Chapter 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 superstition, 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 gods 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 gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit.

Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into God--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 gods 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 multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass 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 illustration, 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 bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess 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, bloody 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 worship 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 goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, 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 bloody 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 washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On the way we passed 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 assured 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 "worshippers" 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 assistance--there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," 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 pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose characteristic is love, and whose worship 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 gods, 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 massive 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 gods 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.

A great many pilgrims--may God have pity, as He will, on their poor untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. "_Rama, nama, satya hai_" (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.

Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked a Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see there," he replied. And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them only the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the cremation is concluded it is the son's duty--in some places I visited, at least--to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to release his father's spirit!

But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propitiated gods, is "remerging in the general soul," the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic of the social and political institutions of the Orient.

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India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many
races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The
right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance
to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is a
praying-wheel.

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TWO RANGOON TYPES.

Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one
need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized:

"'Er petticoat was yaller and 'er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.
An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot'"

{207 continued}

But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of "Mother Gunga," as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are many temples in which they must worship, many priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for his services--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).

And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares--so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls" dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defended as proper.

Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look at them.

That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."

Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.

Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of one another above its highest point--the massive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.

Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldliness.

It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in which man's fretful spirit--

"From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free"--

may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through all our human realm of Time and Place.

Lucknow, India.

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