Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  * The Hindus believe in seven heavens, one of them on earth, the others rising in gradations above it; there are twenty-one hells, divided into seven sections. Punishment is not eternal, but it is diversified. Père Dubois’ description of the Hindu hells rivals Dante’s account of Inferno, and illustrates, like it, the many fears, and the sadistic imagination, of mankind. “Fire, steel, serpents, venomous insects, savage beasts, birds of prey, gall, poison, stenches; in a word, everything possible is employed to torment the damned. Some have a cord run through their nostrils, by which they are forever dragged over the edges of extremely sharp knives; others are condemned to pass through the eye of a needle; others are placed between two flat rocks, which meet, and crush, without killing, them; others have their eyes pecked incessantly by famished vultures; while millions of them continually swim and paddle in a pool filled with the urine of dogs or with the mucus from men’s nostrils.”40 Such beliefs were probably the privilege of the lowest Hindus and the strictest theologians. We shall find it easier to forgive them if we remember that our own Hell, unlike that of India, was not only varied, but eternal.

  † The belief in Karma and transmigration is the greatest theoretical obstacle to the removal of the caste system from India; for the orthodox Hindu presumes that caste differences are decreed by the soul’s conduct in past lives, and are part of a divine plan which it would be sacrilegious to disturb.

  * Schopenhauer, like Buddha, reduced all suffering to the will to live and beget, and advocated race suicide by voluntary sterility. Heine could hardly pen a stanza without speaking of death, and could write, in Hindu strain,

  Sweet is sleep, but death is better;

  Best of all is never to be born.42

  Kant, scorning the optimism of Leibnitz, asked: “Would any man of sound understanding who has lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care to go again through life’s poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any conditions whatever?”43

  * Cf. footnote to page 80 above.

  † So the good European caps each sneeze with a benediction, originally to guard against the soul being ejected by the force of the expiration.

  * Such human sacrifices were recorded as late as 1854.64 It was formerly believed that devotees had offered themselves as sacrifices, as in the case of fanatics supposed to have thrown themselves under the wheels of the Juggernaut (Indian Jagannath) car;65 but it is now held that the rare cases of such apparent self-sacrifice may have been accidents66

  * Ghee is clarified butter. Urine, says the Abbé Dubois (1820), “is looked upon as most efficacious for purifying any kind of uncleanness. I have often seen superstitious Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest.”72 De gustibus non disputandum.

  * Dubois, sceptical of everything but his own myth, adds: “The greater number of these sannyasin are looked upon as utter impostors, and that by the most enlightened of their fellow-counuymen.”75

  * It was used by the Mayas of America in the first century A.D.8a Dr. Breasted attributes a knowledge of the place value of numerals to the ancient Babylonians (Saturday Review of Literature, New York, July 13, 1935, P. 15).

  * The first algebraist known to us, the Greek Diophantus (360 A.D.), antedates Aryabhata by a century; but Cajori believes that he took his lead from India.11

  * E.g., in The Ocean of Music (Samgita-ratnakara) of Sharamgadeva (1210-47).

  * Hospitals were erected in Ceylon as early as 427 B.C. and in northern India as early as 226 B.C39

  * Asti, it is; n’asti, it is not.

  * The Nyaya syllogism, however, has five propositions: theorem, reason, major premiss, minor premiss and conclusion. E.g.: (i) Socrates is mortal, (2) for he is a man; (3) all men are mortal; (4) Socrates is a man; (5) therefore Socrates is mortal.

  * Its earliest extant literature, the Sankhya-karika of the commentator Ishvara Krishna, dates back only to the fifth century A.D., and the Sankhya-sutras once attributed to Kapila are not older than our fifteenth century; but the origins of the system apparendy antedate Buddhism itself.70 The Buddhist texts and the Mahabharata70a repeatedly refer to it, and Winternitz finds its influence in Pythagoras.70b

  * “The evolution of Prakriti” says one Hindu commentator on Kapila, “has no purpose except to provide a spectacle for the soul.”80 Perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, the wisest way to view the world is as an esthetic and dramatic spectacle.

  * Cf. the poem quoted on page 512 above.

  † The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold as The Song Celestial, London, 1925, bk. vi, p. 35. Brahmacaria is the vow of chastity taken by the ascetic student “Me” is Krishna.

  * Cf. Hobbes: Semper idem sentire idem est ac nihil sentire: “always to feel the same thing is the same as to feel nothing.”

  † Eliot compares, for the illumination of this stage, a passage from Schopenhauer, obviously inspired by his study of Hindu philosophy: “When some sudden cause or inward disposition lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace that we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us.”102

  * The blunt Dubois describes them as “a tribe of vagabonds.”109 The word fakir, sometimes applied to Yogis, is an Arab term, originally meaning “poor,” and properly applied only to members of Moslem religious orders vowed to poverty.

  * Hence the name Advaita—non-dualism—often given to the Vedanta philosophy.

  † Shankara and the Vedanta are not quite pantheistic: things considered as distinct from one another are not Brahman; they are Brahman only in their essential, indivisible and changeless essence and reality. “Brahman,” says Shankara, “resembles not the world, and (yet) apart from Brahman there is naught; all that which seems to exist outside of It (Brahman) cannot exist (in such fashion) save in an illusory manner, like the semblance of water in the desert.”115a

  * Cf. Blake:

  “I will go down to self-annihilation and Eternal Death.

  Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,

  And I be seized and given into the hands of my own Selfhood.”117

  Or Tennyson’s “Ancient Sage”:

  “For more than once when I

  Sat all alone, revolving in myself

  The word that is the symbol of myself,

  The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

  And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud

  Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs—the limbs

  Were strange, not mine—and yet not shade of doubt

  But utter clearness, and through loss of Self

  The gain of such large life as matched with ours

  Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,

  Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”118

  * We do not know how much Parmenides’ insistence that the Many are unreal, and that only the One exists, owed to the Upanishads, or contributed to Shankara; nor can we establish any connection, of cause or suggestion, between Shankara and the astonishingly similar philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

  * “No Indian saint ever had anything but contempt for the knowledge gained by the senses and the intellect.”127 “Never have the Indian sages . . . fallen into our typical error of taking any intellectual formation seriously in the metaphysical sense; these are no more substantial than any Maya formation.”128

  * Cf. Spinoza: “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind
has with the whole of Nature.”131 “The intellectual love of God” is a summary of Hindu philosophy.

  * Cf. Bergson, Keyserling, Christian Science, Theosophy.

  * Some examples of Sanskrit agglutination: citerapratisamkramayastadakarapattau, upadanavisvamasattakakaruapattih.1

  † The movement for self-rule.

  * The Babylonians had done likewise; cf. p. 250 above.

  † Of printing there is no sign till the nineteenth century—possibly because, as in China, the adjustment of movable type to the native scripts was too expensive, possibly because printing was looked upon as a vulgar descent from the art of calligraphy. The printing of newspapers and books was brought by the English to the Hindus, who bettered the instruction; today there are 1,517 newspapers in India, 3,627 periodicals, and over 17,000 new books published in an average year.5

  * I.e., instructions.

  * We cannot tell how much of the following (and perhaps of the preceding) quotation is Bernier’s, and how much Aurangzeb’s; we only know that it bears reprinting.

  * References in the Vedas to certain characters of the Mahabharata indicate that the story of a great intertribal war in the second millennium B.C. is fundamentally historical.

  * E.g.: “Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain.”24 “Even if the enemy seeks help, the good man will be ready to grant him aid.”25 “With meekness conquer wrath, and ill with ruth; by giving niggards vanquish, lies with truth.”26

  † E.g.: “As in the great ocean one piece of wood meets another, and parts from it again, such is the meeting of creatures.”27

  * Couplets.

  † l.e., the age in which literature used Sanskrit as its medium.

  * An exceptional instance. Usually, in Hindu plays, the women speak Prakrit, on the ground that it would be unbecoming in a lady to be familiar with a dead language.

  * The great Hindu theorist of the drama, Dhanamjaya (ca. 1000 A.D.), writes: “As for any simple man of little intelligence who says that from dramas, which distil joy, the gain is knowledge only—homage to him, for he has averted his face from what is delightful.”52

  * Sir William Jones reported that the Hindus laid claim to three inventions: chess, the decimal system, and teaching by fables.

  † A lively war rages in the fields of Oriental scholarship as to whether these fables passed from India to Europe, or turn about; we leave the dispute to men of leisure. Perhaps they passed to both India and Europe from Egypt, via Mesopotamia and Crete. The influence of the Panchatantra upon the Arabian Nights, however, is beyond question.58

  * Poetry tended now to be less objective than in the days of the epic, and gave itself more and more to the interweaving of religion and love. Metre, which had been loose and free in the epics, varying in the length of the line, and requiring regularity only in the last four or five syllables, became at once stricter and more varied; a thousand complications of prosody were introduced, which disappear in translation; artifices of letter and phrase abounded, and rhyme appeared not only at the end but often in the middle of the line. Rigid rules were composed for the poetic art, and the form became more precise as the content thinned.

  * Rabindranath Tagore has translated, with characteristic perfection, one hundred Songs of Kabir, New York, 1915.

  * Cf. p. 497 above.

  † Perhaps the oldest printing of textiles from blocks was done in India,8 though it never grew there into the kindred art of block-printing books.

  ‡ From the Hindu paijamas, meaning leg-clothing.

  § These fine woolen shawls are made of several strips, skilfully joined into what seems to be a single fabric.10

  * The secular Hindu dance has been revealed to Europe and America by the not quite orthodox art of Shankar, in which every movement of the body, the hands, the fingers and the eyes conveys a subtle and precise significance to the initiated spectator, and carries an undulating grace, and a precise and corporeal poetry, unknown in the Western dance since our democratic return to the African in art.

  * More strictly speaking there are six ragas or basic themes, each with five modifications called ragini. Raga means color, passion, mood; ragini is its feminine form.

  * Near the village of Fardapur, in the native state of Hyderabad.

  * Among his preliminary sketches for The Last Supper.

  † A supposition. We do not know who painted these frescoes.

  * Hsieh Ho; cf. p. 752 below. The Sandanga is of uncertain date, being known to us through a thirteenth-century commentary.

  * An exception outweighing this generalization was the copper colossus of Buddha, eighty feet high, which Yuan Chwang saw at Pataliputra; through Yuan and other Far Eastern pilgrims to India this may have been one ancestor of the great Buddhas at Nara and Kamakura in Japan.

  * The correspondence of this interior with that of Christian churches has suggested a possible influence of Hindu styles upon early Christian architecture.74a

  * Swastika is a Sanskrit word, from su, well, and asti, being. This eternally recurring symbol appears among a great variety of peoples, primitive and modern, usually as a sign of well-being or good luck.

  * Here, says Meadows Taylor, “the carving on some of the pillars, and of the lintels and architraves of the doors, is quite beyond description. No chased work in silver or gold could possibly be finer. By what tools this very hard, tough stone could have been wrought and polished as it is, is not at all intelligible at the present day.”95

  * The summit of the temple is a single block of stone twenty-five feet square, and weighing some eighty tons. According to Hindu tradition it was raised into place by being drawn up an incline four miles long. Forced labor was probably employed in such works, instead of “man-enslaving” machinery.

  * In 1604 a Portuguese missionary told of hunters reporting some ruins in the jungle, and another priest made a similar report in 1672; but no attention was paid to these statements.113

  * E.g., the lacquered stone Buddha in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

  * I.e., minaret, from the Arabic manarat, a lamp or lighthouse.

  * The Delhi Fort originally contained fifty-two palaces, but only twenty-seven remain. A harassed British garrison took refuge there in the Sepoy Mutiny, and razed several of the palaces to make room for their stores. Much looting occurred.

  * It was a sad error of Shah Jehan’s to make a fortress of these lovely palaces. When the British besieged Agra (1803) they inevitably turned their guns upon the Fort. Seeing the cannon-balls strike the Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Hindus surrendered, thinking beauty more precious than victory. A little later Warren Hastings tore up the bath of the palace to present it to George IV; and other portions of the structure were sold by Lord William Bentinck to help the revenues of India.123

  † Lord William Bentinck, one of the kindliest of the British governors of India, once thought of selling the Taj for $150,000 to a Hindu contractor, who believed that better use could be made of the material.126 Since Lord Curzon’s administration the British Government of India has taken excellent care of these Mogul monuments.

  * Goods bought for $2,000,000 in India were sold for $10,000,000 in England.1 The stock of the Company rose to $32,000 a share.2

  * Literally, the “Brahma Society”; known more fully as “The Society of the Believers in Brahman, the Supreme Spirit.”

  † It has today some 5,500 adherents.16 Another reform organization, the Arya-Somaj (Aryan Society), founded by Swami Dyananda, and brilliantly carried forward by the late Lala Lajpat Rai, denounced caste, polytheism, superstition, idolatry and Christianity, and urged a return to the simpler religion of the Vedas. Its followers now number half a million.17 A reverse influence, of Hinduism upon Christianity, appears in Theosophy—a mixture of Hindu mysticism and Christian morality, developed in India by two exotic women: Mme. Helena Blavatsky (1878) and Mrs. Annie Besant (1893).