Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Doubtless the lower orders in India derive some profane amusement from phallic processions;57 but for the most part the people appear to find no more obscene stimulus in the linga or the yoni than a Christian does in the contemplation of the Madonna nursing her child; custom lends propriety, and time lends sanctity, to anything. The sexual symbolism of the objects seems long since to have been forgotten by the people; the images are now merely the traditional and sacred ways of representing the power of Shiva.58 Perhaps the difference between the European and the Hindu conception of this matter arose from divergence in the age of marriage; early marriage releases those impulses which, when long frustrated, turn in upon themselves and beget prurience as well as romantic love. The sexual morals and manners of India are in general higher than those of Europe and America, and far more decorous and restrained. The worship of Shiva is one of the most austere and ascetic of all the Hindu cults; and the devoutest worshipers of the linga are the Lingayats—the most Puritanic sect in India.59 “It has remained for our Western visitors,” says Gandhi, “to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learned that Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all.”60

  The use of the linga and the yoni was but one of the myriad rituals that seemed, to the passing and alien eye, not merely the form but half the essence of Indian religion. Nearly every act of life, even to washing and dressing, had its religious rite. In every pious home there were private and special gods to be worshiped, and ancestors to be honored, every day; indeed religion, to the Hindu, was a matter for domestic observances rather than for temple ceremonies, which were reserved for holydays. But the people rejoiced in the many feasts that marked the ecclesiastical year and brought them in great processions or pilgrimages to their ancient shrines. They could not understand the service there, for it was conducted in Sanskrit, but they could understand the idol. They decked it with ornaments, covered it with paint, and encrusted it with jewels; sometimes they treated it as a human being—awakened it, bathed it, dressed it, fed it, scolded it, and put it to bed at the close of the day.61

  The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death.62 When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes.63* As morals improved, the gods had to content themselves with animals, of which great numbers were offered them. The goat was especially favored for these ceremonies. Buddhism, Jainism and ahimsa put an end to animal sacrifice in Hindustan,67 but the replacement of Buddhism with Hinduism restored the custom, which survived, in diminishing extent, to our own time. It is to the credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that involved the shedding of blood.68

  Purification rites took many an hour of Hindu life, for fears of pollution were as frequent in Indian religion as in modern hygiene. At any moment the Hindu might be made unclean—by improper food, by offal, by the touch of a Shudra, an Outcaste, a corpse, a menstruating woman, or in a hundred other ways. The woman herself, of course, was defiled by menstruation or childbirth; Brahmanical law required isolation in such cases, and complex hygienic precautions.69 After all such pollutions—or, as we should say, possible infections—the Hindu had to undergo ritual purification: in minor cases by such simple ceremonies as being sprinkled with holy water;70 in major cases by more complicated methods, culminating in the terrible Panchagavia. This purification was decreed as punishment for violating important caste laws (e.g., for leaving India), and consisted in drinking a mixture of “five substances” from the sacred cow: milk, curds, ghee, urine and dung.71*

  A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a semitropical climate, was clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. “Sacred” pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul. Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every morning;73 from that century to ours those waters have never seen the sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently, “Om, Om, Om.” Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn, and smelled with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats, and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the same silent deities. The unresponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty and her desolation.

  V. SAINTS AND SCEPTICS

  Methods of sanctity—Heretics—Toleration—General view of Hindu Religion

  Saints seem more abundant in India than elsewhere, so that at last the visitor feels that they are a natural product of the country, like the poppy or the snake. Hindu piety recognized three main avenues to sanctity: Jnanayoga, the Way of Meditation, Karma-yoga, the Way of Action, and Bhakti-yoga, the Way of Love. The Brahmans allowed for all three by their rule of the four Ashramas, or stages of sanctity. The young Brahman was to begin as a Brahmachari, vowed to premarital chastity, to piety, study, truthfulness, and loving service of his Guru or teacher. After marriage, which he should not delay beyond his eighteenth year, he was to enter the second stage of Brahmanical life as Grihastha, or householder, and beget sons for the care and worship of himself and his ancestors. In the third stage (now seldom practiced) the aspirant to sanctity retired with his wife to live as a Vanaprastha, or jungle-dweller, accepting hard conditions gladly, and limiting sexual relations to the begetting of children. Finally the Brahman who wished to reach the highest stage might, in his old age, leave even his wife, and become a Sannyasi, or “abandoner” of the world; giving up all property, all money and all ties, he would keep only an antelope skin for his body, a staff for his hand, and a gourd of water for his thirst. He must smear his body with ashes every day, drink the Five Substances frequently, and live entirely by alms. “He must,” says the Brahmanical Rule, “regard all men as equals. He must not be influenced by anything that happens, and must be able to view with perfect equanimity even revolutions that overthrow empires. His one object must be to acquire that measure of wisdom and of spirituality which shall finally reunite him to the Supreme Divinity, from which we are separated by our passions and our material surroundings.”74*

  In the midst of all this piety one comes occasionally upon a sceptical voice stridently out of tune with the solemnity of the normal Hindu note. Doubtless when India was wealthy, sceptics were numerous, for humanity doubts its gods most when it prospers, and worships them most when it is miserable. We have noted the Charvakas and other heretics of Buddha’s time. Almost as old is a work called, in the sesquipedalian fashion of the Hindus, Shwasamved y o panishad, which simplifies theology into four propositions: (1) that there is no reincarnation, no god, no heaven, no hell, and no world; (2) that all traditional religious literature is the work of conceited fools; (3) that Nature the originator and Time the destroyer are the rulers of all things, and take no account of virtue or vice in awarding happiness or misery to men; and (4) that people, deluded by flowery speech, cling to gods, temples and priests, when in reality there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog.76 With all the inconsistency of a Bible harboring Ecclesiastes, the Pali canon of Buddhism offers us a remarkable treatise, probably as old as Christianity, called “The Questions of King Milinda,” in wh
ich the Buddhist teacher Nagasena is represented as giving very disturbing answers to the religious inquiries made of him by the Greco-Bactrian King Menander, who ruled northern India at the turn of the first century before Christ. Religion, says Nagasena, must not be made a mere way of escape for suffering men; it should be an ascetic search for sanctity and wisdom without presuming a heaven or a god; for in truth, this saint assures us, these do not exist.77 The Mahabharata inveighs against doubters and atheists who, it tells us, deny the reality of souls, and despise immortality; such men, it says, “wander over the whole earth”; and it warns them of their future punishment by the horrible example of a jackal who explains his species by admitting that in a previous incarnation he had been “a rationalist, a critic of the Vedas, . . . a reviler and opposer of priests, . . . an unbeliever, a doubter of all.”78 The Bhagavad-Gita refers to heretics who deny the existence of a god and describe the world as “none other than a House of Lust.”79 The Brahmans themselves were often sceptics, but too completely so to attack the religion of the people. And though the poets of India are as a rule assiduously pious, some of them, like Kabir and Vemana, speak in defense of a very emancipated theism. Vemana, a South Indian poet of the seventeenth century, writes scornfully of ascetic hermits, pilgrimages, and caste:

  The solitariness of a dog! the meditations of a crane! the chanting of an ass! the bathing of a frog! . . . How are you the better for smearing your body with ashes? Your thoughts should be set on God alone; for the rest, an ass can wallow in dirt as well as you. . . . The books called Vedas are like courtesans, deluding men, and wholly unfathomable; but the hidden knowledge of God is like an honorable wife. . . . Will the application of white ashes do away with the smell of a wine-pot?—will a cord cast over your neck make you twice-born? . . . Why should we constantly revile the Pariah? Are not his flesh and blood the same as our own? And of what caste is He who pervades the Pariah? . . . He who says, “I know nothing” is the shrewdest of all.80

  It is worthy of note that pronouncements of this kind could be made with impunity in a society mentally ruled by a priestly caste. Except for foreign repressions (and perhaps because of alien rulers indifferent to native theologies) India has enjoyed a freedom of thought far greater than that of the medieval Europe to which its civilization corresponds; and the Brahmans have exercised their authority with discrimination and lenience. They relied upon the conservatism of the poor to preserve the orthodox religion, and they were not disappointed. When heresies or strange gods became dangerously popular they tolerated them, and then absorbed them into the capacious caverns of Hindu belief; one god more or less could not make much difference in India. Hence there has been comparatively little sectarian animosity within the Hindu community, though much between Hindus and Moslems; and no blood has been shed for religion in India except by its invaders.81 Intolerance came with Islam and Christianity; the Moslems proposed to buy Paradise with the blood of “infidels,” and the Portuguese, when they captured Goa, introduced the Inquisition into India.82

  If we look for common defining elements in this jungle of faiths, we shall find them in the practical unanimity of the Hindus in worshiping both Vishnu and Shiva, in reverencing the Vedas, the Brahmans, and the cow, and in accepting the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as no mere literary epics, but as the secondary scriptures of the race.83 It is significant that the deities and dogmas of India today are not those of the Vedas; in a sense Hinduism represents the triumph of aboriginal Dravidic India over the Aryans of the Vedic age. As the result of conquest, spoliation and poverty, India has been injured in body and soul, and has sought refuge from harsh terrestrial defeat in the easy victories of myth and imagination. Despite its elements of nobility, Buddhism, like Stoicism, was a slave philosophy, even if voiced by a prince; it meant that all desire or struggle, even for personal or national freedom, should be abandoned, and that the ideal was a desireless passivity; obviouslv the exhausting heat of India spoke in this rationalization of fatigue. Hinduism continued the weakening of India by binding itself, through the caste system, in permanent servitude to a priesthood; it conceived its gods in unmoral terms, and maintained for centuries brutal customs, like human sacrifice and suttee, which many nations had long since outgrown; it depicted life as inevitably evil, and broke the courage and darkened the spirit of its devotees; it turned all earthly phenomena into illusion, and thereby destroyed the distinction between freedom and slavery, good and evil, corruption and betterment. In the words of a brave Hindu, “Hindu religion . . . has now degenerated into an idol-worship and conventional ritualism, in which the form is regarded as everything, and its substance as nothing.”84 A nation ridden with priests and infested with saints, India awaits with unformulated longing her Renaissance, her Reformation, and her Enlightenment.

  We must, however, keep our historical perspective in thinking of India; we too were once in the Middle Ages, and preferred mysticism to science, priestcraft to plutocracy—and may do likewise again. We cannot judge these mystics, for our judgments in the West are usually based upon corporeal experience and material results, which seem irrelevant and superficial to the Hindu saint. What if wealth and power, war and conquest, were only surface illusions, unworthy of a mature mind? What if this science of hypothetical atoms and genes, of whimsical protons and cells, of gases generating Shakespeares and chemicals fusing into Christ, were only one more faith, and one of the strangest, most incredible and most transitory of all? The East, resentful of subjection and poverty, may go in for science and industry at the very time when the children of the West, sick of machines that impoverish them and of sciences that disillusion them, may destroy their cities and their machines in chaotic revolution or war, go back, beaten, weary and starving, to the soil, and forge for themselves another mystic faith to give them courage in the face of hunger, cruelty, injustice and death. There is no humorist like history.

  CHAPTER XIX

  The Life of the Mind

  I. HINDU SCIENCE

  Its religious origins—Astronomers—Mathematicism—The “Arabic” numerals—The decimal system—Algebra—Geometry—Physics—Chemistry—Physiology—Vedic medicine—Physicians—Surgeons—Anesthetics—Vaccination—Hypnotism

  INDIA’S work in science is both very old and very young: young as an independent and secular pursuit, old as a subsidiary interest of her priests. Religion being the core of Hindu life, those sciences were cultivated first that contributed to religion: astronomy grew out of the worship of the heavenly bodies, and the observation of their movements aimed to fix the calendar of festival and sacrificial days; grammar and philology developed out of the insistence that every prayer and formula, though couched in a dead language, should be textually and phonetically correct.1 As in our Middle Ages, the scientists of India, for better and for worse, were her priests.

  Astronomy was an incidental offspring of astrology, and slowly emancipated itself under Greek influence. The earliest astronomical treatises, the Siddhantas (ca. 425 B.C.), were based on Greek science,3 and Varahamihira, whose compendium was significantly entitled Complete System of Natural Astrology, frankly acknowledged his dependence upon the Greeks. The greatest of Hindu astronomers and mathematicians, Aryabhata, discussed in verse such poetic subjects as quadratic equations, sines, and the value of π; he explained eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, announced the sphericity of the earth and its diurnal revolution on its axis, and wrote, in daring anticipation of Renaissance science: “The sphere of the stars is stationary, and the earth, by its revolution, produces the daily rising and setting of planets and stars.”4 His most famous successor, Brahmagupta, systematized the astronomic knowledge of India, but obstructed its development by rejecting Aryabhata’s theory of the revolution of the earth. These men and their followers adapted to Hindu usage the Babylonian division of the skies into zodiacal constellations; they made a calendar of twelve months, each of thirty days, each of thirty hours, inserting an intercalary month every five years; they calculated with remarkable
accuracy the diameter of the moon, the eclipses of the moon and the sun, the position of the poles, and the position and motion of the major stars.5 They expounded the theory, though not the law, of gravity when they wrote in the Siddhantas: “The earth, owing to its force of gravity, draws all things to itself.”6

  To make these complex calculations the Hindus developed a system of mathematics superior, in everything except geometry, to that of the Greeks.7 Among the most vital parts of our Oriental heritage are the “Arabic” numerals and the decimal system, both of which came to us, through the Arabs, from India. The miscalled “Arabic” numerals are found on the Rock Edicts of Ashoka (256 B.C.), a thousand years before their occurrence in Arabic literature. Said the great and magnanimous Laplace:

  It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.8