUKE IV. the nobility, though willing to work together with the priests, had evidently opened for themselves new avenues of thought, and begun to assert great inde¬ pendence in religious speculation, while among some of the Brahmans also a desire seems to have arisen to be freed from the tedious routine of their life, and to retire into the forest for silent contemplation. It is curious that in both directions the Brahmanic system should have yielded so readily. People who had done their duty as students and as married men, were allowed to retire into the forest, free from nearly all religious restrictions, and to meditate there with perfect freedom on the highest problems of life. In these philosophical meditations princes and noblemen took an active part, and we hear of kings instructing the wisest among the Brahmans in the knowledge of the Highest Self. Aranyakas and XTpanisliads. All these later phases of life are reflected in the Brahma^ias, and particularly in the latest portions of them, the so-called Ara?iyakas and Upanishads. Arauyaka means a forest-book, Upanishad^ a sitting down at the feet of a teacher to listen to his instruction ^ See Upanishads, translated by M. M., in S. B. E., vol. i. p. Ixxx. ^ We have for the Eig-veda, the Aitareya-aranyaka, with an Upanishad, and the Kaushitaki-arawyaka, with an Upanishad ; for the Taittiriya, the Taittiriya-aranyaka, with an Upanishad ; for the Vag^asaneyins, the Bnhad-arawyaka, with an Upanishad ; for the A/jandogas, the A'Mndogya-upanishad, following the Mantra-brahmana. The number of independent Upanishads is very large. See M. M., Sacred Books of the East, vol. i. p. Ixviii. SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITEKATUKE, 81 Duration of Brahmana Period. How long that BrahmaTia period lasted, how long it took to elaborate the stupendous system of sacri¬ ficial rules, and afterwards the lofty speculations of the Ara7iyakas and Upanishads, which in their turn may be said to have neutralised and superseded all sacrifices, we can only guess. If we allowed ourselves to be guided by the large number of ancient and modern authorities quoted in the Brahma^ias, and by the long lists of successive teachers preserved in different schools, we should say that three or four centuries would hardly suffice for the whole of the Brahma^ia period. But ancient Indian chronology is built up on ever so many ifs, and against an uncom¬ promising scepticism our arguments would prove of little avail. The Atharva-veda. Before we proceed, however, to a consideration of these chronological questions, I have still a few words to say about the fourth so-called Veda, the Atharva- veda. The Atharva-veda possesses a Samhita or collection of verses, a Brahmaria, and Sutras, like the other Vedas. But it is difficult as yet to say what special purpose this Veda was intended to serve. Some native authorities maintain that the Atharva-veda was meant specially for the superintending priest, the Brahman, and was therefore called Brahma-veda ; but there is nothing to confirm this view. It seems a mere guess that, because there are four classes of priests and four Vedas, therefore the fourth Veda must have belonged (2) G 82 LECTUKE IV. to the fourth class of priests. So far as we know at present, hymns from the Atharva-veda were usfed for domestic ceremonies, at the celebration of the birth of children, at weddings, funerals, and likewise at the coronation of kings. Many of its verses are simply taken from the Kig-veda; the rest, and those the most interesting, contain all kinds of imprecations, bless¬ ings, charms, formulas to drive away diseases, prayers for success on journeys or in gambling, and lines for conjuring, often quite unintelligible. Supposing that these verses had been in use among the people, they would allow us an insight into their more homely thoughts, and deserve therefore to be studied more carefully than they have hitherto been. Some native authorities stoutly refuse to recognise the Atharva as a real Veda, others defend its authority with equal zeal. The old name of the Atharva-veda is Atharvangirasas, which would seem to indicate that the families of the Atharvans and the Angiras, or the Atharvangiras, were the original collectors or possessors of this Veda. We possess the text of the Atharva-veda as handed down in two schools, the >Saunakas and the Paippa- ladas ; but there is as yet no really critical edition of the text. A commentary lately discovered in India has not yet been published. In our next lecture I shall try to explain to you how it is possible to assign certain dates to this large mass of Vedic literature which has come down to us, partly by oral tradition, partly in MSS. If you con¬ sider that most of these MSS. do not go back beyond the fifteenth century, you will understand that it is no easy undertaking to throw a bridge from the fifteenth century A. D. to the fifteenth century B. c. SUKVEY OF VEDIC LITEKATUKE. 83 Still tlie attempt must be made, for unless an histo¬ rical date can be assigned to these relics of an ancient world, they would dwindle down in the eyes of the historian to mere curiosities. They would lose what alone makes them worthy of serious study, their historical character. LECTURE V. AGE OF THE VEDA. Accurate knowledg’e of the Veda necessary for a study of Physical Belig'iou. T he survey of the Vedic literature which I en¬ deavoured to place before you in my last lecture, may seem to have occupied a great deal of our time. But for studies such as we are engaged in, it is abso¬ lutely necessary to make our foundation sure. It really makes one shiver if one sees how the Veda is spoken of by some very eminent writers, in their treatises on the origin of mythology and religion.- First of all, I hope I shall not hear the Veda any longer spoken of as the Veeda. As I explained to you before, Veda means knowledge, and is derived from the root vid, to see, which we have in Latin videre. The vowel in Veda is a diphthong, consisting of a -f- i. This a 4- i is pronounced in Sanskrit like ai in aid, and should properly be written e. It is the same diphthong which in Greek is represented by o + t, as in ot8a, I know, which stands for Fdiha. Secondly, though Veda ends in a, it is not a feminine m Sanskrit, but a masculine, and I hope that French AGE OF THE VEDA. 85 and German writers more particularly will no longer speak of the Veda as she. It is not to be expected that every student of the science of mythology and religion should read the Veda in the original. But it is essential that they should know more than the name; that they should have a clear idea what the Vedic literature consists of, how it arose, when it arose, where it arose, how it was handed down, when it was consigned to writing, how it is to be interpreted, and what is the reason why so much of it is still doubtful and unintelligible, and why scholars so frequently differ in their transla¬ tions of difficult passages. No knowledge is better than knowledge that cannot give an account of itself, and I do not think that a scholar like study of Phy¬ sical Keligion would be possible without a clear and accurate conception of what the Veda is, which has been truly called the Bible of Physical Beligion. How to fix tlie Date of the Veda. As yet the whole of the Vedic literature, such as I described it to you, hangs, so to say, in the air. There was a time, not very long ago, when the whole of Sanskrit literature, the Veda included, was repre¬ sented as a forgery of the Brahmans. It seemed too bad to be true that the language of India should be as perfect as Greek, and that the mythology of Greece should have the same roots as the mythology of India. And though this uncompromising scepticism finds but few representatives at present, Sanskrit is still looked upon as an unwelcome guest by many classical scholars, and anything that can be said against it. 86 LECTURE V. is welcomed by all wbo dislike the trouble of learning a new language. Aryan immigration into India. Not long ago my friend, Professor Sayce, stated as the result of his Babylonian researches, that the migration of the Aryas towards India could not have taken place before about 600 or 700 b. c. Now consider what a complete upheaval of all our ideas on the ancient history of the Aryas in general, and more especially on the growth of religious thought in India, would be caused if this discovery could be maintained. Between the migration of the Aryas into the land of the Seven Bivers and the composition of hymns, addressed to the rivers of the Penjab, and containing allusions even to the Ganges, some time must have elapsed. ' We have then to find room for successive generations of Vedic poets and Vedic princes, for re¬ peated collections of ancient hymns, for a period filled by the composition of the Brahma^ias, written in prose and in a dialect different from that of the hymns, and lastly for the rise of that philosophical literature which we find in the Upanishads. If this Upanishad literature is, as I have tried to show, presupposed by Buddhism, and if Buddha lived about 500 b. c., what becomes of the first immigration of the Aryas into India about 600 or 700 b.c.? Sindhu, cotton, mentioned 3000 B.C. But while Professor Sayce has given us no argu¬ ments in support of this very recent date assigned by him to the first appearance of Aryas in India, he AGE OF THE VEDA. 87 has placed at our disposal some facts which, if true, would seem to prove that Sanskrit must have been the language of India at least 3000 B. c. We are told ^ that ‘in the copy of an old list of clothing one article is mentioned which has to be pro¬ nounced sindhu in Assyro-BabyIonian, and has the two ideographs “ cloth + vegetable fibre.” The copy of the list now extant was made for the library of Assur-bani-pal, but the original Babylonian tablet was of a much earlier date, possibly as early as the age of Khammuragas, say about 3000 B. c., though this is not quite certain.’ If we trust to these facts, and if, as Professor Sayce suggests, this vegetable fibre was cotton, and was called sindhu by the Babylonians, because it came from the river Sindhu, i. e. from India, this would prove the presence of Sanskrit-speaking Aryas in India about at least 3000 b. c. Professor Sayce further identifies the Assyro-Baby- lonian word sindhu with the Greek aivhiov, which occurs in Homer, and he thinks that the Hebrew satin, a linen shirt, mentioned in Isaiah iii. 23, was borrowed from Greek. I confess I see no similarity, whether in form or meaning, between the Hebrew satin and the Greek aivbcav, particularly as we have in Arabic the word satin, meaning a covering in general. But if, as he argues, the Phenicians brought this word from the Sindhu, the Indus, and if both the Greeks and the Babylonians borrowed that word from the Phenicians, the presence of Sanskrit-speaking Ai*yas on the shores of the Indus would go back to a ^ Hibhert Lectures, by Sayce, p. 138. 88 LECTUKE Y. far more distant antiquity than we hitherto ventured to assign to it. It should likewise be considered that cotton is not yet mentioned in the Vedic hymns, nor in the ancient Brahma?ias. It appears for the first time in the Sutras (Asval. >S'rauta Sutra, IX. 4) as the name of a dress made of karpasa, cotton. The other names, pi^u, pi/{:ula, and tula are certainly post-Vedic. However, a cloth made of vegetable substances need not necessarily be cotton. It may have been valka, the bark of certain trees, which was used from a very early time in India for making cloth, while in the Veda wool is the principal material used for weaving This discrepancy between two such dates as 600 B.c. and 3000 b. o., as the time of the migration of the Vedic Aryas into India, will show at all events how necessary it is to defend every approach to the for¬ tress of Vedic chronology, and how essential for our own purposes, to settle once for all the true antiquity and the really historical character of the Veda. There are but few chronological sheet-anchqrs which hold the ancient history of India, and we must try to fasten the fioating literature of the Veda to one of them, as firmly and securely as we can. In order to do that I must, however, first say a few words more on another class of literary compositions which form the last products of the Vedic age, and which will have to serve as our hawsers to connect the ancient history of India with the terra firma of Greek chronology. The Sutras. If you could read some of the Brahmanas, which I ^ See Appendix IX. AGE OF THE VEDA. 89 described to you in my last lecture, you would easily understand wby^ even for the purposes for which they were principally intended, they proved in the long run utterly useless. I defy any one to learn the correct performance of a Vedic sacrifice from these treatises. This explains the rise of a new kind of literature, in style the very opposite of the Brahma^ias, in which the performance of the same sacrifices which we saw described in the Brahmar^-as, is explained in the shortest and the most business-like manner. These works are called Sutra, which means literally threads. Some passages occurring in the Brahma^ias and containing short rules are called by the same name, and it is quite clear that these Sutras, though independent works, are entirely based on ancient Brahmanas. Their style is almost enigmatical by its terseness, their grammar retains but few traces of the Vedic language, though Vedic irregularities are tolerated in them, while the language of the Brahmams is still entirely Vedic, and contains many ancient forms, even such as do not occur in the Vedic hymns. The introduction of this new class of literature must have been the result of some social or re¬ ligious change. The change ,from the careless dif- fuseness of the Brahma-r^as to the studied brevity of the Sutras must have had a definite purpose. I can think of two explanations only. It is just possible that a knowledge of the art of writing, which was unknown to the authors of the BrahmaTias, may have reached India sooner than we know, and that its inherent difficulties may have produced at first this almost lapidary style of the Sutras. What is against this supposition is the non-ap- 90 LECTUEE V. pearance of any allusion to writing in the Sutras themselves. We are therefore driven to the other explanation, that the Brahmans themselves could no longer trust to a traditional knowledge of the different sacrifices ; that the text of the Brahma?ias, even if learnt by heart, was no longer found sufficient to enable priests to perform their respective duties correctly, and that therefore these new practical manuals were com¬ posed, containing no useless speculations, but simply an outline of the duties of the three classes of’priests, a thread of rules to be learnt by heart by the priests who had to perform the sacrifices. These Sutras are called Kalpa-sutras, and are divided into two classes, >S^rauta and Smarta. /S'rauta is derived from sruti, hearing, which means revelation. Smarta is derived from smr^ti, memory, which means tradition. Each class of priests, the labouring, the singing, and the reciting priests, have their own Sutras, as they had their own Brahmarias and Sawihitas. When this Sutra-style had once become popular, other subjects also were treated in it. The rules of pronunciation, for instance, which were at first taught in metrical form, as in the Rig-veda-pratisakhya, were afterwards reduced to the form of Sutras. The rules of metre also were composed in Sutras, and not only does the Sutra-style prevail in the great grammar ascribed to Pa?iini, but the quotations from earlier grammarians also seem to indicate that they were handed down in the same short, pithy sen¬ tences. AGE OF THE VEDA. 91 The Three Literary Periods of the Vedic Ag-e. We have now finished our survey of the ancient literature of India, as it passes through three distinct stages, each marked by its own style. We saw Vedic Sanskrit at first in the metrical hymns of the Rig- veda ; we saw it afterwards in the diffuse prose of the Brahma^ias, and we saw it last of all in the strait- jacket of the Sutras. We also saw that the Sutras presupposed the existence of the Brahmana literature, and that the BrahmaTia literature presupposed the existence of the hymns as collected in the Big-veda-samhita. If now we ask how we can fix the date of these three periods, it is quite clear that we cannot hope to fix a terminus a quo. Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, or 1500, or 2000, or 3000 years B. c., no power on earth will ever determine. Chronclog'ical terminus ad quern. The question then arises, can we fix on a terminus ad quern, can we determine the date of the last Vedic period, that of the Sutras, and then work our way back to the two preceding literary periods 1 Sandrocottus, died 291 B.C. I believe this is possible. You know that the sheet-anchor of ancient Indian chronology is the date of the contemporary of Alexander the Great, Sandro¬ cottus, who is the Aandragupta of Indian history. You may also know that this Sandrocottus who died 291 B. c., was the grandfather of Asoka, who reigned from 259 to 222 B.C., and whose inscriptions we 92 LECTURE V. possess engraved on rocks and pillars in numerous places in India. This Asoka tolerated, or even ac¬ cepted the religion founded bj Buddha, and it was during his reign that the second great Buddhist Council was held at Pa^aliputra. On the strength of the information contained in the Buddhist Canon, as settled at the Council under Asoka, we are enabled to place the rise of Buddhism at about 500 b. c., and the death of its founder at 477 B. 0. These are dates as certain in the eyes of the general historian as we can ever expect to extract from the extant literature of India. Buddhism, a reaction against the Vedic Religion. Now Buddhism is not a completely new religion. On the contrary, it represents a reaction against some other already existing religion, and more particularly against some of the extravagant theories of the Brahmans. ^ In one sense it may really be said to be a practical carrying out of the theories, proclaimed for the first time in the Araiiyakas and Upanishads. While the Brahmans allowed members of the three upper castes to retire from the world after they had performed all the duties of their youth and manhood, the Buddhists allowed everybody to become a Bhik- shu, a mendicant, whether he had passed this previous apprenticeship or not. Again, while the Brahmans reserved the right of teaching to themselves, Buddha, who belonged to the caste of the nobles, claimed that right for himself, and for all who were ‘ enlightened,’ he. buddha. These are two essential points of difference between Brahmans and Buddhists, and AGE OF THE VEDA. 93 orthodox Brahmans constantly harp on them as proving the heterodoxy of Buddha. But we can not only show that Buddhism was a kind of Protestantism, as compared with Brahmanism, we can point out also a number of words and thoughts, the growth of which we can watch in the periods of Vedic literature, and which were taken over bodily by the Buddhists, though sometimes with a change of meaning. The word Upanishad. For instance, the very name of Upanishad can have been formed and can have grown up towards the end of the Brahma7ia period only. Its original meaning was a sitting (sad), below (ni), towards (npa) the teacher It became the recognised name of the attitude assumed by the pupil when listening to his teacher. It then was fixed as the name of the teach¬ ing itself, and at last conveyed the meaning of secret doctrine (adesa). In that sense which it had slowly acquired in the Brahma-ua and Sutra periods, we find it used again in the sacred canon of the Southern Buddhists, who use upanisa in the sense of secret and cause. The Northern Buddhists also knew the word upanishad^. We may safely conclude there¬ fore that this title and what it signified must have existed previous to the rise of Buddhism, that is, previous to 500 B. c. ^ S. B. E., vol. i. p. Ixxix seq. In Pali also the verb upa-ni-sad occurs with reference to a king and his friends seating themselves at the feet of a teacher. See Mahavansa, p. 82 ; Childers, Pali Dic¬ tionary, s. V. ^ Va^raMedika, § 16, p 35 ; § 24, p. 42. There it seems to mean approach, comparison. 94 LECTURE V. The word Sutra. The same applies to the word Sutra. We do not know exactly why Siitra should have become the name of those short sentences to which the scholastic knowledge of the Brahmans was finally reduced. But that word must have assumed the more general meaning of teaching or lesson, before the Buddhists could have employed it as they do, namely, as the name of the long sermons delivered by Buddha, and collected in one of the three divisions of their sacred canon, the Sutta-pi^aka h I could mention other words more or less technical, which have their history in the BrahmaTias and Sutras, and which in that form and with that meaning which they had gradually assumed among the Brahmans of the Vedic period, were taken over by the Buddhists. But even these two words, Upanishad and Sutra, will suffice, for it is beyond the limits of probability to suppose that such tech¬ nical terms as these could have been formed twice and independently one from the other. They were formed by the Brahmans, and accepted by the Buddhists, though often with a slightly modified meaning. Relation of Buddhism to Brahmanism. Nor must we forget that though Buddhism, as a religious, social, and philosophical system, is a re¬ action against Brahmanism, there is an unbroken continuity between the two. We could not under¬ stand the antagonism between Buddhism and the ancient’ religion of India, unless the Vedic religion ^ See Appendix X. AGE OF THE VEDA. 95 had first reached that artificial and corrupt stage in which we find it in the Brahma-rias. Buddha himself, as represented to us in the canonical writings of the Buddhists, shows no hostilit}^ to the Brahmans in general, nor does he seem to have been fond of arguing against Brahmanism. If the prevailing re¬ ligion of India at his time had consisted of the simple Vedic hymns only, Buddha’s position would become quite unintelligible. He does not argue against the Vedic gods. He tolerates them in that subordinate capacity in which they were tolerated by the authors of the Upanishads, after they had discovered the higher , truth of Brahman, and the identity of their own self with the Highest Self, the Paramatman. What he attacks is the Brahmanic sacrifice, as it had been developed in the Brahma'Tias, the privileges arro¬ gated to their caste by the Brahmans, and the claim of a divine revelation set up for the Veda, particu¬ larly for the Brahma-nas. It is curious to see how a modern reformer, Dayananda Sarasvati, takes a very similar position. He admits the hymns of the Veda as divinely inspired, but he insists on the Brah- ma7^as being the works of men. If then the very origin of the Buddhistic reform in India would be unintelligible without the latest phase of the Vedic religion, if Upanishads and Sutras must have existed, if the word Upanishad must have come to mean secret doctrine, before it could be used in the sense of secret and cause, as it is in Buddhism, and if the word Sutra must have assumed the general mean¬ ing of teaching, before it could have been applied to Buddha’s sermons, we have found a terminus ad quern for our Vedic literature. It must have reached its ' 96 LECTUEE V. final shape before the birth of Buddha, that is about 600 B. c. Before that date we must make room for three whole periods of literature, each presupposing the other. Constructive Chronologfy. Here, no doubt, our chronology becomes purely con¬ structive. We can no longer build on solid rock, but must be satisfied to erect our chronological structure, like the palaces of Venice, on piles carefully driven into the shifting sands of historical tradition. If then we place the rise of Buddhism between 500 and 600 B. C., and assign provisionally 200 years to the Sutra period, and another 200 years to the Brahmatia period, we should arrive at about 1000 B. o. as the date when the collection of the ten books of the ancient hymns must have taken place. How long a time it took for these hymns, some of them very ancient, some of them very modern in character, to grow up, we shall never be able to determine. Some scholars postulate 500, others 1000 or even 2000 years. These are all vague guesses, and cannot be anything else. To us it suffices that the Brahmanas presuppose the Rig-veda as we have it, including even such very late hymns as the Valakhilyas in the eighth Marzc^ala. It is possible that further critical researches may enable us to dis¬ tinguish between the present collection of hymns and an older one on which our Rig-veda was founded. But even our Rig-veda, such as it is, with every Ma'^^(iala and every hymn, with every verse and every word counted, must have existed, so far as we know at present, about 1000 B. c., and that is more than can be said of any work of any other Aryan literature. We have thus thrown our bridge from our own AGE OF THE VEDA. 97 MSS., say 1000 a.d., to the first arch, represented by the collected Vedic hymns in 1000 b.c. It is a bridge that requires careful testing. But I can honestly say I see no flaw in our chronological argument, and we must leave it as it is, for the present. But I should not be honest towards myself or towards others, if I did not state at the same time that there are hymns in the Rig-veda which make me shiver when I am asked to look upon them as representing the thoughts and language of our humanity three thousand years ago. And yet, how to find a loophole through which what we should consider modern hymns might have crept into the collection of older hymns, I cannot tell. I have tried my best to find it, but I have not suc¬ ceeded. Perhaps we shall have to confess that, after all, our ideas of what human beings in India ought to have thought 3000 years ago, are evolved from our inner consciousness, and that we must learn to digest facts, though they do not agree with our tastes and our preconceived ideas Character of the Veda. I should like now to give you an idea of what the general character of the Vedic hymns is, such as we find them collected in the Rig-veda-sauihita, and commented upon in the Brahma-uas, in the Pr^i- sakhyas, in the Nirukta, and later works. But this is extremely difficult, partly on account of the long period of time during which these hymns were com¬ posed, partly on account of the different families or localities where they were collected. (2) ^ See Appendix XI. H 98 LECTUEE V. Simplicity of Vedic Hymns. The Vedic hymns have often been characterised as very simple and primitive. It may be that this simple and primitive character of the Vedic hymns has some¬ times been exaggerated, not so much by Vedic scholars as by outsiders, who were led to imagine that what was called simple and primitive meant really what psychologists imagine to have been the very first manifestations of human thought and language. They thought that the Veda would give them what Adam said to Eve, or, as we should say now, what the first anthropoid ape confided to his mate, when his self- consciousness had been roused for the first time, on his discovering that he differed from other apes by the absence of a tail, or when he sighed over the pre¬ mature falling off of his hair, which left him at last hairless and naked, as the first Homo sapiens. These expectations have, no doubt, been disappointed by the publication of the Kig-veda. But the reaction that set in has gone much too far. We are now told that there is nothing simple and primitive in the Vedic hymns, nay, that these verses are no more than the fabrications of priests who wished to accompany certain acts of their complicated sacrifices with sacred hymns. Let us consider each of these objections by itself. If one class of scholars maintain that they find nothing simple or primitive in the Veda, they ought to tell us, first of all, what they mean by simple and primitive. Surely we may call primitive what re¬ quires no antecedents, and simple Avhat is natural, intelligible, and requires no explanation. Of such AGE OF THE VEDA. 99 thoughts I still maintain, as strongly as ever, that we find more in the E,ig-veda than in any other book, Aryan or Semitic. I call many of the hymns addressed to the Dawn, the Sun, the Sky, the Fire, the Waters and Fivers, per¬ fectly simple. If Devas or so-called gods had once been recognised,—and this, as language teaches us, must have been the case before the Aryas separated,— we require no explanation why human beings should have addressed the sun in the morning and evening, asking him to bring light and warmth, on which their very life depended, deprecating his scorching rays, which might destroy their harvest and kill their cattle, and imploring him to* return when he had vanished for a time, and had left them helpless in cold and darkness. The phases of the moon, too, might well excite in an observant mind thoughts fit for expression, particularly as we know that it was the moon who first helped men to reckon time, with¬ out which no well-regulated social life was possible. Lastly, the return of the seasons and the year would likewise turn the thoughts of husbandmen, hunters, or sailors to powers above them who controlled their life and its occupations, but who themselves could not be controlled either by force or cunning, though they, like animals or men, might be softened, they thought, by kind words and kind deeds. Nor could the profound and unvarying order that pervades and sustains the whole of nature, escape even the most careless observers. It was perceived by the Vedic poets in the return of day and night, in the changes of the moon, the seasons, and the years. They called that order Aita, and they soon began to look H 2 100 LECTURE V. upon their gods as the guardians of that order (r ita- pa), while they suspected in storms and floods and other convulsions of nature the working of powers opposed to their gods. The order of nature and belief in their gods were so intimately connected in the minds of the early poets that one of them said (Rv. I. 102, 2), ‘ Sun and moon move in regular succession, in order that we may see and believe.’ Moral Elements. The moral relation between men and the Devas or gods was also in its origin of the simplest character. We meet in the Vedic hymns with such homely phrases, addressed to their gods, as ‘ If you give me this, I shall give you that,’ or, ‘ As you have given me this, I shall give you that.’ This was a mere barter as yet between men and gods, and yet the former sentiment might grow in time into a prayer, the latter into a thank-offering. Sometimes the poet expostu¬ lates with the gods, and tells them that ‘ if he were as rich as they are, he would not allow his worshippers to go beggiug.’ Surely, nothing can be more simple and more natural than all this, provided always that we are dealing with men who had elaborated a perfect language, not with missing links between brute and man. Early Sacrifices. Even when sacrificial offerings came in, they consisted at first of nothing but some kinds of food relished by men themselves, such as water, milk, butter, oil, grains, and berries, prepared in different AGE OF THE VEDA. 101 . ways as puddings, cakes, etc. Of sacrificial animals we find goats, sheep, oxen; for later and greater sacrifices, horses and even men. There are dark traditions of human sacrifices, but in the recognised ceremonial of the Veda a man is never killed. Incense also is mentioned, and in some sacrifices an intoxicat¬ ing beverage, the Soma, is very prominent, and must have been known before the Zoroastrians separated from the Vedic people, because it forms a very prominent feature in both religions. Cliildisli Thoughts in the Veda. As to almost childish thoughts, surely they abound in the Veda. It is rather hard to have to pick out childish and absurd thoughts, in order to prove the primitive and unsophisticated character of the Veda. But if it must be done, it can be done. The Vedic poets wonder again and again why a dark or a red cow should give white milk^. Can we imagine anything more primitive'? Yet that thought is not peculiar to India, and some people might feel inclined to refer it to a period previous to the Aryan separation. There is a common saying or riddle in German, which you may hear repeated by children to the present day, ‘ 0 sagt mir doch, wie gelit es zu, Dass weiss die Milch der rothen Kuh.’ ‘ Tell me how does it happen That the milk of the red cow is white.’ There is perhaps more excuse for their wondering at another miracle. In I. 68, .2, we read, ‘that men were pleased with the power of Agni, that he should ^ Ev. I. 62, 9 ; Aufrecht, vol. ii. pref. p. xvii. 102 LECTURE V. be bom alive from a dry stick,’ at it te visve kratum ^ushanta sushkat yat deva giY^h ^anish^AaA. Again, can anything be more primitive than the wonderment expressed by Vedic poets, that the sun should not tumble down from the sky? Thus we read, Rv. IV. 13, 5, ‘ Unsupported, not fastened, how does he (the sun) rising up, not fall down?’ Anayata/i. anibaddhaA katha ayam nyah uttana/i ava padyate na. Other nations have wondered whv the ocean should receive all the rivers and yet never overflow (Eccles. i. 7). The Vedic poet too discovers signs of the great might of what he calls the wisest Being, in that ‘ The bright inpouring rivers never fill the ocean with water ^ (Rv. V. 85, 6). My object in quoting these passages is simply to show the lowest level of Vedic thought. In no other literature do we find a record of the world’s real childhood to be compared with that of the Veda. It is easy to call these utterances childish and absurd. They are childish and absurd. But if we want to study the early childhood, if not the infancy, of the human race ; if we think that there is something to be gained from that study, as there is from a study of the scattered boulders of unstratified rocks in geology, then even these childish sayings are welcome to the student of religion, welcome for the simple fact that, whatever their chronological age may be, they cannot easily be matched anywhere else. More exalted Ideas. These childish ideas, however, this simple wonder- AGE OF THE VEDA. 103 ment at tlie commonest events in nature, soon led on to more exalted ideas. One poet asks (Rv. X. 88, 18), ‘ How many fires are there, how many suns, how many dawns, and how many waters ? I do not say this, O fathers, to worry you; I ask you, O seers, that I may know it.’ Another says: ‘ What was the wood, and what was the tree from which they have cut out heaven and earth h ’ (E.V. X. 31, 7 ; 81, 4.) Kim svit vanam ka^ u sa^ vrfksha^, asa yataA dyavaprRhivi ni/^-tatakshuA. Or again, X. 81, 2 : ‘ What was the stand on which he rested, which was it and how, from whence the All-maker, the all- seeing, created the earth and spread out the sky by his might 1 ’ Kim svit asit adhisM/zanam arambha'uam katamat svit katha asit, yata/z- bhumim ^anayan visvakarma vi dyam aurrz/ot mahina visvaZ^aksha^,. We see here how difficult it would be to draw a line between what we call childishness and what we call wisdom from the mouths of babes. If it is true that il ny a quun pas dm sublime au ridicule, it would seem to be equally true that il uy a quun pas du ridicule au sublime. A childish question may call forth an answer full of profound wisdom. But to say that we look in vain for simple and primitive thoughts in the Veda is to set up a standard of simplicity and primitiveness that would apply to cave-dwellers rather and prehistoric monsters, and not to people who, as long as we know them, were in full possession of one of the most perfect of Aryan 104 LECTUKE V. languages. No doubt there are in the Veda thoughts and sentiments also that might have been uttered in the nineteenth century. But this only serves to show how large a period is covered by those ancient hymns, and how many different minds are reflected in it. The Sacrificial Character of the Vedic Hymns. Another view of the Veda, first advanced by Professor Ludwig, has of late been defended with great ingenuity by a French scholar, M. Bergaigne, a man whose death has been a serious loss to our studies. He held that all, or nearly all the Vedic hymns, were modern, artificial, and chiefly composed for the sake of the sacrifice. Other scholars have followed his lead, till at last it has almost become a new doctrine that everywhere in the world sacrifice preceded sacred poetry. Here again we find truth and untruth strangely mixed together. It is well known that in several cases verses con¬ tained in hymns, totally unconnected with the sacrifice, were slightly changed in order to adapt them to the requirements of the sacrificial ceremonial. The first verse, for instance, of the dialogue between Yama and Yami (Bv. X. 10, 1), is 6 Ht sakliayam sakhya vavntyam, ‘May I bring near the friend by friendship.’ In the Sama-veda, X. 340, the same verse appears as a tva sakhayaTj sakhy4' vavrityu/i, ‘ May the friends bring thee near by friendship,’ that is, ‘May the priests bring the god to the sacrifice '■ Yon Schroeder, Indiens Literaiur, p. 168 : Apast. Paribh. Sutra 129. AGE OF THE VEDA. 105 That many Vedic hymns, however, contain allusions to what may be called sacrificial customs, no one who has ever looked into the Veda can deny. Some of the hymns, and generally those which for other reasons also would be treated as comparatively late, presuppose what we should call a highly developed system of sacrificial technicalities. The distinction, for instance, between a verse [rik), and a song (saman), and a sacrificial formula (ya^us), the dis¬ tinction on which, as we saw, rests the division of the Veda into Rig-veda, Sama-veda, and Ya^ur-veda, is found in one of the hymns, X. 90, and there only. But curiously enough, this very hymn is one of those that occur at the end of an Anuvaka, and contains several other indications of its relatively modern character. Many similar passages, full of sacrificial technicalities, have been pointed out ^ in the Rig-veda, and they certainly show that when these passages were composed, the sacrifice in India had already assumed what seems to us a very advanced, or, if you like, a very degraded and artificial character. But there are other passages also where the poet says, ‘ Whosoever sacrifices to Agni with a stick of wood, with a libation, with a bundle of herbs, or with an inclination of his head,’ he will be blessed with many blessings (Rv. VIII. 19, 5 ; 102, 19). This whole question, so hotly discussed of late, whether sacrifice comes first or prayer, whether the Vedic poets waited till the ceremonial was fully ^ The most complete collection of sacrificial terms occurring in the hymns of the Kig-veda' may be found in Ludwig’s Die Mantra- litteratur, 1878, pp. 353-415. Bergaigne’s Religion Vedique appeared from 1878 to 1883. 106 LECTURE V. developed before they invoked the Dawn, and the Sun, and the Storms to bless them, or whether, on the contrary, their spontaneous prayers suggested the performance of sacrificial acts, repeated at certain times of the day, of the month, of the year, is im¬ possible to solve, because, as it seems to me, it is wrongly put. ‘ Sacrifice,’ as Grimm remarked long ago, ‘ is only a prayer offered with gifts.’ We nowhere hear of a mute sacrifice. What we call sacrifice, the ancients called simply karma, an act. Now in one sense a simple prayer, preceded by a washing of the hands, or accompanied by an inclination of the head, may be called a karma, an act^. On the other hand, a man who in lighting the fire on the hearth or in putting one log on the smouldering ashes, bows his head (namas), raises his arms (uttanahastaA, Rv. VI. 16, 46), and utters the name of Agni with some kind epithets (ya^Us), may be said to have addressed a hymn of praise to the god of fire. Prayer and sacrifice may have been originally inseparable, but in human nature I should say that prayer comes always first, sacrifice second. That the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period, we may gather from the fact that in the common dictionary of the Aryan nations there is no word for it, while Sanskrit and Zend have not only the same name for sacrifice, but share together a great many words which refer to minute technicalities of the ancient ceremonial. ^ Kalpa, act, in the plural, occurs Rv. IX. 9, 7. AGE OF THE VEDA. 107 Yag, to sacrifice. The usual word for sacrificing in Sanskrit is YAG^. Zend yaz, from which ya^;ia, sacrifice, ya^-us, sacrificial formula, ya^ami, I sacrifice, ya^ya, to be worshipped. This ya^ya has been compared with Greek ayto?, sacred, though this is not certain^. Why ya^ should have taken that meaning of sacrificing, or giving to the gods, we cannot tell^, for it is impossible to trace that root back to any other root of a more general meaning. Hu, to sacrifice. Another Sanskrit root which has frequently to be translated by sacrificing is HU. In this case we can clearly see the original intention of the root. It meant to pour out, and was chiefly applied to the act of throwing barley and oil and other substances into the fire It afterwards took a more general meaning, not so general, however, as to be applicable to animal sacrifices. From it we have in Sanskrit havis, havya, sacrifice, a-hava, a jug, puhu, a spoon, ho-t7’i, priest, homa and ahuti, libation. In Greek XV or yef means simply to pour out, xv-rpa, an earthen¬ ware pot Sv€Lv, to sacrifice, might phonetically ^ The Greek dyos or dyos does not mean sacrifice, but rather ex¬ piation. It cannot be the Sk. a gas, because in Greek the a is short. ^ Sanskrit theologians connect yag with tyar/, to give up, to leave, but there is no analogy for this. Comparative philologists used to place bhag, to worship, by the side of yar?, assigning to bh (bhi) and y (ni or ti) a prepositional origin, but this is a pure hypothesis, which has long been surrendered. ^ Al-Biruni, ii. p. 96. * Aufrecht in Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, xiv. p. 268. This root hu, to pour out, exists also in the Latin futis, a water-jug, and in vasa futilia, which Paulus, Eint. p. 89, explains rightly as derived a fun- dendo. Futilis, in the sense of futile, may have been conceived either as a man who always pours forth, or as a vessel, leaky, not holding 108 LECTURE V. be traced back to the same source, but its meanings cause difficulty. Sacrificial Terms. A third word for sacrifice in Sanskrit is adhvara, which is generally, though I doubt whether correctly, explained as a compound of the negative a and dhvara, flaw. From it, adhvaryu, the name of the officiating priest. Stress is frequently laid on the sacrificial offering being without a flaw, or free from any blemish. This may account for the meaning of the English holy, which is the AS. hdlig, derived from hcil, that is, hale and ivhole. The Greek Upos, sacred, holy, had a similar origin. It is identical with the Sk. is hira, which means alive, strong, vigorous, a meaning still perceptible in the Greek of Homer, who speaks of lephs l^Ovs (II. ii, 407), a lively fish, l^pov gevos, a vigorous mind, while in later Greek Upos means sacred only^and Up^vs, a priest, like adhvar-yu. This is all that we can discover as to the original conception of a sacrifice among some of the Aryan nations. The equation of y a^, to sacrifice, with Greek d(op,ai, to stand in awe, is difficult, if not impossible, on account of the difference of meaninor. Nothins^, in O fact, justifies us in supposing that the idea of a sacrifice, in our sense of the word, existed among the Ary as before they separated. The concept of gods or devas had, no doubt, been elaborated before their final separation. Words also for metrical language (^Aandas = scandere, sas-man = carmen in cas- water. Fundo is a nasalised form of fud, and fud is a secondary form of/u, Sk. hu. The Gothic giuta means to pour out. AGE OF THE VEDA. 109 mena) existed. Such expressions as dataras vasu- nam or vasuam in the Veda, datard vohunam and data vanhvam in Zend, and horjjpes kaoiv (i.e. FecrFaodv) in Homer, would seem to show that the idea of the gods giving gifts to men had been fully realised^, though not yet the idea of men giving gifts to the gods. If in hoTTipes edcov and dataras vasuam we may recognise, as Kuhn suggested, a phrase that had become fixed and idiomatic before the Aryan nations separated, it would have to be kept as a perfect gem in our linguistic museums. Prayer Ijetter than Sacrifice. In spite of the preponderance which the sacrifice has assumed in India, it is imprortant to observe that the Vedic poets themselve^ were strongly impressed with the feeling that after all prayer was better than sacrifice. Thus we read, Kv. YIII. 24, 20; dilsmyam va/t'a/i glin'tat svadiya/i madhuna/i ka. vo/cata, ‘ Utter a powerful speech to Indra, which is sweeter than butter and honey.’ Rv. VI. 16, 47: a te agne n'Aa havi/j hnda tashMm bharamasi, te te bhavantu ukshana/i ?'ishabhasa/i vasa/i uta. ‘ We offer to thee, 0 Agni, an oblation made by the heart with a verse, let this be thy oxen, thy bulls, and thy cows Kv. I. 109, 1: Vi hi akhyam manasa vasya/i ikkhan Indragni gnasah uta va sagatan, Na anya yuvat pramati/i asti mahyam, Sa/i vam dhiyam v%ayantim ataksham. 'I looked about in my mind, 0 Indra and Agni, wishing for wealth, among acquaintances and kinsfolk. But there is no guardian for me but you, therefore did I compose this song for you.’ ^ Benfey, Vocativ, p. 57 ; M: M., Selected Essays, i. p. 224. ^ It may also mean, ‘ Let these oxen be thine.’ 110 LECTUEE V. Kv. III. 53, 2: Pitu/i na putra/i si/cam a rabhe te Indra svadish, to drive, aypa, the chase ; in Latin ago, agnien. The Sk. agrra, Gr. ay go’s, Lat. ager, Goth, akr-s, mean meadow and field, possibly from the cattle being driven over it. The German Trifi comes likewise from treiben. The words for goat also may be referred to this root, if they meant originally quickly moving or agile ; Sk. a ( 7 a, Greek a’l^, Lit. ozys. Consider the drift of an argument, and what are you driving at. PHYSICAL KELIGIOIs. 127 conception of motion includes that of a moving body. What then is the thing moved in the case of sunlight ? The undulatory theory replies that it is a substance of determinate mechanical properties, a body which may or may not be a form of ordinary matter, but to which, whether it is or not, we give the name of Ether.^ May not the ancient Ary as say with the same right: ‘ Is it in the human mind to imagine motion without at the same time imaginino; some one that moves ? ’ Certainly not. The very conception of motion in¬ cludes that of a mover, and, in the end, of a prime mover. Who then is that mover h The ancient Aryas reply that it is a subject of determinate properties, a person who may or may not be like ordinary persons, but to whom, whether he is or not, we give the name of Agni. Ag*!!! as a Human or Animal Agrent. When that step had once been made, when the word Agni, Fire, had once been coined, the temptation was great, nay almost irresistible, as Agni was con¬ ceived as an agent, to conceive him also as something like the only other agents known to man, as either an animal or human agent. We often read in theVeda of the tongue or the tongues of Agni, which are meant for what we call his lambent flames. We read of his bright teeth (su/ddan, VII. 4,2), of his jaws, his burning forehead {tapu/it-murdhan, VII. 3, 1), nay, even of his flaming and golden hair [soldJi- ke^a, V. 8, 2; hirariyakesa, I. 79, 1), and of his golden beard (hirkmasru, V. 7, 7). His face (anikam) is mentioned, but that means no more than his appear- 128 LECTUEE VI. ance, and when he is called winged (I. 58, 5 ; VIII. 32, 4), or even the hawk of the sky (diva/i syena/i, VII. 15, 4), that is simply intended to express, what his very name expresses, his swift movement. This may help to explain how some nations, particularly the Egyptians were led on to conceive some of their gods in the shape of animals. It arose from a necessity of language. This was not the case, however, in India. Agni and the other gods of the Veda, if they are imagined at all in their bodily shape, are always imagined as human, though never as so intensely human as the gods and goddesses of the Greeks. Beauty, human, superhuman, ideal beauty, is not an Indian conception. When in later times the Indians also invented plastic representations of their gods, they did not shrink from unnatural and monstrous combinations, so long as they helped to convey the character of each god. All this is perfectly intelligible, and a careful study of language supplies us with the key to almost all the riddles of ancient mythology. New explanation of Animism, Personification, and Anthropomorphism. Formerly the attribution of movement, of life, of personality and of other human or animal qualities to the great phenomena of nature, was explained by names such as Animism. Personification, Anthropo¬ morphism. It seemed as if people imagined that to name a process was to explain it. Mr. Herbert Spencer, ag'aihst Animism. Here we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Herbert ^ See Appendix XII. PHYSICAL KELTGION. 129 Spencer for having stood up for once as the champion of primitive man. I have often pointed out the bad treatment which these poor primitive creatures receive at the hands of anthropologists. Whatever the anthropologists wish these primitives to do or not to do, to believe or not to believe, they muvst obey, like silent Karyatides supporting the airy structures of ethnological psychology ( VvlkerpsycJiologie). If Ani¬ mism is to be supported, they must say, ‘ Of course, the storm has a soul.’ If Personification is doubted, they are called in as witnesses that their fetish is very personal indeed. If Antliropomorpliism has to be proved as a universal feature of early religion, primitive man is dragged in again, and has to confess that the uncouth stone which he worships is certainly a man, and a great deal more than a man. Whenever I protested against this system of establishing Animism, Personification, and Anthropo¬ morphism as the primeval springs of all religion, I was told that I knew nothing of primitive man, nor of his direct descendants, the modern savages. I have always pleaded guilty of a complete want of acquaint¬ ance with primitive man, and have never ventured to speak about savages, whether ancient or modern, unless I knew something, however little, of the nature of their language. Mr. H. Spencer, however, cannot be disposed of so easily. If any one knows the savages, surely he does. But even he has had to pro¬ test at last against the theory that the primitive man is a kind of maid-of-all-work, at the beck and call of every anthropologist. ‘ The assumption,’ he writes (Sociology, p. 143), ‘ tacit or avowed, that the primitive man tends to ascribe life to things which are not (2) K 130 LECTUBE VI. living, is clearly an untenable assumption/ He defends even the child, which has likewise had to do service again and again for what I called Nursery- ps^^chology, against the charge of animism. When a child says, ‘Naughty chair to hurt baby—beat it,’ Mr. Herbert Spencer shows that this burst of anger admits of very different explanations, and that no one would be more frightened than the child if the chair, on being beaten, began to kick, to bite, or to cry. But though Mr. Herbert Spencer does not believe that any human being ever mistook an inanimate for an animate object, for even animals have learnt to make that distinction, he still considers them capable of very wonderful follies. He thinks that they do not dis¬ tinguish between what they see in dreams and what they see while awake (p. 147), nay, he considers them capable of mistaking their actual shadows for their souls. On this point we shall have to touch at a later time. At present it suffices to state that all these processes have now been, traced back to their vera causa, namely, to language, and more particularly to what are called the roots of language. As every one of these roots expressed, owing to their very origin, one of the many acts with which men in an early state of society were most familiar, the objects thus named could not be named and conceived except as agents of such acts or as subjects. If the Aryan nations wished to speak of fire, they could only speak of it as doing something. If they called it Agni, they meant the agent of fire. Instead of this understood agent, implied in the name of Agni, we hear other nations speak of the heart, the PHYSICAL RELIGION. 131 soul, the spirit, the lord, or the god of fire But all these expressions belong to a later phase of thought, for they presuppose the former elaboration of such con¬ cepts as soul, spirit, god, or they are based on meta¬ phor, as in the case of heart. Prof. Tiele’s Theory of the Gods as facteiirs. Professor Tiele in his Le Mythe de Kronos, 1886, came nearest to my own view on the development of the concept of God. ‘ The ancient gods,’ he says (p. 9), ‘ are what, according to our abstract manner of speaking, we should call “ des facteurs, des forces, des sources de vie.'' ’ He does not indeed lay stress on the fact that there was in our very language and thought an irresistible necessity of our speaking of the sky, the sun, the fire, if we speak of them at all, as agents. He only warns us against supposing that ‘ the gods are ever the phenomena of nature themselves, con¬ sidered as acting persons, but always what he calls souls or spirits, represented as analogous to the soul of man, that impart movement to the celestial bodies and produce all the effects for good or evil which appear in nature.’ This is most true, but does it not explain one difficulty by another? Was the soul of man a matter of more easy discovery than the soul of the sky ? When we have once arrived at the concept of a spirit, as something substantial, yet different from the material body, the task of the religious and mytho¬ logical poet is easy enough. In another place (p. 30) Professor Tiele most rightly defines the physical deities, not as ‘ des ohjets naturels que Von a personnijies,' but as ^ des etres positifs, des esprits^ que I'on a vus d ^ Brinton, Myths of the New World, pp. 48 seq. 132 LECTUKE VI. Voeuvre dans la nature, ou Us se manifestent par leur action! All this is perfectly true in our modern languages, which supply us with such terms as esprits and etres positifs, ready made, but if we have to account for the more ancient formations and the earliest strata of religious thought, the science of lan¬ guage alone will solve the riddle why the great pheno¬ mena of nature were named as agents, as facteurs, nay, it will show that what at first seemed a mere freak of fancy was in reality a necessity of language. While I accept Professor Tide’s facteurs, I cannot, for the early periods of human thought, accept his forces or sources de vie. While I gladly accept Mr. H. Spencer’s agents, I cannot accept his agencies'^. The Agents in Nature. Facts are stronger than theories, and unless the facts as collected in my Science of Thought can be shown to be no facts, the fact remains and Avill remain for ever, that all objects which were named and conceived at all, were named and conceived at first as agents. The sky was he who covers, the sun he who warms, the moon he who measures night and day, the cloud he who rains, the 'fire he who moves, the horse he who runs, the bird he who flies, the tree he who grows or shades, even the stone he who cuts. We need not wonder at this, for we ourselves still speak of a cutter, a tender, a sucker, a slipper, of clinkers and splinters, without thinking of the activi¬ ties ascribed to all these objects by the primitive framers of words. Though the agents of the different acts of nature ^ Sociology, p. 237. PHYSICAL KELIGION. 133 remained unknown, yet as the agents of the light of the sun or of the rain of the clouds, they were con¬ ceived as very real agents. All this was the work, the almost inevitable work of language, provided always that we take language in the sense of the Greek logos, comprehending both speech and thought as one. The Categ’ories of the Understanding’. If we once have accustomed ourselves to speak of thought as something different from language, then, of course, instead of appealing to the necessities of language as a whole^ we should, with Kant, have to appeal to the categories of the understanding. We should then have to recognise the category of substance as embodied in the active character of roots. We should thus gain, perhaps, a clearer insight into the abstract process of thought, but we should lose all that is most important to us, namely, the historical growth of the human mind. I have neither forgotten Kant, nor surrendered my belief in his categories. But the study of language, as the embodiment of thought, has made it clear to me that Kant’s categories are abstractions only. They have no existence by themselves. They are not pigeon-holes made of a pine and covered with cloth— they are simply the inside of language. The Categ'ories of Iiangruag'e. Justice has at last been done to language. At first Aristotle learnt from language what he very properly called the categories, that is, the predica¬ ments, or what we can predicate of our experience. 134 LECTURE YI. Afterwards these categories, though originally ab¬ stracted from language, claimed complete independence and became extremely masterful in their relation to language and grammar. At last, however, language has now resumed her proper position as the only possible embodiment of deliberate thought, and the categories, so far from being the moulds in which language was cast, are recognised once more as the inherent forms of thought-language. We shall thus understand why fire, if it was to be named at all, could at first be named in one way only, namely, as an agent. Fire, as a Deva. We may now advance a step further, and ask how it was that Agni in the Veda is not conceived as an agent only, but as a god, or, if not, as yet, as a god in the Greek sense of the word, at least as a Deva. How shall we account for that ? Here we touch at once on the most vital point in our analysis. Certainly in the Veda Agni was called deva, perhaps more frequently than any other god. But fortunately in the Veda we can still discover the original meaning of the word deva. It did not mean divine, for how should such a concept have been suddenly called into being? Deva is derived from the root DIV, and meant originally bright. From the same root we have in Sanskrit diva, sky, divasa, day, in Lat. dies, and many more, all originally ex¬ pressive of light and brightness. In many passages where Agni, or the Dawn, or the Sky, or the Sun are called deva, it is far better to translate deva by bright than by divine, the former conveying a natural meaning in harmony with the whole tenour of the PHYSICAL KELIGION. 135 Vedic hymns, the latter conveying hardly any mean¬ ing at all. But it is true nevertheless that this epithet deva, meaning originally bright, became in time, in the Vedic, nay even in the Aryan period already, the recognised name of those natural agents whom we have been accustomed to call gods. We can watch the evolutionary process before our very eyes. When the different phenomena of nature representing light, such as the morning, the dawn, the sun, the moon, the sky, had been invoked each by its own name, they could all be spoken of by the one epithet which they shared in common, namely deva, bright. In this general concept of those Bright ones, all that was special and peculiar to each was dropt, and there re- hiained only the one epithet deva, to embrace them all. Here then there arose, as if by necessity, a new concept, in which the distinctive features of the various bright beings had all been merged in that of brightness, and in which even the original meaning of brightness, being shared by so many very different beings, had been considerably dimmed or generalised, so that there remained little more than the concept of agent which, as modified by brightness, had been from the begin¬ ning contained in the root HIV. You will now perceive the difference between our saying that the ancient Aryas applied the name of gods to the fire, the sun, or the sky, or our watching the process by which these Aryas were brought to extract or abstract from the concepts of fire, sun, moon, and sky, all being bright beings, the general con¬ cept of Deva-hood. But, though we cannot help translating deva by gody you will easily understand 136 LECTURE VI. what a distance there is from Deva-hood to God- hood. A Deva is as yet no more than a bright agent, then a kind agent, then a powerful agent, a more than human agent, nay, if you like, a super¬ human agent; and then only, by another step, by what may be called a step in the dark, a divine agent. Greek and Roman Gods. In Greece the process was slightly different. The Greeks very soon endowed these powerful agents with human qualities, to such an extent that immor¬ tality seems almost the only quality which they do not share in common with human beings. In Italy the old gods had less of that anthropomorphic character which they had in Greece. It is, in fact, a distinguishing feature of ancient Koman mythology that there are few family ties that hold the gods to¬ gether, while the Greek gods are all related with one another most intimately, if not always, most correctly. The early Christians invented still another concept for these Greek and Koman gods. They did not deny their substantial existence, but they accepted them as living beings, as spirits, as they called them, but as evil spirits. This idea has remained till almost to our own time, when the study of ancient religion and ancient languaore has enabled us to see what the Devas of the Aryas really were—not evil spirits, not human or superhuman beings, but names given to the most prominent phenomena of nature, which naturally and necessarily implied the idea of agents. With the progress of language and thought ive are now able to speak instead of agents, of agencies, of PHYSICAL KELIGION. 137 forces, forces of nature, as we call them ; but what is behind tliose agencies, what is behind warmth or light or ether, we know as little as the Vedic Rishis knew what was behind their Ai>’ni or their O other Devas. Ruskin on the Ancient Gods. How powerful the influence of words may be, how long they may continue to charm and to mislead even the wisest, we may see from an eloquent passage in Mr. Ruskin’s Fraeterita, vol. iii. p. 172. He tries to explain to himself and to others what he means when he speaks, as he often does, half poet, half philosopher as he is, of gods. ‘ By gods in the plural,’ he writes, ‘ I mean the totality of spiritual powers, delegated by the Lord of the universe to do, in their several heights, or offices, parts of His will respecting man, or the world that man is imprisoned in; not as myself knowing, or in security believing, that there are such, but in meekness accepting the testimony and belief of all ages, to the presence, in heaven and earth, of angels, principalities, powers, thrones, and the like—with genii, fairies, or spirits ministering and guarding, or destroying and tempting, or aiding good work and inspiring the mightiest. For all these I take the general word “gods,” as the best understood in all languages, and the truest and widest in meaning, including the minor ones of seraph, cherub, ghost, wraith, and the like; and myself knowing for indisputable fact, that no true happiness exists, nor is any good work ever done by human creatures, but in the sense or imagination of such presences.’ 138 LECTUKE VI. Does not this confirm the words of Rosmini when he said: ‘ The deeper we penetrate into this matter, the more do we find that all our intellectual errors, all the pernicious theories, the deceptive sophistries by which individuals and nations have been deluded, can be traced back to the vague and improper use of words k’ Evolution of the word Deva. It is very important that you should clearly appre¬ hend this process by which the word deva, originally meaning bright, assumed in time the meaning of god, in that sense at least in which the Hindus, like the Greeks and Romans, would speak of Agni, the fire, Us has, the dawn, Dyaus, the sky, as their Devas, or their gods. It is one of the most interesting cases of intellectual evolution, for it shows us how a word, having originally the purely material meaning of brightness, came in the end by the most natural process to mean divine. There was nothing inten¬ tional in that process. It was impossible that there should have been a conscious intention to express the divine, for, if there had been such a conscious intention, there would have been already in the human mind a pre-existent name and concept of the divine. The process was one of the most natural evolution. You may say that nothing could be evolved that was not involved in the word deva, and in one sense this is perfectly true. In the idea of agency, which was involved in every root, there lay the germ which, as one outside envelope ^ The Ruling Principle of Method, applied to Education hy Rosmini. Translated by Mrs. W. Grey, 1887, p. 262. PHYSICAL RELIGION. ]39 after the other was removed, came out in the end in all its simplicity and purity. But it came out nevertheless after it had been coloured or deter¬ mined by these former envelopments. It had passed through an historical process, and had thus grown into an historical concept. Nor must we suppose that the evolution of the word deva was the only evolution which gave us in the end the idea of divine. That idea was evolved in many different ways, but nowhere can we watch every stage in the evolution so well as in the history of the word deva. Our own word God must have passed through a similar evolution, provided it be an old word. But unfortunately nearly all its ante¬ cedents are lost, and its etymology is quite unknown. We have as yet traced the history, or, if you like, the evolution of the word deva to that stage only when it signifies a number of bright, kind, powerful agents, such as Mr. Buskin declared he could still accept on the testimony and belief of all ages. But its history, as we shall see, does not end there. It gradually rises to the highest concept of deity, to a belief in a God above all gods, a creator, a ruler of the world, a judge, and yet a compassionate father, so that what seems at first a mere matter of linguistic archaeology, will stand before us in the end as the solution of one of the most vital questions of religious philosophy. How many times has the question been asked, Whence comes the idea of Godand how many different answers has it elicited ! Some people main¬ tain it is inherent in the human mind, it is an innate idea, or a precept, as it has lately been called. Others assert that it could have come to man by a special 140 LECTUEE VI. revelation only. Others again, like Professor Gruppe, maintain that it is a mere hallucination that took possession of one man, and was then disseminated throuo:h well-known channels over the whole world. We do not want any of these guesses. We have a guide that does not leave us in the dark when we are searching; for the first germs of the idea of God. Guided by language, we can see as clearly as possible how, in the case of deva, the idea of God grew out of the idea of light, of active light, of an awakening, shining, illuminating, and warming light. We are apt to despise the decayed seed when the majestic oak stands before our eyes, and it may cause a certain dismay in the hearts of some philosophers that the voice of God should first have spoken to man from cut the fire. Still as there is no break between deva, bright, as applied to Agni, the fire, and many other powers of nature, and the Deus Optimus Maximiis of the Pomans, nay, as the God whom the Greeks ignorantly worshipped was the same God whom St. Paul declared unto them, we must learn the lesson, and a most valuable lesson it will turn out to be— that the idea of God is the result of an unbroken historical evolution, call it a development, an unveil¬ ing, or a purification, but not of a sudden revelation. Natural IRevelation of God. It seems almost incredible that in our days such a lesson, confirmed as it is by the irrefragable evidence of historical documents, should be objected to as dangerous to the interests of religion, nay, should form the object of virulent attacks. For some reason or other, our opponents claim for PHYSICAL KELIGION. 141 their own theories the character of orthodoxy, while they try to prejudge the whole question by stigma¬ tising our own argument as heterodox. Now I should like to ask our opponents, first of all, by what authority such metaphysical theories as that of innate ideas can possibly claim the name of orthodox, or where they can point to chapter and verse in support of what they call either a special or a universal primeval revelation, imparting to human beings the first concept and name of God? To a student of the religions of the world, in their immense variety and their constant divisions, the names of orthodox and heterodox, so freely used at all times and on all sides, have lost much both of their charm and their terror. What right have we to find fault with the manner in which the Divine revealed itself, first to the eyes, and then to the mind of man? Is the revelation in nature really so contemptible a thing that we can afford to despise it, or at the utmost treat it as good enough for the heathen world? Our eyes must have grown very dim, our mind very dull, if we can no longer perceive how the heavens declare the glory of God. We have now named and classified the whole of nature, and nothing seems able any longer to surprise, to terrify, to overwhelm us. But if the mind of man had to be roused for the first time, and to be lifted up to the conception of something beyond itself, what language could have been more powerful than that which spoke in mountains and torrents, in clouds and thunderstorms, in skies and dawns, in sun and moon, in day and night, in life and death ? Is there no voice, no meaning, is there no revelation in all this? Was it possible to contemplate the move- 143 LECTUKE VI. ments of the heavenly bodies, the regular return of day and night, of spring and winter, of birth and death, without the deepest emotion ? Of course, people may say now. We know all this, we can account for it all, and philosophy has taught us Nil admirari. If that is so, then it may be true indeed that the sluggish mind of man had to be stirred once more by a more than natural revelation. But in the early days of the world, the world was too full of wonders to require any other miracles. The whole Avorld was a miracle and a revelation, there was no need for any special disclosure. At that time the heavens, the waters, the sun and moon, the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, the winds of God, fire and heat, winter and sum¬ mer, ice and snow, nights and days, lightnings and clouds, the earth, the mountains and hills, the green things upon the earth, the wells, and seas, and fioods, —all blessed the Lord, praised Him, and magnified Him for ever. Can we imagine a more powerful revelation ? Is it for us to say that for the children of men to join in praising and magnifying Him who revealed Himself in His own way in all the magnificence, the wisdom, and order of nature, is mere paganism, polytheism, pantheism, and abominable idolatry? I have heard many blasphemies, I have heard none greater than this. It may be said, however, that the road from nature leads only to nature’s gods, to a belief in many, not in one supreme God. It certainly leads through that gate, but it does not stop there. If we return to the Veda, the oldest record of a polytheistic faith, and if PHYSICAL KELIGION. 143 we take up once more the thread where we left it, we shall be able to see how Agni, the god of fire^ being at first but one by the side of many other gods, develops into something much higher. He does not remain one out of many gods. He becomes in the end a supreme god, the Supreme God, till his very name is thrown away, or is recognised as but one out of many names by which ancient seers in their help¬ less language called that which is, the One and All. You may remember the passage from the Veda which I quoted before: ‘ That which is one, the seers call in many ways, they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan. The Biography of Ag’ni. This process, which I call the theogonic process, is so important that we must study it carefully, and step by step, in the case of at least one of the ancient gods. If I select for that purpose the god of fire, Agni, and not Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, the supreme god of the Aryan Pantheon, it is because the biography of Dyaus, having been fully worked out by me on former occasions, need not be gone through again in full detail^. It is my chief object at pi’esent to show how many roads, starting from different beginnings, all converged and met in the end in the same central point, the belief in one Supreme Agent, manifested in all that is and moves and lives, and how the perception of the Infinite was revealed everywhere in what we call the perceptions of the Finite. ^ Science of Language, vol. ii. chap. 11. LECTURE VIL THE BIOGKAPHY OF AGNI. Facts ag'ainst Theories. W E begin to-day the biography of Agni, the god of fire, and shall try to follow it from the first chapter to the last. That biography may sometimes seem lengthy and wearisome, but we must go through all its chapters patiently^ for the whole question of Natural Religion depends really on the success of our present inquiry. The only successful way of contro¬ verting the prevalent theories of the origin of religion is an appeal to facts. I maintain that the ancient records of religion, more particularly in India, supply historical evidences that the human mind was able, by its own inherent powers, to ascend from nature to nature’s gods, and, in the end, to the God of nature. If we can prove this, the verdict cannot be doubtful, for even in theological discussion facts are still stronger than theories. In answer to those who have recourse to what they call innate faculties or special revelations, we appeal to historical records, and, where so much is at stake, we must not shrink from wearisome labour. Some of the details in the historical evolution of Agni, fire, may seem unim¬ portant for our purpose, but we have watchful and powerful enemies, and we must not leave any posi- THE BIOGRAPHY OF AGNT. 145 tion in our onward march exposed to surprise and capture. Premature Generalisation. Nothing does so much mischief in our sphere of work as premature generalisation. It seems that Professor Weber ^ remarked, in one of his early publi¬ cations, that ‘Agni is adored essentially as earthly sacrificial fire, and not as an elemental force.’ This statement has been repeated again and again, till at last it was supposed that Agni was really a mere in¬ vention of priests, and unknown, at all events, before the development of the sacrificial system in India. It is perfectly true that Agni, as the fire on the altar, takes a very prominent place in the Vedic hymns. Agni, in fact, is, together with Indra, the Deva to whom most hymns are addressed, and in many of them the same praises are repeated and the same epithets used which apply to the sacrificial fire. But there are other passages, less numerous, no doubt, but, for that very reason, more important to us, in which Agni is celebrated without any reference as yet to the fire on the altar. I shall begin by examining these passages in which Agni is described in his purely physical character. Agni in his Physical Character. The first question was. Whence did he come ? To this many answers are given. We read, Rv. II. 1,1: Tvam agne dyiibhi/i tvam asusukshawi/i tvam adbhya/i tvam asmanaA pari, (2) ^ History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 40. L 146 LECTURE VII. Tvam vanebhya/i tvam oshadhibhya/i tvam nrmam nnpate firayase snkih. ‘ Thou, 0 Agni, art born wishing to shine forth, thou art born from the skies, thou from the waters, thou from the stone, thou from the wood, thou from the herbs, thou, king of men, the bright one/ Here we learn in one verse all the possible ways in which Agni could have appeared to man. First, from the skies, as the fiery and scorching sun, which by its heat could kindle inflammable substances ; secondly, from the waters, that is, from the clouds, as lightning; thirdly, from the stone, which must be meant for the Hint, though the striking fire out of flint is not recog¬ nised in the Veda as a sacrificial act; fourthly, froin the wood and the herbs, that is, from the fire-sticks and from dry leaves which, like our tinder, caught the spark and kept it safe, till, by means of blowing, it would burst forth into flames. Let us now examine thes<) four kinds of Agni’s birth more in detail. Agfni, as the Sun. That Agni was often taken as the sun, is proved by many passages in the hymns of the Rig-veda. For instance, Rv. VI. 9, 1 : Aha/i A-a knshnam aha/i argfunam ka. vi vartete ragrasi vedy- abhi/«, Vaisvanara/i (/ayamana/i na ragfa ava atirat gryotisha. agni7i tamawsi. ‘ The black day and the red day (night and day) turn heaven and earth by their different colours. Agni strides down across the darkness, beloved by all men, like a born king.’ Here Agni, striding down across the darkness, is evidently meant for the sun itself. In another verse, HI. 14, 4, Agni is called Surya, sun. THE BIOGEAPHY OF AGNI. 147 Yat soMsha sahasa/i putra tishithivya/i bhuvanasya mag^man^. ‘ The Bhngus excited or kindled Agni in the centre of the earth by the strength of man.’ And again, II. 4, 2 : dvita adadhu/i bhngava/i vikshu kyoh. ‘The Bhngus placed Agni twofold among the tribes of men.’ It is curious that the name Bhrzgu should correspond letter by letter to the d>Aeyues of Greek mythology. Mythologfical Ideas connected with Fire. This last process of producing fire by rubbing is a very favourite subject of the Vedic poets. Of the tyvo pieces of wood used for rubbing out fire, one is called the mother, the other the father of Agni. Thus we read, V. 9, 3: Uta sma yam sisum yatha navam g^anish^a arani, dhartaram manushinam visam agnim svadhvaram. ‘ He whom the two fire-sticks (arawi) produced, like a new-born babe, Agni, the supporter of the tribes of man, good at the sacrifice.’ This myth of the new-born babe soon assumes greater proportions. Thus it is said, Rv. X. 79, 4; Tat vam ntam rodasi pra bravimi g'ayamanaTi matar^. garbha/i atti, na aham devasya martya/i fciketa agni/i anga vi/ceta/i sa/j pra- keikh. ^ It is curious to observe that in many of the languages of Australia there is but one word both for fire and for wood. See Curr, The Australian Race, vol. i. p. 9. THE BIOGKAPHY OP AGNI. 155 ‘ O Heaven and Earth, I proclaim this truthful fact, that the child, as soon as born, eats his parents. I, a mortal, do not understand this (act) of a god; Agni indeed understands, for he is wise ! ’ It was considered another wonderful thing, as we saw before, that a living thing, like Agni, should be born from a dry stick, or that, though his mother does not suckle him, he yet should grow so rapidly, and proceed at once to do his work as messenger between gods and men (X. 115, 1). Again (V. 9, 4), he is said to be difficult to catch, like a brood of serpents, and to con¬ sume forests, as cattle do on their pasture. But all this is a beginning only. The subject grows, and is varied in every possible way. You know how often our critics have expressed their inability to believe that the conversation of the Vedic Aryas should have turned on nothing but the trivial events of every day. I can understand their incredulity, so long as they do not open the pages of the Big-veda. But on every one of these pages they will find facts which are stronger than all theories, and which leave us no doubt that the poetry of the Vedic Aryas turned chiefly on the sun, the moon, the sky, the wind, the storm, and the fii'e. The repetition of the same ideas is apt to become tedious, but even this tedious repetition contains a lesson, if it helps to give us a truer idea of the slow but natural growth of the human intellect where we can best watch it,—in the hymns of the Big-veda ; and, if it makes us understand that even a belief in Agents, whether in the fire, or in the sun, or in the sky, need not be considered as mere paganism and idolatry, but as containing healthy seeds, which in time were meant to grow into a rich harvest. 156 LECTURE VII. Agfui, as Deva, Bright, Amartya, Undying, &c. We saw how naturally Agni, the fire, could be called deva, bright, without any thought, as yet, of calling him a god. Even when the light of Agni is spoken of as immortal, that need not mean, as yet, any more than that it lasts for ever, if properly kept up. We read, for instance, Rv. VI. 9, 4, idam gjoiiJi am7"'itam martyeshu, ‘ See this light immortal among mortals.’ Here immortal might still be translated by the never- dying hght. The fire, as a masculine, or rather as an agent, was also called, I. 58, 4, a^ara, not-aging, and the Vedic poets dwelt again and again on the contrast between the undying Agni and his dying friends. Of other Devas also it was said that they were not. like human beings, subject to decay and death. Agni, tlie Immortal among Mortals. But while the ancient poets brought themselves to think of an impassable gulf between the mortals on one side and the immortals on the other, this gulf vanished again in the case of Agni. He, immortal as he was, dwelt among men. He was the guest (atithi, H. 4, 1) of men, often called the immortal among mortals (amr^ta/7/ I I „ ® "B. ii K K 12 L A A L 'I '7 M M /vwv\ If,. "-7 *1 N N tt. '* /w^ ffl ~ o o O 0 □ 1 ? / ? ? R 20. 1 p w s & + T T T From Brugsch. 218 LECTURE IX. by the discovery of gunpowder, of the printing press, of the steam engine, of electricity in modern times ; and you would have in ancient times the epochs marked by the discovery of lire, of bronze, of iron, and of alphabetic writing for literary purposes. But if the introduction of written books marks an epoch in the history of civilisation, we ought to be able to discover clear traces of it in the principal countries of the world. Now you know the wonder¬ ful intellectual activity of the sixth century B. c. in every part of the civilised world. Between 600 and 500 B. c. we have in Asia the foundation of the Persian Empire, with Cyrus and Darius Hydaspes, the restorer of the Zoroastrian faith. We have in Asia Minor the rise of the Ionian republics, and the sudden burst of Greek philosophy, Greek poetry, nay even Greek history. Not only Thales (solar eclipse, 585), Anaxi¬ mander (612-546) and Anaximenes, but Pythagoras (t 510), Xenophanes, Herakleitos, and Parmenides all belonged to that great century. Greek lyric poetry burst forth in the songs of Theognis, Simonides, and Anakreon; ancient laws began to be collected by Solon and others, and towards the close of the century we hear of Pisistratus (f 528) collecting manuscripts of the Homeric songs, as they had been recited at the great Panathenaic festivals. The Logo- graphi of that time were actual luriters of chronicles, and the immediate precursors of real historians, such as Herodotus. Though it is a mere guess, it seems to me extremely likely that this literary development of the sixth century B. C. was really due to the introduction of alphabetic writing for literary purposes from Egypt USEFULNESS OF THE VEDIC KELIGION. 219 and Phenicia to Asia Minor and Europe. I doubt whether we can trace the writing down of any of the sacred books of the East to an earlier date than that century, though they, no doubt, existed for centuries before that time, preserved by oral tradition. The Zoroastrian texts may have been collected at the time of Darius. The Veda was probably not reduced to writing till much later, and the same applies to the Buddhist canon. In China writing, according to their fashion, may have been known long before, but the collection of the canonical books of Confucius and Laotze belongs again to the sixth century. The Old Testament as an Historical Book. If then we turn to the books of the Old Testament, we find that they were finally collected by Ezra, 458 B. c., wdio lived about seventy-five years after Darius, the collector of the Zoroastrian code. We must re¬ member that Ezra had been brought up in Babylon during the reign of Artaxerxes. To suppose that por¬ tions of the Old Testament existed in the form of books at the time of Moses would run counter to all history. The Jews, we must remember, were far from being a more literary people than their neighbours, and to sup¬ pose that they alone should have possessed a book- literature at a time when all their neighbours had to be satisfied with oral tradition, or with hieroglyphic inscriptions, hieratic papyri, and cuneiform cylinders, is more than at present any historian can admit b But though in using the books of the Old Testament we must always be on our guard against intellectual ^ See Appendix XIII. 220 LECTURE IX. anachronisms, due to the inevitable colouring which the mind of the collector and final redactor may have thrown on the character of a book, the traditions, as finally collected by Ezra, and before him by the High Priest, Hilkiah, hardly allow us to doubt that a belief in one Supreme God, even if at first it was only a henotheistic, and not yet a monotheistic belief, took possession of the leading spirits of the Jewish race at a very early time. All tradition assigns that belief in One God, the Most High, to Abraham. According to the Old Testament, Abraham, though he did not deny the existence of the gods worshipped by the neigh¬ bouring tribes, yet looked upon them as different from, and as decidedly inferior to, his own God. His mono¬ theism was, no doubt, narrow. His God was the friend of Abraham, as Abraham was the friend of God. Y et the concept of God formed by Abraham was a con¬ cept that could grow and that did grow. Neither Moses, nor the Prophets, nor Christ himself, nor even Mohammed, had to introduce a new God. Their God was always called the God of Abraham, even when freed from all that was still local and narrow and superstitious in the faith of that patriarch. Monotheistic Instinct of the Semitic Kace. It is well known that some excellent Semitic scholars, and more particularly Penan, find the ex¬ planation of this early monotheistic belief of the Father of the Faithful in what they call the mono¬ theistic instinct of the whole Semitic race. That theory, however, even if it explained anything, is flatly contradicted by all the facts that have come to light in the early history of the Semitic nations. USEFULNESS OF THE VEDIC KELIGION. 221 If there was any religious instinct in them, it was a polytheistic instinct, as we see in the monuments of Babylon and Nineveh, in the traditions of Arabia, and even in the constant backslidings of the Jews. Abraham. Many years ago, in one of my earliest essays on Semitic Monotheism (1860), I tried to show, in oppo¬ sition to Henan’s view, that the Jewish belief in One Supreme God must be traced back, like all great ideas, to one person, namely to Abraham, and that, in his case, it could not be ascribed to a national instinct, which rather would have led him in the very opposite direction, but on the contrary, to his personal opposition to the national instinct, or to what I ventured to call, in the truest sense of the word, a special revelation. For that expression I have been taken to task again and again during the last thirty years, though I thought I had made it very clear in all my writings what I meant by a special revelation^ not a theophany, but ‘a profound insight, an in¬ spired vision of truth, so deep and so living as to make it a reality like that of the outward world nay, more than that of the outward world. Such a revelation can, by its very nature, be granted to one man only, can be preached by one man only, with the full faith in its reality, and this man, as far as the religion of Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans is concerned, was Abraham. But although Abraham may have attained at a very early time to his sublime conception of the One God, ^ These are the words in which my defence was undertaken by .T. F. Clarke in his Ten Great Religions, p. 403. 222 LECTURE IX. the Most High God, freed from the purely physical characteristics which adhere to the gods of other nations, we can see very clearly that in this sublime conception he stood almost alone, and that the gods of the Jews, and of the Semitic nations in general, had once been gods of nature, quite as much as the gods of India. If we saw the account of the appearance of Jehovah on mount Sinai in the sacred books of any other religion, we should have little doubt that the God, as thei'e described, was originally a god of hre and thunder. ‘In the morning,’ we read, ‘there were thun¬ ders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount. And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.’ mijah. What is told of Elijah and of his vision on mount Horeb is like an epitome of the whole growth of the Jewish religion in general. We read that ‘the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. ‘ And after the earthquake a fire ; but the Lord was not in the fire. ‘ And after the fire a still, small voice.’ What we should have expected in any other sacred book, at the end of this description of a storm, would have been the loud, strong voice of the thunder. USEFULNESS OF THE VEDIO RELIGION. 223 following after the storm, and the earthquake, and the fire of lightning. But the still small voice shows that Elijah saw more than the mere physical features of the storm, and that the voice which he heard was meant for a higher voice that speaks not only in the storm, the earthquake, and the fire, but in the heart of man. The God of Tire in the Old Testament. The highest authorities on the religious antiquities of the Semitic peoples, and of the Jewish people in particular, have expressed their conviction that the physical characteristics of their principal God point to an original god of fire, taking fire in the same wide sense in which it was taken in India, not only as the fire on earth, but as the fire of heaven, the fire manifested in storm and lightning, nay, the fire as the life of nature and of man. In this way only, they think, can we account for the poetical phraseo¬ logy still found in many places of the Old Testament. For instance. Psalm xviii. 8 : ‘ There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, And fire out of his mouth devoured ; Coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also, and came down, And thick darkness was under his feet.’ Or again. Psalm xxix. 3 : ‘ The voice of the Lord is upon the waters. The glory of God thundereth, Even the Lord, upon many waters.’ But though we can clearly perceive in these and similar passages that there were physical ingredients in the character of the supreme God of the Jews, nowhere but in the hymns of the Veda can we watch 224 LECTURE IX. the gradual elimination of these physical ingredients, and the historical unfolding of the true idea of God out of these primitive germs. I know full well that to some any attempt to trace back the name and concept of Jehovah to the same hidden sources from which other nations derived their first intimation of deity, may seem almost sacrilegious. They forget the difference between the human concept of the deity and the deity itself, which is beyond the reach of all human concepts. But the historian reads deeper lessons in the growth of these human concepts, as they spring up everywhere in the minds of men who have been seekers after truth—seeking the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and find him ;—and when he can show the slow, but healthy growth of the noblest and sublimest thoughts out of small and apparently in¬ significant beginnings, he rejoices as the labourer rejoices over his golden harvest; nay, he often wonders what is more truly wonderful, the butterfly that soars up to heaven on its silvery wings, or the grub that hides within its mean chrysalis such marvellous possi¬ bilities. LECTUEE X. FIKE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. Pire widely Worshipped. T hough we cannot hope to find in other religions any documents in which to study, as we can in the Veda, the successive stages through which the worship of fire passed from its simplest beginnings, as the fire on the hearth, to its highest stage, as the creator and ruler of the world, we may at all events try to collect some fragments of the worship of Fire, preserved in other religions, whether united genea¬ logically with the Vedic religion or independent in their origin. Next to the worship of the sun, there is probably no religious worship so widely diffused as that of Fire. ‘ Since there has been fire, it has been wor¬ shipped,’ is a saying of Bashshar Ibn Burd, quoted by Al-Biruni (vol. ii. p. 131). But we must distin¬ guish. Fire has been worshipped for very different reasons, and the very name of worship comprehends many heterogeneous kinds of reverence, esteem, grati¬ tude, and even prudential considerations, which were called forth by the benefits and services rendered by fire to the different races of man. Nevertheless, I (2) Q 226 LECTUEE X. believe we shall find that there is nothing, or very little, in the religious, philosophical, and mythological conceptions of fire, whether entertained by civilised or uncivilised, by ancient or modern races, that does not find some analogy, and, to a great extent, some explanation, in the rich religious, philosophical, and mythological phraseology of India. Tire in the Avesta. The nearest relations of the ancient Aryas of India were no doubt the Aryas of Media and Persia, of whose religion we obtain some interesting, though fragmentary, information from the Zend-avesta. The idea, once so prevalent, that their religion consisted entirely of Fire-worship has long been surrendered by scholars, though it crops up again and again in popular writings. From the first acquaintance with the original texts of their sacred writings, it became clear that Fire occupied only a subordinate place in their religious system. If we call the religion of Zoroaster fire-worship, we must apply the same name to the religion of India, nay even to the religion of the Jews. Almost every religion which recognises burnt offerings, exhibits at the same time a more or less prominent reverence for the sacrificial fire itself. To outsiders in particular, and to casual observers, the fires burning on the altars of temples or on the hearth of every house seem to be the principal manifestation of religious worship and of religious faith. Thus it happened that, like the religion of Persia, that of India also was often represented as fire-worship. Al-Birum, for instance (vol. i. p. 128; vol. ii. p. 139), declares that FIKE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 227 the Kig-veda treats of the sacrifices to the fire, as if it treated of nothing else. He is, however, more correct when he states (vol. ii. p. 131) ‘that the Hindus highly venerate the fire, and offer flowers to it,’ though we ought to remember that there are many things besides flowers which were sacrificed in and to the fire. Ormazd, not Fire. In the Zend-avesta Agni, as a separate god of fire, occupies in fact a far less prominent place than in the Veda. The real object of veneration with Zoroaster and his followers was Ahura-mazda, whom we call Ormazd. Ahura-mazda was a deity whose deepest roots we shall discover in the concepts of heaven, light, and wisdom. He was not Fire, though he is often represented as the father of Fire. This shows his close relationship with the Vedic Hyaus, the sky, who was likewise conceived as the father of Agni. Atar, Fire. The name of fire in Zend, however, is not Agni, but Atar, a word which in Sanskrit is supposed to exist in the name Athar-van, one of the early sages who kept the fire, the supposed ancestor of the family of the Atharvans, to whom, as we saw, the Atharva- veda was attributed. It is sometimes used also as a name of Agni himself. The word atar has no etymology, so far as we know whether in Sanskrit or in Zend. ^ Darmesteter, Ormazd et AJiriman, p. 55, note. That athar in athar-van is the same word as atar may be conceded. In Zend athravan has long, athaurun short a. The Vedic athari also, and atharyu, may be connected with athar, and possibly the Q 2 228 LECTURE X. It seemed strange to students of the Parsi religion that A tar, fire, should be the son of Ahura-mazda, and that his mother, the wife of Ahura-mazda, should be water. From what we now know, however, from the Kig-veda, this becomes perfectly intelligible. Fire is the son of the sky, whether in his character of the sun or of lii^htnino;, and he is the son of the waters, whether as rising from the clouds in the morning, or as issuing from the clouds as lightning in a thunderstorm Atar’s Fig'ht witli A^i Dahaka. This Atar or fire in the Avesta represents in some respects both Agni and Indra, for the battle against Dahaka, the fiendish snake, is waged in the Avesta by Atar alone, who frightens the fiend away and recovers the light (/ivareno). Trita, who in the Veda takes sometimes the place of the conqueror of the fiend, is called Aptya, the descendant of the waters, which shows his close connection with Agni, as Apam napat, the oftspring of the waters or the clouds, that is, the lightning. In the Avesta this Trita appears as Thraetaona Athwya, who kills A^i Dahaka in the four-cornered Varena, originally a name of the sky, corresponding to Greek ovpavos, and Sanskrit Varu7?a. This battle between Agni or Trita and Ahi in the Veda, between Atar or Thraetaona and A^i Dahaka Greek dOpayivij, a tree of which tinder was made. ’A6rjp also in the sense of the point of a weapon might be related, but not so 'AOtjvt], v/hich comes from a very different source. ^ Apam napat is distinguished in the Avesta from Atar, but is often mentioned in close connection with him ; see Vispered, VII. 5. FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 229 in the A vesta, which was originally a purely mytho¬ logical representation of the battle between light and darkness, whether in a thunderstorm or in the diurnal struggle between day and night, became after a time a mere legend. And it was one of Burnouf’s most brilliant discoveries that in what was formerly ac¬ cepted as genuine Persian history, namely the over¬ throw of king Jemshid by the usurper Zohak, and the overthrow of Zohak by Feridun, he recognised once more our old Vedic friends, Trita, A hi, and Yam a, brought down from the sky to the earth, and changed from divine and mythological powers into human and historical characters Plurality of Atar. A When by the side of the one Atar we find also many atars (S. B. E. xxiii. 8) mentioned in the Avesta, we have only to remember that in the Veda also there were many agnis or fires, in which the presence of Agni was discovered and acknowledged. This sub¬ division of Fire was carried on even further in the Avesta than in the Veda. In the Veda we can dis¬ tinguish three fires, sometimes called Agni nirma- thya, fire obtained by rubbing, Agni aushasya, fire rising with the dawn, solar fire, and Agni vaidyuta, the fire of lightning. In the Avesta (Yasna XVII) we meet with five fires:—(1) the fire that was before Ahura-mazda, (2) the fire that dwells in animal bodies, (3) the fire in trees and plants, (4) the fire in the clouds, (5) the domestic fire, (6) the Nairya-sangha ^ On the changes of Thraetaona into Feridun, of Yima Khshaeta into Jemshid, and of Asi Dahaka into Zohak, see Selected Essmjs, i. p. 479. 230 LECTUKE X. fire, also called the Behram fire, which is to bo kept burning in temples h Besides the three principal fires in the Veda, the fire obtained by rubbing, the fire of lightning, and the fire in the sun, two more are often mentioned, the gktJiduVSi, that which resides in the stomach and cooks or digests food, and another that is supposed to reside in plants. This identity of the fire on the hearth with the fire in the human body was expressed with great definiteness by a Shawnee prophet. ‘ Know,’ he said, ‘ that the life in your body and the fire on your hearth are one and the same thing, and that both proceed from one source^.’ When, however, Agni is invoked as residing in all things, and also as a witness abiding in our own body, this is not meant for the ^a^Aaragni, but involves a higher conception of Agni as an omnipresent power. Thus we read, Bam. VI. 101, 30:— Tvam agne sarvabhutanam sarirantar ago/cara/i, Tvam sakshi nama dehasthas, trahi mam devasattama. ‘ Thou, O Agni, art invisible inside the body of all creatures, thou art called the witness in the body, save me, 0 best of gods.’ The Agni residing in the plants, may be the warmth that ripens them (Bv. X. 88, 10, sa/t 6shadhi/t paA^ati visvarupa/t); but more frequently he is conceived as dwelling within trees and plants, because he can be called forth from them by friction. He is called, VI. 3, 3, vane^a/t, born in the wood ; II. 1, 14, garbha^ virudham, the child of the plants; and he is often represented as hidden in certain trees which were used for producing fire. ^ S. B. E. xxxi. p. 258. ^ Narrative of John Tanner, p. 161; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 144. FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 231 The three sacrificial fires are the Garhapatya, Da- kshi9^a, and Ahavaniya, to which the Avasathya and Sabhya are sometimes added so as to make five. A Atar, Son of Ormazd. A But Atar had also a divine personality of his own. His constant name is the son of Ahura-mazda. He is called a warrior, driving on a blazing chariot [S. B. E. xxiii. p. 153), a benefactor, a source of glorj?" and a source of healing (l.c., p. 15). In the Atas Nyagis (1. c., p. 359) we read not only of sacrifices and in¬ vocations offered unto Atar, but he himself is called worthy of sacrifice and invocation. He is implored to burn for ever in the house, until the time of the good and powerful restoration of the world. It is said to Ite well with a man who worships Atar with sacrifices, holding in his hand the sacred wood, the baresma, and the meat. For Atar can bestow not only fulness of life and welfare, but also knowledge, sagacity, quickness of tongue, a good memory, an under¬ standing that goes on growing and that is not acquired through learning. In a prayer addressed to him the poet says: ‘ Give me, O Atar, son of Ahura-mazda, however unworthy I am, now and for ever, a seat in the bright, all-happy, blissful abode of the holy ones. May I obtain the good reward, a good renown, a long cheerfulness of soul.’ And Atar is supposed to bestow the following blessing on his worshippers: ‘ May herds of oxen grow for thee, and increase of sons ; may thy mind and thy soul be master of its vow, and mayest thou live on in the joy of the soul all the nights of thy life ’ (xxiii. p. 360 ; and xxxi. p. 313). 232 LECTURE X. Difference between Atar and Ag‘ni. A Kemember all this is addressed to Atar, originally simply a name of fire. It is much the same as what we saw addressed to Agni in the Veda. But there are differences also between the Vedic Agni and the Avestic Atar. We saw that Agni in the Veda was made a sarvabhaksha, a devourer of all things, that he resented the affront, but that in the end everything was supposed to be purified by fire. Thus the Vedic Indians burnt their dead in the fire, and afterwards buried the ashes. To the Zoroastrians both these acts Avould have seemed sacrilegious, for such was their belief in the holiness of fire and of the earth, that they would have considered both polluted by any contact with unclean things The very breath of man or of woman, which, as we saw, Agni was so fond of, was believed by the Zoroastrians to con¬ taminate the fire and hence the Paitidana^,a kind of veil worn by the priest, and reaching from the nose to the chin, the modern Penom^. ^ S. B. E. iv. p. 80. “ It should be remembered, however, that Manu also (IV. 53) for¬ bids blowing the fire with one’s mouth. He likewise disapproves of throwing impure substances into the fire, warming one’s feet at it, or stepping over it. Some authorities, however, say that the Srauta fire may be kindled by blowing, because it is particularly ordained so in the V%asaneyaka, but that the domestic fire is not to be thus treated. See Apastamba Sutras, translated by Biihler, S. B.E. ii. p. 56 ; I. 15, 20 ; VasishiJ/ta XII. 27-20. ^ 1. c., p. 164. * A curious coincidence shows itself in the ceremonial of the Slaves, as described by Saxo Grammaticus. The priest has to clean the sacellum with a broom, and while doing this must never allow his breath to escape. When he can retain his breath no longer, he has to go out and then to return to his work in the temple, so that the deity may not be contaminated by human breath. See Lippert, Die Religionen der Europdischen Cidturvolker. p. 93. FIEE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHEE EELIGIONS. 233 Is the Avestic Religion dualistic? It is generally supposed that the religion of the A vesta differs from that of the Veda by being dualistic^. In one sense this is perfectly true. The Zoroastrians recognise an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, by the side of the good spirit, Ahura-mazda. In some respects these two spirits are equals. The good spirit did not create the evil spirit, nor can he altogether prevent the mischief that is wrought by the evil spirit. The Zoroastrian religion, having a decidedly moral character, recognises in this struggle between good and evil the eternal law of reward and punish¬ ment, good always begetting good and evil evil. In the same manner as the good spirit opposes the evil spirit, every man is expected to fight against evil in every shape. Zoroaster himself was supposed to have been appointed by Ahura-mazda to defend the good people, it may be the agricultural population, against the attacks of their enemies, the worshippers of the Daevas. The oldest prayers in the Avesta are supposed to have been addressed by Zoroaster to Ahura-mazda, imploring his help, and mourning over the sufferings of his people. All this is perfectly true, but if we once know from the Veda what the fight between good and evil, between light and darkness meant in the beginning, we shall understand why after all, in the dualism of the Avesta, the good spirit is always supreme, as Indra is supreme over V?vtra, Agni over Ahi, Atar over A^i Dahaka. The fact that Indra or Agni or Atar has an enemy, that light is sometimes over- ^ See West, S. B. E., vol. v. p. Ixix ; Mills, S. B. E., vol. xxxi. Introd. 234 LECTUKE X. whelmed by darkness, does not annihilate the belief in the supremacy of one of these two contending powers. The gods are always conceived as different in kind from their opponents. The gods are worshipped, the demons are feared. If therefore we call the ancient religion of Zoroaster dualistic, the same name might be applied to the Vedic religion, so far as it recog¬ nises Vritra and other powers of darkness as dangerous opponents of the bright beings. Indeed, I doubt whether there is any religion which is dualistic in the sense of recognising two divine antagonistic powers as perfect equals. Even so-called Satanic races who offer sacrifices to evil spirits only, and seem to neglect the good spirits, do so because they can trust the latter, but are afraid of the former. Wherever there is a belief in a devil, the devil may be very powerful, but he can never become supreme. He is by its very nature a negative, not a positive concept. No doubt, the powers of evil in the Avesta are different from the powers of darkness in the Veda. They have assumed a decidedly moral character. But they are the same in origin, and it is owing to this that they never have, never could have attained to perfect equality with the Good and Wise Spirit, Ahura-mazda. The most important lesson which we may learn from the Avesta, particularly when we do not lose sight of its antecedents in the Veda, is that we may see how physical religion leads on almost uncon¬ sciously . to moral religion. It is the distinction between night and day, between darkness and light, that foreshadows and predetermines the distinction between what is lovely and unlovely, between what is evil and good, between what belongs to the powers FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 235 of darkness and the powers of light. Nature, as the voice of the God of Nature, awakens in the heart of man the first conception of that eternal Dualism which is manifested in night and day, in darkness and light, and in the works of darkness and in the works of light. And as night is the negation of day, not day of night, as darkness is the negation of light, not light of darkness, a deep conviction was left in the mind of man, that evil also is the negation of good, not good of evil. The light of the sun might be absent for a time, but it was hidden only, it could never be destroyed, and as every morning proclaimed the victory of light, the ancient worshippers of nature and of the gods of nature never doubted that the final victory must belong to the powers of light, that Vritra must succumb, that Ahriman must be vanquished, and that light and truth and righteousness must prevail in the end. Tire in Eg‘ypt. But it is not only the religion of Persia which receives its true explanation from India, it is not only the Zoroastrian Atar whose true historical ante¬ cedents are preserved to us in the hymns addressed to the Vedic Agni. In this case there is really a genealogical relationship between the two religions and betweerf the two deities. But even where there can be no thought of such a genealogical relationship, we shall often find in the most distant countries the most striking similarities with the conceptions of fire as elaborated by the Vedic Indians. In some cases mythological ideas which seemed utterly irrational become at once intelligible by a 236 LECTURE X. mere comparison with Vedic ideas. We saw how many different characters were ascribed to Agni in the hymns of the Yeda. In one hymn he was clearly the fire on the hearth, the protector of the family; in another the lightning, the destroyer of the demons of darkness; in another again the sun, the light of the world, the giver of life and strength. Being all this, and representing such different powers, he soon was conceived as something different from each and all of these manifestations, something behind and above them all, and thus was raised at last to that divine supremacy which, as we saw, marks the highest stage which religious speculation has reached at any time. If we have clearly understood this process, and then turn our eyes to Egypt, we shall find it repeated there in almost every detail. Modern Character of the Eg^yptian ReUgfion. Only while in Egypt we can no longer discover the motives that led to this syncretism, these motives are fully disclosed to us in the hymns of the Veda. It is strange, but it is recognised as a fact by the best scholars, that in Egypt, where the actual monuments are apparently so much older than in India, we seldom, if ever, can discover the deepest roots and feeders of religion. Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye, in his able reanme of the recent researches of Egyptologists, remarks (§ 51): ‘ Our knowledge of the first dynasties has been greatly enlarged by Maspero’s discoveries during the last years, but we have not come any nearer to the original sources of Egyptian civilisation. Our knowledge does not reach beyond Menes, who governed a fully organised kingdom. The rehgion FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 237 also of the oldest periods was quite complete, at least we find there almost all the elements of religious thought, but we cannot discover their beginnings. Everything, even architecture and plastic art, is already so fully developed that we must look for a more ancient antiquity, and that is entirely with¬ drawn from our sight.’ Under these circumstances a comparative study of religions can alone throw light on those periods in the development of the Egyptian religion which lie confessedly beyond the earliest monuments. Though we cannot admit a common historical ground from which the religions of Egypt and India branched off, we can admit a common human foundation in which they had their deepest roots. Even if the Veda did not allow us an insight into the workings of the Indian mind which produced, for instance, that strange syncretism of a terrestrial, celestial, and atmospheric Agni, the mere fact that the same puzzle presented itself to the Indians and to the Egyptians would lead us to look for a common cause, simply in their com¬ mon human nature, and thus facilitate the solution of the riddle. But if in India we still find the key left, as it were, in the lock, we have a perfect right to try whether the same key will not turn the bolts in the Egyptian lock. If it does, we have done all that we can do. If we have not perfect certainty, we have at all events high probability that the problem can be, and has been successfully solved in Egypt as well as in India. I quote once more from M. Chantepie de la Saussaye: ‘We first draw attention,’ he writes (§ 49), ‘ to the general identification of the gods with one another. We perceive at once how impossible it 238 LECTUKE X. is to distinguish from each other the attributes of the individual gods or the spheres of their activity. From this arises the assertion made by many Egyptologists that fundamentally the Egyptian gods all meant the same thing; the gods represented the sun, the god¬ desses the mothers or something else. This is most certainly not the case. But at a very early date the gods were almost all represented as being gods of light. Hence the combined names of Amon-Ra, Ra- Osiris, and many more. This is the reason why it is so difficult to fathom the nature of the gods from the texts. Originally Ptah was probably not a sun-god. Still he is most distinctly called the sun-disc. The fact that Set appears in the boat of the sun, does not determine his original nature.’ All this, as we saw before, would be applicable to the Vedic religion as well as to the religion of Egypt. Let us now con¬ sider some individual gods in Egypt that show some similarity with Agni. When we read the account given, for instance, of Ra, we almost imagine that we are reading an account of Agni, in his character as sun-god. Nearly all the gods are identified with Ra. He is the sun-god, the creator and ruler of the world. He daily conquers his enemies, particularly the dark cloud-serpent Apep (Sk. Ahi). His nearest relatives are Shu and Tefnut, the children of the sun (Asvinau, divo napatau). Ra is identified with Tmu, the setting sun (Yama), and with Harmachis, the daily sun travelling from East to West (Vishriu). FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 239 Osiris. In Osiris, again, most Egyptian scholars have now discovered a solar deity. He is the oldest child of Seb, goddess of the earth (PWthivi), and Nut, goddess of heaven (Dyaus). He is married to his sister Isis (Yama and Yami^), killed by his brother Set, but avenged by his son Horus. Osiris becomes lord of the lower world and judge of the dead (Yama); and his worshippers look forward after death to admission into his kingdom. As Agni is Yama and Yama Agni, so Ha is called the soul of Osiris, Osiris the soul of Ra (1. c., § 47). Ptah. Another Egyptian deity, Ptah (the opener'?), is often identified with Osiris. Both are represented in the form of mummies, and like Osiris, Ptah also is invoked in the end as the creator of heaven, of earth, and of man. Ptah represents, in fact, another phase of the sun, the sun that has set and become invisible but that returns again at the end of the night, or at the end of winter And while Ptah thus receives light from Agni, both being the light by night as distinguished from the sun, the light by day, Ptah also reflects light on Agni, at least in one of his special developments. We saw how Agni, the sacrificial fire, was not only used by the priest as a means of conveying offering to the gods, but was very soon, by a very natural transition ^ On a curious coincidence between the twins Yama and Yami, and the twins Yame and Yama in Peru, see Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 155. ^ Brugsch, Religion der alten Aegypter, p. 237. 240 LECTURE X. of thought, conceived as himself a priest. In a very similar manner, the fire which was used by the smith for melting metal and fashioning it into tools and weapons, was likewise conceived as himself a smith and an artificer. We see this change very clearly in the Greek Hephaestos, in the Eoman Vulcan, and in the Egyptian Ptah. For Ptah is not only the nocturnal sun, Ptah is the former and artificer, the worker of metals from gold to iron he is the lord of artists, and to him is naturally ascribed the forging of the vault of heaven and of the sun. By another (I c., p. 512) step he advances to the dignity of a maker of the world, father of the beginnings, creator of the egg, and father of the gods. Nay, like Agni, he is said to have generated himself (p. 514). Tvash^ri in tlie Veda. A similar concatenation of ideas seems to have led to the conception of a Vedic deity, otherwise difficult to explain, namely Tvash^r^. Tvash^W means the artificer, the maker and shaper, but it is clear that originally this name belonged to Agni. In some of the Vedic hymns Tvash^r^ is still used as a synonym of Agni (I. 95, 2 ; 5); in others he is identified with Savitr^ visvarupa, the sun of many forms (III. 55, 19 ; X. 10, 5). His character in the Veda is by no means coherent and intelligible, but if we admit Agni, the solar fire, as his foundation, we can account for his more special character as the fire applied to every kind of workmanship, as the forger of the thunderbolt, the maker of the sky, and lastly, as the creator of the ^ Brugsch, 1. e., p. 508. FIRE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHER RELIGIONS. 241 whole world (Va^. Samh. XXIX. 9), and the giver of life (Rv. X. 18, 6). In the end, his original character as Agni was so entirely forgotten that in one passage Tvash^ri is actually represented as having fashioned Agni also (Rv. X. 46, 9). But though the Egyptian Ptah explains some characteristic features in the Vedic Tvash^?’i, there is much that still remains mysterious in the legends told about this Indian Hephaestos, particularly the marriage of his daughter (Sara??yu), and the murder of his three-headed son, Visvarupa (X. 10, 5 ; X. 8, 9). Fire in Greece, Hephaestos. If now we turn our eyes from Egypt to Greece and Rome, we find hardly anything for which we are not fully prepared. Anything like pyrolatry or worship of fire, as a mere element, is foreign to the character of the Greeks. All their gods had become thoroughly personal and almost human long before we know anything about them. Hence, though we can discover an elementary background in Hephaestos, his per¬ sonal character preponderates so decidedly that it has almost obliterated every trace of his origin. According to Homer (II. i. 577 ; Od. viii. 312), Hephaestos was the son of Zeus and Hera, just as Agni was the son of Dyaus and of the waters. These waters repre¬ sented not only the "clouds, but the whole bright atmosphere, where fire, as light or lightning, was sup¬ posed to dwell. Here f'Hp?]) corresponds to a Sanskrit form *Svara, a feminine of Svar, sky, from which also "'HXlos, the sun. He) e, though recognised as the principal wife of Zeus, represented but one out of the ^inany phenomena of nature with which Zeus, the (2) R 242 LECTURE X. highest god of heaven, was supposed to have produced offspring. We have only to remember that in the Veda Dyaus was often assigned to Agni as his father, and the waters and the dawn as his mothers \ in order to understand the Homeric conception that Hephaestos was the child of Zeus and Here. The idea that Hephaestos had no father, but that Here, out of spite, brought him forth by herself, as Zeus had given birth by himself to Athene, is but one of the many half-poetical, half-philosophical, and often purely imaginative expansions of mythology which abound in Greece more than anywhere else. The statue of Here, mentioned by Herodotus (vi. 82), which repre¬ sented her as emitting fire from her breast, is the truest image of her as the bright atmosphere, sending forth lightning from the clouds. As Agni is often called the child of the waters, without any mention of a father, Hephaestos may possibly, in that sense also, have been called the offspring of Here. Even the lameness of Hephaestos may find its explanation in the fact that Agni in the Veda is called footless (apad), and that his movement is unsteady and vacillating. The violent catastrophe when Zeus hurls Hephaestos from the sky, is again a mythological rendering of Zeus hurling his thunderbolt upon the earth, while the myth that it took Hephaestos a whole day to fall from the sky to the earth, and that he touched the island of Lemnos with the setting sun, may contain a recollection of the identity of Agni, as ^ It is true that Dyava-pnthivyau, Heaven and Earth, are often mentioned as the parents of Agni, but this would not justify us in taking Here, with Welcker (Gbtterlehre, i. p. 363), as originally a god¬ dess of the earth. FIEE AS CONCEIVED IN OTHEK KELIGIONS. 243 lightning, with Agni, as the setting sun. Even the hiding of Hephaestos during nine years may be a faint echo of the many stories told in the Veda of Agni wishing to absent himself and hiding in the waters (cf. II. xviii. 398). In the mind of Homer, however, the elementary antecedents of Hephaestos exist no longer. With him he is the crafty smith or carpenter or artist, and it is difficult to say whether Charis or Aphrodite was assigned to him as his wife, because originally she represented the Dawn, or whether this myth was merely intended to indicate the grace and charm of the art of Hephaestos. The name of ''H(^ato-ros is difficult to explain. I thought ^ it might be traced back to the Vedic yavish^Aa, a constant epithet of Agni, meaning the youngest, or the always young. Thus we read, Rv. II. 4, 5 ; gufirurvan ya/i muhur a yuva bhut. ‘Agni, when he had grown old, became always young again. Rv. I. 144, 4: diva na naktam palita/t yuva agani. ‘ By night, as by day, having become grey, he was born young. ’ But there are phonetic difficulties, as I pointed out, which make this derivation doubtful ^ Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, xviii. ^ The question is whether Hephaistos is the original form, or ’F.