Xl PREFACE TO THE
faithful translations of their sacred books. Extracts
will no longer suffice. We do not know Germany,
if we know the Rhine; nor Rome, when we have
admired St. Peter’s. No one who collects and pub-
lishes such extracts can resist, no one at all events,
so far as I know, has ever resisted, the temptation
of giving what is beautiful, or it may be what is
strange and startling, and leaving out what is com-
monplace, tedious, or it may be repulsive, or, lastly,
what is difficult to construe and to understand. We
must face the problem in its completeness, and I[
confess it has been for many years a problem to
me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the
Sacred Books of the East should, by the side of so
much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful, and
true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning,
artificial, and silly, but even hideous and repellent.
This is a fact, and must be accounted for in some
way or other.
To some minds this problem may seem to be no
problem at all. To those (and I do not speak of
Christians only) who look upon the sacred books of
all religions except their own as necessarily the out-
come of human or superhuman ignorance and de-
pravity, the mixed nature of their contents may
seem to be exactly what it ought to be, what they
expected it would be. But there are other and
more. reverent minds who can feel a divine afflatus
in the sacred books, not only of their own, but of
other religions also, and to them the mixed character
of some of the ancient sacred canons must always
be extremely perplexing.
I can account for it to a certain extent, though not entirely to my own satisfaction. Most of the
SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. Xill
ancient sacred books have been handed down by
oral tradition for many generations before they were
consigned to writing. In an age when there was
nothing corresponding to what we call literature,
every saying, every proverb, every story handed
down from father to son, received very soon a kind
of hallowed character. They became sacred heir-
looms, sacred, because they came from an unknown
source, from a distant age. There was a stage in
the development of human thought, when the dis-
tance that separated the living generation from their
grandfathers or great-grandfathers was as yet the
nearest approach to a conception of eternity, and
when the name of grandfather and great-grandfather
seemed the nearest expression of God*. Hence,
what had been said by-these half-human, half-divine
ancestors, if it was preserved at all; was soon looked
upon as a more than human utterance. It was
received with reverence, it was never questioned
and criticised.
Some of these ancient sayings were preserved
because they were so true and so striking that they
could not be forgotten. They contained eternal
truths, expressed for the first time in human lan-
guage. Of such oracles of truth it was said in India
that they had been heard, sruta, and from it arose
the word sruti, the recognised term for divine
revelation in Sanskrit.
But besides those utterances which had a vitality of their own, strong enough to defy the power of
' Bishop Callaway, Unkulunkulu, or the Tradition of Creation, as existing among the Amazulu and other tribes of South Africa,
Pp. 7:
Xiv Preface to the
time, there were others which might have struck
the minds of the listeners with great force under
the peculiar circumstances that evoked them, but
which, when these circumstances were forgotten, be-
came trivial and almost unintelligible. A few verses
sung by warriors on the eve of a great battle would,
if that battle ended in victory, assume a charm
quite independent of their poetic merit. They
would be repeated in memory of the heroes
who conquered, and of the gods who granted
victory. But when the heroes, and the gods, and
the victory were all forgotten, the song of victory
and thanksgiving would often survive as a relic
of the past, though almost unintelligible to later
generations.
Even a single ceremonial act, performed at the
time of a famine or an inundation, and apparently
attended with a sudden and almost miraculous
success, might often be preserved in the liturgical
code of a family or a tribe with a superstitious awe
entirely beyond our understanding. It might be
repeated for some time on similar emergencies, till
when it had failed again and again it survived only
as a superstitious custom in the memory of priests
and poets.
Further, it should be remembered that in ancient
as in modern times, the utterances of men who had
once gained a certain prestige, would often receive
attention far beyond their merits, so that in many
a family or tribe the sayings and teachings of one
man, who had once in his youth or manhood uttered
words of inspired wisdom, would all be handed
down together, without any attempt to separate
the grain from the chaff.
Sacred Books of the East. Xv
Nor must we forget that though oral tradition,
when once brought under proper discipline, is a
most faithful guardian, it is not without its dangers
in its incipient stages. Many a word may have been
misunderstood, many a sentence confused, as it was
told by father to son, before it became fixed in the
tradition of a village community, and then resisted
by its very sacredness all attempts at emendation.
Lastly, we must remember that those who handed
down the ancestral treasures of ancient wisdom,
would often feel inclined to add what seemed useful
to themselves, and what they knew could be pre-
served in one way only, namely, if it was allowed to
form part of the tradition that had to be handed
down, as a sacred trust, from generation to genera-
tion. The priestly influence was at work, even
before there were priests by profession, and when
the priesthood had once become professional, its
influence may account for much that would other-
wise seem inexplicable in the sacred codes of the
ancient world.
These are some of the considerations which may
help to explain how, mixed up with real treasures of
thought, we meet in the sacred books with so many
passages and whole chapters which either never had
any life or meaning at all, or if they had, have, in the
form in which they have come down to us, com-
pletely lost it. We must try to imagine what the Old
Testament would have been, if it had not been kept
distinct from the Talmud; or the New Testament,
if it had been mixed up not only with the spurious
gospels, but with the records of the wranglings of
the early Councils, if we wish to understand, to some
extent at least, the wild confusion of sublime truth
Xvi Preface to the
with vulgar stupidity that meets us in the pages of
the Veda, the Avesta, and the Tripizaka. The idea
of keeping the original and genuine tradition separate
from apocryphal accretions was an idea of later
growth, that could spring up only after the earlier
tendency of preserving whatever could be preserved
of sacred or half-sacred lore, had done its work, and
wrought its own destruction.
In using, what may seem to some of my fellow-
workers, this very strong and almost irreverent lan-
guage with regard to the ancient Sacred Books of
the East, I have not neglected to make full allow-
ance for that very important intellectual parallax
which, no doubt, renders it most difficult for a
Western observer to see things and thoughts under
exactly the same angle and in the same light as they
would appear to an Eastern eye. There are Western
expressions which offend Eastern taste as much as
Eastern expressions are apt to offend Western taste.
A symphony of Beethoven’s would be mere noise to
an Indian ear, an Indian Sangita seems to us with-
out melody, harmony, or rhythm. All this I fully
admit, yet after making every allowance for national
taste and traditions, I still confidently appeal to the
best Oriental scholars, who have not entirely for-
gotten that there is a world outside the four walls
of their study, whether they think that my con-
demnation is too severe, or that Eastern nations
themselves would tolerate, in any of their classical
literary compositions, such violations of the simplest
rules of taste as they have accustomed themselves to
tolerate, if not to admire, in their sacred books.
But then it might no doubt be objected that books of such a character hardly deserve the honour of
Sacred Books of the East. Xvii
being translated into English, and that the sooner
they are forgotten, the better. Such opinions have
of late been freely expressed by some eminent
writers, and supported by arguments worthy of the
Khalif Omar himself. In these days of anthropo-
logical research, when no custom is too disgusting
to be recorded, no rules of intermarriage too com-
plicated to be disentangled, it may seem strange
that the few genuine relics of ancient religion which,
as by a miracle, have been preserved to us, should thus
have been judged from a purely zsthetic, and not from
an historical point of view. There was some excuse for
this in the days of Sir William Jones and Colebrooke.
The latter, as is well known, considered ‘the Vedas
as too voluminous for a complete translation of the
whole, adding that ‘what they contain would hardly
reward the labour of the reader; much less that of
the translator’) The former went still further in
the condemnation which he pronounced on Anquetil
Duperron’s translation of the Zend-avesta. Sir W.
Jones, we must remember, was not only a scholar,
but also a man of taste, and the man of taste some-
times gained a victory over the scholar. His con-
troversy with Anquetil Duperron, the discoverer of
the Zend-avesta, is well known. It was carried on
by Sir W. Jones apparently with great success, and
yet in the end the victor has proved to be the
vanquished. It was easy, no doubt, to pick out from
Anquetil Duperron’s translation of the sacred writings
of Zoroaster hundreds of passages which were or
seemed to be utterly unmeaning or absurd. This
arose partly, but partly only, from the imperfections
' Colebrooke’s Miscellaneous Essays, 1873, vol. ii, p. 102.
XVill PREFACE TO THE
of the translation. Much, however, of what Sir W.
Jones represented as ridiculous, and therefore un-
worthy of Zoroaster, and therefore unworthy of being
translated, forms an integral part of the sacred code of
the Zoroastrians. Sir W. Jones smiles at those who
‘think obscurity sublime and venerable, like that of
ancient cloisters and temples, shedding, as Milton
expresses it, ‘a dim religious light!’ ‘On possé-
dait déja, he writes in his letter addressed to
Anquetil Duperron, and composed in very good
and sparkling French, ‘plusieurs traités attribués a
Zardusht ou Zeratusht, traduits en Persan moderne ;
de prétendues conférences de ce législateur avec
Ormuzd, des priéres, des dogmes, des lois religieuses.
Quelques savans, qui ont lu ces traductions, nous ont
assuré que les originaux étaient de la plus haute
antiquité, parce qu'ils renfermaient beaucoup de plati-
tudes, de bévues, et de contradictions: mais nous
avons conclu par les mémes raisons, quiils étaient
trés-modernes, ou bien quiils n’étaient pas dun
homme d’esprit, et d’un philosophe, tel que Zoroastre
est peint par nos historiens. Votre nouvelle tra-
duction, Monsieur, nous confirme dans ce juge-
ment: tout le collé¢ge des Guébres aurait beau
nous l’assurer; nous ne croirons jamais que le
charlatan le moins habile ait pu écrire les fadaises
dont vos deux derniers volumes sont remplis 2’
He at last sums up his argument in the following
words: ‘Ou Zoroastre n'avait pas le sens commun,
ou il n’écrivit pas le livre que vous lui attribuez:
sil n'avait pas le sens commun, il fallait le laisser
dans la foule, et dans Vobscurité; s'il n’écrivit pas
* Sir W. Jones's Works, vol. iv, p.113. ? Ib., vol. x, p. 408.
Sacred Books of the East. Xix
ce livre, il était impudent de le publier sous son
nom. Ainsi, ou vous avez insulté le gofit du public
en lui présentant des sottises, ou vous l’avez trompé
en lui donnant des faussetés: et de chaque cété vous
méritez son mépris!’
This alternative holds good no longer. The
sacred code of Zoroaster or of any other of the —
founders of religions may appear to/us to be full of
absurdities, or may in fact really bé so, and it may
yet be the duty of the scholar to publish, to translate,
and carefully to examine those codes as memorials
of the past, as the /only trustworthy documents in
which to study the growt and decay of religion.
It does not answer to say that/if Zoroaster was what
we believe him to have been, A wise man, in our
sense of the word, he could not have written the
rubbish which we find in the Avesta. If we are
once satisfied that the text of the Avesta, or the
Veda, or the Tripi¢aka is old and genuine, and
that this text formed the foundation on which,
during many centuries, the religious belief of millions
of human beings was based, it becomes our duty,
both as historians and philosophers, to study these
books, to try to understand how they could have
arisen, and how they could have exercised for ages
an influence over human beings who in all other
respects were not inferior to ourselves, nay, whom
we are accustomed to look up to on many points as
patterns of wisdom, of virtue, and of taste.
The facts, such as they are, must be faced, if the
study of the ancient religions of the world is ever
to assume a really historical character; and having