l. 14, C'est que c'est une chose difficile a rencontrer que

la naissance d'un bouddha, aussi difficile a rencontrer que la fleur de l'Udumbara, que l'introduction du col d'une tortue dans l'ouverture d'un joug forme par le grand ocean.

'Il y a en chinois: un bouddha est difficile a rencontrer, comme les fleurs Udumbara et Palaca; et en outre comme si une tortue borgne voulait rencontrer un trou dans un bois flottant (litt. le trou d'un bois flottant).

'Lotus francais, p. 39, l. 110 (les creatures), enchainees par la concupiscence comme par la queue du Yak, perpetuellement aveuglees en ce monde par les desirs, elles ne cherchent pas le Buddha.

'Il y a en chinois: Profondement attachees aux cinq desirs--Elles les aiment comme le Yak aime sa queue. Par la concupiscence et l'amour, elles s'aveuglent elles-memes, etc.' ]

The whole work is written in a similar style, and where fact and legend, prose and poetry, sense and nonsense, are so mixed together, the plan adopted by M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, of making two lives out of one, the one containing all that seems possible, the other what seems impossible, would naturally recommend itself. It is not a safe process, however, to distil history out of legend by simply straining the legendary through the sieve of physical possibility. Many things are possible, and may yet be the mere inventions of later writers, and many things which sound impossible have been reclaimed as historical, after removing from them the thin film of mythological phraseology. We believe that the only use which the historian can safely make of the Lalita-Vistara, is to employ it, not as evidence of facts which actually happened, but in illustration of the popular belief prevalent at the time when it was committed to writing. Without therefore adopting the division of fact and fiction in the life of Buddha, as attempted by M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, we yet believe that in order to avoid a repetition of childish absurdities, we shall best consult the interest of our readers if we follow his example, and give a short and rational abstract of the life of Buddha as handed down by tradition, and committed to writing not later than the first century B.C.

Buddha, or more correctly, the Buddha,--for Buddha is an appellative meaning Enlightened,--was born at Kapilavastu, the capital of a kingdom of the same name, situated at the foot of the mountains of Nepal, north of the present Oude. His father, the king of Kapilavastu, was of the family of the _S_akyas, and belonged to the clan of the Gautamas. His mother was Mayadevi, daughter of king Suprabuddha, and need we say that she was as beautiful as he was powerful and just? Buddha was therefore by birth of the Kshatriya or warrior caste, and he took the name of _S_akya from his family, and that of Gautama from his clan, claiming a kind of spiritual relationship with the honoured race of Gautama. The name of Buddha, or the Buddha, dates from a later period of his life, and so probably does the name Siddhartha (he whose objects have been accomplished), though we are told that it was given him in his childhood. His mother died seven days after his birth, and the father confided the child to the care of his deceased wife's sister, who, however, had been his wife even before the mother's death. The child grew up a most beautiful and most accomplished boy, who soon knew more than his masters could teach him. He refused to take part in the games of his playmates, and never felt so happy as when he could sit alone, lost in meditation in the deep shadows of the forest. It was there that his father found him, when he had thought him lost, and in order to prevent the young prince from becoming a dreamer, the king determined to marry him at once. When the subject was mentioned by the aged ministers to the future heir to the throne, he demanded seven days for reflection, and convinced at last that not even marriage could disturb the calm of his mind, he allowed the ministers to look out for a princess. The princess selected was the beautiful Gopa, the daughter of Da_nd_apa_n_i. Though her father objected at first to her marrying a young prince who was represented to him as deficient in manliness and intellect, he gladly gave his consent when he saw the royal suitor distancing all his rivals both in feats of arms and power of mind. Their marriage proved one of the happiest, but the prince remained, as he had been before, absorbed in meditation on the problems of life and death. 'Nothing is stable on earth,' he used to say, 'nothing is real. Life is like the spark produced by the friction of wood. It is lighted and is extinguished--we know not whence it came or whither it goes. It is like the sound of a lyre, and the wise man asks in vain from whence it came and whither it goes. There must be some supreme intelligence where we could find rest. If I attained it, I could bring light to man; if I were free myself, I could deliver the world.' The king, who perceived the melancholy mood of the young prince, tried every thing to divert him from his speculations: but all was in vain. Three of the most ordinary events that could happen to any man, proved of the utmost importance in the career of Buddha. We quote the description of these occurrences from M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire:

'One day when the prince with a large retinue drove through the eastern gate of the city on the way to one of his parks, he met on the road an old man, broken and decrepit. One could see the veins and muscles over the whole of his body, his teeth chattered, he was covered with wrinkles, bald, and hardly able to utter hollow and unmelodious sounds. He was bent on his stick, and all his limbs and joints trembled. "Who is that man?" said the prince to his coachman. "He is small and weak, his flesh and his blood are dried up, his muscles stick to his skin, his head is white, his teeth chatter, his body is wasted away; leaning on his stick he is hardly able to walk, stumbling at every step. Is there something peculiar in his family, or is this the common lot of all created beings?"

'"Sir," replied the coachman, "that man is sinking under old age, his senses have become obtuse, suffering has destroyed his strength, and he is despised by his relations. He is without support and useless, and people have abandoned him, like a dead tree in a forest. But this is not peculiar to his family. In every creature youth is defeated by old age. Your father, your mother, all your relations, all your friends, will come to the same state; this is the appointed end of all creatures."

'"Alas!" replied the prince, "are creatures so ignorant, so weak and foolish, as to be proud of the youth by which they are intoxicated, not seeing the old age which awaits them! As for me, I go away. Coachman, turn my chariot quickly. What have I, the future prey of old age,--what have I to do with pleasure?" And the young prince returned to the city without going to his park.

'Another time the prince drove through the southern gate to his pleasure garden, when he perceived on the road a man suffering from illness, parched with fever, his body wasted, covered with mud, without a friend, without a home, hardly able to breathe, and frightened at the sight of himself and the approach of death. Having questioned his coachman, and received from him the answer which he expected, the young prince said, "Alas! health is but the sport of a dream, and the fear of suffering must take this frightful form. Where is the wise man who, after having seen what he is, could any longer think of joy and pleasure?" The prince turned his chariot and returned to the city.

'A third time he drove to his pleasure garden through the western gate, when he saw a dead body on the road, lying on a bier, and covered with a cloth. The friends stood about crying, sobbing, tearing their hair, covering their heads with dust, striking their breasts, and uttering wild cries. The prince, again calling his coachman to witness this painful scene, exclaimed, "Oh! woe to youth, which must be destroyed by old age! Woe to health, which must be destroyed by so many diseases! Woe to this life, where a man remains so short a time! If there were no old age, no disease, no death; if these could be made captive for ever!" Then betraying for the first time his intentions, the young prince said, "Let us turn back, I must think how to accomplish deliverance."

'A last meeting put an end to his hesitation. He drove through the northern gate on the way to his pleasure gardens, when he saw a mendicant who appeared outwardly calm, subdued, looking downwards, wearing with an air of dignity his religious vestment, and carrying an alms-bowl.

'"Who is this man?" asked the prince.

'"Sir," replied the coachman, "this man is one of those who are called bhikshus, or mendicants. He has renounced all pleasures, all desires, and leads a life of austerity. He tries to conquer himself. He has become a devotee. Without passion, without envy, he walks about asking for alms."

'"This is good and well said," replied the prince. "The life of a devotee has always been praised by the wise. It will be my refuge, and the refuge of other creatures; it will lead us to a real life, to happiness and immortality."

'With these words the young prince turned his chariot and returned to the city.'

* * * * *

After having declared to his father and his wife his intention of retiring from the world, Buddha left his palace one night when all the guards that were to have watched him, were asleep. After travelling the whole night, he gave his horse and his ornaments to his groom, and sent him back to Kapilavastu. 'A monument,' remarks the author of the Lalita-Vistara (p. 270), 'is still to be seen on the spot where the coachman turned back,' Hiouen-Thsang (II. 330) saw the same monument at the edge of a large forest, on his road to Ku_s_inagara, a city now in ruins, and situated about fifty miles E.S.E. from Gorakpur.[59]

[Footnote 59: The geography of India at the time of Buddha, and later at the time of Fahian and Hiouen-Thsang, has been admirably treated by M. L. Vivien de Saint-Martin, in his 'Memoire Analytique sur la Carte de l'Asie Centrale et de l'Inde,' in the third volume of M. Stanislas Julien's 'Pelerins Bouddhistes.']

Buddha first went to Vai_s_ali, and became the pupil of a famous Brahman, who had gathered round him 300 disciples. Having learnt all that the Brahman could teach him, Buddha went away disappointed. He had not found the road to salvation. He then tried another Brahman at Ra_g_ag_r_iha, the capital of Magadha or Behar, who had 700 disciples, and there too he looked in vain for the means of deliverance. He left him, followed by five of his fellow-students, and for six years retired into solitude, near a village named Uruvilva, subjecting himself to the most severe penances, previous to his appearing in the world as a teacher. At the end of this period, however, he arrived at the conviction that asceticism, far from giving peace of mind and preparing the way to salvation, was a snare and a stumbling-block in the way of truth. He gave up his exercises, and was at once deserted as an apostate by his five disciples. Left to himself he now began to elaborate his own system. He had learnt that neither the doctrines nor the austerities of the Brahmans were of any avail for accomplishing the deliverance of man, and freeing him from the fear of old age, disease, and death. After long meditations, and ecstatic visions, he at last imagined that he had arrived at that true knowledge which discloses the cause, and thereby destroys the fear, of all the changes inherent in life. It was from the moment when he arrived at this knowledge, that he claimed the name of Buddha, the Enlightened. At that moment we may truly say that the fate of millions of millions of human beings trembled in the balance. Buddha hesitated for a time whether he should keep his knowledge to himself, or communicate it to the world. Compassion for the sufferings of man prevailed, and the young prince became the founder of a religion which, after more than 2000 years, is still professed by 455,000,000 of human beings.[60]

[Footnote 60: Though truth is not settled by majorities, it would be interesting to know which religion, counts at the present moment the largest numbers of believers. Berghaus, in his 'Physical Atlas,' gives the following division of the human race according to religion:

Buddhists 31.2 per cent. Christians 30.7 " Mohammedans 15.7 " Brahmanists 13.4 " Heathens 8.7 " Jews 0.3 "

As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the followers of Confucius and Lao-tse, 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 according to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-sse temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel. ('Melanges Asiatiques de St. Petersbourg,' vol. ii. p. 374.)]

The further history of the new teacher is very simple. He proceeded to Benares, which at all times was the principal seat of learning in India, and the first converts he made were the five fellow-students who had left him when he threw off the yoke of the Brahmanical observances. Many others followed; but as the Lalita-Vistara breaks off at Buddha's arrival at Benares, we have no further consecutive account of the rapid progress of his doctrine. From what we can gather from scattered notices in the Buddhist canon, he was invited by the king of Magadha, Bimbisara, to his capital, Ra_g_ag_r_iha. Many of his lectures are represented as having been delivered at the monastery of Kalantaka, with which the king or some rich merchant had presented him; others on the Vulture Peak, one of the five hills that surrounded the ancient capital.

Three of his most famous disciples, _S_ariputra, Katyayana, and Maudgalyayana, joined him during his stay in Magadha, where he enjoyed for many years the friendship of the king. That king was afterwards assassinated by his son, A_g_ata_s_atru, and then we hear of Buddha as settled for a time at _S_ravasti, north of the Ganges, where Anathapi_nd_ada, a rich merchant, had offered him and his disciples a magnificent building for their residence. Most of Buddha's lectures or sermons were delivered at _S_ravasti, the capital of Ko_s_ala; and the king of Ko_s_ala himself, Prasena_g_it, became a convert to his doctrine. After an absence of twelve years we are told that Buddha visited his father at Kapilavastu, on which occasion he performed several miracles, and converted all the _S_akyas to his faith. His own wife became one of his followers, and, with his aunt, offers the first instance of female Buddhist devotees in India. We have fuller particulars again of the last days of Buddha's life. He had attained the good age of three score and ten, and had been on a visit to Ra_g_ag_r_iha, where the king, A_g_ata_s_atru, the former enemy of Buddha, and the assassin of his own father, had joined the congregation, after making a public confession of his crimes. On his return he was followed by a large number of disciples, and when on the point of crossing the Ganges, he stood on a square stone, and turning his eyes back towards Ra_g_ag_r_iha, he said, full of emotion, 'This is the last time that I see that city.' He likewise visited Vai_s_ali, and after taking leave of it, he had nearly reached the city of Ku_s_inagara, when his vital strength began to fail. He halted in a forest, and while sitting under a sal tree, he gave up the ghost, or, as a Buddhist would say, entered into Nirva_n_a.

This is the simple story of Buddha's life. It reads much better in the eloquent pages of M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, than in the turgid language of the Buddhists. If a critical historian, with the materials we possess, entered at all on the process of separating truth from falsehood, he would probably cut off much of what our biographer has left. Professor Wilson, in his Essay on Buddha and Buddhism, considers it doubtful whether any such person as Buddha ever actually existed. He dwells on the fact that there are at least twenty different dates assigned to his birth, varying from 2420 to 453 B.C. He points out that the clan of the _S_akyas is never mentioned by early Hindu writers, and he lays much stress on the fact that most of the proper names of the persons connected with Buddha suggest an allegorical signification. The name of his father means, he whose food is pure; that of his mother signifies illusion; his own secular appellation, Siddhartha, he by whom the end is accomplished. Buddha itself means, the Enlightened, or, as Professor Wilson translates it less accurately, he by whom all is known. The same distinguished scholar goes even further, and maintaining that Kapilavastu, the birthplace of Buddha, has no place in the geography of the Hindus, suggests that it may be rendered, the substance of Kapila; intimating, in fact, the Sankhya philosophy, the doctrine of Kapila Muni, upon which the fundamental elements of Buddhism, the eternity of matter, the principles of things, and the final extinction, are supposed to be planned. 'It seems not impossible,' he continues, 'that _S_akya Muni is an unreal being, and that all that is related of him is as much a fiction, as is that of his preceding migrations, and the miracles that attended his birth, his life, and his departure.' This is going far beyond Niebuhr, far even beyond Strauss. If an allegorical name had been invented for the father of Buddha, one more appropriate than 'Clean-food' might surely have been found. His wife is not the only queen known by the name of Maya, Mayadevi, or Mayavati. Why, if these names were invented, should his wife have been allowed to keep the prosaic name of Gopa (cowherdess), and his father-in-law, that of Da_nd_apa_n_i, 'Stick-hand?' As to his own name, Siddhartha, the Tibetans maintain that it was given him by his parent, whose wish (artha) had been fulfilled (siddha), as we hear of Desires and Dieu-donnes in French. One of the ministers of Da_s_aratha had the same name. It is possible also that Buddha himself assumed it in after life, as was the case with many of the Roman surnames. As to the name of Buddha, no one ever maintained that it was more than a title, the Enlightened, changed from an appellative into a proper name, just like the name of Christos, the Anointed, or Mohammed, the Expected.[61] Kapilavastu would be a most extraordinary compound to express 'the substance of the Sankhya philosophy.' But all doubt on the subject is removed by the fact that both Fahian in the fifth, and Hiouen-Thsang in the seventh centuries, visited the real ruins of that city.

[Footnote 61: See Sprenger, 'Das Leben des Mohammed,' 1861, vol. i. p. 155.]

Making every possible allowance for the accumulation of fiction which is sure to gather round the life of the founder of every great religion, we may be satisfied that Buddhism, which changed the aspect not only of India, but of nearly the whole of Asia, had a real founder; that he was not a Brahman by birth, but belonged to the second or royal caste; that being of a meditative turn of mind, and deeply impressed with the frailty of all created things, he became a recluse, and sought for light and comfort in the different systems of Brahman philosophy and theology. Dissatisfied with the artificial systems of their priests and philosophers, convinced of the uselessness, nay of the pernicious influence, of their ceremonial practices and bodily penances, shocked, too, by their worldliness and pharisaical conceit, which made the priesthood the exclusive property of one caste and rendered every sincere approach of man to his Creator impossible without their intervention, Buddha must have produced at once a powerful impression on the people at large, when breaking through all the established rules of caste, he assumed the privileges of a Brahman, and throwing away the splendour of his royal position, travelled about as a beggar, not shrinking from the defiling contact of sinners and publicans. Though when we now speak of Buddhism, we think chiefly of its doctrines, the reform of Buddha had originally much more of a social than of a religious character. Buddha swept away the web with which the Brahmans had encircled the whole of India. Beginning as the destroyer of an old, he became the founder of a new religion. We can hardly understand how any nation could have lived under a system like that of the Brahmanic hierarchy, which coiled itself round every public and private act, and would have rendered life intolerable to any who had forfeited the favour of the priests. That system was attacked by Buddha. Buddha might have taught whatever philosophy he pleased, and we should hardly have heard his name. The people would not have minded him, and his system would only have been a drop in the ocean of philosophical speculation, by which India was deluged at all times. But when a young prince assembled round him people of all castes, of all ranks, when he defeated the Brahmans in public disputations, when he declared the sacrifices by which they made their living not only useless but sinful, when instead of severe penance or excommunications inflicted by the Brahmans sometimes for the most trifling offences, he only required public confession of sin and a promise to sin no more: when the charitable gifts hitherto monopolised by the Brahmans, began to flow into new channels, supporting hundreds and thousands of Buddhist mendicants, more had been achieved than probably Buddha himself had ever dreamt of; and he whose meditations had been how to deliver the soul of man from misery and the fear of death, had delivered the people of India from a degrading thraldom and from priestly tyranny.

The most important element of the Buddhist reform has always been its social and moral code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral code, taken by itself, is one of the most perfect which the world has ever known. On this point all testimonies from hostile and from friendly quarters agree. Spence Hardy, a Wesleyan Missionary, speaking of the Dhamma Padam, or the 'Footsteps of the Law,' admits that a collection might be made from the precepts of this work, which in the purity of its ethics could hardly be equalled from any other heathen author. M. Laboulaye, one of the most distinguished members of the French Academy, remarks in the 'Debats' of the 4th of April, 1853: 'It is difficult to comprehend how men not assisted by revelation could have soared so high, and approached so near to the truth.' Besides the five great commandments not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, not to get drunk, every shade of vice, hypocrisy, anger, pride, suspicion, greediness, gossiping, cruelty to animals, is guarded against by special precepts. Among the virtues recommended, we find not only reverence of parents, care for children, submission to authority, gratitude, moderation in time of prosperity, submission in time of trial, equanimity at all times, but virtues unknown in any heathen system of morality, such as the duty of forgiving insults and not rewarding evil with evil. All virtues, we are told, spring from Maitri, and this Maitri can only be translated by charity and love. 'I do not hesitate,' says Burnouf,[62] 'to translate by charity the word Maitri; it does not express friendship or the feeling of particular affection which a man has for one or more of his fellow-creatures, but that universal feeling which inspires us with good-will towards all men and constant willingness to help them.' We add one more testimony from the work of M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire:

'Je n'hesite pas a ajouter,' he writes, 'que, sauf le Christ tout seul, il n'est point, parmi les fondateurs de religion, de figure plus pure ni plus touchante que celle du Bouddha. Sa vie n'a point de tache. Son constant heroisme egale sa conviction; et si la theorie qu'il preconise est fausse, les exemples personnels qu'il donne sont irreprochables. Il est le modele acheve de toutes les vertus qu'il preche; son abnegation, sa charite son inalterable douceur, ne se dementent point un seul instant; il abandonne a vingt-neuf ans la cour du roi son pere pour se faire religieux et mendiant; il prepare silencieusement sa doctrine par six annees de retraite et de meditation; il la propage par la seule puissance de la parole et de la persuasion, pendant plus d'un demi-siecle; et quand il meurt entre les bras de ses disciples, c'est avec la serenite d'un sage qui a pratique le bien toute sa vie, et qui est assure d'avoir trouve le vrai.' (Page v.)

[Footnote 62: Burnouf, 'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 300.]

* * * * *

There still remain, no doubt, some blurred and doubtful pages in the history of the prince of Kapilavastu; but we have only to look at the works on ancient philosophy and religion published some thirty years ago, in order to perceive the immense progress that has been made in establishing the true historical character of the founder of Buddhism. There was a time when Buddha was identified with Christ. The Manichaeans were actually forced to abjure their belief that Buddha, Christ, and Mani were one and the same person.[63] But we are thinking rather of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when elaborate books were written, in order to prove that Buddha had been in reality the Thoth of the Egyptians, that he was Mercury, or Wodan, or Zoroaster, or Pythagoras. Even Sir W. Jones, as we saw, identified Buddha, first with Odin, and afterwards with Shishak, 'who either in person or by a colony from Egypt imported into India the mild heresy of the ancient Bauddhas.' At present we know that neither Egypt nor the Walhalla of Germany, neither Greece nor Persia, could have produced either the man himself or his doctrine. He is the offspring of India in mind and soul. His doctrine, by the very antagonism in which it stands to the old system of Brahmanism, shows that it could not have sprung up in any country except India. The ancient history of Brahmanism leads on to Buddhism, with the same necessity with which mediaeval Romanism led to Protestantism. Though the date of Buddha is still liable to small chronological oscillations, his place in the intellectual annals of India is henceforth definitely marked: Buddhism became the state religion of India at the time of A_s_oka; and A_s_oka, the Buddhist Constantine, was the grandson of _K_andragupta, the contemporary of Seleucus Nicator. The system of the Brahmans had run its course. Their ascendency, at first purely intellectual and religious, had gradually assumed a political character. By means of the system of caste this influence pervaded the whole social fabric, not as a vivifying leaven, but as a deadly poison. Their increasing power and self-confidence are clearly exhibited in the successive periods of their ancient literature. It begins with the simple hymns of the Veda. These are followed by the tracts, known by the name of Brahma_n_as, in which a complete system of theology is elaborated, and claims advanced in favour of the Brahmans, such as were seldom conceded to any hierarchy. The third period in the history of their ancient literature is marked by their Sutras or Aphorisms, curt and dry formularies, showing the Brahmans in secure possession of all their claims. Such privileges as they then enjoyed are never enjoyed for any length of time. It was impossible for anybody to move or to assert his freedom of thought and action without finding himself impeded on all sides by the web of the Brahmanic law; nor was there anything in their religion to satisfy the natural yearnings of the human heart after spiritual comfort. What was felt by Buddha, had been felt more or less intensely by thousands; and this was the secret of his success. That success was accelerated, however, by political events. _K_andragupta had conquered the throne of Magadha, and acquired his supremacy in India in defiance of the Brahmanic law. He was of low origin, a mere adventurer, and by his accession to the throne an important mesh had been broken in the intricate system of caste. Neither he nor his successors could count on the support of the Brahmans, and it is but natural that his grandson, A_s_oka, should have been driven to seek support from the sect founded by Buddha. Buddha, by giving up his royal station, had broken the law of caste as much as _K_andragupta by usurping it. His school, though it had probably escaped open persecution until it rose to political importance, could never have been on friendly terms with the Brahmans of the old school. The _parvenu_ on the throne saw his natural allies in the followers of Buddha, and the mendicants, who by their unostentatious behaviour had won golden opinions among the lower and middle classes, were suddenly raised to an importance little dreamt of by their founder. Those who see in Buddhism, not a social but chiefly a religious and philosophical reform, have been deceived by the later Buddhist literature, and particularly by the controversies between Buddhists and Brahmans, which in later times led to the total expulsion of the former from India, and to the political re-establishment of Brahmanism. These, no doubt, turn chiefly on philosophical problems, and are of the most abstruse and intricate character. But such was not the teaching of Buddha. If we may judge from 'the four verities,' which Buddha inculcated from the first day that he entered on his career as a teacher, his philosophy of life was very simple. He proclaims that there was nothing but sorrow in life; that sorrow is produced by our affections, that our affections must be destroyed in order to destroy the root of sorrow, and that he could teach mankind how to eradicate all the affections, all passions, all desires. Such doctrines were intelligible; and considering that Buddha received people of all castes, who after renouncing the world and assuming their yellow robes, were sure of finding a livelihood from the charitable gifts of the people, it is not surprising that the number of his followers should have grown so rapidly. If Buddha really taught the metaphysical doctrines which are ascribed to him by subsequent writers--and this is a point which it is impossible to settle--not one in a thousand among his followers would have been capable of appreciating those speculations. They must have been reserved for a few of his disciples, and they would never have formed the nucleus for a popular religion.

[Footnote 63: Neander, 'History of the Church,' vol. i. p. 817: [Greek: Ton Zaradan kai Boudan kai ton Christon kai ton Manichaion hena kai ton auton einai.]]

Nearly all who have written on Buddhism, and M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire among the rest, have endeavoured to show that these metaphysical doctrines of Buddha were borrowed from the earlier systems of Brahmanic philosophy, and more particularly from the Sankhya system. The reputed founder of that system is Kapila, and we saw before how Professor Wilson actually changed the name of Kapilavastu, the birthplace of Buddha, into a mere allegory:--Kapilavastu meaning, according to him, the substance of Kapila or of the Sankhya philosophy. This is not all. Mr. Spence Hardy (p. 132) quotes a legend in which it is said that Buddha was in a former existence the ascetic Kapila, that the _S_akya princes came to his hermitage, and that he pointed out to them the proper place for founding a new city, which city was named after him Kapilavastu. But we have looked in vain for any definite similarities between the system of Kapila, as known to us in the Sankhya-sutras, and the Abhidharma, or the metaphysics of the Buddhists. Such similarities would be invaluable. They would probably enable us to decide whether Buddha borrowed from Kapila or Kapila from Buddha, and thus determine the real chronology of the philosophical literature of India, as either prior or subsequent to the Buddhist era. There are certain notions which Buddha shares in common not only with Kapila, but with every Hindu philosopher. The idea of transmigration, the belief in the continuing effects of our good and bad actions, extending from our former to our present and from our present to our future lives, the sense that life is a dream or a burden, the admission of the uselessness of religious observances after the attainment of the highest knowledge, all these belong, so to say, to the national philosophy of India. We meet with these ideas everywhere, in the poetry, the philosophy, the religion of the Hindus. They cannot be claimed as the exclusive property of any system in particular. But if we look for more special coincidences between Buddha's doctrines and those of Kapila or other Indian philosophers, we look in vain. At first it might seem as if the very first aphorism of Kapila, namely, 'the complete cessation of pain, which is of three kinds, is the highest aim of man,' was merely a philosophical paraphrase of the events which, as we saw, determined Buddha to renounce the world in search of the true road to salvation. But though the starting-point of Kapila and Buddha is the same, a keen sense of human misery and a yearning after a better state, their roads diverge so completely and their goals are so far apart, that it is difficult to understand how, almost by common consent, Buddha is supposed either to have followed in the footsteps of Kapila, or to have changed Kapila's philosophy into a religion. Some scholars imagine that there was a more simple and primitive philosophy which was taught by Kapila, and that the Sutras which are now ascribed to him, are of later date. It is impossible either to prove or to disprove such a view. At present we know Kapila's philosophy from his Sutras only,[64] and these Sutras seem to us posterior, not anterior, to Buddha. Though the name of Buddha is not mentioned in the Sutras, his doctrines are clearly alluded to and controverted in several parts of them.

[Footnote 64: Of Kapila's Sutras, together with the commentary of Vi_g_nana Bhikshu, a new edition was published in 1856, by Dr. Fitz-Edward Hall, in the 'Bibliotheca Indica.' An excellent translation of the Aphorisms, with illustrative extracts from the commentaries, was printed for the use of the Benares College, by Dr. Ballantyne.]

It has been said that Buddha and Kapila were both atheists, and that Buddha borrowed his atheism from Kapila. But atheism is an indefinite term, and may mean very different things. In one sense every Indian philosopher was an atheist, for they all perceived that the gods of the populace could not claim the attributes that belong to a Supreme Being. But all the important philosophical systems of the Brahmans admit, in some form or other, the existence of an Absolute and Supreme Being, the source of all that exists, or seems to exist. Kapila, when accused of atheism, is not accused of denying the existence of an Absolute Being. He is accused of denying the existence of I_s_vara, which in general means the Lord, but which in the passage where it occurs, refers to the I_s_vara of the Yogins, or mystic philosophers. They maintained that in an ecstatic state man possesses the power of seeing God face to face, and they wished to have this ecstatic intuition included under the head of sensuous perceptions. To this Kapila demurred. You have not proved the existence of your Lord, he says, and therefore I see no reason why I should alter my definition of sensuous perception in order to accommodate your ecstatic visions. The commentator narrates that this strong language was used by Kapila in order to silence the wild talk of the Mystics, and that, though he taunted his adversaries with having failed to prove the existence of their Lord, he himself did not deny the existence of a Supreme Being. Kapila, however, went further. He endeavoured to show that all the attributes which the Mystics ascribed to their Lord are inappropriate. He used arguments very similar to those which have lately been used with such ability by a distinguished Bampton Lecturer. The supreme lord of the Mystics, Kapila argued, is either absolute and unconditioned (mukta), or he is bound and conditioned (baddha). If he is absolute and unconditioned, he cannot enter into the condition of a Creator; he would have no desires which could instigate him to create. If, on the contrary, he is represented as active, and entering on the work of creation, he would no longer be the absolute and unchangeable Being which we are asked to believe in. Kapila, like the preacher of our own days, was accused of paving the road to atheism, but his philosophy was nevertheless admitted as orthodox, because, in addition to sensuous perception and inductive reasoning, Kapila professed emphatically his belief in revelation, i. e. in the Veda, and allowed to it a place among the recognised instruments of knowledge. Buddha refused to allow to the Vedas any independent authority whatever, and this constituted the fundamental difference between the two philosophers.

Whether Kapila's philosophy was really in accordance with the spirit of the Veda, is quite a different question. No philosophy, at least nothing like a definite system, is to be found in the sacred hymns of the Brahmans; and though the Vedanta philosophy does less violence to the passages which it quotes from the Veda, the authors of the Veda would have been as much surprised at the consequences deduced from their words by the Vedantin, as by the strange meaning attributed to them by Kapila. The Vedanta philosopher, like Kapila, would deny the existence of a Creator in the usual sense of the word. He explained the universe as an emanation from Brahman, which is all in all. Kapila admitted two principles, an absolute Spirit and Nature, and he looked upon the universe as produced by a reflection of Nature thrown on the mirror of the absolute Spirit. Both systems seem to regard creation, or the created world, as a misfortune, as an unfortunate accident. But they maintain that its effects can be neutralised, and that emancipation from the bonds of earthly existence is possible by means of philosophy. The Vedanta philosopher imagines he is free when he has arrived at the knowledge that nothing exists but Brahman; that all phenomena are merely the result of ignorance; that after the destruction of that ignorance, and of its effects, all is merged again in Brahman, the true source of being, thought, and happiness. Kapila taught that the spirit became free from all mundane fetters as soon as it perceived that all phenomena were only passing reflections produced by nature upon the spirit, and as soon as it was able to shut its eyes to those illusory visions. Both systems therefore, and the same applies to all the other philosophical systems of the Brahmans, admitted an absolute or self-existing Being as the cause of all that exists or seems to exist. And here lies the specific difference between Kapila and Buddha. Buddha, like Kapila, maintained that this world had no absolute reality, that it was a snare and an illusion. The words, 'All is perishable, all is miserable, all is void,' must frequently have passed his lips. But we cannot call things unreal unless we have a conception of something that is real. Where, then, did Buddha find a reality in comparison with which this world might be called unreal? What remedy did he propose as an emancipation from the sufferings of this life? Difficult as it seems to us to conceive it, Buddha admits of no real cause of this unreal world. He denies the existence not only of a Creator, but of any Absolute Being. According to the metaphysical tenets, if not of Buddha himself, at least of his sect, there is no reality anywhere, neither in the past nor in the future. True wisdom consists in perceiving the nothingness of all things, and in a desire to become nothing, to be blown out, to enter into Nirva_n_a. Emancipation is obtained by total extinction, not by absorption in Brahman, or by a recovery of the soul's true estate. If to be is misery, not to be must be felicity, and this felicity is the highest reward which Buddha promised to his disciples. In reading the Aphorisms of Kapila, it is difficult not to see in his remarks on those who maintain that all is void, covert attacks on Buddha and his followers. In one place (I. 43) Kapila argues that if people believed in the reality of thought only, and denied the reality of external objects, they would soon be driven to admit that nothing at all exists, because we perceive our thoughts in the same manner as we perceive external objects. This naturally leads him to an examination of that extreme doctrine, according to which all that we perceive is void, and all is supposed to perish, because it is the nature of things that they should perish. Kapila remarks in reference to this view (I. 45), that it is a mere assertion of persons who are 'not enlightened,' in Sanskrit a-buddha, a sarcastic expression in which it is very difficult not to see an allusion to Buddha, or to those who claimed for him the title of the Enlightened. Kapila then proceeds to give the best answer that could be given to those who taught that complete annihilation must be the highest aim of man, as the only means of a complete cessation of suffering. 'It is not so,' he says, 'for if people wish to be free from suffering, it is they themselves who wish to be free, just as in this life it is they themselves who wish to enjoy happiness. There must be a permanent soul in order to satisfy the yearnings of the human heart, and if you deny that soul, you have no right to speak of the highest aim--of man.'

Whether the belief in this kind of Nirva_n_a, i. e. in a total extinction of being, personality, and consciousness, was at any time shared by the large masses of the people, is difficult either to assert or deny. We know nothing in ancient times of the religious convictions of the millions. We only know what a few leading spirits believed, or professed to believe. That certain individuals should have spoken and written of total extinction as the highest aim of man, is intelligible. Job cursed the day on which he was born, and Solomon praised the 'dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive,' 'Yea, better is he than both they,' he said, 'which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun,' Voltaire said in his own flippant way, 'On aime la vie, mais le neant ne laisse pas d'avoir du bon;' and a modern German philosopher, who has found much favour with those who profess to despise Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, writes, 'Considered in its objective value, it is more than doubtful that life is preferable to the Nothing. I should say even, that if experience and reflection could lift up their voices they would recommend to us the Nothing. We are what ought not to be, and we shall therefore cease to be.' Under peculiar circumstances, in the agonies of despair, or under the gathering clouds of madness, such language is intelligible; but to believe, as we are asked to believe, that one half of mankind had yearned for total annihilation, would be tantamount to a belief that there is a difference in kind between man and man. Buddhist philosophers, no doubt, held this doctrine, and it cannot be denied that it found a place in the Buddhist canon. But even among the different schools of Buddhist philosophers, very different views are adopted as to the true meaning of Nirva_n_a, and with the modern Buddhists of Burmah, Nigban, as they call it, is defined simply as freedom from old age, disease, and death. We do not find fault with M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire for having so emphatically pressed the charge of nihilism against Buddha himself. In one portion of the Buddhist canon the most extreme views of nihilism are put into his mouth. All we can say is that that canon is later than Buddha, and that in the same canon[65] the founder of Buddhism, after having entered into Nirva_n_a, is still spoken of as living, nay, as showing himself to those who believe in him. Buddha, who denied the existence, or at least the divine nature, of the gods worshipped by the Brahmans, was raised himself to the rank of a deity by some of his followers (the Ai_s_varikas), and we need not wonder therefore if his Nirva_n_a too was gradually changed into an Elysian field. And finally, if we may argue from human nature, such as we find it at all times and in all countries, we confess that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that the reformer of India, the teacher of so perfect a code of morality, the young prince who gave up all he had in order to help those whom he saw afflicted in mind, body, or estate, should have cared much about speculations which he knew would either be misunderstood, or not understood at all, by those whom he wished to benefit; that he should have thrown away one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of every religious teacher, the belief in a future life, and should not have seen, that if this life was sooner or later to end in nothing, it was hardly worth the trouble which he took himself, or the sacrifices which he imposed on his disciples.

_April, 1862._

[Footnote 65: 'L'enfant egare,' par Ph. Ed. Foucaux, p. 19.]

X.

BUDDHIST PILGRIMS.[66]

M. Stanislas Julien has commenced the publication of a work entitled, 'Voyages des Pelerins Bouddhistes.' The first volume, published in the year 1853, contains the biography of Hiouen-thsang, who, in the middle of the seventh century A.D., travelled from China through Central Asia to India. The second, which has just reached us, gives us the first portion of Hiouen-thsang's own diary.

[Footnote 66: 'Voyages des Pelerins Bouddhistes.' Vol. I. Histoire de la Vie de Hiouen-thsang, et de ses Voyages dans l'Inde, depuis l'an 629 jusqu'en 645, par Hoeili et Yen-thsong; traduite du Chinois par Stanislas Julien.

Vol. II. Memoires sur les Contrees Occidentales, traduits du Sanscrit en Chinois, en l'an 648, par Hiouen-thsang, et du Chinois en Francais, pas Stanislas Julien. Paris, 1853-1857: B. Duprat. London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate.]

There are not many books of travel which can be compared to these volumes. Hiouen-thsang passed through countries which few had visited before him. He describes parts of the world which no one has explored since, and where even our modern maps contain hardly more than the ingenious conjectures of Alexander von Humboldt. His observations are minute; his geographical, statistical, and historical remarks most accurate and trustworthy. The chief object of his travels was to study the religion of Buddha, the great reformer of India. Some Chinese pilgrims visited India before, several after, his time. Hiouen-thsang, however, is considered by the Chinese themselves as the most distinguished of these pilgrims, and M. Stanislas Julien has rightly assigned to him the first place in his collection.

In order to understand what Hiouen-thsang was, and to appreciate his life and his labours, we must first cast a glance at the history of a religion which, however unattractive and even mischievous it may appear to ourselves, inspired her votary with the true spirit of devotion and self-sacrifice. That religion has now existed for exactly 2,400 years. To millions and millions of human beings it has been the only preparation for a higher life placed within their reach. And even at the present day it counts among the hordes of Asia a more numerous array of believers than any other faith, not excluding Mohammedanism or Christianity. The religion of Buddha took its origin in India about the middle of the sixth century B.C., but it did not assume its political importance till about the time of Alexander's invasion. We know little, therefore, of its first origin and spreading, because the canonical works on which we must chiefly rely for information belong to a much later period, and are strongly tinged with a legendary character. The very existence of such a being as Buddha, the son of _S_uddhodana, king of Kapilavastu, has been doubted. But what can never be doubted is this, that Buddhism, such as we find it in Russia[67] and Sweden[68] on the very threshold of European civilisation, in the north of Asia, in Mongolia, Tatary, China, Tibet, Nepal, Siam, Burmah, and Ceylon, had its origin in India. Doctrines similar to those of Buddha existed in that country long before his time. We can trace them like meandering roots below the surface long before we reach the point where the roots strike up into a stem, and the stem branches off again into fruit-bearing branches. What was original and new in Buddha was his changing a philosophical system into a practical doctrine; his taking the wisdom of the few, and coining as much of it as he thought genuine for the benefit of the many; his breaking with the traditional formalities of the past, and proclaiming for the first time, in spite of castes and creeds, the equality of the rich and the poor, the foolish and the wise, the 'twice-born' and the outcast. Buddhism, as a religion and as a political fact, was a reaction against Brahmanism, though it retained much of that more primitive form of faith and worship. Buddhism, in its historical growth, presupposes Brahmanism, and, however hostile the mutual relation of these two religions may have been at different periods of Indian history, it can be shown, without much difficulty, that the latter was but a natural consequence of the former.

The ancient religion of the Aryan inhabitants of India had started, like the religion of the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, Slaves, and Celts, with a simple and intelligible mythological phraseology. In the Veda--for there is but one real Veda--the names of all the so-called gods or Devas betray their original physical character and meaning without disguise. The fire was praised and invoked by the name of "Agni" (_ignis_); the earth by the name of "P_r_ithvi" (the broad); the sky by the name of "Dyu" (Jupiter), and afterwards of "Indra;" the firmament and the waters by the name of "Varu_n_a," or [Greek: Ovravos]. The sun was invoked by many names, such as "Surya," "Savit_r_i," "Vish_n_u," or "Mitra;" and the dawn rejoiced in such titles as "Ushas," "Urva_s_i," "Ahana," and "Surya." Nor was the moon forgotten. For though it is mentioned but rarely under its usual name of "_K_andra," it is alluded to under the more sacred appellation of "Soma;" and each of its four phases had received its own denomination. There is hardly any part of nature, if it could impress the human mind in any way with the ideas of a higher power, of order, eternity, or beneficence,--whether the winds, or the rivers, or the trees, or the mountains,--without a name and representative in the early Hindu Pantheon. No doubt there existed in the human mind, from the very beginning, something, whether we call it a suspicion, an innate idea, an intuition, or a sense of the Divine. What distinguishes man from the rest of the animal creation is chiefly that ineradicable feeling of dependence and reliance upon some higher power, a consciousness of bondage, from which the very name of "religion" was derived. "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves." The presence of that power was felt everywhere, and nowhere more clearly and strongly than in the rising and setting of the sun, in the change of day and night, of spring and winter, of birth and death. But, although the Divine presence was felt everywhere, it was impossible in that early period of thought, and with a language incapable as yet of expressing anything but material objects, to conceive the idea of God in its purity and fullness, or to assign to it an adequate and worthy expression. Children cannot think the thoughts of men, and the poets of the Veda could not speak the language of Aristotle. It was by a slow process that the human mind elaborated the idea of one absolute and supreme Godhead; and by a still slower process that the human language matured a word to express that idea. A period of growth was inevitable, and those who, from a mere guess of their own, do not hesitate to speak authoritatively of a primeval revelation, which imparted to the Pagan world the idea of the Godhead in all its purity, forget that, however pure and sublime and spiritual that revelation might have been, there was no language capable as yet of expressing the high and immaterial conceptions of that Heaven-sent message. The real history of religion, during the earliest mythological period, represents to us a slow process of fermentation in thought and language, with its various interruptions, its overflowings, its coolings, its deposits, and its gradual clearing from all extraneous and foreign admixture. This is not only the case among the Indo-European or Aryan races in India, in Greece, and in Germany. In Peru, and wherever the primitive formations of the intellectual world crop out, the process is exactly the same. "The religion of the sun," as it has been boldly said by the author of the "Spanish Conquest in America," "was inevitable." It was like a deep furrow which that heavenly luminary drew, in its silent procession from east to west, over the virgin mind of the gazing multitude; and in the impression left there by the first rising and setting of the sun, there lay the dark seed of a faith in a more than human being, the first intimation of a life without beginning, of a world without end. Manifold seed fell afterwards into the soil once broken. Something divine was discovered in everything that moved and lived. Names were stammered forth in anxious haste, and no single name could fully express what lay hidden in the human mind and wanted expression--the idea of an absolute, and perfect, and supreme, and immortal Essence. Thus a countless host of nominal gods was called into being, and for a time seemed to satisfy the wants of a thoughtless multitude. But there were thoughtful men at all times, and their reason protested against the contradictions of a mythological phraseology, though it had been hallowed by sacred customs and traditions. That rebellious reason had been at work from the very first, always ready to break the yoke of names and formulas which no longer expressed what they were intended to express. The idea which had yearned for utterance was the idea of a supreme and absolute Power, and that yearning was not satisfied by such names as "Kronos," "Zeus," and "Apollon." The very sound of such a word as "God," used in the plural, jarred on the ear, as if we were to speak of two universes, or of a single twin. There are many words, as Greek and Latin grammarians tell us, which, if used in the plural, have a different meaning from what they have in the singular. The Latin "aeedes" means a temple; if used in the plural it means a house. "Deus" and [Greek: Theos] ought to be added to the same class of words. The idea of supreme perfection excluded limitation, and the idea of God excluded the possibility of many gods. This may seem language too abstract and metaphysical for the early times of which we are speaking. But the ancient poets of the Vedic hymns have expressed the same thought with perfect clearness and simplicity. In the Rig-veda (I. 164, 46) we read:--

"That which is one the sages speak of in many ways--they call it 'Agni,' 'Yama,' 'Matari_s_van.'"

[Footnote 67: See W. Spottiswoode's 'Tarantasse Journey,' p. 220, Visit to the Buddhist Temple.]

[Footnote 68: The only trace of the influence of Buddhism among the _K_udic races, the Fins, Laps, &c., is found in the name of their priests and sorcerers, the Shamans. Shaman is supposed to be a corruption of _S_rama_n_a, a name applied to Buddha, and to Buddhist priests in general. The ancient mythological religion of the _K_udic races has nothing in common with Buddhism. See Castren's 'Lectures on Finnish Mythology,' 1853. Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809, See the Author's 'Survey of Languages,' second edition, p. 116. Shamanism found its way from India to Siberia via Tibet, China, and Mongolia. Rules on the formation of magic figures, on the treatment of diseases by charms, on the worship of evil spirits, on the acquisition of supernatural powers, on charms, incantations, and other branches of Shaman witchcraft, are found in the Stan-gyour, or the second part of the Tibetan canon, and in some of the late Tantras of the Nepalese collection.]

Besides the plurality of gods, which was sure to lead to their destruction, there was a taint of mortality which they could not throw off. They all derived their being from the life of nature. The god who represented the sun was liable, in the mythological language of antiquity, to all the accidents which threatened the solar luminary. Though he might rise in immortal youth in the morning, he was conquered by the shadows of the night, and the powers of winter seemed to overthrow his heavenly throne. There is nothing in nature free from change, and the gods of nature fell under the thralldom of nature's laws. The sun must set, and the solar gods and heroes must die. There must be one God, there must be one unchanging Deity; this was the silent conviction of the human mind. There are many gods, liable to all the vicissitudes of life; this was everywhere the answer of mythological religion.

It is curious to observe in how many various ways these two opposite principles were kept for a time from open conflict, and how long the heathen temples resisted the enemy which was slowly and imperceptibly undermining their very foundations. In Greece this mortal element, inherent in all gods, was eliminated to a great extent by the conception of heroes. Whatever was too human in the ancient legends told of Zeus and Apollon was transfered to so-called half-gods or heroes, who were represented as the sons or favorites of the gods, and who bore their fate under a slightly altered name. The twofold character of Herakles as a god and as a hero is acknowledged even by Herodotus, and some of his epithets would have been sufficient to indicate his solar and originally divine character. But, in order to make some of the legends told of the solar deity possible or conceivable, it was necessary to represent Herakles as a more human being, and to make him rise to the seat of the Immortals only after he had endured toils and sufferings incompatible with the dignity of an Olympian god. We find the same idea in Peru, only that there it led to different results. A thinking, or, as he was called, a freethinking Inca[69] remarked that this perpetual travelling of the sun was a sign of servitude,[70] and he threw doubts upon the divine nature of such an unquiet thing as that great luminary appeared to him to be. And this misgiving led to a tradition which, even should it be unfounded in history, had some truth in itself, that there was in Peru an earlier worship, that of an invisible Deity, the Creator of the world, Pachacamac. In Greece, also, there are signs of a similar craving after the "Unknown God." A supreme God was wanted, and Zeus, the stripling of Creta, was raised to that rank. He became God above all gods--[Greek: hapanton kyrios] as Pindar calls him. Yet more was wanted than a mere Zeus; and thus a supreme Fate or Spell was imagined before which all the gods, and even Zeus, had to bow. And even this Fate was not allowed to remain supreme, and there was something in the destinies of man which was called [Greek: hypermoron], or "beyond Fate." The most awful solution, however, of the problem belongs to Teutonic mythology. Here, also, some heroes were introduced; but their death was only the beginning of the final catastrophe. "All gods must die." Such is the last word of that religion which had grown up in the forests of Germany, and found a last refuge among the glaciers and volcanoes of Iceland. The death of Sigurd, the descendant of Odin, could not avert the death of Balder, the son of Odin; and the death of Balder was soon to be followed by the death of Odin himself, and of all the immortal gods.

All this was inevitable, and Prometheus, the man of forethought, could safely predict the fall of Zeus. The struggles by which reason and faith overthrow tradition and superstition vary in different countries and at different times; but the final victory is always on their side. In India the same antagonism manifested itself, but what there seemed a victory of reason threatened to become the destruction of all religious faith. At first there was hardly a struggle. On the primitive mythological stratum of thought two new formations arose,--the Brahmanical philosophy and the Brahmanical ceremonial; the one opening the widest avenues of philosophical thought, the other fencing all religious feeling within the narrowest barriers. Both derived their authority from the same source. Both professed to carry out the meaning and purpose of the Veda. Thus we see on the one side, the growth of a numerous and powerful priesthood, and the establishment of a ceremonial which embraced every moment of a man's life from his birth to his death. There was no event which might have moved the heart to a spontaneous outpouring of praise or thanksgiving, which was not regulated by priestly formulas. Every prayer was prescribed, every sacrifice determined. Every god had his share, and the claims of each deity on the adoration of the faithful were set down with such punctiliousness, the danger of offending their pride was represented in such vivid colors, that no one would venture to approach their presence without the assistance of a well-paid staff of masters of divine ceremonies. It was impossible to avoid sin without the help of the Brahmans. They alone knew the food that might properly be eaten, the air which might properly be breathed, the dress which might properly be worn. They alone could tell what god should be invoked, what sacrifice be offered; and the slightest mistake of pronunciation, the slightest neglect about clarified butter, or the length of the ladle in which it was to be offered, might bring destruction upon the head of the unassisted worshipper. No nation was ever so completely priest-ridden as the Hindus under the sway of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought, and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied nor asserted; they were of no greater importance in the system of the world of thought than trees or mountains, men or animals; and to offer sacrifices to them with a hope of rewards, so far from being meritorious, was considered as dangerous to that emancipation to which a clear perception of philosophical truth was to lead the patient student. There was one system which taught that there existed but one Being, without a second; that everything else which seemed to exist was but a dream and illusion, and that this illusion might be removed by a true knowledge of the one Being. There was another system which admitted two principles,--one a subjective and self-existent mind, the other matter, endowed with qualities. Here the world, with its joys and sorrows, was explained as the result of the subjective Self, reflecting itself in the mirror of matter; and final emancipation was obtained by turning away the eyes from the play of nature, and being absorbed in the knowledge of the time and absolute Self. A third system started with the admission of atoms, and explained every effect, including the elements and the mind, animals, men, and gods, from the concurrence of these atoms. In fact, as M. Cousin remarked many years ago, the history of the philosophy of India is "un abrege de l'histoire de la philosophie." The germs of all these systems are traced back to the Vedas, Brahma_n_as, and the Upanishads, and the man who believed in any of them was considered as orthodox as the devout worshipper of the gods; the one was saved by knowledge and faith, the other by works and faith.

Such was the state of the Hindu mind when Buddhism arose; or, rather, such was the state of the Hindu mind which gave rise to Buddhism. Buddha himself went through the school of the Brahmans. He performed their penances, he studied their philosophy, and he at last claimed the name of "the Buddha," or "the Enlightened," when he threw away the whole ceremonial, with its sacrifices, superstitions, penances, and castes, as worthless, and changed the complicated systems of philosophy into a short doctrine of salvation. This doctrine of salvation has been called pure Atheism and Nihilism, and it no doubt was liable to both charges in its metaphysical character, and in that form in which we chiefly know it. It was Atheistic, not because it denied the existence of such gods as Indra and Brahma. Buddha did not even condescend to deny their existence. But it was called Atheistic, like the Sankhya philosophy, which admitted but one subjective Self, and considered creation as an illusion of that Self, imaging itself for a while in the mirror of nature. As there was no reality in creation, there could be no real Creator. All that seemed to exist was the result of ignorance. To remove that ignorance was to remove the cause of all that seemed to exist. How a religion which taught the annihilation of all existence, of all thought, of all individuality and personality, as the highest object of all endeavors, could have laid hold of the minds of millions of human beings, and how at the same time, by enforcing the duties of morality, justice, kindness, and self-sacrifice, it could have exercised a decided beneficial influence, not only on the natives of India, but on the lowest barbarians of Central Asia, is a riddle which no one has been able to solve. We must distinguish, it seems, between Buddhism as a religion, and Buddhism as a a religion, and Buddhism as a philosophy. The former addressed itself to millions, the latter to a few isolated thinkers. It is from these isolated thinkers, however, and from their literary compositions, that we are apt to form our notions of what Buddhism was, while, as a matter of fact, not one in a thousand would have been capable of following these metaphysical speculations. To the people at large Buddhism was a moral and religious, not a philosophical reform. Yet even its morality has a metaphysical tinge. The morality which it teaches is not a morality of expediency and rewards. Virtue is not enjoined because it necessarily leads to happiness. No; virtue is to be practised, but happiness is to be shunned, and the only reward for virtue is that it subdues the passions, and thus prepares the human mind for that knowledge which is to end in complete annihilation. There are ten commandments which Buddha imposes on his disciples.[71] They are--

1. Not to kill. 2. Not to steal. 3. Not to commit adultery. 4. Not to lie. 5. Not to get intoxicated. 6. To abstain from unseasonable meals. 7. To abstain from public spectacles.

[Footnote 69: Helps, _The Spanish Conquest_, vol. iii. p. 503: "Que cosa tam inquieta non le parescia ser Dios."]

[Footnote 70: On the servitude of the gods, see the "Essay on Comparative Mythology," _Oxford Essays_, 1856, p. 69.]

[Footnote 71: See Burnouf, 'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 444. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, 'Du Bouddhisme,' p. 132. Ch.F.Neumann, 'Catechism of the Shamans.']

8. To abstain from expensive dresses. 9. Not to have a large bed. 10. Not to receive silver or gold.

The duties of those who embraced a religious life were more severe. They were not allowed to wear any dress except rags collected in cemeteries, and these rags they had to sew together with their own hands. A yellow cloak was to be thrown over these rags. Their food was to be extremely simple, and they were not to possess anything, except what they could get by collecting alms from door to door in their wooden bowls. They had but one meal in the morning, and were not allowed to touch any food after midday. They were to live in forests, not in cities, and their only shelter was to be the shadow of a tree. There they were to sit, to spread their carpet, but not to lie down, even during sleep. They were allowed to enter the nearest city or village in order to beg, but they had to return to their forest before night, and the only change which was allowed, or rather prescribed, was when they had to spend some nights in the cemeteries, there to meditate on the vanity of all things. And what was the object of all this asceticism? Simply to guide each individual towards that path which would finally bring him to Nirva_n_a, to utter extinction or annihilation. The very definition of virtue was that it helped man to cross over to the other shore, and that other shore was not death, but cessation of all being. Thus charity was considered a virtue; modesty, patience, courage, contemplation, and science, all were virtues, but they were practised only as a means of arriving at deliverance. Buddha himself exhibited the perfection of all these virtues. His charity knew no bounds. When he saw a tigress starved, and unable to feed her cubs, he is said to have made a charitable oblation of his body to be devoured by them. Hiouen-thsang visited the place on the banks of the Indus where this miracle was supposed to have happened, and he remarks that the soil is still red there from the blood of Buddha, and that the trees and flowers have the same colour.[72] As to the modesty of Buddha, nothing could exceed it. One day, king Prasena_g_it, the protector of Buddha, called on him to perform miracles, in order to silence his adversaries, the Brahmans. Buddha consented. He performed the required miracles; but he exclaimed, 'Great king, I do not teach the law to my pupils, telling them, Go, ye saints, and before the eyes of the Brahmans and householders perform, by means of your supernatural powers, miracles greater than any man can perform. I tell them, when I teach them the law, Live, ye saints, hiding your good works and showing your sins.' And yet, all this self-sacrificing charity, all this self-sacrificing humility, by which the life of Buddha was distinguished throughout, and which he preached to the multitudes that came to listen to him, had, we are told, but one object, and that object was final annihilation. It is impossible almost to believe it, and yet when we turn away our eyes from the pleasing picture of that high morality which Buddha preached for the first time to all classes of men, and look into the dark pages of his code of religious metaphysics, we can hardly find another explanation. Fortunately, the millions who embraced the doctrines of Buddha, and were saved by it from the depths of barbarism, brutality, and selfishness, were unable to fathom the meaning of his metaphysical doctrines. With them the Nirva_n_a to which they aspired, became only a relative deliverance from the miseries of human life; nay, it took the bright colours of a paradise, to be regained by the pious worshipper of Buddha. But was this the meaning of Buddha himself? In his 'Four Verities' he does not, indeed, define Nirva_n_a, except by cessation of all pain; but when he traces the cause of pain, and teaches the means of destroying not only pain itself, but the cause of pain, we shall see that his Nirva_n_a assumes a very different meaning. His 'Four Verities' are very simple. The first asserts the existence of pain; the second asserts that the cause of pain lies in sin; the third asserts that pain may cease by Nirva_n_a; the fourth shows the way that leads to Nirva_n_a. This way to Nirva_n_a consists in eight things--right faith (orthodoxy), right judgment (logic), right language (veracity), right purpose (honesty), right practice (religious life), right obedience (lawful life), right memory, and right meditation. All these precepts might be understood as part of a simply moral code, closing with a kind of mystic meditation on the highest object of thought, and with a yearning after deliverance from all worldly ties. Similar systems have prevailed in many parts of the world, without denying the existence of an absolute Being, or of a something towards which the human mind tends, in which it is absorbed or even annihilated. Awful as such a mysticism may appear, yet it leaves still something that exists, it acknowledges a feeling of dependence in man. It knows of a first cause, though it may have nothing to predicate of it except that it is [Greek: to kinoun akineton]. A return is possible from that desert. The first cause may be called to life again. It may take the names of Creator, Preserver, Ruler; and when the simplicity and helplessness of the child have re-entered the heart of man, the name of father will come back to the lips which had uttered in vain all the names of a philosophical despair. But from the Nirva_n_a of the Buddhist metaphysician there is no return. He starts from the idea that the highest object is to escape pain. Life in his eyes is nothing but misery; birth the cause of all evil, from which even death cannot deliver him, because he believes in an eternal cycle of existence, or in transmigration. There is no deliverance from evil, except by breaking through the prison walls, not only of life, but of existence, and by extirpating the last cause of existence. What, then, is the cause of existence? The cause of existence, says the Buddhist metaphysician, is attachment--an inclination towards something; and this attachment arises from thirst or desire. Desire presupposes perception of the object desired; perception presupposes contact; contact, at least a sentient contact, presupposes the senses; and, as the senses can only perceive what has form and name, or what is distinct, distinction is the real cause of all the effects which end in existence, birth, and pain. Now, this distinction is itself the result of conceptions or ideas; but these ideas, so far from being, as in Greek philosophy, the true and everlasting forms of the Absolute, are here represented as mere illusions, the effects of ignorance (avidya). Ignorance, therefore, is really the primary cause of all that seems to exist. To know that ignorance, as the root of all evil, is the same as to destroy it, and with it all effects that flowed from it. In order to see how this doctrine affects the individual, let us watch the last moments of Buddha as described by his disciples. He enters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedom from sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, and has no desire except that of Nirva_n_a. But he still feels pleasure; he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use of these powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, when nothing remains but a desire after Nirva_n_a, and a general feeling of satisfaction, arising from his intellectual perfection. That satisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage. Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self-consciousness, and a certain amount of physical pleasure. These last remnants are destroyed in the fourth stage; memory fades away, all pleasure and pain are gone, and the doors of Nirva_n_a now open before him. After having passed these four stages once, Buddha went through them a second time, but he died before he attained again to the fourth stage. We must soar still higher, and though we may feel giddy and disgusted, we must sit out this tragedy till the curtain falls. After the four stages of meditation[73] are passed, the Buddha (and every being is to become a Buddha) enters into the infinity of space; then into the infinity of intelligence; and thence he passes into the region of nothing. But even here there is no rest. There is still something left--the idea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must be destroyed, and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region, where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and where there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not nothing.[74] There are few persons who will take the trouble of reasoning out such hallucinations; least of all, persons who are accustomed to the sober language of Greek philosophy; and it is the more interesting to hear the opinion which one of the best Aristotelean scholars of the present day, after a patient examination of the authentic documents of Buddhism, has formed of its system of metaphysics. M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, in a review on Buddhism, published in the 'Journal des Savants,' says:

'Buddhism has no God; it has not even the confused and vague notion of a Universal Spirit in which the human soul, according to the orthodox doctrine of Brahmanism, and the Sankhya philosophy, may be absorbed. Nor does it admit nature, in the proper sense of the word, and it ignores that profound division between spirit and matter which forms the system and the glory of Kapila. It confounds man with all that surrounds him, all the while preaching to him the laws of virtue. Buddhism, therefore, cannot unite the human soul, which it does not even mention, with a God, whom it ignores; nor with nature, which it does not know better. Nothing remained but to annihilate the soul; and in order to be quite sure that the soul may not re-appear under some new form in this world, which has been cursed as the abode of illusion and misery, Buddhism destroys its very elements, and never gets tired of glorying in this achievement. What more is wanted?

[Footnote 72: Vol. i. p. 89, vol. ii. p. 167.]

[Footnote 73: These 'four stages' are described in the same manner in the canonical books of Ceylon and Nepal, and may therefore safely be ascribed to that original form of Buddhism from which the Southern and the Northern schools branched off at a later period. See Burnouf, 'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 800.]

[Footnote 74: See Burnouf, 'Lotus de la bonne Loi,' p. 814.]

If this is not the absolute nothing, what is Nirva_n_a?'

Such religion, we should say, was made for a mad-house. But Buddhism was an advance, if compared with Brahmanism; it has stood its ground for centuries, and if truth could be decided by majorities, the show of hands, even at the present day, would be in favour of Buddha. The metaphysics of Buddhism, like the metaphysics of most religions, not excluding our own Gnosticism and Mysticism, were beyond the reach of all except a few hardened philosophers or ecstatic dreamers. Human nature could not be changed. Out of the very nothing it made a new paradise; and he who had left no place in the whole universe for a Divine Being, was deified himself by the multitudes who wanted a person whom they could worship, a king whose help they might invoke, a friend before whom they could pour out their most secret griefs. And there remained the code of a pure morality, proclaimed by Buddha. There remained the spirit of charity, kindness, and universal pity with which he had inspired his disciples.[75] There remained the simplicity of the ceremonial he had taught, the equality of all men which he had declared, the religious toleration which he had preached from the beginning. There remained much, therefore, to account for the rapid strides which his doctrine made from the mountain peaks of Ceylon to the Tundras of the Samoyedes, and we shall see in the simple story of the life of Hiouen-thsang that Buddhism, with all its defects, has had its heroes, its martyrs, and its saints.

[Footnote 75: See the 'Dhammapadam,' a Pali work on Buddhist ethics, lately edited by V. Fausboell, a distinguished pupil of Professor Westergaard, at Copenhagen. The Rev. Spence Hardy ('Eastern Monachism,' p. 169) writes: 'A collection might be made from the precepts of this work, that in the purity of its ethics could scarcely be equalled from any other heathen author.' Mr. Knighton, when speaking of the same work in his 'History of Ceylon' (p. 77), remarks: 'In it we have exemplified a code of morality, and a list of precepts, which, for pureness, excellence, and wisdom, is only second to that of the Divine Lawgiver himself.']

Hiouen-thsang, born in China more than a thousand years after the death of Buddha, was a believer in Buddhism. He dedicated his whole life to the study of that religion; travelling from his native country to India, visiting every place mentioned in Buddhist history or tradition, acquiring the ancient language in which the canonical books of the Buddhists were written, studying commentaries, discussing points of difficulty, and defending the orthodox faith at public councils against disbelievers and schismatics. Buddhism had grown and changed since the death of its founder, but it had lost nothing of its vitality. At a very early period a proselytizing spirit awoke among the disciples of the Indian reformer, an element entirely new in the history of ancient religions. No Jew, no Greek, no Roman, no Brahman ever thought of converting people to his own national form of worship. Religion was looked upon as private or national property. It was to be guarded against strangers. The most sacred names of the gods, the prayers by which their favour could be gained, were kept secret. No religion, however, was more exclusive than that of the Brahmans. A Brahman was born, nay, twice-born. He could not be made. Not even the lowest caste, that of the _S_udras, would open its ranks to a stranger. Here lay the secret of Buddha's success. He addressed himself to castes and outcasts. He promised salvation to all; and he commanded his disciples to preach his doctrine in all places and to all men. A sense of duty, extending from the narrow limits of the house, the village, and the country to the widest circle of mankind, a feeling of sympathy and brotherhood towards all men, the idea, in fact, of humanity, were in India first pronounced by Buddha. In the third Buddhist Council, the acts of which have been preserved to us in the 'Mahavansa,'[76] we hear of missionaries being sent to the chief countries beyond India. This Council, we are told, took place 308 B.C., 235 years after the death of Buddha, in the 17th year of the reign of the famous king A_s_oka, whose edicts have been preserved to us on rock inscriptions in various parts of India. There are sentences in these inscriptions of A_s_oka which might be read with advantage by our own missionaries, though they are now more than 2000 years old. Thus it is written on the rocks of Girnar, Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri--

'Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the ascetics of all creeds might reside in all places. All these ascetics profess alike the command which people should exercise over themselves, and the purity of the soul. But people have different opinions, and different inclinations.'

And again:

'A man ought to honour his own faith only; but he should never abuse the faith of others. It is thus that he will do no harm to anybody. There are even circumstances where the religion of others ought to be honoured. And in acting thus, a man fortifies his own faith, and assists the faith of others. He who acts otherwise, diminishes his own faith, and hurts the faith of others.'

[Footnote 76: 'Mahavanso,' ed. G. Turnour, Ceylon, 1837, p. 71.]

Those who have no time to read the voluminous works of the late E. Burnouf on Buddhism, his 'Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme,' and his translation of 'Le Lotus de la bonne Loi,' will find a very interesting and lucid account of these councils, and edicts, and missions, and the history of Buddhism in general, in a work lately published by Mrs. Speir, 'Life in Ancient India.' Buddhism spread in the south to Ceylon, in the north to Kashmir, the Himalayan countries, Tibet, and China. One Buddhist missionary is mentioned in the Chinese annals as early as 217 B.C.;[77] and about the year 120 B.C. a Chinese General, after defeating the barbarous tribes north of the Desert of Gobi, brought back as a trophy a golden statue, the statue of Buddha.[78] It was not, however, till the year 65 A.D. that Buddhism was officially recognised by the Emperor Ming-ti[79] as a third state religion in China. Ever since, it has shared equal honours with the doctrines of Confucius and Lao-tse, in the Celestial Empire, and it is but lately that these three established religions have had to fear the encroachments of a new rival in the creed of the Chief of the rebels.

[Footnote 77: See 'Foe Koue Ki,' p. 41, and xxxviii. preface.]

[Footnote 78: See 'Foe Koue Ki,' p. 41.]

[Footnote 79: 'Lalita-Vistara,' ed. Foucaux, p. xvii. n.]

After Buddhism had been introduced into China, the first care of its teachers was to translate the sacred works from Sanskrit, in which they were originally written, into Chinese. We read of the Emperor Ming-ti,[80] of the dynasty of Han, sending Tsai-in and other high officials to India, in order to study there the doctrine of Buddha. They engaged the services of two learned Buddhists, Matanga and Tchou-fa-lan, and some of the most important Buddhist works were translated by them into Chinese. 'The Life of Buddha,' the 'Lalita-Vistara,'[81] a Sanskrit work which, on account of its style and language, had been referred by Oriental scholars to a much more modern period of Indian literature, can now safely be ascribed to an ante-Christian era, if, as we are told by Chinese scholars, it was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, as one of the canonical books of Buddhism, as early as the year 76 A.D. The same work was translated also into Tibetan; and an edition of it--the first Tibetan work printed in Europe--published in Paris by M.E. Foucaux, reflects high credit on that distinguished scholar, and on the Government which supports these studies in the most liberal and enlightened spirit. The intellectual intercourse between the Indian peninsula and the northern continent of Asia remained uninterrupted for many centuries. Missions were sent from China to India, to report on the political and geographical state of the country, but the chief object of interest which attracted public embassies and private pilgrims across the Himalayan mountains was the religion of Buddha. About three hundred years after the public recognition of Buddhism by the Emperor Ming-ti, the great stream of Buddhist pilgrims began to flow from China to India. The first account which we possess of these pilgrimages refers to the travels of Fahian, who visited India towards the end of the fourth century. His travels have been translated by Remusat, but M. Julien promises a new and more correct translation. After Fahian, we have the travels of Hoei-seng and Song-yun, who were sent to India, in 518, by command of the Empress, with a view of collecting sacred books and relics. Of Hiouen-thsang, who follows next in time, we possess, at present, eight out of twelve books; and there is reason to hope that the last four books of his Journal will soon follow in M. Julien's translation.[82] After Hiouen-thsang, the chief works of Chinese pilgrims are the 'Itineraries' of the fifty-six monks, published in 730, and the travels of Khi-nie, who visited India in 964, at the head of three hundred pilgrims. India was for a time the Holy Land of China. There lay the scene of the life and death of the great teacher; there were the monuments commemorating the chief events of his life; there the shrines where his relics might be worshipped; there the monasteries where tradition had preserved his sayings and his doings; there the books where his doctrine might be studied in its original purity; there the schools where the tenets of different sects which had sprung up in the course of time might best be acquired.

[Footnote 80: 'Lalita-Vistara,' p. 17.]

[Footnote 81: Two parts of the Sanskrit text have been published in the 'Bibliotheca Indica.']

[Footnote 82: They have since been published.]

Some of the pilgrims and envoys have left us accounts of their travels, and, in the absence of anything like an historical literature in India itself, these Chinese works are of the utmost importance for gaining an insight into the social, political, and religious history of that country from the beginning of our era to the time of the Mohammedan conquest. The importance of Mohammedan writers, so far as they treat on the history of India during the Middle Ages, was soon recognised, and in a memoir lately published by the most eminent Arabic scholar of France, M. Reinaud, new and valuable historical materials have been collected--materials doubly valuable in India, where no native historian has ever noted down the passing events of the day. But, although the existence of similar documents in Chinese was known, and although men of the highest literary eminence--such as Humboldt, Biot, and others--had repeatedly urged the necessity of having a translation of the early travels of the Chinese Pilgrims, it seemed almost as if our curiosity was never to be satisfied. France has been the only country where Chinese scholarship has ever flourished, and it was a French scholar, Abel Remusat, who undertook at last the translation of one of the Chinese Pilgrims. Remusat died before his work was published, and his translation of the travels of Fahian, edited by M. Landresse, remained for a long time without being followed up by any other. Nor did the work of that eminent scholar answer all expectations. Most of the proper names, the names of countries, towns, mountains, and rivers, the titles of books, and the whole Buddhistic phraseology, were so disguised in their Chinese dress that it was frequently impossible to discover their original form.

The Chinese alphabet was never intended to represent the sound of words. It was in its origin a hieroglyphic system, each word having its own graphic representative. Nor would it have been possible to write Chinese in any other way. Chinese is a monosyllabic language. No word is allowed more than one consonant and one vowel,--the vowels including diphthongs and nasal vowels. Hence the possible number of words is extremely small, and the number of significative sounds in the Chinese language is said to be no more than 450. No language, however, could be satisfied with so small a vocabulary, and in Chinese, as in other monosyllabic dialects, each word, as it was pronounced with various accents and intonations, was made to convey a large number of meanings; so that the total number of words, or rather of ideas, expressed in Chinese, is said to amount to 43,496. Hence a graphic representation of the mere sound of words would have been perfectly useless, and it was absolutely necessary to resort to hieroglyphical writing, enlarged by the introduction of determinative signs. Nearly the whole immense dictionary of Chinese--at least twenty-nine thirtieths--consists of combined signs, one part indicating the general sound, the other determining its special meaning. With such a system of writing it was possible to represent Chinese, but impossible to convey either the sound or the meaning of any other language. Besides, some of the most common sounds--such as r, b, d, and the short a--are unknown in Chinese.

How, then, were the translators to render Sanskrit names in Chinese? The most rational plan would have been to select as many Chinese signs as there were Sanskrit letters, and to express one and the same letter in Sanskrit always by one and the same sign in Chinese; or, if the conception of a consonant without a vowel, and of a vowel without a consonant, was too much for a Chinese understanding, to express at least the same syllabic sound in Sanskrit, by one and the same syllabic sign in Chinese. A similar system is adopted at the present day, when the Chinese find themselves under the necessity of writing the names of Lord Palmerston or Sir John Bowring; but, instead of adopting any definite system of transcribing, each translator seems to have chosen his own signs for rendering the sounds of Sanskrit words, and to have chosen them at random. The result is that every Sanskrit word as transcribed by the Chinese Buddhists is a riddle which no ingenuity is able to solve. Who could have guessed that 'Fo-to,' or more frequently 'Fo,' was meant for Buddha? 'Ko-lo-keou-lo' for Rahula, the son of Buddha? 'Po-lo-nai' for Benares? 'Heng-ho' for Ganges? 'Niepan' for Nirv_ana_? 'Chamen' for _S_rama_n_a? 'Feito' for Veda? 'Tcha-li' for Kshattriya? 'Siu-to-lo' for _S_udra? 'Fan' or 'Fan-lon-mo' for Brahma? Sometimes, it is true, the Chinese endeavoured to give, besides the sounds, a translation of the meaning of the Sanskrit words. But the translation of proper names is always very precarious, and it required an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit and Buddhist literature to recognise from these awkward translations the exact form of the proper names for which they were intended. If, in a Chinese translation of 'Thukydides,' we read of a person called 'Leader of the people,' we might guess his name to have been Demagogos, or Laoegos, as well as Agesilaos. And when the name of the town of _S_ravasti was written Che-wei, which means in Chinese 'where one hears,' it required no ordinary power of combination to find that the name of _S_ravasti was derived from a Sanskrit noun, _s_ravas (Greek [Greek: kleos], Lat. cluo), which means 'hearing' or 'fame,' and that the etymological meaning of the name of _S_ravasti was intended by the Chinese 'Che-wei.' Besides these names of places and rivers, of kings and saints, there was the whole strange phraseology of Buddhism, of which no dictionary gives any satisfactory explanation. How was even the best Chinese scholar to know that the words which usually mean 'dark shadow' must be taken in the technical sense of Nirva_n_a, or becoming absorbed in the Absolute, that 'return-purity' had the same sense, and that a third synonymous expression was to be recognised in a phrase which, in ordinary Chinese, would have the sense of 'transport-figure-crossing-age?' A monastery is called 'origin-door,' instead of 'black-door.' The voice of Buddha is called 'the voice of the dragon;' and his doctrine goes by the name of 'the door of expedients.'

Tedious as these details may seem, it was almost a duty to state them, in order to give an idea of the difficulties which M. Stanislas Julien had to grapple with. Oriental scholars labour under great disadvantages. Few people take an interest in their works, or, if they do, they simply accept the results, but they are unable to appreciate the difficulty with which these results were obtained. Many persons who have read the translation of the cuneiform inscriptions are glad, no doubt, to have the authentic and contemporaneous records of Darius and Xerxes. But if they followed the process by which scholars such as Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson arrived at their results, they would see that the discovery of the alphabet, the language, the grammar, and the meaning of the inscriptions of the Achaemenian dynasty deserves to be classed with the discoveries of a Kepler, a Newton, or a Faraday. In a similar manner, the mere translation of a Chinese work into French seems a very ordinary performance; but M. Stanislas Julien, who has long been acknowledged as the first Chinese scholar in Europe, had to spend twenty years of incessant labour in order to prepare himself for the task of translating the 'Travels of Hiouen-thsang.' He had to learn Sanskrit, no very easy language; he had to study the Buddhist literature written in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese. He had to make vast indices of every proper name connected with Buddhism. Thus only could he shape his own tools, and accomplish what at last he did accomplish. Most persons will remember the interest with which the travels of M.M. Huc and Gabet were read a few years ago, though these two adventurous missionaries were obliged to renounce their original intention of entering India by way of China and Tibet, and were not allowed to proceed beyond the famous capital of Lhassa. If, then, it be considered that there was a traveller who had made a similar journey twelve hundred years earlier--who had succeeded in crossing the deserts and mountain passes which separate China from India--who had visited the principal cities of the Indian Peninsula, at a time of which we have no information, from native or foreign sources, as to the state of that country--who had learned Sanskrit, and made a large collection of Buddhist works--who had carried on public disputations with the most eminent philosophers and theologians of the day--who had translated the most important works on Buddhism from Sanskrit into Chinese, and left an account of his travels, which still existed in the libraries of China--nay, which had been actually printed and published--we may well imagine the impatience with which all scholars interested in the ancient history of India, and in the subject of Buddhism, looked forward to the publication of so important a work. Hiouen-thsang's name had first been mentioned in Europe by Abel Remusat and Klaproth. They had discovered some fragments of his travels in a Chinese work on foreign countries and foreign nations. Remusat wrote to China to procure, if possible, a complete copy of Hiouen-thsang's works. He was informed by Morrison that they were out of print. Still, the few specimens which he had given at the end of his translation of the 'Foe Koue Ki' had whetted the appetite of Oriental scholars. M. Stanislas Julien succeeded in procuring a copy of Hiouen-thsang in 1838; and after nearly twenty years spent in preparing a translation of the Chinese traveller, his version is now before us. If there are but few who know the difficulty of a work like that of M. Stanislas Julien, it becomes their duty to speak out, though, after all, perhaps the most intelligible eulogium would be, that in a branch of study where there are no monopolies and no patents, M. Stanislas Julien is acknowledged to be the only man in Europe who could produce the article which he has produced in the work before us.

We shall devote the rest of our space to a short account of the life and travels of Hiouen-thsang. Hiouen-thsang was born in a provincial town of China, at a time when the empire was in a chronic state of revolution. His father had left the public service, and had given most of his time to the education of his four children. Two of them distinguished themselves at a very early age--one of them was Hiouen-thsang, the future traveller and theologian. The boy was sent to school at a Buddhist monastery, and, after receiving there the necessary instruction, partly from his elder brother, he was himself admitted as a monk at the early age of thirteen. During the next seven years, the young monk travelled about with his brother from place to place, in order to follow the lectures of some of the most distinguished professors. The horrors of war frequently broke in upon his quiet studies, and forced him to seek refuge in the more distant provinces of the empire. At the age of twenty he took priest's orders, and had then already become famous by his vast knowledge. He had studied the chief canonical books of the Buddhist faith, the records of Buddha's life and teaching, the system of ethics and metaphysics; and he was versed in the works of Confucius and Lao-tse. But still his own mind was agitated by doubts. Six years he continued his studies in the chief places of learning in China, and where he came to learn he was frequently asked to teach. At last, when he saw that none, even the most eminent theologians, were able to give him the information he wanted, he formed his resolve of travelling to India. The works of earlier pilgrims, such as Fahian and others, were known to him. He knew that in India he should find the originals of the works which in their Chinese translation left so many things doubtful in his mind; and though he knew from the same sources the dangers of his journey, yet 'the glory,' as he says, 'of recovering the Law, which was to be a guide to all men and the means of their salvation, seemed to him worthy of imitation.' In common with several other priests, he addressed a memorial to the Emperor to ask leave for their journey. Leave was refused, and the courage of his companions failed. Not that of Hiouen-thsang. His own mother had told him that, soon before she gave birth to him, she had seen her child travelling to the Far West in search of the Law. He was himself haunted by similar visions, and having long surrendered worldly desires, he resolved to brave all dangers, and to risk his life for the only object for which he thought it worth while to live. He proceeded to the Yellow River, the Hoang-ho, and to the place where the caravans bound for India used to meet, and, though the Governor had sent strict orders not to allow any one to cross the frontier, the young priest, with the assistance of his co-religionists, succeeded in escaping the vigilance of the Chinese 'douaniers.' Spies were sent after him. But so frank was his avowal, and so firm his resolution, which he expressed in the presence of the authorities, that the Governor himself tore his hue and cry to pieces, and allowed him to proceed. Hitherto he had been accompanied by two friends. They now left him, and Hiouen-thsang found himself alone, without a friend and without a guide. He sought for strength in fervent prayer. The next morning a person presented himself, offering his services as a guide. This guide conducted him safely for some distance, but left him when they approached the desert. There were still five watch-towers to be passed, and there was nothing to indicate the road through the desert, except the hoof-marks of horses, and skeletons. The traveller followed this melancholy track, and, though misled by the 'mirage' of the desert, he reached the first tower. Here the arrows of the watchmen would have put an end to his existence and his cherished expedition. But the officer in command, himself a zealous Buddhist, allowed the courageous pilgrim to proceed, and gave him letters of recommendation to the officers of the next towers. The last tower, however, was guarded by men inaccessible to bribes, and deaf to reasoning. In order to escape their notice, Hiouen-thsang had to make a long detour. He passed through another desert, and lost his way. The bag in which he carried his water burst, and then even the courage of Hiouen-thsang failed. He began to retrace his steps. But suddenly he stopped. 'I took an oath,' he said, 'never to make a step backward till I had reached India. Why, then, have I come here? It is better I should die proceeding to the West than return to the East and live.' Four nights and five days he travelled through the desert without a drop of water. He had nothing to refresh himself except his prayers--and what were they? Texts from a work which taught that there was no God, no Creator, no creation,--nothing but mind, minding itself. It is incredible in how exhausted an atmosphere the divine spark within us will glimmer on, and even warm the dark chambers of the human heart. Comforted by his prayers, Hiouen-thsang proceeded, and arrived after some time at a large lake. He was in the country of the Oigour Tatars. They received him well, nay, too well. One of the Tatar Khans, himself a Buddhist, sent for the Buddhist pilgrim, and insisted on his staying with him to instruct his people. Remonstrances proved of no avail. But Hiouen-thsang was not to be conquered. 'I know,' he said, 'that the king, in spite of his power, has no power over my mind and my will;' and he refused all nourishment, in order to put an end to his life. [Greek: Thanoumai kai eleutheresomai.] Three days he persevered, and at last the Khan, afraid of the consequences, was obliged to yield to the poor monk. He made him promise to visit him on his return to China, and then to stay three years with him. At last, after a delay of one month, during which the Khan and his Court came daily to hear the lessons of their pious guest, the traveller continued his journey with a numerous escort, and with letters of introduction from the Khan to twenty-four Princes whose territories the little caravan had to pass. Their way lay through what is now called Dsungary, across the Musur-dabaghan mountains, the northern portion of the Belur-tag, the Yaxartes valley, Bactria, and Kabulistan. We cannot follow them through all the places they passed, though the accounts which he gives of their adventures are most interesting, and the description of the people most important. Here is a description of the Musur-dabaghan mountains:

'The top of the mountain rises to the sky. Since the beginning of the world the snow has been accumulating, and is now transformed into vast masses of ice, which never melt, either in spring or summer. Hard and brilliant sheets of snow are spread out till they are lost in the infinite, and mingle with the clouds. If one looks at them, the eyes are dazzled by the splendour. Frozen peaks hang down over both sides of the road, some hundred feet high, and twenty feet or thirty feet thick. It is not without difficulty and danger that the traveller can clear them or climb over them. Besides, there are squalls of wind, and tornadoes of snow which attack the pilgrims. Even with double shoes, and in thick furs, one cannot help trembling and shivering.'

During the seven days that Hiouen-thsang crossed these Alpine passes he lost fourteen of his companions.

What is most important, however, in this early portion of the Chinese traveller is the account which he gives of the high degree of civilisation among the tribes of Central Asia. We had gradually accustomed ourselves to believe in an early civilisation of Egypt, of Babylon, of China, of India; but now that we find the hordes of Tatary possessing in the seventh century the chief arts and institutions of an advanced society, we shall soon have to drop the name of barbarians altogether. The theory of M. Oppert, who ascribes the original invention of the cuneiform letters and a civilisation anterior to that of Babylon and Nineveh to a Turanian or Scythian race, will lose much of its apparent improbability; for no new wave of civilisation had reached these countries between the cuneiform period of their literature and history and the time of Hiouen-thsang's visit. In the kingdom of Okini, on the western frontier of China, Hiouen-thsang found an active commerce, gold, silver, and copper coinage; monasteries, where the chief works of Buddhism were studied, and an alphabet, derived from Sanskrit. As he travelled on he met with mines, with agriculture, including pears, plums, peaches, almonds, grapes, pomegranates, rice, and wheat. The inhabitants were dressed in silk and woollen materials. There were musicians in the chief cities who played on the flute and the guitar. Buddhism was the prevailing religion, but there were traces of an earlier worship, the Bactrian fire-worship. The country was everywhere studded with halls, monasteries, monuments, and statues. Samarkand formed at that early time a kind of Athens, and its manners were copied by all the tribes in the neighbourhood. Balkh, the old capital of Bactria, was still an important place on the Oxus, well fortified, and full of sacred buildings. And the details which our traveller gives of the exact circumference of the cities, the number of their inhabitants, the products of the soil, the articles of trade, can leave no doubt in our minds that he relates what he had seen and heard himself. A new page in the history of the world is here opened, and new ruins pointed out, which would reward the pickaxe of a Layard.

But we must not linger. Our traveller, as we said, had entered India by way of Kabul. Shortly before he arrived at Pou-lou-cha-pou-lo, i. e. the Sanskrit Purushapura, the modern Peshawer, Hiouen-thsang heard of an extraordinary cave, where Buddha had formerly converted a dragon, and had promised his new pupil to leave him his shadow, in order that, whenever the evil passions of his dragon-nature should revive, the aspect of his master's shadowy features might remind him of his former vows. This promise was fulfilled, and the dragon-cave became a famous place of pilgrimage. Our traveller was told that the roads leading to the cave were extremely dangerous, and infested by robbers--that for three years none of the pilgrims had ever returned from the cave. But he replied, 'It would be difficult during a hundred thousand Kalpas to meet one single time with the true shadow of Buddha; how could I, having come so near, pass on without going to adore it?' He left his companions behind, and after asking in vain for a guide, he met at last with a boy who showed him to a farm belonging to a convent. Here he found an old man who undertook to act as his guide. They had hardly proceeded a few miles when they were attacked by five robbers. The monk took off his cap and displayed his ecclesiastical robes. 'Master,' said one of the robbers, 'where are you going?' Hiouen-thsang replied, 'I desire to adore the shadow of Buddha.' 'Master,' said the robber, 'have you not heard that these roads are full of bandits?' 'Robbers are men,' Hiouen-thsang exclaimed, 'and at present, when I am going to adore the shadow of Buddha, even though the roads were full of wild beasts, I should walk on without fear. Surely, then, I ought not to fear you, as you are men whose heart is possessed of pity.' The robbers were moved by these words, and opened their hearts to the true faith. After this little incident, Hiouen-thsang proceeded with his guide. He passed a stream rushing down between two precipitous walls of rock. In the rock itself there was a door which opened. All was dark. But Hiouen-thsang entered, advanced towards the east, then moved fifty steps backwards, and began his devotions. He made one hundred salutations, but he saw nothing. He reproached himself bitterly with his former sins, he cried, and abandoned himself to utter despair, because the shadow of Buddha would not appear before him. At last, after many prayers and invocations, he saw on the eastern wall a dim light, of the size of a saucepan, such as the Buddhist monks carry in their hands. But it disappeared. He continued praying full of joy and pain, and again he saw a light, which vanished like lightning. Then he vowed, full of devotion and love, that he would never leave the place till he had seen the shadow of the 'Venerable of the age.' After two hundred prayers, the cave was suddenly bathed in light, and the shadow of Buddha, of a brilliant white colour, rose majestically on the wall, as when the clouds suddenly open and, all at once, display the marvellous image of the 'Mountain of Light.' A dazzling splendour lighted up the features of the divine countenance. Hiouen-thsang was lost in contemplation and wonder, and would not turn his eyes away from the sublime and incomparable object.... After he awoke from his trance, he called in six men, and commanded them to light a fire in the cave, in order to burn incense; but, as the approach of the light made the shadow of Buddha disappear, the fire was extinguished. Then five of the men saw the shadow, but the sixth saw nothing. The old man who had acted as guide was astounded when Hiouen-thsang told him the vision. 'Master,' he said, 'without the sincerity of your faith, and the energy of your vows, you could not have seen such a miracle.'

This is the account given by Hiouen-thsang's biographers. But we must say, to the credit of Hiouen-thsang himself, that in the 'Si-yu-ki,' which contains his own diary, the story is told in a different way. The cave is described with almost the same words. But afterwards, the writer continues: 'Formerly, the shadow of Buddha was seen in the cave, bright, like his natural appearance, and with all the marks of his divine beauty. One might have said, it was Buddha himself. For some centuries, however, it can no longer be seen completely. Though one does see something, it is only a feeble and doubtful resemblance. If a man prays with sincere faith, and if he has received from above a hidden impression, he sees the shadow clearly, but he cannot enjoy the sight for any length of time.'

From Peshawer, the scene of this extraordinary miracle, Hiouen-thsang proceeded to Kashmir, visited the chief towns of Central India, and arrived at last in Magadha, the Holy Land of the Buddhists. Here he remained five years, devoting all his time to the study of Sanskrit and Buddhist literature, and inspecting every place hallowed by the recollections of the past. He then passed through Bengal, and proceeded to the south, with a view of visiting Ceylon, the chief seat of Buddhism. Baffled in that wish, he crossed the peninsula from east to west, ascended the Malabar coast, reached the Indus, and, after numerous excursions to the chief places of North-Western India, returned to Magadha, to spend there, with his old friends, some of the happiest years of his life. The route of his journeyings is laid down in a map drawn with exquisite skill by M. Vivien de Saint-Martin. At last he was obliged to return to China, and, passing through the Penjab, Kabulistan, and Bactria, he reached the Oxus, followed its course nearly to its sources on the plateau of Pamir, and, after staying some time in the three chief towns of Turkistan, Khasgar, Yarkand, and Khoten, he found himself again, after sixteen years of travels, dangers, and studies, in his own native country. His fame had spread far and wide, and the poor pilgrim, who had once been hunted by imperial spies and armed policemen, was now received with public honours by the Emperor himself. His entry into the capital was like a triumph. The streets were covered with carpets, flowers were scattered, and banners flying. Soldiers were drawn up, the magistrates went out to meet him, and all the monks of the neighbourhood marched along in solemn procession. The trophies that adorned this triumph, carried by a large number of horses, were of a peculiar kind. First, 150 grains of the dust of Buddha; secondly, a golden statue of the great Teacher; thirdly, a similar statue of sandal-wood; fourthly, a statue of sandal-wood, representing Buddha as descending from heaven; fifthly, a statue of silver; sixthly, a golden statue of Buddha conquering the dragons; seventhly, a statue of sandal-wood, representing Buddha as a preacher; lastly, a collection of 657 works in 520 volumes. The Emperor received the traveller in the Phoenix Palace, and, full of admiration for his talents and wisdom, invited him to accept a high office in the Government. This Hiouen-thsang declined. 'The soul of the administration,' he said, 'is still the doctrine of Confucius;' and he would dedicate the rest of his life to the Law of Buddha. The Emperor thereupon asked him to write an account of his travels, and assigned him a monastery where he might employ his leisure in translating the works he had brought back from India. His travels were soon written and published, but the translation of the Sanskrit MSS. occupied he whole rest of his life. It is said that the number of works translated by him, with the assistance of a large staff of monks, amounted to 740, in 1,335 volumes. Frequently he might be seen meditating on a difficult passage, when suddenly it seemed as if a higher spirit had enlightened his mind. His soul was cheered, as when a man walking in darkness sees all at once the sun piercing the clouds and shining in its full brightness; and, unwilling to trust to his own understanding, he used to attribute his knowledge to a secret inspiration of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas. When he found that the hour of death approached, he had all his property divided among the poor. He invited his friends to come and see him, and to take a cheerful leave of that impure body of Hiouen-thsang. 'I desire,' he said, 'that whatever merits I may have gained by good works may fall upon other people. May I be born again with them in the heaven of the blessed, be admitted to the family of Mi-le, and serve the Buddha of the future, who is full of kindness and affection. When I descend again upon earth to pass through other forms of existence, I desire at every new birth to fulfil my duties towards Buddha, and arrive at the last at the highest and most perfect intelligence. He died in the year 664--about the same time that Mohammedanism was pursuing its bloody conquests in the East, and Christianity began to shed its pure light over the dark forests of Germany.

It is impossible to do justice to the character of so extraordinary a man as Hiouen-thsang in so short a sketch as we have been able to give. If we knew only his own account of his life and travels--the volume which has just been published at Paris--we should be ignorant of the motives which guided him and of the sufferings which he underwent. Happily, two of his friends and pupils had left an account of their teacher, and M. Stanislas Julien has acted wisely in beginning his collection of the Buddhist Pilgrims with the translation of that biography. There we learn something of the man himself and of that silent enthusiasm which supported him in his arduous work. There we see him braving the dangers of the desert, scrambling along glaciers, crossing over torrents, and quietly submitting to the brutal violence of Indian Thugs. There we see him rejecting the tempting invitations of Khans, Kings, and Emperors, and quietly pursuing among strangers, within the bleak walls of the cell of a Buddhist college, the study of a foreign language, the key to the sacred literature of his faith. There we see him rising to eminence, acknowledged as an equal by his former teachers, as a superior by the most distinguished scholars of India; the champion of the orthodox faith, an arbiter at councils, the favourite of Indian kings. In his own work there is hardly a word about all this. We do not wish to disguise his weaknesses, such as they appear in the same biography. He was a credulous man, easily imposed upon by crafty priests, still more easily carried away by his own superstitions; but he deserved to have lived in better times, and we almost grudge so high and noble a character to a country not our own, and to a religion unworthy of such a man. Of selfishness we find no trace in him. His whole life belonged to the faith in which he was born, and the objects of his labour was not so much to perfect himself as to benefit others. He was an honest man. And strange, and stiff, and absurd, and outlandish as his outward appearance may seem, there is something in the face of that poor Chinese monk, with his yellow skin and his small oblique eyes, that appeals to our sympathy--something in his life, and the work of his life, that places him by right among the heroes of Greece, the martyrs of Rome, the knights of the crusades, the explorers of the Arctic regions--something that makes us feel it a duty to inscribe his name on the roll of the 'forgotten worthies' of the human race. There is a higher consanguinity than that of the blood which runs through our veins--that of the blood which makes our hearts beat with the same indignation and the same joy. And there is a higher nationality than that of being governed by the same imperial dynasty--that of our common allegiance to the Father and Ruler of all mankind.

It is but right to state that we owe the publication, at least of the second volume of M. Julien's work, to the liberality of the Court of Directors of the East-India Company. We have had several opportunities of pointing out the creditable manner in which that body has patronized literary and scientific works connected with the East, and we congratulate the Chairman, Colonel Sykes, and the President of the Board of Control, Mr. Vernon Smith, on the excellent choice they have made in this instance. Nothing can be more satisfactory than that nearly the whole edition of a work which would have remained unpublished without their liberal assistance, has been sold in little more than a month.

_April, 1857._

XI.

THE MEANING OF NIRVANA.

_To the Editor of_ THE TIMES.

Sir,--Mr. Francis Barham, of Bath, has protested in a letter, printed in 'The Times' of the 24th of April, against my interpretations of Nirva_n_a, or the summum bonum of the Buddhists. He maintains that the Nirva_n_a in which the Buddhists believe, and which they represent as the highest goal of their religion and philosophy, means union and communion with God, or absorption of the individual soul by the divine essence, and not, as I tried to show in my articles on the 'Buddhist Pilgrims,' utter annihilation.

I must not take up much more of your space with so abstruse a subject as Buddhist metaphysics; but at the same time I cannot allow Mr. Barham's protest to pass unnoticed. The authorities which he brings forward against my account of Buddhism, and particularly against my interpretation of Nirva_n_a, seem formidable enough. There is Neander, the great church historian, Creuzer, the famous scholar, and Hue, the well-known traveller and missionary,--all interpreting, as Mr. Barham says, the Nirva_n_a of the Buddhists in the sense of an apotheosis of the human soul, as it was taught in the Vedanta philosophy of the Brahmans, the Sufiism of the Persians, and the Christian mysticism of Eckhart and Tauler, and not in the sense of absolute annihilation.

Now, with regard to Neander and Creuzer, I must observe that their works were written before the canonical books of the Buddhists, composed in Sanskrit, had been discovered, or at least before they had been sent to Europe, and been analysed by European scholars. Besides, neither Neander nor Creuzer was an Oriental scholar, and their knowledge of the subject could only be second-hand. It was in 1824 that Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, then resident at the Court of Nepal, gave the first intimation of the existence of a large religious literature written in Sanskrit, and preserved by the Buddhists of Nepal as the canonical books of their faith. It was in 1830 and 1835 that the same eminent scholar and naturalist presented the first set of these books to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. In 1837 he made a similar gift to the Societe Asiatique of Paris, and some of the most important works were transmitted by him to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It was in 1844 that the late Eugene Burnouf published, after a careful study of these documents, his classical work, 'Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien,' and it is from this book that our knowledge of Buddhism may be said to date. Several works have since been published, which have added considerably to the stock of authentic information on the doctrine of the great Indian reformer. There is Burnouf's translation of 'Le Lotus de la bonne Loi,' published after the death of that lamented scholar, together with numerous essays, in 1852. There are two interesting works by the Rev. Spence Hardy--'Eastern Monachism,' London, 1850, and 'A Manual of Buddhism,' London, 1853; and there are the publications of M. Stanislas Julien, E. Foucaux, the Honourable George Turnour, Professor H. H. Wilson, and others, alluded to in my article on the 'Buddhist Pilgrims.' It is from these works alone that we can derive correct and authentic information on Buddhism, and not from Neander's 'History of the Christian Church' or from Creuzer's 'Symbolik.'

If any one will consult these works, he will find that the discussions on the true meaning of Nirva_n_a are not of modern date, and that, at a very early period, different philosophical schools among the Buddhists of India, and different teachers who spread the doctrine of Buddhism abroad, propounded every conceivable opinion as to the orthodox explanation of this term. Even in one and the same school we find different parties maintaining different views on the meaning of Nirva_n_a. There is the school of the Svabhavikas, which still exists in Nepal. The Svabhavikas maintain that nothing exists but nature, or rather substance, and that this substance exists by itself (svabhavat), without a Creator or a Ruler. It exists, however, under two forms: in the state of Prav_r_itti, as active, or in the state of Nirv_r_itti, as passive. Human beings, who, like everything else, exist svabhavat, 'by themselves,' are supposed to be capable of arriving at Nirv_r_itti, or passiveness, which is nearly synonymous with Nirva_n_a. But here the Svabhavikas branch off into two sects. Some believe that Nirv_r_itti is repose, others that it is annihilation; and the former add, 'were it even annihilation (sunyata), it would still be good, man being otherwise doomed to an eternal migration through all the forms of nature; the more desirable of which are little to be wished for; and the less so, at any price to be shunned.'[83]

What was the original meaning of Nirva_n_a may perhaps best be seen from the etymology of this technical term. Every Sanskrit scholar knows that Nirva_n_a means originally the blowing out, the extinction of light, and not absorption. The human soul, when it arrives at its perfection, is blown out,[84] if we use the phraseology of the Buddhists, like a lamp; it is not absorbed, as the Brahmans say, like a drop in the ocean. Neither in the system of Buddhist philosophy, nor in the philosophy from which Buddha is supposed to have borrowed, was there any place left for a Divine Being by which the human soul could be absorbed. Sankhya philosophy, in its original form, claims the name of an-i_s_vara, 'lordless' or 'atheistic' as its distinctive title. Its final object is not absorption in God, whether personal or impersonal, but Moksha, deliverance of the soul from all pain and illusion, and recovery by the soul of its true nature. It is doubtful whether the term Nirva_n_a was coined by Buddha. It occurs in the literature of the Brahmans as a synonyme of Moksha, deliverance; Nirv_r_itti, cessation; Apavarga, release; Ni_hs_reyas, summum bonum. It is used in this sense in the Mahabharata, and it is explained in the Amara-Kosha as having the meaning of 'blowing out, applied to a fire and to a sage.'[85] Unless, however, we succeed in tracing this term in works anterior to Buddha, we may suppose that it was invented by him in order to express that meaning of the summum bonum which he was the first to preach, and which some of his disciples explained in the sense of absolute annihilation.

[Footnote 83: See Burnouf, 'Introduction,' p. 441; Hodgson, 'Asiatic Researches,' vol. xvi.]

[Footnote 84: 'Calm,' 'without wind,' as Nirva_n_a is sometimes explained, is expressed in Sanskrit by Nirvata. See Amara-Kosha, sub voce.]

[Footnote 85: Different views of the Nirva_n_a, as conceived by the Tirthakas or the Brahmans, may be seen in an extract from the Lankavatara, translated by Burnouf, p. 514.]

The earliest authority to which we can go back, if we want to know the original character of Buddhism, is the Buddhist Canon, as settled after the death of Buddha at the first Council. It is called Tripi_t_aka, or the Three Baskets, the first containing the Sutras, or the discourses of Buddha; the second, the Vinaya, or his code of morality; the third, the Abhidharma, or the system of metaphysics. The first was compiled by Ananda, the second by Upali, the third by Ka_s_yapa--all of them the pupils and friends of Buddha. It may be that these collections, as we now possess them, were finally arranged, not at the first, but at the third Council. Yet, even then, we have no earlier, no more authentic, documents from which we could form an opinion as to the original teaching of Buddha; and the Nirva_n_a, as taught in the metaphysics of Ka_s_yapa, and particularly in the Pra_gn_a-paramita, is annihilation, not absorption. Buddhism, therefore, if tested by its own canonical books, cannot be freed from the charge of Nihilism, whatever may have been its character in the mind of its founder, and whatever changes it may have undergone in later times, and among races less inured to metaphysical discussions than the Hindus.

The ineradicable feeling of dependence on something else, which is the life-spring of all religion, was completely numbed in the early Buddhist metaphysicians, and it was only after several generations had passed away, and after Buddhism had become the creed of millions, that this feeling returned with increased warmth, changing, as I said in my article, the very Nothing into a paradise, and deifying the very Buddha who had denied the existence of a Deity. That this has been the case in China we know from the interesting works of the Abbe Huc, and from other sources, such as the 'Catechism of the Shamans, or the Laws and Regulations of the Priesthood of Buddha in China,' translated by Ch. F. Neumann, London, 1831. In India, also, Buddhism, as soon as it became a popular religion, had to speak a more human language than that of metaphysical Pyrrhonism. But, if it did so, it was because it was shamed into it. This we may see from the very nicknames which the Brahmans apply to their opponents, the Bauddhas. They call them Nastikas--those who maintain that there is nothing; _S_unyavadins-those who maintain that there is a universal void.

The only ground, therefore, on which we may stand, if we wish to defend the founder of Buddhism against the charges of Nihilism and Atheism, is this, that, as some of the Buddhists admit, the 'Basket of Metaphysics' was rather the work of his pupils, not of Buddha himself.[86] This distinction between the authentic words of Buddha and the canonical books in general, is mentioned more than once. The priesthood of Ceylon, when the manifest errors with which their canonical commentaries abound, were brought to their notice, retreated from their former position, and now assert that it is only the express words of Buddha that they receive as undoubted truth.[87] There is a passage in a Buddhist work which reminds us somewhat of the last page of Dean Milman's 'History of Christianity,' and where we read:

'The words of the priesthood are good; those of the Rahats (saints) are better; but those of the All-knowing are the best of all.'

[Footnote 86: See Burnouf, 'Introduction,' p. 41. 'Abuddhoktam abhidharma-_s_astram.' Ibid. p. 454. According to the Tibetan Buddhists, however, Buddha propounded the Abhidharma when he was fifty-one years old. 'Asiatic Researches,' vol. xx. p. 339.]

[Footnote 87: 'Eastern Monachism,' p. 171.]

This is an argument which Mr. Francis Barham might have used with more success, and by which he might have justified, if not the first disciples, at least the original founder of Buddhism. Nay, there is a saying of Buddha's which tends to show that all metaphysical discussion was regarded by him as vain and useless. It is a saying mentioned in one of the MSS. belonging to the Bodleian Library. As it has never been published before, I may be allowed to quote it in the original: Sadasad vi_k_aram na sahate,--'The ideas of being and not being do not admit of discussion,'--a tenet which, if we consider that it was enunciated before the time of the Eleatic philosophers of Greece, and long before Hegel's Logic, might certainly have saved us many an intricate and indigestible argument.

A few passages from the Buddhist writings of Nepal and Ceylon will best show that the horror nihili was not felt by the metaphysicians of former ages in the same degree as it is felt by ourselves. The famous hymn which resounds in heaven when the luminous rays of the smile of Buddha penetrate through the clouds, is 'All is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is without substance.' Again, it is said in the Pra_gn_a-paramita,[88] that Buddha began to think that he ought to conduct all creatures to perfect Nirva_n_a. But he reflected that there are really no creatures which ought to be conducted, nor creatures that conduct; and, nevertheless, he did conduct all creatures to perfect Nirva_n_a. Then, continues the text, why is it said that there are neither creatures which arrive at complete Nirva_n_a, nor creatures which conduct there? Because it is illusion which makes creatures what they are. It is as if a clever juggler, or his pupil, made an immense number of people to appear on the high road, and after having made them to appear, made them to disappear again. Would there be anybody who had killed, or murdered, or annihilated, or caused them to vanish? No. And it is the same with Buddha. He conducts an immense, innumerable, infinite number of creatures to complete Nirva_n_a, and yet there are neither creatures which are conducted, nor creatures that conduct. If a Bodhisattva, on hearing this explanation of the Law, is not frightened, then it may be said that he has put on the great armour.[89]

[Footnote 88: Burnouf, 'Introduction,' p. 462.]

[Footnote 89: Ibid. p. 478.]

Soon after, we read: 'The name of Buddha is nothing but a word. The name of Bodhisattva is nothing but a word. The name of Perfect Wisdom (Pra_gn_a-paramita) is nothing but a word. The name is indefinite, as if one says "I," for "I" is something indefinite, because it has no limits.'

Burnouf gives the gist of the whole Pra_gn_a-paramita in the following words: 'The highest Wisdom, or what is to be known, has no more real existence than he who has to know, or the Bodhisattva; no more than he who does know, or the Buddha.' But Burnouf remarks that nothing of this kind is to be found in the Sutras, and that Gautama _S_akya-muni, the son of _S_uddhodana, would never have become the founder of a popular religion if he had started with similar absurdities. In the Sutras the reality of the objective world is denied; the reality of form is denied; the reality of the individual, or the 'I,' is equally denied. But the existence of a subject, of something like the Purusha, the thinking substance of the Sankhya philosophy, is spared. Something at least exists with respect to which everything else may be said not to exist. The germs of the ideas, developed in the Pra_gn_a-paramita, may indeed be discovered here and there in the Sutras.[90] But they had not yet ripened into that poisonous plant which soon became an indispensable narcotic in the schools of the later Buddhists. Buddha himself, however, though, perhaps, not a Nihilist, was certainly an Atheist. He does not deny distinctly either the existence of gods, or that of God; but he ignores the former, and he is ignorant of the latter. Therefore, if Nirva_n_a in his mind was not yet complete annihilation, still less could it have been absorption into a Divine essence. It was nothing but selfishness, in the metaphysical sense of the word--a relapse into that being which is nothing but itself. This is the most charitable view which we can take of the Nirva_n_a, even as conceived by Buddha himself, and it is the view which Burnouf derived from the canonical books of the Northern Buddhists. On the other hand, Mr. Spence Hardy, who in his works follows exclusively the authority of the Southern Buddhists, the Pali and Singhalese works of Ceylon, arrives at the same result. We read in his work: 'The Rahat (Arhat), who has reached Nirva_n_a, but is not yet a Pratyeka-buddha, or a Supreme Buddha, says: "I await the appointed time for the cessation of existence. I have no wish to live; I have no wish to die. Desire is extinct."'

[Footnote 90: Burnouf, 'Introduction,' p. 520.]

* * * * *

In a very interesting dialogue between Milinda and Nagasena, communicated by Mr. Spence Hardy, Nirva_n_a is represented as something which has no antecedent cause, no qualities, no locality. It is something of which the utmost we may assert is, that it is:

_Nagasena._ Can a man, by his natural strength, go from the city of Sagal to the forest of Himala?

_Milinda._ Yes.

_Nagasena._ But could any man, by his natural strength, bring the forest of Himala to this city of Sagal?

_Milinda._ No.

_Nagasena._ In like manner, though the fruition of the paths may cause the accomplishment of Nirva_n_a, no cause by which Nirva_n_a is produced can be declared. The path that leads to Nirva_n_a may be pointed out, but not any cause for its production. Why? because that which constitutes Nirva_n_a is beyond all computation,--a mystery, not to be understood.... It cannot be said that it is produced, nor that it is not produced; that it is past or future or present. Nor can it be said that it is the seeing of the eye, or the hearing of the ear, or the smelling of the nose, or the tasting of the tongue, or the feeling of the body.

_Milinda._ Then you speak of a thing that is not; you merely say that Nirva_n_a is Nirva_n_a;--therefore there is no Nirva_n_a.

_Nagasena._ Great king, Nirva_n_a is.

Another question also, whether Nirva_n_a is something different from the beings that enter into it, has been asked by the Buddhists themselves:

_Milinda._ Does the being who acquires it, attain something that has previously existed?--or is it his own product, a formation peculiar to himself?

_Nagasena._ Nirva_n_a does not exist previously to its reception; nor is it that which was brought into existence. Still to the being who attains it, there is Nirva_n_a.

In opposition, therefore, to the more advanced views of the Nihilistic philosophers of the North, Nagasena maintains the existence of Nirva_n_a, and of the being that has entered Nirva_n_a. He does not say that Buddha is a mere word. When asked by king Milinda, whether the all-wise Buddha exists, he replies:

_Nagasena._ He who is the most meritorious (Bhagavat) does exist.

_Milinda._ Then can you point out to me the place in which he exists?

_Nagasena._ Our Bhagavat has attained Nirva_n_a, where there is no repetition of birth. We cannot say that he is here, or that he is there. When a fire is extinguished, can it be said that it is here, or that it is there? Even so, our Buddha has attained extinction (Nirva_n_a). He is like the sun that has set behind the Astagiri mountain. It cannot be said that he is here, or that he is there: but we can point him out by the discourses he delivered. In them he lives.

At the present moment, the great majority of Buddhists would probably be quite incapable of understanding the abstract speculation of their ancient masters. The view taken of Nirva_n_a in China, Mongolia, and Tatary may probably be as gross as that which most of the Mohammedans form of their paradise. But, in the history of religion, the historian must go back to the earliest and most original documents that are to be obtained. Thus only may he hope to understand the later developments which, whether for good or evil, every form of faith has had to undergo.

_April, 1857._

XII.

CHINESE TRANSLATIONS

OF

SANSKRIT TEXTS.[91]

Well might M. Stanislas Julien put [Greek: heureka] on the title-page of his last work, in which he explains his method of deciphering the Sanskrit words which occur in the Chinese translations of the Buddhist literature of India. We endeavoured to explain the laborious character and the important results of his researches on this subject on a former occasion, when reviewing his translation of the 'Life and Travels of the Buddhist Pilgrim Hiouen-thsang.' At that time, however, M. Julien kept the key of his discoveries to himself. He gave us the results of his labours without giving us more than a general idea of the process by which those results had been obtained. He has now published his 'Methode pour dechiffrer et transcrire les noms sanscrits qui se rencontrent dans les livres chinois,' and he has given to the public his Chinese-Sanskrit dictionary, the work of sixteen years of arduous labour, containing all the Chinese characters which are used for representing phonetically the technical terms and proper names of the Buddhist literature of India.

[Footnote 91: 'Methode pour dechiffrer et transcrire les noms sanscrits qui se rencontrent dans les livres chinois.' Par M. Stanislas Julien, Membre de l'Institut. Paris, 1861.]

In order fully to appreciate the labours and discoveries of M. Julien in this remote field of Oriental literature, we must bear in mind that the doctrine of Buddha arose in India about two centuries before Alexander's invasion. It became the state religion of India soon after Alexander's conquest, and it produced a vast literature, which was collected into a canon at a council held about 246 B.C. Very soon after that council, Buddhism assumed a proselytizing character. It spread in the south to Ceylon, in the north to Kashmir, the Himalayan countries, Tibet, and China. In the historical annals of China, on which, in the absence of anything like historical literature in Sanskrit, we must mainly depend for information on the spreading of Buddhism, one Buddhist missionary is mentioned as early as 217 B.C.; and about the year 120 B.C. a Chinese general, after defeating the barbarous tribes north of the desert of Gobi, brought back as a trophy a golden statue--the statue of Buddha. It was not, however, till the year 65 A.D. that Buddhism was officially recognised by the Chinese Emperor as a third state religion. Ever since, it has shared equal honours with the doctrines of Confucius and Lao-tse in the Celestial Empire; and it is but lately that these three established religions have had to fear the encroachments of a new rival in the creed of the Chief of the rebels.

Once established in China, and well provided with monasteries and benefices, the Buddhist priesthood seems to have been most active in its literary labours. Immense as was the Buddhist literature of India, the Chinese swelled it to still more appalling proportions. The first thing to be done was to translate the canonical books. This seems to have been the joint work of Chinese who had acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit during their travels in India, and of Hindus who settled in Chinese monasteries in order to assist the native translators. The translation of books which profess to contain a new religious doctrine is under all circumstances a task of great difficulty. It was so particularly when the subtle abstractions of the Buddhist religion had to be clothed in the solid, matter-of-fact idiom of the Chinese. But there was another difficulty which it seemed almost impossible to overcome. Many words, not only proper names, but the technical terms also of the Buddhist creed, had to be preserved in Chinese. They were not to be translated, but to be transliterated. But how was this to be effected with a language which, like Chinese, had no phonetic alphabet? Every Chinese character is a word; it has both sound and meaning; and it is unfit, therefore, for the representation of the sound of foreign words. In modern times, certain characters have been set apart for the purpose of writing the proper names and titles of foreigners; but such is the peculiar nature of the Chinese system of writing, that even with this alphabet it is only possible to represent approximatively the pronunciation of foreign words. In the absence, however, of even such an alphabet, the translators of the Buddhist literature seem to have used their own discretion--or rather indiscretion--in appropriating, without any system, whatever Chinese characters seemed to them to come nearest to the sound of Sanskrit words. Now the whole Chinese language consists in reality of about four hundred words, or significative sounds, all monosyllabic. Each of these monosyllabic sounds embraces a large number of various meanings, and each of these various meanings is represented by its own sign. Thus it has happened that the Chinese Dictionary contains 43,496 signs, whereas the Chinese language commands only four hundred distinct utterances. Instead of being restricted, therefore, to one character which always expresses the same sound, the Buddhist translators were at liberty to express one and the same sound in a hundred different ways. Of this freedom they availed themselves to the fullest extent. Each translator, each monastery, fixed on its own characters for representing the pronunciation of Sanskrit words. There are more than twelve hundred Chinese characters employed by various writers in order to represent the forty-two simple letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. The result has been that even the Chinese were after a time unable to read--i. e. to pronounce--these random transliterations. What, then, was to be expected from Chinese scholars in Europe? Fortunately, the Chinese, to save themselves from their own perplexities, had some lists drawn up, exhibiting the principles followed by the various translators in representing the proper names, the names of places, and the technical terms of philosophy and religion which they had borrowed from the Sanskrit. With the help of these lists, and after sixteen years consecrated to the study of the Chinese translations of Sanskrit works and of other original compositions of Buddhist authors, M. Julien at last caught up the thread that was to lead him through this labyrinth; and by means of his knowledge of Sanskrit, which he acquired solely for that purpose, he is now able to do what not even the most learned among the Buddhists in China could accomplish--he is able to restore the exact form and meaning of every word transferred from Sanskrit into the Buddhist literature of China.

Without this laborious process, which would have tired out the patience and deadened the enthusiasm of most scholars, the treasures of the Buddhist literature preserved in Chinese were really useless. Abel Remusat, who during his lifetime was considered the first Chinese scholar in Europe, attempted indeed a translation of the travels of Fahian, a Buddhist pilgrim, who visited India about the end of the fourth century after Christ. It was in many respects a most valuable work, but the hopelessness of reducing the uncouth Chinese terms to their Sanskrit originals made it most tantalising to look through its pages. Who was to guess that Ho-kia-lo was meant for the Sanskrit Vyakara_n_a, in the sense of sermons; Po-to for the Sanskrit Avadana, parables; Kia-ye-i for the Sanskrit Ka_s_yapiyas, the followers of Ka_s_yapa? In some instances, Abel Remusat, assisted by Chezy, guessed rightly; and later Sanskrit scholars, such as Burnouf, Lassen, and Wilson, succeeded in re-establishing, with more or less certainty, the original form of a number of Sanskrit words, in spite of their Chinese disguises. Still there was no system, and therefore no certainty, in these guesses, and many erroneous conclusions were drawn from fragmentary translations of Chinese writers on Buddhism, which even now are not yet entirely eliminated from the works of Oriental scholars. With M. Julien's method, mathematical certainty seems to have taken the place of learned conjectures; and whatever is to be learnt from the Chinese on the origin, the history, and the true character of Buddha's doctrine may now be had in an authentic and unambiguous form.

But even after the principal difficulties have been cleared away through the perseverance of M. Stanislas Julien, and after we have been allowed to reap the fruits of his labours in his masterly translation of the 'Voyages des Pelerins Bouddhistes,' there still remains one point that requires some elucidation. How was it that the Chinese, whose ears no doubt are of the same construction as our own, should have made such sad work of the Sanskrit names which they transcribed with their own alphabet? Much may be explained by the defects of their language. Such common sounds as v, g, r, b, d, and short a, are unknown in Chinese as initials; no compound consonants are allowed, every consonant being followed by a vowel; and the final letters are limited to a very small number. This, no doubt, explains, to a great extent, the distorted appearance of many Sanskrit words when written in Chinese. Thus, Buddha could only be written Fo to. There was no sign for an initial b, nor was it possible to represent a double consonant, such as ddh. Fo to was the nearest approach to Buddha of which Chinese, when written, was capable. But was it so in speaking? Was it really impossible for Fahian and Hiouen-thsang, who had spent so many years in India, and who were acquainted with all the intricacies of Sanskrit grammar, to distinguish between the sounds of Buddha and Fo to? We cannot believe this. We are convinced that Hiouen-thsang, though he wrote, and could not but write, Fo to with the Chinese characters, pronounced Buddha just as we pronounce it, and that it was only among the unlearned that Fo to became at last the recognised name of the founder of Buddhism, abbreviated even to the monosyllabic Fo, which is now the most current appellation of 'the Enlightened.' In the same manner the Chinese pilgrims wrote Niepan, but they pronounced Nirva_n_a; they wrote Fan-lon-mo, and pronounced Brahma.

Nor is it necessary that we should throw all the blame of these distortions on the Chinese. On the contrary, it is almost certain that some of the discrepancies between the Sanskrit of their translations and the classical Sanskrit of Pa_n_ini were due to the corruption which, at the time when Buddhism arose, and still more at the time when Buddhism spread to China, had crept into the spoken language of India. Sanskrit had ceased to be the spoken language of the people previous to the time of A_s_oka. The edicts which are still preserved on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri are written in a dialect which stands to Sanskrit in the same relation as Italian to Latin. Now it is true, no doubt, that the canonical books of the Buddhists are written in a tolerably correct Sanskrit, very different from the Italianized dialect of A_s_oka. But that Sanskrit was, like the Greek of Alexandria, like the Latin of Hungary, a learned idiom, written by the learned for the learned; it was no longer the living speech of India. Now it is curious that in many of the canonical Buddhist works which we still possess, the text which is written in Sanskrit prose is from time to time interrupted by poetical portions, called Gathas or ballads, in which the same things are told in verse which had before been related in prose. The dialect of these songs or ballads is full of what grammarians would call irregularities, that is to say, full of those changes which every language undergoes in the mouths of the people. In character these corruptions are the same as those which have been observed in the inscriptions of A_s_oka, and which afterwards appear in Pali and the modern Prakrit dialects of India. Various conjectures have been started to explain the amalgamation of the correct prose text and the free and easy poetical version of the same events, as embodied in the sacred literature of the Buddhists. Burnouf, the first who instituted a critical inquiry into the history and literature of Buddhism, supposed that there was, besides the canon fixed by the three convocations, another digest of Buddhist doctrines composed in the popular style, which may have developed itself, as he says, subsequently to the preaching of _S_akya, and which would thus be intermediate between the regular Sanskrit and the Pali. He afterwards, however, inclines to another view--namely, that these Gathas were written out of India by men to whom Sanskrit was no longer familiar, and who endeavoured to write in the learned language, which they ill understood, with the freedom which is imparted by the habitual use of a popular but imperfectly determined dialect. Other Sanskrit scholars have proposed other solutions of this strange mixture of correct prose and incorrect poetry in the Buddhist literature; but none of them was satisfactory. The problem seems to have been solved at last by a native scholar, Babu Rajendralal, a curious instance of the reaction of European antiquarian research on the native mind of India. Babu Rajendralal reads Sanskrit of course with the greatest ease. He is a pandit by profession, but he is at the same time a scholar and critic in our sense of the word. He has edited Sanskrit texts after a careful collation of MSS., and in his various contributions to the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' he has proved himself completely above the prejudices of his class, freed from the erroneous views on the history and literature of India in which every Brahman is brought up, and thoroughly imbued with those principles of criticism which men like Colebrooke, Lassen, and Burnouf have followed in their researches into the literary treasures of his country. His English is remarkably clear and simple, and his arguments would do credit to any Sanskrit scholar in England. We quote from his remarks on Burnouf's account of the Gathas, as given in that scholar's 'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien:'

'Burnouf's opinion on the origin of the Gathas, we venture to think, is founded on a mistaken estimate of Sanskrit style. The poetry of the Gatha has much artistic elegance which at once indicates that it is not the composition of men who were ignorant of the first principles of grammar. The authors display a great deal of learning, and discuss the subtlest questions of logic and metaphysics with much tact and ability, and it is difficult to conceive that men who were perfectly familiar with the most intricate forms of Sanskrit logic, who have expressed the most abstruse metaphysical ideas in precise and often in beautiful language, who composed with ease and elegance in Arya, To_t_aka, and other difficult measures, were unacquainted with the rudiments of the language in which they wrote, and were unable to conjugate the verb to be in all its forms.... The more reasonable conjecture appears to be that the Gatha is the production of bards who were contemporaries or immediate successors of _S_akya, who recounted to the devout congregations of the prophet of Magadha, the sayings and doings of their great teacher in popular and easy-flowing verses, which in course of time came to be regarded as the most authentic source of all information connected with the founder of Buddhism. The high estimation in which the ballads and improvisations of bards are held in India and particularly in the Buddhist writings, favours this supposition; and the circumstance that the poetical portions are generally introduced in corroboration of the narration of the prose, with the words "Thereof this may be said," affords a strong presumptive evidence.'

Now this, from the pen of a native scholar, is truly remarkable. The spirit of Niebuhr seems to have reached the shores of India, and this ballad theory comes out more successfully in the history of Buddha than in the history of Romulus. The absence of anything like cant in the mouth of a Brahman speaking of Buddhism, the _bete noire_ of all orthodox Brahmans, is highly satisfactory, and our Sanskrit scholars in Europe will have to pull hard if, with such men as Babu Rajendralal in the field, they are not to be distanced in the race of scholarship.

We believe, then, that Babu Rajendralal is right, and we look upon the dialect of the Gathas as a specimen of the Sanskrit spoken by the followers of Buddha about the time of A_s_oka and later. And this will help us to understand some of the peculiar changes which the Sanskrit of the Chinese Buddhists must have undergone, even before it was disguised in the strange dress of the Chinese alphabet. The Chinese pilgrims did not hear the Sanskrit pronounced as it was pronounced in the Parishads according to the strict rules of their _S_iksha or phonetics. They heard it as it was spoken in Buddhist monasteries, as it was sung in the Gathas of Buddhist minstrels, as it was preached in the Vyakara_n_as or sermons of Buddhist friars. For instance. In the Gathas a short a is frequently lengthened. We find na instead of na, 'no.' The same occurs in the Sanskrit of the Chinese Buddhists. (See Julien, 'Methode,' p. 18; p. 21.) We find there also vistara instead of vistara, &c. In the dialect of the Gathas nouns ending in consonants, and therefore irregular, are transferred to the easier declension in a. The same process takes place in modern Greek and in the transition of Latin into Italian; it is, in fact, a general tendency of all languages which are carried on by the stream of living speech. Now this transition from one declension to another had taken place before the Chinese had appropriated the Sanskrit of the Buddhist books. The Sanskrit nabhas becomes nabha in the Gathas; locative nabhe, instead of nabhasi. If, therefore, we find in Chinese lo-che for the Sanskrit ra_g_as, dust, we may ascribe the change of r into l to the inability of the Chinese to pronounce or to write an r. We may admit that the Chinese alphabet offered nothing nearer to the sound of _g_a than tche; but the dropping of the final s has no excuse in Chinese, and finds its real explanation in the nature of the Gatha dialect. Thus the Chinese Fan-lan-mo does not represent the correct Sanskrit Brahman, but the vulgar form Brahma. The Chinese so-po for sarva, all, thomo for dharma, law, find no explanation in the dialect of the Gathas, but the suppression of the r before v and m, is of frequent occurrence in the inscriptions of A_s_oka. The omission of the initial s in words like sthana, place, sthavira, an elder, is likewise founded on the rules of Pali and Prakrit, and need not be placed to the account of the Chinese translators. In the inscription of Girnar sthavira is even reduced to thaira. The s of the nominative is frequently dropped in the dialect of the Gathas, or changed into o. Hence we might venture to doubt whether it is necessary to give to the character 1780 of M. Julien's list, which generally has the value of ta, a second value sta. This s is only wanted to supply the final s of kas, the interrogative pronoun, in such a sentence as kas tadgu_n_a_h_? what is the use of this? Now here we are inclined to believe that the final s of kas had long disappeared in the popular language of India, before the Chinese came to listen to the strange sounds and doctrines of the disciples of Buddha. They probably heard ka tadgu_n_a, or ka taggu_n_a, and this they represented as best they could by the Chinese kia-to-kieou-na.

With these few suggestions we leave the work of M. Stanislas Julien. It is in reality a work done once for all--one huge stone and stumbling-block effectually rolled away which for years had barred the approach to some most valuable documents of the history of the East. Now that the way is clear, let us hope that others will follow, and that we shall soon have complete and correct translations of the travels of Fahian and other Buddhist pilgrims whose works are like so many Murray's 'Handbooks of India,' giving us an insight into the social, political, and religious state of that country at a time when we look in vain for any other historical documents.

_March, 1861._

XIII.

THE WORKS OF CONFUCIUS.[92]

In reviewing the works of missionaries, we have repeatedly dwelt on the opportunities of scientific usefulness which are open to the messengers of the Gospel in every part of the world. We are not afraid of the common objection that missionaries ought to devote their whole time and powers to the one purpose for which they are sent out and paid by our societies. Missionaries cannot always be engaged in teaching, preaching, converting, and baptising the heathen. A missionary, like every other human creature, ought to have his leisure hours; and if those leisure hours are devoted to scientific pursuits, to the study of the languages or the literature of the people among whom he lives, to a careful description of the scenery and antiquities of the country, the manners, laws, and customs of its inhabitants, their legends, their national poetry, or popular stories, or, again, to the cultivation of any branch of natural science, he may rest assured that he is not neglecting the sacred trust which he accepted, but is only bracing and invigorating his mind, and keeping it from that stagnation which is the inevitable result of a too monotonous employment. The staff of missionaries which is spread over the whole globe supplies the most perfect machinery that could be devised for the collection of all kinds of scientific knowledge. They ought to be the pioneers of science. They should not only take out--they should also bring something home; and there is nothing more likely to increase and strengthen the support on which our missionary societies depend, nothing more sure to raise the intellectual standard of the men selected for missionary labour, than a formal recognition of this additional duty. There may be exceptional cases where missionaries are wanted for constant toil among natives ready to be instructed, and anxious to be received as members of a Christian community. But, as a general rule, the missionary abroad has more leisure than a clergyman at home, and time sits heavy on the hands of many whose congregations consist of no more than ten or twenty souls. It is hardly necessary to argue this point, when we can appeal to so many facts. The most successful missionaries have been exactly those whose names are remembered with gratitude, not only by the natives among whom they laboured, but also by the savants of Europe; and the labours of the Jesuit missionaries in India and China, of the Baptist missionaries at Serampore, of Gogerly and Spence Hardy in Ceylon, of Caldwell in Tinnevelly, of Wilson in Bombay, of Moffat, Krapf, and last, but not least, of Livingstone, will live not only in the journals of our academies, but likewise in the annals of the missionary Church.

[Footnote 92: 'The Chinese Classics;' with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes. By James Legge, D.D., of the London Missionary Society. Hong Kong, 1861.]

The first volume of an edition of the Chinese Classics, which we have just received from the Rev. Dr. J. Legge, of the London Missionary Society, is a new proof of what can be achieved by missionaries, if encouraged to devote part of their time and attention to scientific and literary pursuits. We do not care to inquire whether Dr. Legge has been successful as a missionary. Even if he had not converted a single Chinese, he would, after completing the work which he has just begun, have rendered most important aid to the introduction of Christianity into China. He arrived in the East towards the end of 1839, having received only a few months' instruction in Chinese from Professor Kidd in London. Being stationed at Malacca, it seemed to him then--and he adds 'that the experience of twenty-one years has given its sanction to the correctness of the judgment'--that he could not consider himself qualified for the duties of his position until he had thoroughly mastered the classical books of the Chinese, and investigated for himself the whole field of thought through which the sages of China had ranged, and in which were to be found the foundations of the moral, social, and political life of the people. He was not able to pursue his studies without interruption, and it was only after some years, when the charge of the Anglo-Chinese College had devolved upon him, that he could procure the books necessary to facilitate his progress. After sixteen years of assiduous study, Dr. Legge had explored the principal works of Chinese literature; and he then felt that he could render the course of reading through which he had passed more easy to those who were to follow after him, by publishing, on the model of our editions of the Greek and Roman Classics, a critical text of the Classics of China, together with a translation and explanatory notes. His materials were ready, but there was the difficulty of finding the funds necessary for so costly an undertaking. Scarcely, however, had Dr. Legge's wants become known among the British and other foreign merchants in China, than one of them, Mr. Joseph Jardine, sent for the Doctor, and said to him, 'I know the liberality of the merchants in China, and that many of them would readily give their help to such an undertaking; but you need not have the trouble of canvassing the community. If you are prepared to undertake the toil of the publication, I will bear the expense of it. We make our money in China, and we should be glad to assist in whatever promises to be a benefit to it.' The result of this combination of disinterested devotion on the part of the author, and enlightened liberality on the part of his patron, lies now before us in a splendid volume of text, translation, and commentary, which, if the life of the editor is spared (and the sudden death of Mr. Jardine from the effects of the climate is a warning how busily death is at work among the European settlers in those regions), will be followed by at least six other volumes.

The edition is to comprise the books now recognised as of highest authority by the Chinese themselves. These are the five King's and the four Shoo's. King means the warp threads of a web, and its application to literary compositions rests on the same metaphor as the Latin word textus, and the Sanskrit Sutra, meaning a yarn, and a book. Shoo simply means writings. The five King's are, 1. the Yih, or the Book of Changes; 2. the Shoo, or the Book of History; 3. the She, or the Book of Poetry; 4. the Le Ke, or Record of Rites; and 5. the Chun Tsew, or Spring and Autumn; a chronicle extending from 721 to 480 B.C. The four Shoo's consist of, 1. the Lun Yu, or Digested Conversations between Confucius and his disciples; 2. Ta Heo, or Great Learning, commonly attributed to one of his disciples; 3. the Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the Mean, ascribed to the grandson of Confucius; 4. of the works of Mencius, who died 288 B.C.

The authorship of the five King's is loosely attributed to Confucius; but it is only the fifth, or 'the Spring and Autumn,' which can be claimed as the work of the philosopher. The Yih, the Shoo, and the She King were not composed, but only compiled by him, and much of the Le Ke is clearly from later hands. Confucius, though the founder of a religion and a reformer, was thoroughly conservative in his tendencies, and devotedly attached to the past. He calls himself a transmitter, not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients (p. 59). 'I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge,' he says, 'I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there' (p. 65). The most frequent themes of his discourses were the ancient songs, the history, and the rules of propriety established by ancient sages (p. 64). When one of his contemporaries wished to do away with the offering of a lamb as a meaningless formality, Confucius reproved him with the pithy sentence, 'You love the sheep, I love the ceremony.' There were four things, we are told, which Confucius taught--letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and truthfulness (p. 66). When speaking of himself, he said, 'At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubt. At fifty, I knew the decrees of heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right' (p. 10). Though this may sound like boasting, it is remarkable how seldom Confucius himself claims any superiority above his fellow-creatures. He offers his advice to those who are willing to listen, but he never speaks dogmatically; he never attempts to tyrannize over the minds or hearts of his friends. If we read his biography, we can hardly understand how a man whose life was devoted to such tranquil pursuits, and whose death scarcely produced a ripple on the smooth and silent surface of the Eastern world, could have left the impress of his mind on millions and millions of human beings--an impress which even now, after 2339 years, is clearly discernible in the national character of the largest empire of the world. Confucius died in 478 B.C., complaining that of all the princes of the empire there was not one who would adopt his principles and obey his lessons. After two generations, however, his name had risen to be a power--the rallying point of a vast movement of national and religious regeneration. His grandson speaks of him as the ideal of a sage, as the sage is the ideal of humanity at large. Though Tze-tze claims no divine honour for his grandsire, he exalts his wisdom and virtue beyond the limits of human nature. This is a specimen of the language which he applies to Confucius:

'He may be compared to heaven and earth in their supporting and containing, their overshadowing and curtaining all things; he may be compared to the four seasons in their alternating progress, and to the sun and moon in their successive shining.... Quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intellect and all-embracing knowledge, he was fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, he was fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, he was fitted to maintain a firm hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean, and correct, he was fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, he was fitted to exercise discrimination.... All-embracing and vast, he was like heaven; deep and active as a fountain, he was like the abyss.... Therefore his fame overspreads the Middle Kingdom and extends to all barbarous tribes. Wherever ships and carriages reach, wherever the strength of man penetrates, wherever the heavens overshadow and the earth sustains, wherever the sun and moon shine, wherever frost and dews fall, all who have blood and breath unfeignedly honour and love him. Hence it is said--He is the equal of Heaven' (p. 53).

This is certainly very magnificent phraseology, but it will hardly convey any definite impression to the minds of those who are not acquainted with the life and teaching of the great Chinese sage. These may be studied now by all who can care for the history of human thought, in the excellent work of Dr. Legge. The first volume, just published, contains the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, or the First, Second, and Third Shoo's, and will, we hope, soon be followed by the other Chinese Classics.[93] We must here confine ourselves to giving a few of the sage's sayings, selected from thousands that are to be found in the Confucian Analects. Their interest is chiefly historical, as throwing light on the character of one of the most remarkable men in the history of the human race. But there is besides this a charm in the simple enunciation of simple truths; and such is the fear of truism in our modern writers that we must go to distant times and distant countries if we wish to listen to that simple Solomonic wisdom which is better than the merchandize of silver and the gain thereof than fine gold.

[Footnote 93: Dr. Legge has since published: vol. ii. containing the works of Mencius; vol. iii. part 1. containing the first part of the Shoo King; vol. iii. part 2. containing the fifth part of the Shoo King.]

Confucius shows his tolerant spirit when he says, 'The superior man is catholic, and no partisan. The mean man is a partisan, and not catholic' (p. 14).

There is honest manliness in his saying, 'To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage' (p. 18).

His definition of knowledge, though less profound than that of Socrates, is nevertheless full of good sense:

'The Master said, "Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge"' (p. 15).

Nor was Confucius unacquainted with the secrets of the heart: 'It is only the truly virtuous man,' he says in one place, 'who can love or who can hate others' (p. 30). In another place he expresses his belief in the irresistible charm of virtue: 'Virtue is not left to stand alone,' he says; 'he who practises it will have neighbours.' He bears witness to the hidden connection between intellectual and moral excellence: 'It is not easy,' he remarks, 'to find a man who has learned for three years without coming to be good' (p. 76). In his ethics, the golden rule of the Gospel, 'Do ye unto others as ye would that others should do to you,' is represented as almost unattainable. Thus we read, 'Tsze-Kung said, "What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men." The Master said, "Tsze, you have not attained to that,"' The Brahmans, too, had a distant perception of the same truth, which is expressed, for instance, in the Hitopadesa in the following words: 'Good people show mercy unto all beings, considering how like they are to themselves.' On subjects which transcend the limits of human understanding, Confucius is less explicit; but his very reticence is remarkable, when we consider the recklessness with which Oriental philosophers launch into the depths of religious metaphysics. Thus we read (p. 107):

'Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master said, "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?"

Ke Loo added, "I venture to ask about death." He was answered, "While you do not know life, how can you know about death?"'

And again (p. 190):

'The Master said, "I would prefer not speaking."

Tsze-Kung said, "If you, Master, do not speak, what shall we, your disciples, have to record?"

The Master said, "Does Heaven speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced; but does Heaven say anything?"'

_November, 1861._

XIV.

POPOL VUH.

A book called 'Popol Vuh,'[94] and pretending to be the original text of the sacred writings of the Indians of Central America, will be received by most people with a sceptical smile. The Aztec children who were shown all over Europe as descendants of a race to whom, before the Spanish conquest, divine honours were paid by the natives of Mexico, and who turned out to be unfortunate creatures that had been tampered with by heartless speculators, are still fresh in the memory of most people; and the 'Livre des Sauvages,'[95] lately published by the Abbe Domenech, under the auspices of Count Walewsky, has somewhat lowered the dignity of American studies in general. Still, those who laugh at the 'Manuscrit Pictographique Americain' discovered by the French Abbe in the library of the French Arsenal, and edited by him with so much care as a precious relic of the old Red-skins of North America, ought not to forget that there would be nothing at all surprising in the existence of such a MS., containing genuine pictographic writing of the Red Indians. The German critic of Abbe Domenech, M. Petzholdt,[96] assumes much too triumphant an air in announcing his discovery that the 'Manuscrit Pictographique' was the work of a German boy in the backwoods of America. He ought to have acknowledged that the Abbe himself had pointed out the German scrawls on some of the pages of his MS.; that he had read the names of Anna and Maria; and that he never claimed any great antiquity for the book in question. Indeed, though M. Petzholdt tells us very confidently that the whole book is the work of a naughty, nasty, and profane little boy, the son of German settlers in the backwoods of America, we doubt whether anybody who takes the trouble to look through all the pages will consider this view as at all satisfactory, or even as more probable than that of the French Abbe. We know what boys are capable of in pictographic art from the occasional defacements of our walls and railings; but we still feel a little sceptical when M. Petzholdt assures us that there is nothing extraordinary in a boy filling a whole volume with these elaborate scrawls. If M. Petzholdt had taken the trouble to look at some of the barbarous hieroglyphics that have been collected in North America, he would have understood more readily how the Abbe Domenech, who had spent many years among the Red Indians, and had himself copied several of their inscriptions, should have taken the pages preserved in the library of the Arsenal at Paris as genuine specimens of American pictography. There is a certain similarity between these scrawls and the figures scratched on rocks, tombstones, and trees by the wandering tribes of North America; and though we should be very sorry to endorse the opinion of the enthusiastic Abbe, or to start any conjecture of our own as to the real authorship of the 'Livre des Sauvages,' we cannot but think that M. Petzholdt would have written less confidently, and certainly less scornfully, if he had been more familiar than he seems to be with the little that is known of the picture-writing of the Indian tribes. As a preliminary to the question of the authenticity of the 'Popol Vuh,' a few words on the pictorial literature of the Red Indians of North America will not be considered out of place. The 'Popol Vuh' is not indeed a 'Livre des Sauvages,' but a literary composition in the true sense of the word. It contains the mythology and history of the civilised races of Central America, and comes before us with credentials that will bear the test of critical inquiry. But we shall be better able to appreciate the higher achievements of the South after we have examined, however cursorily, the rude beginnings in literature among the savage races of the North.

[Footnote 94: 'Popol Vuh:' le Livre Sacre et les Mythes de l'Antiquite Americaine, avec les Livres Heroiques et Historiques des Quiches. Par l'Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg. Paris: Durand, 1861.]

[Footnote 95: 'Manuscrit Pictographique Americain,' precede d'une Notice sur l'Ideographie des Peaux-Rouges. Par l'Abbe Em. Domenech. Ouvrage publie sous les auspices de M. le Ministre d'Etat et de la Maison de l'Empereur. Paris, 1860.]

[Footnote 96: 'Das Buch der Wilden im Lichte Franzoesischer Civilisation.' Mit Proben aus dem in Paris als 'Manuscrit Pictographique Americain,' veroeffentlichten Schmierbuche eines Deutsch-Amerikanischen Hinterwaelder Jungen. Von J. Petzholdt. Dresden, 1861.]

Colden, in his 'History of the Five Nations,' informs us that when, in 1696, the Count de Frontenac marched a well-appointed army into the Iroquois country, with artillery and all other means of regular military offence, he found, on the banks of the Onondaga, now called Oswego River, a tree, on the trunk of which the Indians had depicted the French army, and deposited two bundles of cut rushes at its foot, consisting of 1434 pieces; an act of symbolical defiance on their part, which was intended to warn their Gallic invaders that they would have to encounter this number of warriors.

This warlike message is a specimen of Indian picture-writing. It belongs to the lowest stage of graphic representation, and hardly differs from the primitive way in which the Persian ambassadors communicated with the Greeks, or the Romans with the Carthaginians. Instead of the lance and the staff of peace between which the Carthaginians were asked to choose, the Red Indians would have sent an arrow and a pipe, and the message would have been equally understood. This, though not yet _peindre la parole_, is nevertheless a first attempt at _parler aux yeux_. It is a first beginning which may lead to something more perfect in the end. We find similar attempts at pictorial communication among other savage tribes, and they seem to answer every purpose. In Freycinet and Arago's 'Voyage to the Eastern Ocean' we are told of a native of the Carolina Islands, a Tamor of Sathoual, who wished to avail himself of the presence of a ship to send to a trader at Botta, M. Martinez, some shells which he had promised to collect in exchange for a few axes and some other articles. This he expressed to the captain, who gave him a piece of paper to make the drawing, and satisfactorily executed the commission. The figure of a man at the top denoted the ship's captain, who by his outstretched hands represented his office as a messenger between the parties. The rays or ornaments on his head denote rank or authority. The vine beneath him is a type of friendship. In the left column are depicted the number and kinds of shells sent; in the right column the things wished for in exchange--namely, seven fish-hooks, three large and four small, two axes, and two pieces of iron.

The inscriptions which are found on the Indian graveboards mark a step in advance. Every warrior has his crest, which is called his totem, and is painted on his tombstone. A celebrated war-chief, the Adjetatig of Wabojeeg, died on Lake Superior, about 1793. He was of the clan of the Addik, or American reindeer. This fact is symbolized by the figure of the deer. The reversed position denotes death. His own personal name, which was White Fisher, is not noticed. But there are seven transverse strokes on the left, and these have a meaning--namely, that he had led seven war parties. Then there are three perpendicular lines below his crest, and these again are readily understood by every Indian. They represent the wounds received in battle. The figure of a moose's head is said to relate to a desperate conflict with an enraged animal of this kind; and the symbols of the arrow and the pipe are drawn to indicate the chief's influence in war and peace.

There is another graveboard of the ruling chief of Sandy Lake on the Upper Mississippi. Here the reversed bird denotes his family name or clan, the Crane. Four transverse lines above it denote that he had killed four of his enemies in battle. An analogous custom is mentioned by Aristotle ('Politica,' vii. 2, p. 220, ed. Goettling). Speaking of the Iberians, he states that they placed as many obelisks round the grave of a warrior as he had killed enemies in battle.

But the Indians went further; and though they never arrived at the perfection of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, they had a number of symbolic emblems which were perfectly understood by all their tribes. Eating is represented by a man's hand lifted to his mouth. Power over man is symbolized by a line drawn in the figure from the mouth to the heart; power in general by a head with two horns. A circle drawn around the body at the abdomen denotes full means of subsistence. A boy drawn with waved lines from each ear and lines leading to the heart represents a pupil. A figure with a plant as head, and two wings, denotes a doctor skilled in medicine, and endowed with the power of ubiquity. A tree with human legs, a herbalist or professor of botany. Night is represented by a finely crossed or barred sun, or a circle with human legs. Rain is figured by a dot or semicircle filled with water and placed on the head. The heaven with three disks of the sun is understood to mean three days' journey, and a landing after a voyage is represented by a tortoise. Short sentences, too, can be pictured in this manner. A prescription ordering abstinence from food for two, and rest for four, days is written by drawing a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs. We are told even of war-songs and love-songs composed in this primitive alphabet; but it would seem as if, in these cases, the reader required even greater poetical imagination than the writer. There is one war-song consisting of four pictures--

1. The sun rising.

2. A figure pointing with one hand to the earth and the other extended to the sky.

3. The moon with two human legs.

4. A figure personifying the Eastern woman, i. e. the evening star.

These four symbols are said to convey to the Indian the following meaning:

I am rising to seek the war path; The earth and the sky are before me; I walk by day and by night; And the evening star is my guide.

The following is a specimen of a love-song:

1. Figure representing a god (monedo) endowed with magic power.

2. Figure beating the drum and singing; lines from his mouth.

3. Figure surrounded by a secret lodge.

4. Two bodies joined with one continuous arm.

5. A woman on an island.

6. A woman asleep; lines from his ear towards her.

7. A red heart in a circle.

This poem is intended to express these sentiments:

1. It is my form and person that make me great--

2. Hear the voice of my song, it is my voice.

3. I shield myself with secret coverings.

4. All your thoughts are known to me, blush!

5. I could draw you hence were you ever so far--

6. Though you were on the other hemisphere--

7. I speak to your naked heart.

All we can say is, that if the Indians can read this writing, they are greater adepts in the mysteries of love than the judges of the old _Cours d'amour_. But it is much more likely that these war-songs and love-songs are known to the people beforehand, and that their writings are only meant to revive what exists in the memory of the reader. It is a kind of mnemonic writing, and it has been used by missionaries for similar purposes, and with considerable success. Thus, in a translation of the Bible in the Massachusetts language by Eliot, the verses from 25 to 32 in the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs, are expressed by 'an ant, a coney, a locust, a spider, a river (symbol of motion), a lion, a greyhound, a he-goat and king, a man foolishly lifting himself to take hold of the heavens.' No doubt these symbols would help the reader to remember the proper order of the verses, but they would be perfectly useless without a commentary or without a previous knowledge of the text.

We are told that the famous Testera, brother of the chamberlain of Francois I, who came to America eight or nine years after the taking of Mexico, finding it impossible to learn the language of the natives, taught them the Bible history and the principal doctrines of the Christian religion, by means of pictures, and that these diagrams produced a greater effect on the minds of the people, who were accustomed to this style of representation, than all other means employed by the missionaries. But here again, unless these pictures were explained by interpreters, they could by themselves convey no meaning to the gazing crowds of the natives. The fullest information on this subject is to be found in a work by T. Baptiste, 'Hieroglyphes de la conversion, ou par des estampes et des figures on apprend aux naturels a desirer le ciel.'

There is no evidence to show that the Indians of the North ever advanced beyond the rude attempts which we have thus described, and of which numerous specimens may be found in the voluminous work of Schoolcraft, published by authority of Congress, 'Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States,' Philadelphia, 1851-1855. There is no trace of anything like literature among the wandering tribes of the North, and until a real 'Livre des Sauvages' turns up to fill this gap, they must continue to be classed among the illiterate races.[97]

[Footnote 97: 'Manuscrit Pictographique,' pp. 26, 29.]

It is very different if we turn our eyes to the people of Central and South America, to the races who formed the population of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, when conquered by the Spaniards. The Mexican hieroglyphics published by Lord Kingsborough are not to be placed in the same category with the totems and the pictorial scratches of the Red-skins. They are, first of all, of a much more artistic character, more conventional in their structure, and hence more definite in their meaning. They are coloured, written on paper, and in many respects quite on a level with the hieroglyphic inscriptions and hieratic papyri of Egypt. Even the conception of speaking to the ear through the eye, of expressing sound by means of outlines, was familiar to the Mexicans, though they seem to have applied their phonetic signs to the writing of the names of places and persons only. The principal object, indeed, of the Mexican hieroglyphic manuscripts was not to convey new information, but rather to remind the reader by means of mnemonic artifices of what he had learnt beforehand. This is acknowledged by the best authorities, by men who knew the Indians shortly after their first intercourse with Europeans, and whom we may safely trust in what they tell us of the oral literature and hieroglyphic writings of the natives. Acosta, in his 'Historia natural y moral,' vi. 7, tells us that the Indians were still in the habit of reciting from memory the addresses and speeches of their ancient orators, and numerous songs composed by their national poets. As it was impossible to acquire these by means of hieroglyphics or written characters such as were used by the Mexicans, care was taken that those speeches and poems should be learnt by heart. There were colleges and schools for that purpose, where these and other things were taught to the young by the aged in whose memory they seemed to be engraved. The young men who were brought up to be orators themselves had to learn the ancient compositions word by word; and when the Spaniards came and taught them to read and write the Spanish language, the Indians soon began to write for themselves, a fact attested by many eye-witnesses.

Las Casas, the devoted friend of the Indians, writes as follows:

'It ought to be known that in all the republics of this country, in the kingdoms of New Spain and elsewhere, there was amongst other professions, that of the chroniclers and historians. They possessed a knowledge of the earliest times, and of all things concerning religion, the gods, and their worship. They knew the founders of cities, and the early history of their kings and kingdoms. They knew the modes of election and the right of succession; they could tell the number and characters of their ancient kings, their works, and memorable achievements whether good or bad, and whether they had governed well or ill. They knew the men renowned for virtue and heroism in former days, what wars they had waged, and how they had distinguished themselves; who had been the earliest settlers, what had been their ancient customs, their triumphs and defeats. They knew, in fact, whatever belonged to history; and were able to give an account of all the events of the past.... These chroniclers had likewise to calculate the days, months, and years; and though they had no writing like our own, they had their symbols and characters through which they understood everything; they had their great books, which were composed with such ingenuity and art that our alphabet was really of no great assistance to them.... Our priests have seen those books, and I myself have seen them likewise, though many were burnt at the instigation of the monks, who were afraid that they might impede the work of conversion. Sometimes when the Indians who had been converted had forgotten certain words, or particular points of the Christian doctrine, they began--as they were unable to read our books--to write very ingeniously with their own symbols and characters, drawing the figures which corresponded either to the ideas or to the sounds of our words. I have myself seen a large portion of the Christian doctrine written in figures and images, which they read as we read the characters of a letter; and this is a very extraordinary proof of their genius.... There never was a lack of those chroniclers. It was a profession which passed from father to son, highly respected in the whole republic; each historian instructed two or three of his relatives. He made them practise constantly, and they had recourse to him whenever a doubt arose on a point of history.... But not these young historians only went to consult him; kings, princes, and priests came to ask his advice. Whenever there was a doubt as to ceremonies, precepts of religion, religious festivals, or anything of importance in the history of the ancient kingdoms, every one went to the chroniclers to ask for information.'

In spite of the religious zeal of Dominican and Franciscan friars, a few of these hieroglyphic MSS. escaped the flames, and may now be seen in some of our public libraries, as curious relics of a nearly extinct and forgotten literature. The first collection of these MSS. and other American antiquities was due to the zeal of the Milanese antiquarian, Boturini, who had been sent by the Pope in 1736 to regulate some ecclesiastical matters, and who devoted the eight years of his stay in the New World to rescuing whatever could be rescued from the scattered ruins of ancient America. Before, however, he could bring these treasures safe to Europe, he was despoiled of his valuables by the Spanish Viceroy; and when at last he made his escape with the remnants of his collection, he was taken prisoner by an English cruiser, and lost everything. The collection, which remained at Mexico, became the subject of several lawsuits, and after passing through the hands of Veytia and Gama, who both added to it considerably, it was sold at last by public auction. Humboldt, who was at that time passing through Mexico, acquired some of the MSS., which he gave to the Royal Museum at Berlin. Others found their way into private hands, and after many vicissitudes they have mostly been secured by the public libraries or private collectors of Europe. The most valuable part of that unfortunate shipwreck is now in the hands of M. Aubin, who was sent to Mexico in 1830 by the French Government, and who devoted nearly twenty years to the same work which Boturini had commenced a hundred years before. He either bought the dispersed fragments of the collections of Boturini, Gama, and Pichardo, or procured accurate copies; and he has brought to Europe, what is, if not the most complete, at least the most valuable and most judiciously arranged collection of American antiquities. We likewise owe to M. Aubin the first accurate knowledge of the real nature of the ancient Mexican writing; and we look forward with confident hope to his still achieving in his own field as great a triumph as that of Champollion, the decipherer of the hieroglyphics of Egypt.

One of the most important helps towards the deciphering of the hieroglyphic MSS. of the Americans is to be found in certain books which, soon after the conquest of Mexico, were written down by natives who had learnt the art of alphabetic writing from their conquerors, the Spaniards. Ixtlilxochitl, descended from the royal family of Tetzcuco, and employed as interpreter by the Spanish Government, wrote the history of his own country from the earliest time to the arrival of Cortez. In writing this history he followed the hieroglyphic paintings as they had been explained to him by the old chroniclers. Some of these very paintings, which formed the text-book of the Mexican historian, have been recovered by M. Aubin; and as they helped the historian in writing his history, that history now helps the scholar in deciphering their meaning. It is with the study of works like that of Ixtlilxochitl that American philology ought to begin. They are to the student of American antiquities what Manetho is to the student of Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Berosus to the decipherer of the cuneiform inscriptions. They are written in dialects not more than three hundred years old, and still spoken by large numbers of natives, with such modifications as three centuries are certain to produce. They give us whatever was known of history, mythology, and religion among the people whom the Spaniards found in Central and South America in the possession of most of the advantages of a long-established civilisation. Though we must not expect to find in them what we are accustomed to call history, they are nevertheless of great historical interest, as supplying the vague outlines of a distant past, filled with migrations, wars, dynasties, and revolutions, such as were cherished in the memory of the Greeks at the time of Solon, and believed in by the Romans at the time of Cato. They teach us that the New World which was opened to Europe a few centuries ago, was in its own eyes an old world, not so different in character and feelings from ourselves as we are apt to imagine when we speak of the Red-skins of America, or when we read the accounts of the Spanish conquerors, who denied that the natives of America possessed human souls, in order to establish their own right of treating them like wild beasts.

The 'Popol Vuh,' or the sacred book of the people of Guatemala, of which the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg has just published the original text, together with a literal French translation, holds a very prominent rank among the works composed by natives in their own native dialects, and written down by them with the letters of the Roman alphabet. There are but two works that can be compared to it in their importance to the student of American antiquities and American languages, namely, the 'Codex Chimalpopoca' in Nahuatl, the ancient written language of Mexico, and the 'Codex Cakchiquel' in the dialect of Guatemala. These, together with the work published by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg under the title of 'Popol Vuh,' must form the starting-point of all critical inquiries into the antiquities of the American people.

The first point which has to be determined with regard to books of this kind is whether they are genuine or not: whether they are what they pretend to be--compositions about three centuries old, founded on the oral traditions and the pictographic documents of the ancient inhabitants of America, and written in the dialects as spoken at the time of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro. What the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg has to say on this point amounts to this:--The manuscript was first discovered by Father Francisco Ximenes towards the end of the seventeenth century. He was cure of Santo-Tomas Chichicastenango, situated about three leagues south of Santa-Cruz del Quiche, and twenty-two leagues north-east of Guatemala. He was well acquainted with the languages of the natives of Guatemala, and has left a dictionary of their three principal dialects, his 'Tesoro de las Lenguas Quiche, Cakchiquel y Tzutohil.' This work, which has never been printed, fills two volumes, the second of which contains the copy of the MS. discovered by Ximenes. Ximenes likewise wrote a history of the province of the preachers of San-Vincente de Chiapas y Guatemala, in four volumes. Of this he left two copies. But three volumes only were still in existence when the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg visited Guatemala, and they are said to contain valuable information on the history and traditions of the country. The first volume contains the Spanish translation of the manuscript which occupies us at present. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg copied that translation in 1855. About the same time a German traveller, Dr. Scherzer, happened to be at Guatemala, and had copies made of the works of Ximenes. These were published at Vienna, in 1856.[98] The French Abbe, however, was not satisfied with a mere reprint of the text and its Spanish translation by Ximenes, a translation which he qualifies as untrustworthy and frequently unintelligible. During his travels in America he acquired a practical knowledge of several of the native dialects, particularly of the Quiche, which is still spoken in various dialects by about six hundred thousand people. As a priest he was in daily intercourse with these people; and it was while residing among them and able to consult them like living dictionaries, that, with the help of the MSS. of Ximenes, he undertook his own translation of the ancient chronicles of the Quiches. From the time of the discovery of Ximenes, therefore, to the time of the publication of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, all seems clear and satisfactory. But there is still a century to be accounted for, from the end of the sixteenth century, when the original is supposed to have been written, to the end of the seventeenth, when it was first discovered by Ximenes at Chichicastenango.

[Footnote 98: Mr. A. Helps was the first to point out the importance of this work in his excellent 'History of the Spanish Conquest in America.']

These years are not bridged over. We may appeal, however, to the authority of the MS. itself, which carries the royal dynasties down to the Spanish Conquest, and ends with the names of the two princes, Don Juan de Rojas and Don Juan Cortes, the sons of Tecum and Tepepul. These princes, though entirely subject to the Spaniards, were allowed to retain the insignia of royalty to the year 1558, and it is shortly after their time that the MS. is supposed to have been written. The author himself says in the beginning that he wrote 'after the word of God (chabal Dios) had been preached, in the midst of Christianity; and that he did so because people could no longer see the 'Popol Vuh,' wherein it was clearly shown that they came from the other side of the sea, the account of our living in the land of shadow, and how we saw light and life.' There is no attempt at claiming for his work any extravagant age or mysterious authority. It is acknowledged to have been written when the Castilians were the rulers of the land; when bishops were preaching the word of Dios, the new God; when the ancient traditions of the people were gradually dying out. Even the title of 'Popol Vuh,' which the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg has given to this work, is not claimed for it by its author. He says that he wrote when the 'Popol Vuh' was no longer to be seen. Now 'Popol Vuh' means the book of the people, and referred to the traditional literature in which all that was known about the early history of the nation, their religion and ceremonies, was handed down from age to age.

It is to be regretted that the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg should have sanctioned the application of this name to the Quiche MS. discovered by Father Ximenes, and that he should apparently have translated it by 'Livre sacre' instead of 'Livre national,' or 'Libro del comun,' as proposed by Ximenes. Such small inaccuracies are sure to produce great confusion. Nothing but a desire to have a fine sounding title could have led the editor to commit this mistake, for he himself confesses that the work published by him has no right to the title 'Popol Vuh,' and that 'Popol Vuh' does not mean 'Livre sacre.' Nor is there any more reason to suppose, with the learned Abbe, that the first two books of the Quiche MS. contain an almost literal transcript of the 'Popol Vuh,' or that the 'Popol Vuh; was the original of the 'Teo-Amoxtli,' or the sacred book of the Toltecs. All we know is, that the author wrote his anonymous work because the 'Popol Vuh'--the national book, or the national tradition--was dying out, and that he comprehended in the first two sections the ancient traditions common to the whole race, while he devoted the last two to the historical annals of the Quiches, the ruling nation at the time of the Conquest in what is now the republic of Guatemala. If we look at the MS. in this light, there is nothing at all suspicious in its character and its contents. The author wished to save from destruction the stories which he had heard as a child of his gods and his ancestors. Though the general outline of these stories may have been preserved partly in the schools, partly in the pictographic MSS., the Spanish Conquest had thrown everything into confusion, and the writer had probably to depend chiefly on his own recollections. To extract consecutive history from these recollections, is simply impossible. All is vague, contradictory, miraculous, absurd. Consecutive history is altogether a modern idea, of which few only of the ancient nations had any conception. If we had the exact words of the 'Popol Vuh,' we should probably find no more history there than we find in the Quiche MS. as it now stands. Now and then, it is true, one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again. It may be difficult to confess that with all the traditions of the early migrations of Cecrops and Danaus into Greece, with the Homeric poems of the Trojan war, and the genealogies of the ancient dynasties of Greece, we know nothing of Greek history before the Olympiads, and very little even then. Yet the true historian does not allow himself to indulge in any illusions on this subject, and he shuts his eyes even to the most plausible reconstructions.

The same applies with a force increased a hundredfold to the ancient history of the aboriginal races of America, and the sooner this is acknowledged, the better for the credit of American scholars. Even the traditions of the migrations of the Chichimecs, Colhuas, and Nahuas, which form the staple of all American antiquarians, are no better than the Greek traditions about Pelasgians, AEolians, and Ionians; and it would be a mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again sooner or later by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis.

But if we do not find history in the stories of the ancient races of Guatemala, we do find materials for studying their character, for analysing their religion and mythology, for comparing their principles of morality, their views of virtue, beauty, and heroism, to those of other races of mankind. This is the charm, the real and lasting charm, of such works as that presented to us for the first time in a trustworthy translation by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg. Unfortunately there is one circumstance which may destroy even this charm. It is just possible that the writers of this and other American MSS. may have felt more or less consciously the influence of European and Christian ideas, and if so, we have no sufficient guarantee that the stories they tell represent to us the American mind in its pristine and genuine form. There are some coincidences between the Old Testament and the Quiche MS. which are certainly startling. Yet even if a Christian influence has to be admitted, much remains in these American traditions which is so different from anything else in the national literatures of other countries, that we may safely treat it as the genuine growth of the intellectual soil of America. We shall give, in conclusion, some extracts to bear out our remarks; but we ought not to part with Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg without expressing to him our gratitude for his excellent work, and without adding a hope that he may be able to realise his plan of publishing a 'Collection of documents written in the indigenous languages, to assist the student of the history and philology of ancient America,' a collection of which the work now published is to form the first volume.

_Extracts from the 'Popol Vuh.'_

The Quiche MS. begins with an account of the creation. If we read it in the literal translation of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, with all the uncouth names of divine and other beings that have to act their parts in it, it does not leave any very clear impression on our minds. Yet after reading it again and again, some salient features stand out more distinctly, and make us feel that there was a groundwork of noble conceptions which has been covered and distorted by an aftergrowth of fantastic nonsense. We shall do best for the present to leave out all proper names, which only bewilder the memory and which convey no distinct meaning even to the scholar. It will require long-continued research before it can be determined whether the names so profusely applied to the Deity were intended as the names of so many distinct personalities, or as the names of the various manifestations of one and the same Power. At all events, they are of no importance to us till we can connect more distinct ideas than it is possible to gather from the materials now at hand, with such inharmonious sounds as Tzakol, Bitol, Alom, Qaholom, Hun-Ahpu-Vuch, Gucumatz, Quax-Cho, &c. Their supposed meanings are in some cases very appropriate, such as the Creator, the Fashioner, the Begetter, the Vivifier, the Ruler, the Lord of the green planisphere, the Lord of the azure surface, the Heart of heaven; in other cases we cannot fathom the original intention of names such as the feathered serpent, the white boar, _le tireur de sarbacane au sarigue_, and others; and they therefore sound to our ears simply absurd. Well, the Quiches believed that there was a time when all that exists in heaven and earth was made. All was then in suspense, all was calm and silent; all was immovable, all peaceful, and the vast space of the heavens was empty. There was no man, no animal, no shore, no trees; heaven alone existed. The face of the earth was not to be seen; there was only the still expanse of the sea and the heaven above. Divine Beings were on the waters like a growing light. Their voice was heard as they meditated and consulted, and when the dawn rose, man appeared. Then the waters were commanded to retire, the earth was established that she might bear fruit and that the light of day might shine on heaven and earth.

'For, they said, we shall receive neither glory nor honour from all we have created until there is a human being--a being endowed with reason. "Earth," they said, and in a moment the earth was formed. Like a vapour it rose into being, mountains appeared from the waters like lobsters, and the great mountains were made. Thus was the creation of the earth, when it was fashioned by those who are the Heart of heaven, the Heart of the earth; for thus were they called who first gave fertility to them, heaven and earth being still inert and suspended in the midst of the waters.'

Then follows the creation of the brute world, and the disappointment of the gods when they command the animals to tell their names and to honour those who had created them. Then the gods said to the animals:

'You will be changed, because you cannot speak. We have changed your speech. You shall have your food and your dens in the woods and crags; for our glory is not perfect, and you do not invoke us. There will be beings still that can salute us; we shall make them capable of obeying. Do your task; as to your flesh, it will be broken by the tooth.'

Then follows the creation of man. His flesh was made of earth (_terre glaise_). But man was without cohesion or power, inert and aqueous; he could not turn his head, his sight was dim, and though he had the gift of speech, he had no intellect. He was soon consumed again in the water.

And the gods consulted a second time how to create beings that should adore them, and after some magic ceremonies, men were made of wood, and they multiplied. But they had no heart, no intellect, no recollection of their Creator; they did not lift up their heads to their Maker, and they withered away and were swallowed up by the waters.

Then follows a third creation, man being made of a tree called tzite, woman of the marrow of a reed called sibac. They, too, did neither think nor speak before him who had made them, and they were likewise swept away by the waters and destroyed. The whole nature--animals, trees, and stones--turned against men to revenge the wrongs they had suffered at their hands, and the only remnant of that early race is to be found in small monkeys which still live in the forests.

Then follows a story of a very different character, and which completely interrupts the progress of events. It has nothing to do with the creation, though it ends with two of its heroes being changed into sun and moon. It is a story very much like the fables of the Brahmans or the German Maehrchen. Some of the principal actors in it are clearly divine beings who have been brought down to the level of human nature, and who perform feats and tricks so strange and incredible that in reading them we imagine ourselves in the midst of the Arabian Nights. In the struggles of the two favourite heroes against the cruel princes of Xibalba, there may be reminiscences of historical events; but it would be perfectly hopeless to attempt to extricate these from the mass of fable by which they are surrounded. The chief interest of the American tale consists in the points of similarity which it exhibits with the tales of the Old World. We shall mention two only--the repeated resuscitation of the chief heroes, who, even when burnt and ground to powder and scattered on the water, are born again as fish and changed into men; and the introduction of animals endowed with reason and speech. As in the German tales, certain peculiarities in the appearance and natural habits of animals are frequently accounted for by events that happened 'once upon a time'--for instance, the stumpy tail of the bear, by his misfortune when he went out fishing on the ice--so we find in the American tales, 'that it was when the two principal heroes (Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque) had caught the rat and were going to strangle it over the fire, that _le rat commenca a porter une queue sans poil_. Thus, because a certain serpent swallowed a frog who was sent as a messenger, therefore _aujourd'hui encore les serpents engloutissent les crapauds_.'

The story, which well deserves the attention of those who are interested in the origin and spreading of popular tales, is carried on to the end of the second book, and it is only in the third that we hear once more of the creation of man.

Three attempts, as we saw, had been made and had failed. We now hear again that before the beginning of dawn, and before the sun and moon had risen, man had been made, and that nourishment was provided for him which was to supply his blood, namely, yellow and white maize. Four men are mentioned as the real ancestors of the human race, or rather of the race of the Quiches. They were neither begotten by the gods nor born of woman, but their creation was a wonder wrought by the Creator. They could reason and speak, their sight was unlimited, and they knew all things at once. When they had rendered thanks to their Creator for their existence, the gods were frightened and they breathed a cloud over the eyes of men that they might see a certain distance only, and not be like the gods themselves. Then while the four men were asleep, the gods gave them beautiful wives, and these became the mothers of all tribes, great and small. These tribes, both black and white, lived and spread in the East. They did not yet worship the gods, but only turned their faces up to heaven, hardly knowing what they were meant to do here below. Their features were sweet, so was their language, and their intellect was strong.

We now come to a most interesting passage, which is intended to explain the confusion of tongues. No nation, except the Jews, has dwelt much on the problem why there should be many languages instead of one. Grimm, in his 'Essay on the Origin of Language,' remarks: 'It may seem surprising that neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Indians attempted to propose or to solve the question as to the origin and the multiplicity of human speech. Holy Writ strove to solve at least one of these riddles, that of the multiplicity of languages, by means of the tower of Babel. I know only one other poor Esthonian legend which might be placed by the side of this biblical solution. "The old god," they say, "when men found their first seats too narrow, resolved to spread them over the whole earth, and to give to each nation its own language. For this purpose he placed a caldron of water on the fire, and commanded the different races to approach it in order, and to select for themselves the sounds which were uttered by the singing of the water in its confinement and torture.'"

Grimm might have added another legend which is current among the Thlinkithians, and was clearly framed in order to account for the existence of different languages. The Thlinkithians are one of the four principal races inhabiting Russian America. They are called Kaljush, Koljush, or Kolosh by the Russians, and inhabit the coast from about 60 deg. to 45 deg. N.L., reaching therefore across the Russian frontier as far as the Columbia River, and they likewise hold many of the neighbouring islands. Weniaminow estimates their number, both in the Russian and English colonies, at 20 to 25,000. They are evidently a decreasing race, and their legends, which seem to be numerous and full of original ideas, would well deserve the careful attention of American ethnologists. Wrangel suspected a relationship between them and the Aztecs of Mexico. These Thlinkithians believe in a general flood or deluge, and that men saved themselves in a large floating building. When the waters fell, the building was wrecked on a rock, and by its own weight burst into two pieces. Hence arose the difference of languages. The Thlinkithians with their language remained on one side; on the other side were all the other races of the earth.[99]

[Footnote 99: Holmberg, 'Ethnographische Skizzen ueber die Voelker des Russischen Amerika,' Helsingfors, 1855.]

Neither the Esthonian nor the Thlinkithian legend, however, offers any striking points of coincidence with the Mosaic accounts. The analogies, therefore, as well as the discrepancies, between the ninth chapter of Genesis and the chapter here translated from the Quiche MS. require special attention:

'All had but one language, and they did not invoke as yet either wood or stones; they only remembered the word of the Creator, the Heart of heaven and earth.

'And they spoke while meditating on what was hidden by the spring of day; and full of the sacred word, full of love, obedience, and fear, they made their prayers, and lifting their eyes up to heaven, they asked for sons and daughters:

'"Hail! O Creator and Fashioner, thou who seest and hearest us! do not forsake us, O God, who art in heaven and earth, Heart of the sky, Heart of the earth! Give us offspring and descendants as long as the sun and dawn shall advance. Let there be seed and light. Let us always walk on open paths, on roads where there is no ambush. Let us always be quiet and in peace with those who are ours. May our lives run on happily. Give us a life secure from reproach. Let there be seed for harvest, and let there be light."

'They then proceeded to the town of Tulan, where they received their gods.

'And when all the tribes were there gathered together, their speech was changed, and they did not understand each other after they arrived at Tulan. It was there that they separated, and some went to the East, others came here. Even the language of the four ancestors of the human race became different. "Alas," they said, "we have left our language. How has this happened? We are ruined! How could we have been led into error? We had but one language when we came to Tulan; our form of worship was but one. What we have done is not good," replied all the tribes in the woods and under the lianas.'

The rest of the work, which consists altogether of four books, is taken up with an account of the migrations of the tribes from the East, and their various settlements. The four ancestors of the race seem to have had a long life, and when at last they came to die, they disappeared in a mysterious manner, and left to their sons what is called the Hidden Majesty, which was never to be opened by human hands. What it was we do not know. There are many subjects of interest in the chapters which follow, only we must not look there for history, although the author evidently accepts as truly historical what he tells us about the successive generations of kings. But when he brings us down at last, after sundry migrations, wars, and rebellions, to the arrival of the Castilians, we find that between the first four ancestors of the human or of the Quiche race and the last of their royal dynasties, there intervene only fourteen generations, and the author, whoever he was, ends with the confession:

'This is all that remains of the existence of Quiche; for it is impossible to see the book in which formerly the kings could read everything, as it has disappeared. It is over with all those of Quiche! It is now called Santa-Cruz!'

_March, 1862._

XV.

SEMITIC MONOTHEISM.[100]

A work such as M. Renan's 'Histoire Generale et Systeme Compare des Langues Semitiques' can only be reviewed chapter by chapter. It contains a survey not only, as its title would lead us to suppose, of the Semitic languages, but of the Semitic languages and nations; and, considering that the whole history of the civilised world has hitherto been acted by two races only, the Semitic and the Aryan, with occasional interruptions produced by the inroads of the Turanian race, M. Renan's work comprehends in reality half of the history of the ancient world. We have received as yet the first volume only of this important work, and before the author had time to finish the second, he was called upon to publish a second edition of the first, which appeared in 1858, with important additions and alterations.

[Footnote 100: 'Histoire Generale et Systeme Compare des Langues Semitiques.' Par Ernest Renan, Membre de l'Institut. Seconde edition, Paris, 1858.

'Nouvelles Considerations sur le Caractere General des Peuples Semitiques, et en particulier sur leur Tendance au Monotheisme,' Par Ernest Renan. Paris, 1859.]

In writing the history of the Semitic race it is necessary to lay down certain general characteristics common to all the members of that race, before we can speak of nations so widely separated from each other as the Jews, the Babylonians, Phenicians, Carthaginians, and Arabs, as one race or family. The most important bond which binds these scattered tribes together into one ideal whole is to be found in their language. There can be as little doubt that the dialects of all the Semitic nations are derived from one common type as there is about the derivation of French, Spanish, and Italian from Latin, or of Latin, Greek, German, Celtic, Slavonic, and Sanskrit from the primitive idiom of the ancestors of the Aryan race. The evidence of language would by itself be quite sufficient to establish the fact that the Semitic nations descended from common ancestors, and constitute what, in the science of language, may be called a distinct race. But M. Renan was not satisfied with this single criterion of the relationship of the Semitic tribes, and he has endeavoured to draw, partly from his own observations, partly from the suggestions of other scholars, such as Ewald and Lassen, a more complete portrait of the Semitic man. This was no easy task. It was like drawing the portrait of a whole family, omitting all that is peculiar to each individual member, and yet preserving the features which, constitute the general family likeness. The result has been what might be expected. Critics most familiar with one or the other branch of the Semitic family have each and all protested that they can see no likeness in the portrait. It seems to some to contain features which it ought not to contain, whereas others miss the very expression which appears to them most striking.

The following is a short abstract of what M. Renan considers the salient points in the Semitic character:

'Their character,' he says, 'is religious rather than political, and the mainspring of their religion is the conception of the unity of God. Their religious phraseology is simple, and free from mythological elements. Their religious feelings are strong, exclusive, intolerant, and sustained by a fervour which finds its peculiar expression in prophetic visions. Compared to the Aryan nations, they are found deficient in scientific and philosophical originality. Their poetry is chiefly subjective or lyrical, and we look in vain among their poets for excellence in epic and dramatic compositions. Painting and the plastic arts have never arrived at a higher than the decorative stage. Their political life has remained patriarchal and despotic, and their inability to organise on a large scale has deprived them of the means of military success. Perhaps the most general feature of their character is a negative one,--their inability to perceive the general and the abstract, whether in thought, language, religion, poetry, or politics; and, on the other hand, a strong attraction towards the individual and personal, which makes them monotheistic in religion, lyrical in poetry, monarchical in politics, abrupt in style, and impractical for speculation.'

One cannot look at this bold and rapid outline of the Semitic character without perceiving how many points it contains which are open to doubt and discussion. We shall confine our remarks to one point, which, in our mind, and, as far as we can see, in M. Renan's mind likewise, is the most important of all--namely, the supposed monotheistic tendency of the Semitic race. M. Renan asserts that this tendency belongs to the race by instinct,--that it forms the rule, not the exception; and he seems to imply that without it the human race would never have arrived at the knowledge or worship of the One God.

If such a remark had been made fifty years ago, it would have roused little or no opposition. 'Semitic' was then used in a more restricted sense, and hardly comprehended more than the Jews and Arabs. Of this small group of people it might well have been said, with such limitations as are tacitly implied in every general proposition on the character of individuals or nations, that the work set apart for them by a Divine Providence in the history of the world was the preaching of a belief in one God. Three religions have been founded by members of that more circumscribed Semitic family--the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohammedan; and all three proclaim, with the strongest accent, the doctrine that there is but one God.

Of late, however, not only have the limits of the Semitic family been considerably extended, so as to embrace several nations notorious for their idolatrous worship, but the history of the Jewish and Arab tribes has been explored so much more fully, that even there traces of a wide-spread tendency to polytheism have come to light.

The Semitic family is divided by M. Renan into two great branches, differing from each other in the form of their monotheistic belief, yet both, according to their historian, imbued from the beginning with the instinctive faith in one God:

1. The nomad branch, consisting of Arabs, Hebrews, and the neighbouring tribes of Palestine, commonly called the descendants of Terah; and

2. The political branch, including the nations of Phenicia, of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Yemen.

Can it be said that all these nations, comprising the worshippers of Elohim, Jehovah, Sabaoth, Moloch, Nisroch, Rimmon, Nebo, Dagon, Ashtaroth, Baal or Bel, Baal-peor, Baal-zebub, Chemosh, Milcom, Adrammelech, Annamelech, Nibhaz and Tartak, Ashima, Nergal, Succoth-benoth, the Sun, Moon, planets, and all the host of heaven, were endowed with a monotheistic instinct? M. Renan admits that monotheism has always had its principal bulwark in the nomadic branch, but he maintains that it has by no means been so unknown among the members of the political branch as is commonly supposed. But where are the criteria by which, in the same manner as their dialects, the religions of the Semitic races could be distinguished from the religions of the Aryan and Turanian races? We can recognise any Semitic dialect by the triliteral character of its roots. Is it possible to discover similar radical elements in all the forms of faith, primary or secondary, primitive or derivative, of the Semitic tribes? M. Renan thinks that it is. He imagines that he hears the key-note of a pure monotheism through all the wild shoutings of the priests of Baal and other Semitic idols, and he denies the presence of that key-note in any of the religious systems of the Aryan nations, whether Greeks or Romans, Germans or Celts, Hindus or Persians. Such an assertion could not but rouse considerable opposition, and so strong seems to have been the remonstrances addressed to M. Renan by several of his colleagues in the French Institute that, without awaiting the publication of the second volume of his great work, he has thought it right to publish part of it as a separate pamphlet. In his 'Nouvelles Considerations sur le Caractere General des Peuples Semitiques, et en particulier sur leur Tendance au Monotheisme,' he endeavours to silence the objections raised against the leading idea of his history of the Semitic race. It is an essay which exhibits not only the comprehensive knowledge of the scholar, but the warmth and alacrity of the advocate. With M. Renan the monotheistic character of the descendants of Shem is not only a scientific tenet, but a moral conviction. He wishes that his whole work should stand or fall with this thesis, and it becomes, therefore, all the more the duty of the critic, to inquire whether the arguments which he brings forward in support of his favourite idea are valid or not.

It is but fair to M. Renan that, in examining his statements, we should pay particular attention to any slight modifications which he may himself have adopted in his last memoir. In his history he asserts with great confidence, and somewhat broadly, that 'le monotheisme resume et explique tous les caracteres de la race Semitique.' In his later pamphlet he is more captious. As an experienced pleader he is ready to make many concessions in order to gain all the more readily our assent to his general proposition. He points out himself with great candour the weaker points of his argument, though, of course, only in order to return with unabated courage to his first position,--that of all the races of mankind the Semitic race alone was endowed with the instinct of monotheism. As it is impossible to deny the fact that the Semitic nations, in spite of this supposed monotheistic instinct, were frequently addicted to the most degraded forms of a polytheistic idolatry, and that even the Jews, the most monotheistic of all, frequently provoked the anger of the Lord by burning incense to other gods, M. Renan remarks that when he speaks of a nation in general he only speaks of the intellectual aristocracy of that nation. He appeals in self-defence to the manner in which historians lay down the character of modern nations. 'The French,' he says, 'are repeatedly called "_une nation spirituelle_," and yet no one would wish to assert either that every Frenchman is _spirituel_, or that no one could be _spirituel_ who is not a Frenchman.' Now, here we may grant to M. Renan that if we speak of '_esprit_' we naturally think of the intellectual minority only, and not of the whole bulk of a nation; but if we speak of religion, the case is different. If we say that the French believe in one God only, or that they are Christians, we speak not only of the intellectual aristocracy of France but of every man, woman, and child born and bred in France. Even if we say that the French are Roman Catholics, we do so only because we know that there is a decided majority in France in favour of the unreformed system of Christianity. But if, because some of the most distinguished writers of France have paraded their contempt for all religious dogmas, we were to say broadly that the French are a nation without religion, we should justly be called to order for abusing the legitimate privileges of generalization. The fact that Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah were firm believers in one God could not be considered sufficient to support the general proposition that the Jewish nation was monotheistic by instinct. And if we remember that among the other Semitic races we should look in vain for even four such names, the case would seem to be desperate to any one but M. Renan.

We cannot believe that M. Renan would be satisfied with the admission that there had been among the Jews a few leading men who believed in one God, or that the existence of but one God was an article of faith not quite unknown among the other Semitic races; yet he has hardly proved more. He has collected, with great learning and ingenuity, all traces of monotheism in the annals of the Semitic nations; but he has taken no pains to discover the traces of polytheism, whether faint or distinct, which are disclosed in the same annals. In acting the part of an advocate he has for a time divested himself of the nobler character of the historian.

If M. Renan had looked with equal zeal for the scattered vestiges both of a monotheistic and of a polytheistic worship, he would have drawn, perhaps, a less striking, but we believe a more faithful, portrait of the Semitic man. We may accept all the facts of M. Renan, for his facts are almost always to be trusted; but we cannot accept his conclusions, because they would be in contradiction to other facts which M. Renan places too much in the background, or ignores altogether. Besides, there is something in the very conclusions to which he is driven by his too partial evidence which jars on our ears, and betrays a want of harmony in the premises on which he builds. Taking his stand on the fact that the Jewish race was the first of all the nations of the world to arrive at the knowledge of one God, M. Renan proceeds to argue that, if their monotheism had been the result of a persevering mental effort--if it had been a discovery like the philosophical or scientific discoveries of the Greeks, it would be necessary to admit that the Jews surpassed all other nations of the world in intellect and vigour of speculation. This, he admits, is contrary to fact:

'Apart la superiorite de son culte, le peuple juif n'en a aucune autre; c'est un des peuples les moins doues pour la science et la philosophie parmi les peuples de l'antiquite; il n'a une grande position ni politique ni militaire. Ses institutions sont purement conservatrices; les prophetes, qui representent excellemment son genie, sont des hommes essentiellement reactionnaires, se reportant toujours vers un ideal anterieur. Comment expliquer, au sein d'une societe aussi etroite et aussi peu developpee, une revolution d'idees qu'Athenes et Alexandrie n'ont pas reussi a accomplir?'

M. Renan then defines the monotheism of the Jews, and of the Semitic nations in general, as the result of a low, rather than of a high state of intellectual cultivation: 'Il s'en faut,' he writes (p. 40), 'que le monotheisme soit le produit d'une race qui a des idees exaltees en fait de religion; c'est en realite le fruit d'une race qui a peu de besoins religieux. C'est comme _minimum_ de religion, en fait de dogmes et en fait de pratiques exterieures, que le monotheisme est surtout accommode aux besoins des populations nomades.'

But even this _minimum_ of religious reflection which is required, according to M. Renan, for the perception of the unity of God, he grudges to the Semitic nations, and he is driven in the end (p. 73) to explain the Semitic Monotheism as the result of a religious instinct, analogous to the instinct which led each race to the formation of its own language.

Here we miss the usual clearness and precision which distinguish most of M. Renan's works. It is always dangerous to transfer expressions from one branch of knowledge to another. The word 'instinct' has its legitimate application in natural history, where it is used of the unconscious acts of unconscious beings. We say that birds build their nests by instinct, that fishes swim by instinct, that cats catch mice by instinct; and, though no natural philosopher has yet explained what instinct is, yet we accept the term as a conventional expression for an unknown power working in the animal world.

If we transfer this word to the unconscious acts of conscious beings, we must necessarily alter its definition. We may speak of an instinctive motion of the arm, but we only mean a motion which has become so habitual as to require no longer any special effort of the will.

If, however, we transfer the word to the conscious thoughts of conscious beings, we strain the word beyond its natural capacities, we use it in order to avoid other terms which would commit us to the admission either of innate ideas or inspired truths. We use a word in order to avoid a definition. It may sound more scientific to speak of a monotheistic instinct rather than of the inborn image or the revealed truth of the One living God; but is instinct less mysterious than revelation? Can there be an instinct without an instigation or an instigator? And whose hand was it that instigated the Semitic mind to the worship of one God? Could the same hand have instigated the Aryan mind to the worship of many gods? Could the monotheistic instinct of the Semitic race, if an instinct, have been so frequently obscured, or the polytheistic instinct of the Aryan race, if an instinct, so completely annihilated, as to allow the Jews to worship on all the high places round Jerusalem, and the Greeks and Romans to become believers in Christ? Fishes never fly, and cats never catch frogs. These are the difficulties into which we are led; and they arise simply and solely from our using words for their sound rather than for their meaning. We begin by playing with words, but in the end the words will play with us.

There are, in fact, various kinds of monotheism, and it becomes our duty to examine more carefully what they mean and how they arise. There is one kind of monotheism, though it would more properly be called theism, or henotheism, which forms the birthright of every human being. What distinguishes man from all other creatures, and not only raises him above the animal world, but removes him altogether from the confines of a merely natural existence, is the feeling of sonship inherent in and inseparable from human nature. That feeling may find expression in a thousand ways, but there breathes through all of them the inextinguishable conviction, 'It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' That feeling of sonship may with some races manifest itself in fear and trembling, and it may drive whole generations into religious madness and devil worship. In other countries it may tempt the creature into a fatal familiarity with the Creator, and end in an apotheosis of man, or a headlong plunging of the human into the divine. It may take, as with the Jews, the form of a simple assertion that 'Adam was the son of God,' or it may be clothed in the mythological phraseology of the Hindus, that Manu, or man, was the descendant of Svayambhu, the Self-existing. But, in some form or other, the feeling of dependence on a higher Power breaks through in all the religions of the world, and explains to us the meaning of St. Paul, 'that God, though in times past He suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, nevertheless He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.'

This primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of dependence on God, could only have been the result of a primitive revelation, in the truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw and felt God as the only source of his own and of all other existence. By the very act of the creation, God had revealed Himself. There He was, manifested in His works, in all His majesty and power, before the face of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit of God.

This primitive intuition of God, however, was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either, according to the expression which it took in the languages of man. It was this primitive intuition which supplied either the subject or the predicate in all the religions of the world, and without it no religion, whether true or false, whether revealed or natural, could have had even its first beginning. It is too often forgotten by those who believe that a polytheistic worship was the most natural unfolding of religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have been preceded by a more or less conscious theism. In no language does the plural exist before the singular. No human mind could have conceived the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of a god. It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine, because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that therefore a belief in One God preceded everywhere the belief in many gods. A belief in God as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.

The primitive intuition of the Godhead is neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, and it finds its most natural expression in the simplest and yet the most important article of faith--that God is God. This must have been the faith of the ancestors of mankind previously to any division of race or confusion of tongues. It might seem, indeed, as if in such a faith the oneness of God, though not expressly asserted, was implied, and that it existed, though latent, in the first revelation of God. History, however, proves that the question of oneness was yet undecided in that primitive faith, and that the intuition of God was not yet secured against the illusions of a double vision. There are, in reality, two kinds of oneness which, when we enter into metaphysical discussions, must be carefully distinguished, and which for practical purposes are well kept separate by the definite and indefinite articles. There is one kind of oneness which does not exclude the idea of plurality; there is another which does. When we say that Cromwell was a Protector of England, we do not assert that he was the only protector. But if we say that he was the Protector of England, it is understood that he was the only man who enjoyed that title. If, therefore, an expression had been given to that primitive intuition of the Deity, which is the mainspring of all later religion, it would have been--'There is a God,' but not yet 'There is but "One God."' The latter form of faith, the belief in One God, is properly called monotheism, whereas the term of henotheism would best express the faith in a single god.

We must bear in mind that we are here speaking of a period in the history of mankind when, together with the awakening of ideas, the first attempts only were being made at expressing the simplest conceptions by means of a language most simple, most sensuous, and most unwieldy. There was as yet no word sufficiently reduced by the wear and tear of thought to serve as an adequate expression for the abstract idea of an immaterial and supernatural Being. There were words for walking and shouting, for cutting and burning, for dog and cow, for house and wall, for sun and moon, for day and night. Every object was called by some quality which had struck the eye as most peculiar and characteristic. But what quality should be predicated of that Being of which man knew as yet nothing but its existence? Language possessed as yet no auxiliary verbs. The very idea of being without the attributes of quality or action, had never entered into the human mind. How then was that Being to be called which had revealed its existence, and continued to make itself felt by everything that most powerfully impressed the awakening mind, but which as yet was known only like a subterraneous spring by the waters which it poured forth with inexhaustible strength? When storm and lightning drove a father with his helpless family to seek refuge in the forests, and the fall of mighty trees crushed at his side those who were most dear to him, there were, no doubt, feelings of terror and awe, of helplessness and dependence, in the human heart which burst forth in a shriek for pity or help from the only Being that could command the storm. But there was no name by which He could be called. There might be names for the storm-wind and the thunderbolt, but these were not the names applicable to Him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of old. Again, when after a wild and tearful night the sun dawned in the morning, smiling on man--when after a dreary and deathlike winter spring came again with its sunshine and flowers, there were feelings of joy and gratitude, of love and adoration in the heart of every human being; but though there were names for the sun and the spring, for the bright sky and the brilliant dawn, there was no word by which to call the source of all this gladness, the giver of light and life.

At the time when we may suppose that the first attempts at finding a name for God were made, the divergence of the languages of mankind had commenced. We cannot dwell here on the causes which led to the multiplicity of human speech; but whether we look on the confusion of tongues as a natural or supernatural event, it was an event which the science of language has proved to have been inevitable. The ancestors of the Semitic and the Aryan nations had long become unintelligible to each other in their conversations on the most ordinary topics, when they each in their own way began to look for a proper name for God. Now one of the most striking differences between the Aryan and the Semitic forms of speech was this:--In the Semitic languages the roots expressive of the predicates which were to serve as the proper names of any subjects, remained so distinct within the body of a word, that those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning, and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative power. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, the significative element, or the root of a word, was apt to become so completely absorbed by the derivative elements, whether prefixes or suffixes, that most substantives ceased almost immediately to be appellative, and were changed into mere names or proper names. What we mean can best be illustrated by the fact that the dictionaries of Semitic languages are mostly arranged according to their roots. When we wish to find the meaning of a word in Hebrew or Arabic we first look for its root, whether triliteral or biliteral, and then look in the dictionary for that root and its derivatives. In the Aryan languages, on the contrary, such an arrangement would be extremely inconvenient. In many words it is impossible to detect the radical element. In others, after the root is discovered, we find that it has not given birth to any other derivatives which would throw their converging rays of light on its radical meaning. In other cases, again, such seems to have been the boldness of the original name-giver that we can hardly enter into the idiosyncrasy which assigned such a name to such an object.

This peculiarity of the Semitic and Aryan languages must have had the greatest influence on the formation of their religious phraseology. The Semitic man would call on God in adjectives only, or in words which always conveyed a predicative meaning. Every one of his words was more or less predicative, and he was therefore restricted in his choice to such words as expressed some one or other of the abstract qualities of the Deity. The Aryan man was less fettered in his choice. Let us take an instance. Being startled by the sound of thunder, he would at first express his impression by the single phrase, It thunders,--[Greek: brouta]. Here the idea of God is understood rather than expressed, very much in the same manner as the Semitic proper names Zabd (present), Abd (servant), Aus (present), are habitually used for Zabd-allah, Abd-allah, Aus-allah,--the servant of God, the gift of God. It would be more in accordance with the feelings and thoughts of those who first used these so-called impersonal verbs to translate them by He thunders, He rains, He snows. Afterwards, instead of the simple impersonal verb He thunders, another expression naturally suggested itself. The thunder came from the sky, the sky was frequently called Dyaus (the bright one), in Greek [Greek: Zeus]; and though it was not the bright sky which thundered, but the dark, yet Dyaus had already ceased to be an expressive predicate, it had become a traditional name, and hence there was nothing to prevent an Aryan man from saying Dyaus, or the sky thunders, in Greek [Greek: Zeus brouta]. Let us here mark the almost irresistible influence of language on the mind. The word Dyaus, which at first meant bright, had lost its radical meaning, and now meant simply sky. It then entered into a new stage. The idea which had first been expressed by the pronoun or the termination of the third person, He thunders, was taken up into the word Dyaus, or sky. He thunders, and Dyaus thunders, became synonymous expressions, and by the mere habit of speech He became Dyaus, and Dyaus became He. Henceforth Dyaus remained as an appellative of that unseen though ever present Power, which had revealed its existence to man from the beginning, but which remained without a name long after every beast of the field and every fowl of the air had been named by Adam.

Now, what happened in this instance with the name of Dyaus, happened again and again with other names. When men felt the presence of God in the great and strong wind, in the earthquake, or the fire, they said at first, He storms, He shakes, He burns. But they likewise said, the storm (Marut) blows, the fire (Agni) burns, the subterraneous fire (Vulcanus) upheaves the earth. And after a time the result was the same as before, and the words meaning originally wind or fire were used, under certain restrictions, as names of the unknown God. As long as all these names were remembered as mere names or attributes of one and the same Divine Power, there was as yet no polytheism, though, no doubt, every new name threatened to obscure more and more the primitive intuition of God. At first, the names of God, like fetishes or statues, were honest attempts at expressing or representing an idea which could never find an adequate expression or representation. But the eidolon, or likeness, became an idol; the nomen, or name, lapsed into a numen, or demon, as soon as they were drawn away from their original intention. If the Greeks had remembered that Zeus was but a name or symbol of the Deity, there would have been no more harm in calling God by that name than by any other. If they had remembered that Kronos, and Uranos, and Apollon were all but so many attempts at naming the various sides, or manifestations, or aspects, or persons of the Deity, they might have used these names in the hours of their various needs, just as the Jews called on Jehovah, Elohim, and Sabaoth, or as Roman Catholics implore the help of Nunziata, Dolores, and Notre-Dame-de-Grace.

What, then, is the difference between the Aryan and Semitic nomenclature for the Deity? Why are we told that the pious invocations of the Aryan world turned into a blasphemous mocking of the Deity, whereas the Semitic nations are supposed to have found from the first the true name of God? Before we look anywhere else for an answer to the question, we must look to language itself, and here we see that the Semitic dialects could never, by any possibility, have produced such names as the Sanskrit Dyaus (Zeus), Varu_n_a (Uranos), Marut (Storm, Mars), or Ushas (Eos). They had no doubt names for the bright sky, for the tent of heaven, and for the dawn. But these names were so distinctly felt as appellatives, that they could never be thought of as proper names, whether as names of the Deity, or as names of deities. This peculiarity has been illustrated with great skill by M. Renan. We differ from him when he tries to explain the difference between the mythological phraseology of the Aryan and the theological phraseology of the Semitic races, by assigning to each a peculiar theological instinct. We cannot, in fact, see how the admission of such an instinct, i. e. of an unknown and incomprehensible power, helps us in any way whatsoever to comprehend this curious mental process. His problem, however, is exactly the same as ours, and it would be impossible to state that problem in a more telling manner than he has done.

'The rain,' he says (p. 79), 'is represented, in all the primitive mythologies of the Aryan race, as the fruit of the embraces of Heaven and Earth.' 'The bright sky,' says AEschylus, in a passage which one might suppose was taken from the Vedas, 'loves to penetrate the earth; the earth on her part aspires to the heavenly marriage. Rain falling from the loving sky impregnates the earth, and she produces for mortals pastures of the flocks and the gifts of Ceres.' In the Book of Job,[101] on the contrary, it is God who tears open the waterskins of Heaven (xxxviii. 37), who opens the courses for the floods (ibid. 25), who engenders the drops of dew (ibid. 28):

'He draws towards Him the mists from the waters, Which pour down as rain, and form their vapours. Afterwards the clouds spread them out, They fall as drops on the crowds of men.' (Job xxxvi. 27, 28.)

[Footnote 101: We give the extracts according to M. Renan's translation of the Book of Job (Paris, 1859, Michel Levy).]

'He charges the night with damp vapours, He drives before Him the thunder-bearing cloud. It is driven to one side or the other by His command. To execute all that He ordains On the face of the universe, Whether it be to punish His creatures Or to make thereof a proof of His mercy,' (Job xxxvii. 11-13.)

Or, again, Proverbs xxx. 4:

'Who hath gathered the wind in His fists? Who hath bound the waters in a garment? Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and what is His Son's name, if thou canst tell?'

It has been shown by ample evidence from the Rig-veda how many mythes were suggested to the Aryan world by various names of the dawn, the day-spring of life. The language of the ancient Aryans of India had thrown out many names for that heavenly apparition, and every name, as it ceased to be understood, became, like a decaying seed, the germ of an abundant growth of mythe and legend. Why should not the same have happened to the Semitic names for the dawn? Simply and solely because the Semitic words had no tendency to phonetic corruption; simply and solely because they continued to be felt as appellatives, and would inevitably have defeated every attempt at mythological phraseology such as we find in India and Greece. When the dawn is mentioned in the Book of Job (ix. 11), it is God 'who commandeth the sun and it riseth not, and sealeth up the stars.' It is His power which causeth the day-spring to know its place, that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it (Job xxxviii. 12, 13; Renan, 'Livre de Job,' pref. 71). Shahar, the dawn, never becomes an independent agent; she is never spoken of as Eos rising from the bed of her husband Tithonos (the setting sun), solely and simply because the word retained its power as an appellative, and thus could not enter into any mythological metamorphosis.

Even in Greece there are certain words which have remained so pellucid as to prove unfit for mythological refraction. Selene in Greek is so clearly the moon that her name would pierce through the darkest clouds of mythe and fable. Call her Hecate, and she will bear any disguise, however fanciful. It is the same with the Latin Luna. She is too clearly the moon to be mistaken for anything else, but call her Lucina, and she will readily enter into various mythological phases. If, then, the names of sun and moon, of thunder and lightning, of light and day, of night and dawn could not yield to the Semitic races fit appellatives for the Deity, where were they to be found? If the names of Heaven or Earth jarred on their ears as names unfit for the Creator, where could they find more appropriate terms? They would not have objected to real names such as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or [Greek: Zeus kydistos megistos], if such words could have been framed in their dialects, and the names of Jupiter and Zeus could have been so ground down as to become synonymous with the general term for 'God.' Not even the Jews could have given a more exalted definition of the Deity than that of Optimus Maximus--the Best and the Greatest; and their very name of God, Jehovah, is generally supposed to mean no more than what the Peleiades of Dodona said of Zeus, [Greek: Zeus en, Zeus estin, Zeus essetai o megale Zeu], 'He was, He is, He will be, Oh great Zeus!' Not being able to form such substantives as Dyaus, or Varu_n_a, or Indra, the descendants of Shem fixed on the predicates which in the Aryan prayers follow the name of the Deity, and called Him the Best and the Greatest, the Lord and King. If we examine the numerous names of the Deity in the Semitic dialects we find that they are all adjectives, expressive of moral qualities. There is El, strong; Bel or Baal, Lord; Beel-samin, Lord of Heaven; Adonis (in Phenicia), Lord; Marnas (at Gaza), our Lord; Shet, Master, afterwards a demon; Moloch, Milcom, Malika, King; Eliun, the Highest (the God of Melchisedek); Ram and Rimmon, the Exalted; and many more names, all originally adjectives and expressive of certain general qualities of the Deity, but all raised by one or the other of the Semitic tribes to be the names of God or of that idea which the first breath of life, the first sight of this world, the first consciousness of existence, had for ever impressed and implanted in the human mind.

But do these names prove that the people who invented them had a clear and settled idea of the unity of the Deity? Do we not find among the Aryan nations that the same superlatives, the same names of Lord and King, of Master and Father, are used when the human mind is brought face to face with the Divine, and the human heart pours out in prayer and thanksgiving the feelings inspired by the presence of God? Brahman, in Sanskrit, meant originally Power, the same as El. It resisted for a long time the mythological contagion, but at last it yielded like all other names of God, and became the name of one God. By the first man who formed or fixed these names, Brahman, like El, and like every name of God, was meant, no doubt, as the best expression that could be found for the image reflected from the Creator upon the mind of the creature. But in none of these words can we see any decided proof that those who framed them had arrived at the clear perception of One God, and were thus secured against the danger of polytheism. Like Dyaus, like Indra, like Brahman, Baal and El and Moloch were names of God, but not yet of the One God.

And we have only to follow the history of these Semitic names in order to see that, in spite of their superlative meaning, they proved no stronger bulwark against polytheism than the Latin Optimus Maximus. The very names which we saw explained before as meaning the Highest, the Lord, the Master, are represented in the Phenician mythology as standing to each other in the relation of Father and Son. (Renan, p. 60.) There is hardly one single Semitic tribe which did not at times forget the original meaning of the names by which they called on God. If the Jews had remembered the meaning of El, the Omnipotent, they could not have worshipped Baal, the Lord, as different from El. But as the Aryan tribes bartered the names of their gods, and were glad to add the worship of Zeus to that of Uranos, the worship of Apollon to that of Zeus, the worship of Hermes to that of Apollon, the Semitic nations likewise were ready to try the gods of their neighbours. If there had been in the Semitic race a truly monotheistic instinct, the history of those nations would become perfectly unintelligible. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than an instinct: naturam furca expellas, tamen usque recurret. But the history even of the Jews is made up of an almost uninterrupted series of relapses into polytheism. Let us admit, on the contrary, that God had in the beginning revealed Himself the same to the ancestors of the whole human race. Let us then observe the natural divergence of the languages of man, and consider the peculiar difficulties that had to be overcome in framing names for God, and the peculiar manner in which they were overcome in the Semitic and Aryan languages, and everything that follows will be intelligible. If we consider the abundance of synonymes into which all ancient languages burst out at their first starting--if we remember that there were hundreds of names for the earth and the sky, the sun and the moon, we shall not be surprised at meeting with more than one name for God both among the Semitic and the Aryan nations. If we consider how easily the radical or significative elements of words were absorbed and obscured in the Aryan, and how they stood out in bold relief in the Semitic languages, we shall appreciate the difficulty which the Shemites experienced in framing any name that should not seem to take too one-sided a view of the Deity by predicating but one quality, whether strength, dominion, or majesty; and we shall equally perceive the snare which their very language laid for the Aryan nations, by supplying them with a number of words which, though they seemed harmless as meaning nothing except what by tradition or definition they were made to mean, yet were full of mischief owing to the recollections which, at any time, they might revive. Dyaus in itself was as good a name as any for God, and in some respects more appropriate than its derivative deva, the Latin deus, which the Romance nations still use without meaning any harm. But Dyaus had meant sky for too long a time to become entirely divested of all the old mythes or sayings which were true of Dyaus, the sky, but could only be retained as fables if transferred to Dyaus, God. Dyaus, the Bright, might be called the husband of the earth; but, when the same mythe was repeated of Zeus, the god, then Zeus became the husband of Demeter, Demeter became a goddess, a daughter sprang from their union, and all the sluices of mythological madness were opened. There were a few men, no doubt, at all times, who saw through this mythological phraseology, who called on God, though they called him Zeus, or Dyaus, or Jupiter. Xenophanes, one of the earliest Greek heretics, boldly maintained that there was but 'one God, and that He was not like unto men, either in body or mind.'[102] A poet in the Veda asserts distinctly, 'They call Him Indra, Mitra, Varu_n_a, Agni; then He is the well-winged heavenly Garutmat; that which is One the wise call it many ways--they call it Agni, Yama, Matari_s_van.'[103]

[Footnote 102: Xenophanes, about contemporary with Cyrus, as quoted by Clemens Alex., Strom. v, p. 601,--[Greek: eis theos en te theoisi kai anthropoisi megistos, oute demas thnetoisin homoiios oude noema].]

[Footnote 103: 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' by M. M., p. 567.]

But, on the whole, the charm of mythology prevailed among the Aryan nations, and a return to the primitive intuition of God and a total negation of all gods, wore rendered more difficult to the Aryan than to the Semitic man. The Semitic man had hardly ever to resist the allurements of mythology. The names with which he invoked the Deity did not trick him by their equivocal character. Nevertheless, these Semitic names, too, though predicative in the beginning, became subjective, and from being the various names of One Being, lapsed into names of various beings. Hence arose a danger which threatened well-nigh to bar to the Semitic race the approach to the conception and worship of the One God.

Nowhere can we see this danger more clearly than in the history of the Jews. The Jews had, no doubt, preserved, from the beginning the idea of God, and their names of God contained nothing but what might by right be ascribed to Him. They worshipped a single God, and, whenever they fell into idolatry, they felt that they had fallen away from God. But that God, under whatever name they invoked Him, was especially their God, their own national God, and His existence did not exclude the existence of other gods or demons. Of the ancestors of Abraham and Nachor, even of their father Terah, we know that in old time, when they dwelt on the other side of the flood, they served other gods (Joshua xxiv. 2). At the time of Joshua these gods were not yet forgotten, and instead of denying their existence altogether, Joshua only exhorts the people to put away the gods which their fathers served on the other side of the flood and in Egypt, and to serve the Lord: 'Choose ye this day,' he says, 'whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.'

Such a speech, exhorting the people to make their choice between various gods, would have been unmeaning if addressed to a nation which had once conceived the unity of the Godhead. Even images of the gods were not unknown to the family of Abraham, for, though we know nothing of the exact form of the teraphim, or images which Rachel stole from her father, certain it is that Laban calls them his gods (Genesis xxxi. 19, 30). But what is much more significant than these traces of polytheism and idolatry is the hesitating tone in which some of the early patriarchs speak of their God. When Jacob flees before Esau into Padan-Aram and awakes from his vision at Bethel, he does not profess his faith in the One God, but he bargains, and says, 'If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all that thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee' (Genesis xxviii. 20-22). Language of this kind evinces not only a temporary want of faith in God, but it shows that the conception of God had not yet acquired that complete universality which alone deserves to be called monotheism, or belief in the One God. To him who has seen God face to face there is no longer any escape or doubt as to who is to be his god; God is his god, whatever befall. But this Jacob learnt not until he had struggled and wrestled with God, and committed himself to His care at the very time when no one else could have saved him. In that struggle Jacob asked for the true name of God, and he learnt from God that His name was secret (Genesis xxxii. 29). After that, his God was no longer one of many gods. His faith was not like the faith of Jethro (Exodus xxvii. 11), the priest of Midian, the father-in-law of Moses, who when he heard of all that God had done for Moses acknowledged that God (Jehovah) was greater than all gods (Elohim). This is not yet faith in the One God. It is a faith hardly above the faith of the people who were halting between Jehovah and Baal, and who only when they saw what the Lord did for Elijah, fell on their faces and said, 'The Lord He is the God.'

And yet this limited faith in Jehovah as the God of the Jews, as a God more powerful than the gods of the heathen, as a God above all gods, betrays itself again and again in the history of the Jews. The idea of many gods is there, and wherever that idea exists, wherever the plural of god is used in earnest, there is polytheism. It is not so much the names of Zeus, Hermes, &c., which constitute the polytheism of the Greeks; it is the plural [Greek: theoi], gods, which contains the fatal spell. We do not know what M. Renan means when he says that Jehovah with the Jews 'n'est pas le plus grand entre plusieurs dieux; c'est le Dieu unique.' It was so with Abraham, it was so after Jacob had been changed into Israel, it was so with Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. But what is the meaning of the very first commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me?' Could this command have been addressed to a nation to whom the plural of God was a nonentity? It might be answered that the plural of God was to the Jews as revolting as it is to us, that it was revolting to their faith, if not to their reason. But how was it that their language tolerated the plural of a word which excludes plurality as much as the word for the centre of a sphere? No man who had clearly perceived the unity of God, could say with the Psalmist (lxxxvi. 8), 'Among the gods there is none like unto Thee, O Lord, neither are there any works like unto Thy works.' Though the same poet says, 'Thou art God alone,' he could not have compared God with other gods, if his idea of God had really reached that all-embracing character which it had with Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Nor would God have been praised as the 'great king above all gods' by a poet in whose eyes the gods of the heathen had been recognised as what they were--mighty shadows, thrown by the mighty works of God, and intercepting for a time the pure light of the Godhead.

We thus arrive at a different conviction from that which M. Renan has made the basis of the history of the Semitic race. We can see nothing that would justify the admission of a monotheistic instinct, granted to the Semitic, and withheld from the Aryan race. They both share in the primitive intuition of God, they are both exposed to dangers in framing names for God, and they both fall into polytheism. What is peculiar to the Aryan race is their mythological phraseology, superadded to their polytheism; what is peculiar to the Semitic race is their belief in a national god--in a god chosen by his people as his people had been chosen by him.

No doubt, M. Renan might say that we ignored his problem, and that we have not removed the difficulties which drove him to the admission of a monotheistic instinct. How is the fact to be explained, he might ask, that the three great religions of the world in which the unity of the Deity forms the key-note, are of Semitic origin, and that the Aryan nations, wherever they have been brought to a worship of the One God, invoke Him with names borrowed from the Semitic languages?

But let us look more closely at the facts before we venture on theories. Mohammedanism, no doubt, is a Semitic religion, and its very core is monotheism. But did Mohammed invent monotheism? Did he invent even a new name of God? (Renan, p. 23.) Not at all. His object was to destroy the idolatry of the Semitic tribes of Arabia, to dethrone the angels, the Jin, the sons and daughters who had been assigned to Allah, and to restore the faith of Abraham in one God. (Renan, p. 37.)

And how is it with Christianity? Did Christ come to preach a faith in a new God? Did He or His disciples invent a new name of God? No, Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and the God whom He preached was the God of Abraham.

And who is the God of Jeremiah, of Elijah, and of Moses? We answer again, the God of Abraham.

Thus the faith in the One living God, which seemed to require the admission of a monotheistic instinct, grafted in every member of the Semitic family, is traced back to one man, to him 'in whom all families of the earth shall be blessed' (Genesis xii. 3, Acts iii. 25, Galatians iii. 8). If from our earliest childhood we have looked upon Abraham, the friend of God, with love and veneration; if our first impressions of a truly god-fearing life were taken from him, who left the land of his fathers to live a stranger in the land whither God had called him, who always listened to the voice of God, whether it conveyed to him the promise of a son in his old age, or the command to sacrifice that son, his only son Isaac, his venerable figure will assume still more majestic proportions when we see in him the life-spring of that faith which was to unite all the nations of the earth, and the author of that blessing which was to come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.

And if we are asked how this one Abraham possessed not only the primitive intuition of God as He had revealed Himself to all mankind, but passed through the denial of all other gods to the knowledge of the one God, we are content to answer that it was by a special Divine Revelation. We do not indulge in theological phraseology, but we mean every word to its fullest extent. The Father of Truth chooses His own prophets, and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may lose its Divine accent, and sink into the language of worldly prudence; but it may also, from time to time, assume its real nature, with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from Heaven. A 'divine instinct' may sound more scientific, and less theological; but in truth it would neither be an appropriate name for what is a gift or grace accorded to but few, nor would it be a more scientific, i. e. a more intelligible word than 'special revelation.'

The important point, however, is not whether the faith of Abraham should be called a divine instinct or a revelation; what we wish here to insist on is that that instinct, or that revelation, was special, granted to one man, and handed down from him to Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans, to all who believe in the God of Abraham. Nor was it granted to Abraham entirely as a free gift. Abraham was tried and tempted before he was trusted by God. He had to break with the faith of his fathers; he had to deny the gods who were worshipped by his friends and neighbours. Like all the friends of God, he had to hear himself called an infidel and atheist, and in our own days he would have been looked upon as a madman for attempting to slay his son. It was through special faith that Abraham received his special revelation, not through instinct, not through abstract meditation, not through ecstatic visions. We want to know more of that man than we do; but, even with the little we know of him, he stands before us as a figure second only to one in the whole history of the world. We see his zeal for God, but we never see him contentious. Though Melchisedek worshipped God under a different name, invoking Him as Eliun, the Most High, Abraham at once acknowledged in Melchisedek a worshipper and priest of the true God, or Elohim, and paid him tithes. In the very name of Elohim we seem to trace the conciliatory spirit of Abraham. Elohim is a plural, though it is followed by the verb in the singular. It is generally said that the genius of the Semitic languages countenances the use of plurals for abstract conceptions, and that when Jehovah is called Elohim, the plural should be translated by 'the Deity.' We do not deny the fact, but we wish for an explanation, and an explanation is suggested by the various phases through which, as we saw, the conception of God passed in the ancient history of the Semitic mind. Eloah was at first the name for God, and as it is found in all the dialects of the Semitic family except the Phenician (Renan, p. 61), it may probably be considered as the most ancient name of the Deity, sanctioned at a time when the original Semitic speech had not yet branched off into national dialects. When this name was first used in the plural, it could only have signified, like every plural, many Eloahs, and such a plural could only have been formed after the various names of God had become the names of independent deities, i. e. during a polytheistic stage. The transition from this into the monotheistic stage could be effected in two ways--either by denying altogether the existence of the Elohim, and changing them into devils, as the Zoroastrians did with the Devas of their Brahmanic ancestors; or by taking a higher view, and looking upon the Elohim as so many names, invented with the honest purpose of expressing the various aspects of the Deity, though in time diverted from their original purpose. This is the view taken by St. Paul of the religion of the Greeks when he came to declare unto them 'Him whom they ignorantly worshipped,' and the same view was taken by Abraham. Whatever the names of the Elohim, worshipped by the numerous clans of his race, Abraham saw that all the Elohim were meant for God, and thus Elohim, comprehending by one name everything that ever had been or could be called divine, became the name with which the monotheistic age was rightly inaugurated,--a plural, conceived and construed as a singular. Jehovah was all the Elohim, and therefore there could be no other God. From this point of view the Semitic name of the Deity, Elohim, which seemed at first not only ungrammatical but irrational, becomes perfectly clear and intelligible, and it proves better than anything else that the true monotheism could not have risen except on the ruins of a polytheistic faith. It is easy to scoff at the gods of the heathen, but a cold-hearted philosophical negation of the gods of the ancient world is more likely to lead to Deism or Atheism than to a belief in the One living God, the Father of all mankind, 'who hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring.'

Taking this view of the historical growth of the idea of God, many of the difficulties which M. Renan has to overcome by most elaborate and sometimes hair-splitting arguments, disappear at once. M. Renan, for instance, dwells much on Semitic proper names in which the names of the Deity occur, and he thinks that, like the Greek names Theodorus or Theodotus, instead of Zenodotus, they prove the existence of a faith in one God. We should say they may or may not. As Devadatta, in Sanskrit, may mean either 'given by God,' or 'given by the gods,' so every proper name which M. Renan quotes, whether of Jews, or Edomites, Ishmaelites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Themanites, whether from the Bible, or from Arab historians, from Greek authors, Greek inscriptions, the Egyptian papyri, the Himyaritic and Sinaitic inscriptions and ancient coins, are all open to two interpretations. 'The servant of Baal' may mean the servant of the Lord, but it may also mean the servant of Baal, as one of many lords, or even the servant of the Baalim or the Lords. The same applies to all other names. 'The gift of El' may mean 'the gift of the only strong God;' but it may likewise mean 'the gift of the El,' as one of many gods, or even 'the gift of the Els,' in the sense of the strong gods. Nor do we see why M. Renan should take such pains to prove that the name of Orotal or Orotulat, mentioned by Herodotos (III. 8), may be interpreted as the name of a supreme deity; and that Alilat, mentioned by the same traveller, should be taken, not as the name of a goddess, but as a feminine noun expressive of the abstract sense of the deity. Herodotos says distinctly that Orotal was a deity like Bacchus; and Alilat, as he translates her name by [Greek: Ouranie], must have appeared to him as a goddess, and not as the Supreme Deity. One verse of the Koran is sufficient to show that the Semitic inhabitants of Arabia worshipped not only gods, but goddesses also. 'What think ye of Allat, al Uzza, and Manah, that other third goddess?'

If our view of the development of the idea of God be correct, we can perfectly understand how, in spite of this polytheistic phraseology, the primitive intuition of God should make itself felt from time to time, long before Mohammed restored the belief of Abraham in one God. The old Arabic prayer mentioned by Abulfarag may be perfectly genuine: 'I dedicate myself to thy service, O God! Thou hast no companion, except thy companion, of whom thou art absolute master, and of whatever is his.' The verse pointed out to M. Renan by M. Caussin de Perceval from the Moallaka of Zoheyr, was certainly anterior to Mohammed: 'Try not to hide your secret feelings from the sight of Allah; Allah knows all that is hidden.' But these quotations serve no more to establish the universality of the monotheistic instinct in the Semitic race than similar quotations from the Veda would prove the existence of a conscious monotheism among the ancestors of the Aryan race. There too we read, 'Agni knows what is secret among mortals' (Rig-veda VIII. 39, 6): and again, 'He, the upholder of order, Varu_n_a, sits down among his people; he, the wise, sits there to govern. From thence perceiving all wondrous things, he sees what has been and what will be done.'[104] But in these very hymns, better than anywhere else, we learn that the idea of supremacy and omnipotence ascribed to one god did by no means exclude the admission of other gods, or names of God. All the other gods disappear from the vision of the poet while he addresses his own God, and he only who is to fulfil his desires stands in full light before the eyes of the worshipper as the supreme and only God.

[Footnote 104: 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' by M. M., p. 536.]

The Science of Religion is only just beginning, and we must take care how we impede its progress by preconceived notions or too hasty generalizations. During the last fifty years the authentic documents of the most important religions of the world have been recovered in a most unexpected and almost miraculous manner. We have now before us the canonical books of Buddhism; the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster is no longer a sealed book; and the hymns of the Rig-veda have revealed a state of religion anterior to the first beginnings of that mythology which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as a mouldering ruin. The soil of Mesopotamia has given back the very images once worshipped by the most powerful of the Semitic tribes, and the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon and Nineveh have disclosed the very prayers addressed to Baal or Nisroch. With the discovery of these documents a new era begins in the study of religion. We begin to see more clearly every day what St. Paul meant in his sermon at Athens. But as the excavator at Babylon or Nineveh, before he ventures to reconstruct the palaces of these ancient kingdoms, sinks his shafts into the ground slowly and circumspectly lest he should injure the walls of the ancient palaces which he is disinterring; as he watches every corner-stone lest he mistake their dark passages and galleries, and as he removes with awe and trembling the dust and clay from the brittle monuments lest he destroy their outlines, and obliterate their inscriptions, so it behoves the student of the history of religion to set to work carefully, lest he should miss the track, and lose himself in an inextricable maze. The relics which he handles are more precious than the ruins of Babylon; the problems he has to solve are more important than the questions of ancient chronology; and the substructions which he hopes one day to lay bare are the world-wide foundations of the eternal kingdom of God.

We look forward with the highest expectations to the completion of M. Renan's work, and though English readers will differ from many of the author's views, and feel offended now and then at his blunt and unguarded language, we doubt not that they will find his volumes both instructive and suggestive. They are written in that clear and brilliant style which has secured to M. Renan the rank of one of the best writers of French, and which throws its charm even over the dry and abstruse inquiries into the grammatical forms and radical elements of the Semitic languages.

_April, 1860._

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