CHAPTER XVIII
The Paradise of the Gods

IN no other country is religion so powerful, or so important, as in India. If the Hindus have permitted alien governments to be set over them again and again it is partly because they did not care much who ruled or exploited them—natives or foreigners; the crucial matter was religion, not politics; the soul, not the body; endless later lives rather than this passing one. When Ashoka became a saint, and Akbar almost adopted Hinduism, the power of religion was revealed over even the strongest men. In our century it is a saint, rather than a statesman, who for the first time in history has unified all India.

I. THE LATER HISTORY OF BUDDHISM

The Zenith of Buddhism—The Two Vehicles—“Mahayana”—Buddhism, Stoicism and Christianity—The decay of Buddhism—Its migrations: Ceylon, Burma, Turkestan, Tibet, Cambodia, China, Japan

Two hundred years after Ashoka’s death Buddhism reached the peak of its curve in India. The period of Buddhist growth from Ashoka to Harsha was in many ways the climax of Indian religion, education and art. But the Buddhism that prevailed was not that of Buddha; we might better describe it as that of his rebellious disciple Subhadda, who, on hearing of the Master’s death, said to the monks: “Enough, sirs! Weep not, neither lament! We are well rid of the great Samana . We used to be annoyed by being told, “This beseems you, this beseems you not.’ But now we shall be able to do whatever we like; and what we do not like, that we shall not have to do!”¹

The first thing they did with their freedom was to split into sects. Within two centuries of Buddha’s death eighteen varieties of Buddhistic doctrine had divided the Master’s heritage. The Buddhists of south India and Ceylon held fast for a time to the simpler and purer creed of the Founder, which came to be called Hinayana, or the “Lesser Vehicle”: they worshiped Buddha as a great teacher, but not as a god, and their Scriptures were the Pali texts of the more ancient faith. But throughout northern India, Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan the Buddhism that prevailed was the Mahayana, or the “Greater Vehicle,” defined and propagated by Kanishka’s Council; these (politically) inspired theologians announced the divinity of Buddha, surrounded him with angels and saints, adopted the Yoga asceticism of Patanjali, and issued in Sanskrit a new set of Holy Writ which, though it lent itself readily to metaphysical and scholastic refinements, proclaimed and certified a more popular religion than the austere pessimism of Shakya-muni.

The Mahayana was Buddhism softened with Brahmanical deities, practices and myths, and adapted to the needs of the Kushan Tatars and the Mongols of Tibet, over whom Kanishka had extended his rule. A heaven was conceived in which there were many Buddhas, of whom Amida Buddha, the Redeemer, came to be the best beloved by the people; this heaven and a corresponding hell were to be the reward or punishment of good or evil done on earth, and would thereby liberate some of the King’s militia for other services. The greatest of the saints, in this new theology, were the Bodhisattwas, or future Buddhas, who voluntarily refrained from achieving the Nirvana (here freedom from rebirth) that was within their merit and power, in order to be reborn into life after life, and to help others on earth to find the Way.* As in Mediterranean Christianity, these saints became so popular that they almost crowded out the head of the pantheon in worship and art. The veneration of relics, the use of holy water, candles, incense, the rosary, clerical vestments, a liturgical dead language, monks and nuns, monastic tonsure and celibacy, confession, fast days, the canonization of saints, purgatory and masses for the dead flourished in Buddhism as in medieval Christianity, and seem to have appeared in Buddhism first.† Mahayana became to Hinayana or primitive Buddhism what Catholicism was to Stoicism and primitive Christianity. Buddha, like Luther, had made the mistake of supposing that the drama of religious ritual could be replaced with sermons and morality; and the victory of a Buddhism rich in myths, miracles, ceremonies and intermediating saints corresponds to the ancient and current triumph of a colorful and dramatic Catholicism over the austere simplicity of early Christianity and modern Protestantism.

That same popular preference for polytheism, miracles and myths which destroyed Buddha’s Buddhism finally destroyed, in India, the Buddhism of the Greater Vehicle itself. For—to speak with the hindsight wisdom of the historian—if Buddhism was to take over so much of Hinduism, so many of its legends, its rites and its gods, soon very little would remain to distinguish the two religions; and the one with the deeper roots, the more popular appeal, and the richer economic resources and political support would gradually absorb the other. Rapidly superstition, which seems to be the very lifeblood of our race, poured over from the older faith to the younger one, until even the phallic enthusiasms of the Shakti sects found place in the ritual of Buddhism. Slowly the patient and tenacious Brahmans recaptured influence and imperial patronage; and the success of the youthful philosopher Shankara in restoring the authority of the Vedas as the basis of Hindu thought put an end to the intellectual leadership of the Buddhists in India.

The final blow came from without, and was in a sense invited by Buddhism itself. The prestige of the Sangha, or Buddhist Order, had, after Ashoka, drawn the best blood of Magadha into a celibate and pacific clergy; even in Buddha’s time some patriots had complained that “the monk Gautama causes fathers to beget no sons, and families to become extinct.”⁵ The growth of Buddhism and monasticism in the first year of our era sapped the manhood of India, and conspired with political division to leave India open to easy conquest. When the Arabs came, pledged to spread a simple and stoic monotheism, they looked with scorn upon the lazy, venal, miracle-mongering Buddhist monks; they smashed the monasteries, killed thousands of monks, and made monasticism unpopular with the cautious. The survivors were re-absorbed into the Hinduism that had begotten them; the ancient orthodoxy received the penitent heresy, and “Brahmanism killed Buddhism by a fraternal embrace.”⁶ Brahmanism had always been tolerant; in all the history of the rise and fall of Buddhism and a hundred other sects we find much disputation, but no instance of persecution. On the contrary Brahmanism eased the return of the prodigal by proclaiming Buddha a god (as an avatar of Vishnu), ending animal sacrifice, and accepting into orthodox practice the Buddhist doctrine of the sanctity of all animal life. Quietly and peacefully, after half a thousand years of gradual decay, Buddhism disappeared from India.*

Meanwhile it was winning nearly all the remainder of the Asiatic world. Its ideas, its literature and its art spread to Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula in the south, to Tibet and Turkestan in the north, to Burma, Siam, Cambodia, China, Korea and Japan in the east; in this way all of these regions except the Far East received as much civilization as they could digest, precisely as western Europe and Russia received civilization from Roman and Byzantine monks in the Middle Ages. The cultural zenith of most of these nations came from the stimulus of Buddhism. From the time of Ashoka to its decay in the ninth century, Anuradhapura, in Ceylon, was one of the major cities of the Oriental world; the Bo-tree there has been worshiped for two thousand years, and the temple on the heights of Kandy is one of the Meccas of the 150,000,000 Buddhists of Asia.† The Buddhism of Burma is probably the purest now extant, and its monks often approach the ideal of Buddha; under their ministrations the 13,000,000 inhabitants of Burma have reached a standard of living considerably higher than that of India.⁷ Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot have unearthed from the sands of Turkestan hundreds of Buddhist manuscripts, and other evidences of a culture which flourished there from the time of Kanishka to the thirteenth century A.D. In the seventh century of our era the enlightened warrior, Srong-tsan Gampo, established an able government in Tibet, annexed Nepal, built Lhasa as his capital, and made it rich as a halfway house in Chinese-Indian trade. Having invited Buddhist monks to come from India and spread Buddhism and education among his people, he retired from rule for four years in order to learn how to read and write, and inaugurated the Golden Age of Tibet. Thousands of monasteries were built in the mountains and on the great plateau; and a voluminous Tibetan canon of Buddhist books was published, in three hundred and thirty-three volumes, which preserved for modern scholarship many works whose Hindu originals have long been lost.⁸ Here, eremitically sealed from the rest of the world, Buddhism developed into a maze of superstitions, monasticism and ecclesiasticism rivaled only by early medieval Europe; and the Dalai Lama (or “All-Embracing Priest”), hidden away in the great Potala monastery that overlooks the city of Lhasa, is still believed by the good people of Tibet to be the living incarnation of the Bodhisattwa Avalokiteshvafa.⁹ In Cambodia, or Indo-China, Buddhism conspired with Hinduism to provide the religious framework for one of the richest ages in the history of Oriental art. Buddhism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its birth; and it won them without shedding a drop of blood.

II. THE NEW DIVINITIES

Hinduism—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—Krishna—Kali—Animal gods—The sacred cow—Polytheism and monotheism

The “Hinduism” that now replaced Buddhism was not one religion, nor was it only religion; it was a medley of faiths and ceremonies whose practitioners had only four qualities in common: they recognized the caste system and the leadership of the Brahmans, they reverenced the cow as especially representative of divinity, they accepted the law of Karma and the transmigration of souls, and they replaced with new gods the deities of the Vedas. These faiths had in part antedated and survived Vedic nature worship; in part they had grown from the connivance of the Brahmans at rites, divinities and beliefs unknown to the Scriptures and largely contrary to the Vedic spirit; they had boiled in the cauldron of Hindu religious thought even while Buddhism maintained a passing intellectual ascendancy.

The gods of Hinduism were characterized by a kind of anatomical superabundance vaguely symbolizing extraordinary knowledge, activity or power. The new Brahma had four faces, Kartikeya six; Shiva had three eyes, Indra a thousand; and nearly every deity had four arms.¹⁰ At the head of this revised pantheon was Brahma, chivalrously neuter, acknowledged master of the gods, but no more noticed in actual worship than a constitutional monarch in modern Europe. Combined with him and Shiva in a triad—not a trinity—of dominant deities was Vishnu, a god of love who repeatedly became man in order to help mankind. His greatest incarnation was Krishna; as such he was born in a prison, had accomplished many marvels of heroism and romance, healed the deaf and the blind, helped lepers, championed the poor, and raised men from the grave. He had a beloved disciple, Arjuna, before whom he was transfigured. He died, some say, by an arrow; others say by a crucifixion on a tree. He descended into hell, rose to heaven, and will return on the last day to judge the quick and the dead.¹¹

To the Hindu there are three chief processes in life and the universe: creation, preservation and destruction. Hence divinity takes for him three main forms: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer; these are the Trimurti, or “Three Shapes,” which all Hindus but the Jains adore.* Popular devotion is divided between Vaishnavism, the religion of Vishnu, and Shivaism, the religion of Shiva. The two cults are peaceful neighbors, and sometimes hold sacrifices in the same temple;¹³ and the wise Brahmans, followed by a majority of the people, pay equal honor to both these gods. Pious Vaishnavites paint upon their foreheads every morning with red clay the trident sign of Vishnu; pious Shivaites trace horizontal lines across their brows with cow-dung ashes, or wear the linga—symbol of the male organ—fastened on their arms or hung from their necks.¹⁴

The worship of Shiva is one of the oldest, most profound and most terrible elements in Hinduism. Sir John Marshall reports “unmistakable evidence” of the cult of Shiva at Mohenjo-daro, partly in the form of a three-headed Shiva, partly in the form of little stone columns which he presumes to be as phallic as their modern counterparts. “Shivaism,” he concludes, “is therefore the most ancient living faith in the world.”†¹⁵ The name of the god is a euphemism; literally it means “propitious”; whereas Shiva himself is viewed chiefly as a god of cruelty and destruction, the personification of that cosmic force which destroys, one after another, all the forms that reality takes—all cells, all organisms, all species, all ideas, all works, all planets and all things. Never has another people dared to face the impermanence of forms, and the impartiality of nature, so frankly, or to recognize so clearly that evil balances good, that destruction goes step by step with creation, and that all birth is a capital crime, punishable with death. The Hindu, tortured with a thousand misfortunes and sufferings, sees in them the handiwork of a vivacious force that appears to find pleasure in breaking down everything that Brahma—the creative power in nature—has produced. Shiva dances to the tune of a perpetually forming, dissolving and re-forming world.

Just as death is the penalty of birth, so birth is the frustration of death; and the same god who symbolizes destruction represents also, for the Hindu mind, that passion and torrent of reproduction which overrides the death of the individual with the continuance of the race. In some parts of India, particularly Bengal, this creative or reproductive energy (Shakti) of Shiva or nature is personified in the figure of Shiva’s wife, Kali (Parvati, Uma, Durga), and is worshiped in one of the many Shakti cults. Until the last century this worship was a bloody ritual, often involving human sacrifice; latterly the goddess has been content with goats.¹⁷ The deity is portrayed for the populace by a black figure with gaping mouth and protruding tongue, adorned with snakes and dancing upon a corpse; her earrings are dead men, her necklace is a string of skulls, her face and breasts are smeared with blood.¹⁸ Two of her four hands carry a sword and a severed head; the other two are extended in blessing and protection. For Kali-Parvati is the goddess of motherhood as well as the bride of destruction and death; she can be tender as well as cruel, and can smile as well as kill; once, perhaps, she was a mother-goddess in Sumeria, and was imported into India before she became so terrible.¹⁹ Doubtless she and her lord are made as horrible as possible in order that timid worshipers may be frightened into decency, and perhaps into generosity to the priests.*

These are the greater gods of Hinduism; but they are merely five of thirty million deities in the Hindu pantheon; only to catalogue them would take a hundred volumes. Some of them are more properly angels, some are what we should call devils, some are heavenly bodies like the sun, some are mascots like Lakshmi (goddess of good luck), many of them are beasts of the field or fowl of the air. To the Hindu mind there was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls, and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again; all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincarnation. The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was recognized as Shiva’s son;²¹ he personified man’s animal nature, and at the same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honor of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the entrance to their holes.²² Temples have been erected in honor of snakes, as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests.²³ Crocodiles, tigers, peacocks, parrots, even rats, receive their meed of worship.²⁴

Most sacred of all animals to a Hindu is the cow. Images of bulls, in every material and size, appear in temples and homes, and in the city squares; the cow itself is the most popular organism in India, and has full freedom of the streets; its dung is used as fuel or a holy ointment; its urine is a sacred wine that will wash away all inner or outer uncleanness. Under no circumstances are these animals to be eaten by a Hindu, nor is their flesh to be worn as clothing—headgear or gloves or shoes; and when they die they are to be buried with the pomp of religious ritual.²⁵ Perhaps wise statesmanship once decreed this tabu in order to preserve agricultural draft animals for the growing population of India;²⁰ today, however, they number almost one-fourth as many as the population.²⁷ The Hindu view is that it is no more unreasonable to feel a profound affection for cows, and a profound revulsion at the thought of eating them, than it is to have similar feelings in regard to domestic cats and dogs; the cynical view of the matter is that the Brahmans believed that cows should never be slaughtered, that insects should never be injured, and that widows should, be burned alive. The truth is that the worship of animals occurs in the history of every people, and that if one must deify any animal, the kind and placid cow seems entitled to her measure of devotion. We must not be too haughtily shocked by the menagerie of Hindu gods; we too have had our serpent-devil of Eden, our golden calf of the Old Testament, our sacred fish of the catacombs, and our gracious Lamb of God.

The secret of polytheism is the inability of the simple mind to think in impersonal terms; it can understand persons more readily than forces, wills more easily than laws.²⁸ The Hindu suspects that our human senses see only the outside of the events that they report; behind the veil of these phenomena, he thinks, there are countless superphysical beings whom, in Kant’s phrase, we can only conceive but never perceive. A certain philosophical tolerance in the Brahmans has added to the teeming pantheon of India; local or tribal gods have been received into the Hindu Valhalla by adoption, usually by interpreting them as aspects or avatars of accepted deities; every faith could get its credentials if it paid its dues. In the end nearly every god became a phase, attribute or incarnation of another god, until all these divinities, to adult Hindu minds, merged into one; polytheism became pantheism, almost monotheism, almost monism. Just as a good Christian may pray to the Madonna or one of a thousand saints, and yet be a monotheist in the sense that he recognizes one God as supreme, so the Hindu prays to Kali or Rama or Krishma or Ganesha without presuming for a moment that these are supreme deities.* Some Hindus recognize Vishnu as supreme, and call Shiva merely a subordinate divinity; some call Shiva supreme, and make Vishnu an angel; if only a few worship Brahma it is because of its impersonality, its intangibility, its distance, and for the same reason that most churches in Christendom were erected to Mary or a saint, while Christianity waited for Voltaire to raise a chapel to God.

III. BELIEFS

The “Puranas”—The reincarnations of the universe—The migrations of the soul—“Karma”—Its philosophical aspects—Life as evil—Release

Mingled with this complex theology is a complex mythology at once superstitious and profound. The Vedas having died in the language in which they were written, and the metaphysics of the Brahman schools being beyond the comprehension of the people, Vyasa and others, over a period of a thousand years (500 B.C.—500 A.D.), composed eighteen Puranas—“old stories”—in 400,000 couplets, expounding to the laity the exact truth about the creation of the world, its periodical evolution and dissolution, the genealogy of the gods, and the history of the heroic age. These books made no pretense to literary form, logical order, or numerical moderation; they insisted that the lovers Urvashi and Pururavas spent 61,000 years in pleasure and delight.³⁰ But through the intelligibility of their language, the attractiveness of their parables, and the orthodoxy of their doctrine they became the second Bible of Hinduism, the grand repository of its superstitions, its myths, even of its philosophy. Here, for example, in the Vishnupurana, is the oldest and ever-recurrent theme of Hindu thought—that individual separateness is an illusion, and that all life is one:

In these Puranas, and kindred writings of medieval India, we find a very modern theory of the universe. There is no creation in the sense of Genesis; the world is perpetually evolving and dissolving, growing and decaying, through cycle after cycle, like every plant in it, and every organism. Brahma—or, as the Creator is more often called in this literature, Prajapati—is the spiritual force that upholds this endless process. We do not know how the universe began, if it did; perhaps, say the Puranas, Brahma laid it as an egg and then hatched it by sitting on it; perhaps it is a passing error of the Maker, or a little joke.³² Each cycle or Kalpa in the history of the universe is divided into a thousand mahayugas, or great ages, of 4,320,000 years each; and each mahayuga contains four yugas or ages, in which the human race undergoes a gradual deterioration. In the present mahayuga three ages have now passed, totaling 3,888,888 years; we live in the fourth age, the Kali-yuga, or Age of Misery; 5035 years of this bitter era have elapsed, but 426,965 remain. Then the world will suffer one of its periodical deaths, and Brahma will begin another “day of Brahma,” i.e., a Kalpa of 4,320,000,000 years. In each Kalpa cycle the universe develops by natural means and processes, and by natural means and processes decays; the destruction of the whole world is as certain as the death of a mouse, and, to the philosopher, not more important. There is no final purpose towards which the whole creation moves; there is no “progress”; there is only endless repetition.³³

Through all these ages and great ages billions of souls have passed from species to species, from body to body, from life to life, in weary transmigration. An individual is not really an individual, he is a link in the chain of life, a page in the chronicle of a soul; a species is not really a separate species, for the souls in these flowers or fleas may yesterday have been, or tomorrow may be, the spirits of men; all life is one. A man is only partly a man, he is also an animal; shreds and echoes of past lower existences linger in him, and make him more akin to the brute than to the sage. Man is only a part of nature, not actually its center or master;³⁴ a life is only a part of a soul’s career, not the entirety; every form is transitory, but every reality is continuous and one. The many reincarnations of a soul are like years or days in a single life, and may bring the soul now to growth, now to decay. How can the individual life, so brief in the tropic torrent of generations, contain all the history of a soul, or give it due punishment and reward for its evil and its good? And if the soul is immortal, how could one short life determine its fate forever?*

Life can be understood, says the Hindu, only on the assumption that each existence is bearing the penalty or enjoying the fruits of vice or virtue in some antecedent life. No deed small or great, good or bad, can be without effect; everything will out. This is the Law of Karma—the Law of the Deed—the law of causality in the spiritual world; and it is the highest and most terrible law of all. If a man does justice and kindness without sin his reward cannot come in one mortal span; it is stretched over other lives in which, if his virtue persists, he will be reborn into loftier place and larger good fortune; but if he lives evilly he will be reborn as an Outcaste, or a weasel, or a dog.³⁵† This law of Karma, like the Greek Moira or Fate, is above both gods and men; even the gods do not change its absolute operation; or, as the theologians put it, Karma and the will or action of the gods are one.³⁸ But Karma is not Fate; Fate implies the helplessness of man to determine his own lot; Karma makes him (taking all his lives as a whole) the creator of his own destiny. Nor do heaven and hell end the work of Karma, or the chain of births and deaths; the soul, after the death of the body, may go to hell for special punishment, or to heaven for quick and special reward; but no soul stays in hell, and few souls stay in heaven, forever; nearly every soul that enters them must sooner or later return to earth, and live out its Karma in new incarnations.³⁹*

Biologically there was much truth in this doctrine. We are the reincarnations of our ancestors, and will be reincarnated in our children; and the defects of the fathers are to some extent (though perhaps not as much as good conservatives suppose) visited upon the children, even through many generations. Karma was an excellent myth for dissuading the human beast from murder, theft, procrastination, or offertorial parsimony; furthermore, it extended the sense of moral unity and obligations to all life, and gave the moral code an extent of application far greater, and more logical, than in any other civilization. Good Hindus do not kill insects if they can possibly avoid it; “even those whose aspirations to virtue are modest treat animals as humble brethren rather than as lower creatures over whom they have dominion by divine command.”⁴¹ Philosophically, Karma explained for India many facts otherwise obscure in meaning or bitterly unjust. All those eternal inequalities among men which so frustrate the eternal demands for equality and justice; all the diverse forms of evil that blacken the earth and redden the stream of history; all the suffering that enters into human life with birth and accompanies it unto death, seemed intelligible to the Hindu who accepted Karma; these evils and injustices, these variations between idiocy and genius, poverty and wealth, were the results of past existences, the inevitable working out of a law unjust for a life or a moment, but perfectly just in the end.† Karma is one of those many inventions by which men have sought to bear evil patiently, and to face life with hope. To explain evil, and to find for men some scheme in which they may accept it, if not with good cheer, then with peace of mind—this is the task that most religions have attempted to fulfill. Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering, the religion of India mitigates the human tragedy by giving meaning and value to grief and pain. The soul, in Hindu theology, has at least this consolation, that it must bear the consequences only of its own acts; unless it questions all existence it can accept evil as a passing punishment, and look forward to tangible rewards for virtue borne.

But in truth the Hindus do question all existence. Oppressed with an enervating environment, national subjection and economic exploitation, they have tended to look upon life as more a bitter punishment than an opportunity or a reward. The Vedas, written by a hardy race coming in from the north, were almost as optimistic as Whitman; Buddha, representing the same stock five hundred years later, already denied the value of life; the Puranas, five centuries later still, represented a view more profoundly pessimistic than anything known in the West except in stray moments of philosophic doubt.* The East, until reached by the Industrial Revolution, could not understand the zest with which the Occident has taken life; it saw only superficiality and childishness in our merciless busyness, our discontented ambition, our nerve-racking labor-saving devices, our progress and speed; it could no more comprehend this profound immersion in the surface of things, this clever refusal to look ultimates in the face, than the West can fathom the quiet inertia, the “stagnation” and “hopelessness” of the traditional East. Heat cannot understand cold.

“What is the most wonderful thing in the world?” asks Yama of Yudishthira; and Yudishthira replies: “Man after man dies; seeing this, men still move about as if they were immortal.”⁴⁴ “By death the world is afflicted,” say the Mahabharata, “by age it is held in bar, and the nights are the Unfailing Ones that are ever coming and going. When I know that death cannot halt, what can I expect from walking in a cover of lore?”⁴⁵ And in the Ramayana Sita asks, as her reward for fidelity through every temptation and trial, only death:

So the last word of Hindu religious thought is moksha, release—first from desire, then from life. Nirvana may be one release or the other; but it is fullest in both. The sage Bhartri-hari expresses the first:

Gandhi expresses the second form of release: “I do not want to be reborn,” he says.⁴⁸ The highest and final aspiration of the Hindu is to escape reincarnation, to lose that fever of ego which revives with each individual body and birth. Salvation does not come by faith, nor yet by works; it comes by such uninterrupted self-denial, by such selfless intuition of the part-engulfing Whole, that at last the self is dead, and there is nothing to be reborn. The hell of individuality passes into the haven and heaven of unity, of complete and impersonal absorption into Brahman, the soul or Force of the World.

IV. CURIOSITIES OF RELIGION

Superstitions—Astrology—Phallic worship—Ritual—Sacrifice—Purification—The sacred waters

Amid all this theology of fear and suffering, superstition—first aid from the supernatural for the minor ills of life—flourished with rank fertility. Oblations, charms, exorcisms, astrology, oracles, incantations, vows, palmistry, divination, 2,728,812 priests, a million fortune-tellers, a hundred thousand snake-charmers, a million fakirs, yogis and other holy men—this is one part of the historic picture of India. For twelve hundred years the Hindus have had a great number of Tantras (manuals) expounding mysticism, witchcraft, divination and magic, and formulating the holy mantras (spells) by which almost any purpose might be magically attained. The Brahmans looked with silent contempt upon this religion of magic; they tolerated it partly because they feared that superstition among the people might be essential to their own power, partly, perhaps, because they believed that superstition is indestructible, dying in one form only to be reborn in another. No man of sense, they felt, would quarrel with a force capable of so many reincarnations.

The simple Hindu, like many cultured Americans,* accepted astrology, and took it for granted that every star exercised a special influence over those born under its ascendancy.⁵⁰ Menstruating women, like Ophelia, were to keep out of the sunshine, for this might make them pregnant.⁵¹ The secret of material prosperity, said the Kaushitaki Upanishad, is the regular adoration of the new moon. Sorcerers, necromancers and soothsayers, for a pittance, expounded the past and the future by studying palms, ordure, dreams, signs in the sky, or holes eaten into cloth by mice. Chanting the charms which only they knew how to recite, they laid ghosts, bemused cobras, enthralled birds, and forced the gods themselves to come to the aid of the contributor. Magicians, for the proper fee, introduced a demon into one’s enemy, or expelled it from one’s self; they caused the enemy’s sudden death, or brought him down with an incurable disease. Even a Brahman, when he yawned, snapped his fingers to right and left to frighten away the evil spirits that might enter his mouth,† At all times the Hindu, like many European peasants, was on his guard against the evil eye; at any time he might be visited with misfortune, or death, magically brought upon him by his enemies. Above all, the magician could restore sexual vitality, or inspire love in any one for any one, or give children to barren women.⁵²

There was nothing, not even Nirvana, that the Hindu desired so intensely as children. Hence, in part, his longing for sexual power, and his ritual adoration of the symbols of reproduction and fertility. Phallic worship, which has prevailed in most countries at one time or another, has persisted in India from ancient times to the twentieth century. Shiva was its deity, the phallus was its ikon, the Tantras were its Talmud. The Shakti, or energizing power, of Shiva was conceived sometimes as his consort Kali, sometimes as a female element in Shiva’s nature, which included both male and female powers; and these two powers were represented by idols called linga or yoni, representing respectively the male or the female organs of generation.⁵³ Everywhere in India one sees signs of this worship of sex: in the phallic figures on the Nepalese and other temples in Benares; in the gigantic lingas that adorn or surround the Shivaite temples of the south; in phallic processions and ceremonies, and in the phallic images worn on the arm or about the neck. Linga stones may be seen on the highways; Hindus break upon them the cocoanuts which they are about to offer in sacrifice.⁵⁴ At the Rameshvaram Temple the linga stone is daily washed with Ganges water, which is afterwards sold to the pious,⁵⁵ as holy water or mesmerized water has been sold in Europe. Usually the phallic ritual is simple and becoming; it consists in anointing the stone with consecrated water or oil, and decorating it with leaves.⁵⁶

Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement from phallic processions;⁵⁷ but for the most part the people appear to find no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing the power of Shiva.⁵⁸ Perhaps the difference between the European and the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frustrated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained. The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats—the most Puritanic sect in India.⁵⁹ “It has remained for our Western visitors,” says Gandhi, “to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learned that Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all.”⁶⁰

The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day; indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays. But the people rejoiced in the many feasts that marked the ecclesiastical year and brought them in great processions or pilgrimages to their ancient shrines. They could not understand the service there, for it was conducted in Sanskrit, but they could understand the idol. They decked it with ornaments, covered it with paint, and encrusted it with jewels; sometimes they treated it as a human being—awakened it, bathed it, dressed it, fed it, scolded it, and put it to bed at the close of the day.⁶¹

The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death.⁶² When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes.⁶³* As morals improved, the gods had to content themselves with animals, of which great numbers were offered them. The goat was especially favored for these ceremonies. Buddhism, Jainism and ahimsa put an end to animal sacrifice in Hindustan,⁶⁷ but the replacement of Buddhism with Hinduism restored the custom, which survived, in diminishing extent, to our own time. It is to the credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that involved the shedding of blood.⁶⁸

Purification rites took many an hour of Hindu life, for fears of pollution were as frequent in Indian religion as in modern hygiene. At any moment the Hindu might be made unclean—by improper food, by offal, by the touch of a Shudra, an Outcaste, a corpse, a menstruating woman, or in a hundred other ways. The woman herself, of course, was defiled by menstruation or childbirth; Brahmanical law required isolation in such cases, and complex hygienic precautions.⁶⁹ After all such pollutions—or, as we should say, possible infections—the Hindu had to undergo ritual purification: in minor cases by such simple ceremonies as being sprinkled with holy water;⁷⁰ in major cases by more complicated methods, culminating in the terrible Panchagavia. This purification was decreed as punishment for violating important caste laws (e.g., for leaving India), and consisted in drinking a mixture of “five substances” from the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine and dung.⁷¹*

A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a semitropical climate, was clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. “Sacred” pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul. Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every morning;⁷³ from that century to ours those waters have never seen the sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently, “Om, Om, Om.” Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn, and smelled with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats, and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the same silent deities. The unresponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her desolation.

V. SAINTS AND SCEPTICS

Methods of sanctity—Heretics—Toleration—General view of Hindu Religion

Saints seem more abundant in India than elsewhere, so that at last the visitor feels that they are a natural product of the country, like the poppy or the snake. Hindu piety recognized three main avenues to sanctity: Jnanayoga, the Way of Meditation, Karma-yoga, the Way of Action, and Bhakti-yoga, the Way of Love. The Brahmans allowed for all three by their rule of the four Ashramas, or stages of sanctity. The young Brahman was to begin as a Brahmachari, vowed to premarital chastity, to piety, study, truthfulness, and loving service of his Guru or teacher. After marriage, which he should not delay beyond his eighteenth year, he was to enter the second stage of Brahmanical life as Grihastha, or householder, and beget sons for the care and worship of himself and his ancestors. In the third stage (now seldom practiced) the aspirant to sanctity retired with his wife to live as a Vanaprastha, or jungle-dweller, accepting hard conditions gladly, and limiting sexual relations to the begetting of children. Finally the Brahman who wished to reach the highest stage might, in his old age, leave even his wife, and become a Sannyasi, or “abandoner” of the world; giving up all property, all money and all ties, he would keep only an antelope skin for his body, a staff for his hand, and a gourd of water for his thirst. He must smear his body with ashes every day, drink the Five Substances frequently, and live entirely by alms. “He must,” says the Brahmanical Rule, “regard all men as equals. He must not be influenced by anything that happens, and must be able to view with perfect equanimity even revolutions that overthrow empires. His one object must be to acquire that measure of wisdom and of spirituality which shall finally reunite him to the Supreme Divinity, from which we are separated by our passions and our material surroundings.”⁷⁴*

In the midst of all this piety one comes occasionally upon a sceptical voice stridently out of tune with the solemnity of the normal Hindu note. Doubtless when India was wealthy, sceptics were numerous, for humanity doubts its gods most when it prospers, and worships them most when it is miserable. We have noted the Charvakas and other heretics of Buddha’s time. Almost as old is a work called, in the sesquipedalian fashion of the Hindus, Shwasamved y o panishad, which simplifies theology into four propositions: (1) that there is no reincarnation, no god, no heaven, no hell, and no world; (2) that all traditional religious literature is the work of conceited fools; (3) that Nature the originator and Time the destroyer are the rulers of all things, and take no account of virtue or vice in awarding happiness or misery to men; and (4) that people, deluded by flowery speech, cling to gods, temples and priests, when in reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog.⁷⁶ With all the inconsistency of a Bible harboring Ecclesiastes, the Pali canon of Buddhism offers us a remarkable treatise, probably as old as Christianity, called “The Questions of King Milinda,” in which the Buddhist teacher Nagasena is represented as giving very disturbing answers to the religious inquiries made of him by the Greco-Bactrian King Menander, who ruled northern India at the turn of the first century before Christ. Religion, says Nagasena, must not be made a mere way of escape for suffering men; it should be an ascetic search for sanctity and wisdom without presuming a heaven or a god; for in truth, this saint assures us, these do not exist.⁷⁷ The Mahabharata inveighs against doubters and atheists who, it tells us, deny the reality of souls, and despise immortality; such men, it says, “wander over the whole earth”; and it warns them of their future punishment by the horrible example of a jackal who explains his species by admitting that in a previous incarnation he had been “a rationalist, a critic of the Vedas, . . . a reviler and opposer of priests, . . . an unbeliever, a doubter of all.”⁷⁸ The Bhagavad-Gita refers to heretics who deny the existence of a god and describe the world as “none other than a House of Lust.”⁷⁹ The Brahmans themselves were often sceptics, but too completely so to attack the religion of the people. And though the poets of India are as a rule assiduously pious, some of them, like Kabir and Vemana, speak in defense of a very emancipated theism. Vemana, a South Indian poet of the seventeenth century, writes scornfully of ascetic hermits, pilgrimages, and caste:

It is worthy of note that pronouncements of this kind could be made with impunity in a society mentally ruled by a priestly caste. Except for foreign repressions (and perhaps because of alien rulers indifferent to native theologies) India has enjoyed a freedom of thought far greater than that of the medieval Europe to which its civilization corresponds; and the Brahmans have exercised their authority with discrimination and lenience. They relied upon the conservatism of the poor to preserve the orthodox religion, and they were not disappointed. When heresies or strange gods became dangerously popular they tolerated them, and then absorbed them into the capacious caverns of Hindu belief; one god more or less could not make much difference in India. Hence there has been comparatively little sectarian animosity within the Hindu community, though much between Hindus and Moslems; and no blood has been shed for religion in India except by its invaders.⁸¹ Intolerance came with Islam and Christianity; the Moslems proposed to buy Paradise with the blood of “infidels,” and the Portuguese, when they captured Goa, introduced the Inquisition into India.⁸²

If we look for common defining elements in this jungle of faiths, we shall find them in the practical unanimity of the Hindus in worshiping both Vishnu and Shiva, in reverencing the Vedas, the Brahmans, and the cow, and in accepting the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as no mere literary epics, but as the secondary scriptures of the race.⁸³ It is significant that the deities and dogmas of India today are not those of the Vedas; in a sense Hinduism represents the triumph of aboriginal Dravidic India over the Aryans of the Vedic age. As the result of conquest, spoliation and poverty, India has been injured in body and soul, and has sought refuge from harsh terrestrial defeat in the easy victories of myth and imagination. Despite its elements of nobility, Buddhism, like Stoicism, was a slave philosophy, even if voiced by a prince; it meant that all desire or struggle, even for personal or national freedom, should be abandoned, and that the ideal was a desireless passivity; obviouslv the exhausting heat of India spoke in this rationalization of fatigue. Hinduism continued the weakening of India by binding itself, through the caste system, in permanent servitude to a priesthood; it conceived its gods in unmoral terms, and maintained for centuries brutal customs, like human sacrifice and suttee, which many nations had long since outgrown; it depicted life as inevitably evil, and broke the courage and darkened the spirit of its devotees; it turned all earthly phenomena into illusion, and thereby destroyed the distinction between freedom and slavery, good and evil, corruption and betterment. In the words of a brave Hindu, “Hindu religion . . . has now degenerated into an idol-worship and conventional ritualism, in which the form is regarded as everything, and its substance as nothing.”⁸⁴ A nation ridden with priests and infested with saints, India awaits with unformulated longing her Renaissance, her Reformation, and her Enlightenment.

We must, however, keep our historical perspective in thinking of India; we too were once in the Middle Ages, and preferred mysticism to science, priestcraft to plutocracy—and may do likewise again. We cannot judge these mystics, for our judgments in the West are usually based upon corporeal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and superficial to the Hindu saint. What if wealth and power, war and conquest, were only surface illusions, unworthy of a mature mind? What if this science of hypothetical atoms and genes, of whimsical protons and cells, of gases generating Shakespeares and chemicals fusing into Christ, were only one more faith, and one of the strangest, most incredible and most transitory of all? The East, resentful of subjection and poverty, may go in for science and industry at the very time when the children of the West, sick of machines that impoverish them and of sciences that disillusion them, may destroy their cities and their machines in chaotic revolution or war, go back, beaten, weary and starving, to the soil, and forge for themselves another mystic faith to give them courage in the face of hunger, cruelty, injustice and death. There is no humorist like history.