The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0080/00808.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00808}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter V}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{god
vishnu
religions
gods
krishna
salvation
rama
religious
india
king}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of India
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter V

Hinduism

     The Emergence of the Popular Religions - Their Character - Salvation by
Divine Grace - Variety of Types - Vishnu and His Incarnations - Krishna - The
Bhagavad-Gita - Rama - Vishnuite Sects - Ramanujas - Controversies Over the
Doctrines of Grace - Madhvas - Vallabhas - Caitanyas - Civa - Civaite Sects -
Gods of Civa's Circle - Goddesses - Worship of the Caktis - The Triad: Brahma,
Vishnu, and Civa - Hindu Temples, Idols, Priests - Pilgrimages - Domestic
Religion - The Dead and the Hereafter - The Influence of Mohammedanism in
India - The Sikhs - The Brahma-Samaj and Other Theistic Reforming Sects.

     Our attention has thus far been fixed almost exclusively on the
philosophies of later Vedic and post-Vedic times, which all present themselves
as a way of salvation by knowledge, and on the great heresies, Jainism and
Buddhism, which - notwithstanding Buddha's antipathy to metaphysics - are also
essentially philosophies of salvation.  Wide and deep as these movements were,
they appealed by their very nature to limited circles; even when the ideas
filtered into the popular mind in various dilution and confusion, they did not
disturb, much less supplant, the inherited religions.

     In the same centuries great changes were, however, taking place, from
other causes, in these religions.  The old Vedic deities were not displaced,
but Indra and his peers had to yield the precedence to gods who in the hymns
are but figures of secondary rank, Vishnu and Civa.  How these religions got
started on their career toward supremacy is unknown. Megasthenes, who visited
India about 300 B. C. as commissioner of Seleucus Nicator to Sandracottus
(Candragupta), reports that Dionysos (Civa) was worshipped in the hills, while
the worship of Herakles (Krishna) prevailed in the Ganges valley, where he was
said to have founded, among other cities, Palimbothra (Patna), the capital of
Sandracottus' kingdom.  In the religious and didactic parts of the national
epic, the Mahabharata, the growth of which extends through several centuries
before and after the Christian era, Vishnu is the dominant figure, but poets
of the rival faith who have contributed to it exalt Civa to the highest place;
the Ramayana, which was composed perhaps in the second or third century B. C.,
has for its subject one of the incarnations of Vishnu; the Puranas, the oldest
of which are probably of at least equal antiquity, are the proper holy
scriptures of these younger religions, for which they have the same importance
as the Vedas for Brahmanism.  In the following centuries the worship of Vishnu
and of Civa spread over all India, not so much supplanting the popular
religions that were there before them as absorbing them; and to the present
day, in their innumerable branches and subdivisions, they divide between them
the two hundred millions of the population who are entered as Hindus in the
religious census.

     It is characteristic of these religions that each of them has a supreme
personal god of much more concrete individuality than the deities of the old
Vedic pantheon.  We have remarked in later hymns of the Rig-Veda a
monotheistic tendency which made Prajapati or Brihaspati-Brahmanaspati the
author of the universe; but this priority in cosmogonic speculation does not
carry with it the effective sovereignty in the actual world of nature and
history which alone leads to religious monotheism.  The sectarian religions in
time made themselves heirs of this tendency in Brahmanism, along with others,
but they did not spring from it. The monotheism of these religions is not of
the exclusive type represented by Judaism and Mohammedanism: the other gods
are subordinated to the one supreme God, or identified with him.  From this it
may be inferred with considerable probability that the supreme gods were
originally the chief gods of certain tribes, or groups of tribes,
comparatively little affected by Brahmanism, which in these centuries emerged
into political prominence.  Their victories in war or their success in
founding states brought their gods into corresponding prominence, somewhat as
the Aryan invasion of India many centuries before had made Indra the greatest
of the gods in the Rig-Veda.

     One of these gods, called by his worshippers "the great god" (Mahadeva)
or "the propitious" (Civa), was perhaps from the beginning identical with the
Vedic Rudra, whose wild and cruel character he has maintained in bloody
sacrifices and orgiastic revels.  The other is identified with Vishnu, a Vedic
deity highly honoured in the hymns, where already some of the exploits of
Indra are ascribed to him. ^1 Vishnu is a much more civilised god than Civa,
as becomes the god of more civilised tribes or regions.  Both religions
exhibit their unbrahmanical origin and character in having temples, images or
material symbols of the deity, and a temple priesthood (not necessarily of the
Brahman caste) - all at variance with the old Vedic tradition and the Brahman
law. ^2

[Footnote 1: See above, pp. 253 f.]

[Footnote 2: The law-books forbid Brahmans to serve as priests of the
non-Vedic religions.]

     By the time when they first make their entrance into literature, however,
they had already been drawn into the main current of Indian theological
development.  The cosmogonic myths and speculations are appropriated for the
sectarian gods; sectarian Upanishads echo the pantheistic note; and in the
epic the ideas of the Vedanta and the Sankhya-Yoga jostle one another.  In
revenge, the firmer theism of the new religions compels concessions both from
the absolutism of the Vedanta and the atheism of the Sankhya; the theistic
Vedanta and the deistic Yoga are witnesses to the power of the idea of a
personal god in Vishnuism and Civaism.  The Brahman priesthood, following the
movements of the times, made of the vaguely personal Brahman of some
Upanishads a god more after the type of the new religions.  The whole
religious history of India from that time on is the result of the confluence
of these two streams.

     In another more important respect the sectarian religions fell into line
with the previous development: they were doubtless in the beginning natural
religions; they may have come into prominence as tribal religions; but from
our first knowledge of them they offer not only the good gifts of God in this
life, but salvation from the round of retributive rebirths - something which
the Brahmanic religion (as distinct from the philosophies) had never
undertaken to do.  But they make the great salvation depend primarily, not on
works - that good works as well as evil involved a man in the consequences of
works, that is, in the round of rebirth, was then axiomatic - not on knowledge
of the absolute Brahman-Atman or of the transcendental monad Ego, and not on
the suppression of the activity of the soul or the extinction of the will to
be by the circumstantial methods of Jain or Buddhist monks, but on devotion to
a saving god.

     Hitherto it had been universally assumed that man must achieve his own
salvation by works or by knowledge; the new religions proclaimed salvation the
gracious gift of God to men who seek it of him in faith and love.  It is
possible that this solution of the problem of salvation which had tormented
India for centuries did not originate in either Vishnuism or Civaism, but was
adopted from a sect which worshipped its divine Saviour under some other name;
but, wherever the doctrine came from, it was these religions whose essentially
theistic character gave it meaning and power. This was a way of salvation for
the masses of men, a way they could comprehend, and by which they might hope
to attain