Part 11

As a rule unnamed wild animals may be supposed to have been protected. The fox was considered a powerful daeva-scarer, which shows that not only in China did the fox seem an “uncanny” beast. In Iran his supernatural services made him highly esteemed. There seem to have been no cats though so many mice. The later Iran was destined to be a great admirer of cats, witness the praise of them by Persian poets, but it is not easy to fix the date when they were introduced. Monkeys were known and were attributed by a post-Avestic superstition to the union of human women and daevas. Vultures were sacred because they devoured good Mazdeans. On the whole, not much attention was paid to wild nature, with one striking exception: the extraordinary respect for the water-dog, beaver or otter. Suddenly the solid utilitarian basis of Zoroastrian zoology gives way and we behold a fabric of dreams. We might understand it better could we know the early animistic beliefs of Iran, though the trend of the Avesta apparently ran _counter_ to old popular credences far more than with them. It should be remembered that water was only a little less sacred than fire in the Zoroastrian system; the defilement of rivers was strictly forbidden. The Udra, or beaver, became the “luck” of the rivers: to destroy it would provoke a drought. If it was found roaming on the land, the Mazdean was bound to carry it to the nearest stream. In later legend, the Udra, even more than the fox, was a daeva-foe. But by far its most important characteristic is its mythical connexion with the dog. To the question: “What becomes of the aged dog when his strength fails him and he dies?” follows the answer: “He goes to the dwelling in the water, where he is met by two water-dogs.” These are his conductors to the dogs’ paradise. A fair sward beneath the waters, cool and fresh in the summer heat, is at least a pleasant idea, but when the two water-dogs are described as consisting of one thousand male and one thousand female dogs, the myth seems to lose its balance which no proper myth ought to do. Myths have the habit of proceeding rationally enough in their own orbit. Later commentators reject this fantastic interpretation and suppose the verse to mean that the dog-soul is received, not by two, but by two thousand water-dogs, which in Oriental hyperbole would mean merely “a great many.”

Be this as it may, Udra-murder was a frightful sin, and frightful were the penalties attached to it. Besides undergoing the usual blows with a horse-goad (to be self inflicted?) the murderer must kill ten thousand each of some half-dozen insects and reptiles: this, at least, is how it looks, but as a matter of fact the long lists of penalties in the Vendîdâd must be taken not as cumulative, but as alternative. This is evident, though it is never stated, and it explains many things. A large number of the alternative punishments for beaver-killing take the form of offerings to the priests. Arms, whips, grindstones, handmills, house-matting, wine and food, a team of oxen, cattle both small and large, _a suitable wife_—the young sister of the sinner—these are among the specified offerings. The culprit may also build a bridge, or breed fourteen dogs as an act of expiation; in short, he may do any kind of meritorious deed, but something he must do, or it will be the worse for him in the world to come.

The Vendîdâd was not a code of criminal law enforced by the civil power, but an adjugation of penances for the atonement of sin. This was not understood at first, which caused the selection of punishments to appear more extravagant than it really is. For the most part the penances were active good works or things which were reckoned as such. Charity and alms-giving were always contemplated among the means of grace, and if they were not dwelt upon more continually, it was because there existed nothing comparable to modern destitution. Moreover, it was understood better than in other parts of the East that not every beggar was a saint: too often he was a lazy fellow who had shirked the common obligation of labour. The repetition of certain prayers was another practice recommended to the repentant sinner. But no good work or pious exercise was of any avail unless accompanied by sincere sorrow for having done wrong. The Law opened the door of grace, but to obtain it the heart must have become changed. God forgives those who truly desire His forgiveness. It is impossible to doubt that the spurious Mazdeism which got into Europe, distorted though it was, yet took with it the two great Mazdean doctrines of repentance and the remission of sin. Great ideas conquer, and it was by these two doctrines that Mithraism so nearly conquered the Western world—not by its unlovely rites.

On one or two points the human eschatology of Zoroastrianism is associated with dogs. A dog is brought into the presence of the dying man. This has been explained by reference to the dogs of Yama, the Vedic lord of death, and the European superstition about the howling of a dog being a death-portent is explained in the same way, but in both instances the immediate cause seems nearer at hand. An Indian officer once remarked to me that any one who had heard the true “death-howl” of a dog would never need any recondite reason for the uncomfortable feeling which it arouses. As regards the Zoroastrian dog, the immediate cause of the belief that he drives away evil spirits lies in the fact that he drives away thieves and prowlers in the night. Death being a pollution as the work of Ahriman, evil spirits beset the dying, but they flee at the sight of the dog, created by Ahura Mazda to protect man. The dead wander for three days near the tenantless body: then they go to the bridge Chinvat, where the division takes place between the good and the wicked. The bridge is guarded by dogs, who drive away all things evil from the path of the righteous, but do nothing to prevent bad spirits from tripping up sinners so that they fall into the pit.

The good go into light, sinners into darkness, where Ahriman, “whose religion is evil,” mocks them, saying: “Why did you eat the bread of Ahura Mazda and do my work? and thought not of your own Creator but practised my will?” Nothing is told of the punishment of Ahriman—the doom of Evil is to be Evil—but in the end he will be utterly extinguished. Through time, _but not_ through eternity the wicked remain in his power. In the Khordah Avesta it is said that God, after purifying all the obedient, will purify the wicked out of hell. In the words of a living Parsi writer: “The reign of terror, at the end of the stipulated time, vanishes into oblivion, and its chief factor, Ahriman, goes to meet his doom of total extinction, whilst Ahura Mazda, the Omnipotent Victor, remains the Great All in All.”

The Zoroastrian was as free as Socrates himself from the materialism which looks upon the body after death as if it were still the being that tenanted it. Some kind of renewed body the dead will have: meanwhile, this is not they! The hope of immortality was so firm that it was thought an actual sin to give way to excessive mourning: the wailing and keening of the Jews seem to be here condemned, though they are not mentioned, there being no direct allusion to the religions of other peoples in the Avesta. There is a river of human tears which hinders souls on their way to beatitude: the dead would fain that the living check their tears which swell the river and make it hard to cross over in safety. The same idea is to be found in one of the most beautiful of Scandinavian folk-songs.

The small work known as the Book of Ardâ Vîrâf is a document of priceless worth to the student of Mazdean eschatology, and it is also of the greatest interest in its relation to ideas about animals. If printed in a convenient form, every humane person would carry it in his pocket. Like the vision of the Seer of Patmos this work is purely religious; it attempts no criticism of life and man such as that embodied in the “Divina Commedia,” but in spite of this difference in aim, there is an astonishing resemblance between its general plan and that of the poem of Dante. Without going into this subject, I may say that I cannot feel convinced that with the geographical, astronomical, and other knowledge of the East which is believed to have reached Dante by means of conversations with merchants, pilgrims and perhaps craftsmen (for that Italian artists worked in India at an early date the Madonna-like groups in many a remote Hindu temple bear almost certain testimony), there did not come to him also some report of the travels of the Persian visitant to the next world.

The author of the Persian vision was a pious Mazdean whose whole desire was to revive religious feeling amid growing indifference. He is supposed to have lived not earlier than 500, and not later than 700 A.D. The former is the likelier date. Had the assault of Islam begun, the book must have borne traces of the struggle with invaders who threatened to annihilate the faith. The author states that the work was intended as an antidote in the first place to atheism and in the second to “the religions of many kinds” that were springing up. This probably contains a reference to Christian sects, but it is not the way that allusion would have been made to propagandists with a sword in their hands. Christian sects managed to recover from the first persecution in 344 A.D., after which they were more often than not tolerated, though the Zoroastrian priesthood feared a Church that possessed an organisation so much like their own. They were accused, moreover, as at Rome, of being anti-national: everywhere the sentiment against the Christians took a form closely resembling the anti-Semiticism of our days. Such accusations can hardly fail to create, to some extent, the thing they predicate, and it is no great wonder if in the end the Persian Christians received the Moslem invaders with favour. Though the essence of Mazdeism is peace to men of good-will, it is to be feared that the Zoroastrian priests (like others) were less tolerant than their creed, and that the harassing of the Christians generally originated with them. They are known to have counselled this policy to Homizd IV., who gave them the memorable answer that his royal throne could not stand on its front legs alone, but needed the support of the Christians and other sectaries as well as of the faithful. It was one of the wisest sayings that ever fell from the lips of a king and more Mazdean than all the bigotry of Zoroastrian clericalism.

The author of Ardâ Vîrâf tried the perfectly legitimate means of persuasion in rallying his countrymen to their own religion. He tells the story of how, in an age of doubt, it was agreed that the best thing would be to send some one into the next world to see if Mazdeism were, indeed, the true religion. Lots fell on a very virtuous man named Ardâ Vîrâf, who was commissioned to make the journey in a trance-state produced by the administration of a narcotic. Even now, in India, children and others are given narcotics, sometimes of a dangerous sort, in order to obtain knowledge which is supposed to come to them whilst insensible. To a Mazdean the ordeal would be particularly terrible, because sleep, like death, was created by Ahriman. The calm fortitude with which Ardâ Vîrâf submits, while his family break into loud weeping, almost reminds one of the bearing of Socrates on the eve of a similar departure but one with no return. “It is the custom that I should pray to the departed souls and make a will,” he says; “when I have done that, give me the narcotic.” His body was treated as though dead, being kept at the proper distance from fire and other sacred things, but priests stayed near it night and day, praying and reading the Scriptures, that the powers of ill might not prevail.

At the end of seven days the wandering spirit of Ardâ Vîrâf re-entered his inanimate form, and after he had taken food and water and wine he called for a ready writer, to whom he dictated the tale of what he had seen. Guided by Srosh the Pious and Ataro the Angel (Virgil and Beatrice) the traveller visited heaven and hell. At the outset he saw the meeting of a righteous soul and its Fravashi. This soul crosses the Chinvat bridge in safety, and on the other side passes into an atmosphere laden with an ineffably sweet perfume which emanates from the direction of the presence of God. Here it meets a damsel more wondrously fair than aught it has beheld in the land of the living. Enraptured at the sight, it asks her name and receives the answer: “I am thine own good actions.” Every good deed embellishes the human soul’s archetype, every evil deed mars and stains it with the hideousness of sin. This poetic and beautiful conception was not due to the author of Ardâ Vîrâf: it is taken from the venerable pages of the Avesta itself.

In the abode of Punishment the most impressive penalties are those undergone by the souls which have tortured helpless infants or dumb animals. The mother who feeds another’s child from greed and starves her own, is seen digging into an iron hill with her breasts while the cry of her child for food comes ever from the other side of the hill, “but the infant comes not to the mother nor the mother to the infant.” Here the supreme anguish is mental: it is caused by the awakening of that maternal instinct which the woman stifled on earth. Has the _Inferno_ any thought so luminously subtle as this? The woman-soul will never reach her child “till the renewal of the world.” Till the renewal of the world! Across the hell-fog penetrates the final hope!

The unfaithful wife who destroys the fruit of her illicit love suffers a horrible punishment. It is strange that if we wish to find an analogy to these severe judgments on offences against infancy, we must go to a small tribe of Dravidian mountaineers in the Nilgiri hills, among whose folk-songs is one which describes a vision of heaven and hell. In this a woman is shown who is condemned to see her own child continually die, because she refused help to a stranger’s child, saying: “It is not mine!”

Those who treated their beasts cruelly, who overworked them, overloaded them, gave them insufficient food, continued to work them when they suffered from sores caused by leanness instead of trying to cure the sores, are seen by Ardâ Vîrâf hung up head downwards while a ceaseless rain of stones falls on their backs. Those who wantonly killed animals have a knife driven ceaselessly into their hearts. Those who muzzled the ox which ploughed the furrows are dashed under the feet of cattle. The same punishment falls to those who forget to give water to the oxen in the heat of the day or who worked them when hungry and thirsty. Demons like dogs constantly tear the man who kept back food from shepherds’-dogs and house-dogs or who beat or killed them: he offers bread to the dogs, but they eat it not and only tear the more.

Ardâ Vîrâf tells a story which belongs to the cycle of “Sultan Murad,” immortalised by Victor Hugo. A certain lazy man named Davânôs, who never did any other thing of good during all the years when he governed many provinces, once cast a bundle of grass with his right foot to within the reach of a ploughing-ox. Hence his right foot is exempted from torment while the rest of his body is gnawed by noxious creatures.

It is easy to imagine that the realistic picture of heaven and hell by a poet of no little power produced the deepest effect on the minds of people, who for the most part took it to be literally true. No Oriental work ever became more popular or was more widely read and translated. People still living can remember the time when it was the habit of the Parsis at Bombay to have public readings of Ardâ Vîrâf, on which occasions the audience, especially the feminine part of it, broke into violent sobbing from the excitement caused by the description of the punishment of the wicked. The Parsis have abandoned now the theory that the book is other than a work of imagination, but it may be hoped that they will not cease to regard it as a cherished legacy from their fathers and a precious bequest to their children.

VIII

A RELIGION OF RUTH

AN Englishman who went to see a Hindu saint was deterred from entering the cave where the holy man lived by the spectacle of numerous rats. The hermit, observing his hesitation, inquired what was the matter? “Don’t you see them?” answered his visitor. “Yes,” was the brief reply. “Why don’t you kill them?” asked the Englishman. “Why should I kill them?” said the native of the land. Finding the whole onus of the discussion thrown on his shoulders, the English traveller felt that it would be difficult with his limited knowledge of the language to express a European’s ideas about rats. He thought to sum up the case in one sentence: “We people kill them.” To which the saint answered: “We people don’t kill them.”

In another country, but still among a race which has inherited the habit of looking at questions between man and animals not exclusively from the man’s point of view, a learned professor proposed to an old gardener at Yezd that they should dig up an ant-hill to ascertain if the local prejudice were true which insisted that inside each ant-hill there lodged two scorpions. The old Persian declined to be a party to any such proceeding. “As long as the scorpions stay inside,” he said with decision, “we have no right to molest them and to do so would bring ill-luck.”

These anecdotes show, amusingly and convincingly, the wall of demarcation between Eastern and Western thought by which the son of the West is apt to find his passage barred. They serve my purpose in quoting them the better because they are not connected with the religious sect whose precepts I am going to sketch. They illustrate what I believe to be true, namely, that this sect and Buddhism itself would not have made their way in so wonderful a manner, seemingly almost without effort, had they not found the ground prepared by a racial tendency to fly to the doctrine of _Ahimsa_, or “non-killing,” which forms part of their systems.

No religion prevails unless it appeals to some chord, if not of the human heart everywhere, at least of the particular human hearts to which it is directed. In the West a religion based on Vegetarianism would not have a chance. Not that there exists no trace of the life-preserving instinct among Western peoples—far from that. All nice children have it and all saints of the type of him of Assisi. Other people have it who are neither children, nor saints, nor yet lunatics (“though by your smiling you seem to say so”). I know an old hero of the Siege of Delhi who to this day would stoop to lift a worm from his path. But the sentiment, which in the West is rather a secret thing, forming a sort of freemasonry among those who feel it, asserts its sway in the East in the broad light of day. No one there would mind giving the fullest publicity to his opinion that the scorpion has as good a right to live undisturbed in his domestic ant-hill as you have in your suburban villa.

Long before the Jainas made _Ahimsa_ a gateway to perfection, innumerable Asiatics practised and even preached the very same rule. It was the bond of union between all the religious teachers and ascetics who constituted a well-defined feature in Indian life from remote if not from the earliest antiquity. The founders of Jainism and of Buddhism, too, were Gurus like the rest, only they possessed an intensified magnetic influence and, at least in Buddha’s case, an unique genius. Every Eastern religion has been taught by a Guru, not excepting the most divine of them all.[4]

Footnote 4:

“It is stated of the Divine Founder of the Christian religion that without a parable spoke He not to the people. Christ, in fact, acted and taught as an _Oriental Guru_, a character which none of the European writers of Christ’s life has invested Him with” (Rev. J. Long: v. “Oriental Proverbs” in the Report of the Proceedings of the Second Congress of Orientalists).

In the occurrence of a new religious evolution much depends on the individual, but much also on the fulness of time. When Buddhism and Jainism arose, the psychological moment was come for a change or modification in the current faith. To some degree, both were a revolt against Sacerdotalism. Men were told that they could work out their salvation without priestly aid or intervention. The new teachers, though each springing from the class of the feudal nobility, won to their side the surging wave of the only kind of democratic yearning which, till now, Asia has known—the yearning for religious equality. Professor Hermann Jacobi (the foremost authority on Jainism, to whom all who study the subject owe an unbounded debt) suggests that there was a certain friction between the highly meritorious of the noble and the priestly castes because the priests were inclined to look down on the layman saint. To this category belonged Sakya Muni, who was the younger son of a prince, or, as we should say, a feudal lord, and who renounced rank and riches to become a recluse. The same family history is told of Mahavira, whom the Jainas claim to be their founder. For a long time Europeans believed the two religions to have but one source, and Jainism was dismissed as a Buddhist sect. The Jainas, however, always strongly held that they had a founder of their own, namely, Mahavira, and they even declared that Buddha was not his master but his disciple. After much research, Professor Jacobi decided the case in their favour by assigning to them a separate origin. Both Sakya Muni and Mahavira are generally believed to have flourished in the sixth century B.C.

The confusion of the Jainas with the Buddhists and even with the Brahmans has made it difficult to reckon their present numbers: in the census of 1901 they are estimated at 1,334,138, chiefly living in the Bombay Presidency, but this does not tell us their real number. Jainas are to be found almost everywhere in Upper India, in the West and South and along the Ganges. They inhabit the towns more than the country. In treating ancient Indian religions the living document is always round the corner, ready to be called into the witness-box, and the Jainas of to-day can give a good account of themselves. Every one has a good word for them; a friend of mine, than whom few know India better, describes them thus: “A tall, fair, handsome, good and humble lot they are and terribly bullied they are by their more bellicose fellow-countrymen, who all look on Jainas as made for them to pilfer, but the Jainas never turn on their persecutors.” In spite of their meekness, they are good men of business, which is proved by their remarkable success in commerce. Perhaps it is not such bad policy to be peaceful, and helpful, and honest as a cynical century supposes.