Page:Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists.djvu/23

 There has always been room for a stronger race, with its own equipment of custom and ideals, to settle down in the interstices of the Brāhmanical civilization, uninfluenced and uninfluencing. To this day Calcutta and Bombay have their various quarters—Chinese, Burmese, and what not—not one of which contributes to, or receives from, the civic life in the midst of which it is set. To this day the Baniyā of India is the Phœnix or Phœnician, perhaps of an older world. But this unmixingness has not been uniform. The personality of Buddha was the source of an impulse of religion to China and half a dozen minor nations. The Gupta empire represents an epoch in which foreign guests and foreign cultures were as highly welcomed and appreciated in India as to-day in Europe and America. And finally only the rise of Islām was effective in ending these long ages of intercourse which have left their traces in the faith and thought of the Indian people.

The Motives of Religion

Hinduism is, in fact, an immense synthesis, deriving its elements from a hundred different directions, and incorporating every conceivable motive of religion. The motives of religion are manifold. Earth-worship, sun-worship, nature-worship, sky-worship, honour paid to heroes and ancestors, mother-worship, father-worship, prayers for the dead, the mystic association of certain plants and animals: all these and more are included within Hinduism. And each marks some single age of the past, with its characteristic conjunction or invasion of races formerly alien to one another. They are all welded together now to form a great whole. But still by visits to outlying shrines, by the study of the literature of certain definite periods, and by careful following up of the special 3