The Historians' History of the World 02

Besides these restraints on eating, a Brahman is subjected to a multitude of minute regulations relating to the most ordinary occupations of life, the transgressing of any of which is nevertheless to be considered as a sin. Drinking spirits is classed in the first degree of crime. Performing sacrifices to destroy the innocent only falls under the third. Under the same penance with some real offences come giving pain to a Brahman and “smelling things not fit to be smelled.” Some penances would, if compulsory, be punishments of the most atrocious cruelty. They are sufficiently absurd when left, as they are, to the will of the offenders, to be employed in averting exclusion from society in this world or retribution in the next. For incest with the wife of a father, natural or spiritual, or with a sister, connection with a child under the age of puberty, or with a woman of the lowest class, the penance is death by burning on an iron bed, or embracing a red-hot metal image. For drinking spirits the penance is death by drinking the boiling hot urine of a cow.

The other expiations are mostly made by fines and austerities. The fines are almost always in cattle to be given to Brahmans, some as high as a bull and a thousand cows. They, also, are oddly enough proportioned: for killing a snake a Brahman must give a hoe; for killing an eunuch, a load of rice straw. Saying “hush” or “pish” to a superior, or overpowering a Brahman in argument, involve each a slight penance. Killing insects, and even cutting down plants and grass (if not for a useful purpose), require a penance, since plants also are supposed to be endued with feeling. One passage about expiation is characteristic in many ways. “A priest who should retain in his memory the whole Rig-Veda would be absolved from all guilt, even if he had slain the inhabitants of the three worlds, and had eaten food from the foulest hands.”

The effect of the religion of Manu on morals is, indeed, generally good. The essential distinction between right and wrong, it has been seen, is strongly marked at the outset, and is in general well preserved. The well-known passages relating to false evidence, one or two where the property of another may be appropriated for the purposes of sacrifice, and some laxity in the means by which a king may detect and seize offenders, are the only exceptions noted. On the other hand, there are numerous injunctions to justice, truth, and virtue; and many are the evils, both in this world and the next, which are said to follow from vicious conduct. The upright man need not be cast down, though oppressed with penury, while “the unjust man attains no felicity, nor he whose wealth proceeds from false evidence.”

The moral duties are in one place distinctly declared to be superior to the ceremonial ones. The punishments of a future state are as much directed against the offences which disturb society as against sins affecting religion. One maxim, however, on this subject, is of a less laudable tendency; for it declares that the men who receive from the government the punishment due to their crimes go pure to heaven, and become as clean as those who have done well.

It may be observed, in conclusion, that the morality thus enjoined by the law was not, as now, sapped by the example of fabled gods, or by the debauchery permitted in the religious ceremonies of certain sects. From many passages cited in different places it has been shown that the code is not by any means deficient in generous maxims or in elevated sentiments; but the general tendency of the Brahman morality is rather towards innocence than active virtue, and its main objects are to enjoy tranquillity and to prevent pain or evil to any sentient being.c

Soul Transmigration

It is well known that the metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul into various orders of being, reviving in one form when it ceases to exist in another, is the tenet of the Hindus. The Brahmans grafted upon it, in their usual way, a number of fantastic refinements, and gave to their ideas on this subject a more systematic form than is usual with those eccentric theologians. They describe the mind as characterised by three qualities—goodness, passion, darkness. According as any soul is distinguished by one or another of those qualities in its present life, is the species of being into which it migrates in the life to come.