The Sanskrit Epics

by Delphi Classics

  It is interesting to note the changes which tales undergo in the course of such wanderings. In the second edition of his Fables (1678), La Fontaine acknowledges his indebtedness for a large part of his work to the Indian sage Pilpay. A well-known story in the French writer is that of the milkmaid, who, while carrying a pail of milk on her head to market, and building all kinds of castles in the air with the future proceeds of the sale of the milk, suddenly gives a jump of joy at the prospect of her approaching fortune, and thereby shatters the pail to pieces on the ground. This is only a transformation of a story still preserved in the Panchatantra. Here it is a Brahman who, having filled an alms-bowl with the remnants of some rice-pap he has begged, hangs it up on a nail in the wall above his bed. He dreams of the money he will procure by selling the rice when a famine breaks out. Then he will gradually acquire cattle, buy a fine house, and marry a beautiful girl with a rich dowry. One day when he calls to his wife to take away his son who is playing about, and she does not hear, he will rise up to give her a kick. As this thought passes through his mind, his foot shatters the alms-bowl, the contents of which are spilt all over him.

  Another Panchatantra story recurring in La Fontaine is that of the too avaricious jackal. Finding the dead bodies of a boar and a hunter, besides the bow of the latter, he resolves on devouring the bowstring first. As soon as he begins to gnaw, the bow starts asunder, pierces his head, and kills him. In La Fontaine the jackal has become a wolf, and the latter is killed by the arrow shot off as he touches the bow.

  Nothing, perhaps, in the history of the migration of Indian tales is more remarkable than the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. At the court of Khalif Almansur (753–774), under whom Kalīlah and Dimnah was translated into Arabic, there lived a Christian known as John of Damascus, who wrote in Greek the story of Barlaam and Josaphat as a manual of Christian theology. This became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages, being translated into many Oriental as well as European languages. It is enlivened by a number of fables and parables, most of which have been traced to Indian sources. The very hero of the story, Prince Josaphat, has an Indian origin, being, in fact, no other than Buddha. The name has been shown to be a corruption of Bodhisattva, a well-known designation of the Indian reformer. Josaphat rose to the rank of a saint both in the Greek and the Roman Church, his day in the former being August 26, in the latter November 27. That the founder of an atheistic Oriental religion should have developed into a Christian saint is one of the most astounding facts in religious history.

  Though Europe was thus undoubtedly indebted to India for its mediæval literature of fairy tales and fables, the Indian claim to priority of origin in ancient times is somewhat dubious. A certain number of apologues found in the collections of Æsop and Babrius are distinctly related to Indian fables. The Indian claim is supported by the argument that the relation of the jackal to the lion is a natural one in the Indian fable, while the connection of the fox and the lion in Greece has no basis in fact. On the other side it has been urged that animals and birds which are peculiar to India play but a minor part in Indian fables, while there exists a Greek representation of the Æsopian fable of the fox and the raven, dating from the sixth century B.C. Weber and Benfey both conclude that the Indians borrowed a few fables from the Greeks, admitting at the same time that the Indians had independent fables of their own before. Rudimentary fables are found even in the Chhāndogya Upanishad, and the transmigration theory would have favoured the development of this form of tale; indeed Buddha himself in the old Jātaka stories appears in the form of various animals.

  Contemporaneously with the fable literature, the most intellectual game the world has known began its westward migration from India. Chess in Sanskrit is called chatur-anga, or the “four-limbed army,” because it represents a kriegspiel, in which two armies, consisting of infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants, each led by a king and his councillor, are opposed. The earliest direct mention of the game in Sanskrit literature is found in the works of Bāṇa, and the Kāvyālaṃkāra of Rudraṭa, a Kashmirian poet of the ninth century, contains a metrical puzzle illustrating the moves of the chariot, the elephant, and the horse. Introduced into Persia in the sixth century, chess was brought by the Arabs to Europe, where it was generally known by 1100 A.D. It has left its mark on mediæval poetry, on the idioms of European languages (e.g. “check,” from the Persian shah, “king”), on the science of arithmetic in the calculation of progressions with the chessboard, and even in heraldry, where the “rook” often figures in coats of arms. Beside the fable literature of India, this Indian game served to while away the tedious life of myriads during the Middle Ages in Europe.

  Turning to Philosophical Literature, we find that the early Greek and Indian philosophers have many points in common. Some of the leading doctrines of the Eleatics, that God and the universe are one, that everything existing in multiplicity has no reality, that thinking and being are identical, are all to be found in the philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedānta system, which is its outcome. Again, the doctrine of Empedocles, that nothing can arise which has not existed before, and that nothing existing can be annihilated, has its exact parallel in the characteristic doctrine of the Sānkhya system about the eternity and indestructibility of matter. According to Greek tradition, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and others undertook journeys to Oriental countries in order to study philosophy. Hence there is at least the historical possibility of the Greeks having been influenced by Indian thought through Persia.

  Whatever may be the truth in the cases just mentioned, the dependence of Pythagoras on Indian philosophy and science certainly seems to have a high degree of probability. Almost all the doctrines ascribed to him, religious, philosophical, mathematical, were known in India in the sixth century B.C. The coincidences are so numerous that their cumulative force becomes considerable. The transmigration theory, the assumption of five elements, the Pythagorean theorem in geometry, the prohibition as to eating beans, the religio-philosophical character of the Pythagorean fraternity, and the mystical speculations of the Pythagorean school, all have their close parallels in ancient India. The doctrine of metempsychosis in the case of Pythagoras appears without any connection or explanatory background, and was regarded by the Greeks as of foreign origin. He could not have derived it from Egypt, as it was not known to the ancient Egyptians. In spite, however, of the later tradition, it seems impossible that Pythagoras should have made his way to India at so early a date, but he could quite well have met Indians in Persia.

  Coming to later centuries, we find indications that the Neo-Platonist philosophy may have been influenced by the Sānkhya system, which flourished in the first centuries of our era, and could easily have become known at Alexandria owing to the lively intercourse between that city and India at the time. From this source Plotinus (204–269 A.D.), chief of the Neo-Platonists, may have derived his doctrine that soul is free from suffering, which belongs only to matter, his identification of soul with light, and his illustrative use of the mirror, in which the reflections of objects appear, for the purpose of explaining the phenomena of consciousness. The influence of the Yoga system on Plotinus is suggested by his requirement that man should renounce the world of sense and strive after truth by contemplation. Connection with Sānkhya ideas is still more likely in the case of Plotinus’s most eminent pupil, Porphyry (232–304 A.D.), who lays particular stress on the difference between soul and matter, on the omnipresence of soul when freed from the bonds of matter, and on the doctrine that the world has no beginning. It is also noteworthy that he rejects sacrifice and prohibits the killing of animals.

  The influence of Indian philosophy on Christian Gnosticism in the second and third centuries seems at any rate undoubted. The Gnostic doctrine of the opposition between soul and matter, of the personal existence of intellect, will, and so forth, the identification of soul and light, are derived from the Sānkhya system. The division, peculiar to several Gnostics, of men into the
three classes of pneumatikoi, psychikoi, and hylikoi, is also based on the Sānkhya doctrine of the three guṇas. Again, Bardesanes, a Gnostic of the Syrian school, who obtained information about India from Indian philosophers, assumed the existence of a subtle ethereal body which is identical with the linga-çarīra of the Sānkhya system. Finally, the many heavens of the Gnostics are evidently derived from the fantastic cosmogony of later Buddhism.

  With regard to the present century, the influence of Indian thought on the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann is well known. How great an impression the Upanishads produced on the former, even in a second-hand Latin translation, may be inferred from his writing that they were his consolation in life and would be so in death.

  In Science, too, the debt of Europe to India has been considerable. There is, in the first place, the great fact that the Indians invented the numerical figures used all over the world. The influence which the decimal system of reckoning dependent on those figures has had not only on mathematics, but on the progress of civilisation in general, can hardly be over-estimated. During the eighth and ninth centuries the Indians became the teachers in arithmetic and algebra of the Arabs, and through them of the nations of the West. Thus, though we call the latter science by an Arabic name, it is a gift we owe to India.

  In Geometry the points of contact between the Çulva Sūtras and the work of the Greeks are so considerable, that, according to Cantor, the historian of mathematics, borrowing must have taken place on one side or the other. In the opinion of that authority, the Çulva Sūtras were influenced by the Alexandrian geometry of Hero (215 B.C.), which, he thinks, came to India after 100 B.C. The Çulva Sūtras are, however, probably far earlier than that date, for they form an integral portion of the Çrauta Sūtras, and their geometry is a part of the Brahmanical theology, having taken its rise in India from practical motives as much as the science of grammar. The prose parts of the Yajurvedas and the Brāhmaṇas constantly speak of the arrangement of the sacrificial ground and the construction of altars according to very strict rules, the slightest deviation from which might cause the greatest disaster. It is not likely that the exclusive Brahmans should have been willing to borrow anything closely connected with their religion from foreigners.

  Of Astronomy the ancient Indians had but slight independent knowledge. It is probable that they derived their early acquaintance with the twenty-eight divisions of the moon’s orbit from the Chaldeans through their commercial relations with the Phœnicians. Indian astronomy did not really begin to flourish till it was affected by that of Greece; it is indeed the one science in which undoubtedly strong Greek influence can be proved. The debt which the native astronomers always acknowledge they owe to the Yavanas is sufficiently obvious from the numerous Greek terms in Indian astronomical writings. Thus, in Varāha Mihira’s Horā-çāstra the signs of the zodiac are enumerated either by Sanskrit names translated from the Greek or by the original Greek names, as Āra for Ares, Heli for Hēlios, Jyau for Zeus. Many technical terms were directly borrowed from Greek works, as kendra for kentron, jāmitra for diametron. Some of the very names of the oldest astronomical treatises of the Indians indicate their Western origin. Thus the Romaka-siddhānta means the “Roman manual.” The title of Varāha Mihira’s Horā-çāstra contains the Greek word hōrā.

  In a few respects, however, the Indians independently advanced astronomical science further than the Greeks themselves, and at a later period they in their turn influenced the West even in astronomy. For in the eighth and ninth centuries they became the teachers of the Arabs in this science also. The siddhāntas (Arabic Sind Hind), the writings of Āryabhaṭa (called Arjehīr), and the Ahargaṇa (Arkand), attributed to Brahmagupta, were translated or adapted by the Arabs, and Khalifs of Bagdad repeatedly summoned Indian astronomers to their court to supervise this work. Through the Arabs, Indian astronomy then migrated to Europe, which in this case only received back in a roundabout way what it had given long before. Thus the Sanskrit word uchcha, “apex of a planet’s orbit,” was borrowed in the form of aux (gen. aug-is) in Latin translations of Arabic astronomers.

  After Bhāskara (twelfth century), Hindu astronomy, ceasing to make further progress, became once more merged in the astrology from which it had sprung. It was now the turn of the Arabs, and, by a strange inversion of things, an Arabic writer of the ninth century who had written on Indian astronomy and arithmetic, in this period became an object of study to the Hindus. The old Greek terms remained, but new Arabic ones were added as the necessity for them arose.

  The question as to whether Indian Medical Science in its earlier period was affected by that of the Greeks cannot yet be answered with certainty, the two systems not having hitherto been compared with sufficient care. Recently, however, some close parallels have been discovered between the works of Hippocrates and Charaka (according to a Chinese authority, the official physician of King Kanishka), which render Greek influence before the beginning of our era likely.

  On the other hand, the effect of Hindu medical science upon the Arabs after about 700 A.D. was considerable, for the Khalifs of Bagdad caused several books on the subject to be translated. The works of Charaka and Suçruta (probably not later than the fourth century A.D.) were rendered into Arabic at the close of the eighth century, and are quoted as authorities by the celebrated Arabic physician Al-Razi, who died in 932 A.D. Arabic medicine in its turn became the chief authority, down to the seventeenth century, of European physicians. By the latter Indian medical authors must have been thought highly of, for Charaka is repeatedly mentioned in the Latin translations of the Arab writers Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), Rhazes (Al-Razi), and Serapion (Ibn Sarāfyūn). In modern days European surgery has borrowed the operation of rhinoplasty, or the formation of artificial noses, from India, where Englishmen became acquainted with the art in the last century.

  We have already seen that the discovery of the Sanskrit language and literature led, in the present century, to the foundation of the two new sciences of Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology. Through the latter it has even affected the practical school-teaching of the classical languages in Europe. The interest in Buddhism has already produced an immense literature in Europe. Some of the finest lyrics of Heine, and works like Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, to mention only a few instances, have drawn their inspiration from Sanskrit poetry. The intellectual debt of Europe to Sanskrit literature has thus been undeniably great; it may perhaps become greater still in the years that are to come.

  Appendix on Technical Literature

  Law.

  ON SANSKRIT LEGAL literature in general, consult the very valuable work of Jolly, Recht und Sitte, in Bühler’s Encyclopædia, 1896 (complete bibliography). There are several secondary Dharma Sūtras of the post-Vedic period. The most important of these is the Vaishṇava Dharma Çāstra or Vishṇu Smṛiti (closely connected with the Kāṭhaka Gṛihya Sūtra), not earlier than 200 A.D. in its final redaction (ed. by Jolly, Calcutta, 1881, trans. by him in the Sacred Books of the East, Oxford, 1880). The regular post-Vedic lawbooks are metrical (mostly in çlokas). They are much wider in scope than the Dharma Sūtras, which are limited to matters connected with religion. The most important and earliest of the metrical Smṛitis is the Mānava Dharma Çāstra, or Code of Manu, not improbably based on a Mānava Dharma Sūtra. It is closely connected with the Mahābhārata, of which three books alone (iii., xii., xvi.) contain as many as 260 of its 2684 çlokas. It probably assumed its present shape not much later than 200 A.D. It was ed. by Jolly, London, 1887; trans. by Bühler, with valuable introd., in the Sacred Books, Oxford, 1886; also trans. by Burnell (ed. by Hopkins), London, 1884; text ed., with seven comm., by Mandlik, Bombay, 1886; text, with Kullūka’s comm., Bombay, 1888, better than Nirn. Sāg. Pr., ed. 1887. Next comes the Yājnavalkya Dharma Çāstra, which is much more concise (1009 çlokas). It was probably based on a Dharma Sūtra of the White Yajurveda; its third section resembles the Pāraskara Gṛihya Sūtra, but it is unmistak
ably connected with the Mānava Gṛihya Sūtra of the Black Yajurveda. Its approximate date seems to be about 350 A.D. Its author probably belonged to Mithilā, capital of Videha (Tirhut). Yājnavalkya, ed. and trans, by Stenzler, Berlin, 1849; with comm. Mitāksharā, 3rd ed., Bombay, 1892. The Nārada Smṛiti is the first to limit dharma to law in the strict sense. It contains more than 12,000 çlokas, and appears to have been founded chiefly on Manu. Bāṇa mentions a Nāradīya Dharma Çāstra, and Nārada was annotated by one of the earliest legal commentators in the eighth century. His date is probably about 500 A.D. Nārada, ed. by Jolly, Calcutta, 1885, trans. by him in Sacred Books, vol. xxxiii. 1889. A late lawbook is the Parāçara Smṛiti (anterior to 1300 A.D.), ed. in Bombay Sansk. Series, 1893; trans. Bibl. Ind., 1887. The second stage of post-Vedic legal literature is formed by the commentaries. The oldest one preserved is that of Medhātithi on Manu; he dates from about 900 A.D. The most famous comm. on Manu is that of Kullūka-bhaṭṭa, composed at Benares in the fifteenth century, but it is nothing more than a plagiarism of Govindarāja, a commentator of the twelfth century. The most celebrated comm. on Yājnavalkya is the Mitāksharā of Vijnāneçvara, composed about 1100 A.D. It early attained to the position of a standard work, not only in the Dekhan, but even in Benares and a great part of Northern India. In the present century it acquired the greatest importance in the practice of the Anglo-Indian law-courts through Colebrooke’s translation of the section which it contains on the law of inheritance. From about 1000 A.D. onwards, an innumerable multitude of legal compendia, called Dharma-nibandhas, was produced in India. The most imposing of them is the voluminous work in five parts entitled Chaturvarga-chintāmaṇi, composed by Hemādri about 1300 A.D. It hardly treats of law at all, but is a perfect mine of interesting quotations from the Smṛitis and the Purāṇas; it has been edited in the Bibl. Ind. The Dharmaratna of Jīmūtavāhana (probably fifteenth century) may here be mentioned, because part of it is the famous treatise on the law of inheritance entitled Dāyabhāga, which is the chief work of the Bengal School on the subject, and was translated by Colebrooke. It should be noted that the Indian Smṛitis are not on the same footing as the lawbooks of other nations, but are works of private individuals; they were also written by Brahmans for Brahmans, whose caste pretensions they consequently exaggerate. It is therefore important to check their statements by outside evidence.