XVII
OF INDIA
IF CONJECTURES are allowable, the Indians toward the Ganges are, perhaps, the men who were the most anciently united into a body of people. It is certain that the soil, where animals most easily find pasture, is soon covered with that species, which it is fit to nourish.
Now there is no country in the world where the human species have within their reach more wholesome and agreeable ailments, or in greater plenty, than towards the Ganges; rice grows spontaneously; pineapples, cocoa, dates, and fig trees, offer on every side delicious regales; the orange and lemon trees at once yield refreshing liquor and some nourishment; sugar-canes are under their very hand; the palm and broad-leaf fig-trees spread the thickest shade. There is no occasion in this country to skin herds, to defend their children against the inclemency of the season; they are to this hour brought up to the age of puberty quite naked. Life was here never risqued for the means of preserving it, by attacking animals in order to feed upon their dismembered joints, as has been practised every where else.
Men would of themselves have united into society in this happy climate; no contest would have arisen for a parched country to rear bands of negroes: war would not have been waged for a well or a fountain, as with the Barbarians of Arabia Petraea.
I shall make no mention here of the ancient monuments of which the Bramins boast: it is sufficient to know that the most antique rarities which the emperor of China, Camhi, had in his palace, were Indian: he displayed to our mathematical missionaries Indian specie in coin of much earlier date than any of the copper money of the Chinese emperors; and it was, probably, from the Indians that the kings of Persia acquired the art of coining.
The Greeks, before the time of Pythagoras, travelled into India for instruction. The signs of the seven planets and of the seven metals are still almost all over the earth, such as the Indians invented: the Arabians were obliged to adopt their cyphers. Those of games, which do the greatest honor to the human understanding, incontestibly come from India; as elephants, for which we have substituted towers, evince. In fine, the people who were the earliest known, the Persians, Phenicians, Arabians, Egyptians, went from time immemorial to traffic in India, in order to bring home spices, which nature has given to those climates alone; but the Indians never went to ask any thing from other nations.
One Bacchus is mentioned, who is said to have set out from Egypt, or a country west of Asia, to conquer India. This Bacchus, whoever he was, must therefore have known that there was, at the end of our continent, a nation more valuable than his own. Want created the first robbers; they invaded India for no other reason but because it was rich; and surely a rich people is united, civilized, and polished, long before a society of thieves.
What strikes me the most in India, is that ancient opinion of the transmigration of souls, which in time extended itself as far as China, and into Europe. Not that the Indians knew what a soul was; but they imagined that this principle, whether it was aerial or igneous, successively animated different bodies. Let us attentively observe that system of philosophy which relates to morals. The dread of being condemned by Visnon and Brama, to become the most vile and unhappy of animals, was a great constraint upon those of a perverse disposition. We shall presently find that all the great people had an idea of another life, though their notions of it were different. I meet with very few amongst the ancient empires, except the Chinese, who did not establish the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Their first legislators promulgated only moral laws; they thought it sufficient to exhort men to virtue, and to compel them by a severe police.
The doctrine of the metempsychosis imposed another constraint upon the Indians; the dread of killing their father or their mother, in slaying men and animals, inspired them with horror for murder and all violence, which became amongst them a second nature. Thus all the Indians, whose families are not allied, either to the Arabians or the Tartars, are to this hour the mildest of men. Their religion, and the temperature of their climate, rendered these people entirely similar to those peaceable animals which we rear in our folds and dovehouses, to destroy them at pleasure. All ferocious nations who descended from the mounts Caucasus, Taurus, and Imaus, to subjugate the inhabitants of the coasts of the Indies, the Hydaspes, and the Ganges, conquered them by only appearing.
The same thing would happen now to those primitive Christians called Quakers, who are as pacific as the Indians; they would be devoured by other nations, if they were not protected by their warlike countrymen. The Christian religion, which these alone strictly follow, is as much an enemy to blood as that of the Pythagorians. But the Christian people have never observed their religion, and the ancient Indian casts always practiced theirs; because Pythagorianism is the only religion in the world which could render the horror of murder part of filial piety, and a religious sentiment. The transmigration of souls is a system so simple, and even so probable to the eyes of ignorant people; it is so easy to believe that what animates one man may afterwards animate another, that all those who adopted this religion, imagined that they saw the souls of their relations in all the men that surrounded them: they believed that they were all brothers, fathers, mothers, and children of one another. This idea necessarily inspired universal charity; a man trembled at wounding a being who was of the same family: in a word, the ancient religion of India, and that of the literary men in China, are the only ones, wherein men have not been barbarous. How could it afterwards happen that these same men, who looked upon killing an animal as a crime, should allow the women to burn themselves upon their husbands’ dead bodies, in the vain hope of being born again in bodies that should be more beautiful and more happy? Because fanaticism and contradiction are the appendages to human nature.
It should be particularly observed, that abstinence from the flesh of animals, is a necessary consequence of the climate; meat is soon corrupted by its extreme heat and humidity, and is therefore a very bad ailment. Strong liquors are also forbidden, by the necessity of drinking cooling liquors in India. The metempsychosis reached, indeed, our northern countries. The Celts thought that they should regenerate in other bodies; but if the Druids had subjoined to this doctrine a prohibition of eating flesh, they would not have been obeyed.
We scarce know any thing of the rites of the ancient Bramins, which are still preserved. The books of the Hanscri, which they have still in this ancient sacred language, give us but very little insight into them. Their Vedams have been as long unknown as the Zend of the Persians, and the Five Kings of the Chinese. It is scarce six score years since the Europeans had the first notion of the Five Kings; and the Zend was never seen but by the celebrated Dr. Hyde, who had not wherewithal to purchase it, nor to pay the interpreter; and by the trader Chardin, who would not give the price for it he was asked. We had no other extract of the Zend but the Sadder, which I have amply spoke of.
The library of Paris has, by a mere lucky accident, procured an ancient book of the Bramins: this is the Ezourvedam, written before the expedition of Alexander into India, with a recital of all the ancient rites of the Brachmanes, intitled the Cormovedam. This manuscript, which is translated by a Bramin, is not really the Vedam itself, but it is a sequel of the rites and opinions contained in that law. We may, therefore, flatter ourselves that we have a knowledge of the three most ancient writings in the world.
We can never hope to have any thing from the Egyptians, their books are lost, their religion is annihilated; they no longer undestand their own vulgar tongue, still less the sacred one: so that which was nearer to us, more easily preserved, and deposited in immense libraries, is lost for ever; and we have found, at the end of the world, monuments not less authentic, which we had no reason to expect finding.
The truth and authenticity of this ritual of the Brach-mans, of which I am speaking, cannot be doubted. The author certainly does not batter his sect; he does not attempt to disguise their superstitions, or to give them an air of probability, by feigned explanations, or to excuse them by allegories. He gives an account of the most extravagant laws, with simplicity and candor; human understanding appears then in all its misery. If the Bramins observed all the laws of their Vedam, there is no monk who would submit to such a state; scarce is the son of a Bramin born before he is the slave of ceremonies: his tongue is rubbed with rosin mixed with flour; the word Oum is pronounced; twenty divinities are invoked before his navel skin is cut; but these words are repeated to him, Live to command Men; and as soon as he can speak, he is taught the dignity of his being. The Brachmanes were, in effect, for a long time sovereigns of India; and theocracy was established in that vast country more than in any country in the world.
The infant is soon exposed to the moon; the supreme being is implored to efface those sins which the child may have committed, though he has been born only eight days; anthems are sung to fires; the child, after a hundred ceremonies, is called Chormo, which is the honorary title of the Bramins.
As soon as the child can walk, his life is passed in bathing and repeating prayers. He sacrifices for the dead; and this sacrifice is instituted, that Brama may give to the souls of the child’s ancestors an agreeable abode in other bodies.
The five winds that may issue from the five openings of the human body, are prayed to. This is not more strange than the prayers which are repeated to the god Crepitum, by the good old women of Rome.
There is no function of nature, no action among the Bramins, without prayers. The first time that the child’s head is shaved, the father says to the razor, very devoutly, “Razor, shave my son as thou hast shaved the sun and the god Indro.” It is possible that the god Indro might formerly have been shaved; but as to the sun’s undergoing that operation, this is not very easy to comprehend, unless the Bramins have had our Apollo, whom we still represent without a beard.
The recital of all these ceremonies would be as tedious as they appear ridiculous; and in their blind state, they say as much of ours: but there is a mystery amongst them, which should not be passed over in silence: this is, the Matricha Machom; this mystery gives fresh being and new life.
The soul is supposed to be in the breast, and this, indeed, is the sentiment of almost all antiquity. The hand is moved from the breast to the head, in pressing upon the nerve which we imagine communicates from one of these organs to the other, and in this manner the soul is conducted to the brain. When it is certain that the soul is well hung, the young man then calls out, that his soul and body are united to the supreme being, and says, “I am myself part of the divinity.”
This opinion was that of the most respectable philosophers of Greece, of those Stoics who have raised human nature above itself, that of the divine Antoninus’s; and it must be owned that nothing was more capable of inspiring great virtues: to believe one’s self part of the divinity, is to impose a law of doing nothing that is not worthy of God himself.
We find in this law the Brachmanes’ ten commandments, and these are ten sins to be avoided; they are divided into three species, the sins of the body, those of the word, and those of the will. To strike or kill one’s neighbor, to rob him, and violate a woman, these are bodily sins; dissimulation, lying, and scandal, are the sins of the world; those of the will consist in evil-wishing, in being envious of others’ good, in not being affected with others’ misfortunes. These ten commandments make us forgive all the ridiculous rites. We evidently find that morality is the same with all civilized nations; and that the most sacred customs amongst one people, appear to others as extravagant or detestable. Established rites at present divide mankind, and morality re-unites them.
Superstition never prevented the Brachmanes from acknowledging an only God. Strabo, in his fifteenth book, says that they adore a supreme god; that they remain silent for several years, before they dare speak; that they are sober, chaste, and temperate; that justice guides their life, and they die without remorse. This is corroborated by St. Clement of Alexandria, Apuleius, Porphyry, Paladius, and St. Ambrose. We should constantly remember that they enjoyed a terrestrial paradise, and that those who abused God’s bounties were driven out of that paradise.
The fall of degenerated man is the foundation of the theology of almost all nations. The natural bias of man to complain of the present, and praise the past, has made it universally believed, that there was a golden age, to which the iron ages have succeeded. What is still more extraordinary, is, that the Vedam of the ancient Brachmanes taught that the first man was Adimo and the first woman Procriti: Adimo, signified lord, and Procriti meant life; as Hera, among the Phenicians and the Hebrews, signified also life, or the serpent. This conformity deserves great attention.