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AT the hour when the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean were writing the first page of history, India was also beginning to live a superior moral life. But only the murmur of the Vedic hymns, more ancient by a thousand or two thousand years, perhaps, than the epics of Greece, arises from the confusion of the past. Not a single poem of stone, save a few megalithic monuments whose antiquity is not known, exists to unveil the mystery of the Indian soul before the Middle Ages of the Occident, and it seems nearer to this period than to the ancient civilizations.
AT the hour when the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean were writing the first page of history, India was also beginning to live a superior moral life. But only the murmur of the Vedic hymns, more ancient by a thousand or two thousand years, perhaps, than the epics of Greece, arises from the confusion of the past. Not a single poem of stone, save a few megalithic monuments whose antiquity is not known, exists to unveil the mystery of the Indian soul before the Middle Ages of the Occident, and it seems nearer to this period than to the ancient civilizations.
It is
because the tribes of Iran, when they had left the high plateaus to descend the
lengths of the rivers toward the horizon of the great plains, did not find
everywhere the same soil, the same trees, the same waters, the same skies. Some
of them had to face the unity of the desert, the source of the metaphysical
absolutes. Others peopled the countries of moderate size, with scattered
vegetation and clear-cut forms, which led them to observe objectively, and
brought about the desire to complete in their minds the balanced forces that
make up the harmonious universe. The Iranians who had followed the valley of
the Ganges had first to give way to the intoxication of the senses. Still
keeping within them the silence and the coolness of the high country, they
plunged without transition into a world that overwhelmed them with its ardor
and fecundity.
Never,
in any part of the globe, had man found himself in the presence of an aspect of
nature at once so generous and so fierce. Death and life impose themselves
there with such violence that he was forced to endure them no matter what their
form. To escape the dead seasons, to reach the seasons of fertility, it was
enough for him to move northward or southward. Nourishing vegetation, roots,
fruit, and grain sprouted from a soil that does not exhaust itself. He held out
his hand and gathered up life. When he entered the woods to draw water from the
great rivers or to seek materials for his house, death rose up irresistibly,
carried along by the waves, as with the crocodile, hidden in the thickets, as
with the tiger, writhing under the grasses with the cobra, or breaking down the
rampart of trees with the step of the elephant. Scarcely, if at all, in the
nocturnal tangle of tree stems, the branches, and the leaves, could he
distinguish the movement of animal life from the movement of rotting matter and
the flowering of herbs. Born of the hidden fermentations in which life and
death fuse, the torrent of sap which feeds our universe burst from the
luxuriant body of the earth in healthful fruits and poisonous flowers.
The
mingling aspects of generosity and cruelty that nature offered to man disarmed
him mentally and physically. The possibility of attaining a moral ideal, to be
reached only through the conquest of tremendous forests and multiplied
temptations, seemed to him as inaccessible as the brow of the Himalayas which
lifted the highest glaciers of the earth into the blue light of the north.
Accepting life and death with the same indifference, he had to do no more than
lay open his senses to the penetration of the universe and permit the gradual
rise from his instincts to his soul of that grandiose, confused pantheism which
is the whole of the science, the religion, and the philosophy of the man of
India.
And
yet, when Alexander reached the banks of the Indus, a great social revolution
was shaking the peninsula. A century before, Sakyamuni, the Buddha, had felt
the flood of pantheist intoxication in his inner life, had felt it invaded by a
love whose power swept him on like a river. He loved men, he loved beasts, he
loved the trees, the stones—everything that breathed, that throbbed, that
moved; everything, even, whose form could be grasped by the senses, from the
constellations of heaven to the grass on which one trod. Since the world is but
a single body, it must be that an irresistible tenderness draws together all
the dispersed elements, all the different forms which wander through the world.
Hunger, killing, suffering, all are love. Sakyamuni tenderly offered his bare
flesh to an eagle that was pursuing a dove.
Whatever
the fatalism and the sensualism of a people, it always listens, at least once
during the course of history, to him who comes to pour the balm of love upon
its wounds. The tiger could not be conquered, it is true, the peak of the
Himalayas could not be reached, and the sacred rivers that descended from it
could not cease to roll fever and life in their waters. And yet the social
machinery of the Brahman, the implacable régime of castes which reflected from
top to bottom the relentless rigor of the energy of the universe, was shattered
by the revolt of love. Half a century after the incursion of Alexander, the
emperor Asoka was forced to follow the lead of the multitudes and erect
eighty-four thousand temples in commemoration of a man who had never spoken of
the gods.
How
long did Buddhism last in India? Seven or eight centuries, perhaps—an hour of
the life of these multitudes whose history, as it evolves in the past and in
the future, seems as infinite and as confused as their swarming in space. India
returned, insensibly, to the Vedic gods; the Brahman, supported by the prince,
rebuilt the social pyramid and swept from the earth man's hope of paradise. Buddhism
took refuge in the soul of a few cenobites and, beyond the frontiers of India,
was to conquer Asia. Thus Christianity, born of the Semitic ideal, was to
conquer the whole Occident, save the Hebrews. A revolution does not vanquish
the fundamental instinct of the surroundings that provoke it.
It was
from the depths of the Indian nature itself that the materialistic mysticism
had risen again to stifle all the desires for humanity aroused by Buddhism. The
temples with which the crowds of neophytes had sown the soil of India brought
them, stone by stone, to submit anew to the ritualization of the primitive
beliefs, which did not cease to be source of their emotions. The Buddhistic
monument, properly so called, has almost disappeared from India. The topes, the great reliquaries of brick,
are perhaps the only edifices not dedicated to a god having a material figure.
And yet the history of Buddha, the whole of his life as it was passed among the
animals and the forests, is sculptured on the door. The chaityas, the basilicas that were built about the first century,
already have capitals composed of animal figures. When Sakyamuni himself
appears in the sanctuary, his teaching is forgotten and an instinctive
sensualism overcomes the moral needs.
What
did it matter to the crowds of India? They needed forms to love. The Brahmans
had no difficulty in conquering. Were they even conscious of their victory, and
did the miserable multitude feel the defeat weighing upon its hope? Was there a
victory? Was there a defeat? Is not defeat the abdication of the real nature
that has been developed by our geographical surroundings and the great secret
atavism that binds us to the very depths of our history? Is not victory the
triumph within us of that imperishable nature through which alone the
conception of the life that is native to us can be manifested? Was a single
Buddhistic temple destroyed, a single believer persecuted? Perhaps not. In
India, the religious spirit dominates dogma. One tide rises after another and,
on the shore, leaves seaweed, shells, new corpses, new palpitating lives.
Everything is mingled and confused —the Brahman officiates in the Buddhistic
temples and venerates the statue of Buddha as well as those of Shiva, Brahma,
and Vishnu. A given underground temple, begun in the first periods of Buddhism,
continues to be dug out when the Tartars, after the Persians and the Arabs,
have imposed Islam on half of the Indians.
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