INDIA

WHAT CAN IT TEACH US Book: F. Max Muller Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi

Part 2 OBJECTIONS The Veda may be called primitive, because there is no other literary document more primitive than it; but the language, the mythology, the religion and philosophy that meets us in the Veda open vistas of the past which no one would venture to measure in years. In the Rig-Veda we have poems, composed in perfect language, in elaborate metre, telling us about gods and men, about sacrifices and battles, about the varying aspects of nature, and the changing of conditions of society, about duty and pleasure, philosophy and morality articulate voices reaching us from a distance from which we never heard before the faintest whisper. If we mean by primitive the people who have been the first of the Aryan race to leave behind literary relics of their existence on the earth, then I say the Vedic poets are primitive, the Vedic language is primitive, the Vedic religion is primitive, and, taken as a whole, more primitive than anything else that we are ever likely to recover in the whole of history of our race. In India alone, and more particularly in Vedic India, we see a plant entirely grow on native soil, and entirely nurtured by native air. For this reason, because the religion of the Veda was so completely guarded from all strange infections, it is full of lessons which the student of religion could learn nowhere else. After having carefully examined all the traces of supposed foreign influences that have been brought forward by various scholars, I think I may say that there really is no trace whatever of any foreign influence in

the language, the religion, or the ceremonial of the ancient Vedic literature of India. It presents us with a home-grown poetry, and a home-grown religion; and history has preserved to us at least this one relic, in order to teach us what the human mind can achieve if left to itself, surrounded by a scenery and by conditions of life that might have made mans life on earth a paradise, if man did not possess the strange art of turning even a paradise into a place of misery. The Lessons of the Veda Although there is hardly any department of learning which has not received new light and new life from the ancient literature of India, yet nowhere is the light that comes to us from India so important, so novel, and so rich as in the study of religion and mythology. Deva, which we translate by god, was originally nothing but an adjective, expressive of a quality shared by heaven and earth, by the sun and the stars, and the dawn and the sea, namely brightness; and the idea of god, at that early time, contains neither more nor less than what is shared in common by all these bright beings. When the ideas of other gods, and of more active and more distinctly personal gods had been elaborated, the Vedic Rishis asked without hesitation, Who then has made heaven and earth?, not exactly Heaven and earth, as conceived before, but heaven and earth as seen everyday, as a part of what began to be called Nature or the Universe. When we see two giant specters of Heaven and Earth on the background of the Vedic religion, exerting their influence for a time, and then vanishing before the light of younger and more active gods, we learn a lesson which we can hardly learn anywhere else the lesson how gods were made and unmade how the Beyond or the Infinite was named by different names in order to bring it near to the mind of man, to make it for a time comprehensible, until, when name after name had proved of no avail, a nameless God was left to answer best the restless craving of the human heart. They had what I call religion, though it was very simple, and handy not reduced as yet to the form of a creed. There is a Beyond, that was all they felt and knew, though they tried, as well as they could, to give names to that Beyond, and thus to change religion into a religion. They had not yet a name for God certainly not in the our sense of the word or even a general name for the gods; but they invented name after name to enable them to grasp and comprehend by some outward and visible token powers whose presence they felt in nature, though their true and full essence was to them, as it is to us, invisible and incomprehensive.

Vedic Deities The next important phenomenon of nature which was represented in the Veda as a terrestrial deity is Fire, in Sanskrit Agni, in Latin ignis. In the worship which is paid to the fire and the in the high praises bestowed on Agni we can clearly perceive the traces of a period in history of man in which not only the most essential comfort of life, but life itself, depended on the knowledge of producing fire. Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, whatever name we choose to call it. The name of Indra is peculiar to India, and must have been formed after the separation of the great Aryan family had taken place, for we find it neither in Greek, nor in Latin, nor in German. Parjanya was meant originally for the cloud, so far as it gives rain; but as soon as the idea of a giver arose the visible cloud became the outboard appearance only, or the body of that giver, and the giver himself was somewhere else, we know not where. Sometimes Parjanya does the work of Indra; sometimes of Vayu, the wind, sometimes of Soma, the giver of rain. Yet with all this he is not Dyaus, nor Indra, nor the Maruts, nor Vayu, nor Soma. He stands by himself, a separate person, a separate god, as we should say nay, one of the oldest of the Aryan gods. The same god Parjanya, the God of clouds and thunder and lightning and rain, who was invoked in India a thousand years before Alexander reached India, has been remembered and believed in by Lituanian peasants on the frontier between East Prussia and Russia, not more than two hundred years ago, and has retained its old name Parjanya, which means showering, under the form of Perkuna, which in Lituanian is a name and name only, without any etymological meaning at all, nay, has lived on, as some scholars assure us, in an abbreviated form in most Slavonic dialects, namely, in Old Slavonic as Perun, in Polish as Piorun, in Bohemian as Peraun, all meaning thunder or thunder-storm. Varuna, a name derived from the root var, to cover, is one of the most interesting creations of the Hindu mind, because though we can still perceive the physical background from which he rises, the vast, starry, brilliant expanse above, his features, more than those of any of the Vedic gods, have become completely transfigured, and he stands before us as a god who watches over the

world, punishes the evil-doer, and even forgives the sins of those who implore his pardon. In several verses of the Vedic hymns Varuna was called Aditya, or son of Aditi. Now Aditi means infinite, from dita, bound, and a, not, that is not bound, not limited, absolute, infinite. Aditi itself is invoked now and then in Veda as the Beyond, as what is beyond the earth and the sky, and the sun and the dawn a most surprising conception in that early period of religious thought. More frequently, however, than Aditi, we meet with the Adityas, literally the sons of Aditi, or the gods beyond the visible earth and sky, - in one sense, the Infinite gods. One of them is Varuna, others Mitra and Aryaman (Bhaga, Daksha, Amsa), most of them abstract names, though pointing to heaven and the solar light of heavens as their first, though almost forgotten source. The whole of nature was alive to the poets of the Veda, the presence of the gods was felt everywhere, and in that sentiment of the presence of the gods there was a germ of religious morality, sufficiently strong, it would seem, to restrain people from committing as it wee before the eyes of their gods what they were ashamed to commit before the eyes of men. The names of Vedic gods were all meant to express the Beyond, the Invisible behind the Visible, the Infinite within the Finite, the Supernatural above the Natural, the Divine, Omnipresent and Omnipotent. They failed in expressing what, by its very nature, must always remain inexpressible. But that Inexpressible itself remained, and in spite of all these failures, it never succumbed, or vanished from the mind of the ancient thinkers and poets, but always called for new and better names, nay calls for them even now, and will call for them to the very end of mans existence upon earth. Veda and Vedanta The Rig-Veda contains a collection of ten books of hymns addressed to various deities and consists of 1017 (1028) poems, 10,580 verses and about 153,826 words. This may sound startling, but yet is a fact that can easily be ascertained by anybody who doubts it at the present moment, if any Manuscripts (MS) of the Rig-Veda were lost, we should be able to recover the whole of it from the memory of the Shrotriyas in India. These native students learn the Veda by heart, and they learn it from the mouth of their Guru, never from a MS, still less from my printed edition and after a time they teach it again to their pupils. The whole of the Rig-Veda, and a great deal more, still exists at the present in the oral tradition of a number of scholars who, if they liked, could write down every letter, and every accent, exactly as we find them in our old MSS.

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The Brahmans are regarded throughout the five divisions of India as the most respectable. They revere their Scriptures, the four Vedas, containing about 100,000 verses. The Vedas are handed down from mouth to mouth, not written on paper. There are in every generation some intelligent Brahmans who can recite those 100,000 verses. I myself saw such men. - I-tsing [Chinese scholar to India 7th Century AD] There are I fact three religions in the Veda, or, if I may say so, three naves in one great temple, reared, as it were, before our eyes by poets, prophets, and philosophers. In the same manner in which, out of the bright powers of nature, the Devas or gods had arisen, there arose out of predicates shared in common by the departed such as Pitri, fathers, preta, gone away, another concept, what we should call Manes, the kind ones, Ancestors, Shades, Spirits or Ghosts, whose worship was no where more fully developed than in India. That common name Pitris or Fathers, gradually attracted towards itself all that the fathers shared in common. It came to mean not only fathers, but invisible, kind, powerful, immortal, heavenly beings, and we can watch in the Veda, better perhaps than anywhere else, the inevitable, yet most touching metamorphosis of ancient thought, - the love of the child for father and mother becoming transfigured into an instinctive belief in the immortality of the soul. The Pitris and the Devas had each their independent origin and they represent two totally distinct phases of the human mind in the creation of its objects of worship. We read in the Rig-Veda [VI.52.4]: My the rising Dawn protect me, may the flowing Rivers protect me, may the firm Mountains protect me, may the Fathers protect me at this invocation of the gods. The daily Pitri-yajna or Ancestor-worship is one of the five sacrifices called the Great Sacrifices, which every married man ought to perform day by day. They are mentioned in the Grihya-Sutras [Asv. III.1], as Deva-yajna, for the Devas, Bhuta-yajna, for animals etc., Pitri-yajna, for the Fathers, Brahma-yajna for Brahman, i.e. study of the Veda and Manushya-yajna, for men, i.e. hospitality, etc. The Brahmans were socially and intellectually, a class of men of high breeding. They were a recognized and, no doubt, a most essential element in the ancient society of India. As they lived for others, and were excluded from most of the lucrative pursuits of life, it was a social, and it soon became a religious duty, that they should be supported by the community at large.

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But there is still another Beyond that found expression in the ancient religion of India. Besides the Devas and the Pitris, there was a third world, without which the ancient religion of India could not have become what we see in the Veda. That third Beyond was what the poets of the Veda called Rita. We call that Rita, that straight, direct or right line, when we apply it in a more general sense, the Law of Nature; and when we apply it to the moral world, we try to express the same idea again by speaking of the Moral Law, the law on which our life is founded, the external Law of Right and Reason; or, it may be, that which makes righteousness both inside us and without. This law underlies everything, a law in which we might trust, whatever befall, a law which speaks within us with the divine voice of conscience, and tells us this is Rita, this is right, this is true, whatever the statutes of our ancestors, or even the voices of our bright gods may say to the contrary. Philosophy in India is, what it ought to be, not the denial, but the fulfillment of religion; it is the highest religion, and the oldest name of the oldest system of philosophy in India is Vedanta, that is, the end, the goal, the highest object of the Veda. Vedanta is the religion, or the philosophy, whichever you like to call it, that has lived on from about 500 BC to the present day. If the people of India can be said to have now any system of religion at all, - apart from their ancestral sacrifices and their Shraddhas, and apart from mere caste-observances, - it is found in the Vedanta philosophy, the leading tenets of which are known to some extent in every village. There is, in fact, an unbroken continuity between the most modern and the most ancient phases of Hindu thought, extending over more than three thousand years. To the present day India acknowledges no higher authority in matters of religion, ceremonial, customs, and law than the Veda, and so long as India is India, nothing will extinguish that ancient spirit of Vedantism which is breathed by every Hindu from his earliest youth, and pervades in various forms the prayers even of the idolator, the speculations of the philosopher, and the proverbs of the beggar. For knowing something of the secret springs which determine the character, the thoughts and the deeds, of the lowest as well as the highest amongst the people in India, - an acquaintance with their religion, which is founded on the Veda, and with their philosophy, which is founded on the Vedanta, is highly desirable. Behind all the Devas or gods, the authors of the Upanishads discovered the Atman or the Self. Of that Self they predicated three things only, that it is, that it perceives, and that it enjoys eternal bliss. All other predicates were negative: it is not this, it is not that it is beyond anything that we can conceive and name.

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But that self, the Highest Self, the Parmatman, could be discovered after a severe moral and intellectual discipline only, and those who had not yet discovered it were allowed to worship lower gods, and to employ more poetical names to satisfy their human wants. Those who knew the other gods to be but names or persons personae or marks, in the true sense of the word Pratikas, as they call them in Sanskrit knew that those who worshipped these names or persons, worshipped in truth the Highest Self, though ignorantly. This is a most characteristic feature in the religious history of India. Even in the Bhagavad-Gita, a rather popular and exoteric exposition of Vedantic doctrines, the Supreme Lord or Bhagavat himself is introduced as saying: Even those who worship idols worship Me. But that was not all. As behind the names of Agni, Indra and Prajapati, and behind all the mythology of nature, the ancient sages of India had discovered the Atman let us call it the objective Self they perceived also behind the veil of the body, behind the senses, behind the mind, and behind the reason (in fact behind the mythology of the soul, which we often call psychology) another Atman, or the subjective Self. That Self, too, was to be discovered by a severe moral and intellectual discipline only, and those who wished to find it, who wished to know, not themselves, but their Self, had to cut far deeper than the senses, or the mind, or the reason, or the ordinary ego. When that point had been reached, then the highest knowledge began to dawn, the Self within (the Pratyagatman) was drawn towards the Highest Self (the Parmatman), it found its true self in the Highest Self, and the oneness of the subjective with the objective Self was recognized as underlying all reality, as the dream of religion as the pure light of philosophy. Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi

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