Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/248

206 to a lonely wood, taking with him his sacred fires and the implements required for the daily and periodical offerings. Clad in a deer s skin, in a single piece of cloth, or in a bark garment, with his hair and nails uncut, the hermit is to subsist exclusively on food growing wild in the forest, such as roots, fruit, green herbs, and wild rice and grain. He must not accept gifts from any one, except of what may be absolutely necessary to maintain him ; but with his own little hoard he should, on the contrary, honour, to the best of his ability, those who visit his hermitage. His time must be spent in reading the metaphysical treatises of the Veda, in making oblations, and in undergoing various kinds of privation and austerities, with a view to mortify ing his passions and producing in his mind an entire indifference to worldly objects. Having by these means succeeded in overcoming all sensual affections and desires, and in acquiring perfect equanimity towards everything around him, the hermit has fitted himself for the final and most exalted order, that of devotee or religious mendicant. As such he has no further need of either mortifications or religious observances ; but &quot; with the sacrificial fires reposited in his mind,&quot; he may devote the remainder of his days to meditating on the divinity. Taking up his abode at the foot of a tree in total solitude, &quot; with no companion but his own soul,&quot; clad in a coarse garment, he should carefully avoid injuring any creature or giving offence to any human being that may happen to come near him. Once a day, in the evening, &quot;when the charcoal fire is extinguished and the smoke no longer issues from the fire places, when the pestle is at rest, when the people have taken their meals and the dishes are removed,&quot; he should go near the habitations of men, in order to beg what little food may suffice to sustain his feeble frame. Ever pure of mind he should thus bide his time, &quot; as a servant expects his wages,&quot; wishing neither for death nor for life, until at last his soul is freed from its fetters and absorbed in the eternal spirit, the impersonal self-existent Brahma. The neuter term brdhma is met with in the Rigveda both in the abstract sense of &quot; devotion, worship,&quot; and in the concrete one of &quot; prayer, hymn.&quot; Closely connected with it is found the masculine term brahmd, &quot;a worshipper, a priest.&quot; The popular belief in the efficacy of invocation constituted a prominent feature of the Vedic symbolism, which the traditional and professional activity of the poet and minister of worship did, no doubt, much to keep up and foster. In the theosophical speculations of the later Vedic poets this mystic power of devotion found its fullest expression. in the recognition of the brdhma as the highest cosmical principle, and its identification with the pantheistic conception of an all pervading self-existent essence, the primary source of the universe. Whether this identification was originally due to some extent to the influence of class- interest possibly aided by the coincidence of name, or whether it was solely the product of a highly-wrought re ligious imagination, it is difficult to decide. Certain it is, however, that the term brdhma began to be used about the same time as the abstract designation of priestly function and the Brahmanical order in general, in the same way as the word Jcshatra came to denote the aggregate of functions and individuals of the military class. The tendency towards a comprehension of the unity of divine essence had resulted in some minds, as has been remarked before, in a kind of monotheistic notion of the origin of the universe. In the literature of the Brahmana period we meet with this conception as a common element of speculation ; and so far from its being considered incom patible with the existence of a universal spirit, Prajdpati, the personal creator of the world, is generally allowed a prominent place in the pantheistic theories. Yet the state of theological speculation, reflected in these writings, is one of transition. The general drift of thought is essentially pantheistic, but it is far from being reduced to a regular system, and the ancient form of belief still enters largely into it. The attributes of Prajapati, in the same way, have in them elements of a purely polytheistic nature, and some of the attempts at reconciling this new-fangled deity with the traditional belief are somewhat awkward. An ancient classification of the gods represented them as being thirty-three in number, eleven in each of the three worlds or regions of nature. These regions being associated each with the name of one principal deity, this division gave rise at a later time to the notion of a kind of triple divine government, consisting of Agni (fire), Indra (sky) or Vdyu (wind), and Surya (sun), as presiding respectively over the gods on earth, in the atmosphere, and in the sky. Of this Vedic triad mention is frequently made in the Brahmana writings. Oil the other hand the term prajdpati (lord of creatures), which in the Rigveda occurs as an epithet of the sun, is also once in the Atharvaveda applied jointly to Indra and Agni. In the Brahmanas Prajapati is several times mentioned as the thirty-fourth god ; whilst in one passage he is called the fourth god, and made to rule over the three worlds. More frequently, however, the writings of this period represent him as the maker of the world and the father or creator of the gods. It is clear from this discordance of opinion on so important a point of doctrine, that at this time no authoritative system of belief had been agreed upon by the theologians. Yet there are unmistakable signs of a strong tendency towards constructing one, and it is possible that in yielding to it the Brahmans may have been partly prompted by political considerations. The definite settlement of the caste system and the Brahmanical supremacy must probably be assigned to somewhere about the close of the Brahmana period. Division in their own ranks was hardly favourable to the aspirations of the priests at such a time; and the want of a distinct formula of belief adapted to the general drift of theological speculation, to which they could all rally, was probably felt the more acutely, the more determined a resistance the military class was likely to oppose to their claims. Side by side with the conception of the Brahma, the universal spiritual principle, with which speculative thought had already become deeply imbued, the notion of a supreme personal being, the author of the material creation, had come to bo considered by many as a necessary complement of the pantheistic doctrine. But, owing perhaps to his polythe istic associations and the attributive nature of his name, the person of Prajapati seems to have been thought but insufficiently adapted to represent this abstract idea. Tho expedient resorted to for solving the difficulty was as ingenious as it was characteristic of the Brahmanical aspira tions. In the same way as the abstract denomination of sacerdotalism, the neuter brdhma, had come to express the divine essence, so the old designation of the individual priest, the masculine term brahmd, was raised to denote the supreme personal deity which was to take the place and attributes of the Prajapati of the Brahmanas and Upanishads. By this means the very name of the god expressed the essential oneness of his nature with that of the divine spirit as whose manifestation he was to be considered. Even in the later Vedic writings Brahma is but rarely mentioned ; and in some of these passages he is expressly identified with Prajapati. It is in the institutes of Mariu, where, as we have seen, the system of castes is propounded in its complete development, that his definite place is assigned to him in the cosmogony. According to this work, the universe, before undiscerncd, was made discernible in the beginning by the sole, self- existent spirit (brahma). He, then, having willed to pro duce from his own substance various creatures, created the 