Part 4
Buddhism was developed from Hinduism. It originated as a revolt from the excessive ritualism of the Brahmans. We have seen that Hinduism became an all-embracing system of religious ritual and social organisation, but that alongside, as it were, of this process there was evolved a philosophical system based upon two theories: the belief in a Universal Soul as the centre of reality, and the belief in the ultimate identity of the Individual and the Universal Soul. In the sixth century before Christ India was seething and fermenting with spiritual thought. A great teacher was called for, and such a one was given to the world in Gautama, the Buddha, that is to say, the Enlightened or Awakened One.
Gautama was born on the frontiers of Nepal at the foot of the great Himalaya range about the year 557 before Christ. He was the only son of a chief or king. At the age of eighteen he was married to the daughter of the chief of a neighbouring clan, and a son was born to him. But the yearnings of a reformer were stirring within Gautama, and he could not rest. So one night in secret he left his wife and infant and went out into the world a wanderer in search of “that inward illumination on ‘great matters,’ which was the cherished dream of every thinker in that memorable era.” He followed to no purpose the paths of metaphysical speculation, of mental discipline, and of ascetic rigour, and at last on one eventful night, as he sat under the Bodhi Tree at Gaya, in Behar, “he reaped the fruit of his long spiritual effort, the truth of things being of a sudden so clearly revealed to him that from henceforth he never swerved for a moment from devotion to his creed and to the mission that it imposed upon him.”
The truth which Buddha discovered and preached to humanity was that the salvation of man lay not in sacrifices and ceremonial, nor in penances, but in spiritual effort and a holy life, in charity, forgiveness, and love. The sages of Hinduism had taught as a doctrine for the few that the Universal Soul is the only reality, and is therefore the real self of every man. Buddha gave to the world a system by which the truth of this doctrine could be realised in the life of an ordinary man.
The four-fold truth on which Buddha’s whole scheme hinges may be expressed as follows:—Life on earth is full of suffering; suffering is generated by desire; the extinction of desire involves the extinction of suffering; the extinction of desire, and therefore of suffering, is the outcome of a righteous life. But how is desire with the suffering which it generates to be extinguished? The answer of Buddhism is that the eightfold path which leads to the extinction of suffering is by “Right Belief, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Effort, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Remembrance and Self-discipline, Right Concentration of Thought.” In Buddha’s system, as he himself gave it to the world, doctrines and beliefs are of secondary importance. Fully alive to the truth that “what we do, besides being the outward and visible sign of our inward and spiritual state, reacts naturally and necessarily on what we are, and so moulds our character and controls our destiny,” he formulated for his followers a simple system of moral rules, obedience to which would set them on the path which leads to salvation. On this path there are successive stages, and each of these stages is marked by the breaking of some of the fetters which bind man to earth and to self, and when all the fetters are at last broken then the Holy One, as he is now called, has reached his goal. In other words, he has attained to that state which Buddhists call Nirvana, a state of “perfect knowledge, perfect love, perfect peace, and therefore of perfect bliss.”
The Buddhist system emphasises the importance of education and discipline. All over Burma there are schools conducted by Buddhist monastic orders at which instruction is gratuitously given to boys in the vernacular of the country, and one rarely finds a native of Burma who cannot read and write his own language. It is also part of the religious discipline of every Burman boy that he should become a novice in a monastic order and live for a time the life of a monk. The aim of this training is to teach obedience and self-control, and thus in these days of change, when strange and disintegrating influences are at work in the East, the Burman retains, to a certain extent at all events, his simplicity and his kindly faith. To appreciate the influence of Buddhism in Burma let us remember that a Buddhist priest is supported entirely by gifts in kind, and never touches a coin.
For some centuries Buddhism made great progress in India, the land of its birth; but in the end Hinduism re-asserted itself, and to-day there are very few Buddhists in India proper, though in Burma nearly all the people are of that faith. This is the chief cause of the difference in almost every respect between Burma and India. In the Ananda Temple, as we have seen, there are four images of Buddha, for it is the tradition of the religion that before Gautama there were in former ages of the world three other teachers who reached enlightenment and were therefore called Buddha.
[Sidenote: 57. The Wilderness of Bricks, Pagan.] [Sidenote: 58. Gadawpalin Temple, Pagan.] [Sidenote: 59. Vultures on a ruined Temple at Pagan.] [Sidenote: 60. Cactus at Pagan.] [Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 6.] Here, still at Pagan, is the so-called Wilderness of Bricks, with the Ananda Temple in the distance to the right. Then we have the entry to one of the other temples, and then yet another Pagan ruin with vultures on the summit. Finally we have a scene of tall cactus growth, also at Pagan, for this city stands in what is known as the Dry Belt of Burma. The map shows us that two ranges of mountains extend northward, respectively to east and west of the Irawaddy valley. The winds of summer and autumn blow from the southwest, from the sea, bringing moisture which falls in heavy rains on the west sides of the mountains and over the delta. At Rangoon there is an annual rainfall of over one hundred inches, or more than three times the rainfall of London. To the east of the western range, however, as we leave the delta on our journey up the river, there is a low-lying district near Pagan, which is screened from the sea winds by the continuous mountain ridge, and here the rainfall is small, as little as twenty inches in the year, but the climate is hot and evaporation is rapid. In this district, therefore, cactus is the typical vegetation, but elsewhere in Burma are rich crops or the most luxuriant forests of leafy trees. These forests supply the teak wood, which is floated down the river. They are full of game, and the haunt of poisonous snakes. Wild peacocks come from the woods to feed on the rice when it is ripe, and tigers are not unknown in the villages. Only a few years ago a tiger was shot on one of the ledges of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in the midst of Rangoon.
Notwithstanding the age of some of its temples and pagodas, Burma is in the main a new country, in which Nature is still masterful. It is the largest of the provinces under the Government of India, but all told it contains but ten million people—Burmese, Chinese, Hindus, and the Hill Tribes.
LECTURE III.
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=BENGAL.=
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THE MONSOONS.
[Sidenote: 1. Map of Bengal.] From Burma we take steamer again and cross the sea to Bengal, the Metropolitan Province of India. The heart of Bengal is one of the largest deltas in the world, a great plain of moist silt brought down by the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra from the Himalaya mountains. But along the borders of the Province, and especially to the west, much hill country is included.
The map shows to the north the high tableland of Tibet, edged by the Himalaya range, whose southern slopes descend steeply, but with many foot hills, to the level, low-lying plains of the two great river valleys. Eastward of Bengal there is a ridge, rising to heights of more than six thousand feet, densely forested, which separates the Irawaddy valley of Burma from the plains of India. This ridge throws out a spur westward, which near its end rises a little into the Garo hills. The deeply trenched narrow valley of the Brahmaputra, known as the Assam Valley, lies between the Garo hills and the Himalayas. Away in the west of Bengal is another hill spur, bearing the name of Rajmahal, which forms the northeastern point of the plateau of Southern India. The Ganges flows through the plain bounded southward by this plateau and northward by the Himalayas. A broad lowland gateway is left between the Garo and the Rajmahal hills, and through this, on either hand, the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers turn southward and converge gradually until they join to form the vast Megna estuary. The country which lies west of the Megna is the Ganges delta, traversed by many minor channels which branch from the right bank of the river before it enters the Megna. East of the Megna is another deltaic land whose silt is derived in the main from the Garo hills. It is said that the highest rainfall in the world occurs in these hills, when the monsoon sweeps northward from the Bay of Bengal and blows against their southern face. The rainfall on a single day in the rainy season is often as great as the whole annual rainfall of London. Little wonder that there is abundance of silt for the formation of the fertile plains below.
The approach to the coast, as may be concluded from this geographical description, presents little of interest. As you enter the Hooghly river, the westernmost of the deltaic channels, you see broad grey mud banks, with here and there a palm tree. From time to time, as the ship passes some more solid ground, there are villages of thatched huts surrounded by banana plantations with tall broad green leaves.
[Sidenote: 2. Approaching Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 3. Coolie Emigrant Ship on the Hooghly.] [Sidenote: 4. The Hooghly at Calcutta, showing the High Court.] [Sidenote: 5. The Same.] Calcutta, the chief port and capital of India, is placed no less than eighty miles up the Hooghly, on the eastern bank. As we approach it we pass mills and factories with tall chimneys throwing out black smoke. A steamer crosses us, outward bound, carrying, as we are told, coolies going to work in South Africa; for the basin of the Ganges, unlike Burma, is one of the most densely peopled lands in the world, and sends forth annually some thousand emigrants. At last we find ourselves amid a throng of shipping, and our steamer ties up to a buoy in the turbid river, with the great city of Calcutta on the eastern bank, and the large industrial town of Howrah on the western bank, and not a hill in sight round all the horizon, only the great dome of the Post Office rising white in the sunshine.
[Sidenote: 6. Plan of Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 7. Palm Avenue, Calcutta Botanical Gardens.] Let us examine the plan of this mighty city with more than a million inhabitants, second in the Empire in population, and one of the twelve largest towns in the world. The Hooghly flows southward. On its eastern bank stands Fort William, a fortress which with its outworks occupies a space of nearly a thousand acres. Around, to the north, the east, and the south of the fort, is a wide green plain, the Maidan, separating the fort from the city. From north to south the Maidan extends for some two miles, and it is about a mile broad from east to west. In its southern end is the racecourse, where are held at Christmas time the races, the principal social event of Calcutta life. To the east of the Maidan is the European quarter, with its hotels, and clubs, and private houses. To the north, in a garden, is Government House, the residence of the Viceroy of India. Beside Government House, and also facing the Maidan, are the High Court of Justice and the Town Hall. Behind Government House is Dalhousie Square, occupied by a green, in the centre of which is a large tank. Facing this square is the Bengal Government Secretariat, between which and the river are the Post Office and the Customs House. Away to the north is the great native city. One bridge only connects Calcutta with the industrial town of Howrah, where are jute mills and great engineering works. In Howrah also is the terminus of the East Indian Railway. A hundred years ago Howrah was but a small village; to-day it contains some 160,000 people. Finally to the south of Howrah on the west bank of the river are the celebrated Botanical Gardens, containing many great palms, and most notable of all a banyan tree whose circumference measures nearly a thousand feet. North of Calcutta, and on the east bank of the Hooghly, is Barrackpur, with the country house of the Viceroy of India. There is a military cantonment at Barrackpur, and also a garrison in Fort William.
[Sidenote: 8. The Howrah Bridge, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 9. Scene from the Howrah Bridge.] Nothing impresses the stranger in Calcutta more than the density of life in this populous city, the focus of a great and fertile province. At no spot is it more evident than on the Howrah Bridge, where from morning to night a close throng crosses and re-crosses. From the approach to the bridge we look down on a crowd bathing in the muddy but sacred water. Cheek by jowl with the busy commercial traffic of the bridge, we have here the religion of the East. Purified by the bath, and clothed again, the bather sits in the crowd while for a few pies, or say a farthing, his sect mark is painted afresh on his forehead.
[Sidenote: 10. Calcutta from Howrah across the Hooghly.] The buildings of Calcutta are worthy of the capital rank of the city, but they are of European design, for Calcutta is a modern city. Fort William was so named from King William III., in whose reign, little more than two centuries ago, Job Charnock, a factor or commercial representative of the East India Company, bought the little village Kalikata, probably so named from a local shrine of the goddess Kali. There he built, on the site of the present Customs House, the first Fort William. Within ten years the population had grown to some ten thousand, and it has never ceased growing to this day, although at one time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an episode in the history of the place which for a time somewhat checked its advance. Suraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, quarrelled with the English at Fort William, and finally attacked them. Most of them escaped down the river, but a hundred and forty-six were taken prisoners when Fort William fell, and were confined for a night in a small cell measuring 22 feet by 14 feet, and some 18 feet high. It was at the end of the hot season, and only twenty-three of the prisoners came out alive the next morning. This tragedy is known in history as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Soon afterwards Colonel Clive, the same Clive who as a Captain defended Arcot in the south of India, arrived with reinforcements and recaptured Calcutta. Fort William was rebuilt on a larger scale, and in a position a little south of the original site.
Suraj-ud-Daulah quarrelled with the East India Company again, and Clive led an army against him into the north of Bengal, and defeated him and his French allies in the famous battle of Plassey. The British force amounted to only three thousand men, of whom but two hundred were English, whereas the Nawab had an army of nearly forty thousand. In 1765 the whole of Bengal was annexed by the East India Company, and from 1772 was ruled from Calcutta. Suraj-ud-Daulah’s capital had been at a place called Murshidabad, a hundred miles to the north of Calcutta.
[Sidenote: 11. Black Hole Monument, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 12. The Marble Pavement, Black Hole, Calcutta.] Here, at the corner of Dalhousie Square, is the Black Hole Monument, erected by Lord Curzon when Viceroy of India, in the year 1902, upon the site of the original monument which was set up by one of the twenty-three survivors; and here is a marble pavement marking the exact position of the Black Hole.
[Sidenote: 13. Bengal Government Office, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 14. The High Court, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 15. Eastern Gateway, Government House, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 16. Government House, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 17. The Same.] [Sidenote: 18. Imperial Museum, Calcutta.] We have next the great red brick building in Dalhousie Square known as the Bengal Secretariat. Not far away are the public offices of the Government of India, but most of the staff are removed to Simla in the hills during the hot and rainy seasons. Here, facing the Maidan, is the frontage of the Supreme Court of Justice, with a fine tower nearly two hundred feet high, which we saw just now from the Hooghly. Next is the eastern gateway to the grounds of Government House, and here is Government House itself, with the Union Jack flying above it, and Indian sentries on guard. It was built a little more than a hundred years ago, and contains the throne of Tippu Sultan, the tyrant of Mysore, of whom we heard in the first lecture. Opposite Government House, on the Maidan, is the Jubilee Statue of Victoria, the Queen-Empress of India, which was unveiled in the year 1902. Here we have a more distant view of Government House, as seen from the Maidan, with a statue of one of the Viceroys in the foreground. Next, in Chowringhee road, is the Imperial Museum, a fine building with a valuable Gallery of Antiquities.
[Sidenote: 19. Musulmans at Prayer in the Maidan.] [Sidenote: 20. Ochterlony Monument, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 21. Calcutta from the Ochterlony Monument.] [Sidenote: 22. Race Course, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 23. St. Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 24. Tiretta Bazaar Street, Calcutta.] Let us walk round the Maidan, and note the curiously mingled life upon it. Here, for instance, are Musulmans at prayer, an impressive sight that may be witnessed every evening. Here we are at the foot of the Ochterlony monument, a column erected in honour of Sir David Ochterlony, a successful general in the wars with Nepal. From the top of it we have a fine view over the city. Notice Government House and the High Court. At the other end of the Maidan is the racecourse and polo ground, to which we have already referred, and here amid the trees in the southeastern corner, beside the tank, is the spire of the English Cathedral. Here, in contrast, is a view in the native city. The streets are with a few exceptions very narrow, as in most southern cities where the sunshine is dreaded and where shade is essential to comfort.
[Sidenote: 25. Jute Mills, Howrah.] [Sidenote: 26. A Workshop in Iron Foundry at Howrah.] [Sidenote: 27. The same, Plate Girders.] [Sidenote: 28. Workpeople bathing at Howrah.] Now we cross to Howrah, to the great jute mills, where the jute fibre grown up country is spun and woven in competition with the jute manufacture of Dundee. In these mills you will find that the machinery bears the names of Dundee and Leeds makers, for the industry is relatively new in India, and has not yet reached the stage of manufacturing its own machinery. Next we pass into the engineering works of Messrs. Burn and Co., where some five thousand natives and some sixty Europeans are employed in the steel industry. Here are plate girders made in these works for railway bridge building, and here in this same industrial town of Howrah are people bathing after work in the jute mills.
Let us recount the essence of what we have seen—the Hooghly channel from the ocean, bearing inward the European ships; the Shrine of the Goddess Kali; the Fort which protected the factory of the East India Company; the Monument of the Black Hole; Government House and the Secretariat, whence the vast empire is ruled; the Cathedral and the Racecourse of the white rulers; the Courts of Justice, which, more than any military power, betoken the essence of British rule in India; the Native City with its narrow ways and crowded life drawn from the surrounding agricultural plain; the Howrah Bridge with the steel and jute mills beyond, which imply a vast incoming change in the economic life of this eastern land; and the Botanic Gardens with their wealth of vegetation typifying the ultimate resources of India—the tropical sunshine and the torrential rains.
[Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 1.] Now let us run northward by the East Bengal Railway for some three hundred miles to Darjeeling, the hill station of Calcutta, as Ootacamund is the hill station of Madras. We traverse the dead level of the plain with its thickly set villages and tropical vegetation. There are some seven hundred and fifty thousand villages in India, and these village communities are the real India, for only about ten per cent. of the total population is contained in the cities. Yet Bengal in its present limits, which exclude Eastern Bengal, has a population of more than fifty millions, on an area slightly smaller than that of the United Kingdom. Now the total population of the United Kingdom is only some forty-four millions, and of these forty-four millions fully one-third inhabit some forty large cities. Britain is therefore mainly industrial, whereas India is mainly agricultural, nine-tenths of all the people in India being supported by occupations connected with agriculture. From such statistics some idea may be gained of the density of the agricultural population of Bengal, a Province with one great city only, as greatness of cities is measured in our British Islands.
The rule of these village-dotted plains is the main daily business of the Indian Government. A great Province like Bengal is divided into Districts, each of them about as large as the English county of Lincolnshire or a little larger. On the average each of them contains from half a million to a million and a half of population. There are some 250 of such Districts in British India, that is to say in that greater part of India which is administered directly by British officials. In each District there is a chief executive officer, styled the Collector or Deputy Commissioner. He is the head of the District administration, and he is also the principal Magistrate in the District. Under the Collector there is a staff of Executive Officers, British and Indian, of whom the chief are the Assistant Collector, the Deputy Collector, the Superintendent of Police, the Engineer, and the Civil Surgeon. The Collector is so called because in the days of the old East India Company his main function was to collect revenue. In his other capacity of Magistrate, he is the head of the Magisterial Courts of the District. The laws which he and his assistants administer are made by the Viceroy in Council, and in a subordinate way by the Lieutenant-Governors and their Councils in the various Provinces. The Collector does not decide civil suits. These, as well as all serious criminal cases, come before Civil Judges of different grades, who are independent of the Collector.
Therefore we find in India that essential division of the Legislature, Judicature, and Executive which is the chief security of freedom in all British communities. Subject to the law and to the instructions of the superior Provincial Officers, the District Collector is, however, supreme, except in the Civil Courts of his District. He it is who alone for the vast majority of the Indian population represents the Raj or Rule of the King-Emperor. Between the Collectors and the Lieutenant-Governors are intermediate controlling officers known as Commissioners, who superintend Divisions or groups of several Districts.