The Religions of India eBook

Edward Washburn Hopkins
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 825 pages of information about The Religions of India.

The Religions of India eBook

Edward Washburn Hopkins
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 825 pages of information about The Religions of India.
S[=u]droi, and that the slave-caste as a whole, which bears the name C[=u]dra, received this appellation first as conquered tribes of Afghanistan.]
[Footnote 14:  Brahmanism has always been an island in a sea.  Even in the Brahmanic age there is evidence to show that it was the isolated belief of a comparatively small group of minds.  It did not even control all the Aryan population.]
[Footnote 15:  We refer partly to literature, that of the drama and novel, for instance; and partly to the fine arts.  But in connection with the latter it may be remarked that painting, and the fine arts generally, are expressly reckoned as the pursuit of slaves alone.  For instance, even as late a jurist as he that wrote the law-code of ‘Vishnu’ thus (chap. ii.) parcels out the duties and occupations of the four castes:  The duty of a priest is to teach the Veda, his means of livelihood is to sacrifice for others and to receive aims; the duty of the warrior is to fight, his means of livelihood is to receive taxes for protecting the other castes; the duty of the V[=a]icya is to tend cattle, his means of livelihood 1s gain from flocks, farm, trade, or money-lending.  The duty of a slave, Cudra, is to serve the three upper castes; his means of livelihood is the fine arts.]
[Footnote 16:  It is this that has exaggerated, though not produced, that most marked of native beliefs, a faith which Intertwines with every system, Brahmanic, Buddhistic, or Hinduistic, a belief in an ecstatic power in man which gives him control over supernatural forces.  Today this Yogism and Mah[=a]tmaism, which is visible even in the Rig Veda, is nothing but unbridled fancy playing with mesmerism and lies.]
[Footnote 17:  The Hindu sectarian cults are often strangely like those of Greece in details, which, as we have already suggested, must revert to a like, though not necessarily mutual, source of primitive superstition.  Even the sacred free bulls, which roam at large, look like old familiar friends, [Greek:  apheton dnion tauron en tps tou IIoseidonos Ierps] (Plato, Kritias, 119); and we have dared to question whether Lang’s ‘Bull-roarer’ might not be sought in the command that the priest should make the bull roar at the sacrifice; and in the verse of the Rig Veda which says that the priests “beget (produce) the Dawn by means of the roar of a bull” (vii. 79. 4); or must the bull be soma?  For Mueller’s defence of the Hindu’s veraciousness, see his India, What Can It Teach Us_, p. 34.]
[Footnote 18:  Some exception may be taken to this on the ground that moral laws really are referred to the Creator in one form or another, This we acknowledge as a theory of authority, but it so seldom comes into play, and there is so little rapport between gods and moral goodness, that the difference in this regard is greater by far than the resemblance.  A Christian
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The Religions of India from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.