Imatges de pàgina
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is nowadays an ever-growing body of thought stirring with the leaven of Western knowledge and Western scientific method; and the juxtaposition of the two makes the government of India by the English an undertaking without a parallel in its novelty and difficulty, and in the amount of caution, insight, and self-command demanded from its admi

nistrators.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

NOTE A.

WHEEL-PICTURES.

BUDDHIST wheel-pictures are, as I have said, commoner than those of the Hindus, and have been frequently figured. Mr. Grant Duff's kindness has, however, supplied me from Madras with two Hindu pictures of the class, less perfect in outline than the Buddhist wheel-pictures, but manifestly following the same model.

I am indebted to Professor Cowell for the following curious legendary account of the origin of the Buddhist pictures :

In the twenty-first story of the Northern Buddhist collection of legends called the "Divyávadána," there is an account how Buddha's disciple, Maudgalyáyana, used occasionally to visit heaven and hell, and when he returned to earth he would describe the different sights which he had seen.

'Buddha said to Ánanda, "Maudgalyáyana will not always be present, nor one like Maudgalyáyana ; therefore a wheel must be made with five divisions and placed in the chamber of the gate. The mendicants heard that Buddha had given this order, but they did not know what sort of a wheel was to be made. Buddha said, "Five paths are to be made those in

Of these

the hells, animals, pretas,1 gods and men. the hells are to be made lowest; then the animals and pretas; and above, the gods and men-i.e. the four continents, viz., Púrvavideha, Aparagodáníya, Uttarakuru, and Jambudvipa. In the centre are to be made desire, hatred and stupid indifference: desire in the form of a dove, hatred in that of a snake, stupid indifference in that of a hog. And images of Buddha are to be made pointing out the circle of Nirvána. Beings are to be represented as being born in a supernatural way, as by the machinery of a water-wheel, falling from one state and being produced in another. All round is to be represented the twelve-fold circle of causation in the regular and in the reverse order. Everything is to be represented as devoured by Transitoriness, and the two gáthás are to be written there,

3

'Begin, come out, be zealous in the doctrine of Buddha,

Shake off the army of death as an elephant a hut of reeds.
He who shall walk unfaltering in the Doctrine and Discipline,4
Leaving behind birth and mundane existence, shall make an end
of pain.

'The mendicants carried out Buddha's words, and made the wheel with five divisions. The Brahmans and householders came and asked, "Sir, what is this engraved here?" They reply, "Sirs, even we do not know." Buddha said, "Let a certain mendicant be appointed to stand in the chamber of the gate, who shall show it to all the Brahmans and householders who come from time to time."

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1 Ghosts or goblins who suffer from perpetual hunger.
2 The well-known three faults' of Hindu philosophy.
3 See Colebrooke's Essays (ed. 2), vol. i. pp. 453-455.
▲ Dharma and Vinaya.

CHAPTER III.

ANCESTOR-WORSHIP.

I HAVE said that the rules of life contained in the most ancient of the sacred law-books of the Hindus are strongly affected by two systems of religious belief which were probably at one time independent of one another. Although welded together by the Hindu sacerdotal lawyers, the purgation of sin by posthumous punishment in a series of hells, and the purgation of sin by transmigration from body to body, are distinct solutions of the same problem. The breach of the rules set forth in the law-books afflicts the lawbreaker with a special taint, which, unless he be cleansed from it by proper penances in his lifetime, will cling to his spirit after death, and can only then be purged away by far severer expiations. Two separate views of the life after death would appear to have contributed the theory of successive special Purgatories, and the theory of Transmigration, to the maturer Hindu system which has joined them together. But besides the traces of this two-fold religious speculation, there is plain evidence of yet a

third, and perhaps a still older religion, standing quite by itself, in these treatises. This is the Worship of Ancestors, which has shaped the entire Hindu law of Inheritance. The connection between AncestorWorship and Inheritance is not, however, peculiar to the Hindus. The most ancient law of a considerable number of the communities which have contributed most to civilisation shows us the performance of some part of this worship as a duty incumbent on expectant heirs and as the condition of their succession. This rude and primitive belief has thus very strongly influenced the branch of jurisprudence which, as linking the generations each to each, is of the greatest importance to all advancing societies.

Ancestor-worship is not here to be understood in the sense in which the expression has usually been taken by scholars. It is not the cult of some longdescended and generally fabulous ancestor, of some Hero, the name-giving progenitor of a Race, a Nation, a Tribe, a House or a Family; an Ion, a Romulus, or an Eumolpus. Nor, again, can it be visibly connected with the superstitious reverence of savages for their Totem, even though it symbolise to them the living creature from which they conceive themselves to have sprung. In the case before us the ancestors sought to be propitiated by sacrifices and prayers are ancestors actually remembered, or, at all events, capable of being remembered by the

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