The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6)

In this transformation, which we find in the later writings of the Buddhists, the entire Indian and Brahmanic view of the world reappears in its widest extent. The divine mountain Meru forms the centre of the earth. Beneath it, in the deepest abyss, is hell. The Buddhists are even more minute than the Brahmans in describing the torments and subdivisions of hell, and with them also Yama is the god of death and the under world.702 On the summit of Meru Indra is enthroned, who with the Buddhists also is the special protector of kings, and with him are the thirty-three gods of light (p. 161). In the Buddhist mythology the evil spirits, the Asuras, attack Indra and the bright spirits, as in the Vedic conception; but the Asuras could not advance further than the third of the four stages which the Buddhists ascribed to Meru, after the analogy of the four truths and the four stages of sanctification. The Gandharvas have to defend the eastern side of Meru against the Asuras; the Yakshas (the spirits of the god Kuvera, p. 161), the northern; the Kumbhandas (the dwarfs), the southern; and the Nagas or serpent spirits, the western side. In the Buddhist view the earth, the divine mountain, and the heaven of Indra above it make up the world of desire and sin. Indra and his deities are supreme over certain supernatural powers, but they are powerless against the man who has controlled himself;703 they propagate themselves like men, are subject to the doom of regeneration, and can decline into lower existences. In this sense, with the Buddhists, the evil spirit of desire and sensual pleasure is enthroned over the heaven of Indra; his name is Kama or Mara; he is the cause of all generation, and hence of the restless revolution of the world, and of all misery. Above this heaven of the god of sin, which is filled with innumerable troops of the spirits of desires, begin the four upper heavens, the heaven of the liberated, into which those pass who have delivered themselves from sensual appetite, desire, and existence.704

Among the Buddhists there could be no question of the worship of these unreal deities, without power to bless or destroy. Their cultus was limited to the person of the founder, the symbols and memorials of his life, the relics of his body, the places sanctified by his presence. But they could not slay animals in sacrifice to the relics or the Manes of Buddha, nor invite the extinguished etherealized dead to the enjoyment of the soma. Of what value was the blood or flesh of victims to one who would never wake again; and how could they offer bloody sacrifices to one with whom it was the first commandment not to slay any living thing? Agni could carry no gift up to him who was perfected; and moreover Buddha had himself expressly forbidden sacrifice by fire; the Buddhists were to tend the law as the Brahmans tended the fire.705 They could only place offerings of flowers, fruits, and perfumes at the sacred shrines, before the relics of the Enlightened, as signs of thankfulness and reverence, as symbols of worship (puja). Prayer was in reality unknown to a cultus which was directed to a deceased man, and not to a deity. Believers must be content with the symbols of reverence, with singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to the Enlightened, for having discovered truth, proclaimed liberation, shown pity, and brought help to all creatures; they must limit themselves to the confessions which these doctrines comprised, to hearing moral exhortations, to pronouncing and wishing blessings: "that all creatures may be free from sickness and wicked pleasure, that every man may become an Arhat in the future regeneration."706 The gradual elevation of the position of Buddha, and the more complete apotheosis which was granted to him, led to direct invocations of the Enlightened. As the benefactor of all creatures he was besought for his blessing; as the liberator he was entreated to confer the power of liberation, and liberation. When after the end of the third century B.C. statues of Buddha stood in the halls of the Viharas, it became usual to invoke Buddha to be present in these statues. By the consecration which they underwent at the hands of the priests they received a ray of the spirit of Buddha, and thus acquired a beneficent miraculous power.

At morning, midday, and evening, i. e. at the times when it was customary among the Aryas to offer prayers, or gifts, or strew grains of corn, the monks of the Enlightened were summoned to prayers. At the new and full moon, when the Bhikshus fasted, and met for confession, the laity also discontinued their occupations, assembled to read the law, or hear preachers, or utter prayers. In no religious community was prayer so frequent and so mechanical as among the Buddhists, and this is still the case. Greater festivals were celebrated at the beginning of the spring, in the later spring, and at the end of the rainy season. The festival held at the new moon in the first month of spring, is said to have been a festival in commemoration of the victory which Buddha won in the disputation and contest of miracles with the Brahmanic penitents (p. 356). Buddha himself is said to have indulged in secular enjoyment for eight days after this success. As a fact, it was, no doubt, the customary spring festival – a remnant of the old Arian custom, to celebrate in the spring the victory gained by the spirits of light and the clear air over the gloom of the winter – which the Buddhists now celebrated in honour of their great teacher. At the full moon of the month Vaiçakha in the later spring, the day was celebrated on which the Enlightened saw the light for the salvation of the world. With the Buddhists the rainy season was the sacred season, the time for reflection and retirement. At the end of the rains Buddha had always revisited the world, in order to announce to it salvation; and like him, his followers, the Bhikshus, who could not leave the Vihara in the rainy season, returned on this day to the world, in order to recommence their wanderings and preaching for the salvation of living creatures. This return of the teachers to the world was marked by a great festival, at which the Bhikshus received presents from the laity; sermons were preached, and processions held in which the lamps, no doubt, represented the light returning after the gloom of the rains, or the light of salvation which Buddha had kindled for the world.

The combination of the clergy and laity in the Buddhist church was even less close than the connection of the Brahmanic priesthood with the other orders. In their traditional position at the funeral feasts of the families the Brahmans retained the guidance of certain corporations. With the Buddhists the care of souls lay entirely in the hands of the wandering Bhikshus, the mendicant monks, unless indeed in a few cases laymen attached themselves of their own free will to some not too distant monastery. But the separation of the Bhikshus from the family and house, their exclusive devotion to teaching and religion, the constant mission and preaching which occupied them for two-thirds of the year, throughout the spring and the hot season, quickly showed itself more efficacious than the sacrificial service of the Brahmans, which was linked with house and home. These travelling monks, who could enter into closer relations with the people because they had no impurities to avoid, such as in many cases entirely excluded the Brahmans from the lower castes, caused their exhortations and counsel to be heard in every house; they were asked about the names to be given to new-born children; they assisted at the ceremony of the cutting of the hair of boys when they reached the age of puberty, at marriages and burials, and undertook prayers for the happy regeneration of the dead. And not only were the Bhikshus nearer the people, and more easily brought into relations with them, but they obtained far greater hold on their conscience than the Brahmans. This was not merely due to the precepts of their practical morality, which included the whole life and activity of the believers, and of the application and observance of which they took account in the confessional – a duty devolving on the laity as well as the clergy – the doctrine of regeneration was developed more fully in Buddhism, and formed more distinctly the centre of the system than among the Brahmans.

We saw that it was the active force of merit or guilt in earlier existences which fixed the fate of the individual in the kind of regeneration, in the happiness or misfortune of his life. In the same way the good and evil of this life had its effects. "He who goes out of the world, him his deeds await"707– such is the formula of the Buddhists. The various divisions of hell, the distinctions of the castes, which with the Buddhists counted as gradations of rank among men (p. 362), the heavenly spirits and the ancient gods, which had been received into the Buddhist heaven, served to increase the graduated series of regenerations to a considerable degree. "He who has lived foolishly goes into hell after the dissolution of the body;"708 he is born again as a creature of hell in a department of greater or less torment according to his guilt. The less guilty are born again as evil spirits. Higher in the scale stood regeneration as an animal; among animal regenerations the Buddhists counted birth as an ant, louse, bug, or worm the worst. Among mankind men were born again in a bad or good way, in a lower or higher caste, under easier or harder circumstances, according to their guilt or merit. Birth as a heavenly spirit counted higher than any human regeneration; higher still was birth as a god. But even when born again as a god, man was still under the dominion of desire; as we have seen, Indra only held the rank of a Çrotaapanna. From this stage it was possible to decline; it was by further conquest and liberation that a man must work his way upwards. Above the heaven of Indra and Mara, in the four high heavens, dwelt the spirits which had liberated themselves from desire and existence; in the lowest of these were the spirits who, though free from desire, are fettered by plurality, i. e. by ignorance; in the next, the heaven of clearer light, are those who, though free from desire and ignorance, are not so free that they cannot again sink under their dominion; the highest heaven but one receives the spirits who have no relapse to fear; and in the highest of all are the Arhats who have exhausted existence. As we see, the Buddhists avail themselves of the Brahmanic heaven and hell, and the intervals which the Brahmans place between regenerations in hell or in Indra's heaven, in order to construct out of them a more complete system. In this the process of the purification of the soul ascends from the lowest place in hell through the evil spirits, the creeping, flying, and four-footed animals, through men of all positions in life, and then through the heavenly spirits and deities to the highest heaven, till the point is reached at which all earlier guilt is exhausted, and the total of merit so extended that the original sin of the soul, desire and its possibility, is removed; and thus liberation from existence takes place, the Ego is extinguished. It is an inconsistency, no doubt, that those who have annihilated themselves and the roots of their existence by attaining Nirvana, shall still have a kind of existence in the highest heaven; but by this means the system was made more complete and realistic.

And not merely this wide development of the system of regenerations, but the practical application of it must have given the Bhikshus greater power over the consciences and heart of the nation than that exercised by the Brahmans. Buddha had known his own earlier existences. The tradition of the Singhalese ascribes to him 550 earlier lives before he saw the light as the son of Çuddhodana. He had lived as a rat and a crow, as a frog and a hare, as a dog and a pig, twice as a fish, six times as a snipe, four times as a golden eagle, four times as a peacock and as a serpent, ten times as a goose, as a deer, and as a lion, six times as an elephant, four times as a horse and as a bull, eighteen times as an ape, four times as a slave, three times as a potter, thirteen times as a merchant, twenty-four times as a Brahman and as a prince, fifty-eight times as a king, twenty times as the god Indra, and four times as Mahabrahman. Buddha had not only known his own earlier existences (p. 345), but those of all other living creatures; and this supernatural knowledge, this divine omniscience was, as we have seen, ascribed to those who after him attained the rank of Arhats. Though it did not reside in the full extent in Anagamins, Sakridagamins, Çrotaapannas, and still less in all the Bhikshus, it was nevertheless found in an imperfect degree in all "who advanced on the way." The people believed that the Çramanas could not only foretell from the present conduct of a man his future lot, and his regenerations in hell, among animals or men, but that they could also declare his future in this life from his previous existences. Hence the Bhikshus were masters not of the future only but also of the past of every man; and as they had his fate completely in view, the rules which they laid down from this point received an importance calculated to ensure their observance.709

It was no hindrance to morality that in this doctrine every man had his fate in his own hands at least so far that he could alleviate it for the future, and the practical results which the ethics of the Buddhists achieved on the basis of this imaginary background of regeneration are far from contemptible. The essential points in the Buddhist ethics, the moderate, passionless life, and patience and sympathy, have been dwelt upon (p. 355). It was not without value that the Buddhists taught, that no fire was like hatred and passion, and no stream like desire;710 that the desires bring little pleasure and much pain; only he who controlled himself lived in happiness, and contentment is the best treasure.711 He who merely saw the deficiencies of others, his offences would increase; and he who was always thinking: Such a man injured me, annoyed me, will never attain repose. Hard words were answered with hard words; therefore a man should bear slighting speeches patiently, as an elephant endures arrows in the battle, and lives without enmity among his enemies.712 To tend fire for a hundred years, or offer sacrifice for a thousand,713 was of no avail; neither the penance of the moon nor sacrifice changes anything in the evil act, even though it were offered for a year.714 Those who lie and deny the acts they have done will go into hell.715 The evil act pursues the doer; there is no place in the world in which to escape it; it destroys the doer unless it is conquered and covered by good deeds.716 Duties come from the heart; if the act is good it leaves no remorse in the heart. A man should give alms though he has but little; the covetous will not come into the world of the gods. These earnest exhortations to acquire before all things the feeling which gives rise to good works, to extinguish offences by confession and good actions, to moderate greed and covetousness, to live contentedly and peaceably, to be gentle in our deeds, could not be without effect. This peaceableness the Buddhists showed in the tolerance they extended to those who were of a different faith than their own; and for the family the rules of affection impressed on children towards their parents, of chastity and forbearance impressed on husbands and wives, were wholesome and advantageous in their results.717 The limitations set up by the arrangement of the castes, worship, and custom of the Brahmans began to waver; man was guided from the fortune of birth, the sanctification of works, to his inward effort, and led to the moral education of self. Disposition and personal merit obtained the first place in the community, and fixed a man's fortune in a future life. Thus the pride of higher birth as against the lower born has to give way; and hence slaves were treated with greater kindness. Fantastic as was the heaven and hell reconstructed by the Buddhists, marvellous as was the elevation of a man to be god, superstitious as was the worship of relics, exaggerated as was the conception of the way, the increasing supernatural power of him who was attaining liberation, and indubitable as was the tendency of Nirvana to end in the last instance in mere stolid indifference – the individual and morality were again restored by this doctrine and placed in their rights; society could again acquire free movement in personal intercourse and free choice of a vocation; all men were in reality equal, and could help each other as brothers.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE REFORMS OF THE BRAHMANS

A doctrine coming forward with so much self-confidence and force as Buddhism, touching such essential sides of the Indian national spirit, and meeting such distinct needs of the heart and of society, could not but react on the system which opposed it, which it fought against and strove to remove, i. e. on Brahmanism. We cannot suppose that the Brahmans looked supinely on at the advances of Buddhism. The accounts which we received from the Greeks about the various forms of worship dominant about the year 300 B.C. among the Indians (p. 424) show us that the Brahmanic heaven and the order of the world did not remain untouched; that there had crept in considerable variations from the ideas which the ancient sutras mention as current among the Brahmans at the time of the appearance of the Enlightened. We can confidently conclude that this change in the Brahmanic idea of God – important as we shall find it to be, and accomplished in part unconsciously and in part with a definite purpose – was brought about through Buddhism, by the inward value of the new doctrine, the struggle it entered into with Brahmanism, the necessity of opposing and checking its advances.

We have shown above how the subordination of the gods to Brahman and the great saints, the degradation of the ancient deities, must have aroused especially in the people the need of living divine powers. Thus forms hitherto little noticed in the series of the ancient deities became prominent, in which the people, conforming to the change in their instincts and the new demands of the heart, recognised the ruling and protecting powers of their life, and which they invoked especially as helpers and benefactors. These forms were Vishnu, the god of light, who even in the Veda is extolled for his friendly feeling to man, and Çiva, the mighty god of the storm-wind. In Vishnu the people found the spirit of the beneficent and uniform nature of the district of the Ganges; in Çiva, the lord of the storm-swept summits of the Himalayas, the ruler of mountains. Each was equally in their eyes the life-giving, sovereign power of nature. The system of the world-soul had left the gods a place little to be envied in the series of the emanations of Brahman, and had thrust back nature to a distance; the favour which Vishnu and Çiva found among the people showed the Brahmans that the worship of real and living deities was indispensable, that the life of nature could not be entirely excluded from the forms of the deities. To overcome the tide of popular feeling in the direction of Vishnu and Çiva, and the doctrine of Buddha at one and the same time, was a victory which the Brahmans could the less hope for, as the tendency towards a more personal supreme Being than Brahman was not unknown in their own schools, so far as these were not devoted to strict meditation and philosophy. Thus the Brahmans followed the movement excited within the circle of the ancient religion; they aimed at satisfying both the nation and themselves by the worship of more personal living gods. In one place Vishnu, in another Çiva, was adopted into the system of the Brahmans (p. 326, 330), which in this way underwent a very essential change and assumed an entirely novel point of view.

If the adoption of Vishnu into the Brahmanic system in the form given to him by the people on the Ganges, who reproduced in the epithets ascribed to the god their own quiet sensuous nature, was to be efficacious, he could not be allowed to play the unimportant part to which the Brahmans had condemned the ancient gods; they must make him the centre of heaven in the place of the feeble personal or impersonal Brahman; he must become the living lord of nature and the world. From the indications of the Brahmans quoted above, we may draw, though in wavering lines, a sketch of the gradations through which by a gradual elevation Vishnu obtained the precedence even over Brahman. Brahman finally became the quiescent, Vishnu the active, substance of the world. The latter contains the former, and is therefore the higher power. Vishnu personifies the world-soul; but he also comprises the whole life of nature; he takes the place of the sun-gods Surya, Savitar, Pushan, and even the place of Indra, who has to offer sacrifice to him, and purify himself before him,718 until at length in the revisions of the Epos he is regarded no longer as the quiescent cause but as the active lord of nature, and of the whole life of the spirits, and is elevated to be the creator and governor of the universe. In him, the lord of all beings, so we are told in the Mahabharata, all beings are contained as his attributes, like precious stones on a string; on him rests the universe existent and non-existent. Hari (Vishnu) with a thousand heads, a thousand feet, a thousand eyes, gleams with a thousand faces; the god, pre-eminent above all, the smallest of the small, the widest of the wide, the greatest of the great, supreme among the supreme, is the soul of all; he, the all-knowing, all-observing, is the author of all; in him the world swims like birds in water.719 Vishnu is without beginning and without end, the source of the existence of all beings. From the thousand-armed Vishnu, the head and the lord of the world, all creatures sprang in the beginning of time, and to him all return at the end of time. Hari is the eternal spirit, glittering as gold, as the sun in a cloudless sky. Brahman sprung from his body, and dwells in it with the rest of the gods; the lights of the sky are the hairs of his head. He, the lotus-eyed god, is extolled by the eternal Brahman; to him the gods pray.720

When Vishnu unveils himself to Arjuna at his prayer, and shows himself in his real form, in which no man had yet seen him, he is seen reaching up to the sky without beginning, middle, or end, with many heads, eyes, and arms, uniting in himself thousands of faces; all gods, animals, and serpents are to be seen in him; Brahman shows himself in the lotus-cup of the navel of Vishnu.721

Thus did the Brahmans place Vishnu on the throne of Brahman; Brahman, impersonal and personal, passed into him. These pictures are attempts to represent the creative power, the supreme God, the world-soul, the cause which sustains and comprises all, as a sensuous union of all divine shapes, of all the forms of the world into one frame. The worship offered to this supreme deity consisted in definite prayers, which had to be spoken at morning, midday, and evening; in offerings of flowers, and fruits, and libations of water.722

What attracted the people to the doctrine of Buddha was obviously, to no inconsiderable extent, the fact that the highest wisdom and goodness were personified in Buddha; that there was again mercy and grace, on earth, if not in heaven; that the king's son had become a mendicant in order to alleviate the sorrows of the world. The Brahmans, therefore, had to prove that love and pity existed in their heaven; it was of importance for them to show the people that the gods, whom the adherents of the old religion worshipped, had compassion for men, and knew how to help them, that even among them the divine wisdom and perfection had assumed a human shape out of love to mankind. If the Brahmans had so long taught that man could make himself into god by meditation, penance, and sanctity, why should not the gods have made themselves into men? The new god of the land of the Ganges was a gentle and helpful deity; his government of the world and beneficent acts were not only shown in the life of nature, and in the light which he sent daily, or the purifying water which he sent yearly in the rainy season, and the inundation of the Ganges, but also in the fortunes of men. The Brahmans obtained historical points of connection for the new god, and re-established a personal and living relation, which had been entirely lost in the Brahmanic system, between man and the gods, by representing Vishnu as gracious even in past days, as descending from heaven from time to time, and walking on earth for the help of men. From motives of this kind or because the conception of the beneficent acts of Vishnu came into the foreground, because they wished to see and believed that they saw his influence operating everywhere, there came the result that the achievements of the heroes which in the Epos are the centres of the action, Krishna and Rama, were transferred to the god Vishnu, and these heroic figures were supposed to be appearances of the god, so that by degrees a number of incarnations (avatara) are ascribed to Vishnu, in which he visited earth and did great deeds for men. According to this new system it was Vishnu who assisted the Brahmans to their supremacy, and therefore consecrated it, who taking the bodily form of Paraçurama annihilated the proud races of the Kshatriyas (p. 152). Thus the Brahmans transformed the god of beneficent nature, when they adopted him into their system, into the founder of the Brahmanic order of the world, a pattern of Brahmanic sanctity and virtue, and thus they sought to close the path against any counter-movement. In this way Vishnu appeared in the light of a perpetual benefactor, constantly assuming the human form anew, whenever mischief, evil, and sin had got the upper hand, in order to remove them, and then to reascend into heaven. "Whenever justice falls asleep and injustice arises, I create myself," are the words of Vishnu in the Bhagavad-gita; "for the liberation of the good and the annihilation of the evil I was born in each age of the world."723