THE AVESTAN PERIOD
FROM ABOUT 800 B. C. TO ABOUT A. D. 200
AT THE LATEST
CHAPTER XIII
INDIA LEAVES INDO-IRANIAN RELIGION BEHIND
Brahmanism. The millennium that followed the advent of Zarathushtra witnessed the great creative period of religious and philosophical thought in the world. Beginning with Zoroastrianism, it gave rise to Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, which form the religion of one half of mankind at the present day. In addition, it developed Judaism in Palestine, and Taoism and Confucianism in China. When the Indo-Iranians separated, members of one group settled in the Panjaub and produced the hymns of the Rig Veda. Their descendants, who had by this time moved towards the plains of the Ganges, created the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. Apart from Buddhism and Jainism, which arose in the middle of this period of religious and philosophical efflorescence, we may distinguish at least four stages of religious evolution, namely those of the Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. These periods do not exclude but overlap one another. The Vedic period continued for a considerable time into that of the ritualistic Brahmanism, and the Brahmanic into that of the philosophic Upanishads and the Upanishad period projects into that of the religion of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Brahmans officiated at the sacrifices and conducted religious services for the laity. They propitiated and placated gods with libations and sacrifices and penances to win magical power. When the Vedic language and literature became antiquated, the Brahmans interpreted and amplified the ancient texts. Thus arose the Brahmanas dealing with sacrificial texts based on the authority of the Vedas. The Vedic poets had weaved religious thought in the garb of beautiful lyrical poetry. Their descendants were now preoccupied in formulating elaborate ceremonials and sacrificial rites. Symbolical significance was attached to their punctilious performance. Rites and ceremonies came to be invested with mysterious power to secure for the donor his heart's desires. Words specifically arranged and recited in a specific manner were believed to have magical potency and were supposed to heal disease, to win the favour of gods, to rout the demons, to frustrate the evil scheming of enemies and to cause them harm. The power of sacrifices was equally great. The gods, it is said, were originally mortals and dreaded death, but later won immortality by sacrifices. Sacrifice, it is added, enables the Brahmans to compel the gods to do their will. Ritualism thus rose to a pre-eminent position. Burnt offerings and sacrifices were believed to procure earthly gifts and heavenly bliss and to raise the estate of the soul in the next world. Exhortations for moral life continued to be made, yet elaborate ritual and animal sacrifices became the central feature of religion.
Such elaborate ceremonies performed and sacrifices offered by a specialized priestly class satisfied the religious needs of the masses of people. The chanting of the sacred formulas, the sound of bells and conches, the odour of the burning incense and of burnt offerings, descended soothingly upon the spirits of the vast numbers of people and appeased their innate human hunger for religion.
But there were some persons of a deep devotional disposition whom dreary ritualism and magical incantations which superseded a religion of morality, did not satisfy and they yearned for higher personal religious experience. They longed for passionately plunging into the life of the spirit. Such persons aspired to live religion in their own persons, to approximate the object of their devotion, to see their God face to face, to commune with him, and to lay bare their souls before him. They aimed at leading the life of the spirit, but the spirit was encased in a fleshy frame, and the flesh seemed to them to be antagonizing the spirit. Beneath their calm exterior, they often experienced the tempest raging within and their inner world torn by the conflict. Evil thoughts and vicious passions forced themselves into the mind and tortured it. Their one paramount function, they concluded, was to quell the tumult of their physical nature, before they could embark upon spiritual progress. They betook themselves to ascetic practices to drill and discipline, control and subdue their unruly bodies. They left their homes and retired to the forests. They practised various kinds of austerities, flagellated themselves, emaciated, tortured, and mortified their bodies by rigorous devices. They laboured to induce ecstatic state by fasting, vigil, and use of narcotics, as aspirants to magical power have been known to do from primitive times. The austerities and devotional exercises of some advanced ascetic monks, known by the name of Shramanas, excited great admiration and reverence of the people. Even gods, it is alleged, gained their supernatural power by practising austerities. They were mortals originally, say the Atharva Veda and the Brahmanas, and austerities enabled them to defy death. Sages and saints attained miraculous power by the same means. Manu speaks of the practice of austerities as the best means of purifying one's life. By the close of the Vedic period, life was divided into four stages, being those of discipleship, householdership, hermitage, and renunciation. The great legislator lays down that when a householder finds his skin wrinkled and his hair grown gray and witnesses sons born to his sons, he should give up his possessions, wear a tattered garment, resort to the forest, and fare on what grows in the forest or beg his food in adjoining villages. There he should practise austerities and concentrate his mind on Brahma. The ascetic ideal rose in great esteem. People whose lives were saddened with sorrow and suffering, those of highly emotional nature who were extremely sensitive to the jars and buffets of life, those who were temperamentally subject to intense alternating elation and depression, or those in the autumn of their lives who were anxious for their spiritual edification, severed all ties with their families and the busy world and returned to the forest solitudes. The cloister attracted recluses from all grades of society. King Janaka renounced his throne in old age and became a hermit.
The philosophical religion. Among the forest dwellers there arose a class of persons to whom the ascetic life, with its concomitant mortification of body, failed to bring mental satisfaction. There were already germs of theosophy in the Vedic hymns, and such persons, prone to reflection, began to think deeply on the great problems of life and death.
Philosophy has generally led its distinctive existence as a parallel attempt of man to think out for himself the eternal verities of life, which religion has claimed to impart through divine revelation. Religion has acknowledged it as an aid in its need or as a handmaid to amplify and elucidate its preachings. Philosophers have stood as a class by themselves. Their systems of thought have been recognized as the results of concentrated thinking on the problems of existence, or as the findings of human reason. Philosophy has from its earliest days been regarded in Greece as a secular attempt of the human mind to solve the riddles of life. India, on the other hand, has classed all such thinkers as one group of seers, sages, or prophets and held the utterance of every thinker as inspired. The unknown Vedic seer who sings of the water as the germ of life in the hymn of creation is giving expression to revealed truth, whereas Thales of Miletus, who declares water as the first principle, speaks in terms of cosmogonic philosophy. Kapila's great Sankhya system of numbers is enshrined for all time as divinely vouchsafed. When his Greek contemporary, Pythagoras, preaches that number is the first principle of the world, he passes as a lay thinker grafting his metaphysics on numbers.
With the advent of the great thinkers who weave their metaphysical speculations into creative systems of philosophy, higher religion in India tends to be philosophical religion, and metaphysical speculation becomes religious philosophy. The philosophical religion thus propounded by the great thinkers is embodied in the Upanishads. These Upanishads are appendices to Brahmanas and represent the essence of higher Brahmanism. They set aside the Vedic gods. The supreme God of the Brahmanic period was Prajapati or Brahma, a personal god like the various gods of the Vedic pantheon. The Upanishads replace this father-god by the impersonal world-soul. They teach the principle of divine immanence. Personality implies the existence of another, as an 'I' to a 'thee.' It is limitation. According to the thinkers, nothing exists outside of Brahma; all is Brahma. They teach idealistic monism. Brahma is the only reality, all else is illusion. The individual self is a mere reflex of the Self or Brahma. It is identical with the universal Self. It is due to ignorance and illusion that this fundamental truth is not recognized. It is knowledge that leads the individual to discover for himself that the outward Brahma and his inner self are one and the same. Man had always extolled God and humiliated himself. God was infinite when man was finite. God was all powerful, man was a weakling. God was king and man was his subject. Man looked to God with awe and reverence. He bowed before him, and prayed with folded arms and on bended knees. The Indian mystic philosopher is daring in his intercourse with the divine. He claims intimacy and identity with God, nay, he hails himself God, and assures every human being of potential divinity. When knowledge dawns upon man he can acclaim with sublime ecstasy, 'I am Brahma.' Man thus becomes God and the supreme function of philosophy is to raise man to his proper estate by means of knowledge. Divinity sleeps in man, it has to be awakened. Man is God in the making and knowledge makes him God. In its keen insight into the mystery of existence, its scientific value of philosophical thinking, its boldness of conception, this all-absorbing monism has no equal in the history of philosophy. Brahma, as the apex of existence, is the acme of metaphysical speculation. But being nameless, colourless, and lifeless, it denies definition and defies description. It demands that man shall speak of it in negation only, but better still not speak at all. It is an impersonal neuter abstraction, a phantom god in the world of shadowy reality, a god who is no god.
But the human heart hungers for a God who is a thinking and willing being, a personal God who can hear man's prayers, who can bestow gifts, who can fulfil hopes, who can guide man on the highway of life, who can protect him from harm, who can award merit, who can punish wrong, who can forgive man's trespasses, who can replenish life when it seems hollow and empty, who can brighten it with gleams of sunshine when it seems dark and dreary, who can sustain man when he is downcast, in whom he can find strength in his weakness, before whom he can lay his troubles, upon whom he can lean in his loneliness, in whom he can find refuge when the world seems to fail him, who can console the heavy-hearted, who can heal the bruised and bleeding heart, who can wipe away the tears of those that weep their lives out, and who can respond to the human call whenever and from wherever it comes and whatever it may be.
The philosophers thus dispensed with gods, but they persisted none the less. Like the rise and fall of kings and dynasties, old gods were forgotten, forsaken, but new ones simultaneously succeeded them. The sacred texts habitually explain and accommodate new gods by depicting one as incarnating himself in the person of another or by declaring a new god as being identical with the old one. Rudra, for example, is seen resenting the treatment accorded him. The supreme Adorable One pacifies him by saying that homage paid to one was equivalent to that given to another, for they were both one and the same. When Bhagavat or Vasudeva rises to be the supreme God in the fourth century b.c., Brahma and Shiva are declared to be his creations and are relegated to subordinate positions to carry out the will of the new god. Similarly when Brahmanism later absorbed the cult of Bhagavat, Vishnu, the sun god, who was popular at the period, became the supreme God. Thus did the generality of mankind find that they could not live without personal gods and kindly gods did not desert them to their fate.
The religion of devotion. Krishna Vasudeva, a member of the warrior caste, founded Bhagavatism, the religion of bhakti, devotion or love, about the 4th century b.c. Bhagavatism arose under the influence of Sankhya and Yoga. Sankhya being an atheistic system, Bhagavatism allied itself with Yoga. Concentration of thought, which is Yoga's fundamental concern, was converted into devotion to a personal God. This personal God, whom he termed the Adorable One, was the objective of man's devotion and love. This doctrine is later propounded in the Bhagavad Gita, or the Song Celestial, originally composed in the 2nd century b.c., and surviving in its later redacted form. In transcendent beauty and elegance of form, this philosophical poem is among the sublimest that have been vouchsafed to man. It teaches an eclectic philosophy weaving ideas from Sankhya and Yoga around the central doctrine of devotion or love to God.
Whole-hearted love of God and duty selflessly performed in the name of God, dedicating one's actions to the glory of God, win deliverance for man—such is the message of the Gita. Rituals, concentration of thought, and disciplinary ascetic practices are aids to the life of devotion or love for God. Love for God leads man to know him better and teaches him to do his deeds, leaving their outcome to God. Those who know Krishna are freed from the binding nature of actions. Those who piously seek and find refuge in him are absolved of their sins. Faith, love, and resignation in him sustain man in this life and open for him, after his death, a life of felicity in loving fellowship with God.
New gods thus replaced the old Indo-Iranian gods. The evolution of religious thought in India made such a comprehensive and revolutionary advancement upon Indo-Iranian religion, that it gave an altogether different form to the religions that originated during the millennium.
The Indian outlook on life changes. A thousand years of life upon the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges had softened and sombred the character of the robust and joyful Aryan settlers of India. In common with their Iranian cousins whom they had left behind the Hindukush, the Vedic singers had sung of this world in laudatory terms and feverently prayed for long life in it with its riches and joys. The hymns of these priestly sages throb with the cheerful, optimistic view of life. Their descendants of the later Brahmanic period who speculated on the problems of life showed a marked turn from this cheerful and optimistic attitude towards life upon earth to a gloomy and pessimistic one. The Kshatriyas or men of the ruling and fighting class produced the pessimistic philosophy of the Upanishads from about 800 b.c. onwards. They seem to have grown intensely sensitive to the stress of living. Climatic influences, political upheavals, racial contacts, and above all, metaphysical speculations of their great thinkers are the causes that have contributed to their altered attitude towards life upon earth. This new philosophical religion preaches that happiness or enjoyment of life while living or of the merited good after death reacts upon the person and condemns him to several lives in the woeful world This world is illusory and soaked in sorrow and suffering. Yet upon such a purgatorial world man's desire for happiness brings him again and again to go the dreary rounds of births and deaths, to live out the karma of his past lives until, divested of actions and their consequences, he may, at a dim and distant date, win liberation from the labyrinth of life and escape heavenward to rest his world-weary head on the breathless bosom of Brahma.
Such is the philosophy of life propounded by the leading thinkers of India by the sixth century b.c. It becomes the standard philosophy for all time and generally leaves its indelible impression upon the subsequent religious and philosophical thought in India. With the exception of some materialistic systems of philosophy of the type of the Charvaka which taught pure Hedonism, the various schools of thought generally agreed in their estimate of life upon earth as a life of woe. Buddha and Mahavira, who founded their great religions at short intervals during the sixth century b.c., had their minds saturated with the pessimistic view of man's life upon earth. The one great thinker whose teachings exerted lasting influence upon Buddha was Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy. It was the dictum of the Sankhya system, that existence was suffering. What men considered pleasure was pain in disguise. Life was pain.
Buddha lays down with greater emphasis than ever before that life is suffering. There is no cure for the world-ache. The world is irremediable and not to be born in it is the only escape from suffering. Life, says Buddha, is steeped in sorrow and suffering. Pleasure is gilded pain. Joy is veiled sorrow. Birth is sorrow. Age is sorrow. Wealth is sorrow. Sickness is sorrow. Death is sorrow. Union with the unpleasant is sorrow. Separation from the pleasant is sorrow. Desire for life is sorrow. Ungratified desire is sorrow. The tears, he adds, that the weary wayfarers have shed upon their pilgrimages upon earth make a vaster expanse of water than the waters of all the oceans upon the earth. Just as the ocean has only one taste of salt so, it is said, Buddha's teachings have but one taste, deliverance from suffering. The comprehension of the origin and nature of this suffering and the knowledge of the path that leads to its cessation bring freedom from birth and death. Life is suffering and Buddha's mission is to preach the gospel of deliverance from it.
The philosophy of escape from life. There are occasions in the lives of all human beings when they think they cannot adapt themselves to the world around them. Hard facts of life seem to press very heavily upon them and they seek diverse means to lighten the burden. Some like to forget their environments and seek seclusion in out of the way places far from society, where they can feel happy to be alone in the company of nature. They crave the joy of solitude where they can lose themselves in the soliloquy of their own thoughts. Men with literary leanings read so that they may forget themselves for a time and transplant themselves into other environments. Society's baseness revolts some who long to strip themselves bare of the trappings of civilization and escape to the freedom of primitive simplicity. Morbidity drives some to seek isolation from society. Despair and distress drive others to seek refuge in a world of dreams, where they can forget the hard realities of life, and live awhile with their fancies and dreams in the atmosphere created by their own inagination. They like to retreat within themselves, seeking the protection of the inner life against the torments of outer life. Here they fondly delude themselves to ascribe reality to their visions and dreams. They people the world with their own thoughts, make it after their likes and dislikes. It gives them some comfort to live awhile in the world of illusion. Many find occasional reverie soothing. The soothing thoughts of the dreamland of their creation help them to forget the trying reality and lull to sleep the burning fever of the tortured brain. Men of philosophic bent of mind seek to escape the sordid realities of life by retiring into a world of mysticism to live in the atmosphere of otherworldliness.
Among the Aryan settlers of India, we have seen, renunciation of the world of desires became an ideal of life. Desire came to be looked upon as the chief cause of evil. To live is to desire and consequently suffer in many rebirths. Escape from the life of desires to seek their extinction hastened deliverance. The Bhagavad Gita seeks to find compromise by advising the wise to desire without any attachment and to act without any expectation of reaping fruits.
Prince Arjuna is grieved at the painful duty his position in life entails upon him to fight his kinsmen. When he witnesses the contending armies drawn up on the battlefield, he is struck with sudden compunction and appalled at the prospect of the impending slaughter of his kinsfolk. He hesitates to plunge into the battle array. God Krishna manifests himself in human form in the person of his charioteer to relieve him from his embarrassment. On no account can the prince shirk his inevitable duty, urges Krishna, even if its performance forces him to wade his way to the throne through the blood of his relations. Man cannot escape his duty in life. He cannot compass his retreat before the actions that fall to his lot.
Life without actions is unthinkable. One has only to do his work in such a manner that he may maintain complete detachment from the consequence of his actions. Dispassionate and disinterested performance of actions does not fetter the doer. Thus, says Krishna, he acts himself, for the world would perish if he ceased to work. The multifarious actions that he performs do not entail upon him the necessity of going the round of existences because his actions are selfless and directed to the good of mankind. Action, he says, is better than inaction and he adds that immunity from action can be had by action alone. Action should be for the sake of accomplishing it and not for its resulting rewards. Man has to perform his duty zealously in whatever station of life he may happen to be. He has to be utterly indifferent and unmindful of the fruits of his actions. Or better still, says Krishna, he should do his deeds in the name of his God and for him, and dedicate all his activity to the glory of God.
Ignorance is the penalty that the soul pays when it enters the body. The senses introduce it to the fleeting show of the world. The mind broods over the objects and is drawn in attachment to them. Attachment gives rise to desire which is insatiable like fire. As long as man is swayed by desire, he drifts like a ship that is tossed upon the waves by stormy winds. Desire, wrath, and greed are the threefold entrance to hell. By regulating and controlling the senses, man secures the tranquillity of thought and knowledge. His tranquillity of mind should be such as to remain undisturbed like a flame that is sheltered from the wind and flickers not. He should be temperate in food and sleep, work and rest. As the tortoise draws its head and feet within its shell, so should he be withdrawn from the outer world of senses and, retiring to a secluded spot, think and meditate deeply upon God. When he has attained this state of devotional exaltation, a clod of earth and a lump of gold become of equal worth unto him Joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, success and failure, censure and praise, good and evil, friend and foe are all alike unto him and he is unaffected by the pairs of opposites. Happiness is quiescence and life's goal is its attainment.
The inherent evil nature of matter, however, remains characteristic of all Indian thinkings The human body continues to be regarded as the root of evil. The moralists teach the strengthening of the spirit by breaking the body and the ascetic ideal of life is highly esteemed.
When the Buddhist monk migrated to distant lands they spread the ascetic view of life in places where they lived. The Greek philosophers became acquainted with it at an early date. The Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect, adopted it from the Neo-Pythagoreans.