Читать книгу India, Old and New - Sir Valentine Chirol - Страница 8

The very birth of Brahmans is a constant incarnation of Dharma. … When a Brahman springs to light he is born above the world, the chief of all creatures, assigned to guard the treasury of duties, religious and civil. Whatever exists in the world is all in effect, though not in form, the wealth of the Brahman, since the Brahman is entitled to it all by his primogeniture and eminence of birth.

Every offence committed by a Brahman involves a relatively slight penalty; every offence committed against him the direst punishment. Next to the Brahman, but far beneath him, is the Kshatrya and beneath him again the Vaishya. The Shudras are the fourth caste that exists chiefly to serve the three twice-born castes, and above all the Brahman. As Sir William Jones observes in the preface to the translation which he was the first to make a little more than a century ago of these extraordinarily full and detailed ordinances, they represent a system of combined despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law, but artfully conspiring to give mutual support with mutual checks. But though they abound with minute and childish formalities, though they prescribe ceremonies often ridiculous, though the punishments they enact are partial and fanciful, for some crimes dreadfully cruel, for others reprehensibly slight, though the very morals they lay down, rigid enough on the whole, are in one or two instances, as in the case of light oaths and of pious perjury, dangerously relaxed, one must, nevertheless, admit that, subject to those grave limitations, a spirit of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable tenderness to all sentient creatures pervades the whole work, and the style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language of legislation and extorts a respectful awe. Above all it is well to remember that the ordinances of Manu still constitute to-day the framework of Hindu society, and Brahman judges of the Indian High Courts, who administer our own very different codes, still cling to them in private life and quote them in political controversies as the repositories of inspired wisdom.

It is on this background of tangled religious beliefs and abstruse philosophic speculations and very precise and elaborate laws framed to safeguard the twofold authority of priests and kings, but of the latter always in subordination to the former, that we see men and cities and organised states assume for the first time historic substance towards the sixth century B.C. From that date onwards we are on firmer ground. For though even in much later times the Hindus never produced historians in the strict sense of the term, we are able to call in aid the valuable testimony not only of a few indigenous chroniclers but also of Greek and Chinese and Arab writers and travellers, as well as the authoritative evidence supplied by epigraphy and numismatics; and though for many centuries still very infrequently, the precious remains of ancient monuments. But the original background is never effaced, for the whole religious and social system, the whole philosophic outlook upon the world of which I have sought to outline the long and laborious evolution through prehistoric ages, remained fundamentally immune against change until the advent of the British to India subjected them to the solvent of Western civilisation.

One of the most striking peculiarities of Hinduism is that its origin cannot be associated with any single great teacher or prophet, however legendary. Still less can it be identified with the personal inspiration of a Moses or a Christ, of a Confucius or a Mahomed. Only when we reach the firmer ground of historic times does any commanding personality emerge to leave a definite and abiding impress upon successive ages. The first and the greatest is Buddha, and we can still trace to-day his footsteps in the places where he actually stood and delivered his message to the world. It was at Buddh Gaya that, after fleeing from the pomp and luxury of his father's royal palace, he sat and meditated under the Bo-tree on the vanity and misery of human life, but it was at Rajagriha, "the King's House," that he first began to preach. Rajagriha, about 40 miles S.S.E. of the modern Patna, was then the capital of one of the many small kingdoms that had grown up in the broad valley of the Ganges. It was already an ancient city of some fame, for the Mahabharata mentions all the five hills which, as the first Chinese pilgrim, Fa-Hien, puts it, "encompass it with a girdle like the walls of a town." It was itself a walled city, and some of the walls, as we can still see them to-day, represent most probably the earliest structure raised in India by human hands that has survived down to our own times. They were no jerry-builders then. Strengthened at sundry points by great square bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement, but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks not less carefully laid and packed. They merely supplemented and completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of hills, rising to 1200 feet, which shut off Rajagriha from the plain of Bihar. On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Rajagriha described it—"a solitary peak rising to a great height on which vultures make their abode." Many had been the revolutions of the wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture. The swoop of those great birds seemed to invest the whole scene with a new and living reality. Across the intervening centuries I could follow King Bimbisara, who reigned in those days at Rajagriha, proceeding along the causeway of rough, undressed stones, which can be traced to-day to the foot of the mountain and up its rocky flanks, after his men had "levelled the valley and spanned the precipices, and with the stones had made a staircase about ten paces wide," so that he should himself be carried up to wait in his own royal person on the Lord Buddha. There, marked to the present day by the remains of two large stupas, was the place where the king alighted from his litter to go forward on foot, and farther up again the spot where he dismissed his followers and went on alone to invite the Buddha to come down and dwell in his capital.

That must have been about 500 B.C., and Buddha spent thereafter a considerable portion of his time in the bamboo garden which King Bimbisara presented to him on the outskirts of Rajagriha. There, and in his annual wanderings through the country, he delivered to the poor and to the rich, to the Brahman and to the sinner, to princes and peasants, to women as well as to men, his message of spiritual and social deliverance from the thraldom of the flesh and from the tyranny of caste.

With the actual doctrines of Buddhism I do not propose to deal. There is nothing in them that could not be reconciled with those of the Vedanta, and they are especially closely akin to the Sankhya system. But the driving force of Buddhism, as also of Jainism, which grew up at the same time as Buddhism under the inspiration of another great reformer, Mahavira, who is said to have been a cousin of King Bimbisara, was a spirit of revolt against Brahmanical Hinduism, and a new sense of social solidarity which appealed to all classes and castes, and to women as well as to men. The Vedanta reserved the study of the scriptures to men of the three "twice-born" castes, and placed it under the supreme authority of the Brahmans. Both Buddha and Mahavira recognised no such restrictions, though they did not refuse reverence to the Brahman as a man of special learning. The religious orders which they founded were open to all, and these orders included nuns as well as monks. This was the rock on which they split with Hinduism. This was the social revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for centuries.

Though King Bimbisara welcomed the Buddha to his capital, and Buddhism made rapid headway amongst the masses, he does not appear to have himself embraced the new religion, and it is not till after Alexander the Great's expedition had for the first time brought an European conqueror on to Indian soil, and a new dynasty had transferred the seat of government to Pataliputra, the modern Patna, on the Ganges, that perhaps the greatest of Indian rulers, the Emperor Asoka, who reigned from 272 to circa 232 B.C., made Buddhism the state religion of his Empire. Tradition has it, that when Buddha on his last wanderings passed by the fort which King Ajatasatni was building at Pataliputra, he prophesied for it a great and glorious future. It had already fulfilled that prophecy when the Greek Ambassador, Megasthenes, visited it in 303 B.C. A few remains only are being laboriously rescued from the waters of the Ganges, under which Pataliputra is for the most part buried. But at that time it spread for ten miles along the river front; five hundred and seventy towers crowned its walls, which were pierced by sixty-four gates, and the total circumference of the city was twenty-four miles. The palace rivalled those of the Kings of Persia, and a striking topographical similarity has been lately traced between the artificial features of the lay-out of Pataliputra and the natural features of Persepolis, King Darius's capital in Southern Persia.

Pataliputra became the capital of India under Chandragupta Maurya, who, soldier of fortune and usurper that he was, transformed the small kingdom of Magadha into a mighty empire. Known to Greek historians as Sandrokottos, young Chandragupta had been in Alexander's camp on the Indus, and had even, it is said, offered his services to the Macedonian king. In the confusion which followed Alexander's death, he had raised an army with which he fell on the Macedonian frontier garrisons, and then, flushed with victory, turned upon the King of Magadha, whom he dethroned. After eighteen years of constant fighting he had extended his frontiers to the Hindu Kush in the north, and nearly down to the latitude of Madras in the south. He had, at the same time, established a remarkable system of both civil and military administration by which he was able to consolidate his vast conquests. His war office was scientifically divided into six boards for maintaining and supplying his huge fighting force of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 9000 elephants, and 8000 war chariots, besides fully equipped transport and commissariat services. No less scientific was the system of civil government as illustrated by the municipal institutions of Pataliputra. There, again, there were six boards dealing respectively with trade, industries, wages, local taxation, the control of foreign residents and visitors, and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, with vital statistics. Equally admirable was the solicitude displayed for agriculture, then, as now, the greatest of Indian industries, and for its handmaid, irrigation. The people themselves, if we may believe Megasthenes, were a model people well worthy of a model government, though if he does not exaggerate, one is driven to wonder at the necessity for such fearful penalties as were inflicted for the most trivial breaches of the law. But behind Chandragupta the power of the Brahman was still clearly entrenched, for his chief minister was a Brahman, Chanakya, who had followed his fortunes from their first adventurous beginnings.

The stately fabric which Chandragupta built up during his own twenty-five years' reign, circa 322–297 B.C., endured during the reign of his son Bendusara, of whom scarcely anything is known, and at the end of another twenty-five years passed on, undiminished, to his great successor, Asoka, whose unique experiment would have been scarcely possible had he not succeeded to an empire already firmly consolidated at home and abroad. When he came to the throne, about 272 B.C., Asoka had served his apprenticeship in the art of government as viceroy, first in the north at Taxila, and then in the west at Ujjain. He had been brought up by Brahmans in the manner befitting his rank. Buddhist tradition would have us believe that until his conversion he was a monster of cruelty; but there is scarcely enough to warrant that indictment in the fact that he began his reign with a war of aggression, for which he afterwards expressed the deepest remorse. It was, indeed, from that moment that he determined to be henceforth a prince of peace; but it is quite as probable that his determination inclined him more and more to turn his ear to Buddhist teaching as that Buddhist teaching prompted his determination.

No monarch has ever recorded the laws which he gave to his people in such imperishable shape. They are to be seen to the present day cut into granite pillars or chiselled into the face of the living rock in almost every part of what was then the Empire of the Mauryas, from the Peshawar district in the north to Mysore and the Madras Presidency in the south, from the Kathiawar Peninsula in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east. The pillars are often at the same time monuments of artistic design and workmanship, as, above all, the Garnath pillar near Benares with its magnificent capital of the well-known Persepolitan type and its four lions supporting the stone Wheel of the Law, first promulgated on that spot. Many more of Asoka's monuments may yet be discovered, but the eleven pillar edicts and the fourteen rock edicts, not to speak of minor inscriptions already brought to light and deciphered, constitute a body of laws which well deserve to have been made thus imperishable. For no temporal sovereign has ever legislated so fully and exclusively and with such evident conviction for the spiritual advancement and moral elevation of his people. Scarcely less important is the autobiographical value of these inscriptions, which enable one to follow stage by stage the evolution of the Apostle-Emperor's soul. Within a year of the conquest of the Kalinjas, for which he afterwards publicly recorded his remorse, Asoka became a lay disciple of the Buddhist law, and two and a half years later studied as a Buddhist monk. In 257 B.C., the thirteenth year of his reign, he began to preach his series of sermons in stone—sermons that were at the same time laws given to his Empire. His profession of faith was as lofty as it was simple:

The gods who were regarded as true all over India have been shown to be untrue. For the fruit of exertion is not to be attained by a great man only, because even by the small man who chooses to exert himself immense heavenly bliss may be won. … Father and mother must be hearkened to. Similarly, respect for living creatures must be firmly established. Truth must be spoken. These are the virtues of the law of piety which must be practised. … In it are included proper treatment of slaves and servants, honour to teachers, gentleness towards living creatures, and liberality towards ascetics and Brahmans. … All men are my children, and just as I desire for my children that they may enjoy every kind of prosperity and happiness in both this world and the next, so I desire the same for all men.

These principles are applied in all the instructions to his officials. He commends to their special care the primitive jungle folk and the untamed people of the borderlands. He bestows much thought on the alleviation of human suffering, and his injunctions in restriction of the slaughter and maiming of animals and the preservation of life are minute and precise. It is in this connection that the influence of Buddhism on Hinduism has been most permanent, for whilst the primitive Aryan Hindus were beef-eaters, their descendants carried the vegetarian doctrines of Buddhism to the extreme length of condemning cow-killing as the most awful of crimes, next to the killing of a Brahman.

Determined to preserve the unity and discipline of his own church, Asoka's large tolerance sees some good in all creeds. He wishes every man to have the reading of his own scriptures, and whilst reserving his most lavish gifts for Buddhist shrines and monasteries, he does not deny his benefactions to Brahmans and ascetics of other sects. Nor is he content merely to preach and issue orders. His monastic vows, though they lead him to forswear the amusements and even the field sports which had been his youthful pastimes, do not involve the severance of all worldly ties. He is the indefatigable and supreme head of the Church; he visits in solemn pilgrimage all the holy places hallowed by the memory of Buddha, and endows shrines and monasteries and convents with princely munificence; he convenes at Pataliputra a great Buddhist council for combating heresy. But he remains the indefatigable and supreme head of the State. "I am never fully satisfied with my efforts and my despatch of business. Work I must for the welfare of all, and the root of the matter is in effort." He controls a highly trained bureaucracy not unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy and singular loftiness of purpose.

With Asoka Buddhism attained to a supremacy in India which may well be compared with that of Christianity in Europe under Constantine; and it is only by measuring the height to which Buddhism had then risen that we can realise the enduring power of Hinduism, as we see it through successive centuries slowly but irresistibly recovering all the ground it had lost until Buddhism at last disappears almost entirely off the face of India, whereas it continued to spread, though often in very debased forms, over the greater part of Eastern Asia, and still maintains its hold there over more than a third of the total population of the globe.

As with most of the great rulers and conquerors that India has from time to time thrown up, Asoka's life-work fell to pieces almost as soon as he had passed away. Not only did the temporal empire which he built up disintegrate rapidly in the hands of his feeble successors, but Buddhism itself was dethroned within fifty years with the last of his dynasty, slain by the usurper Pushyamitra Sunga, who, after consecrating himself to the Hindu gods with the rites of Rajasuya, celebrated his advent to Paramount Power by reviving the ancient ceremony of Asvamedha, the Sacrifice of the Horse—one of the most characteristic of Brahmanical rites.

It was not till after another great conquering inflow from Central Asia in the first century of our era that Kanishka, the greatest of a new dynasty which had set itself up at Purushpura, situated close to the modern Peshawar, shed a transient gleam of glory over the decline of Buddhism and even restored it to the position of a state religion. But it was a Buddhism already far removed from the purity of Asoka's reign. The most striking feature of this short-lived revival is the artistic inspiration which it derived from Hellenistic sources, of which the museums of Peshawar and Lahore contain so many remarkable illustrations. The theory, at one time very widely entertained, that Alexander's brief incursion into India left any permanent mark on Indian civilisation is now entirely discarded by the best authorities. No Indian author makes even the faintest allusion to him, nor is there any trace of Hellenic influence in the evolution of Indian society, or in the elaborate institutions with which India was endowed by the Mauryan dynasty that followed immediately on the disruption of Alexander's empire. But the Kushans, or Yueh Chis, during the various stages of their slow migration down into Northern India, came into long and close contact with the Indo-Bactrian and Indo-Parthian kingdoms that sprang up after Alexander. The populations were never Hellenised, but their rulers were to some extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation. They spoke Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain, where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to Buddhism. But as these Indo-Scythian kings had not been long enough in India to secure admission to the social aristocracy of Hinduism by that slow process of naturalisation to which so many ruling families have owed their Kshatrya pedigrees, Kanishka, having himself no claim to caste, may well have preferred for reasons of state to favour Buddhism as a creed fundamentally opposed to caste distinctions. Whatever the motives of his conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent stupa, which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited Purushpura five centuries later. To the present day there are traces outside the northern gate of Peshawar of a great Buddhist monastery, also built by Kanishka, which remained a seat of Buddhist learning until it was destroyed by Mahomedan invaders; and it was only a mile from Peshawar that the American Sanskritist, Dr. Spooner, discovered ten years ago the casket containing some of Buddha's bones, which is one of the most perfect specimens of Graeco-Buddhist art. The Buddhist statues and bas-reliefs of that period are Greek rather than Indian in their treatment of sacred history, and even the head of Gautama himself might sometimes be taken for that of a young Greek god.

These exotic influences may indeed have acted as a further solvent upon Buddhism. But in any case, its local and temporary revival as a dominant state religion under Kanishka, whose empire did not long outlive him, failed to arrest its steady resorption into Hinduism. On the one hand, Buddhism itself was losing much of its original purity. The miraculous legends with which the life of Buddha was gradually invested, the almost idolatrous worship paid to him, the belief that he himself was but the last of many incarnations in which the Buddha had already revealed himself from the very beginning of creation—all these later accretions represent, no doubt, the reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic surroundings. But they doubtless helped also to stimulate the growth of the more definite forms of anthropomorphism which characterised the development of Hinduism when the ancient ritual and the more impersonal gods of the Vedas and of the Brahmanas gave way to the cult of such very personal gods as Shiva and Vishnu, with their feminine counterparts, Kali and Lakshmi, and ultimately to the evolution of still more popular deities, some, like Skanda and the elephant-headed Ganesh, closely connected with Shiva; others like Krishna and Rama, avātaras or incarnations—and in many ways extremely human incarnations—of Vishnu. At the same time, the Aryan Hindus, as they went on subduing the numerous aboriginal races of India, constantly facilitated their assimilation by the more or less direct adoption of their primitive deities and religious customs. The two great epics, the Mahabharata, with its wonderful episode, the Baghavat-Ghita, which is the apotheosis of Krishna, and the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama, show the infusion into Hinduism of a distinctly national spirit in direct opposition to the almost cosmopolitan catholicity of Buddhism, sufficiently elastic to adapt itself even to the political aspirations of non-Hindu conquerors as well as of non-Hindu races beyond the borders of Hindustan, in Nepal and in Ceylon, in Burma and in Tibet, in China and in Japan. The conflict between Buddhist and Hindu theology might not have been irreconcilable, for Hinduism, as we know, was quite ready to admit Buddha himself into the privileged circle of its own gods as one of the incarnations of Vishnu. What was irreconcilable was the conflict between a social system based on Brahmanical supremacy and one that denied it—especially after Hinduism had acquired a new sense of Indian patriotism which only reached fuller development in our own times when it was quickened by contact with European nationalism.

Hindus themselves prefer, however, to-day to identify Indian nationalism with the period when from another long interval of darkness, which followed the downfall of the Kushan kingdom, Indian history emerges into the splendour of what has been called "the golden age of Hinduism" in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era under the great Gupta dynasty, who ruled at Ujjain. Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as Ozenī to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva, maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort and danced about with them in a world-shaking frenzy. Her scattered bones fell to earth, and wherever they fell the spot became sacred and a temple sprang up in her honour. One of her elbows fell on the banks of the Sipra at Ujjain, and few shrines enjoy greater or more widespread fame than the great temple of Maha-Kal, consecrated to her worship and that of Shiva. Its wealth was fabulous when it was looted and destroyed by Altamsh and his Pathan Mahomedans in 1235. The present buildings are for the most part barely 200 years old, and remarkable chiefly for the insistency with which the lingam and the bull, the favourite symbols of Shiva, repeat themselves in shrine after shrine. But it attracts immense numbers of pilgrims, especially in every twelfth year, when they flock in hundreds of thousands to Ujjain and camp as near as possible to the river. The peculiarity of the Ujjain festival is that, in memory of the form which Shiva took on when he wooed Uma, it attracts a veritable army of Sanyasis, or mendicants, sometimes as many as fifty thousand, from all parts of India. Seldom, except at the great Jaganath festivals at Puri, is a larger congregation seen of weird and almost inhuman figures; some clothed solely with their long unkempt hair, some with their bodies smeared all over with white ashes, and the symbol of their favourite deity painted conspicuously on their foreheads; some displaying ugly sores or withered limbs as evidence of lifelong mortification of the flesh; some moving as if in a dream and entirely lost to the world's realities; some with frenzied eyes shouting and brandishing their instruments of self-torture; some with a repulsive leer and heavy sensuous jowls affecting a certain coquetry in the ritualistic adornment of their well-fed bodies.

Chandragupta I., the founder of the great dynasty which Hindus extol above all others, was only a petty chieftain by birth, but he was fortunate enough to wed a lady of high lineage, who could trace a connection with the ancient Maurya house of Magadha, and, thanks to this alliance and to his own prowess, he was able at his death to bequeath real kingship to his son, Samadragupta, who, during a fifty years' reign, A.D. 326–375, again welded almost the whole of India north of the Nerbudda river into one empire, and once even spoiled Southern India right down to Cape Comorin. His victories are recorded—with an irony perhaps not wholly accidental—beneath the Asokan inscription on the Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of the sacrificial horse a record of the Asvamedha, which he again revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who reigned in turn for nearly forty years, and has lived in Hindu legend as the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain. The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle between Urdu and Hindi, the battle of religious and political supremacy was largely one of languages. During the centuries of Brahmanical depression that preceded the Gupta dynasty, the more vulgar tongue spoken of the people prevailed. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit, which was the language of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays, and in many other works of which only fragments have survived. Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show to-day. But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples, several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be at all accurately dated. To the credit of Brahmanism be it said that in its hour of triumph it remained at least negatively tolerant, as all purely Indian creeds generally have been. Fa-Hien, who visited India during the reign of Vikramadytia, though dismayed at the desolation which had already overtaken many of the sacred places of Buddhism, pays a generous tribute to the tolerance and statesmanship of that great sovereign. The country seems, indeed, to have enjoyed real prosperity under a paternal and almost model administration.

Yet the Gupta dynasty endured only a little longer than had that of the Mauryas. Its downfall was hastened by the long reign of terror which India went through during the invasion of the White Huns. Europe had undergone a like ordeal nearly a century earlier, for when the Huns began to move out of the steppes of Eastern Asia they poured forth in two separate streams, one of which swept into Eastern Europe, whilst the other flowed more slowly towards Persia and India. What Attila had been to Europe, Mihiragula was to India, and though the domination of the Huns did not long outlive him, the anarchy they left behind them continued for another century, until "the land of Kuru," the cradle and battle-field of so many legendary heroes, produced another heroic figure, who, as King Harsha, filled for more than forty years (606–648) the stage of Indian history with his exploits. He had inherited the blood of the Gupta emperors from his mother, though his father was only a small Raja of Thanesvar, to the north of Delhi. The tragic circumstances in which he succeeded him made a man of him at the early age of fourteen. By the time he was twenty he was "master of the five Indias"—i.e. of nearly the whole of Northern India from Kathiawar to the delta of the Ganges, and henceforth he proved himself as great in peace as in war. In his case the knowledge we owe to Chinese sources is supplemented by the valuable record left by the Brahman Bana, who lived at his court and wrote the Harsha-Charita. Taxation, we are told, was lightened, and the assessment of land revenue was equitable and moderate. Security for life and property was enforced under severe but effective penalties. Education received impartial encouragement whether conducted by Brahmans or by Buddhist monks, and both as a patron of literature, which he himself cultivated by composing dramas, and as a philanthropic ruler King Harsha bestowed his favours with a fairly equal hand on Hinduism and on Buddhism alike. For Buddhism still lingered in the land, and Harsha, who was a mystic and a dreamer as well as a man of action, certainly inclined during his later years towards Buddhism, or, at least, included it in his own eclectic creed.

Hiuen-Tsang, who spent fifteen years in India during Harsha's reign, searching for the relics of early Buddhism in a land from which it was steadily disappearing, has given us a wonderful picture of a religious state-pageant which makes Prayaga, at the triple confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna with the sacred but invisible river, Saraswati, near to the modern city of Allahabad, stand out as another striking landmark in Indian history. Hindus attach great holiness to rivers and their confluence, and this Triveni, or triple confluence, had been specially consecrated by Brahma, who chose that spot for the first Asvamedha. "From ancient times," says the Chinese chronicler, "the kings used to go there to distribute alms, and hence it was known as the Place of Almsgiving. According to tradition more merit is gained by giving one piece of money there than one hundred thousand elsewhere." So King Harsha having invited all alike, whether "followers of the law or heretics, the ascetics and the poor, the orphans and the helpless," the kings of eighteen subordinate kingdoms assembled there with their people to the number of 500,000, and found immense refectories laid out for their refreshment, and long rows of warehouses to receive silk and cotton garments and gold and silver coins for distribution to them. "The first day a statue of Buddha was placed in the shrine erected on the Place of Almsgiving, and there was a distribution of the most precious things and of the garments of greatest value, whilst exquisite viands were served and flowers scattered to the sound of harmonious music. Then all retired to their resting-places. On the second day a statue of the Sun-god was placed in the shrine, and on the third day the statue of Shiva," and the distribution of gifts continued on those days and day after day for a period of over two months, ten thousand Brahmans receiving the lion's share, until, having exhausted all his wealth, even to the jewels and garments he was wearing, King Harsha borrowed a coarse and much-worn garment, and having "adored the Buddhas of the ten countries," he gave vent to his pious delight, exclaiming: "Whilst I was amassing all this wealth I was always afraid lest I should find no safe and secret place to stow it away. Now that I have deposited it by alms-giving in the Field of Happiness I know that it is for ever in safety. I pray that in my future lives I may amass in like manner great treasures and give them away in alms so as to obtain the ten divine faculties in all their plenitude."

Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India, behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the picture left to us is singularly complete. The first day is a sort of farewell tribute to the waning glory of Buddha, and the second to the ancient majesty of the Vedic gods; but they only prepare the way for the culminating worship, on the third day, of the terrific figure of Shiva, who had already been raised to one of the highest, if not the highest, throne in the Hindu pantheon, which he still retains—Shiva, the master of life and death, whose favourite emblem is the phallus, and from whose third eye bursts forth the flame which is one day to consume the world. Around Harsha, and devouring his gifts until, at the end of two months, they are wholly exhausted, are the Brahmans, "born above the world, assigned to guard the treasury of duties, civil and religious," through whom alone the wrath of angry gods can be appeased and present and future life be made safe in the descending hierarchy of caste.

Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descendants of relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.

Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all, and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.

The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws—in no connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a common social function or occupation past or present, some on peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation, in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain penalties of which the most signal is the sentence of irrevocable exclusion or out-casting. The Census of 1901 was the first to attempt a thorough classification of Indian castes, and the number of the main castes enumerated in it is well over two thousand, each one divided up again into almost endless sub-castes. The keystone of the whole caste system is the supremacy of the quasi-sacerdotal caste of Brahmans—a caste which constitutes in some respects the proudest and closest aristocracy that the world has ever seen, since it is not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin. An Indian is either born a Brahman or he is not. No power on earth can make him a Brahman. Not all Brahmans were learned even in the old days of Hinduism, though it was to their monopoly of such learning as there then was that they owed their ascendancy over the warrior kings. Nor do all Brahmans minister in the temples. Strangely enough the minority who do are looked down upon by their own castemen. The majority pursue such worldly avocations, often quite humble, as are permissible for them under their caste laws. The Brahmans were wise enough, too, to temper the fundamental rigidity of the system with sufficient elasticity to absorb the new elements with which it came into contact, and in most cases gradually to reabsorb such elements as from time to time rebelled against it. The process by which new castes may be admitted into the pale of Hinduism, or the status of existing castes be from time to time readjusted to new conditions, has been admirably explained by Sir Alfred Lyall. But the process can be worked only under Brahmanical authority, and the supreme sanction for all caste laws rests solely with the Brahmans, whilst of all caste laws the most inexorable is the supremacy of the Brahman. Therein lies the secret of the great influence which, for good as well as for evil, he has always wielded over the masses. For though in theory there could be no escape from the bondage of caste, individuals, and even a whole group, would sometimes find ways and means of propitiating the Brahmans who ministered to their spiritual needs, and the miraculous intervention of a favouring god or the discovery of a long-lost but entirely mythical ancestor would secure their social uplift on to a higher rung of the caste-ladder.

Such a system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism with so little force of organised political cohesion that the Hindu states of ancient India, with their superior culture and civilisation, were sooner or later swept away by the devastating flood of Mahomedan conquest, whilst the social structure of Hinduism, just because it consisted of such an infinity of water-tight compartments each vital and self-sufficing, could be buffeted again and again and even almost submerged by the waves without ever breaking up.