is, in a fashion, all reality.THE Brahmanic literature of the ages when the Buddhist canon was constituted no longer presents the crude simple-minded realism which prevailed in the Brahmanas and the two oldest Upanishads. It assumes a completely classical character, like the Sanskrit in which its inspiration is expressed. The religious or philosophic thought which it contains presents a very great variety of aspects, reflecting an immense enrichment of culture. Although kept at arms' length as being heterodox, the Jain and Buddhist sects contributed to this renewal of the spirit. In orthodoxy itself they sowed the belief in transmigration and a notion of karman similar to their own, and they compelled orthodoxy to regard the problem of deliverance as one of the first importance.
Not only Buddhism had an effect, if only by contrast, on Brahmanic thought. A factor which had hitherto lain outside classicism won its place there, and a highly important place—the popular religions. While the Brahmanas were especially the production of the Brahmans and the epics of the Kshatriyas, the masses, a mixture of Vaiśyas, Śūdras, and non-Aryan peoples, had, if not their literature, at least their beliefs, cults, and traditions. All these were elements which, in an adapted form, came to be incorporated in a syncretic type of Brahmanism to which, in our day, the name of Hinduism has been given.
The upanishads of medium antiquity on the one hand, and the Mahābhārata on the other, furnish the chief documents for this orthodox eclecticism. But similar themes are to be found in Manu (his Dharmaśāstra), the Rāmāyana, and the older parts of the Puranic books.
The ancient theory of sacrifice becomes less and less important in the Upanishads. As a result of the curious belief that the sacrifice of sacrifices is knowledge, the science of ritual tends to be eclipsed by a gnosis (jñāna, or prājña, which presently becomes prajñā). A beginning was made when it was admitted that intelligence is a means of salvation, because it distinguishes between the relative and the absolute, appearance and reality. This went parallel with Buddhist intellectualism. But eventually everything, relative and absolute, was regarded as being inside the function of knowing, and so a gnosis was formed, just as that of Syrian Alexandrianism proceeded from the Peripatetic postulate that is, in a fashion, all reality.
The classificatory type of intelligibility of early Brahmanism was gradually replaced by an evolutionary conception connecting the various cosmic or intellectual principles by one same dynamism. The whole theory of nature in the Sāṃkhya system was to be stamped with this evolutionism. Nothing could be more contrary to the static hierarchies of the Brāhmanas and the materialism, often atomistic, of early physics. And, just as in the West the hypothesis of evolution owed its success to the importance attached to the idea of life, so in India the same interest produced a series of pantheisms, always renewed, and that among many more non-pantheistic elements than have usually been supposed, since Deussen's time, to have existed in India.
In these pantheisms, which are haphazard rather than systematic, orthodoxy found a means of defence against Jain or Buddhist heresy. The principle of those heresies was a pessimistic valuation of life, in the assertion that a man's act breeds a sort of original sin. Against these gloomy beliefs orthodox esotericism produced the serenity of a philosophy according to which the relative differs from the absolute only as appearance differs from reality, and therefore, provided that we substitute knowledge for ignorance, deliverance cannot escape us, since we were never enslaved except in appearance. But we must bear in mind that the heterodox and the orthodox did not take their stand on the same ground, and that therefore we cannot dismiss them as arriving at opposite conclusions. The Buddhists will have nothing to do with ontology, and indeed deny the absolute; the Brahmans of the Upanishads, in their passion for the absolute, base life and knowledge alike on being. In German terms, the former are Erkenntnistheoretiker, the latter Dogmatiker.
The already Hmduized Brahmamsm which nourished at the beginning of the Christian era differed from the old in that it was no longer confined to an exposition of the Vedas. That task henceforward fell to a special discipline named Mīmāṃsā, which we shall discuss later. The new orthodoxy was wholly penetrated by the influence of a strange asceticism, Yoga, which had not yet become a philosophic system, but claimed to obtain the realization of the absolute by a certain manner of living. Since organic life is explained by the circulation of the breath, certain breathing-exercises are the key to salvation. This is how: to govern inhalation and exhalation enables one to concentrate the mind, both by emptying it of the content which it has received from sensuous experience and by making the voluntary attention supple. When the mind is concentrated and, in the words of the metaphor, has become dense and hard and cutting like the diamond, it breaks loose from physiological conditions and so finds itself as it should be, omniscient, or omnipotent, free, and able to create at will—in short, the possessor of efficiences which to the vulgar seem to be supernatural powers. Although this contraction of the thinking principle had, in principle, nothing in common with Vedic science (vidyā), every later Indian conception of knowledge bore the indelible mark of Yoga, insomuch as knowledge will always imply, in the most realistic sense, a capacity of realization.
The combination of Vedic tradition and Yoga led, in the middle Upanishads, to the sacrificial fire and the breath being compared and even identified. So individual morality became, properly, a sacrifice, and the physical theory of the cosmos became an ascesis. This was quite new and revolutionary. Hitherto the notion of salvation had had no meaning save for the individual consciousness; henceforth it would have one even for the universal consciousness. Great Purusha, the cosmic giant whose limbs are the parts of the world, becomes not only a blissful, serene ātman, but a great Yogin, the guide and support of souls struggling for deliverance. He transcends nature (prakriti) and his spiritual spontaneity, like the human soul, can transcend biological functions. The absolute does not merely exist; it enters into sympathy with human endeavours. Thereby the way is opened to two things characteristic of Hinduism—the belief in a metaphysical first principle periodically becoming incarnate in saviours of the human race, and a pious devotion which connects the relative with the absolute not by knowledge but by sentiment. That which is the universal substance, the universal origin, the universal end, takes on the character of a God, in the Jewish and Christian sense of the word. The neuter brahman is transformed into the masculine Brahmā, and into more concrete divine forms, having a personality. The religious bond tends to become an intimacy between soul and soul, instead of being a reabsorption of the individual in the unindividualized.
It was under the banner of Yoga that these changes took place. The ascetic practising that discipline, the yukta, was in the strict and original sense "joined" with himself by the mastery of his vital functions, as a wheel is joined by the insertion of the spokes in the nave. A secondary and later sense is "united", not to oneself but to a higher principle; in other words, in communion with God. From then onwards, it is by "union" with God that the soul acquires its "unity"; it aims not so much at realizing the absolute as at reaching it and fusing with it. Yoga becomes theistic, and towards theism it gradually draws, if not the philosophies, at least the religions.
The great ascetic god is Siva, in whom his worshippers recognize a "lord", Isvara. His origins are partly Vedic, for he is derived from Rudra, who slays cattle but also preserves them, a principle of destruction capable of deserving his euphemistic names of the Benevolent (Siva). Bhakti, the confident worship which is henceforward a means of salvation in Yoga, is paid to Siva (as we find in the Śvetãśvatara Upanishad) before being addressed to Vasudeva Krishna, as in the Gītā. While mysticism, using its favourite pastoral symbol, attaches the worshipper to his divine master as a herd (paúu) to its herdsman (pati), popular eroticism is chiefly alive to the generative aspect of God, whom it adores in the form of the phallus (linga). We must accustom ourselves to contrasts like this when we examine vast religious monuments to which very primitive and more civilized societies have contributed. The classical figure of Siva is perhaps the result of a combination of a native, non-Aryan god of natural fruitfulness and the Vedic Rudra. The Indo-Greek period, which certainly did not last so long as the Hindu mixture, reveals a confusion between Siva and Dionysos. This first god who was God, Mahādeva, in contrast to the many divine figures of India who are merely limited aspects of nature, may for that very reason be represented at the same time as an obscene Priapus and as an austere Digambara. The dancing Siva, who creates magic by his rhythm, stands half-way between the simple natural energies symbolized by his wives and the severe purity of a transcendent spirit.
By his original destructive function and by his secondary form as a rigid ascetic, Siva represents the terrible aspect of godhead. Its lovable aspect is embodied in various demigods who are gradually combined in a single figure, that of another Mahādeva, Vishnu. Kshatriya inspiration predominates in the legends of this cycle, which have their scene in the northwest of Hindustan, at any rate further west than the countries where the Jains and Buddhists made their appearance.
Panini, who probably lived in the fifth century B.C., mentions Vasudevakas and Arjunakas, sects worshipping the heroes Vasudeva and Arjuna, whose deeds are celebrated in the Mahābhārata. In the first years of the second century B.C. the column of Besnagar, in the south of Gwalior, was erected in honour of the same Vasudeva by the Greek Heliodoros of Takshasila, who had been sent to that country as ambassador. At Ghasundi in Udaipur, an inscription of about 150 B.C. mentions an edifice built in honour of Samkarshana and Vasudeva, two heroes, the former of whom was the elder brother of the latter. Now, Vasudeva is simply another name of Krishna. About the same date, Patanjali in his Mahābhāshya quotes a line which runs, "May the power of Krishna, accompanied by Samkarshana, increase!" So there was in the second century and earlier a cult of demigods, whose worshippers, according to the monuments of Besnagar and Ghasundi, declared themselves Bhāgavatas, sectaries of the Bhagavat, which term is translated the Lord, or the Adorable, or the Blessed.
An older name than Vasudeva applied to the same person is Narayana. It is the name by which the Śatapatha Brāhmana describes the supreme soul, Purusha, as the common foundation of men (nara). To give it to Vasudeva is to make an absolute of him.
The name of Krishna is associated with many legends. One of the Vedic rishis, who is supposed to have "seen" the seventy-fourth hymn of the eighth book, bears this name, which was passed on to a Brahman gotra mentioned by Panini (iv, 1, 99) as Karshnayana. The Krishna who is the hero of the Mahabharata must have been derived from this source. In the course of the epic, he develops from a human being into a god who is both immanent and transcendent. Even more explicitly than the Bhagavadgītā, or Gītā of the Blessed, the Harivamśa makes Krishna a god who has become man. But even that work (3808) shows him refusing to join in the worship of the Vedic god Indra and crying, "We are herdsmen roving in the woods. Our gods are the kine, the mountains, and the forests!" Is it an Aryan herdsman or a Dravidian cattle-owner speaking? The question cannot be answered, but one is the more tempted to ask it because kṛishṇa means "black", perhaps in the sense of "negro". Does the magnanimous hero of the epic belong to the same race as the "white" Arjuna? In any case, there seems to be no connexion between the account of Krishna taking part in the war as the ally of the five Pandavas and other stories of how Krishna Vasudeva was saved from Kamsa, the tyrant of Mathura, at his birth, was reared by the herdsmen and loved by the herd-girls, and finally triumphed and delivered his city. The pretty-pretty "childhoods" and the tales of the amorous youth of the young cowherd (gopāla) seem to belong to an independent cycle alien to the Kshatriya inspiration of the epic and later than the beginning of our era.
We are reduced to conjecture when we try to determine how this confused, involved worship of Krishna became connected with the tradition of Vishnu. The Taittirīya Āranyaka (x, 1, 6) regards Narayana, Vasudeva, and Vishnu as three phases of the same god. Already the Brāhmanas give the first place among the gods to him who conquered the three parts of the world by his Three Steps and sits in the ultimate abode (paramam padam). The Puranas make him the supreme spirit. On the way he as it were absorbed the demigods of the popular cults and the heroes of the feudal romances. No doubt the Brahmans hoped to safeguard orthodoxy by annexing many widespread myths to the tradition of a Vedic deity, the solar Vishnu who reigns in the height of the heavens.
Rama is a later subject of legend than Krishna. According to the Harivamśa he is his brother; in the epic of which he is the central figure, the Rāmāyana, he is the son of Vishnu, although in the natural order his father is Dasaratha, King of Ayodhya. For his strength, his courage, his generosity, and his love of his wife Sita, he is one of the dearest ideals of the Indian soul. As the slayer of Ravana, the hideous despot of Ceylon, he belongs to the line of giant-killers. The first and last books of the Rāmāyaṇa, which were obviously added later as a framework to the legend of the hero, present him as a god come down to earth.
This phrase, "come down to earth," which is so familiar in our language, expresses fairly exactly the notion of the avatāra or "descent" by which Vishnu is believed by India to partake of humanity at intervals. This notion is like the belief that there is a Jina or a Buddha especially connected with each cosmic age. Prophets and Messiahs are not the monopoly of the Hebrews, nor even of the Semites. This type of semi-divine man first appeared in Iran, with its Assyro-Babylonian inheritance, if only in the person of Zoroaster, and Zoroaster's example had a very wide and profound influence on India and on Central Asia. The Indian fashion of justifying the providential saviour, the shower of the way, is to present him as brought forth by the law of universal karman, not to make him an emissary of God or the announcer of a future order.
The most important avatar is that of Krishna, who has even been compared to the Judseo-Greek Christ on the strength of an apparent likeness of name. The only fundamental similarity is the immense love underlying the two cults. The Bhagavadgīta has spoken to men's hearts no less than the Imitation of Christ. The value of an act does not lie in its content, but in the intention of pleasing Bhagavat. If every act, every thought, makes Bhagavat its end, salvation is certain. It does not matter if the Kshatriya comes to it by his own function of warlike violence, or the Brahman by his sacrifice and science, or the slave by his obedience; all dharmas are of equal worth, provided that they are accomplished in order to please Him who is the origin and end of everything. To see God in everything and everything in God is to know. To refer every action to Him alone is, in full confidence, to worship.
Yet it hardly seems that we should see here any actual contact between Christians and Hindus. It is true that the story of Barlaam and Josaphat was introduced into Buddhism. Perhaps we shall never know how much truth there is in the tradition that the apostle Thomas evangelized the kingdom of Gondophares and won the martyr's crown at Mailapur. It is possible that Christians, especially Nestorians, went through Serindia at an early date, but there seems to be no reason to follow Grierson in ascribing the importation of pious devotion to Christian colonies established in the southern ports, when we have evidence that Bhagavatas worshipped Vasudeva, or Narayana, or Krishna, in the north-west about two hundred years before the Christian era. Although bhakti forms no part of early Brahmanism it seems to be a purely native phenomenon.
In allusion to a conception of the fifth century after Christ, it has been said, and too frequently, that Hinduism worships three divine forms regarded as equal—the trimūrti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. Brahma seems a very pale figure beside the two great gods of the rival religions, Vishnuism and Sivaism. The ultimate prototype of the Brahman caste remains a faint abstraction by the side of deities so rich in content that their inconsistency misleads one and so laden with social efficacy that they serve as rallying points to two sects.
Apart from Brahmanic orthodoxy, which in any case is a system rather than a reality, the religious life of India resides in the sect, a free group in which individuals are united without any consideration of caste or profession. This community is animated by a religious tradition, a social conviction, and it may split up ad infinitum according to the developments of the faith or local circumstances. The same process of disintegration which we have seen in the caste reappears in the sect. The followers of Siva or Vishnu, far from forming two solid, homogeneous bodies, break up into a multitude of groups. Nor is there anything to prevent one man from belonging to several groups. Thus the same men were often patrons of the Jains and of the Buddhists, or adherents of a religion of Vishnu and of one of Siva. What prevents Brahmanism from being a sect is its adherence to the dogma of caste; but the Hinduism which is its successor is a chaos of sects, vaguely dominated by the heritage of the Vedic religion, which is the monopoly of the Brahmans. A man can quite well belong to a caste and to one or more sects, although many sections of the people belong to sccts without having any caste.
It is a mistake, then, to look for unity in the beliefs or manners of the worshippers of Vishnu in his many avatars and of Siva. For like reasons, we must not be surprised at the attempts made to bring the two great Hindu cults together, to make them parallel and to some extent equivalent. The determination to harmonize them is clearly seen in many passages in the Mahābhārata, whereas the two inspirations often divide the Upanishads between them. The allegory is transparent in the Harivamśa (adh. 184-190), where it describes a fight between Siva and Vishnu, and terminates the episode by bringing in Brahma, who reconciles them, declaring their fundamental unity. Unity of dogmatic syncretism going with infinite diversity of concrete life is altogether normal in India.
The philosophic attitudes covered by the general name of Brahmanism at the period which we are considering are extremely varied, like the religions; indeed, religion and philosophy can hardly be distinguished from each other, and are both a matter of sect. A philosophy, like a religion, is a collective tradition regarding salvation and the pursuit of it. The Mahābhārata gives a very lively picture of the conceptions, of various degrees of orthodoxy, prevailing in the last centuries before our era.
The old sacrificial dogma is eclipsed by bold speculations for which the way has been prepared by the irreligion of the materialists, the sophists, the sceptics. Most of the reflections which will serve as a basis to the various systems which will take shape later already appear in an atomism which anticipates the Vaiseshika, in an illusionism which forms a pre-Vedānta, and in a Sāmkhya and a Yoga which are already very explicit. These last two systems have not yet their classical structure; they are presented as equivalent, the Sāmkhya giving in theory the same teaching as Yoga in practice. Such as they are, they dominate all philosophic thought.
The countless translators of the Bhagavadgītā have made the West familiar with the notion of an "epic" Samkhya—that is, such as it is expressed in the epics. As its name indicates, it is a doctrine of the enumeration of the ontological principles in order of dignity. At the bottom is manas, the empirical mind or 
which collects sensible data; above that is ahaṃkāra, the function of the self, the "I think "; higher still is buddhi, which judges and decides. These three faculties belong to nature (prakṛiti or pradhãnam); their operation belongs to the material order and they are governed by an evolution. Pure spirit, Purusha, dominates them. In the classical Sāmkhya it will float in absolute transcendence (kaivalyam, isolation) outside and above matter. At the present stage, although transcendent, it is also immanent, and the gunas or qualities of nature are regarded as being at the same time its qualities. It puts them on, it sets them working; cosmic reality is its play, its manifestation, as it were its creation, not a pure illusion as in the Vedānta or part of a wholly secondary and opposite principle, like the nature of the later Samkhya.
The epic Yoga is also different from the classical Yoga. The meaning of the word is bewilderingly elastic; every practice or method is called a yoga. In the strictest sense, it means breathing exercises and concentration of thought, after its diversities and fluctuations have been checked. So, in practice, one attains to that pure spirituality which the Sāmkhya defines as a detached Purusha, abstracted from all contamination by nature. Nevertheless, the Sāmkhya and Yoga must have been very different in their prehistory, for it to be so necessary for the syncretic epics to declare that they are fundamentally the same. Nothing could be less theistic than the Sāmkhya as finally established, in which the transcendence of spirit is asserted in the most uncompromising fashion—nothing, except primitive Yoga, which tried to realize the absolute by doing violence to human nature without any divine assistance. Yet the characteristic feature of the Samkhya and Yoga of the epics is that they agree in a devout theism; such was the influence of Krishnaite sentimentality in that period.
The philosophies which most frankly bear the mark of the age are the Sivaite Pasupata and the Vishnuite Pañcharātra or Bhāgavata. According to the former, the effect, which is the world, must be distinguished from the cause, which is at once the Lord and nature (pradhānam). According to the latter, the supreme spirit, decked out in its qualities (guṇa) and its forms extended in space (vyūha), supports and sustains all things. These metaphysical systems would remind us of certain pantheisms of the European Renaissance, if their dogmas were not submerged in a confused bhakti.
The decline of Brahmanic orthodoxy is manifest in every respect. The less the Vedas are understood, the more they are replaced by gnosis or devotion. Jainism and Buddhism are reprobated, but their substitution of the esehatological problem for the ontological is adopted. Since the popular religions cannot be excluded, they are accepted, being given a faintly Vedie aspect either by the device of the avatars or by means of imaginary lines of ṛishis, pundits, and gurus, traced back to the mythical days of infallible certainties, the Golden Age. The more that strange novelties are consecrated as authentic, the more "Puranas" are composed, in which the new is linked to the old by quite unfounded "ancient histories".
Without a doubt, a place would have been found in orthodoxy even for the Buddhists, if they had not scorned caste and disputed the divinity of the Brahman. The epics give the impression of a hotch-potch, in which all the different elements of a chaotic civilization have been heaped together, to be saved when invaders, Parthian or Saka, entered the country. So too the Brahmans, to preserve their pre-eminent position, were compelled to set the stamp of orthodoxy wholesale on many religious or social elements which were as alien to the matter of the Brahmanas as to that of the Vedas. That simply means that, as Brahmanism came to cover, in addition to the content of the Brahmanas, more and more "Hindu" elements, it was more and more reduced to a form—we may even say a label.