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Chaju. Copyright No.
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
ANCIENT INDIA.
LANGUAGE AND RELIGIONS
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PROF. H. OLDENBERG
CHICAGO
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY
(LONDON: 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., E. C.)
189a
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Translations of the articles "Religion of the Veda" and
"Buddhism" copyrighted by The Open Court Publishing Com-
pany, 1896. ,^ ,^ ,.
H^
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Study of Sanskrit> i
The Religion of the Veda 43
Buddhism 78
PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
THE THREE essays forming this little volume originally
appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau of Berlin and are
now published in English by virtue of a special arrangement
with their distinguished author. The first was translated by Prof.
A. H. Gunlogsen of Tacoma, Washington, and the second and
third by Dr. Otto W. Weyer of Eimira, N. Y.
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT.
THE study of Sanskrit, the science of the antiqui-
ties of India, is about a century 0I4. It was in
the year 1784 that a number of men acting in Calcutta
as judges or administrative officers of the East India
Company, formed themselves into a scientific society,
the Asiatic Society. We may say that the founding
of the Asiatic Society was contemporaneous with the
rise of a new branch of historical inquiry, the possi-
bility of which preceding generations had barely or
never thought of.
Englishmen began the work ; soon it was taken up
by other nations ; and in the course of time, in a
much greater degree than is the case with the study
of hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, it has be-
come ever more distinctly a branch of inquiry pecu-
liarly German.
The little band of workers who are busy in the
workshops of this department of science, have not
been accustomed to have the eyes of other men turned
upon their doings — their successes and failures. But,
in spite, nay, rather in consequence of this, it is right
that an attempt should be made to invite even the
most disinterested to an inspection of these places of
industry, and to point out, piece by piece, the work,
or at least part of the work, that has been done
there.
2 ANCIENT INDIA.
There still lies formless in the workshops of this
department of inquiry many a block of unhewn stone,
which perhaps will forever resist the shaping hand.
But still, under the active chisel, many a form has be-
come visible, from whose features distant times and
the past life of a strange people look down upon us —
a people who are related to us, yet whose ways are so
far removed in every respect from our ways.
We shall first cast a glance at the beginning of In-
dian research toward the close of the last century.
We shall trace the way in which the new science, after
the first hasty survey of its territory, at once concen-
trated its efforts to a more profound investigation of
its subject and advanced to an incomparably broader
plane of study. We shall, above all, follow the diffi-
cult course pursued in the study of the Veda, the most
important of the literary remains of ancient India, a
production with which even the works of the oldest
Buddhism are not to be compared in point of histor-
ical importance. Of the problems that this science
encountered, its aspirations, and of the successes that
attended its efforts in solving difficult questions, we
may venture to give a description, or at least an
outline.
T.
The first effective impulse to the study of Sanskrit
and Sanskrit literature was given by Sir William Jones,
who, in 1783, embarked for India to assume the post
of Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort
William. The honor of having inaugurated a new
era of philological inquiry, was heightened, by the lus-
tre and charm of personal character which this gifted
and versatile man exerted upon his contempora-
ries. In prose and in verse Jones is extolled by his
The study of Sanskrit. 3
friends of both sexes as the phoenix of his time, " the
most enHf^htened of the sons of men " — encomiums
many of which a calmer and more distant observer
would be inclined to modify. The correspondence
and other memoranda of Jones, which exist in great
abundance,* furnish the reader of to-day rather the
picture of an indefatigable and euphuistic dilettante,
than that of an earnest investigator, — apart from the
fact that he was alike greatly deficient in discernment
and zeal.
As a young man we find Jones engaged in reading
and reproducing in English verse, the works of Per-
sian and Arabian poets; occasionally also with glimpses
into Chinese literature. Then, again, a project of his
own, an heroic epic — a sort of new ^neid, for which,
and certainly with ingenuity enough, the Phoenician
mythological deities were impressed into service —
was to celebrate the perfections of the English con-
stitution. On the journey to India this man of thirty-
seven sketched a catalogue of the works, which, God
granting him life, he hoped to write after celebrated
models. These models were carefully designated op-
posite the separate projects of the outline. By the
side of this heroic epic (after the pattern of Homer),
we find a history of the war with America (after the
patterns of Thucydides and Polybius), a philosophical
and historical dialogue (after the pattern of Plato),
and other plans of similar works.
With this feeling of omnipotent self-assurance,
wholly untroubled with doubts, Jones was placed in
India before the task of opening a way into the gigan-
* Edited by his biographer, Lord Teignmouth, and often given with more
completeness than appears advisable considering the panegyrical charac-
ter of the biography.
4 ANCIENT INDIA.
tic masses of an unknown literature, of a strange and
beautiful poetry. He was as well qualified for the pur-
pose (perhaps in a higher degree so) as many a more
earnest and gifted scholar might have been.
The situation of affairs which he found in India
forced it upon the European rulers of the land as a
duty, to acquaint themselves with the Sanskrit lan-
guage and its literature. The rapid extension and at
the same time the redoubled activity of the English
rule made it inconceivable that the existence of the
old indigenous civilization and literature of the na-
tion could long remain ignored or merely superfici-
ally recognized.
Preeminently did this necessity assert itself in the
administration of justice, where the policy of the East
India Company imperatively demanded that the na-
tives should be suffered to retain as many of their
laws and customs as it was possible to concede them.
Already, in an act of parliament passed in 1772 in re-
gard to the affairs of the company, a measure had
been incorporated, at the suggestion of Warren Hast-
ings, providing that Mohammedan and Indian lawyers
should take part in court proceedings, in order to give
effect to native laws and assist in the formulation of
judgments. The dependence that thus resulted, of
European judges upon the reliability or unreliability
of Indian pandits, must have been trying indeed, to the
conscientious jurist; for the assertions of Indian coun-
cillors as to the principles of the Law of inheritance,
contract, etc., contained in the native books, were sub-
ject to no control.
Warren Hastings, in order to obviate the difficulty,
had a digest made by several Brahmanical juris-
consults from the old Sanskrit law books, and this was
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 5
translated into English. The undertaking had but little
success, principally because no European was to be
found who could translate directly from the Sanskrit.
A translation had first to be made from Sanskrit into
Persian and from Persian again into English.* The
necessity therefore of gaining direct access to the
Sanskrit language was unquestionable. The under-
taking was not an easy one, though it was still quite
different from such apparently impossible feats of
philological ingenuity as the deciphering of hiero-
glyphic and cuneiform inscriptions.
The knowledge and likewise the use of Sanskrit in
India had lived on in unbroken tradition.f There were
countless pandits who knew Sanskrit as well as the
scholars of the Middle Ages knew Latin, and who
were eminently competent to teach the language. It
was easy to overcome the opposing Brahmanical pre-
judices. To become master, however, of the obstacles
which emanated from the indescribably intricate and
perverted grammatical systemj of the Hindus, offered
greater difficulties, which could only be overcome by
patience and enthusiasm.
Just at the first moments of this trouble came the
arrival of Sir William Jones in India. Immediately
he was the central figure. From him came the found-
ing of the Asiatic Society; from him, the impulse to a
new revision of the Hindu law of contract and inheri-
* Published in 1776, under the title, "A Code of Gentoo Law."
tThis is the case at the present time. Compare, upon this point. Max
Miiller's " India what can it teach us " p. 78 et seq.
^:The original complaint of Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, a missionary in
India about the time of Jones, is well known.— "The devil, with a phenomenal
display of ingenuity and craft, had incited the Brahmanical sages to invent a
language so rich and so complex, that its mysteries might be concealed not
only from the people at large, but even from the very scholars who were
conversant with it."
6 ANCIENT INDIA.
tance, this time undertaken on a surer basis. He as-
sembled about him competent Brahmans versed in
Sanskrit. In the year 1790 he wrote: "Every day I
talk Sanskrit with the pandits; I hope before I leave
India to understand it as I understand Latin."
It was not now a question of research, but of ac-
quisition, of study; that clear and satisfactory results
might rapidly be acquired, and that a proper selection
of noteworthy productions of the Hindu mind might
be made and presented before the eyes of all. Jones
translated the most delightful of all Hindu dramas,
the story of the touching fate of the ascetic maiden,
Sakuntala, who in the sylvan quiet of her retreat was
seen and loved by the kingly hunter Dushjanta— a
work, full of the most delicate sentiment, exhaling
fragrance like the summer splendor of Indian Nature,
and sung in the delicate rhythms of Kalidasa, of in-
spired eloquence.*
Still more important than the version of Sakuntala
was the publication of a second great work, which
Jones translated, the Laws of Manit. It seemed as
though a Lycurgus of a primitive oriental era had
come to light; for this wonderful picture of a strange
people's life was ascribed to the remotest antiquity — a
description of Braiimanical rule by the grace of Brah-
ma, magnified and distorted by priestly pride, in which
the people are nothing, the prince is little, the priest is
everything. In the face of such an abruptly accumu-
lated mass of unexpected revelations, respecting an an-
* It was formerly thought, for reasons that have not withstood the assault
of criticism, that Kalidasa flourished in the first century before Christ; it was
the custom to compare him to the Roman poets of the Augustan era, whose
contemporaries he in that event would about have been. In point of fact he
must be assigned to an era several centuries later,— about the sixth century
after Christ.
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 7
cient civilization hitherto removed from all knowledge,
how could one resist an attempt to give to that civili-
zation and its language a place among known civili-
zations and languages? Wherever the eye turned
weighty and pregnant suggestions offered themselves,
and with them the temptation to let fancy stray in
aimless sallies. What is more, Jones was in no wise
the man to resist such a temptation. The vocabulary
and the grammatical structure of Sanskrit convinced
him that the ancient language of the Hindus was re-
lated to those of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans,
that it must have been derived with them from a com-
mon mother tongue. "^ But side by side with the con-
ception of this incomparably suggestive idea, innumer-
able fanciful theories abound in the works of Jones,
concerning the relationship of the primitive peoples,
where everything was found to be in some way related
to everything else. Now the Hindu tongue was iden-
tified with that of the Old Testament; now Hindu civ-
ilization was brought into connection with South
American civilization. Buddha was said to be Woden;
and the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt were claimed
to shov/ the style of the same workmen who built the
Hindu cave-temples and chiseled the ancient images
of Buddha.
Fortunately for the new study of Sanskrit, the con-
tinuation of the Vv^ork begun b}^ Jones fell to one of the
most cautious and comprehensive observers of facts
that have ever devoted their attention and talent to
*The identity of Hindu words with those of Latin, Greek, and other lan-
guages had been noticed by several before Jones, and likewise the correct ex-
planation of this phenomenon, namely the kinship of the Hindu nation with
the Latins and Greeks, had been declared by Father Pons as early as 1740.
For fuller account, see Benfey, "History of the Science of Language," {Ge-
schichte der Sprachwissenscha/t) pp. 222, 333-341.
8 ANCIENT INDIA.
the study of oriental literatures. This was Henry
Thomas Colebrooke (born 1765; went to India 1782),
the most active in the active band of Indian adminis-
trative officers. He officiated now as an officer of the
government, now again as a justice, then as diplo-
matist — a man well versed in Indian agriculture and
Indian trade. One can scarcely regard without as-
tonishment the multitude of disclosures which, during
the long period he devoted to Sanskrit, he was able
to make from his incomparable collection of manu-
scripts. These to-day are among the principle treas-
ures of the India Office Library. From the province
of Indian poetry, Colebrooke, who well knew the lim-
its of his own power, kept aloof. But in the literature
of law, grammar, philosophy, and astronomy, he had
a wide reading, which in scope may never again be
reached. He it was who made the first comprehen-
sive disclosure in regard to the literature of the Veda.
Colebrooke's investigations are poor in hypotheses;
we may say he withheld too much from seeking to com-
prehend the historical genesis of the subjects with
which he dealt. But he established the actual foun-
dation of broad provinces of Hindu research ; filled
with wonder himself at the ever widening vistas of
that literature Vv^hich v^ere now revealed to him, and
awakening our just wonder by the sure and patient
toil with which he sought to penetrate into those dis-
tant parts.
While Colebrooke was at the height of his activity,
interest in Hindu inquiry began to be awakened in
a country which has done more than any other land
to make of Hindu research a firm and well-established
science — in Germany.
For the discoveries of Jones and Colebrooke there
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 9
could have been no more receptive soil than the Ger-
many of that time, full of spirited interest in the old
national poetry of all nations and occupied with the
stirring movements rife in its own philosophy and Ht-
erature. Apparently, indeed, the latter were closely al-
lied to the spirit of the distant Hindu literature; for
here too oriental romanticism and poetical thought
sought no less boldly than the absolute philosophy of
Germany, to penetrate to the primal and formless
source of all forms. From the beginning, poets stood
in the foremost ranks among the Sanskritists of Ger-
many j there were the two Schlegels and Friedrich
Riickert, and beside these, careful and unassuming,
the great founder of grammatical science, Franz Bopp.
In the year 1808 appeared Friedrich Schlegel's
work, Ueber die Sprache und VVeisheit der Inder (The
Language and Learning of the Hindus). From what
was known to him of Hindu poetry and speculation,
and according to his own ideas of the laws and aims
of the human mind, Schlegel, with warm and fanciful
eloquence, drew a picture of India as a land of exalted
primitive wisdom. Hindu reHgion and Hindu poetry
he described as replete with exuberant power and
Hght, in comparison with which even the noblest phi-
losophy and poetry of Greece was but a feeble spark
The time from which the masterpieces of the Hindus
dated, appeared to him a distant, gigantic, primeval
age of spiritual culture. There was the home of those
earnest teachings, full of gloomy tragedy, of the soul's
migration, and of the dark fate which ordains for all
beings their ways and their end:
Obedient to this purpose set, they wander; from God to plants;
Here, in the abhorred world of existence, that evermoves to destruction.
While Schlegel gave to the world this fanciful
lo ANCIENT INDIA.
picture of Hindu wisdom, highly effective from its
prophetic perspectives, but still wanting in sober
truth, Bopp applied himself, more unassumingly, but
with an incomparably deeper grasp and patient
sagacity, to investigating the grammatical structure
of Sanskrit; and, on the recognized fact of the rela-
tionship of this language with the Persian and the
principal European tongues, to establishing the science
of comparative grammar. In the year 1816 appeared
his Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Ver-
gleichung 7nit jenem der griechische7i, lateinischen, per-
sischen, und germanischen Sprache (Conjugational Sys-
tem of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with that
of the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Teutonic Lan-
guages).
This was no longer merely an attempt to find iso-
lated similarities in the sounds of the v/ords of related
languages, but an attempt to trace back not only
uniformities but also differences to their fixed laws;
and thus in the life and growth of these languages, as
they sprang from a common root and evolved them-
selves into a rich complexity, to discover more and
more the traces of a necessity dominated by definite
principles.
We can here only briefly touch upon the investi-
gations made durfng the last seventy years, for which
Bopp laid the foundation by the publication of his
work. Rarely have such astonishing results been
achieved by science as here. Elucidative of the early
history of the languages of Homer and the old Italian
monuments before they acquired the form in which
we now find them written, the most unexpected wit-
nesses were brought to give testimony; namely, the
languages of the Hindus, the Germans, the Slavs,
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. n
and the Celts. Of these related tongues, the one sheds
light upon the obscure features of the others, just as
natural history explains the stunted organs of some
animals by pointing out the same organs in their orig-
inal, perfect form, in other animals.
The picture of the mother tongue, whose fiHal de-
scendants are the languages of our linguistic family,
was no longer seen in merely vague or doubtful fea-
tures. The laws under whose dominion the system of
sounds and forms in the separate derived languages
have been developed from the mother tongue, are be-
ing ascertained ever more fully and formulated ever
more sharply.
From the very beginning the essential instrument,
yes, the very founciation of this investigation, was the
Sanskrit language. In the beginning, faith in the
primitiveness of Sanskrit in comparison with the rela-
ted languages was too strong. During the last few
years, however, this erroneous conception has been
fully rectified; and this in itself is a decided step in
advance. We know now that the apparently simpler
and clearer state of Sanskrit in sounds and forms is in
many respects less primitive than the complicated re-
lations of other languages, e. g., the Greek; and that
we must often set out from these languages rather
than from the Sanskrit, in order to make possible the
explanation of Sanskrit forms. Thus Sanskrit now
receives back the light which it has furnished for the
historical understanding of the European languages.*
* It may be permissible here to illustrate this reversion of methods in a sin-
gle point that has become of especially great importance to grammar.
The Greek has five short vowels, «, e, o, i, u. The Sanskrit has i and u corres-
ponding to z and u; but to the three sounds, a, e, o corresponds in Sanskrit only
a single vowel a. Thus, for example, the Greek aj>o (English, /roi7z) reads in
Sanskrit aj>a; the a of the first syllable, and the o of the second syllable of the
12 ANCIENT INDIA.
I must not attempt to follow in detail the course
which the science of comparative grammar, apart
from its connection V\^ith Hindu research, has taken.
While the tv/o branches of the study were rapidly ad-
vanced by Germans particularly, and likewise in France
by the sagacious Burnouf, nev/ material kept pouring
in from India no less rapidly. In two countries on
the outskirts of Indian civilization, in the Himalayan
valleys of Nepal, and in Ceylon, the sacred literature
of the Buddhists, which had disappeared in India
proper, was brought to light in two collections, one in
Sanskrit and one in the popular dialect Pali. The in- '
genuity of Prinseps succeeded in deciphering the
oldest Indian written characters on inscriptions and
coins. In Calcutta was undertaken and completed in
the Thirties the publication of the Mahabharata, a gi-
gantic heroic poem of almost a hundred thousand
Greek word is thus represented in Sanskrit by a. Or, to use another example,
the Greek menos (English, courage) is in Sanskrit inanas; Greek epheron (I
carried) — abharam. What now is the original, i. e,. what existed in the Indo-
Germanic mother tongue for the three sounds of the Greek «, e, o, or the single
sound of the Sanskrit a? When scholars began to study comparative philology
upon the basis of the Sanskrit they thought the a;— and this was a conclusion
apparently supported by the simplicity of the language— to be alone the orig-
inal sound; and were led to believe that this vowel was later divided on Euro-
pean soil into three sounds, a, e, o. Investigations of the most recent time —
and for these we are to thank Amelung, Burgman, John Schmidt, and others —
have shown that the development of the vowel system took the opposite course.
The vowels a, e, oweve already in the Indo-Germanic mother tongue; and in
Sanskrit, or more accurately, before the time of Sanskrit, in the language which
the ancestors of the Indians and Persians spoke when both formed one people,
these vowels were merged into a single vowel Thus the e of esiz and the o of
aJ>o are more original than the a of as;(z, apa.
Now, we find in Sanskrit that where the Greek e corresponds to the San-
skrit «, certain consonants preceding this vowel, as. e.g., k, are affected in a
different way by the latter, than in instances where for the a of Sanskrit the
Greek a ov o'ls used. From the linguistic form of Sanskrit alone, which in the
one case as in the other has a, it would not be intelligible why the k should
each time meet a different fate. The Greek, in that it has preserved the orig-
inal differences of the vowels, gives the key to an understanding of the peculiar
transformations which have taken place in the /^-sound in large and importaiitt
groups of Sanskrit words.
THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. 13
couplets, in whose vast cantos with their labyrinth of
episodes and sub-episodes many generations of poets
have brought together legends of the heroes and days
of the olden time, of their struggles and flagellations.
The sum and substance of all this newly-acquired
knowledge has been incorporated in the great work of
a Norwegian, who became, in Germany, a German — in
the Indische Alterthumskunde (Hindu Antiquities) oi
Christian Lassen.
Lassen did not belong to the great pioneers of
science, like Bopp. It must also be said that often
that sagacity of philological thought is wanting in him,
which sheds light on questions even where it affords
no definite solution of them. And, indeed, was it not
a herculean undertaking, a work like that of the Dana-
ides, to explore the older periods of the Hindu past
when, as the chief sources of information, one was
solely limited to the great epic, and the law book of
Manu? Even a surer critical power than Lassen pos-
sessed could not have discovered much of history in