INTRODUCTION.
LECTURE I.
LECTURE II.
LECTURE III.
LECTURE IV.
LECTURE V.
LECTURE VI.
LECTURE VII.
INTRODUCTION.
Professor
Max Müller has been so long and widely known in the world of letters
as to render any formal introduction unnecessary. He has been from
his early youth an assiduous student of philology, justly regarding
it as an important key to history and an invaluable auxiliary to
intellectual progress. A glance at his personal career will show the
ground upon which his reputation is established.Friedrich
Maximilian Müller, the son of Wilhelm Müller, the Saxon poet, was
born at Dessau, December 6th, 1823. He matriculated at Leipzig in his
eighteenth year, giving his principal attention to classical
philology, and receiving his degree in 1843. He immediately began a
course of Oriental studies, chiefly Sanskrit, under the supervision
of Professor Brockhaus, and in 1844 engaged in his translation of the
"Hitopadesa." He removed from Leipzig to Berlin, and
attended the lectures of Bopp, Rücker, and Schelling. The next year
he went to Paris to listen to Eugene Burnouf at the Collége de
France. He now began the collecting of material for his great quarto
edition of the "Rig-Veda Sanhita" and the "Commentary
of Ságanadránja." He visited England for this purpose to
examine the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and at the Indian
House. At the recommendation of H. H. Wilson, the Orientalist, he was
commissioned by the East India Company to publish his edition in
England at their expense. The first volume appeared in 1849, and five
others followed during the next few years.In
1850 he delivered a course of "Lectures on Comparative
Philology" at Oxford, and the next year was made member of
Christ Church, curator, etc., and appointed Taylorian Professor of
Modern European Languages and Literature. He received also numerous
other marks of distinction from universities, and was made one of the
eight foreign members of the Institute of France. The Volney prize
was awarded him by the French Academy for his "Essay on the
Comparative Philology of Indo-European Languages and its Bearing on
the Early Civilization of Mankind."His
writings have been numerous. Besides editing the translations of the
"Sacred Books of the Principal Religions," he has published
a "Handbook for the Study of Sanskrit," a "Sanskrit-English
Dictionary and Grammar," "Lectures upon the Science of
Language," "An Introduction to the Science of Religion,"
"Essays on Mythology," "Chips from a German Workshop,"
etc. He seems to have no intermission, but penetrates where others
would not have ventured, or have faltered from utter weariness. In
the field of philology he has few peers, while in early Sanskrit
learning he has virtually taken the part of an innovator. While
reverently following after Sir William Jones, Colebrooke,
Windischmann, Bopp, and others of equal distinction, he sets aside
the received views in regard to chronology and historical
occurrences. The era of Vikramâditya and the Golden Age of Sanskrit
literature, bearing a date almost simultaneous with the Augustan
period at the West, are postponed by him to a later century. It may
be that he has overlooked some canon of interpretation that would
have modified his results. Those, however, who hesitate to accept his
conclusions freely acknowledge his scholarly enthusiasm, persistent
energy, and great erudition.Sanskrit
in his judgment constitutes an essential element of a liberal
education. While heartily admiring the employment of some of the best
talent and noblest genius of our age in the study of development in
the outward world, from the first growth of the earth and the
beginning of organic life to the highest stages, he pleads earnestly
that there is an inward and intellectual world also to be studied in
its historical development in strict analogy with the other, leading
up to the beginning of rational thought in its steady progress from
the lowest to the highest stages. In that study of the history of the
human mind, in that study of ourselves, our true selves, India
occupies a place which is second to no other country. Whatever sphere
of the human mind may be selected for special study, whether
language, religion, mythology, or philosophy, whether laws, customs,
primitive art or primitive science, we must go to India, because some
of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of
man are treasured up there, and there only. He inveighs most
eloquently against the narrowing of our horizon to the history of
Greeks and Romans, Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of
Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon, leaving out of sight our nearest
intellectual relatives, the Aryans of India, the framers of that most
wonderful language the Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the
construction of our fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most
natural of natural religions, the makers of the most transparent of
mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the
givers of the most elaborate laws. It is the purpose of historical
study to enable each generation to profit from the experience of
those who came before, and advance toward higher aims, without being
obliged to start anew from the same point as its ancestors after the
manner of every race of brutes. He who knows little of those who
preceded is very likely to care little for those coming after. "Life
would be to him a chain of sand, while it ought to be a kind of
electric chain that makes our hearts tremble and vibrate with the
most ancient thoughts of the Past, as well as with the most distant
hopes of the Future."In
no just sense is this an exaggeration. Deep as science and research
have explored, extensive as is the field which genius and art have
occupied, they have an Herculean labor yet to perform before India
will have yielded up all her opulence of learning. The literature of
the world in all ages has been richly furnished, if not actually
inspired, from that fountain. The Wisdom of the Ancients, so much
lauded in the earlier writings of Hebrews, Greeks, and Phœnicians,
was abundantly represented in the lore of these Wise Men of the East.The
first Ionian sages lighted the torch of philosophy at the altar of
Zoroaster. The conquest of Asia Minor by the Persians brought Thales,
Anaximenes, and Herakleïtos into contact with the Eranian dogmas.
The leaven thus imparted had a potent influence upon the entire mass
of Grecian thought. We find it easy to trace its action upon opinions
in later periods and among the newer nations. Kant, Hegel, Stewart,
and Hamilton, as well as Platô, Zenô, and Aristotle, had their
prototypes in the world and antiquity beyond. Even the first
Zarathustra was an exponent and not the originator of the Religion
and Science of Light. We are thus carried by this route back to the
ancient Aryan Home for the sources from which so many golden streams
have issued. In the Sanskrit books and mantras we must look for the
treasures that make human souls rich. Perhaps we have been too much
disposed to regard that former world as a wonderland, a repertory of
folk-lore, or a theatre of gross and revolting superstition. We are
now required by candor and justice to revise such notions. These
primeval peoples, in their way and in a language akin to ours, adored
the Father in heaven, and contemplated the future of the soul with a
sure and certain hope.Nor
did they, while observing the myriads of races intervening between
man and the monad, regard the world beyond as waste and void.
Intelligences of every grade were believed to people the region
between mortals and the Infinite. The angels and archangels, and the
spirits of the just made perfect—devas
and pitris
they called them—ministered about the throne of the Supreme Being,
and abode in the various spheres of universal space. Much of the
difference between our thought and theirs consists in the names and
not in the substance of our beliefs.We
may thus be prepared to receive what India can teach us. In her
classic dialect, the Sanskrit, we may read with what success the
children of the men who journeyed from the ancient Aryan Home into
the Punjâb and Aryavartta have ventured "to look inward upon
themselves, upward to something not themselves, and to see whether
they could not understand a little of the true purport of that
mystery which we call life upon earth." It was perfectly
natural, as well as perfectly right, that as the beholder caught a
glance of the Infinite Beyond, the image impressed itself upon his
sensorium, as would be the case from looking at the sun, and he would
as a result perceive that Infinite in all that he looked upon. Thus
to the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan, as to the enlightened mind of to-day,
not to see it was utter blindness. What we call science, law,
morality, religion, was in his view pervaded alike throughout by this
concept of Divine presence, or else it would have been less than a
dream that had not come to the awaking. He was a follower of the
light, not from the senses or the logical understanding, but from the
eternal world. Let us not dwell on any darker shade of the picture.
Clouds are dark to those who are beneath them; but on the upper side,
where the sun shines, they glow with golden splendor. Let us be
willing to contemplate India fraternally, and upon that side where
the radiance of the Divine sheds a refulgent illumination.
LECTURE I.
WHAT
CAN INDIA TEACH US?
When
I received from the Board of Historical Studies at Cambridge the
invitation to deliver a course of lectures, specially intended for
the candidates for the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some
time, feeling extremely doubtful whether in a few public discourses I
could say anything that would be of real use to them in passing their
examinations. To enable young men to pass their examinations seems
now to have become the chief, if not the only object of the
universities; and to no class of students is it of greater importance
to pass their examinations, and to pass them well, than to the
candidates for the Indian Civil Service.
But
although I was afraid that attendance on a few public lectures, such
as I could give, would hardly benefit a candidate who was not already
fully prepared to pass through the fiery ordeal of the three London
examinations, I could not on the other hand shut my eyes completely
to the fact that, after all, universities were not meant entirely, or
even chiefly, as stepping-stones to an examination, but that there is
something else which universities can teach and ought to teach—nay,
which I feel quite sure they were originally meant to teach—something
that may not have a marketable value before a Board of Examiners, but
which has a permanent value for the whole of our life, and that is a
real interest in our work, and, more than that, a love of our work,
and, more than that, a true joy and happiness in our work. If a
university can teach that, if it can engraft that one small living
germ in the minds of the young men who come here to study and to
prepare themselves for the battle of life, and, for what is still
more difficult to encounter, the daily dull drudgery of life, then, I
feel convinced, a university has done more, and conferred a more
lasting benefit on its pupils than by helping them to pass the most
difficult examinations, and to take the highest place among Senior
Wranglers or First-Class men.
Unfortunately,
that kind of work which is now required for passing one examination
after another, that process of cramming and crowding which has of
late been brought to the highest pitch of perfection, has often the
very opposite effect, and instead of exciting an appetite for work,
it is apt to produce an indifference, if not a kind of intellectual
nausea, that may last for life.
And
nowhere is this so much to be feared as in the case of candidates for
the Indian Civil Service. After they have passed their first
examination for admission to the Indian Civil Service, and given
proof that they have received the benefits of a liberal education,
and acquired that general information in classics, history, and
mathematics, which is provided at our public schools, and forms no
doubt the best and surest foundation for all more special and
professional studies in later life, they suddenly find themselves
torn away from their old studies and their old friends, and compelled
to take up new subjects which to many of them seem strange,
outlandish, if not repulsive. Strange alphabets, strange languages,
strange names, strange literatures and laws have to be faced, "to
be got up" as it is called, not from choice, but from dire
necessity. The whole course of study during two years is determined
for them, the subjects fixed, the books prescribed, the examinations
regulated, and there is no time to look either right or left, if a
candidate wishes to make sure of taking each successive fence in good
style, and without an accident.
