II. pi

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they turned the palms of their hands backward and upward to heaven, shows that the Romans wished to surrender themselves entirely to the will and pleasuie of their gods. In later times the Romans became the pupils of the Greeks in their religious as well as in their philosophical views, so that when we lead a prayer of Seneca it is difficult to say whethei it breathes Greek or Roman thought. Seneca prays (Clarke, The Great Religions, p. 333)
‘ We worship and adore the framer and former of the universe ; governor, disposer, keeper ; Him on whom all things depend ; mind and spirit of the world ; from whom all things spring ; by whose spirit we live ; the divine spirit, diffused through all ; God all-powerful ; God always present ; God above all other gods ; thee we worship and adore.’
The religion of the Assyrians and Babylonians, as far as we know it from inscriptions, must likewise be classed as one of the national religions, whose founders are unknown. Many of their prayers have been deciphered and translated, but one almost hesitates to quote them or to build any theories on them, because these translations change so very rapidly from year to year. Here is a specimen of an Assyrian prayer,
assigned to the year 650 B.c. :
‘ May the look of pity that shines in thine eternal face dispel my griefs.
May I never feel the anger and wrath of the God.
May my omissions and my sins be wiped out.
May I find reconciliation with him, for I am the servant of his
power, the adorer of the great gods.
May thy powerful face come to my help ; may it shine like heaven, and bless me with happiness and abundance of riches.
May it bring forth in abundance, like the earth, happiness and
every sort of good.’
If this is a correct translation, it shows much deeper feelings and much more simplicity of thought than
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the ordinary Babylonian prayers, which have been translated by some of the most trusted of Cuneiform scholars. They are so very stiff and formal, and evidently the work of an effete priesthood, rather than of sincere believers in visible or invisible gods. Here follows one short specimen: —
‘0 my God, who art violent (against me), receive (my sun- plication). v j v
0 my Goddess, thou who art fierce (towards me), accept (my pra}Ter). v J
Accept my prayer (may thy liver be quieted).
0 my Lord, long-suffering (and) merciful (may thy heart be appeased).
By day, directing unto death that which destroys me, 0 my God, interpret (the vision).
0 my Goddess, look upon me and accept my prayer.
May my sin be forgiven, may my transgression be cleansed.
Let the yoke be unbound, the chain be loosed.
May the seven winds carry away my groaning.
May I strip off my evil so that the bird bear (it) up to heaven. along7 Ule fiSh Cany aWaJ my trouble> maY the river carry (it)
May the reptile of the field receive (it) from me ; may the waters of the river cleanse me as they flow.
Make me shine as a mask of gold.
May I be precious in thy sight as a goblet of glass.’
You see bow advanced and artificial the surround- ings are in which the thoughts of these Babylonian prayers move. There are cities and palaces, and golden masks and goblets of glass, of all of which we see, of course, no trace in really ancient or primitive prayers, such as those of the Veda.
We have now even Accadian prayers, older than those of Nineveh or Babylon, but even they smell of temples and incense rather than of the fresh air of the morning.
A more simple Accadian prayer is the following
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LAST ESSAYS.
‘ God, my Creator, stand by my side,
Keep thou the door of my lips, guard thou my hands,
O Lord of Light.'
The following recommendation to pray is also remarkable -
‘Pray thou, pray thou! Before the couch, pray!
Before the dawn is light, pray ! By the tablets and books, pray ! By the hearth, by the threshold, at the sun-rising,
At the sun-setting, pray1!’
We enter into a different atmosphere when we step into the ruined temples of Egypt. Here, too, the thoughts strike us as „the outcome of many periods of previous thought, but they possess a massiveness and earnestness which appeal to our sympathy. Here is a specimen
‘Hail to thee, maker of all beings, ‘Lord of law, Father of the Gods ; maker of men, creator of beasts ; Lord of grains, making food for the beasts of the field. . . . The One alone without a second.
. . . King alone, single among the Gods ; of many names, unknown is their number.
I come to thee, 0 Lord of the Gods, who has existed from the beginning, eternal God, who hast made all -things that are. Thy name be my protection; prolong my term of life to a good age, may my son be in my place (after me) ; may my dignity remain with him (and his) for ever, as is done to the righteous, who is glorious in the house of the Lord.
Who then art thou, 0 my father Amon? Doth a father forget his son ? Surely a wretched lot awaiteth him who opposes Thy will ; but blessed is he who knoweth thee, for thy deeds proceed from a heart of love. I call upon thee, my father Amon ! behold me in the midst of many peoples unknown to me ; all nations are united against me, and I am alone ; no other is with me. My many warriors have abandoned me, none of my horsemen hath looked towards me ; and when I called them, none hath listened to my voice. But I believed that Amon is worth more to me than a million of warriors, than a hundred thousand horsemen, and ten thousands of brothers and sons, even were they all gathered together. The work of many men is nought, Amon will prevail over them.’
1 W. Tallack, The Inward Light and Christ’s Incarnation, p. 4.
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This is a prayer full of really human feelings, and it theiefore reminds us of ever so many passages in other prayers. The desire that the son may outlive the father, or that the older people may not weep over the j oungei , meets us in a hymn of the Veda when the poet asks— as who has not asked ?— that ‘ the gods may allow us to die in order so that the old may not weep over the young.’
The idea that. the help of Amon is better than a thousand horsemen is re-echoed in many a psalm, as when we read (Ps. cxviii. 9, 10), ‘It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes. All nations compassed me about : but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them.’
If. we now turn our eyes from what we called ethnic and national religions to those religions which claim to be the work of an individual founder, and are therefore called individual religions, we must not imagine that they really came ready made out of the brain of a single person. If the name individual religion is used in that sense, the term would be misleading, for every religion, like every language, carries with it an enormous amount of accumulated thought which the individual prophet may reshape and revive, but which he could not possibly create fr°m the beginning. The great individual religions are Zoroastrianism, Mosaism, Christianity , Moham- medanism, and Buddhism . They are all called after the name of their supposed founders, and the fact that they can appeal to a personal authority imparts to them, no doubt, a peculiar character. But if we take the case of Moses, the religion which he is supposed to have founded sprang from a Semitic soil
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LAST ESSAYS.
prepared for centuries for the reception of his doctrines. We know now that even such accounts as that of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel have their parallels in the clay tablets of Assyria, as deciphered by George Smith and others, and that as there is a general Semitic type of language which Hebrew shares in common with Babylonian, Ai'abic, and Syriac, there is likewise a general type of Semitic religion which forms the common back- ground of all. In the case of Christianity, we know that Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil ; and in the case of Mohammedanism we may safely say that without Judaism and without Christianity it would never have sprung into existence. The ancient religion of Persia, which is called Zoroastrianism, after its reputed author, is in many respects a continuation, in some a reform, of the more ancient Vedic religion ; and exactly the same applies to Buddhism, which has all its roots, even those with which it breaks, in the earlier religion of the Brahmans. In one sense, there- fore, I quite admit that the classification into ethnic, national, and individual religions may be misleading, unless it is carefully defined.
The first individual religion in India is Buddhism, which sprang from Brahmanism, though on many points it stands in opposition to it. This is par- ticularly the case with regard to prayer. There comes a time in the life of religions as in the life of individuals when prayer in the sense of importunate asking and begging for favours and benefits has to cease, and when its place is taken by the simple words, ‘ Thy will be done.’ But in Buddhism there are, as we shall see, even stronger reasons why pra^ ei
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
71
in the ordinary sense of the word had to be surrendered. I had some years ago two Buddhist priests staying with me at Oxford. They had been sent from Japan, which alone contains over thirty millions of Buddhists, to learn Sanskrit at Oxford. As there was no one to teach them the peculiar Sanskrit of the Buddhists, and I did not like their going away to a German university, I offered them my services. Of course, we had many discussions, and I remember well their strong disapprobation of prayer, in the sense of petitioning. They belonged to the Mahayana Bud- dhism, and though they did. not believe in a Supreme Deity or a creator of the world, they believed in a kind of deified Buddha, while the Hlnayana Buddhists think of their Buddha as neither existent nor non- existent. The Mahayanists adore their Buddha, they worship him, they meditate on him, they hope to meet him face to face in Paradise, in Sukhavati. But such was their reverence for Buddha, and such was their firm belief in the eternal order of the world, or in the working of Karma, that it seemed to them the height of impiety to pray, and to place their personal wishes before Buddha. I asked one of them whether, if he saw his child dying, he would not pray for its life, and he replied, No, he could not; it would be wrong, because it would show a want of faith ! ‘And yet,’ I said to him, ‘you Buddhists have actually prayer-wheels. What do you consider the use of them?’
‘ O no,’ he said, c those are not prayer- wheels ; they only contain the names and praises of Buddha, but we ask for nothing in return.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘are not some of these wheels driven
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by the wind like a wind-mill, others by a river like a water-mill % ’
My friend looked somewhat ashamed at first. But he soon recovered himself, and said —
‘ After all, they remind people of Buddha, the law, and the Church, and if that can be done by machines driven by wind or water, is it not better than to employ human beings who, to judge from the way in which they rattle off their prayers in your chapels, seem sometimes to be degraded to mere praying- wheels 1 ’
But while we look in vain for bidding prayers in the sacred literature of the Buddhists, we find in it plenty of meditations on the Buddha and the Buddhas, on saints, past and future. While Pallas (ii. p. 168) tells us that the Buddhists in Mongolia have not even a word for prayer, he gives us (ii. p. 386) specimens which in other religions would certainly be included under that name 1.
‘Thou, in whom innumerable creatures believe, tho\i Buddha, conqueror of the hosts of evil ! Thou, omniscient above all beings, come down to our world ! Made perfect and glorified in in- numerable bygone revolutions ; always pitiful, always gracious, lo, now is the right time to confer loving blessings on all creatures ! Bless us from thy throne, which is firmly established on a truly divine doctrine, with wonderful benefits ! Thou, the eternal redeemer of all creatures, incline thy face with thy immaculate company towards our kingdom ! In faith we bow before thee. Thou the perfecter of eternal welfare, dwelling in the reign of tranquillity, rise and come to us, Buddha and Lord of all blessed rest ! ’
Very different from Buddhism with regard to prayer is Zoroastrianism. It encourages prayer in every form, whether addressed to the Supreme Spirit,
1 Koeppen, Religion ties Buddha, i. p. 555.
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Ahuramazda, or to subordinate deities. All that we know of ancient Zoroastrian literature is, in fact, more or less liturgical and full of prayers, whether actual petitions or hymns of praise, or confessions of sin or expressions of gratitude for favours received. Some of these prayers belong to the most ancient period of Zend literature, and are in consequence difficult to interpret. In giving a translation of the following specimens, I have availed myself of the most recent and most valuable work on the Yasna by M. Darmesteter : —
1. ‘ This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Fulfil my desire as I fulfil yours, 0 Mazda ! I wish to resemble thee, and teach my friends to resemble thee, in order to give thee pious and friendly help. 0 to be with Vohu Mano ! (the good spirit).
2. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! What is the first of things in the world of good, the good which fulfils the desires of him who pursues it ? For he who is friend to thee, O Mazda, always changes evil to good, and rules spiritually in both worlds.
3. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Who was the creator, the first father of Asha (Right)? Who has opened a way for the sun and the stars? Who makes the moon to wax and wane ? These are the things and others which I wish to know
0 Mazda !
4* This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura 1 WIio without supports has kept the earth from falling? Who has made the waters and the plants ? Who has set winds and clouds to run quickly ? Who is the creator of Vohu Mano, O Mazda ?
5; This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! What good artist has made light and darkness ? What good artist has made sleep and waking ? Who has made the dawn, noon, and night ? Who has made the arbiter of justice ?
6. This I ask thee, tell me the truth, 0 Ahura ! Who has created with Khshatlira (royal power) aspiration for perfect piety ? Who has placed love in the heart of a father when he obtains a son ?
1 wish to help thee powerfully, 0 Mazda, 0 beneficent spirit
creator of all things ! ’—(From Gatlm Vshtavaitt, Darmesteter, Yasna’ p. 286.) ’
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And again : —
1. 1 Towards what country shall I turn? Where shall I go to offer my prayer? Relations and servants leave me. Neither my neighbours nor the wicked tyrants of the country wish me well. How shall I succeed in satisfying thee, 0 Mazda Ahura?
2. I see that I am powerless, 0 Mazda ! I see that I am poor in flocks, poor in men. I cry to thee, look at me, O Ahura ! I expect from thee that happiness which friend gives to friend. To the teaching of Vohu Mano (belongs) the fortune of Asha.
3. When will come to us the increasers of days? When will the thoughts of the saints (the Saoshyants) arise, in order to support by their works and their teaching the good world ? To whom will Yohu Mano come for prosperity ? As to me, 0 Lord, I desire thy instruction.
4. In the district and in the country the wicked prevents the workers of holiness from offering the cow, but the violent man will perish by his own acts. Whoever, 0 Mazda, can prevent the wicked from ruling and oppressing makes wise provision for the flocks.’ — (From Gatha Ushtavaiti, Darmesteter, Yasna, p. 30.)
In the Zoroastrian religion prayer is no longer left to the sudden impulses of individuals. It has become part of the general religious worship, part of the constant fight against the powers of darkness and evil, in which every Zoroastrian is called upon to join. A person who neglects these statutable prayers, whether priest or layman, commits a sin. Every Parsi has to say his prayer in the morning and in the evening, besides the prayers enjoined before each meal, and again at the time of a birth, a marriage, or a death. Three times every day the Parsi has to address a prayer to the sun in his various stations, while the priest, who has to rise at midnight, has four such prayers to recite. These three prayers, at sun- rise, at noon, and at sunset, and possibly at midnight, were not unknown to the people of the Veda, and they became more and more fixed in later times.
Mohammed gave great prominence to prayer as an
ANCIENT PEAYEES.
75
outward form of religion. After the erection of the first mosque at Medinah he ordained the office of the crier or muezzin, who from the tower had to call the faithful five times every day to the recital of their prayers. The muezzin cried: —
‘ God is great ! (four times). I bear witness that there is no god but God (twice). I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of God (twice). Come hither to prayers (twice). Come hither to salvation (twice). God is great. There is no other god but God.’
In the early morning the crier adds : —
‘ Prayer is better than sleep.’
The five times for this official prayer are : — (i) Between dawn and sunrise. (2) After the sun has begun to decline. (3) Midway between this. (4) Shortly after sunset. (5) At nightfall.
These prayers are farz, or incumbent ; all others are 7 xafi, supererogatory, or sunnah, in accordance with the practices of the prophet.
Besides these public prayers, private devotions are often recommended by Mohammed, but we possess few specimens of these personal prayers. Mohammed, when speaking of the birds in the air, says that each one knoweth its prayer and its praise, and God knoweth what they do. He recommends his followers to be instant in prayer and almsgiving. ‘ When the call to prayer soundeth on the day of congregation (Friday), then hasten to remember God,’ he says,
‘ and abandon business ; that is better for you, if ye only knew ; and when prayer is done, disperse in the land, and seek of the bounty of God.’ The following may serve as a specimen of a simple Mohammedan prayer. It has sometimes been called Mohammed’s Paternoster : —
76
LAST ESSAYS.
‘ Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds !
The compassionate, the merciful !
King of the day of judgement !
Thee we worship, and Thee we ask for help.
Guide us in the straight way,
The way of those to whom Thou art gracious,
Not of those upon whom is Thy wrath, nor of the erring ! ’
The only two of the individual religions whose prayers we have not yet examined are the Jewish and Christian, and they are so well known that little need be said about them here. Little of any im- portance is said in the Old Testament about ceremonial prayer, as a recognized part of the public religious service, but private prayer is everywhere taken for granted. When we read in Isa. i. 15, ‘And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you : yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear,’ this seems to refer to public rather than to private prayers ( brj^oaCq ). At a later time we find among the Jews, as among Persians, Brahmans, and Egyptians also, certain times fixed for prayer, generally morning, noon, and evening. This is so natural a thought that there is no need to imagine that one nation borrowed the twofold, threefold, or even the fourfold prayer from another. The Jews were gene- rally, like the Greeks, standing while saying their prayers, but we also hear of cases where they bent their knees, threw themselves on the ground, lifted up their hands, smote their breasts, or in deep mourning placed their head between their knees. The proper place for private prayer was the small chamber in the house, but we know how, when prayer had become purely ceremonial, pious people loved to pray standing in the synagogues and the
ANCIENT PRAYERS.
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corners of the streets. The Hebrew Psalms, most of which are prayers, stand out quite unique among the prayers of the world by their simplicity, their power, and majesty of language, though, like all collections of prayers, the collection of the Psalms too contains some which we could gladly spare. There are other prayers put into the mouth of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and other prominent characters by the authors of the historical books of the Old Testament, but hardly one of them approaches the highest standard of the Psalms. In substance the prayer of Elijah, for instance, is but little superior to the prayer1 of the priests of Baal, and the slaughter of the priests of Baal by Elijah’s own hand, after his prayer had been granted, seems indeed more worthy of a priest of Baal than of the priest and prophet of the all- merciful Jehovah. Some of the private prayers of the Jews have been preserved in the Talmud. They are very beautiful, and the Rabbis often pride themselves on being able to match every petition of the Lord’s prayer in the Talmud. Why should they not ? People who are at all inclined to pray have all much the same to say, so much so that there are few prayers in the Sacred Books of the non-Christian religions in which, with certain restrictions, a Christian is not able to join with perfect sincerity. The language changes, but the heart remains the same. We do not deny that there is progress, that there is what is called evolution, or, more correctly, historical con- tinuity, in the different religions of the world. Another important element is the parallelism of various religions, which helps us to understand what is obscure and seemingly without antecedents in one
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LAST ESSAYS.
religion by the fuller light derived from others. So powerful is the stream of religious development that it often seems to land our boat on the very opposite shore from where it started. While the ancient prayers seem to say, Let our will be done, the last and final prayer of the world is, Let Thy will be done. And yet we can watch every step by which the human mind or the human heart changed from the one prayer to the other. Here it is where an his- torical or comparative study of religions bears its most precious fruit. It teaches the followers of different religions to understand each other, and if we can but understand each other, we can more easily bear with each other. My Buddhist pupil would not pray even for the life of his child. What did he mean by this, if not, ‘ Thy will be done ’ ? Many a Christian mother will say, ‘ Thy will be done,’ yet she will add complainingly, ‘ If Thou hadst been here, he would not have died.’
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM1.
NO country has, I believe, suffered so much from what are called ‘ travellers’ tales ’ as India. Before it had been discovered or invaded by Alexander the Great, it seemed to the rest of the world surrounded by a halo of fable and mystery. And even after it had been brought within the horizon of other nations of antiquity, it still continued to be looked upon as a land of wonders and fairy-tales. Almost anything that was told of its natural products, or of the primaeval wisdom of its inhabitants, was readily believed, repeated, and even exaggerated by successive writers. The ancient Greek writers knew really very little about India, but almost all they have to say of it bears this mysterious and marvellous stamp.
Homer probably knew nothing about India. If some scholars hold that his twofold Ethiopians were meant for the inhabitants of India, all we can say is, that, like so many other things, it is possible, but that, from the very nature of the case, it can neither be proved nor disproved. The Homeric name Aithiops is no doubt connected with aitko = ‘ to burn,’ and may have been meant originally for people with burnt or dark faces, while aithops, as applied to metal and
1 Nineteenth Century, May, 1893.
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LAST ESSAYS.
wine, may be translated by ‘fiery ’ or ‘ ruddy.’ Knowing that India was the richest source of fables, which in later times were spread over the whole world, Welcker1 has put forward a conjecture that Aisopos, the fabulous inventor of fables, was originally Aithdpos , a black man, possibly from India. The change of th into s is, no doubt, irregular, but, with all respect for the sacredness of phonetic laws, we ought not to shut our eyes to the fact that in proper names, and more particularly in names of mythology and fable, anomalies and local dialectic varieties occur which would not be tolerated in ordinary words. The change of th into s would be perfectly legitimate, for instance, in the Aeolic 2 and in the Doric 3 dialects, and it can easily be understood how a proper name, formed according to the phonetic rules of one dialect, might be taken over and remain unchanged in others, even if their phonetic laws were different.
In Germany, for instance, if a man is called Schmidt at Berlin, he would not be called Smid at Hamburg, nor should we call him Smith in England. We call the composer Wagner, not Waggoner. If, therefore, the old fable poet Aithdpos became first known in Greece under his Aeolic name of Aisopos, there would have been little inducement to change his name back into Aithdpos. This is a consideration that has been far too much neglected in the treatment of mythological and other proper names, and thei'e is no phonetic bar against Aesdpos having meant originally the same as Aithiops, burnt or dark-faced. If we might go a step further, and take Aithiops as an old name of the inhabitants of India or the far East, this would, no
3 Ahrens, § 36, 2. 3 Ibid. § 7.
1 Rhein. Mus. , vi. p. 366 seq.
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM 81
doubt, be a great help in enabling us to account for the piesence of certain fables in Greece which are nearly identical with ancient fables in India, but occur in Greek literature long before Alexander’s expedition bad opened a road for intellectual and literary intercourse between India and Greece. It is a well-established fact that many of our fables, more paiticularly the animal fables, had their cradle in India, and were exported on well-known historical high roads from the East to the West. But there are some which, unless we claim them as common Aryan pioperty, or as the natural outcome of our common humanity, must somehow have found their way from India to Persia and Greece, long before a Greek soldier had set foot on the sacred soil of Aryavarta.
W e find lor instance, that Plato, when speaking of all the gold that goes into Sparta, while nothing comes out of it, shows himself perfectly familiar with the Aesopian myth or fable— Kara rdv AlaA-nov M vdov — of the fox declining to enter the lion’s cave because he saw how all the footsteps went into the cave but none came out of it. The same old fable appears in the Sanskrit Pa/i&atantra, only told there of a jackal instead of a fox. If the Aesopian fables had come from India, this coincidence would be accounted for, though, of course, the Pa«/catantra, in which it is found, is only a modern collection of far more ancient Indian fables. But we must never forget that what is possible in one place is possible in other places also. The observation of footprints going into a cave and none coming out of it was one that could hardly have escaped shepherds and hunters in any country, and 1 Select Essays , i. 509.
G
II.
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LAST ESSAYS.
we actually find the same application of nulla vestigia retrorsum in a fable related by the Kaffirs in South Africa.
Plato seems well acquainted also with the fable of the donkey in a lion’s skin1. The Greek proverb ovos irapa Kvixaiovs seems to be applied to men boasting before people who have no means of knowing their character or testing their statements. It presupposes the existence of some kind of fable of a donkey appearing in a lion’s skin. In the Pa«&atantras the fable is told of a dyer who, being too poor to feed his donkey, put a tiger’s skin over him and sent him into his neighbour’s field. Here he browsed unmolested till one day he saw a female donkey. Thereupon the disguised tiger began to bray, and the owner of the field, now summoning up courage, came and killed him.
Here the coincidences ai'e so minute that one feels more inclined to admit an actual borrowing, always supposing that Aesop could have introduced some of the Eastern fables from India to the Greeks of Asia Minor before the time of Alexander the Great.
After Homer’s time, the first Greek traveller, or rather sailor, who knew anything about India from personal experience was Sky lax, who, at the command of Darius, undertook his voyage of discovery to the mouth of the Indus about 509 B.c. Unfortunately the account of his expedition which he is said to have written is lost to us, but Hekataeos of Miletos, who died in 486 B.c., knew it and relied on it in his own account of India.
This work of Hekataeos too is lost, but it served as 1 Kratyl, p. 41 1.
INDIAN FABLES AND ESOTERIC BUDDHISM 83
an authority to Herodotus, who in what he has to say of India relies chiefly on him and on the information which he himself could gain from people in Persia.
Herodotus tells us the first traveller's tale about India.. A traveller’s tale, however, need not be an intentional falsehood. Travellers’ tales arise from vdy. different sources. There is in many people an irresistible tendency not only to admire, but also to magnify. This may be called a very pardonable weakness. It is quite right that we should never lose the power of admiring ; it is quite right that we should always look up to things and to men also, and have eyes for what is great and noble in them rather than for what is small and mean. A traveller who has lost the gift of admiring would far better stay at home. But we may admire and yet praise with discrimination and moderation. There are people with whom everything is grand, awfully grand, tiemendous, colossal, or, as the French say, pyramidal ; m fact, to use a more homely expression, all their geese are swans. I do not speak of people who admire because what they admire is somehow connected with themselves. When parents admire their children or grandchildren, when teachers praise their pupils, when every one declares his own college, it may be, his own boat, his own university, his own country, the best in the world, we may call it parental love, appreciation of rising merit, loyalty and patriotism, and all the rest, though in the end we cannot help suspecting that there is in all this a minute dash of selfish- ness.
But even apart from all selfish motives, there are people who cannot resist giving a high colouring to
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LAST ESSAYS.
all they have seen or heard, who delight in the marvel] ous, if only to make people stare, and who enjoy that subtle sense of superiority which arises from having seen or heard what nobody else has seen or is ever likely to see or hear. Nearly all ghost stories of which we hear so much at present arise, I believe, from that source. We all know perfectly well that no one has ever seen a ghost ; for a ghost that can be seen, that is, produce vibrations which impinge on our eyes, must be something material, and ceases ipso facto to be a ghost. But there seems to be something distinguished and aristocratic in having seen a ghost. It is like having been presented to the Pope or the Sultan, or like having seen the sea-serpent. To express any doubt or to attempt anything like cross-examination is considered as almost rude, if not unorthodox. Here lies the real danger of travellers, and here is one source of what we call travellers’ tales. But there is another source, namely simple misapprehension. Unless a traveller is familiar with the language of the people whom he undertakes to describe, misunderstandings are inevitable. We all know the mistakes which Frenchmen make when describing the manners and customs of the English, and if we have our laugh at them, we may be quite sure that they have their laugh at us. I remember a distinguished friend of mine whose book on England has become classical in France, expressing his surprise to me that his English landlady had brought him a beef-steak with buttered toast. To him this was but another proof of the low state ot culinary art in England. The fact was, the poor woman had taken his pronunciation of the word jiotatoes for buttered
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toast, and bad carried out his orders as well as she could, (in pied de la lettre. If that happens in our days of tiee international intercourse, how much more must an ancient Greek, when travelling alone in Egypt or Persia, have been liable to misunderstand what he heard and saw, and what could hardly be explained to him except by signs and gestures? Nor must we forget that there are people who take a mischievous pleasure in telling strangers what is supposed to amuse them, but what they are hardly intended to believe. If a F f enchman were to ask an Englishman whethei husbands may still sell their wives in Smithfield market, I should not be at all surprised if, from sheer delight in mischief, he were told by some wag to go to the market and convince himself of the cruelty of the English law and of English husbands. It happened to me only the other day that a most intelligent German professor, who had been dining in several colleges, assured me that in Oxford men and women went about in the streets ringing a bell to summon the undergraduates from the streets to their dinners in Hall. Some friend had told him so, he had carefully entered it in his note-book, and I had the greatest difficulty in persuading him that he had been chaffed, and that the men who rang the bell in the streets were simply trying to sell the Oxford Times. lien were much the same thousands of years ago as they are now, and there is no disrespect in supposing that what happened to a German professor in Oxford might have happened to Herodotus in Egypt or to Ctesias in Persia.
Herodotus was not himself in India, nor had he any books on India which he could have consulted except
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those of Skylax and Hekataeus. But though he did not reach India he was in Persia, and Persia and India were such near neighbours that there were probably many commercial travellers from India in Persia, and from Persia in India. Certainly some of the things he tells us about India sound very much like stories of commercial travellers, possibly misunderstood by Herodotus himself, or palmed off on him by a waggish fellow traveller. He probably asked how it came to pass that India was so rich in gold, and he was told (iii. 102) that in the desert north of Kashmir there were ants larger than foxes, who dug up the gold. He believed it. How an animal can be an ant with six legs, and yet as large as a fox with four legs, he does not explain. Some of these ants, however, he tells us, and had probably been told so himself, were caught and brought to Persia. These fox-like ants, or ant-like foxes, he says, make themselves dwellings beneath the earth, and in doing so dig up the sand, which is full of gold. In order to collect this gold the Indians tie three camels together, a female in the middle, one that has just had a foal, and two males on each side. The rider sits on the female camel, and after he has filled his bags with gold he rides away full gallop, followed by the ants, who, it seems, want to recover their gold. The female camel, wishing to get home to her young one, runs so fast that the rider escapes from the pursuit of the ants, and brings home his bags full of gold.
Many explanations have been proposed of these ants. A recent traveller suggested that the ants were simply the inhabitants of the country who lived in caves and were clothed in a peculiar way. But many
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years ago, in 1843 Professor Wilson bad called attention to the gold mentioned in the Mahabharata, and brought as tribute to Yudbishi/dra from the Tibetan borderlands. This gold is called in Sanskrit ant-gold, because it is dug up by ants which are called pipilikas in Sanskrit 2.
Now here we clearly see that the poet of the Mahabharata believed that the so-called ant-gold was dug up by ants. Everything else must have been added by the Indians who told the Persians, or by the Persians who told Herodotus. But we may go even a step further. Pipilika, or ant-gold, need not have meant gold dug up by ants, but gold found almost on the surface, so that ants might dig it up. Travellers’ tales could easily have supplied all the rest. When we speak of virgin-gold, we do not mean that it was dug up by virgins, but that it is as pure as a virgin. In the same manner, gold lying so near the surface that it might be dug up by ants could well have been called ant-gold.
The Greek writer who is responsible for most travellers tales about India is Ctesias, who lived in Persia as physician to the king Artaxerxes Mnemon. His books on India and Persia are lost, but they have often been quoted, and there is a large collection of fragments. He had a very bad reputation even among the ancient Greeks on account of the incredi- ble stories which he told. In fact he is simply called a liar. But it should be stated that many of his in- credible stories are not pure inventions, but were due
1 Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc., vii. p. 143.
2 Tad vai pipilikam nama uddhn'taw yat pipilikaU ffMarupaw dronamayam aharshu/i pungraso rm'pa/t.
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to such misunderstandings as are almost inevitable between people speaking different languages. We know, for instance, that the Hindus were very fond of describing hostile neighbours as evil spirits or Rakshasas. All the hideous features which their imagination had conjured up in describing uncanny spirits, ghosts, ogres, and goblins were afterwards transferred to the more or less savage tribes with whom they came in contact in India, or on the frontiers of India. It is not unusual, even with us, to hear the Kafirs talked of as black devils. No wonder that travellers who heard these descriptions of half-imaginary beings, or of black devils, should have taken them for descriptions of real beings in India. Anyhow, we can prove in several cases that what Ctesias and others represent as real monsters living in some part of India correspond with the devils of Hindu folklore. He tells us, for instance, of a real race of men who lived on the mountains where the Indian reed grows, and where their number, he says, is no less than 30,000. Their wives bear offspring once only in their whole lifetime. Their children have teeth of perfect whiteness, both the upper set and the under, and the hair both of their head and of their eyebrows is from their infancy quite grey, whether they be boys or girls. Indeed, every man among them, till he reaches his thirtieth year, has all the hair on his body white, but from that time forward it begins to turn black, and by the time they are sixty there is not a hair to be seen upon them but what is black. These people, both men and women alike, have eight fingers on each hand and eight toes on each foot. They are a very warlike
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people, and five thousand of them, armed with bows and spears, follow the banners of the king of the Indians. Their ears, he adds, are so large that they cover their arms as far as the elbows, while at the same time they cover all the back, and the one ear touches the other.
Now this is clearly a traveller’s tale, and yet it is not a mere invention, but, like most fables, it has a kernel ot truth surrounded by a film of misunder- standing. I mean, the Indians themselves had imagined monsters of that description, and had intro- duced them into their popular poetry as either hostile and fiendish powers, or, in some cases, as helpful spirits also. We find exactly the same in our own mediaeval poetry, and while there is a certain same- ness and tameness about the angels which human imagination has called into existence, the brood of devils, whether in poetry or in painting, displays a, most wonderful wealth and variety of imagination. It seems to admit of no doubt that Ctesias or his friends, whether Persians or Indians— he tells us that he actually saw Indians, two women and five men,
and states that their complexion was fair, not black
mistook these more or less legitimate creations of a wild fancy for real beings. Some of their features can be clearly traced back to their true source, while others may or may not be embellishments, due to his witnesses, or to his own excited brain. The Indians are, for instance, perfectly well acquainted with a race called Ekagarbhas, of which the Greek kvorU rovres may be a literal translation. Their women, according to the Purauas, have offspring once only in their whole life, but instead of living on the Indus or
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Ganges, they are located by the Hindu poets in a division of the terrestrial heaven. In the epic poetry of India 1 another race is mentioned called Kamapravarana (lit. those who used their ears as a covering), who dwelt in the southern region. Skylax already had mentioned a race whom he calls ’UtoXikvoi, having shovel-sized ears, and at a later time Mega- sthenes also speaks of ’ Evootokoltcu , that is, people who slept in their ears. It is possible that these were races who had artificially distended their ears, a custom which we find among other savages also, but it is possible also that what are called ears were originally lappets, made of skins or metal, protecting the ears in battle ; nay, it has been suggested that, as in the case of the god Ganesa, some of these imaginary races were represented with elephant-heads, in which the ears would naturally form a very prominent feature.
However that may be, I think we are justified in saying that Ctesias was not a simple liar, or a traveller who thought he could say anything as long as it amused his readers. It seems that he simply lent a willing ear to the more or less imaginative Orientals with whom he came in contact. He had a taste for the marvellous, he seized on it, and allowed himself to magnify what had caught his own fancy. The temptation was much greater in his time, as there was no one likely to control his statements or to contradict him. This, I believe, is the genesis of most travellex-s’ tales ; and what is curious is, that there has always been a large public delighting in what is marvellous and absurd, nay, taking an actual pride in their ability to believe it all.
1 Maliabli. iii. 297; v. 16137.
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Marvellous stories about India continued to be told, not only in ancient times, when there was little chance of checking them, hut during the whole of the Middle Ages. Even Marco Polo cannot be quite absolved from the charge of romancing, and it is curious to observe how some of the very stories which we see in Ctesias turn up again in Marco Polo’s Travels. Ctesias speaks, for instance, of people with heads of dogs, the Kynohephaloi, and he states that they have large and hairy tails, both men and women. The story of the tails may possibly be traced back to such names as VunaZ/sepa, $unaApu/c&Aa, $unolangula, all meaning Dog-tail, and belonging to persons mentioned in the Veda. We have lately heard a good deal of how it came to pass that during the Middle Ages the French believed that Englishmen had tails °(Angli caudati). That the heads of certain savage races were like the heads of dogs is, no doubt, within the limits of possibility, and that they were black, had teeth, tails, and voices of dogs, would soon follow. Some baboons are called Kynokephaloi, and as we know from the Ramayana that the army of Rama included baboons or Vaneevas, who, however, like the Kynokephaloi of Ctesias, understood and spoke the language of the people (p. 35), we see here, too, some vague elements from which Ctesias could well have framed his fairy-tales. What is curious is, that Marco Polo, when describing the Andaman Islanders, should use the same expression, and describe them as people having heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are, he says, just like big mastiff-dogs — they are no better than wild beasts.
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The persistence of these stories is extraordinary. Not long ago Babu Sohari Das, in his book on the manners and customs of the Hindus, related that an old woman once told him that her husband, a sepoy in the British army, had told her that he had himself seen a people who slept on one ear and covered them- selves with the other L But I must linger no longer on these early travellers’ tales about India, and proceed to those of more recent origin.
One would have thought that after the discovery of the sea road to India in the sixteenth century, and still more after the discovery of the ancient literature of India, through Sir William Jones and his fellow workers, these tales would have ceased. And so they did to a certain extent. We hear no more of races with dogs’ heads, with one eye, or with one leg on which they managed to run faster than anybody else, nor of people with one foot so large that they were able to use it as a parasol when lying on their backs in hot weather. But a new and equally strange class of fables has taken their place. India continued to be considered as the home of a people possessed of mysterious wisdom. As it had been proved that Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, was clearly related to Greek, Latin, and the other Aryan lan- guages, it was supposed that all these languages were derived from Sanskrit, and came from India; and, as some of the Greek deities had been traced back to Vedic deities, India was believed to have been the birthplace of all the Greek gods. India was, in fact,
1 Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindus. Benares, 1S60. Ind. Ant. (May, 1877), p. 133, n.
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looked upon as a kind of primaeval paradise, and people felt thoroughly convinced that if the Brahmans would only be more communicative we should find in their ancient literature the germs of all the wisdom and religions of the world, Judaism and Christianity not excluded. The Pandits were sent for. They were told what, according to the Old Testament, the history of the world had really been, how there had been an Adam and Eve, and a Deluge, and a Noah, with his three sons ; and afterwards an Abraham and his wife Sarah, and all the rest. They were flattered by being assured that all these things must occur in their own sacred writings, and that otherwise they would not be true. They were actually offered rewards if they would only communicate what was wanted. And here, as elsewhere, demand created supply, and a very able scholar, Lieutenant Wilford, sent a number of articles to be published in the Asiatic Researches, in which Adam and Eve, and the Deluge, and Noah, with his sons, Abraham and Sarah, nay, even Isaac' appeared all in due order. These articles produced a great consternation all over Europe. Sir William Jones was asked to examine the Sanskrit originals, and his decision was in favour of their genuineness’ What more could be required? There were the Sanskrit MSS., and in them there were Adam and Eve, and Noah, and Abraham, and all the rest. It was no use to remonstrate and to say that such things were impossible, quite as impossible as when some years ago Shapirah offered the original MSS. of the Pentateuch, written by Moses himself. Scholars might say that Moses did not write, that no cursive Hebrew alphabet existed at that early time; the majority
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were, as usual, in favour of the impossible— viz. of our possessing at last the original scrolls written by the hand of Moses. So it was here. Scholars might show that after the Semitic nations had once become Semitic, and the Aryan nations Aryan, there was no community of language and religion possible between them. The more incredible things are, the more ready people seem to be to believe them. However, the Nemesis came at last. The MSS. of Lieutenant "Wilford were examined once more, and it was found that the leaves containing the Old Testament stories had all been skilfully foisted in. Of course, Pandits are able to write Sanskrit even now, and tar better than our classical scholais can write Latin. However, the curious part is, that even after the whole matter had been cleared up, alter Sir William Jones had openly declared that he had been deceived, after Lieutenant Wilford had in the most honourable way expressed his regret for what had happened, these articles crop up again and again, like Australian rabbits. They continue to be quoted, they are quoted even now, till it seems almost im- possible ever to exterminate them.
Another more recent case is that of a Frenchman,