A millennium indeed! A thousand years of Time which (despite many purely historical events in its latter half, to which return will be made in the next chapter) must be treated, as a whole, as perhaps the most wonderful period in the history of the world. For, just as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanity appears to have set its mind on art, and such names as Shakspeare, Dante, Rafael, Leonardo da Vinci, Palestrina, Cervantes, and a hundred others are to be found jostling each other in history, so, during these thousand years, the mind of man throughout the whole world appears to have been set on solving the great secret of Life and Death.
The answer was given in many ways by the Greek and Roman philosophers, by Confucius in China, by Christ in Judea, by Buddha and the great systems of Indian philosophy in Hindustan; and yet the question is still being asked with the old intensity, the old keen desire for answer!
Now, since these thousand years have, in India, left behind them a very remarkable literature which, even in these latter days, is the root of all life and thought in that vast peninsula, it is as well to attempt a slight sketch of the time, as a whole, before embarking on actual history; though to do the latter we shall, after treating of the religious age, have to hark back to the year 620 B.C.
At the commencement, then, of this thousand years, the Aryans were still pushing their way westwards and southwards from the alluvial plains of Northern India.
It seems likely that the tide of their conquest followed that of the retreating sea. However that may be, certain it is that they found before them dark, almost impenetrable, swampy forests, swarming with enemies of all kinds. Who or what these were we have at first small record. Doubtless the human foes belonged to the aboriginal tribes which are still to be found clinging to the far mountain uplands and inaccessible fastnesses which the Aryans did not care to annex. But in the literature of which mention has been made, all and sundry are disdainfully dismissed with the epithet "Rakshas," or evil demons.
Behind this shrinking verge of devildom, however, we know that "the children of light" were settling down; towns were springing up, waste land was being cleared and cultivated, schools were being established, and many principalities rising into power. But of all this we have as yet no record at all, until about one-half of the millennium was over. On the other hand, we have exhaustive literary evidence of what the minds of men were busying themselves about, first in the Ûpanishads, and then in the myriad Sûtras or Aphorisms, on every subject, apparently, under the sun, which are still extant.
Regarding the former--of which the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, wrote: "They have been the solace of my life; they will be the solace of my death"--though some of these treatises or essays belong, undoubtedly, to the dying years of the Epic age, they fall far more naturally into place during the opening years of this, the succeeding one. Their bold hypotheses covering all things were the first reaction against the soul-stifling formalisms of the Brahmânas; these, again, being due to the development of the dignity of the priestly class, which followed naturally on the excessive militarism so noticeable in the Mâhâbhârata. Of a truth, its stalwart warriors, for ever engaged in deadly combat and stirring adventures, could as heads of households have had little time for the due performance of domestic ceremonials after the customs of their fathers. Hence the rapid growth of the professional priesthood.
The fatal facility, however, with which speculative thought, after throwing off the shackles of canon and dogma, finds fresh slavery for itself in scientific formalism, is shown by the succeeding Sûtra literature, in which every department of thought and action is crystallised and codified into cut-and-dried form.
A reaction from this, again, is to be found in the succeeding philosophy of Kapîla and his disciples, which must have been promulgated a century or so before the birth of Gâutama Buddha. Frankly agnostic, many of the conclusions of this Sankhya system are to be found in the works of the latest German philosophers. Like theirs it is cold, and appeals not to the masses, but to speculative scholars. Still, it is strange that the very first recorded system of philosophy in the world, the very first attempt to solve the Great Question by the light of reason alone, should differ scarcely at all from the last. The human brain fails now, as it failed then; for Kapîla's doctrine never really overset those of the Ûpanishads, though the system of philosophy founded upon these last (and therefore called the Vedanta) was not to come for many years. But what, indeed, can or could overset the doctrine laid down in these same Ûpanishads, of a Universal Soul, a Universal Self, which is--to use the very words of the text:--
"Myself within the heart smaller than a corn of rice, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than the kernel of a canary seed: myself within the heart greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven. Lo! He who beholds all beings in this Self, and Self in all beings, he never turns away from it. When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who has once beheld that unity? He, the Self, encircles all, bright, incorporeal, scatheless, pure, untouched by evil; a seer, wise, omnipresent, self-existent, he disposed all things rightly for eternal years. He therefore who knows this, after having become quiet, subdued, satisfied, patient and collected, sees Self in Self, sees all in Self. Evil does not overcome him, he overcomes all evil. Free from evil, free from stain, free from doubt, he becomes True Brahman. The wise who, meditating on this Self, recognises the Ancient who dwells for ever in the abyss, as God--he indeed leaves joy and sorrow far behind; having reached the subtle Being, he rejoices because he has obtained the cause of rejoicing."
Such words as these live for ever, a veritable Light in the Darkness of many philosophies.
Yet even the Vedanta teaching failed to satisfy the masses; its atmosphere was too rarefied for them. So about the middle of the millennium a new Teacher arose. Gâutama Buddha was born about the year B.C. 560 at Kapilavâstu, and the followers of the religion of which he was the founder number at this present day nearly one-third of the whole human race.
A magnificent work truly, look at it how we may! Yet it becomes the more astounding when we enquire into the religion itself; for it holds out no bait to humanity. It neither gives the immediate and certain grip on a spiritual and therefore eternal life which the Vedanta promises, neither does it proclaim the personal individual immortality for which the Christian is taught to look.
Yet it holds its place firmly as first favourite with humanity. There are some five hundred million Buddhists, as against some three hundred million Christians; while about the tenth century of our era fully one-half the world's inhabitants followed the teaching of Gâutama.
Why is this? Wherein lies the charm? Possibly in its pessimism, in the declaration that all is, must be, suffering.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of Suffering. Birth is suffering, decay is suffering, illness is suffering, Death is suffering.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cause of suffering. Thirst for pleasure, thirst for life, thirst for prosperity, thirst that leads to new birth.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the cessation of Suffering. It is the destruction of desire, the extinction of thirst.
"Hear! O Bhikkhus! the Noble Truth of the Pathway which leads to the cessation of suffering. Right Belief, Right Aspirations, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Exertion, Right-mindedness, Right Meditation."
In these few words lies the whole teaching of Buddhism. To king and beggar alike, the world is evil; there is but one road to freedom, and that must be trodden alike by all. In that road none is before or after others.
Now to the poor, to the oppressed, there is balm in this thought. Lazarus does not yearn for Abraham's bosom! Before all lies forgetfulness, peace, personal annihilation.
This, then, was the teaching which Gâutama Buddha, the son of a king, gave as a gift to his world; and his world, wearied yet once more with formalism, with the ever-growing terrorism of caste and creed, welcomed it with open arms. The progress of the Buddhistic faith was fairly astounding, and half India was converted in the twinkling of an eye. Of the life led by the founder himself much has been written. Many of the incidents bear a strange resemblance to those in the life of Christ. Perhaps none is more beautiful than the story of the woman who applied to Gâutama, begging him to restore her dead child to life. As given in Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, it runs so:--
"Whom, when they came unto the river side,
A woman--dove-eyed, young, with tearful face
And lifted hands saluted, bending low:
'Lord! thou art he,' she said, 'who yesterday
Had pity on me ...
* * * *
* when I came
Trembling to thee whose brow is like a god's.
And wept, and drew the face-cloth from my babe,
Praying thee tell what simples might be good.' ...
'Yea! little sister, there is that might heal
Thee first and him, if thou couldst fetch the thing.
Black mustard-seed a tola; only mark
Thou take it not from any hand or house
Where father, mother, child or slave hath died.'
'Thus didst thou speak, my Lord.
... I went, Lord, clasping to my breast
The babe grown colder, asking at each hut:
"I pray you, give me mustard, of your grace
A tola, black," and each who had it gave.
But when I asked: "In my friend's household here
Hath any, peradventure, ever died?
Husband or wife or child or slave?" they said:
"Oh, Sister! what is this you ask? The dead
Are very many, and the living few." ...
Ah sir! I could not find a single house
Where there was mustard seed, and none had died.'
* * * *
* "'My sister! thou hast found,' the Master said,
'Searching for what none finds that better balm
I had to give thee....
Lo! I would pour my blood if it could stay
Thy tears, and win the secret of that curse
Which makes sweet love our anguish ...
I seek that secret: bury thou thy child.'"Buddha, it will be observed, answered no questions. He left the insoluble alone. He simply preached that holiness meant peace and love, that peace and love meant pure earthly happiness.
So, even while they accepted the morality of Buddhism, and acquiesced in its negation, the keener speculative minds were still busy trying to find some key to fit the Great Lock.
The Yoga system of philosophy followed on the Sankhya, the Nyaya and the Vaisasika on the Yoga; finally, the two Mimamsa or Vedanta philosophies. Of these the Yoga is merely a repetition, with some alteration, of the Sankhya; the Nyaya--which is to the Hindu what the Aristotelian system was to the Greek, and which is still the school of logic--finds its complement in the scientific and atomic theories of the Vaisasika. This last, which is the first effort made in India to enquire into the laws of physics, is curiously provocative of thought. A Rip-van-Winklish feeling creeps into the mind as the eyes read that all material substances are aggregates of atoms, that the ultimate atom must be simple, that the mote visible in the sunbeam, though the smallest perceptible object, must yet be a substance, therefore a thing composed of things smaller than itself.
Once again the question arises, "How much further have we gone towards solution?"
Of the Vedanta system enough has already been said. It is pure Monism, matter being but a manifestation of the Supreme Energy, the Supreme Soul, the Supreme Self which comprises all things, holds all things, is all things.
So much for the speculative thought of this remarkable age. But when we turn to other subjects, we find the same truly marvellous acumen displayed in almost every field of enquiry.
Panini, whom Max Muller called the greatest grammarian the world has ever seen, lived in the middle of this millennium, and by resolving Sanskrit to its simple roots, paved the way for the Science of Languages. It is strange, indeed, to think of him in the dawn of days discovering what was to be rediscovered more than two thousand years afterwards, and adopting half the philological formulas of the present century.
So with geometry, a science which certainly developed from the strict rules concerning the erection of altars, as the science of phonetics grew from the study necessary to ensure absolutely accurate intonations of the sacred text. Of the former science much is to be found in the Sulva Sûtras; amongst other things, the celebrated theorem that the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the square of the two other sides of a rectangular triangle. This proposition is ascribed by the Greeks to Pythagoras, but it was known in India long before his time, and it is supposed that he learnt it while on his travels, which included Hindustan.
Geometry, however, was not destined to take hold of the Indian mind. The cognate science of numbers speedily took its place, and the acute Asiatic intellect soon evolved Algebra out of the arithmetic which they had rendered of practical use by the adoption of the decimal system of notation.
For all these many discoveries the world is indebted to this marvellous millennium.
Regarding the social life of this time the Dharma Sûtras give us endless laws--which are the originals of later and codified laws--concerning almost every subject under the sun. As every Hindu student (and every Hindu had to be student for a definite number of years) had to learn these Sûtras by heart, it may safely be predicted that they faithfully reflect the general conduct of affairs. They are extraordinarily minute in particular, and from them it may be gathered that life had become much more artificial. Amongst the king's duties is that of "guarding household weights and measures from falsification." It may also be noticed that "the taxes payable by those who support themselves by personal labour differ materially from those paid by mere possessors of property." Any injury, also, to a cultivator's land or to an artisan's trade was punished with great severity, and violence in defence of them was held justifiable. A legal rate of interest was settled, and the laws of inheritance were laid down minutely, as also were those of marriage. Indeed, as Mr R. C. Dutt puts it:--
"Everything that was confused during the Epic period was brought to order--everything that was discursive was condemned; opinions were arranged and codified into bodies of laws, and the whole social system of the Hindus underwent a similar rigid treatment."
Briefly, it was at once an age of keen speculation and rapid crystallisation almost unequalled in the history of any nation. Nor have we to found this estimate of it solely by inference from the literature which it has left behind it. We have other evidence on which to draw. True, the earliest foreign notice of India is that of Hekataios of Miletus, who wrote about B.C. 520, but he seems only to have been aware of its existence. The next is that of some inscriptions of the Persian king, Darius, which may be dated about B.C. 486, while Ktesias of Knidos, who collected travellers' tales about the East, wrote a little later. But Alexander's Indian campaign, which began in the year B.C. 327, brought many Western eyes to wonder at what they saw, and from this time Greece practically gives us the chronology of Hindustan.
Of what these Western eyes saw we gain glimpses in the few fragments of the works of Megasthenes which have withstood the destruction of time. Living, as he did, in the fourth century B.C. as Ambassador at the court of Pâlipûtra, he gives us a picture of the times well worth reading, with a few extracts from which this chapter may well conclude.
"The inhabitants, having abundant means of subsistence, exceed, in consequence, the ordinary stature, and are distinguished by their proud bearing. They are also found to be well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very finest water ... they almost always gather in two harvests annually; and even should one of the sowings prove more or less abortive, they are always sure of the other crop. It is accordingly affirmed that famine has never visited India, and that there has never been any general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food.... But, further, there are usages observed by the Indians which contribute to prevent the occurrence of famine among them; for whereas amongst other nations it is usual, in the contests of war, to ravage the soil, and thus to reduce it to an uncultivated waste, among the Indians, on the contrary, by whom husbandmen are regarded as a class that is sacred and inviolable, the tillers of the soil, even when battle is raging in their neighbourhood, are undisturbed by any sense of danger, since the combatants allow them to remain quite unmolested. Neither do they ravage a land with fire nor cut down its trees.... The Indians do not raise monuments to the dead, but consider the virtues which men have displayed in life and the songs in which their praises are celebrated, sufficient to preserve their memory.... All the Indians are free, and not one of them is a slave. The Indians do not even use aliens as slaves, and much less one of their own countrymen.... They live frugally and observe very good order. Theft is of very rare occurrence. The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom appeal to law. They have no suits about pledges or deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each other. They neither put out money at usury or know how to borrow.... Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem.... In contrast to the general simplicity of their style, they love finery and ornaments. Their robes are worked in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wear flowered garments of the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind hold umbrellas over them; for they have a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every device to improve their looks....
"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the market, others of the city, others of the soldiers, while some superintend the canals and measure the land, some collect the taxes, and some construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and the distances....
"Those who have charge of the city are divided into six bodies of five each. The first body looks after industrial art. The second attends to the entertainments of strangers, taking care of them, well or ill, and, in the event of their dying, burying them and forwarding their property to their relatives. The third enquires of births and deaths, so that these among both high and low may not escape the cognisance of Government. The fourth deals with trade and commerce, and has charge of weights and measures. The fifth supervises the sale of manufactured articles which are sold by public notice, and the sixth collects the tithe on such articles. There is, beside the city magistrates, a third body, which directs military affairs. One division of this has charge of the infantry, another of the cavalry, a third of the war chariots, a fourth of the elephants; while one division is appointed to co-operate with the admiral of the fleet and another with the superintendent of the bullock trains used for transporting the munitions of war."
So much for the East before it was gripped by the West. With a full-blown War Office, and a statistical registration of births and deaths, it appears to have gone far on the course of our civilisation.
Concerning the "Brahmanes," as the old writers term the Brahmans, Megasthenes says of them that they live in groves, and
"spend their time in listening to sermons, discourses, and in imparting knowledge to such as will listen to them. The hearer is not allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he offends in any of these ways, he is cast out from their society that very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint. Death is with them a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb matures, and death as the birth into a new and happy life. They go about naked, saying that God has given the body as sufficient covering for the soul."
One may still hear this teaching given in the mango groves, or in the shade of a banyan tree, throughout this India of the twentieth century.
And it still satisfies the hearers.