Professor Rhys Davids is a great scholar, and has a facile pen; when he attempts therefore a reconstruction of the India of the Gth century B.C. the book must be interesting and exlightenug even if not in all points convincing.
The author points out that hitherto all our knowledge of ancient India has been taken from Brahminical sources; that these sources are biased by the odium theologicum; that being the winning side, the Brahmins, in possession of the field, have been able by merely ignoring what was trae but inconvenient, to deceive the modern historian; and that there is another side waiting to be heard whenever the heterodox manuscripts are edited and the necessary excavations made on the historic sites." It is easy for us to imagine that if in China we went to Confucian authors only we should learn very little of the power of Buddhism among the common people.
The book sums up all that can be known, thus far, from all santees nf the political divisions, the economic eonditions, the language, the literature, and t'¢ religion of ancient India, No doubt the chapters on religion are those which would be most likely to cause controversy. The question is not, what do the Brahminieal books say the people ought to believe, but what were the actual beliefs of the people? To-day in China if we only read Confucian books we should got a most inadequate idea of religion as it actually exists among the masses; and the New Testament tells us what Christianity ought to be, not what it is in the concrete churches of Christendom.
"The priests have preserved for us, not 0 much the opinions the people actually held, as the opinions the priests wished them to hold... "And when we consider how vague and inaccurate are the accounts preserved in the writings of the Christian fathers of any views except those they themselves considered ortho-ox, we see how unreasonable it would be to expect that the Brahmins, whose Gifficulties were so much greater, should have been able todo more. What they have done, they have done accurately and well. But the record they have saved for us is a partial record."
There then follows 1 most interesting account of the changing gods, of dryads, of Is, of siren-serpents, etc., with many pictures from unclout soulpture. Many of the gods did not survive till Buddhist times; many so changed as to be nnrecognisable. But the author's conclusion is that there was continual progress; that the common view, viz., that "the Indians were more given to superstition, less intellectual, than for instance, the Greeks and Romans, must be given up."
The priestly literature deals only with. a selected portion of these beliefs; and "the contents of the priestly books on ritual are unspeakably banal." Saerifice, according two rigid rules, and paid for exact fees—sacrifice to immoral gi who ove th '1 supremacy to soci fices they themselves have' offered to older deities, mere mechanical sacrifice with no touch of morality, is the only road to advantage. This idea is later overshadowed by the idea of self-mortification, which as.before is not moral, but mechanical—a mere method of forcing the gods to bestow benefits. The iden algo beld, that the gods themselves practised corresponding austerities. This method of self-torture, apart from any penitence, is as everyone knows prominent in Indian religion to-day. Then there emerges a theory of the soul, which can be benefited neither by sacrifice nor by self-torture, but only by
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.