History of Religion

ch the successful race is found to have spread further towards the East, and to have settled on the Ganges and its tributaries. Along with t

rule of priests. The early religious writings have been formed into a sacred canon: there is an active production of new works which explain the old ones; the sacrifices grow more elaborate and ne

t before they took shape in the rigid caste system of India. This system appears to be organised with a view expressly to the exaltation of the priesthood, and must have been the result of a struggle between the priests and the warrior or ruling classes. The priests have made themselves indispensable in nearly all religious acts. Their very title shows this. While Brahman, as the name of a god, means primarily growth, and later, devotion or prayer, brahmana (neut.) signifies the ritual texts according to which worship is performed, and brahman (mas.) is the name of those who use such texts, and comes to stand for the highest caste of Indian society. Without the brahman there can be no satisfactory

achs, Die Unglei

e-born classes (their second birth answers to confirmation, and takes place when a young man is invested with the sacred thread). The Sudras are the fourth and lowest class; no duty is assigned to them in the law

terary movement in which they were concerned, then of the sacrifices they conducted, and of their gods. We shall then say something of the practical operati

them by mythological stories which we should not otherwise know, and we see from them that many superstitions, to which the Vedas gave no encouragement, yet lived among the people. Each Samhita, or collection of hymns, had its Brahmana, and some of the collections had several. These works, though transcending in dreariness most directories of worship, are yet of great value for the light they throw on the history of Indian manners and ideas, as well as on that of mythology. And as it happened among the Jews in their later period so it happened here;-the sanctity of the text was extended to the commentary, the brahmana also was held to be god-given and inspired, and by some was even more highly esteemed than the hymns themselves. A third class o

ng supernatural powers and of far higher than human origin. They were raised to the rank of a divinity, they were said to have had to do with the creation of the world, or to have been among the first created beings. The value of the study of them was not to be exaggerated; he w

e-and several kinds of priests, and it stands to reason that an elaborate ritual derived from a distant age and cherished by a priestly caste which was growing in power, coul

ording to a certain ritual, it lay with the worshippers to fix to what god or gods the sacrifice should be addressed. There was not one ritual for Agni and another for Indra, but the same would serve for either or for both. The sacrifices of which we hear in the Brahmanas are domestic rites; they are offered by the heads of the household, who invite ancestors also to be present. A Brahman is present to direct those who sacrifice and the inferior priests w

that they forget about the god it is intended for. And as they are quite convinced that the sacrifice, if offered with perfect correctness and with nothing left out, must produce its effect, the sacrifice itself comes to appear as the agent of the desired blessing; the god grows less but the sacrifice grows more. This process, which may be observed wherever ritualism exists, was carried in the period of Brahmanism to its utmost length. In this period the old gods lost the strong hold they had before over the people's mind; men ceased to look for their gods to the sky or to the tempest, and began to look instead to the long ceremonies of the priest or to the hymn he chanted at the altar, or to the austerities he practised. Gods of a new type now make their appearance. As in the Vedic period we saw that Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, had a place beside Indra and Varuna, so now we see that the supreme deity is named Brahma. The prayer connected with the sacrifice has given its name to the ruler of the universe. Other names for t

f acquainted with several of these. The most famous and the longest, is the laws of Manu, a mythical progenitor of mankind. In the form in which we have it this work dates probably from the second century A.D., but the body of the work is much older. Originally a local collection of rules, it ex

triad, but probably the original meaning is Yes, an abstract all-embracing yes, in which nothing but pure being is affirmed), is repeated at every return to study, and also with great frequency at other times. The teacher is more to the student than his father, and is to be treated with the greatest deference and courtesy; these years are a training in gentle and seemly conduct as well as in law. His student days completed, the Brahman offers his first sacrifice, marries, and becomes a householder. Little is said of earning a living; the Brahman is not to be worldly, but he is to be independent if he can. He is, however, allowed to beg if in want. But more stress is laid on the continued pursuit of knowledge, and on the domestic sacr

esire to live; let him wait for his time

me any one's enemy for the sake of this perishable body. Against an angr

present in all organisms, both the highest and the lowest. He is to give up all attachments, and in this way, a

es, that the search for wisdom and the work of self-conquest, and a union with the deity which is quite apart from any offering or from any form of worship, also lead to salvation. It is objected to the ethics of Manu that the ideal they set up is not an active but a suffering one; the ascetic is placed on a higher platform than the householder, men are encouraged to withdraw from the performance of their duties in the family and in society, and to devote themselves to an aim which, however lofty, is personal and, so far, selfish. It is certainly a weakness in the religion that it has no hig

lation and absorption could lead to the highest consummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was at hand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition is made from the service of gods external to man, by the mechanism of rites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feels himself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his own spiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members of the lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction made important contributions, and whi

e have as the supreme, Brahma, the power of prayer,2 a being of a different character from all his predecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, a knower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits in unbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. In rendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are anticipating. Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean the person, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, the essential, innermost self

hma see Mr. Max Müller's

world? This world of change and decay, of disappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do with that? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer to this in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. It was due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in various ways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and this error has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth. Or else it is held that it

irstly negative, that he must not allow the world to influence him at all, and, secondly, positive, that he must strive to be united with Brahma. The negative task is performed by withdrawing the mind from all particular things, and letting it be filled with the general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding the desires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire and ceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positive task is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot here describe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is within and realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts and affections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all is illusion morality di

ver flourished in the world is within the mind;3 and on the other hand, a religion in which outward gods are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is counted sacred because a god or gods inspired it, and in which superstitions gathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by no means killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On the contrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to a region whither the people could not follow, left the religion of the people to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine must here be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism received from the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to the higher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; t

ty with Brahma, the gods are

the three steps (heaven, the air, the earth), who becomes the favourite deity. The stern and destructive S'iva is a new figure, and seems to be partly an adaptation of a god of the savage aborigines: his worship is the most fanatical. These three, the Creator, the Upholder, and the Destroyer, form the Trimurti, or divine trinity of India,-a trinity arrived at not by unfolding the riches of the one great god, but by compounding the claims of three gods who were rivals. The doc

RECO

at the end of last chapter

in the Sacred Books of the East,

and xv. U

xiv. Sacred La

he Institut

li. The Satapatha-Brahma

xxv.

x. Grihya-Sutras (D

ic Hymns. xlvi.

iv. Hymns of t

xxviii., xlviii

Sanscri

ndische

tareya B

PTE

N