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ART. VII.-The Sacred Books of the East, translated by various Oriental Scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. Oxford and London. Clarendon Press, 28 vols. 1879-1885.

THE

rapid progress of the last decades in scientific discovery tends to overshadow, in the public mind, the no less real progress that has been made in historical research. And that this should be so, can be no matter for surprise. The results of scientific discovery are more easily understood, they affect more immediately the every-day life of the people, they appeal to a wider knowledge-inaccurate though it be and incomplete-of the elementary facts underlying the questions at issue. But it may be doubted, whether the most popular branches of scientific enquiry are not precisely those which partake most of the nature of history. And it is certain that one branch at least of historical enquiry-that which deals with the origin and development of religious belief throughout the world is attracting to itself an increasing degree of attention and of interest. There is ample evidence of this, in the number of popular handbooks on the various branches of the subject which have been lately issued to the public. But it is still better attested by the remarkable success of the very important series of original texts, the name of which heads this article. For these texts, even in translation, are by no means easy to be understood and appreciated, and they appeal much more to the scientific historian than to the general reader.

And this must necessarily be so. It is, no doubt, matter of entrancing interest to trace the gradual progress of that religious belief, which has had so overpowering an influence in the history of the past, and which will continue, so long as men are men, to have so overpowering an influence in the history of the future. But the records of that progress are disfigured by so much that is bizarre, are interwoven with so much that is strange and almost unintelligible to men permeated with modern ideas, are clothed in language so full of ambiguous allusions, that it requires a kind of special training to be able to use them aright. Translations when, like those under consideration, they are literal, necessarily and unintentionally present, not a paraphrase by the translator, but as nearly as possible the very words of the original. And, with the words, they retain also many of the difficulties of those strange old texts whose picture they purport to give.

What then are the Sacred Books of the East? 'Ex Oriente Lux,' was the bold motto which the managers of the Oriental Translation Fund placed above the beautiful vignette adorning

the title-page of each work they issued. And their figure of the sun rising out of the Eastern waves covered a real truth. It is from the East that almost all, if not all, religions have come. We know too little about the origin of the Egyptian and Mexican civilizations to be able, with absolute certainty, to class them as exceptions. And we can read for us the Mexican picture-writing, or tell us whether it has preserved a sacred book? The Sacred Books of the East are then the records of the deepest and most earnest thoughts of early times in all · those countries where religion had its most complete and most rapid development. And the series of translations published under the title would naturally embrace them all. It has not, however, been thought necessary to include a new vision of our own Bible, translations of which are already in every hand. And, in spite of the rapid progress made in recent years, the decipherment of hieroglyphs and cuneiforms has not yet reached, in accuracy and certainty, to the level of the high standard aimed at in this series. The Sacred Books of Egypt and of the Euphrates Valley are not, therefore, at present included in the undertaking. Should it become possible, before the series is completed, to give trustworthy versions of them, they will, it is hoped, be added to it before it is finally closed.

Those as yet published are six volumes of Zoroastrianism, four of Confucianism, and two of the Korân; forming a total of twelve volumes devoted to the sacred literature of non-Indian countries. Very naturally and properly a somewhat larger space has been devoted to India; partly because we English are, or ought to be, especially interested in that great continent, partly because it has been the birthplace of the two great religions which still have the greatest influence in Asia, Brahminism and Buddhism. We have three volumes of the theological and ethical speculations of the Brahmins, three of their ritual, four of their sacred laws. And we have three volumes of the rules of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants, three of their ethical poetry and prose, and one volume contains a version of a Chinese Buddhist poem on the life of their teacher. Besides these, one volume is devoted to the sacred books of the Jains, a religious body still remarkable for the wealth and influence of its followers, and in its origin as old as, or perhaps even older than, the beginnings of Buddhism.

This is a stately list, and when the reader considers that these volumes are the work of the foremost scholars of the day in the various fields of study which they cover-and there can be no better judge of such scholarship than the distinguished writer whose duty it has been to select the authors-he will understand

how trustworthy for historical and philological accuracy they are likely to be. Most of the work is also entirely new. A small proportion had previously appeared in translations more or less accurate and complete, into one or other of the better known European tongues. But by far the greater proportion consists of new versions of hitherto untranslated books, versions which would in all probability not have been made at all, had it not been for the inauguration of this connected series of the Sacred Books of the East.

A special feature of the whole series is that it contains no extracts. Each book is given complete--with all its errors of thought, its odd conceptions, its redundancies of expression-or not at all. This method has its disadvantages, but these are greatly outweighed by its value. Nothing is easier than, by means of carefully selected extracts, to convey an entirely erroneous idea of the average standard of thought in ancient books. Let us confess it boldly. The sacred books of the East are not edifying reading. Instructive they most certainly are. But they are instructive, least of all, in the direction in which their authors thought they would be most so. They teach us not so much what to believe, or what we ought to do, as what the purblind have believed, and what the foolish have done. They teach us, above all, how slow and painful were the steps by which mankind advanced along the road, not from error to truth, but from greater error to less. In this, the highest and best direction of their mental activity, men were not different from what they were in more worldly matters,—in the arts of war, in their efforts after material comfort or after social well-being. There are isolated passages in these books of great beauty, of deep religious feeling, even of rare insight into the realities of life. But there is much more that is monotonous, mistaken, wooden, even absurd. We must not turn to them for the sake of any expected revelation of sacred mysteries. Their interest is a real human interest-an interest like that which we take in watching the mind of a child unfold itself, and gather strength and shape, and struggle through ignorance, and even much misconception, into comparative freedom and light. Light has arisen in the East. But those who, with poetic fervour, have hoped that from the wisdom of the East would come the glorious many-tinted light of truth, will be disappointed to find that it is only the clear and cold-and withal somewhat dry-light of stern, historical fact.

And on one important point, on which there has been much discussion, these sacred books of the East neither throw, nor can be expected to throw, any light at all. They have nothing

except untrustworthy legend, to tell us directly, and we can derive from them little or nothing of real value indirectly or by inference, as to the origin of religious belief. The translation of the Vedic hymns is one of those parts of the great undertaking which have yet to be accomplished. But even if it lay complete before us, the decision on this point would not be altered. Even the Vedic hymns begin at a time when religious thought was already very old, at a time which, when we think of the long vista of past centuries behind it, may also be said to be modern. We may argue back, indeed, from the state of religion revealed to us in the Vedas to the state which must have immediately preceded it. We may even hazard some conjecture as to what may, in its turn, have preceded that. But even if our arguments and conclusions were certainly correct, they would scarcely bring us, comparatively speaking, nearer to the original religious conceptions out of which these later developments arose. For an answer to this vexed question we shall have to seek elsewhere.

In the second place, it will be matter of surprise to many how late these sacred books turn out to be. They date, it is true, from an epoch in which it is dangerous to speak of dates. They were composed, for the most part, long before they were written. They incorporated, when they were composed, previously existing works as well as older traditions. And the exact dates, both of their being written and of their being composed, are in most cases uncertain. But the introductions of the various experts enable us to speak with, at least, approximate accuracy, and it will be of value to summarize here the results at which they arrive.

The Chinese boast of trustworthy history extending to more than three thousand years before our era, but that history has not as yet been subjected to a critical examination. Professor Legge is inclined to think of the bulk of the works which fill his four volumes of the Confucian texts that they date, even in their present shape, from the twelfth century B.C. But they were revised in the sixth and fifth centuries by Confucius and his immediate followers, to whom the rest of the works are assigned; it was certainly to Confucius that they owed their position of sacred books as distinguished from mere ancient works; and it has yet to be settled how much or how little, of their actual wording is due to his pen, or rather to his brush? * The earliest of the Vedic hymns have undoubtedly preserved for us the records of beliefs held perhaps as long ago as fifteen

* See Professor Legge's Introductions; and especially vol. xvi. pp. 1, 6, 70; vol. iii., pp. 1–12, 280-285, 446-558; and vol. xxvii. pp. 1-9.

But it is certain that the

hndred or even two thousand B.C. four great collections of the hymns, as we now have them, are many centuries later than the latest of these two dates; and very little progress has, as yet, been made in fixing the comparative age of the various hymns they contain.* The ZendAvesta is believed by M., Darmesteter to have taken its definitive form from the hand of Adarbâd Mahraspand at the beginning of the fourth century of our era, though it certainly incorporates texts which were composed by the sacerdotal caste of the Magi as early as the fifth century B.C.† The most ancient of the Buddhist texts, the Páli Pitakas, which were probably edited as we now have them about 250 B.C., were composed, in the opinion of Professors Rhys Davids and Oldenberg, only about three hundred years before. And some of the most recent of the Buddhist sacred books, translated in this series from the Sanskrit or the Chinese, are even subsequent to the Christian These dates are all more or less liable to revision, but the uncertainty that hangs over them is as nothing to that which affects the sacred books of the Brahmins. Strange is it that men so highly gifted in many ways, as were the members of the priestly caste of India, should have been so deficient in the historic sense, that the labours of two generations of European scholars should have been insufficient to fix, even within centuries, the dates of their works. But we shall probably be erring rather on the side of antiquity than the reverse, if we place all those here translated at somewhere between the eighth and the third century before the Christian era. Finally, the Korán, as is well known, was put together, as we now have it, in 660 A.D.§

era.

We see therefore that the number of sacred books whose final composition can be referred, with any certainty, to a date previous to the eighth century B.C,, is very small indeed. Most of them are much later, and did not so much herald the rise, as signify the petrifaction, the loss of vital movement, in a religious system. And even the above dates refer to the compositions, not to the first writing, of the books.

It was long before a work, after it had been put together, acquired a sacred character. It was still longer before a work, after it had been looked upon as sacred, was committed to writing. Writing was long known, and even widely used for all kinds of memoranda and short communications, before books

* Weber, Hrstory of Indian Literature,' pp. 8-12 Vol. iv. p. xxxviiii.

Vol. xii, p. xxiii.

§ See, for instance, the Introduction to Professor Palmer's translation, vol, vị.

p. lix.

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