Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato"s inspiration, and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato"s disciples, he did what he could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato"s message.
But Plato"s method had guarded that, so that for mystics it should always be there, Aristotle or no. But for mere philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted it. It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists--who turned it back Plato-ward--to the Moslems: through Avicenna, who Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the Stagirite--and pa.s.sed it on as the scientific method of today.
According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.
And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting. For Pheidias of the earlier century, we have in Plato"s time Praxiteles, whose carved G.o.ds are lounging and pretty nincom--- well, mortals; "they sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed, sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."--We have an Aphrodite at the bath, a "sweet young thing" enough, no doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree, and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard." A certain natural magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements with it.--And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite expired; and after that h.e.l.lenism became h.e.l.lenisticism, and what remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one little wink of sleep over.
VII. THE MAURYAS OF INDIA
"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle"s pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We shall find that Mr. Judge"s phrase "the Crest-Wave of Evolution"
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea, raising up splendors in one nation after another in order _geographically,_ and with no haphazard about it. Its first and largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390; Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara, had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy; but in its universal aspect--in its strongest force--it had to roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave"s pa.s.sing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense; it is _our_ Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see; out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very burden of Megasthenes" song.
Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one must admire in him. Though he overthrew the Persians, he never made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race. On the contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one h.o.m.ogeneous people, in which the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he felt in Europeans. The Law made use of his intention, partially, and to the furtherance of its own designs.--His method of treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent than barbarous. He took a short cut to his broad ends, and married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive women very differently. So that it was a kind of enlightenment he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan, and into the Punjab,--which, we may note, was but the outskirts of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but let that be. So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought us where we are to spend this evening.
For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even --to use a very vile drudge of a word--"unique" about India. Go else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make some shift to arrange the history. None need boggle really at any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on a.s.signed Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of dynasties back through four or five millennia. But come to India, and alas, where are you? All out of it, chronologically speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of several hundred thousand years. I have no doubt the Puranas are crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to be taken as plain fact; how much as "blinds"; how much as symbolism--only the Adepts know. The three elements are mingled beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium, Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma. You are in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual, our own _savants_ are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet.
They do not choose that their ancient history should be known; so all things are in a hopeless muddle.
One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe; not a country, like France. The population is even more heterogeneous than that of Europe. Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb --at least for many thousands of years--was ever even nominally master of the whole of it. There are two main divisions, widely different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the peninsular part to the south. The former is the land of the Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan--a race called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in Hindustan, and a.s.similated; but whom in the Deccan, though they have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion, they never quite conquered or supplanted. Well; never is a long day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages of pre-history.
The Aryans came down into India through its one open door--that in the northwest. But when?--Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C., says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to launch a new name for the race: _Indogermanic;_ and to prove Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created. Then others, to dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which at least must have the honor;--it could not be conceded to _inferior_ Asia. All the languages of the group were examined and worried for evidence. Men said, "By the names of trees we shall run it to earth"; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for some time. Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and find in what territory that tree is indigenous: that will certainly be the place. As thus; I will work out for you a suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:--
Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are _potato_ and _tobacco._ "From Greenland"s icy mountains to Ceylon"s sunny isle, Whereever prospect pleases, And only man is vile."--you shall nearly always hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day meal by some term akin to _potato,_ and the subtle weed that companions their meditations, by some word like _tobacco._ _Argal,_ the Aryan race used these two words before their separation; and if the two words, the two plants also. You follow the reasoning?--Now then, seek out the land where these plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find the native seat of the primitive Aryans. And, glory be to Science! they do; both come from Virginia. Virginia, then, is the Aryan Garden of Eden.
Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the race--the Teutons--unacquainted with the word _potato._ You may argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The French say _pomme de terre;_ but this is evidently only a corruption--_potater, pomdeter_--twisted at some late period by false a.n.a.logy into _pomme de terre,_ ("apple of the earth".) But the Teuton has _kartoffel,_ utterly different; argal again, the Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming.
They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word _tobacco._ Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems, the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes!
These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their civilization.--Then presently, after the Teutons had gone, someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes--long enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be as happy as himself? Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon him at last visibly? We shall never know. Or did he call in his neighbors at once and annouce it? Did someone ask: "What shall we name this G.o.d-given thing?"--and did another reply: "It looks to me like a _potato;_ let"s call it that!"? That at least must have been how it came by it name. They received the suggestion with acclamations: and all future out-going expeditions took sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to call it _potato_ to this day. For you must not that being the only food with a name common to all the languages--or almost all --it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of before their separation. Even the words for _father, mother, fire, water,_ and the like, have a greater number of different roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.
To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did quietus make for much philological pother and rout. No; if you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon, than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never suspect. The long and short of it is, that after pursuing the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts of Europe, Science is forced to p.r.o.nouce her final judgement thus: _We really know nothing about it._
The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,--who were not destined to be destroyed. It is a vast region, and there was room for them all. That emigration may have been as long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to America; probably it was; or longer. But it happened, at any rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of water will flow under the bridges. You may call English a universal language now; it might conceivably become so absolutely, after a few centuries. But history will go on and time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law. These are not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;--which, I suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times "since created man." In a million years from now the world will have contracted and expanded often. We have seen, in our little period called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there have been contractions, too. But contractions there will be, major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action and reaction are equal and opposite: it is a fundamental law.
Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal English language?--It will have split into a thousand fragment tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology--the great expansion having happened again--will have as much confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the Indo-European.--In a million years?--Bless my soul, in a poor little hundred thousand!
The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,--or however long it may be; just as they have been doing in historical times. You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.
Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of a bar.
You all know the teaching of _The Secret Doctrine_ about the Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years.
The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race"s history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races would have flourished and pa.s.sed; and this present sixth family-race would be about ten millenniums old. Now, no single branch of the Aryans: by which term I mean the sixth family-race; I shall confine it to that, and not apply it to the Fifth Root-Race as a whole,--no single race among the Aryans has been universal, or dominant, or prominent even, during the whole of the last ten thousand years. The Teutons (including Anglo-Saxons), who loom so largely now, cut a very small figure in the days when Latin was, in its world, something more universal than English is in ours; and a few centuries before that, you should have heard Celtic, and little else, almost anywhere in Europe. This shows how fleeting a thing is the sovereignty of any language; within the three thousand years we know about, three at least of the Aryan language-groups have been "universal"; within the last ten milleniums there has been time enough, and to spare, for a "universality" each of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin, Teutonic, and Celtic. So evidently none of these is the language of the family-race: we may speak of the Aryan Family-Race; not of the Celtic or Slavonic.
But it does not follow that the whole sub-race is not Aryan too.
Mr. Judge says somewhere that Sanskrit will be the universal language again. Supposing that there were some such scheme of evolution here, as in the world-chain? You know the diagram in _The Secret Doctrine,_ with the teaching as to the seven rounds.
_As above, so below;_ when H. P. Blavatsky seems to be giving you a sketch of cosmic evolution, often she is at the same time, if you can read it, telling you about the laws that govern your own and the race"s history. I suspect some such arrangement as this: when the sub-race began, 160,000 years ago, Sanskrit was its "universal" language; spoken by all the Aryans that moved out over Europe and into India. An unaccountable Sanskrit inscription has been found in Asia Minor;* and there is Lithuania, a little speech-island in northeastern Central Europe, where a nearly Sanskrit language, I believe, survives.
Then Sanskrit changed imperceptibly (as American is changing from English) into the parent language of the Persian group, which became the general speech of the sub-race except in India, where Sanskrit survived as a _seed-speech_ for future resurrection.
Then, perhaps _pari pa.s.su_ with further westward expansion, Persian changed into the parent of the Slavonic group, itself living on as a seed-speech in Iran; and so on through all the groups; in each case the type-language of a group remaining, to expand again after the pa.s.sage of ages and when its cycle should return, in or about its corresponding psychic center on the geographical plane. Then this evolution, having reached its farthest limit, began to retrace its course; I would not attempt to say in what order the language groups come: which is globe A in the chain, which Globe D, and so on; but merely suggest that a "family race" may represent one round from Sanskrit to Sanskrit; and the whole Fifth Sub-race, seven such complete rounds.
------ * _Ancient India,_ by E. J. Rapson ------
What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race? Well: I imagine we may have the relic, the _sishta_ or seed of it, in the Hamitic peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians, Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts, Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. We are almost able to discern a time--but have not guessed when it was--when this Iberian race, having perhaps its central seat in Egypt, held all or most lands as far as Ireland to the west, and j.a.pan and New Zealand eastward; we find them surviving, mixed with, but by no means submerged under, Aryan Celts in Spain--which is Iberia; we find their name (I imagine) in that of Iverne, Ierine, Hibernia, or Ireland; we know that they gave the syntax of their language to that of the Celts of the British Isles; and that the Celtic races of today are mainly Iberian in blood--I daresay all Europe is about half Iberian in blood, as a matter of fact;--that the Greeks found them in Greece: I suspect that the main difference between Sparta and Athens lay in the fact that Sparta was pure Aryan, Athens mainly Iberian.--It seems to me then that we can almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own. Some have been puzzled by a seeming discrepancy between Katherine Tingley"s statement that Egypt is older than India, and H. P. Blavatsky"s, that Menes, founder of the Egyptian monarchy, went from India to Egypt to found it. But now suppose that something like this happened--would it not solve the problem?--In 158,000 B. C., or at the time this present Aryan Sub-race began, Egypt, one state in the huge Iberian series, was already a seat of civilization as old as the Iberian race. There may have been an Iberian Empire, almost world-wide; which again may have split into many kingdoms; and as the star of the whole race was declining, we may suppose Egypt in some degree of pralaya; or again, that it may have been an outlying and little-considered province _at that time._ In Central Asia the Sanskrit-speaking tribe begins to increase and multiply furiously. They pour down into Iberian Hindustan. They are strong, and the G.o.ds are leading them; the Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire.
The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not likely to. In their contests with the invaders of India, they have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong; Prince Menes is hailed in Egypt (as the last of the Ommevads, driven out from the East by the Abbasids, was hailed in Spain); he wakens Egypt, and founds a new monarchy there.--I am telling the tale of very ancient and unknown conditions in terms of historic conditions we know about and can understand; it is only the skeleton of the story I would stand for.
And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago--what an amusing idea that will seem!--But the truth is we must wage war against this mischievous foreshortening of history. I have no doubt there have been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it is an eminently convenient place for empire-building. I have no doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses--that is, founders of Egyptian monarchies,--with thousands of years between each two. But I think probably the one that came from India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which evolution was chiefly interested.
Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the "white man"s burden," and all such nonsense as that. We might learn a lesson here. Think: since that time, during how many thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place where all things were doing? All the Setis, the grand Rameseses and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory of Egypt. You never know rightly when to say that the life of a sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.-- But now to India.
We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken: it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it is now--literary language preserved by the high castes. In the days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars grown out of it: Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.--We have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of Europe: the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance; or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian and the rest sprang. No matter; they remain in the ideal world, and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall return to them, take them up, and pa.s.s through them again. But it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.
The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation: they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours. As if that which is to be preserved forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only durable casket for truth.
The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the superiorities of Indian things and people;--_as they did._ The Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts. Almost always they gathered two harvests in the years; and _famine had never visited India._--You see, railways, quick communications, and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization could do for her in manvantara.--Then he goes on to show how that civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but much higher than our own. I said Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war: here was the custom, which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still _was the custom._--The whole continent was divided into any number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with certain features of h.o.m.ogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more than a geographical expression. I am speaking of the India Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long.
It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing war. It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so: which means were military. As this was a well-recognised principle, wars were by no means rare. But with them all, what a Utopia it was, compared to Christendom! There was never a draft or conscription. Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior alone did the fighting. While the conches brayed, and the war- cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle--the peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew no one was making war on them. They trusted Gandiva, the goodly bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and sacred to the tilling of the soil. Megasthenes notes it with wonder. War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever to non-combatants.
Kshatriya fought Kshatriya. If you were a Brahmin: which is to say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or what not of the kind--you were not even called up for physical examination. If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with your "business as usual." A mere patch of garden, or a peddler"s tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire.
Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the battlefield, and nowhere else. The victor became possessed of the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or botheration about it.
And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or beheaded. Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord, paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his disposal; and went on reigning as before. So Porus met Alexander without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his defeat. "How shall I treat you?" said the Macedonian. Porus was surprised.--"I suppose," said he in effect, "as one king would treat another"; or, "like a gentleman." And Alexander rose to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage. Manu imposed his will on him. Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received accretions of territory.--This explains why all the changes of dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little difference as hardly to be worth recording. They effected no change in the life of the people. Even the British Raj has been, to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu. Each strong native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need his Moslem or Kshatriya army.--All of which proves, I think, the extreme antiquity of the svstem: which is so firmly engraved in the prototypal world--the astral molds are so strong--that no outside force coming in has been able materially to change it.
The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.
Which brings us back to Alexander. If he got as far as to the Indus;--he got no farther. There were kingdoms up there in the northwest--perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and Baluchistan--which had formed part of the empire of Darius Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece; and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus"s successor.
But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very different from those in Persia: there was no "unquestionable superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like.
Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the Asiatic to the European." But thither the Macedonians refused to follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of terrene limits. For he knew well that there was plenty more world to conquer, could one conquer it: rich and mighty kingdoms beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to cross. He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a catspaw. Among them one in particular: as masterful a man as Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself. He was (probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors for some centuries. King Suddhodana, the Buddha"s father, had reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king of Magadha; which statement I let pa.s.s, well aware that the latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a republic--perhaps with soviets,--and King Suddhodana himself into a mere ward politician.
This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to tell of the wealth of his kinsman"s kingdom, and of the extreme unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him. But two of a trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to flee the camp. Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and the enterprise with a stomach in"t was, as soon as Alexander"s back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons. This done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of the house of Maurya. That was in 321. Master then of a highly trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all Hindustan. In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander"s successor in Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in marriage.--and received by way of compensation 500 elephants that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere. Also he sent Megisthenes to be his amba.s.sador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta"s capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,--we get a kind of window wherethrough to look into India: the first, and perhaps the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.
Here let me flash a green lantern. If at some future time it should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of Megasthenes; nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja--the "Ionian King Antiochus"
apparently,--Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator"s granson: as is supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258); Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus, who began to reign in 272;--if all these identifications should fall to the ground, let no one be surprised. There are pa.s.sages in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky that seem to suggest there is nothing in them; and yet, after studying those pa.s.sages, I do not find that she says so positively: her att.i.tude seems rather one of withholding information for the time being; she supplies none of a contrary sort. The time may not have been ripe then for unveiling so much of Indian history; nor indeed, in those days, had the pictures of these kings, and particularly of Asoka, so clearly emerged: inscriptions have been deciphered since, which have gone to fill out the outline; and the story, as it his been pieced together now, has an air of verisimilitude, and hangs together. Without the Greek identifications, and the consequent possibility of a.s.signing dates to Chandragupta and his son, we should know indeed that there was a great Maurya empire, which lasted a matter of thirteen decades and a few odd years; but we should hardly know when to place it. Accepting the Greek identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time--you shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law. So, provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale.
First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under Chandragupta. There was no slavery, he notes; all Indians were free, and not even were there aliens enslaved. Crime of any kind was rare; the people were thoroughly law-abiding. Thievery was so little known, that doors went unlocked at all times; there was no usury, and a general absence of litigation. They told the truth: as a Greek, he could not help noticing that. The men were exceptionally brave; the women, chaste and virturous.
But "in contrast to the general simplicity of their style, they loved finery and ornaments. Their robes were worked in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wore flowered garments of the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind held umbrellas over them...."
The system of government was very highly and minutely evolved.
"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the markets, others of the city, others of the soldiers; others superintend the ca.n.a.ls, and measure the land, or collect the taxes; some construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and distances from place to place. Those who have charge of the city are divided into six boards of five members apiece: The first looks after industrial art. The second attends to the entertainment of strangers, taking care of them, sound or sick, and in the event of their death, burying them and sending their property to their relatives." The third board registered births and deaths; the fourth, fifth and sixth had supervision of things commercial. Military affairs were as closely organized: there were Boards of Infantry, Cavalry, War Chariots, Elephants, Navy, and Bullock Transport. And behind all these stood Chandragupta himself, the superman, ruthless and terrifically efficient; and Chanakya, his Macchiavellian minister: a combination to hurry the world into greatness. And so indeed they did.
Under Asoka, Chandragupta"s grandson, the age culminated. H. P.
Blavatsky says positively that he was born into Buddhism; this is not the general view; but one finds nothing in his edicts, really, to contradict it. His father Bindusara, of whom we know nothing, may have been a Buddhist. But it would appear that Asoka in his youth was the most capable, and also the most violent and pa.s.sionate of Bindusara"s sons. During his father"s lifetime, he held one of the great vice-royalties into which the empire was divided; he succeeded to the throne in 271. His domains at that time included all Aryavarta, with Baluchistan, and as much of Afghanistan as lies south of the Hindoo Koosh; and how much of the Deccan it is difficult to determine. Nine years later he extended this realm still further, by the conquest of the Kalingas, whose country lay along the coast northward from Madras. At the end of that war he was master of all India north of a line drawn from Pondicherry to Cannanore in the south; while the tip of the Deccan and Ceylon lay at least within his sphere of influence.
He was easily the strongest monarch of his day. In China--between which country and India there was no communication: they had not discovered each other, or they had lost sight of each other for ages--an old order was breaking to pieces, and all was weakness and decay. In the West, Greek civilization was in decadence, with the successors of Alexander engaged in profitless squabbles.
Rome, a power only in Italy, was about to begin her long struggle with Carthage; overseas n.o.body minded her. The Crest-Wave was in India, the strongest power and most vigorous civilization, so far as we can tell, in the world, and at the head of India stood this Chakravartin, victorious Asoka, flushed with conquest, and a whole world tempting him out to conquer.--
He never went to war again. For twenty-nine years after that conquest of the Kalingas, until his death in 233, he reigned in unbroken peace. He left his heart to posterity in many edicts and inscriptions cut on rocks and pillars; thirty-five of these remain, or have so far been discovered and read. In 257, or five years after the Kalinga War, he published this:
"Devanamipiya Piadasi"--
It means literally "the Beloved of the G.o.ds, the Beautiful of Countenance"; but it is really a t.i.tle equivalent to "His Gracious Majesty," and was borne by all the Maurya kings;--
"Devanampiya Piadasi feels remorse on account of the conquest of the Kalingas; because, during the subjugation of a preciously unconquered country slaughter, death, and taking away captives of the people necessarily occur; whereat His Majesty feels profound sorrow and regret..."
It would be in keeping with the Southern Buddhist tradition as to the ungovernable violence of Asoka"s youth, that he should have introduced into war horrors quite contrary to Manu and Indian custom; but here I must say that H. P. Blavatsky, though she does not particularize, says that there were really two Asokas, two "Devanampiya Piadasis," the first of whom was Chandragupta himself, from whose life the tradition of the youthful violence may have been drawn; and there remains the possibility that this Kalinga War was waged by Chandragupta, not Asoka; and that it was he who made this edict, felt the remorse, and became a Buddhist. However, to continue (tentatively):--