Sacred Books of the East

“ The Sacred Books of the East are no longer a mere butt for the invectives of missionaries or the sarcasms of philosophers. They have at last been recognized as historical documents, ay, as the most ancient documents in the history of the human mind, and as palæontological records of an evolution that begins to elicit wider and deeper sympathies than the nebular formation of the planet on which we dwell for a season, or the organic development of that chrysalis which we call man. ”

“ In using, what may seem to some of my fellow-workers, this very strong and almost irreverent language with regard to the ancient Sacred Books of the East, I have not neglected to make full allowance for that very important intellectual parallax which, no doubt, renders it most difficult for a Western observer to see things and thoughts under exactly the same angle and in the same light as they would appear to an Eastern eye. There are Western expressions which offend Eastern taste as much as Eastern expressions are apt to offend Western taste. ”

“ We know what we have gained by the discovery of the sacred books of the East, by the interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, and from their revelation to us in the Vedic, Iranian, and Mesopotamian cult-centres of a fervour as deep and passionate as any that we find in Hebraic or Christian writings. ”

“ To know oneself to be the Sat, to know that all that is real and eternal in us is the Sat, that all came from it and will, through knowledge, return to it, requires an independent effort of speculative thought. We must realise, as well as we can, the thoughts of the ancient Rishis, before we can hope to translate them. It is not enough simply to read the half-religious, half-philosophical utterances which we find in the Sacred Books of the East, and to say that they are strange, or obscure, or mystic. ”

“ All this I fully admit, yet after making every allowance for national taste and traditions, I still confidently appeal to the best Oriental scholars, who have not entirely forgotten that there is a world outside the four walls of their study, whether they think that my condemnation is too severe, or that Eastern nations themselves would tolerate, in any of their classical literary compositions, such violations of the simplest rules of taste as they have accustomed themselves to tolerate, if not to admire, in their sacred books. ”

“ The religions of antiquity, must always be approached in a loving spirit, and the dry and cold-blooded scholar is likely to do here as much mischief as the enthusiastic sciolist. But true love does not ignore all faults and failings: on the contrary, it scans them keenly, though only in order to be able to understand, to explain, and thus to excuse them. To watch in the Sacred Books of the East the dawn of the religious consciousness of man, must always remain one of the most inspiring and hallowing sights in the whole history of the world ”

“ But whether I am myself one of the guilty or not, I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that has been done and is still being done by the enthusiasm of those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering forest of the sacred literature of the East. They have raised expectations that cannot be fulfilled, fears also that, as will be easily seen, are unfounded. ”

“ We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible. ”

“ We also read of Heaven's raising up the great ancient sovereigns and teachers, and variously assisting them to accomplish their undertakings; but all this need not be more than what a religious man of any country might affirm at the present day of direction, help, and guidance given to himself and others from above. But while the old Chinese books do not profess to contain any divine revelation, the references in them to religious views and practices are numerous; and it is from these that the student has to fashion for himself an outline of the early religion of the people. ”

“ How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his soul! How does every line display its firm, definite, and throughout harmonious meaning! From every sentence deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. Indian air surrounds us, and original thoughts of kindred spirits. ”

“ The mind of the Oriental has ever delighted to wander in the mystic realm of parable and allegory. His sacred books, from the Zendavesta to the Koran, abound with examples of this method of impressing important truths, and even the lighter productions destined to beguile his leisure are not free from it. ”

“ The religion of the Arabs was Sabæanism, or the worship of the hosts of heaven, Seth and Enoch being considered as the prophets of the faith.
This cult no doubt came from Chaldea, and the belief in the existence of angels, which they also professed, is traceable to the same source. Their practice of making the circuit of the holy shrines, still continued as part of the ‘Hagg ceremonies, probably also arose from this planetary worship. ”

“ Say, ‘ God’s is the east and the west, He guides whom He will unto the right path [35] .’ Thus have we made you a middle nation, to be witnesses against men, and that the Apostle may be a witness against you. ”

“ The sacred code of Zoroaster or of any other of the founders of religions may appear to us to be full of absurdities, or may in fact really be so, and it may yet be the duty of the scholar to publish, to translate, and carefully to examine those codes as memorials of the past, as the only trustworthy documents in which to study the growth and decay of religion. It does not answer to say that if Zoroaster was what we believe him to have been, a wise man, in our sense of the word, he could not have written the rubbish which we find in the Avesta. ”

“ Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE, even when only the barest fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the thought of our foremost men.
EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE
We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself, we do not know. ”

“ To be filled and clothed are no lasting pleasures, time passes, and the sorrow recurs; summer is cool during the moon-tide shining; winter comes and cold increases; and so through all the eightfold laws of the world they possess no marks of permanence, sorrow and joy cannot agree together, as a person slave-governed loses his renown. But religion causes all things to be of service, as a king reigning in his sovereignty; so religion controls sorrow, as one fits on a burden according to power of endurance. Whatever our condition in the world, still sorrows accumulate around us. ”

“ So it is with these ancient sages, who have become the founders of the great religions of antiquity. They can never be judged from without, they must be judged from within. We need not become Brahmans or Buddhists or Taosze altogether, but we must for a time, if we wish to understand, and still more, if we are bold enough to undertake to translate their doctrines. Whoever shrinks from that effort, will see hardly anything in these sacred books or their translations but matter to wonder at or to laugh at ”

“ When the sun shall hide behind the green mountains, in the night black as the true jewels of the moor will I come forth. Coming radiant with smiles like the morning sun, thine arms white as rope of paper-mulberry-bark shall softly pat my breast soft as the melting snow; and patting each other interlaced, stretching out and pillowing ourselves on each other's jewel-arms true jewel-arms and with outstretched legs, will we sleep. So speak not too lovingly, Thine Augustness the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears! ”

“ There is much, no doubt, in their sacred books which we should tolerate no longer, though we must not forget that there are portions in our own sacred books, too, which many of us would wish to be absent, which, from the earliest ages of Christianity, have been regretted by theologians of undoubted piety, and which often prove a stumblingblock to those who have been won over by our missionaries to the simple faith of Christ. ”

“ The question is, whether there is or whether there is not, hidden in every one of the sacred books, something that could lift up the human heart from this earth to a higher world, something that could make man feel the omnipresence of a higher Power, something that could make him shrink from evil and incline to good, something to sustain him in the short journey through life, with its bright moments of happiness, and its long hours of terrible distress. ”

“ May the manly Agni, after he has received the oblations, become brilliant at the side of Kanva; may he neigh as a horse in battles. Take thy seat; thou art great. Shine forth, thou who most excellently repairest to the gods. O Agni, holy god, emit thy red, beautiful smoke, O glorious one! Thou whom the gods have placed here for Manu as the best performer of the sacrifice, O carrier of oblations, whom Kanva and Medhyâtithi, whom Vrishan and Upastuta have worshipped, the winner of prizes. ”

“ All, gods and men, shall do worship to it with flowers, incense, perfumed garlands, unguents, powder, clothes, umbrellas, banners, flags, and celebrate it with stanzas and songs. Those who shall turn round that Stûpa from left to right or humbly salute it, shall some of them realise Arhatship, others attain pratyekabuddhaship; others, gods and men, in immense number, shall raise their minds to supreme, perfect enlightenment, never to return. ”

“ It is said that adoration of the celestial gods produces one consequence; and that the performance of the worship of sacred fire, and oblations to sages, to ancestors, to men, and to other creatures, produce another: thus have we heard from learned men, who have distinctly explained the subject to us. ”

“ Translations can do much, but they can never take the place of the originals, and if the originals require not only to be read, but to be read again and again, translations of sacred books require to be studied with much greater care, before we can hope to gain a real understanding of the intentions of their authors or venture on general assertions. ”

“ We implore with well-spoken words the vigorous Agni who belongs to many people, to the clans that worship the gods, whom other people also magnify. Men have placed Agni on the altar as the augmenter of strength. May we worship thee, rich in sacrificial food. Thus be thou here to-day gracious to us, a helper in our striving for gain, O good one! We choose thee, the all-possessor, as our messenger and as our Hotri. The flames of thee, who art great, spread around; thy rays touch the heaven. The gods, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, kindle thee, the ancient messenger. ”

“ So the creatures blind from ignorance remain in the whirl of life, but the Tathâgata, who is out of the triple world, feels compassion, prompted by which, like a father for his dear and only son, he appears in the triple world and sees with his eye of wisdom that the creatures are revolving in the circle of the mundane whirl, and are toiling without finding the right means to escape from the rotation. ”

“ As he has arrived at true insight, he looks upon this triple world in every direction as void, resembling the produce of magic, similar to a dream, a mirage, an echo. He sees that all laws (and phenomena) are unborn and undestroyed, not bound and not loose, not dark and not bright. He who views the profound laws in such a light, sees, as if he were not seeing, the whole triple world full of beings of contrary and omnifarious fancies and dispositions. ”

“ In these days of anthropological research, when no custom is too disgusting to be recorded, no rules of intermarriage too complicated to be disentangled, it may seem strange that the few genuine relics of ancient religion which, as by a miracle, have been preserved to us, should thus have been judged from a purely aesthetic, and not from an historical point of view. ”

“ Of all who are to be loved, is not the ruler the chief? Of all who are to be feared, are not the people the chief? If the multitude were without their sovereign Head, whom should they sustain aloft? If the sovereign had not the multitude, there would be none to guard the country for him. ”

“ It is like a tank for the thirsty, like a fire for those who suffer from cold, like a garment for the naked, like the caravan leader for the merchants, like a mother for her children, like a boat for those who ferry over, like a leech for the sick, like a lamp for those who are wrapt in darkness, like a jewel for those who want wealth, like the ocean for the rivers, like a torch for the dispelling of darkness. ”

“ Thine Augustness, the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears! Being a maiden like a drooping plant, my heart is just a bird on a sand-bank by the shore; it will now indeed be a dotterel. Afterward it will be a gentle bird; so as for thy life, do not deign to die. ”

“ Scarcely changed by the lapse of centuries, the Oriental of the present day retains most of the peculiarities which distinguished him throughout the long series of years during which the books of sacred Scripture were given to the world. In many of these characteristics he differs essentially from Europeans of the present day, and exhibits a tone of mind which seems to be not merely owing to education, but to be innate and inherent in the race. ”