Chapter 30

They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature, wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods; and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it: --you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up in the morning--or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,-- and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire, the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as some folk do, a 'primitive' state of society; we have not the keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our preconceptions about 'primitive Aryans'; whose civilization may have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.

The _Brahmanas_ are priest-books; the _Upanishads,_ it is reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;--you often find in them Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom. The _Brahmanas_ are books of ritual; the _Upanishads_ came much later that the _Brahmanas:_ that they represent a reaction towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste. But probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of the priests. The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest work. So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,--a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the _Upanishads:_ there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit. The exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was to be for many ages: the kings are at the head of things; and they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper Wisdom.--And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution, evolving in the _Brahmanas_ the ritual of their order; with an implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, that only by this ritual salvation could be attained. Not that it follows that this was the idea at first. Ritual has its place: hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.

And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.

The _Upanishads_ affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller's translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether their uplift and quality of song. They sing the philosophy of the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the highest thing in extant literature. They do not come to us whole or untainted. We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati said to H. P. Blavatsky: that he could show the excellent "Moksh Mooller" that "what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books." Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books. Also the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;--it was the Brahmans, by that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office. And no doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added: the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred literature. Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark's song,-- but a spiritual lark's song, floating and running in the golden glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its holiness,--haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but with a wisdom gay and ancient,--eternal, laughter-laden, triumphant,--at once hoary and young,--like the sparkle of snows on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky. Here almost alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age: not a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions (which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open and free;--and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the wisdom. One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely on India for the nexus of her teachings. That country has performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the Golden Age.--Well; each of the races has some function to fulfil. And it is not modern India that has done this; she has not done it of her own good will,--has had no good will to do it. It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses, --and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,--whom we have to thank.

So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature. It passed, and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred. It seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a very long time for this to happen. You may say that in the one analogy we have whose history is well known,--the _Koran,_--we have an example of a book sacred as soon as written. But I do not believe the analogy would hold good here. The _Koran_ came as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual wisdom on to the world-currents;--and there were the precedents of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed, for making the new religious movement center about a Book. But in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs as this: classes there would be, according to the natural differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there was,--that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the spiritual side of life; but no religions,--no snarling sects and jangling foolish creeds. Those things (a God's mercy!) had not been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years. The foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the headship of tribes and nations; they were the _kings,_ as was proper they should be: King-Initiates, Teachers as well as Rulers of the people. And they ordained public ceremonies in which the people, coming together, could invoke and participate in the Life from Above. So we read in the Upanishads of those great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples. Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really inspired, suitable--what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,-- would be used at such ceremonies: sung by the assembled multitudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing them. So a class rose with this special function; and there were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for men of the right temperament;--so a class arose, of _priests:_ among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,--for convenience we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,--at which they performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them;--how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of the Soul behind it really is;--but credited with an extra-human sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration? --To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's _The World is too much with us,_ or Henley's _I am the Captain of my Soul._ And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration, --but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.

Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and somewhat fallen from it again,--or whether their rise was still in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings from their lead,--who can say? But this much, perhaps, we may venture without fear: the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not the same as those of the Upanishads. They were not Adept-Kings and Teachers in the same way. By Epic age, I mean the age in which the epics were written, not that of which they tell. And neither the _Mahabharata_ nor the _Ramayana_ was composed in a day; but in many centuries;--and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work. Some parts of them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about twenty-four thousand couplets;--the _Mahabharata_ being about seven times, the _Ramayana_ about twice as long as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ combined. So the Age of the Epics must be narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the nuclei of them.

As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr. Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the _Mahabharata_ that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the _Ramayana,_ that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.--Is believed by whom, pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the _Mahabharata,_ died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the _Ramayana,_ was the seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;--it is always likely that half the circumstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; --say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,--somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.

Why before Buddha?--Because they are still Kshattriya works; written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;--and because Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman ascendency well established then,--a revolt that by Asoka's time had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's reign itself, for example?--Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely. Panini in his _Grammar_ cites the Mahabharata as an authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C. Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. _En passant,_ we may quote this from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ as to Panini's _Grammar:_ "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled in the literature of any language."--Panini, then, cites the _Mahabharata;_ Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such period;--and from all this I think we may argue without much fear that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;--there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the _Mahabharata_ is, martial.

There is this difference between the two epics,--I speak of the nucleus-poems in each case;--the _Mahabharata_ seems much more a natural growth, a national epic,--the work not of one man, but of many poets celebrating through many centuries a tradition not faded from the national memory;--but the _Ramayana_ is more a structural unity; it bears the marks of coming from one creative mind: even western criticism accepts Valmiki (whoever he may have been) as its author. To him it is credited in Indian tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the _Mahabharata_ to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the _Vedas;_--and this last is manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a great age elapsed between the _Vedas_ and the Epics. So I think that the _Mahabharata_ grew up in the centuries, many or few, that followed the Great War,--or, say, during the second millennium B.C.; that in that millennium, during some great 'day' of literary creation, it was redacted into a single poem;-- and that, the epic habit having thus been started, a single poet, Valmiki, in some succeeding 'day,' was prompted to make another epic, on the other great traditional saga-cycle, the story of Rama. But since that time, and all down through the centuries, both poems have been growing _ad lib._

This is an endeavor to take a bird's-eye view of the whole subject; not to look at the evidence through a microscope, in the modern critical way. It is very unorthodox, but I believe it is the best way: the bird's eye sees most; the microscope sees least; the former takes in whole landscapes in proportion; the latter gets confused with details that seem, under that exaggeration, too highly important,--but which might be negatived altogether could you see the whole thing at once. A telescope for that kind of seeing is not forthcoming; but the methods of thought that H. P. Blavatsky taught us supply at least the first indications of what it may be like: they give us the first lenses. As our perceptions grow under their influence, doubtless new revelations will be made; and we shall see more, and further. All we can do now is to retire from the confusion brought about by searching these far stars with a microscope; to look less at the results of such searching, than at the old traditions themselves, making out what we can of them through what Theosophic lenses we have. We need not be misled by the ridiculous idea that civilization is a new thing. It is only the bias of the age; the next age will count it foolishness.--But to return to our epics.--

First to the _Mahabharata._ It is, as it comes down to us, not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's _Commentaries,_ Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,--all done into blank verse and incorporated with _Paradise Lost._ You have a martial poem like the _Iliad,_ full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;--and you find the _Bhagavad-Gita_ a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house, or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the original,--from the version, that is, that first appeared as an epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material; which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;--says Mr. Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer. Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;--as if they had been actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,--all India has so understood, always,--that the poem is a Soul-symbol, standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it, or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their writings into an epic for the first time.

For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,-- the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of opinion. Just as in the _Iliad_ it is the Trojan Hector who is the most sympathetic character, so in the _Mahabharata_ it is often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the assertion,--with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they are given no credit. Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in the _Bhagavad-Gita_ and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation of Vishnu,--of the Deity, the Supreme Self. As such, he does neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his protegees. Philosophically and symbolically, this is sound and true, no doubt, but one wonders whether the poem (or poems) ran so originally; whether there may not be passages written at first by Kuravist poets; or a Brahminical superimposition of motive on a poem once wholly Kshattriya, and interested only in showing forth the noble and human warrior virtues of the Kshattriya caste. I imagine that in that second millennium B. C., in the early centuries of Kali-Yuga, you had a warrior class with their bards, inspired with high Bushido feeling,--with chivalry and all that is fine in patricianism--but no longer under the leadership of Adept Princes;--the esoteric knowledge was now mainly in the hands of the Priest-class. The Kshattriya bards made poems about the Great War, which grew and coalesced into a national epic. Then in the course of the centuries, as learning in its higher branches became more and more a possession of the Brahmans,--and since there was no feeling against adding to this epic whatever material came handy,--Brahmin esotericists manipulated it with great tact and finesse into a symbol of the warfare of the Soul.

There is the story of the death of the Kurava champion Bhishma. The Pandavas had been victorious; and Duryodhana the Kurava king appealed to Bhishma to save the situation. Bhishma loved the Pandava princes like a father; and urged Duryodhana to end the war by granting them their rights,--but in vain. So next day, owing his allegiance to Duryodhana, he took the field; and

"As a lordly tusker tramples on a field of feeble reeds, As a forest conflagration on the parched woodland feeds, Bhishma rode upon the warriors in his mighty battle car. God nor mortal chief could face him in the gory field of war." *

* The quotations are from Mr. Romesh Dutt's translation. ------