Part 5
There is a Japanese proverb which says: “Meeting is the beginning of parting.” Pregnant, indeed, are those six words, for in them are summed up all the sorrows and the one inevitable certainty of life. When the parting with those who are dear to us takes place, how we treasure some trifle which brings to life recollections of the sweet communion of the past! And so it is with those relics of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. When Assheton Smith, the famous sportsman, was told that he must take his ailing wife to the South of France, he, being a wealthy man, answered: “That I cannot do, but I can and will bring the South of France to her.” And so there arose that marvellous conservatory, a glass palace, which I remember well, when nearly sixty years ago I used to go and stay with Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, who rented the place. In our humble way we bring home to ourselves the lands endeared to us by the careless gaiety of former days, scenes which are peopled by the ghosts of old friends whom we conjure up, living once more in the sunshine of happy youth. Is not that the chief sanity of the collector’s madness?
BUDDHA AND ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND CASTE—THE ARYANS
There are few days in the year, even in mid-winter, or, what is worse still, in March, when I cannot sit out in my Veluvana, a sun-trap snugly sheltered from the north and the biting east. It is my thinking-place, and on this 28th of January, for some mysterious reason, with his image before me, my thoughts have been held entirely by the Buddha himself. Not that I am a Buddhist, or in the remotest degree likely to become one, though we hear of convinced followers of that religion even among Englishmen; but, as those who condescend to read me will have guessed, the story of his life has a great attraction for me, and that none the less because it is the record of one of the greatest rebellions that ever took place. Indeed, there is something weirdly fascinating in the history of all revolution even where we most hate it. What show-place can possess greater interest than the tragic collections of the Musée Carnavalet in what was once Madame de Sévigné’s home in Paris? Yet it is made up of relics which make men shudder, especially those few still left who, like myself, long ago knew not a few people who had lived through the days of the Terreur.
I have stood in that house of gruesome memories spellbound by a fascination such as that by which a snake paralyses its victim. In quite another way I am entranced by the upheaval which was the work of the Buddha. There was not the faintest likeness between the two revolutions—indeed, they were diametrically opposites. The one all fury, flame and murder—hatred, the guillotine, and the _noyades_ of the Loire. The other, the calm extinction of all passion, all human desire, all ambition; a life spent in holy contemplation and in the wooing of that supreme wisdom which is virtue.
And yet Martin Luther himself, when he passionately scourged the Pope and his Bishop for the sale of indulgences, was not a more zealous rebel than this calm and contemplative Buddha, who, renouncing all honours and titles and worldly possessions for himself, contented, like St. Francis, to don the monk’s robe and to carry the beggar’s bowl, entered his peaceful protest against the usurpations and pretensions of the crafty Brahmans, who had long since drifted away from the simple and poetically beautiful teaching of the Rig Veda, albeit they acknowledged its authority as Sruti—inspiration, looking upon it as their one inspired sacred Book.[4] In that wonderful collection of hymns and prayers about which I wish to say a few words later there is no allusion to suttee—the awful institution under which widows are burnt with their dead husbands; none to child-marriages, another cruelty; none to caste. All of these were inventions of the Brahmans, and it was upon the doctrine of caste that they founded their claim to superiority over the kings and princes whom they had gradually supplanted.
So long as the king and priest were one—so long, that is to say, as the king conducted the ceremonies and sacrifices of religion—the authority of the king was unchallenged.[5] But there came a moment when the kings grew weary of a tedious ritual and delegated their religious duties to substitutes. That was the opportunity of the priestcraft, who, as the intercessors between the people and their gods—a powerful position indeed—were able to claim a rank higher than that of the king himself. Here was the beginning of Caste. When Buddha entered upon his ministry there were four castes: (1) The Brahmans, or priests; (2) the Kshatriya, the warrior and governing class, to which the kings and princes belonged—a class analogous to the Samurai or Bushi of Japan; (3) the Vaisiyas—farmers, traders, etc. These three classes, all of Aryan descent, were, and are, “the twice-born,” whose second birth is symbolized by their being invested with the sacred cord at an age which more or less corresponds to that of confirmation with us. (4) The Sudras were the fourth class; they were the lowest of all—despised as the descendants of the Dasyu, the enemies of the bright gods, the aborigines who were defeated by the migration of the white Aryan herdsmen descending upon India from the lofty plains of the Pamirs.
We talk glibly enough of Caste, yet there are not many of us who have any glimmering of light as to its real meaning or origin. The majority of Europeans speak of the word as if it were of Hindu origin, whereas it is simply a Portuguese word signifying race or family. In its present sense, indeed, it is of quite modern birth, for the old Portuguese Barbosa, writing in the sixteenth century, only uses the word _casta_ in the sense of family, speaking of men and women _de boa casta_, of good family. When he wished to indicate the mysterious divisions of Indian society, he used the word _leis_, laws, _leis de gentios_, laws of the heathen. (Sir Henry Yule’s glossary.) Apart from the word, we are apt to speak of Caste as if it were an institution, respectable at any rate on account of its hoary antiquity. Old it certainly is, yet it was not known to the sacred poets of the Rig Veda.
The word which comes nearest to caste in Sanskrit is “Varna” (colour), and in the early days of the Aryan invasion of India there were only two classes: the white conquerors and the “Dasyu,” or enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered people, looked down upon. What we call caste, then, which was originally a question of skin, had already in the Buddha’s time, five centuries before our era, become far more complicated than that. Ethnologically, the division between the white man and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the conqueror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. But whereas the dark man remained as he was—the lowest of the castes—political reasons and the lust of power had subdivided the conquering race into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans laid the “precious corner-stone” of their priestly tyranny.
When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar and athlete, the man whom men envied and women loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order that for them he might work, striving for the good of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He went further than this: he denied the divine authority of the Veda, without which the whole structure of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally was branded as a heretic.
What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact that although Buddhism “became the state religion of India under Asōka, the Constantine of India, in the middle of the third century B.C.” (Max Müller), and was only declining in the seventh century A.D., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But that was not the case—on the contrary, it has become more and more involved, for there are now not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the subdivisions to which professions and occupations have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, looking down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion with some craftsman whose superior he deems himself to be. No wonder caste has been described as “a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of all employers of labour.” Life is, indeed, complicated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth falling upon a boiling pot defiles the food which it contains by an impurity which is almost worse than poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even in a European household, it has been said that no matter how low a menial may be, there is always someone a step lower to whom by payment he may assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning of the approaching contamination of his shadow.
Max Müller, in his “Chips from a German Workshop,” quotes a table by Berghaus showing the relative numbers of the people professing the chief religions into which the world is divided. Nothing can better show the extent of the influence which Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind.
Buddhists 31.2 Christians 30.7 Mohammedans 15.7 Brahmanists 13.4 Various heathens 8.7 Jews 0.3
In a note, Max Müller adds that: “As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssŭ Temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel.”
[Illustration: PROFESSOR F. MAX-MÜLLER.
_After a copyright photograph by Elliott & Fry, London._
[_To face p. 52._]
_Ex Oriente lux._ We see from this table that all the chief religions of the world have their rise, like the sun, in the East.
I have observed with no little astonishment that certain pundits of to-day speak in somewhat offensively patronizing tones of Max Müller, as if he were a thing of the past, all very well in his day, but not up to date, and already superseded. As to that, whether his theories upon the subject of mythology and comparative religion were sound or not, I am not competent to judge; but I feel that if others have pushed his work a step further than the point at which he left it, we may fairly ask whether, without his great labours, these sages would have attained their own success. There is no finality in science, and a Newton or a Faraday is in no way dethroned if others have built on the foundations which he laid. The world does not stand still, and it is the common fate of the pioneer that some new man should go beyond what he has reached. However that may be, the collating, translating and editing of the sacred books of India, and the editing of the thirty volumes of the sacred books of the East, including Chinese and Arabic works, were a colossal labour—the work of a lifetime, which has been of national and international value. All honour to the workman!
I first met Max Müller sixty years ago at the Deanery at Christ Church, where the evening parties were gatherings of all that was most distinguished in university life. He was then a most attractive personality, brilliant, of course, still young, not very tall, but extremely good-looking, an accomplished musician, the friend of Mendelssohn. His conversation was delightfully illuminating, and he was generous enough not to grudge the enjoyment of it to a humble undergraduate who was only too ready to sit at his feet. It was a regret to me that I left Oxford to enter the Foreign Office without having had the chance of attending his lectures; but his works on the Science of Language, and especially his “Chips from a German Workshop,” written at the behest of the great Bunsen, who persuaded the directors of the old East India Company on public grounds to defray the expense of his edition of the Vedas, have been to me the joy of many years, and still continue to fill many an idle moment, robbing it of its idleness, for who could be idle with Max Müller?
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A very charming book is Sabatier’s “Life of St. Francis of Assisi.” To me one of its chief attractions lies in the strong parallel between the life of the mediæval saint and the Eastern reformer. The points of divergence are no more than would be accounted for by the differences of time, place and surroundings. St. Francis was not a prince of the blood royal like the Buddha, but he was the son of a rich man, one of those merchants and men of mark who travelled through the world, visiting all the important fairs of those days, and received as welcome guests by the great nobles. Indeed, they, too, had a sort of patent of nobility of their own, belonging to a guild of popularity—for in those days when newspapers were not, the rare visits of a man who could bring the latest court gossip from Paris or London, and whose waggons were often laden with golden tribute sent from beyond the sea to the Pope, were looked forward to with no little pleasure. So Francis, in his gilded youth, became one of the leading youngsters of the town, foremost in all mischief and riotous living, a fighter and a daredevil, ruffling it in all the fantastic coxcombry of weapons and dress which the ingenuity of mediæval tailors and armourers could devise.
Fighting there was in plenty in the Italian cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who so ready to fight as the extravagant young scapegrace, who was as keen to throw away his life as his money? After one of the local raids came imprisonment for a year—then more fighting, followed by illness, fever and repentance; after that solitude, meditation, and the final renunciation of the world, the flesh and the devil, when the manifest likeness to the Buddha first asserted itself.
The long, lonely silences in the _carceri_, the little natural caves on the side of Mount Subasio, when the saint, plunged in profoundest thought, was dreaming dreams of founding an order which was to save mankind, cannot but remind us of the royal prince starving in the wilderness, he, too, dreaming of the rescue of the world from sin. Both founded their orders on principles which involved the giving up of everything to which men hold most firmly. There was to be no property, no house, no home, no family. Rags and beggary were no disgrace—rather the hall-mark of a spiritual nobility. Homeless, their disciples were to wander forth, trusting in Providence and charity, which should do something towards filling the beggar’s bowl. Neither saw at first that these were conditions which sooner or later must break down. Religion needs its luxuries and will have them: a school of absolute effacement of the world was impossible in the West as it had been in the East. To venture any minute sketch of the aims of the two reformers is beyond what I can do here. Both were animated by the most perfect spirit of self-sacrifice with which they vainly endeavoured to inspire their orders, but no founder of religion has yet succeeded in establishing principles from which their so-called disciples have not sooner or later found self-justified means of breaking away.
One prominent feature in the characters of these two saintly men has in it a touch of poetry which it were ill to miss. Both loved animals with a love that was almost holy. The Buddha held the taking of all life to be a sin, and it is impossible to read the Birth Stories, to which I have alluded elsewhere, without feeling that they were inspired by the tenderest sympathy. St. Francis preached to the birds, and when Buddha taught in the Deer Forest near Benares, stags and hinds stood still and listened.
“Birds, my brethren,” said St. Francis to the birds that fluttered round him, “it is your duty greatly to praise and love your Creator. He has given you feathers for raiment, wings to fly, and filled all your needs. He has made you the noblest of His creatures; He allows you to live in the pure air: you have no need to sow or to reap, but He cares for you, protects you and directs you.” And the birds stretched their necks, spread their wings, opened their beaks and looked at him as if thanking him, while he walked about amongst them, caressing them with the hem of his robe. Then he gave them his blessing and took leave of them.
When he was preaching at Alviano the swallows made such a noise with their twittering that he could not make himself heard. The gentle saint rebuked them: “It is my turn to speak,” he said. “Swallows, little sisters, listen to the Word of God, be silent and hold your peace, until I shall have said my say!” But for all this and much more, how St. Francis praised God for all His creatures and specially for “My Lord the Sun, for of Thee, oh! Most High, he is the symbol,”[6] we must turn to the pages of Sabatier. To St. Francis, as to the Buddha, all God’s creatures and the life which He gave them were sacred.
If there was much that was alike in the two men, there was one point in which they essentially differed. St. Francis was no scholar. He knew a little Latin, which he had learnt from the monks of St. George; that was a necessity for a man in his position, for Latin was a sort of lingua franca in his day, and was the language of sermons and of political discussions. Writing was a difficulty to him; he rarely took a pen in his hand and could do little more than sign his name. The autograph of the Sacro Convento, which is held to be genuine, gives evidence of great awkwardness. For the most part, he dictated, and would sign his letters with a simple T, the symbol of the Holy Cross. The Buddha, on the contrary, like St. Paul among the Pharisees, was a man of learning, deeply versed in the classics of the Brahmans, and well able to hold his own in discussions with the priests upon religion and upon the interpretation of the poems of the Rig Veda.
[Illustration: ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI PREACHING TO THE BIRDS.
_By Giotto._
[_To face p. 58._]
There is no ancient historical problem of so great interest as that of the Aryas, that mysterious people of whom we talk so much and know so little, as has been pointed out. The movements of the planets, the orbits of comets, have been accurately calculated; Nature is continually being compelled to yield many of her secrets to the patient investigations of science. But of this masterful white race, some of whom, from the high tablelands of Central Asia, swarmed down upon India as conquerors, while others, wandering by the shores of the Caspian Sea, overran Europe to become the progenitors of all that is noblest in mankind, there is no record, no history, and in regard to them even fable is silent. Where there is no writing, not so much as a graven stone, there can be no Champollion, no Rawlinson. The migrations of the Aryas, which meant so much for the children of men, were long unsuspected, and only in recent times realized. Even so, the few men of learning who gave thought to this crucial human enigma were travellers in a dense and dark forest, until in the Cimmerian gloom comparative philology opened out vistas—none too broad—through which they were enabled to gain glimpses of a civilization and people of whom all trace had been lost in the mist of many decades of centuries. Narrow as they were, they afforded the ποῦ στῶ, from which the investigation of the lost history was set in motion.
Of this modern learning we must acknowledge Max Müller as the foremost prophet. Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm and Burnouf were great men, but Max Müller, like Saul among the Benjamites, “from his shoulders and upward was higher” than any of them, and he it was who introduced the science of language into this country. To one who, like myself, has been a faithful believer in his teaching, it is a matter of unceasing wonder that there should be men of undoubted scientific and literary merit who hold in opposition to him that the Aryas were originally a European race, who in remote times found their way into Central Asia. This bold theory was started about the year 1839 by a famous Belgian geologist and ethnologist, Omalius d’Halloy, and it was taken up by no less a man than Robert Gordon Latham, by Benfey, Spiegel, Poesche, Penka, Schrader and others. Max Müller appears to attribute the idea to Benfey, a Jew, who was a learned Orientalist and professor of comparative philology at Göttingen. In Vol. IV., page 223, of Max Müller’s “Chips from a German Workshop,” we read: “We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to imagine these dialects flowing like streams from the centre of Asia to the south, the west and the north. I must confess that Professor Benfey’s protest against this theory seems to me very opportune, and his arguments in favour of a more Northern, if not European, origin of the whole Aryan family of speech deserve, at all events, far more attention than they have hitherto received.”
In spite of this, Max Müller does not seem to have bestowed that attention upon them, for I can find nothing either in confirmation or contradiction of the theory. He at once goes off at a tangent on the comparative inter-relations of the various Aryan _languages_ among themselves, but on the supposed European origin of the Aryan _race_ he is silent. I think it just possible that Max Müller may have wished to pay Benfey a compliment without committing himself to an endorsement of his views. Benfey had been strongly recommended to him by Bunsen, his own great friend and patron, for whom he cherished the most grateful affection.