its own portion: the "litigants" mentioned at the end are merely the champions of the two villages between which the dispute lies. By the "king" is meant, no doubt, the great noble, or lord of the manor, who is supreme in that part of the country.

The following passage on the duties of a Vaisya or husbandman (the third caste, reckoned as "twice-born" along with the two upper castes) is partly legislation, partly advice and counsel :

After a Vaisya has received the sacraments and has taken a wife, he shall be always attentive to the business whereby he may subsist and to that of trading cattle....A Vaisya must never conceive this wish, "I will not keep cattle ; and if a Vaisya is willing to keep them, they must never be kept by men of other castes. A Vaisya must know the respective value of gems, of pearls, of coral, of metals, of cloth made of thread, of perfumes, of condiments. He must be acquainted with the manner of sowing of seeds, and with the good and bad qualities of fields, and he must perfectly know all measures and weights. Moreover, the excellence and defects of commodities, the advantages and disadvantages of different countries, the probable profit and loss on merchandise, and the means of properly rearing cattle. He must be acquainted with the proper wages of servants, with the various languages of men, with the manner of keeping goods, and the rules of purchase and sale. Let him exert himself to the utmost to increase his property in a righteous manner, and let him zealously give food to all created beings. Laws, IX. 326, 327–333.

The practical instinct in the above passage will be felt. A few more distinctly ethical passages may be quoted. On the duty of forgiveness:

A king who desires his own welfare, must always forgive litigants, infants, aged and sick men, who inveigh against him. Ibid. vII. 312.

Women receive just appreciation in the following maxim:

Where women are honoured, there the gods are pleased; but where they are not honoured, no sacred rite yields rewards. Ibid. III. 56.

Nor less in the following:

He only is a perfect man who consists of three persons united, his wife, himself, and his offspring; thus says the Veda, and learned Brâhmanas propound this maxim likewise. "The husband is declared to be one with the wife." Ibid. IX. 45.

One cannot deny that polygamy must have stood considerably in the way of this last maxim; but the intention, amid all practical defects, must be honoured.

Whatever we may think of asceticism, the following instructions to an ascetic may meet our approval:

Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult anybody, and let him not become anybody's enemy for the sake of this perishable body.

Against an angry man let him not in return show anger, let him bless when he is cursed, and let him not utter speech devoid of truth. Ibid. VI. 47, 48.

The following maxim declares the supremacy and importance of conscience :

The Soul itself is the witness of the Soul, and the Soul is the refuge of the Soul; despise not thy own soul, the supreme witness of men. Ibid. VIII. 84.

Such maxims, though embedded in the midst of much inferior matter, do in themselves reach a singular height of excellence. From Indian history it is not possible to illustrate them, for Indian history was not only unwritten, but even the conception of a historical record had not been reached in India in the times of which I have been speaking; and even if we had historical records, the real morality of a people is one of the last things that is illustrated in formal histories. It is one of the virtues of poetry that it brings out the sentiments and character of a nation in a degree which historians find it difficult to rival; and the two vast epics of ancient India, the Mahâ-bhârata and the Râmâyana, while of hardly any value as narratives of material fact, have, amid the wildness of their contents, something of the human touch. Those who wish to see this exemplified in brief space, may look to the Indian Wisdom of Monier Williams, and read, from the Râmâyana, the affecting story of the accidental death of the hermit's son through the arrow of king Dasaratha ; and from the Mahâ-bhârata, the tale of Satyavan and his wife Savitri. The Mahâ-bhârata contains that wonderful song, the Bhagavad-gîtâ, which will be found translated in the eighth volume of the Sacred Books of the East; a song in which pantheistic theory is mingled with ardent devotion to the Deity, even to the incarnate Deity (for as such Krishna, who speaks the divine word, is brought before us); a song in which all passion and all desire are represented as shrivelling up before the imperious claim of duty; and this claim has its example in the great warrior Arjuna, who trembles and shrinks, not with cowardly reluctance, before the thought of killing his own kinsmen ranged against him in the field of battle, and is told that such reluctance is a sin. The Bhagavad-gîtâ is probably the work in which the original Hindu religion reaches the highest point; concerning the date of it very various opinions have been held. On this point I have no claim to an opinion; but Mr Telang (the translator of the Bhagavad-gîtâ in the Sacred Books of the East,

and himself a Hindu) pleads impressively on behalf of an early date; that is, a date earlier, and probably a good deal earlier, than 300 B.C.

Let me close this portion of my subject by quoting from the Upanishads the ideal description of the feelings of a righteous soul, just before it passes through the veil of death:

The door of the True is covered with a golden disk. Open that, O Pûshan, that we may see the nature of the True. O Pûshan, only seer, Yama (judge), Sûrya (sun), son of Prajapati, spread thy rays and gather them! The light which is thy fairest form, I see it. I am what he is (viz. the person in the sun). Breath to air, and to the immortal! Then this my body ends in ashes. Om! Mind, remember! Remember thy deeds! Mind, remember! Remember thy deeds! Again, lead us on to wealth (beatitude) by a good path, thou, O God, who knowest all things! Keep far from us crooked evil, and we shall offer thee the fullest praise! Sacred Books of the East, vol. 1. pp. 313, 314.

The famous word "Om " in the above passage is best rendered by "Yea." It may remind us of "the Everlasting Yea" in the sense in which that phrase has been used by Carlyle; a phrase indicating the highest law, the highest blessedness; a supreme state, higher than which is nothing conceivable.

CHAPTER III

INDIA CONTINUED: SIDDARTHA THE BUDDHA

WHEN a form of religion has lasted for many ages, and has been developed in many various ways, rising sometimes to great heights of self-denying virtue, but stained at other times by the sins and infirmities which belong to human nature, it is then to be expected that attempts should, in one quarter or another, be made to reform it, to amend its faults, and to gather all the good that is in it into a new combination, and very likely with a new centre.

The religion of ancient India, which I described in the foregoing chapter, was one that peculiarly called for reform. It was a valiant effort to attain the true touch, whereby an invisible world might be revealed to us; but experience did not bear any clear witness that it had succeeded. A strenuous asceticism had been the instrument on which it chiefly relied; but also, a conformity to ancient rule, an adherence to an established order of society, in which the ranks were rigidly divided and kept apart; these were the characteristics of personal and social life that had resulted from the simple habits and natural religion of the early Aryans, when they quitted the high tablelands of Iran and descended into the burning plains to the south of the Himalayan range. We must not too much find fault with their failure, which had, it will have been seen, its redeeming points; but the great and famous attempt to reform it which was made either in the sixth or fifth century before Christ (the date is uncertain, as generally in Indian history) deserves even more of our attention than the original Hindu religion. At the period just mentioned a spirit of reform was in the air; and though obscure compared with Buddhism, the system of Jainism arose about the same time, and endeavoured to make benevolence, conscientiousness, and human reason supreme in the ordering of men's lives, as against the authority of the Vedas and the time-honoured institution of

caste. Jainism still exists; but this brief mention of it must here be sufficient; and to the great reformer, Siddartha the Buddha, I now come.

Siddartha; that was his name as an individual person; but he is also called by his family name of Gautama or Gotama; and again he is called Sakyamuni, the saint of the Sakya race; and lastly, Buddha, the Enlightened One. Let me be permitted to call him Buddha; for that is the name by which, even if not so intrinsically correct, he will best be recognised by the world of to-day.

If we desire to understand Buddhism, we must remember (as has been already said) that it was a purification of the religion of the ancient Hindus, or Brahminism as it may fairly be called; a purification made by a person of extraordinary goodness and no mean intellectual power. The Upanishads, which are the intellectual core of Brahminism, are also the immediate antecedent of Buddhism; and the kinship is manifested alike in the gentleness of temperament which pervades both, and in the sort of ideal aim which they prescribe for mankind at large; although in respect of this ideal aim, Buddhism is not clearer but more obscure than the Upanishads. The idea of absorption into the Absolute Infinite Being has more apparent intelligibility than the Buddhist Nirvâna; I am not saying that it is nearer the truth.

While we bear in mind the historical descent of Buddhism from the Brahmin religion, we must also note the important fact that Siddartha the Buddha sprang from the warrior caste of the Aryan Hindus, the Kshatriyas, and that this warrior caste had in ancient days lost their natural supremacy through the influence (partly deserved, but partly factitious and false) of the Brahmin priesthood. Hence, notwithstanding the gentleness and humility of Buddha himself, he was likely for personal as well as for general reasons to be opposed to the caste system; and similarly the great system of sacrificial observances, which the Brahmins had elaborated in no slight degree for their own exaltation, would have no attraction for him. He did, as a matter of fact, oppose both the caste system and all sacrifices which implied the extinction of life, even of vegetable life. Yet we should be wrong if we supposed that he made open war against either of these points of practice, or against any part of the Brahmin religion. He stood, in the quietest manner, as one independent of all that he saw around him; for though he was in a true sense formed by