The Religion of the Veda

Front matter

AMERICAN LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS SEVENTH SERIES—1906–1907

THE RELIGION OF THE VEDA (From Rig-Veda to Upanishads)

BY Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in John Hopkins University, Baltimore

Lecture 1

LECTURE THE FIRST.

India the Land of Religions.—The Veda.

I is the land of religions in more than one sense. It has produced out of its own resources a number of distinctive systems and sects, two of which, at least, are of world-wide interest and importance.

Brahmanism, in its manifold aspects, is to this day the religion of about 200 millions of people in India herself, a matter of interest on the face of it. But its universal importance lies with the Brahmanical systems of religious philosophy, especially the two known respectively as Vedānta and Sānkhya. These are two religio-philosophical, or theosophical systems which essay to probe the twin riddle of the universe and human life. They do this in so penetrating a way as to place them by the side of the most profound philosophic endeavors of other nations. The beginnings of this philosophy are found in the so-called Upanishads, a set of treatises which are part of the Veda. The Upanishads contain the higher religion of the Veda. The essence of higher Brahmanical religion is Upanishad religion. The religion of the Upanishads is part of the theme of these lectures.

Buddhism started in the bosom of Brahmanism. Its radical reforms, concerning both doctrine and practical life, are directed in good part against Brahmanism. Yet Buddhism is a religion genuinely Hindu in its texture. It shares with Brahmanism its dominant religious ideas. Transmigration of souls, pessimism, and the all-absorbing desire to be released from an endless chain of existences, linked together by successive deaths, – these are the axioms of both Brahmanism and Buddhism. After spreading over the continent of India Buddhism crossed over into Ceylon, Farther India, and the islands of the Asiatic Archipelago. To the north it passed into and across the great Himālaya Mountains to Nepaul, Thibet, Turkestan, China, Korea, and Japan. In its various forms it is to this day one of the world's great religions. There are no absolutely reliable statistics as to the number of Buddhists upon the surface of the earth; 300 millions may be regarded as a conservative estimate of the number of people who either are Buddhists, or whose religion has been shaped by Buddhist ideas. Brahmanism and Buddhism, both Hindu products, together supply the religious needs of 500 millions of the earth's inhabitants.

In another sense India is the land of religions. Nowhere else is the texture of life so much impregnated with religious convictions and practices. At a very early time belief in the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), whose precise origin in India is still something of a problem, planted itself down in the Hindu mind as the basis and fundamental axiom of all speculations about the soul and future life. This of itself is merely a theory. The practical importance of this theory is, that it is coupled almost from the start with a pessimistic view of life. According to this the everlasting round of existences is a nuisance, and release from it an imperative necessity. It would be difficult to find anywhere else a purely speculative notion which has taken so firm a hold upon practical life. It pervades the Hindu consciousness in a far more real and intimate way than its great rival, the belief in an eternal future life, pervades the religious thought of the Western world.

From the beginning of India's history religious institutions control the character and the development of its people to an extent unknown elsewhere. Hindu life from birth to death, and even after death in the fancied life of the Fathers, or Manes in heaven, is religious, or sacramental throughout. It is surrounded by institutions and practices, and clouded by superstitions which are discarded only by them that have worked their way to the highest philosophical aspects of religion.

The religious life of the Brahmanical Hindu is divided into the four stages of religious disciple; god and sacrificing householder; contemplative forest dweller; and wandering, world-abandoning ascetic. Such at least is the theory of their religious law. Even though practice at all times fell short of this mechanical and exacting arrangement, yet the claim is allowed that life is an essentially solitary religious pilgrimage, the goal being personal salvation. There is no provision in such a scheme for the interests of the State and the development of the race. Unintentionally, but none the less effectively, they are left out of account, leaving a corresponding blank in India's national character.

Over this hovers, like a black cloud, another institution, the system, or rather the chaos, of caste. Its grotesque inconsistencies and bitter tyranny have gone far to make the Hindu what he is. The corrosive properties of this single institution, more than anything else whatsoever, have checked the development of India into a nation. They have made possible the spectacle of a country of nearly 300 millions of inhabitants, governed by the skill of 60,000 military and 60,000 civilian foreigners.

In olden times there were four castes: the Brahman, or priestly caste; the Kshatriya, or warrior caste; the Vaiçya, or merchant and farmer caste; and the Çūdra, or servitor caste. Then came many cross-castes, the result of intermarriages between members of the four original castes. Such marriages are now strictly taboo. Gradually, differences of occupation, trade, and profession, and, to a considerable extent also, difference of geography, established themselves as the basis of caste distinction, until the number of castes became legion. At the present time there are nearly 2000 Brahman castes alone. According to an intelligent Hindu observer of our own day the Sārasvata Brahmins of the Panjab alone number 469 tribes; the Kshatriyas are split up into 590; the Vaiçyas and Çūdras into even more. There is a Hindustani proverb, "eight Brahmins, nine kitchens." In the matter of food and intermarriage all castes are now completely shut off one from the other. A tailor may not, as is the custom with all other peoples, invite his neighbor, an honest shoemaker, to share his humble fare. The son of the shoemaker may not woo and wed the blooming daughter of the barber. Even a minor deviation, some new trick of trade, will at once breed a new caste. In certain parts of India fisher-folk who knit the meshes of their nets from right to left may not intermarry with them that knit from left to right. In Cuttack, the most southerly district of Bengal, there is no intercourse between potters who turn their wheels a-sitting and make small pots, and them that stand up for the manufacture of large pots. A certain class of dairymen who make butter from unboiled milk have been excluded from the caste, and cannot marry the daughters of milkmen who churn upon more orthodox principles. Even as late a census as that of 1901 reports, and in a way gives its sanction to the Cimmerian notion that the touch of the lower caste man defiles the higher:

While a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher cast only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of twenty-four feet, toddy drawers at thirty-six feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at forty-eight feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than sixty-four feet.

Thus Hindu society is split into infinitely small divisions, each holding itself aloof from the other, each engaged in making its exclusiveness as complete as possible. Members of a lower caste cannot rise into a higher caste; the individual is restricted to such progress only as is possible within the confines of his caste. To the Pariah the door of hope is shut forever. There is little chance for national or patriotic combination.

Moreover the laws, or rather the vagaries of caste have taken largely the place of practical religion in the mind of the average Hindu who has not emancipated himself through higher philosophy. The supreme law which really concerns him in his daily life is, to eat correctly; to drink correctly; to marry correctly. The broader, more usual, dictates of religion, such as worship of the gods and ethical conduct, are not ignored, but they take a distinctly secondary place. India has at all times put the stamp of religion upon much that Europe counts as social habit, or social institution. There is not, and there seems never to have been, fixed creed in India. Hinduism has always been tolerant, liberal, latitudinarian in matters of abstract belief; tyrannous, illiberal, narrow-minded as regards such social practices as can be in any way connected with religion. Fluidity of doctrine, rigidity of practice may be regarded as the unspoken motto of Hindu religion at all times.

Fortunately there are not wanting signs of a revulsion of feeling which bids fair to sweep the entire system of caste with all its incredible foolishness off the face of the earth. The great Hindu reformer Rāja Rammohun Roy declared as early as the year 1824 that "caste divisions are as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." The late Svāmī Vivekānanda, the brilliant representative of Hinduism at the "Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in connection with the Universal Exposition in 1893, passed the last years of his too short life (he died in 1902) in a suburb of Calcutta, doing philanthropic work, denouncing caste and the outcasting of those who had crossed the ocean, and recommending the Hindus to take to the eating of meat. The voices of other reformers are lifting. Especially the two great native religious reform associations, the Brāhma Samāj, or Theistic Association of Bengal, and the Ārya Samāj, or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Panjab, different as are their aims in other respects, are marshalled on the side of opposition to caste, as an anachronism, anomaly, and bar to social and national progress.

The dreadful institution of Suttee, or widow-burning abolished in 1829, under the administration of Lord William Bentinck, by decree of government; the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzying quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has of overshadowing individual sanity and public interest. There has been, and there still is, too much so-called religion in India: Brahmanical hierarchy, sacerdotalism, asceticism, caste; infinitely diversified polytheism and idolatry; cruel religious practices; and bottomless superstition. All this the higher Hindu religions, or rather religious philosophies, blow away as the wind does chaff. In their view such religiosity is mere illusion or ignorance, to save from which is their profession. But they can save only the illumined of mind. On the real life of India the great philosophies are merely a thin film. Anyhow they have not as yet penetrated down to the Hindu people, and we may question whether India's salvation will come that way, rather than through the growth of social and political intelligence which so gifted a people is sure, in the long run, to obtain.

The student of the History of Religions has good reason to think of India as the land of religions in yet another sense. Not only has India produced out of its own mental resources many important religions and theosophic systems, but it has carried on these processes continuously, uninterrupted by distracting outside influences. The Moghul conquests in Northern India introduced Mohammedanism to a limited extent, and Mohammedanism fused with Hinduism in the hybrid religion of the Sikhs. A small number of Zoroastrian Parsis, driven from Persia during the Mohammedan conquest, found a friendly refuge for themselves and the religion of Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) in the West of India. Aside from that there is no record of permanent outside influence on a larger scale, until, in the last century, the above-mentioned Brāhma Samāj, a kind of religious Volapük, or Esperanto, undertakes, in the most praiseworthy spirit, upon a universal theistic platform, to blend and harmonise the best in Hindu religious thought, with the best that may be found in other religions. In this way Hindu religion is more strictly native than any of the great religions of mankind. This is no doubt due mainly to India's geographical isolation, and to her insular secular history. It has had the merit of keeping her religious development continuous and organic. Every important idea has a traceable past history; every important idea is certain to develop in the future. We may say that a body of 3500 years of organic religious growth lies more or less open before the eyes of the student of India's religions, to dissect, to study, and to philosophise upon.

This great period of time has of late become definite in a rather important sense. Within recent years there were discovered at Tel-el-Amarna, in Upper Egypt, numerous cuneiform tablets containing letters from tributary kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitani, Phœnicia, and Canaan, addressed to certain Egyptian Pharaohs, their liege lords. These tablets have thrown much new light upon the history of Western Asia. There is among them a letter written by a king of Mitani in Syria, Dushratta by name. In this letter figure among others the names of his brother Artashuvara and his grandfather Artatama. These names are obviously Iranian (Persian), or "Iranoid"; with the tablets themselves they date back to at least 1600 B.C. The names Artashuvara and Artatama open out with the syllables arta-, familiar to Western students of history as part of the numberless Persian names like Artaxerxes, Artaphernes, etc. This stem arta is identical with arta- of the Western Iranian, Achemenidan inscriptions, with asha of the Avesta, and with ṛta of the Veda. The word means "cosmic order," or "order of the universe." We shall find it later on, figuring as one of the most important religious conceptions of the Rig-Veda. We have here at any rate a definite lower date for the idea; it is likely to have existed a long time before 1600 B.C. From the point of view of the history of religious ideas we may, in fact we must, begin the history of Hindu religion at least with the history of this conception. Broad as the ocean, and as uninterrupted in its sweep there lies before us a period of thousands of years of the religious thought and practice of the most religious people in the history of the world.

Now this brings us face to face with the tried and true fact that the religious history of India does not really begin at the time when the Veda, the earliest literature, was composed, but that it begins much earlier. In the first place, it shares a fairly clear common life with the ancient religion of Iran (Persia) in a prehistoric time, the so-called Indo-Iranian or Aryan period. The reconstruction of these common religious properties is purely prehistoric. It partakes of the fate of all prehistoric studies; it is not definite, but more or less hazy. Yet, such as it is, it counts fairly with the best that may be achieved in this way. It is based upon the plainly evident relationship between the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta, the most ancient sacred books of the two peoples. No student of either religion questions that they drew largely from a common source, and therefore mutually illumine each other.

I am sure that the full meaning of this last statement will appear clearer after a word of explanation. Students of profane history are accustomed to see ancient Persia with her face turned westward. It is to them the Persia that conquers, or controls through her satrapies, Assyria and Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, or parts of Asia Minor. It is to them the Persia that falls down before Greece. In the day of her greatest glory Darius I. Hystaspes carved into the Behistan rock, 300 feet above the ground, the hugh trilingual cuneiform inscription, in which he claims suzerainty over twenty-three countries. To all intents and purposes he claims the earth for his own. Among the countries mentioned are parts adjacent to the extreme north-west of India: Drangiana, Arachosia, Gandhāra, etc. Between 500-330 B.C., the rule of the Achemenidan Persian dynasty had without doubt sent out its loosely attached satrapies to the land of the Indus River. But this did not result in the permanent attachment of one country to the other. Again, the so-called Graeco-Parthian rulers, successors of Alexander the Great in the Persian countries of Parthia and Baktria, from about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., established principalities in the north-west of India, notably the Indo-Parthian kingdoms of Taxila and Arachosia. But this political relation, again, proved unstable and transient.

A small number of Parsis, after the Mohammedan conquest of Persia, fled to India with their priests, sacred fire, and the manuscripts of the Avesta, their holy scriptures. Their descendants, about 80,000 in number, still adhere to their ancient religion. They form one of the most esteemed, wealthy, and philanthropic communities on the west shores of India, notably in the city of Bombay. It is not of record that they had even the faintest idea that they were fleeing into the hospitable bosom of a people related by blood and language, or that the Hindus who gave them shelter knew that they were receiving their very own kin. As far as we know, the Aryan Hindus at any rate, throughout their history, are entirely unconscious of the important fact that, across the mountains to the north-west of their country, dwelt at all times a branch of their own stock – the other half of the so-called Indo-Iranians or Aryans.

And yet, the languages of the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta, the respective bibles of the two peoples, are mere dialects of the same speech. Students regularly enter upon the study of the Avestan language through the door of the Veda. Entire passages of the Avesta may be turned into good Vedic merely by applying certain regular sound changes. It is said sometimes that there is less difference between the Veda and the Avesta than be- tween the Veda and the later Hindu Epic, the Mahābhārata. This is, in my opinion, an exaggeration, but it is significant that the statement could be made at all. The early religions and the religious institutions of the Hindus and Persians show, to be sure, far greater independence from one another than their languages, but they are, nevertheless, at the root much the same. So it has come to pass that a not at all mean part of the Vedic Pantheon and Vedic religious ideas begin before the Veda. Or, to put it even more paradoxically, Indian religion begins before its arrival in India.

Yet further, beyond the common period of the Hindus and the Persians, there is a still remoter period which is not entirely closed to our view. It is the common Indo-European time, the time when the Hindus and Persians still shared their language and home with the remaining members of the same stock, the Hellenes, Italians, Celts, Teutons, and Slavs. In this altogether prehistoric time there also existed certain germs of religion, and some of these germs grew into important features of the later religions of these peoples. The religion of the Veda is indebted to this early time to an extent that is not negligible. We shall see later on in what way the two layers of prehistoric religious matter have contributed to and affected the shaping of Vedic thought. For the present it will be advantageous to turn to the Vedic religion of historic times, so that there may be some basis for discriminating between what is old and what is new. And as it would not be gracious to presume too much knowledge of so remote a theme as the Veda, we must first describe briefly the documents of which consists the Veda, the most ancient literary monument of India, the most ancient literary document of the Indo-European peoples – the foundation for all time of India's religious thought.

THE VEDA

The word veda means literally “knowledge," that is, "sacred knowledge." It is derived from vid, "to know," and connected with Greek (F)οἶδα, Gothic wait, German weiss, English wit, "to know." The term Veda is used in two ways: either as the collective designation of the entire oldest sacred literature of India, or as the specific name of single books belonging to that literature. So then, on the one hand, we speak of the Veda as the bible of ancient India; or, on the other hand, we speak of Rig-Veda, Atharva-Veda, etc., as individual books of that great collection. The number of books which, in one sense or another, are counted as Veda is a hundred or more. The Hindus themselves were never very keen about canonicity; quasi-Vedic books, or, as we should say, Pseudo-Vedic books were composed at a very late date, when the various and peculiar sources of early inspiration had dried up; they kept pouring new, mostly sour wine into the old skins. The huge Concordance of the Vedas, which it has been my fate to publish this year (1906), absorbs about 120 texts more or less Vedic.

It is truly humiliating to students of ancient India to have to answer the inevitable question as to the age of the Veda with a meek, "We don't know." As regards their texture, the books of the Veda claim great antiquity with no uncertain voice. One should like to see this intrinsically archaic quality held up by actual dates; those same, almost fabulous, yet perfectly authentic dates that are being bandied about in the ancient history of Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. The late Professor William D. Whitney left behind the witty saying that Hindu dates are merely ten-pins set up to be bowled down again. This is not altogether so. Buddha died 477 B.C. Alexander invaded India in 326 B.C. In the year 315 B.C. Candragupta, or Sandrakottos, "Alexander-Killer," as Greek writers ominously mouthed over his name, led a successful revolt against Alexander's prefects and established the Maurya dynasty in Pātaliputra, the Palibothra of the Greeks, the Patna of to-day. The most important date in Hindu secular history is that of Candragupta's grandson, the famous Buddhist Emperor Açoka or Piyadassi, who ruled India from north to south around about 250 B.C. His edicts, carved into rock all over his great empire, show us the singular spectacle of a great ruler who used his power to propagate his religion peacefully. His inscriptions upon pillars and rocks boast not of victory or heroic deed; they exhort his people to virtue, warn against sin, and plead for tolerance and love of humanity. This is an important date in the history of India, but an even more important date in the history of good manners.

Unquestionably a century or two must have passed between the conclusion of the Vedic period and the beginnings of Buddhism. Buddhist literature presupposes Brahmanical literature and religion in a stage of considerable advancement beyond the Vedas. We are, therefore, reasonably safe in saying that the real Vedic period was concluded about 700 B.C. We are further on safe ground in demanding a number of centuries for the much stratified language, literature, and religion of the Veda. But how many? It is as easy to imagine three as thirteen or twenty-three. Only one thing is certain. Vedic ideas are very old. I have noted the fact that the concept ṛat, "cosmic or universal order," is found in cut and dried Iranian names in Western Asia as early as 1600 B.C. I am, for my part, and I think I voice many scholars, now much more inclined to listen to an early date, say 2000 B.C., for the beginnings of Vedic literary production, and to a much earlier date for the beginnings of the institutions and religious concepts which the Veda has derived from those prehistoric times which cast their shadows forward into the records that are in our hands. Anyhow, we must not be beguiled by that kind of conservatism which merely salves the conscience into thinking that there is better proof for any later date, such as 1500, 1200, or 1000 B.C., rather than the earlier date of 2000 B.C. Once more, frankly, we do not know.

Vedic tradition is in some respects the most remarkable in recorded history. From the entire Vedic period we have not one single piece of antiquarian or archæological material, not one bit of real property; not a building, nor a monument; not a coin, jewel, or utensil; – nothing but winged words. Even the manuscripts of these precious texts, splendid as we know their authority to be on inner evidence are of comparatively recent date. We do not know when the Vedas were first committed to writing. Even if they were written down during the Vedic period itself, as I think altogether likely, the early manuscripts were certain to perish in the furious Indian climate. They must, in that case, have been saved by diligent copying and recopying. The majority of the manuscripts upon which are based our editions of Vedic texts date from recent centuries. Manuscripts that date back to the fourteenth century of our era are rare; only a very few go back to the twelfth.

Here, however, enters one of the curiosities of Hindu religious life. The adherents of a certain Veda or Vedic school, no matter whether the text of that school was reduced to writing or not, must, in theory, know their texts by heart. These are the so-called Çrotriyas or "Oral Traditionalists." They live to this day, being, as it were, living manuscripts of their respective Vedas. The eminent Hindu scholar, the late Shankar Pandurang Pandit, tells us in the preface to his great Bombay edition of the Atharva-Veda how he used three of these oral reciters of the Atharva-Veda out of a total of only four that were at that time still alive in the Dekkhan; and how their oral authority proved to be quite as weighty as the written authority of his manuscripts. These living manuscripts were respectively, Messrs. Bāpujī Jīvanrām; Keçava Bhat bin Dājī Bhat; and Venkan Bhatjī, the last "the most celebrated Atharva Vaidika in the Dekkhan." Mr. Pandit cites them by sigla, quite in the manner of inanimate manuscripts, respectively, as Bp, K, and V. They are, I believe, now all dead.

We are waiting now for the time when the India Exploration Society shall step out from its existence on paper, and take hold of the shovel and the spade. With bated breath we shall then be watching to see whether great good fortune will make it possible to dig through the thick crust of centuries that are piled upon the Vedic period. If so, it will be something like the revelation of the Mycenean age that was found at the root of Hellenic civilisation. Until that time Vedic life and institutions, reported only by word of mouth, must remain an uncertain quantity. The hymns of the Veda are to a considerable degree cloudy, turgid, and mystic; taken by themselves they will never yield a clear picture of human life that fits any time or place. We have from the entire Vedic period no annals except priestly annals, or such at least as have been edited by priests. It is as though we relied upon cloister chronicles alone for our knowledge of the politics and institutions of a certain time. Or, to use an even homelier comparison, as though we had to reconstruct the social conditions of a more modern time from an intercepted boarding-school correspondence. The poets, or priestly writers of the Veda are entirely preoccupied with their own interests; if we want anything like secular records of India we must look to a later time.

We do not even know exactly what a term as familiar as rāja (rēx) "King," meant in those early days. Was a Rāja a great potentate, or merely a tribal chieftain? We know that the early Vedic period was a cattle-raising age. The lowing of kine was lovely music to the ear of the Vedic poet. But there were also workers in metals, chariots, navigation of some kind, gold, jewels, and trade. This is all too vague, and to some extent introduces uncertain quantities into our estimation of Vedic religion.

At an unknown date then, as we have had to confess reluctantly, Aryan tribes or clans (viç) began to migrate from the Iranian highlands to the north of the Hindu-Kush Mountains into the north-west of India, the plains of the river Indus and its tributaries, the Panjab, or the land of the five streams. The river Ganges, so essential to a picture of India in historical times, and even more bound up with all Western poetic fancies about India, is scarcely mentioned in the Rig-Veda. This same text is full of allusions to the struggles of the fair-skinned Aryas with the dark-skinned aborigines, the Dasyus. The struggle is likely to have been bitter. The spread of Aryan civilisation was gradual, and resulted finally in the up-building of a people whose civilisation was foreign and superior, but whose race quality was determined a good deal by the overwhelmingly large, native, dark-skinned, non-Aryan population. At the beginning of our knowledge of India we are face to face with an extensive poetical literature, in set metres. This is crude on the whole, even when compared with classical Sanskrit literature of later times. Yet, it shows, along with uncouth naïveté and semi-barbarous turgidity, a good deal of beauty and elevation of thought, and a degree of skill bordering on the professional, in the handling of language and metre. That this product was not created out of nothing on Indian soil follows from the previously mentioned close connection with the earliest product of Persian literature, the Avesta. Even the metric types of Veda and Avesta are closely related.