The Historians' History of the World 02

These circumstances combined with the more passive and vegetative nature of the people, were favourable to the efforts of the Brahmans to subjugate the whole external and internal life of the nation to priestly dominion. They supplanted the old nature-religion by the pantheistic emanation doctrine of Brahma as the soul of the world, and gave the heroic Indra and his crowds of gods a subordinate place as guardians of the world. They restricted the free development of national power by a strict exclusive order of caste, in which they took the foremost place; and they repressed all natural activity by endless ceremonial and ritualistic laws, by sacrifices and purifications. They cast a gloom over life on earth and suppressed all pleasure in life and joyous impulse by the terrifying doctrine of rebirth and hell punishment. They taught a gloomy asceticism full of expiations and penances, the mortification of the flesh and all sensual pleasure by absorption in an imaginary Divine Being as the surest way to free the soul from the bonds of the body and to restore it to its heavenly home from this miserable earthly life.

Moreover the Brahmans not only obtained dominion over the domain of religion, and endowed it with its peculiar spiritualistic character, but they tried to gain power over and regulate with their precepts the state and law, and civil life in all its manifestations. With this end in view, they put into effect a code of law, ostensibly coming from Manu, which was to have authority in all Indian states and which by dint of severe punishments, and a strict royal despotism, based upon the power of officials and police, kept the people in a state of obedient submission.

The Brahmans were more anxious for the Indians to lead a uniform existence according to the precepts of the law, than for the separate kingdoms to unite into a political whole, and form a power with strong external relations. Therefore the Indian nation was never united by a common alliance, but just as the different castes existed side by side, but separated and without any common interest, so the Indian country was broken up into a lot of smaller or greater states without any external connection. They never formed a federal state, nor even a confederation of states. Separated and asunder, and not seldom in hostile relations, the different kingdoms were as distinct as the castes, and the kingdoms themselves consisted in turn of a lot of disunited villages and city communities only loosely connected together for convenience of taxation and supervision.

These political and social divisions and disruptions were not calculated to turn the attention of the Indian race to political life, so it recoiled from the wretched régime in which gloomy tyranny suppressed all joy in life, and watched over every spiritual activity and sought its happiness and salvation in the realm of faith and fantasy, in the world of imagination and dreams. It submerged itself in the divine, it filled heaven and earth with spirits and higher beings of every kind, and in the fascinating world of legends and stories of saints, of fables of miracles, and myths of penitents, it forgot the real world with its oppression of castes, its despotism of princes and officials, and its blood-sucking system of taxation. Thus did the Indians on the Ganges withdraw more than any other race from real practical life, for the “realm of fantasy was their fatherland, and heaven was their home.”

This was the line taken by Indian culture until the sixth century before our era, and it spread over a great part of the peninsula of the Deccan more by the Brahmanical missions and colonisation, than by force of arms. Then Buddhism developed out of Brahmanism and became a mighty ferment for the whole of eastern Asia. Moreover, the new doctrine was not without its influence on the Brahmanic religious system. The perception that the people were so much attached to the doctrine of Buddha because it cherished the belief that a god had appeared in human form on earth, led the Brahmans to the development of the doctrine of incarnations. They divided the creator Brahma, who always remained an incomprehensible idea to the popular mind, into three forms, and taught that the most popular and beneficent form of this triune deity, Vishnu, the vivifying, supporting spirit of nature, appeared from time to time on earth in human form, to restore order to the disturbed arrangement of the world and to lead back erring humanity to the right road. Rama and Krishna, the heroes of the national epics, were represented as such incarnations of Vishnu and the songs of the heroes were reconstructed according to this idea. Therefore, the profound speech of Bhagavad-gita was incorporated in the Mahabharata, in which the attempt to reconcile the faith of the Buddhists with the doctrine of Brahma is evident.