A Comparative View of Religions | Page 5

his life, Sakya-muni continued in honor after his
death, as the benefactor of the people and as the Buddha, the wise,
pre-eminently; and afterwards was deified, and took his place in the
ranks of the recognized gods as their superior. Thus there arose in
Buddhism, by a departure from the doctrine of the master, a new
polytheism. This was afterwards, through the influence of the
Brahminical priestly caste, suppressed in India, but spread over other
parts of Asia, to the islands of the Indian Archipelago, and also to
China.

e. Later modification of Brahminism in connection with the worship of
Siva and Vishnu.
While Brahminism saw itself menaced by the steadily increasing
influence of Buddhism, the former nature-religion, dispossessed by the
Brahmins, asserted its rights in the worship of Siva in the valleys of the
Himalaya Mountains, and in that of Vishnu on the banks of the Ganges.
Siva is the Rudra of the Veda, the boisterous god of storms, the giver of
rain and growth. Vishnu is the same divinity among other races,
conceived under the influence of a softer climate in a modified form as
the blue sky. Both divinities, originally belonging to different parts of
India, were afterwards taken, first Vishnu, and then also Siva, into the
theological system of the Brahmins, and formed with Brahma, but not
until the fourth century after Christ, the trimurti, according to which the
one supreme being Parabrama is worshiped in the threefold form of
Brahma the creating, Vishnu the sustaining, and Siva the destroying
power of nature. To this later period of Brahminism belongs also the
alteration of the old epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, by which
the heroes Rama and Krishna are represented as avatars, that is
incarnations or human impersonations, of Vishnu. In this also there is
evidently an effort to bring the deity, conceived as the abstract One,
into closer union with man, an effort which is likewise visible in the
later Yoga system of the Brahmins, in which, by the admission of
Buddhistic elements, the visible world is recognized as real, the old
rigid asceticism mitigated, Vishnu represented as the soul of the world,
and immortality taught as a return of the individual soul to Brahma.
2. THE WEST ARIANS, IRANIANS.
[THE BACTRIANS, MEDES, PERSIANS.]
The ancient religion of the Bactrians in the period before Zoroaster was
patriarchal, and consisted in the worship of fire, as the beneficent
power of nature, and of Mithras, the god of the sun, combined with that
of the good spirits (Ahuras), among which were Geus-Urva (the spirit
of the earth), Cpento-mainyus (the white spirit), Armaiti (the earth, or
also the spirit of piety), and of the hero-spirits Sraosha, Traetona, which
as light and darkness are distinguished from Angro (the black spirit).

Later, as it seems, the theology and worship of the neighboring
nomadic Arya penetrated to these nations, and caused a religious
conflict which ended with the migration of Arya to the south. At this
period Zarathustra[2] (Zoroaster) came forward under the Bactrian
priest and King Kava Vistaspa, as defender and reformer of the religion
of the fathers against the encroachments of a strange doctrine. The
Devas (Zend, Dews) or the gods of the Indian Veda appear with
Zarathustra as evil spirits. Not Indra, but the hero Traetona, wages war
with Ahi (Zend, Azhi), while the kavis, or priests, are attacked by him
as deceivers and liars. From the belief in good spirits (Ahuras, i.e., the
living, and Mazdas, i.e., the wise), the ancient genii of the country,
Zarathustra developed the belief of one highest God, Ahura-Mazda
(Ormuzd, Greek, [Greek: Osompzês]), a doctrine which he received by
divine inspiration through the mediation of the spirit Srasha.
Ahura-Mazda, surrounded by the Amesha-Spenta (Amshaspands), or
the holy immortals, not until later reduced to seven, is the creator of
light and life. The hurtful and evil, on the contrary, is non-existence
(akem), and in the oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, which go back
to Zarathustra and his first followers, is not yet conceived as a personal
being. First in the Vendidad, written after Zarathustra, does
Angro-mainyus (Ahriman), or the evil one, with his Dews, although
subordinated to Ahura-Mazda, gain a place in the Iranian conception of
the universe, as the adversary of Ahura-Mazda, and as the cause of evil
in the natural and spiritual world. From these conceptions there was
developed in the later Parsism the system of the four periods of the
world, each of three thousand years, in the book "Bundehesh." In the
first period, Ahura-Mazda appears as creator of the world and as the
source of good. The creation, completed by Ahura-Mazda in six days
by means of the word (Honover), is in the second period destroyed by
Angro-mainyus, who, appearing upon the earth in the form of a serpent,