Two Old Faiths | Page 7

were engaged in incessant wars. Climate, also, must have affected the temperament of the race; and, as the Hindus steadily pressed down the valley of the Ganges into warmer regions, their love of repose and contemplative quietism would continually deepen. And when the Brahmans became a fully developed hierarchy, lavishly endowed, with no employment except the performance of religious ceremonies, their minds could avoid stagnation only by having recourse to speculative thought. Again, asceticism has a deep root in human nature; earnest souls, conscious of their own weakness, will fly from the temptations of the world. Various causes thus led numbers of men to seek a life of seclusion; they dwelt chiefly in forests, and there they revolved the everlasting problems of existence, creation, the soul, and God. The lively Greeks, for whom, with all their high intellectual endowments, a happy sensuous existence was nearly all in all, were amazed at the numbers in northern India who appeared weary of the world and indifferent to life itself. By and for these recluses were gradually composed the Aranyakas, or forest treatises; and out of these grew a series of more regular works, called Upanishads.[13] At least two hundred and fifty of these are known to exist. They have been called "guesses at truth;" they are more so than formal solutions of great questions. Many of them are unintelligible rhapsodies; others rise almost to sublimity. They frequently contradict each other; the same writer sometimes contradicts himself. One prevailing characteristic is all-important; their doctrine is pantheism. The pantheism is sometimes not so much a coldly reasoned system as an aspiration, a yearning, a deep-felt need of something better than the mob of gods who came in the train of Indra, and the darker deities who were still crowding in. Even in spite of the counteracting power of the Gospel mysticism has run easily into pantheism in Europe, and orthodox Christians sometimes slide unconsciously into it, or at least into its language.[14] But, as has been already noted, a strain of pantheism existed in the Hindu mind from early times.
Accordingly, these hermit sages, these mystic dreamers, soon came to identify the human soul with God. And the chief end of man was to seek that the stream derived from God should return to its source, and, ceasing to wander through the wilderness of this world, should find repose in the bosom of the illimitable deep, the One, the All. The Brahmans attached the Upanishads to the Veda proper, and they soon came to be regarded as its most sacred part. In this way the influence these treatises have exercised has been immense; more than any other portion of the earlier Hindu writings they have molded the thoughts of succeeding generations. Philosophy had thus begun.
[Sidenote: Six philosophic schools.] The speculations of which we see the commencement and progress in the Upanishads were finally developed and classified in a series of writings called the six Sastras or darsanas. These constitute the regular official philosophy of India. They are without much difficulty reducible to three leading schools of thought--the Nyaya, the Sankhya, and the Vedanta.
Roundly, and speaking generally, we may characterize these systems as theistic, atheistic, and pantheistic respectively.
[Sidenote: The Nyaya.] It is doubtful, however, whether the earlier form of the Nyaya was theistic or not. The later form is so, but it says nothing of the moral attributes of God, nor of his government. The chief end of man, according to the Nyaya, is deliverance from pain; and this is to be attained by cessation from all action, whether good or bad.
[Sidenote: The Sankhya.] The Sankhya declares matter to be self-existent and eternal. Soul is distinct from matter, and also eternal. When it attains true knowledge it is liberated from matter and from pain. The Sankhya holds the existence of God to be without proof.
[Sidenote: The Vedanta.] But the leading philosophy of India is unquestionably the Vedanta. The name means "the end or scope of the Veda;" and if the Upanishads were the Veda, instead of treatises tacked on to it, the name would be correct; for the Vedanta, like the Upanishads, inculcates pantheism.
The form which this philosophy ultimately assumed is well represented in the treatise called the Vedanta Sara, or essence of the Vedanta. A few extracts will suffice to exhibit its character. "The unity of the soul and God--this is the scope of all Vedanta treatises." We have frequent references made to the "great saying," _Tat twam_--that is, That art thou, or Thou art God; and Aham Brahma, that is, I am God. Again it is said, "The whole universe is God." God is "existence (or more exactly an existent thing[15]), knowledge, and joy." Knowledge, not a knower; joy, not one who rejoices.
[Sidenote: It teaches absolute idealism.] Every thing else has only a seeming