Part 16 (2/2)
Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone--more refres.h.i.+ng and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197} it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas welcomed it!
With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.
Rangoon, Bunna.
{198}
XX
HINDUISM--AND THE HIMALAYAS
If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life-- if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as ”a sacred disease.”
Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privileged and ”superior” being, to whom all lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.
About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening combination of superst.i.tion, idolatry, and {199} vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, ”Samsara,” the belief that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the G.o.ds and win release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence will influence all your future rebirths--this is a doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that G.o.d can be wors.h.i.+pped only in spirit.
Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of G.o.d, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into G.o.d--this also (although destructive of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu G.o.ds themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal.
Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism ”powerless to be born,” is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for mult.i.tude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pa.s.s in review before you, every eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.
It is an extreme ill.u.s.tration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta.
This temple is dedicated to Kali, or ”Mother Kali,” as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the b.l.o.o.d.y G.o.ddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and a.s.sa.s.sins, the Thugs (its founder is wors.h.i.+pped as a saint), had Kali as their patron G.o.ddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a ”temple” of ”religion.”
The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, b.l.o.o.d.y head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to wors.h.i.+p her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible G.o.ddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-wors.h.i.+p, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.
In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a b.l.o.o.d.y human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.
From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were was.h.i.+ng away their sins or ”acquiring merit” with the G.o.ds. On the way we pa.s.sed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, ”the Mother of the Smallpox,” as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest a.s.sured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked ”wors.h.i.+ppers” and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his a.s.sistance--there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of ”wors.h.i.+ppers,” such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.
Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for ”more”) I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu ”religion.”
It was Sunday morning.
Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each pus.h.i.+ng, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty G.o.ddess, herself only one of the many jealous G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one G.o.d whose characteristic is love, and whose wors.h.i.+p is of the spirit. And instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202} recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words into the strange tongue of the Bengali.
At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of those of
”Deaf ear and soul uncaring”
who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with open eyes and open mind.
But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism and more than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I must give more than a paragraph to my impressions of it.
The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win the favor of the G.o.ds, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving ma.s.sive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares.
For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on the throne of Israel.
But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly {203} unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one see crowds like these--crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river's edge through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the names of their G.o.ds as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own households--they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, man-borne _palki_ and are taken within boats with closed sides, where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place.
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