CHAPTER VIII: GROWTH OF HINDUISM, 700 TO 1500 A.D.
The Three Sources of the Indian People
We have now got a view of the three races which make up the Indian people. These were, first, the non-Aryans, or the earliest inhabitants of the country, sometimes called the aborigines. Second, the Aryan race, who came to India from Central Asia in prehistoric times. Third, the Scythians or Tartars, who had also begun to move into India before the dawn of history, and whose later hordes came in great force between the first century B.C. and the fifth century after Christ. Each of these races had their own customs, their own religion, and their own speech.
The Aryans and the non-Aryans
The non-Aryans were hunting tribes. In their family life, some of them kept up the early form of marriage, according to which a woman was the wife of several brethren, and a man’s property descended, not to his own, but to his sister’s children. In their religion, the non-Aryans worshipped demons, and tried by bloody sacrifices or human victims to avert the wrath of the malignant spirits whom they called gods. The Aryans early advanced beyond the rude existence of the hunter to the semi-settled industry of the cattle-breeder and tiller of the soil. In their family life, a woman had only one husband, and their customs and laws of inheritance were nearly the same as those which now prevail in India. In their religion, they worshipped bright and friendly gods.
The Scythians
The third race, or the Scythians, held a position between the other two. The early Scythians, indeed, who arrived in prehistoric times, may have been as wild as the non-Aryans, and they probably supplied a section of what we call the aborigines of India. But the Scythian hordes, who poured into India from 126 B.C. to 400 A.D., were neither hunters like the Indian non-Aryan tribes, nor half-cultivators like the Aryans. They were shepherds or herdsmen, who roamed across the plains of Central Asia with their cattle, and whose one talent was for war.
The Aryan Work of Civilization
The Aryans supplied, therefore, the civilizing power in India. One of their divisions or castes, the Vaisyas, brought the soil under the plough; another caste, the Kshattriyas, conquered the rude non-Aryan peoples; their third caste, the Brahmans, created a religion and a literature. The early Brahman religion made no account of the lower races; but, as we have seen, about 500 B.C. a wider creed, called the Buddhist, was based upon it. This new faith did much to bring the early non-Aryan tribes under the influence of the higher Aryan race, and it was accepted by the later Scythian hordes who came into India from 126 B.C. to 400 A.D. Buddhism was therefore the first great bond of union among the Indian races. It did something to combine the non-Aryans, the Aryans, and the Scythians into a people with similar customs and a common faith. But it was driven out of India before it finished its work.
The Brahmans
The work was continued by the Brahmans. This ancient caste, which had held a high place even during the triumph of the Buddhist religion, became all-powerful upon the decay of that faith. The Chinese Pilgrim to India in 640 A.D. relates how the Brahmans, or, as he calls them, the heretics, were again establishing their power. The Buddhist monasteries had, even at that time, a struggle to hold their own against the Brahman temples. During the next two centuries the Brahmans gradually got the upper hand. The conflict between the two religions brought forth a great line of Brahman apostles, some of whose lives are almost as beautiful as that of Buddha himself. The first of these, Kumarila, a holy Brahman of Behar, began his preaching in the eighth century A.D. He taught the old Vedic doctrine of a personal Creator and God. The Buddhists had no personal God. According to a later legend, Kumarila not only preached against the Buddhists, but persuaded a king of Southern India to persecute them. This prince, it is said, ‘commanded his servants to put to death the old men and the young children of the Buddhists, from the southernmost point of India to the Snowy Mountain. Let him who slays not, be slain.’ At that time, however, there was no king in India whose power to persecute reached from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. The story is probably an exaggerated account of a local persecution by one of the many princes of Southern India. The Brahmans gained the victory partly because Buddhism was itself decaying, and partly because they offered a new bond of union to the Indian races. This new bond of union was Hinduism.
Twofold Basis of Hinduism
Hinduism is a social league and a religious alliance. As a social league, it rests upon caste, and has its roots deep down in the race elements of the Indian people. As a religious alliance, it represents the union of the Vedic faith of the Brahmans with Buddhism on the one hand, and with the ruder rites of the non-Aryan peoples on the other. We must get a clear view of both these aspects of Hinduism—as a social league, and as a religious alliance.
Caste Basis of Hinduism
As a social league, Hinduism arranged the people into the old division of the ‘Twice-born’ Aryan castes, namely the Brahmans, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas; and the ‘Once-born’ castes, consisting of the non-Aryan Sudras, and the classes of mixed descent. This arrangement of the Indian races remains to the present day. The ‘Twice-born’ castes still wear the sacred thread, and claim a joint, although an unequal, inheritance in the holy books of the Veda. The ‘Once-born’ castes are still denied the sacred thread; and they were not allowed to study the holy books, until the English set up schools in India for all classes of the people. But while caste is thus founded on the distinctions of race, it has been influenced by two other systems of division, namely, the employments of the people, and the localities in which they live. Even in the oldest times, the castes had separate occupations assigned to them. They could be divided either into Brahmans, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras; or into priests, warriors, husbandmen, and serfs. They are also divided according to the parts of India in which they live. Even the Brahmans have among themselves ten distinct classes, or rather nations. Five of these classes or Brahman nations live to the north of the Vindhya mountains; five of them live to the south. Each of the ten feels itself to be quite apart from the rest; and they have among themselves no fewer than 1886 subdivisions or separate Brahmanical tribes. In like manner, the Kshattriyas or Rajputs number 590 separate tribes in different parts of India.
Complexity of Caste
While, therefore, Indian caste seems at first a very simple arrangement of the people into four classes, it is in reality a very complex one. For it rests upon three distinct systems of division; namely, upon race, occupation, and geographical position. It is very difficult even to guess at the number of the Indian castes. But there are not fewer than 3000 of them which have separate names, and which regard themselves as separate classes. The different castes cannot intermarry with each other, and most of them cannot eat together. The ordinary rule is that no Hindu of good caste can touch food cooked by a man of inferior caste. By rights, too, each caste should keep to its own occupation. Indeed, there has been a tendency to erect every separate kind of employment or handicraft in each separate Province into a distinct caste. But, as a matter of practice, the castes often change their occupation, and the lower ones sometimes raise themselves in the social scale. Thus the Vaisya caste were in ancient times the tillers of the soil. They have in most Provinces given up this toilsome occupation, and the Vaisyas are now the great merchants and bankers of India. Their fair skins, intelligent faces, and polite bearing, must have altered since the days when their forefathers ploughed, sowed, and reaped under the hot sun. Such changes of employment still occur on a smaller scale throughout India.
Caste as a System of Trade-guilds
The system of caste exercises a great influence upon the industries of the people. Each caste is, in the first place, a trade-guild. It ensures the proper training of the youth of its own special craft; it makes rules for the conduct of the caste-trade; it promotes good feeling by feasts or social gatherings. The famous manufactures of mediaeval India, its muslins, silks, cloth of gold, inlaid weapons, and exquisite work in precious stones—were brought to perfection under the care of the castes or trade-guilds. Such guilds may still be found in full work in many parts of India.
Thus, in the North-Western Districts of Bombay, all heads of artisan families are ranged under their proper trade-guild. The trade-guild or caste prevents undue competition among the members, and upholds the interest of its own body in any dispute arising with other craftsmen.
In 1873, for example, a number of the bricklayers in Ahmadabad could not find work. Men of this class sometimes added to their daily wages by rising very early in the morning, and working overtime. But when several families complained that they could not get employment, the bricklayers’ guild met, and decided that as there was not enough work for all, no member should be allowed to work in extra hours. In the same city, the clothdealers in 1872 tried to cut down the wages of the sizers or men who dress the cotton cloth. The sizers’ guild refused to work at lower rates, and remained six weeks on strike. At length they arranged their dispute, and both the trade-guilds signed a stamped agreement fixing the rates for the future.
Each of the higher castes or trade-guilds in Ahmadabad receives a fee from young men on entering their business. The revenue derived from these fees, and from fines upon members who break caste rules, is spent in feasts to the brethren of the guild, and in helping the poorer craftsmen or their orphans. A favourite plan of raising money in Surat is for the members of the trade to keep a certain day as a holiday, and to shut up all their shops except one. The right to keep open this one shop is put up to auction, and the amount bid is expended on a feast. The trade-guild or caste allows none of its members to starve. It thus acts as a mutual assurance society and takes the place of a poor law in India. The severest social penalty which can be inflicted upon a Hindu is to be put out of his caste.
The Religious Basis of Hinduism
Hinduism is, however, not only a social league resting upon caste—it is also a religious alliance based upon worship. As the various race elements of the Indian people have been welded into caste, so the simple old beliefs of the Veda, the mild doctrines of Buddha, and the fierce rites of the non-Aryan tribes, have been thrown into the melting-pot, and poured out thence as a mixture of precious metal and dross, to be worked up into the complex worship of the Hindu gods.
Buddhist Influences
Buddhism not only inspired Hinduism with its noble spirit of charity, but also bequeathed to it many of its institutions. The Hindu monasteries in Orissa in our own day recall the Buddhist convents of King Siladitya eleven hundred years ago. At the present time, the bankers’ guild of Surat devotes a part of the fees which it levies on bills of exchange to maintain a hospital for sick animals—a true survival of the system of medical aid for man and beast which King Asoka founded in 244 B.C. The religious life of the Hindu Vishnuite sect is governed by the old rules laid down by Buddha himself. The great Bengal scholar, Rajendra Lala Mitra, himself a Vishnuite, believed that the car festival of Jagannath is a relic of a Buddhist procession.
Non-Aryan Influences
Hinduism also drew much of its strength, and many of its rites, from the non-Aryan peoples of India. To them is due the worship of stumps of wood, of rude stones, and of trees, which makes up the religion of the villagers of Bengal. Each hamlet has usually its local god, which it adores in the form either of an unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does service for a deity. Serpent-worship, and the honour paid by certain sects of Hindus to the linga, or symbol of male creative energy, may probably be traced back to the Scythian tribes who came to India, in very early times, from Central Asia.
The Hindu Book of Saints
Hinduism boasts a line of religious founders stretching from about 700 A.D. to the present day. The lives of the mediaeval saints and their wondrous works are recorded in the Bhakta-Mala, or The Garland of the Faithful, compiled by Nabhaji about three centuries ago. It is the Book of Saints and Golden Legend of Hinduism. The same wonders are not recorded of each of its apostles, but miracles abound in the life of all. The greater ones rank as divine incarnations prophesied of old. According to the Hindu stories, some were born of virgins; others overcame lions; raised the dead; their hands and feet when cut off sprouted afresh; prisons were opened to them; the sea received them and returned them to the land unhurt, while the earth opened and swallowed up their slanderers. Their lives were marvellous, and the deaths of the greatest of them a solemn mystery.
Sankara Acharya, Ninth Century A.D.
The first in the line of apostles was Kumarila, a Brahman of Behar, who has been already referred to as having stirred up a legendary persecution of Buddhism throughout India in the eighth century A.D. His yet more famous disciple was Sankara Acharya, with whom we reach historical ground. Sankara was born in Malabar, wandered as an itinerant preacher over India as far as Kashmir, and died at Kedarnath in the Himalayas, aged 32. He moulded the Vedanta philosophy of the Brahmans into its final form, and popularized it into a national religion. It is scarcely too much to say, that since his short life in the eighth or ninth century every new Hindu sect has had to start with a personal God. He addressed himself to the high-caste philosophers on the one hand, and to the low-caste multitude on the other. He left behind, as the twofold results of his life’s work, a compact Brahman sect and a popular religion.
Forms of Siva and his Wife
In the hands of Sankara’s followers and apostolic successors, Siva-worship became one of the two chief religions of India. Siva, at once the Destroyer and Reproducer, represented profound philosophical doctrines, and was early recognized as being in a special sense the god of the Brahmans. To them he was the symbol of death as merely a change of life. On the other hand, his terrible aspects, preserved in his long list of names, from the Roarer (Rudra) of the Veda, to the Dread One (Bhima) of the modern Hindu pantheon, well adapted him to the religion of fear prevalent among the ruder non-Aryan races. Siva, in his twofold character, thus became the deity alike of the highest and of the lowest castes. He is the Maha-deva, or Great God of modern Hinduism; his wife is Devi, literally and pre-eminently the Goddess. His symbol of worship is the linga, or emblem of male reproduction; his sacred beast, the bull, is connected with the same idea; a trident tops his temples. His images partake of his double nature. The Brahmanical conception of Siva is represented by his attitude as a fair-skinned man, seated in profound thought, the symbol of the fertilizing Ganges above his head, and the bull (emblem alike of procreation and of Aryan plough-tillage) near at hand. The wilder non-Aryan aspects of his character are signified by his necklace of skulls, his collar of twining serpents, his tiger-skin, and his club with a human head at the end. Siva has five faces and four arms. His wife Devi, in like manner, appears in her Aryan or Brahmanical form as Uma, ‘Light,’ a gentle goddess and the type of high-born loveliness; in her composite character as Durga, a golden-coloured woman, beautiful but menacing, riding on a tiger; and in her terrible non-Aryan aspects as Kali, a black fury, of a hideous countenance, dripping with blood, crowned with snakes, and hung round with skulls.
Twofold Aspects of Siva-worship
The ritual of Siva-worship preserves, in an even more striking way, the traces of its double origin. The higher minds still adore the godhead by silent contemplation, as prescribed by Sankara, without the aid of external rites. The ordinary Brahman hangs a wreath of flowers around the phallic linga, or places before it harmless offerings of rice. But the low-castes pour out the lives of countless goats at the feet of the terrible Kali, the wife of Siva; and until lately, in time of pestilence and famine, tried in their despair to appease that relentless goddess by human blood. During the famine of 1866, in a temple of Kali, a boy was found with his neck cut, the eyes staring open, and the stiff clotted tongue thrust out between the teeth. In another temple at Hugli (a railway station only twenty-four miles from Calcutta), a head was left before the idol, decked with flowers. Such cases are true survivals of the regular system of human sacrifices which we have seen among the non-Aryan tribes. They have nothing to do with the old mystic purusha-medha, or man-offering, whether real or symbolical, of the ancient Aryan faith, but form a part of the non-Aryan religion of terror, which demands that the greater the need, the greater shall be the propitiation.
The Thirteen Sivaite Sects
The thirteen chief sects of Siva-worshippers faithfully represent the composite character of their god. The Smarta Brahmans, the lineal successors of Sankara’s disciples, still maintain their life of calm monastic piety in Southern India. The Dandis, or ascetics, divide their time between begging and meditation. Some of them adore, without rites, Siva as the third person of the Aryan trinity. Others practise an apparently non-Aryan ceremony of initiation, by drawing blood from the inner part of the novice’s knee as an offering to the god in his more terrible form, Bhairava. The Dandis follow the non-Aryan custom of burying their dead, or commit the body to a sacred stream. The Yogis include every class of devotee, from the speechless mystic, who by long suppressions of the breath has lost the consciousness of existence in an ecstatic union with Siva, to the impostor who pretends that he can sit upon air, and the juggler who travels with a performing goat. The Sivaite sects descend, through various gradations of self-mortification and abstraction, to the Aghoris, who eat carrion and gash their bodies with knives. The lowest sects follow non-Aryan rather than Aryan types, alike as regards their use of animal food and their bloody sacrifices.
Vishnu-Worship
Vishnu had always been a very human god, from the time when he makes his appearance in the Veda as a solar myth, the ‘Unconquerable Preserver,’ striding across the universe in three steps. His later incarnations or avatars made him the familiar friend of man. Of these incarnations or ‘descents’ on earth, which vary according to tradition from ten or twenty-two in number, Vishnu-worship, with the unerring instinct of a popular religion, chose the two most beautiful for adoration. In his two human forms as Rama and Krishna, the god Vishnu attracted to himself innumerable loving legends. Rama, his seventh incarnation, is the hero of the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. In his eighth incarnation, as Krishna, Vishnu appears as a high-souled prince in the other epic, the Mahabharata. As Krishna, also, he afterwards grew into the central figure of Indian pastoral poetry; was spiritualized into the supreme god of the Vishnuite Puranas; and now flourishes as the most popular deity of the Hindus. Under his title of Jagannath, ‘The Lord of the World,’ Vishnu is especially worshipped at Puri, whence his fame has spread through the civilized world. But nothing can be more unjust than the vulgar story which associates his car festival with the wholesale self-murder of his worshippers. Vishnu is essentially a bright and friendly god, who asks no offerings but flowers, and to whom the shedding of blood is a pollution. The official records, and an accurate examination on the spot, disprove the calumnies of some English writers on this subject. Fatal accidents frequently happened amid an excited crowd. Suicides on occasions have taken place. But the stories of wholesale bloodshed at one time told about Jagannath, were merely ignorant libels on a gentle and peaceful god, to whom no sacrifice which cost the life even of a kid could be offered. The Vishnu sects are called Vaishnavas.
The Vishnu Purana, circ. 1045 A.D.
In the eleventh century the Vishnuite doctrines were gathered into a religious treatise. The Vishnu Purana dates from about 1045 A.D., and probably represents, as indeed its name implies, ‘ancient’ traditions of Vishnu which had co-existed with Sivaism and Buddhism for centuries. It derived its doctrines from the Vedas, not, however, in a direct channel, but filtered through the two great epic poems. It forms one of the eighteen Puranas or Sanskrit theological works, in which the Brahman moulders of Vishnuism and Sivaism embodied their rival systems. These works especially extol the second and third members of the Hindu triad, now claiming the pre-eminence for Vishnu as the sole deity, and now for Siva; but in their higher flights rising to a recognition that both are but forms for representing the one eternal God. They are said to contain 1½ million lines. But they exhibit only the Brahmanical aspect of Vishnu-worship and Siva-worship, and are devoid of any genuine sympathy for the lower castes.
Vishnuite Apostles—Ramanuja, 1150 A.D.
The first of the line of Vishnuite reformers was Ramanuja, a Brahman of Southern India. In the middle of the twelfth century, he led a movement against the Sivaites, proclaiming the unity of God, under the title of Vishnu, the Cause and the Creator of all things. Persecuted by the Chola king in Southern India, who tried to enforce Sivaite conformity throughout his dominions, Ramanuja fled to the Jain sovereign of Mysore. This Jain prince he converted to the Vishnuite faith by expelling an evil spirit from his daughter. Seven hundred monasteries, of which four still remain, are said to have been erected by his followers before his death.
Ramanand, 1300-1400 A.D.
Ramanand stands fifth in the apostolic succession from Ramanuja, and spread his doctrine through Northern India. He had his headquarters in a monastery at Benares, but wandered from place to place, preaching the one God under the name of Vishnu. He chose twelve disciples, not from the priests or nobles, but among the despised castes. One of them was a leatherdresser, another a barber, and the most distinguished of all was the reputed son of a weaver. Ramanuja had addressed himself chiefly to the pure Aryan castes, and wrote in the Sanskrit language of the Brahmans. Ramanand appealed to the people, and the literature of his sect is in the dialects familiar to the masses. The Hindi vernacular owes its development into a written language, partly to the folk-songs of the peasantry and the war-ballads of the Rajput court-bards, but chiefly to the literary requirements of the new popular religion of Vishnu.
Kabir, 1380-1420 A.D.
Kabir, one of the twelve disciples of Ramanand, carried his doctrines throughout Bengal. As his master had laboured to gather together all castes of the Hindus into one common faith, so Kabir, seeing that the Hindus were no longer the whole inhabitants of India, tried, about the beginning of the fifteenth century, to build up a religion that should embrace Hindu and Muhammadan alike. The writings of his sect acknowledge that the God of the Hindu is also the God of the Musalman. His universal name is The Inner, whether he be invoked as the Ali of the Muhammadans, or as the Rama of the Hindus. ‘To Ali and to Rama we owe our life,’ say the scriptures of Kabir’s sect, ‘and we should show like tenderness to all who live. . . . The Hindu fasts every eleventh day; the Musalman on the Ramazan. Who formed the remaining months and days, that you should venerate but one? . . . The city of the Hindu God is to the east [Benares], the city of the Musalman God is to the west [Mecca]; but explore your own heart, for there is the God both of the Musalmans and of the Hindus. Behold but One in all things. He to whom the world belongs, he is the father of the worshippers alike of Ali and of Rama. He is my guide, he is my priest.’
Chaitanya, 1485-1527 A.D.
In 1485 Chaitanya was born, and spread the Vishnuite doctrines, with the worship of Jagannath, throughout the deltas of Bengal and Orissa. Signs and wonders attended Chaitanya through life; and during four centuries he has been worshipped as an incarnation of Vishnu. Extricating ourselves from the halo of legend which surrounds this apostle of Jagannath, we know little of his private life except that he was the son of a Brahman settled at Nadiya in Bengal; that in his youth he married the daughter of a celebrated saint; that at the age of twenty-four he forsook the world, and, renouncing the state of a householder, repaired to Orissa, where he devoted the rest of his days to the propagation of the faith. He disappeared in 1527 A.D. But with regard to his doctrine we have the most ample evidence. He held that all men are alike capable of faith, and that all castes by faith become equally pure. Implicit belief and incessant devotion were his watchwords. Contemplation rather than ritual was his pathway to salvation. Obedience to the religious guide is one of the leading features of his sect; but he warned his disciples to respect their teachers as second fathers, and not as gods. The great end of his system, as of all Indian forms of worship, is the liberation of the soul. He held that such liberation does not mean the annihilation of separate existence. It consists in nothing more than an entire freedom from the stains and the frailties and sinful desires of the body.
The Chaitanya Sect
The followers of Chaitanya belong to every caste, but they acknowledge the rule of the descendants of the original disciples (gosains). The sect is open alike to the married and unmarried. It has its celibates and wandering mendicants, but its religious teachers are generally married men. They live with their wives and children in clusters of houses around a temple to Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu). The adoration of the founder, Chaitanya, is thus a sort of family worship in Orissa. The landed gentry worship him with a daily ritual in household chapels dedicated to his name. After his death, a sect arose among his followers, who asserted the spiritual independence of women. In their monastic enclosures, male and female cenobites live in celibacy,—the women shaving their heads, with the exception of a single lock of hair. The two sexes chant the praises of Vishnu and Chaitanya together in hymn and solemn dance. But the really important doctrine of the sect is their recognition of the value of women as instructors of the outside female community. For long they were the only teachers admitted into the zananas of good families in Bengal. Fifty years ago they had effected a change for the better in the state of female education; and the value of such instruction was assigned as the cause of the sect spreading so widely in Calcutta.
Vallabha-Swami, circ. 1520 A.D.
The death of Chaitanya marked the beginning of a spiritual decline in Vishnu-worship. About 1520, Vallabha-Swami preached in Northern India that the liberation of the soul did not depend upon the mortification of the body; and that God was to be sought, not in nakedness and hunger and solitude, but amid the enjoyments of this life. An opulent sect had, from an early period, attached itself to the worship of Krishna and his bride Radha—a mystic significance being of course assigned to their pastoral loves. Still more popular among Hindu women is the adoration of Krishna as the Bala Gopala, or the Infant Cowherd, perhaps unconsciously affected by the Christian worship of the Divine Child. Another influence of Christianity on Hinduism may possibly be traced in the growing importance assigned by the Krishna sects to bhakti, or faith, as an all-sufficient instrument of salvation.
Krishna-Worship
Vallabha-Swami was the apostle of Vishnuism as a religion of pleasure. The special object of his homage was Vishnu in his pastoral incarnation, in which he took the form of the divine youth Krishna, and led an Arcadian life in the forest. Shady bowers, lovely women, exquisite viands, and everything that appeals to the luscious sensuousness of a tropical race, are mingled in his worship. His daily ritual consists of eight services, in which Krishna’s image, as a beautiful boy, is delicately bathed, anointed with essences, splendidly attired, and sumptuously fed. The followers of the first Vishnuite reformers dwelt together in secluded monasteries, and went about scantily clothed, living upon alms. But the Vallabha-Swami sect performs its devotions arrayed in costly apparel, anointed with oil, and perfumed with camphor or sandal-wood. It seeks its converts not among weavers, or leather-dressers, or barbers, but among wealthy bankers and merchants, who look upon life as a thing to be enjoyed, and upon pilgrimage as a holiday excursion, or an opportunity for trade.
The Religious Bond of Hinduism
The worship of Siva and Vishnu acts as a religious bond among the Hindus, in the same way as caste supplies the basis of their social organization. Theoretically, the Hindu religion starts from the Veda, and acknowledges its divine authority. But, practically, we have seen that Hinduism takes its origin from many sources. Vishnu-worship and Sivaite rites represent the two most popular combinations of these various elements. The highly cultivated Brahman is a pure theist; the less cultivated worships the Divinity under some chosen form, his ishta-devata. The ordinary Brahman, especially in the south, takes as his ‘chosen deity’ Siva in his deep philosophical aspects as the fountain of being and of reproduction, the symbol of death deprived of its terrors and welcomed as the entrance into new forms of life. The phallic linga serves him as an emblem of the unseen God. The middle classes and the trading community adore some incarnation of Vishnu. The low-castes propitiate Siva the Destroyer, or one of his female manifestations, such as the dread Kali. But almost every Hindu of education feels that his outward object of homage is merely his ishta-devata, or a ‘chosen’ form under which to adore the supreme Deity, Param-eswara.
Materials for Reference
Hinduism is the joint product of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and the non-Aryan worships, dealt with in Chapters III, IV, and V. But in addition to the works cited at the end of those chapters, the following may be specially noted: Barth’s Religions of India; H. H. Wilson’s Religion of the Hindus, and his Vishnu Purana; Sir Alfred Lyall’s Asiatic Studies; Colebrooke’s Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus; Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire de la Littérature Hindouie et Hindoustanie, and his Les Auteurs Hindoustanís et leurs Ouvrages; Graf Björnstjerna’s Die Theogonie Philosophie und Kosmogonie der Hindus; Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, and his Tree and Serpent Worship; Trumpp’s Die Religion der Sikhs, and his Nanak; Mozoomdar’s Faith and Progress of the Brahmo-Somaj (Calcutta, 1882); and Miss Collet’s Brahmo Year-Book; Sir Monier Williams’ Non-Christian Religious Systems, Hinduism, and his Religious Thought and Life in India; Sir William Hunter’s Orissa, and his Rural Bengal; Dr. J. Wilson’s Indian Caste, and Sherring’s Hindu Tribes and Castes (two works of great original value); Steele’s Law and Custom of Hindu Castes (for Western India); Nelson’s View of Hindu Law, and Burnell’s Dayavibhaga (for the Madras Presidency). Also again Max Müller’s Hibbert Lectures and his Sacred Books of the East, together with the easily accessible volumes of Trübner’s Oriental Series and in the Bibliotheca Indica too numerous to specify.