Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 1 — The Upanishads, Part I (Muller, page scans)

* Anquetil Duperron translates: ‘Ipso hoc modo (ens) illud est subtile: et hoc omne, unus 4tma est: et id verum et rectum est, O Sopatkit, tatoumes, id est, ille 4tma tu as,’

Xxxvi Preface to the

in the printed text (VI, 8, 6) is wrong, and VI, 8, 7
should begin with sa ya esho ’zimA, i.e. that which
is the subtile essence.

The question then is, what is further to be said
about this subtile essence. I have ventured to
translate the passage in the following way:

‘That which is the subtile esserice (the Sat, the
root of everything), in it all that exists has its self,
or more literally, its self-hood. It is the True (not
the Truth in the abstract, but that which truly and
really exists). It is the Self, i.e. the Sat is what is
called the Self of everything?.’ Lastly, he sums up,
and tells Svetaketu that, not only the whole world,
but he too himself is that Self, that Satya, that
Sat.

No doubt this translation sounds strange to
English ears, but as the thoughts contained in the
Upanishads are strange, it would be wrong to
smoothe down their strangeness by clothing them
in language familiar to us, which, because it is
familiar, will fail to startle us, and because it fails
to startle us, will fail also to set us thinking.

To know oneself to be the Sat, to know that all
that is real and eternal in us is the Sat, that all came
from it and will, through knowledge, return to it,
requires an independent effort of speculative thought.
We must realise, as well as we can, the thoughts of
the ancient Rishis, before we can hope to translate
them. It is not enough simply to read the half-reli-
gious, half-philosophical utterances which we find in

* The change of gender in sa for tad is idiomatic. One could not say in Sanskrit tad 4tma, it is the Self, but sa 4tma. By sa, he, the Sat, that which is, is meant. The commentary explains Sa dtma by tat sat, and continues tat sat tat tvam asi (p. 443).

Sacred Books of the East. Xxxvii

the Sacred Books of the East, and to say that they
are strange, or obscure, or mystic. Plato is strange,
till we know him; Berkeley is mystic, till for a time
we have identified ourselves with him. So it is with
these ancient sages, who have become the founders
of the great religions of antiquity. They can never
be judged from without, they must be judged from
within. We need not become Brahmans or Bud-
dhists or Taosze altogether, but we must for a time,
if we wish to understand, and still more, if we are
bold enough to undertake to translate their doc-
trines. Whoever shrinks from that effort, will see
hardly anything in these sacred books or their
translations but matter to wonder at or to laugh at ;
possibly something to make him thankful that he is
not as other men. But to the patient reader these
same books will, in spite of many drawbacks, open a
new view of the history of the human race, of that
one race to which we all belong, with all the fibres
of our flesh, with all the fears and hopes of our soul.
We cannot separate ourselves from those who be-
lieved in these sacred books. There is no specific
difference between ourselves and the Brahmans, the
Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, or the Taosze. Our
powers of perceiving, of reasoning, and of believing
may be more highly developed, but we cannot claim
the possession of any verifying power or of any
power of belief which they did not possess aswell.
Shall we say then that they were forsaken of God,
while we are His chosen people? God forbid!
There is much, no doubt, in their sacred books
which we should tolerate no longer, though we must
not forget that there are portions in our own sacred
_ books, too, which many of us would wish to be absent,

XXXVIil PREFACE TO THE

which, from the earliest ages of Christianity, have
been regretted by theologians of undoubted piety,
and which often prove a stumblingblock to those
who have been won over by our missionaries to the »
simple faith of Christ. But that is not the question.
The question is, whether there is or whether there is
not, hidden in every one of the sacred books, some-
thing that could lift up the human heart from this
earth to a higher world, something that could make
man feel the omnipresence of a higher Power, some-
thing that could make him shrink from evil and in-
cline to good, something to sustain him in the short
journey through life, with its bright moments of
happiness, and its long hours of terrible distress.

If some of those who read and mark these trans-
lations learn how to discover some such precious
grains in the sacred books of other nations, though
hidden under heaps of rubbish, our labour will not
have been in vain, for there is no lesson which at
the present time seems more important than to learn
that in every religion there are such precious grains ;
that we must draw in every religion a broad distinction
between what is essential and what is not, between
the eternal and the temporary, between the divine
and the human; and that though the non-essential
may fill many volumes, the essential can often be
comprehended in a few words, but words on which
‘hang all the law and the prophets.’

Sacred Books of the East. Xxxix

PROGRAM OF A TRANSLATION OF

THE SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST.

I here subjoin the program in which I first put
forward the idea of a translation of the Sacred
Books of the East, and through which I invited the
co-operation of Oriental scholars in this undertaking.
The difficulty of finding translators, both willing
and competent to take a part in it, proved far
greater than I had anticipated. Even when I had
secured the assistance of a number of excellent
scholars, and had received their promises of prompt
co-operation, illness, domestic affliction, and even
death asserted their control over all human affairs.
Professor Childers, who had shown the warmest
interest in our work, and on whom I chiefly de-
pended for the Pali literature of the Buddhists, was
taken from us, an irreparable loss to Oriental scholar-
ship in general, and to our undertaking in particular.
Among native scholars, whose co-operation I had
been particularly desired to secure, Rajendralal Mitra,
who had promised a translation of the Vayu-puraza,
was prevented by serious illness from fulfilling his
engagement. In other cases sorrow and sickness have
caused, at all events, serious delay in the translation
of the very books which were to have inaugurated
this Series. However, new offers of assistance have
come, and I hope that more may still come from
Oriental scholars both in India and England, so
that the limit of time which had been originally

x] PREFACE TO THE

assigned to the publication of twenty-four volumes may not, I hope, be much exceeded.

Tue Sacrep Booxs or THE East, TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUC-
TIONS AND Notes, BY VARIOUS ORIENTAL SCHOLARS, AND EDITED
By F. Max Murer.

Apart from the interest which the Sacred Books of all religions possess in the eyes of the theologian, and, more particularly, of the missionary; to whom an accurate knowledge of them is as indispen- sable as a knowledge of the enemy’s country is to a general, these works have of late assumed a new importance, as viewed in the character of ancient historical documents. In every country where Sacred Books ‘have been preserved, whether by oral tradition or by writing, they are the oldest records, and mark the beginning of what may be called documentary, in opposition to purely tradi- tional, history.

There is nothing more ancient in India than the Vedas; and, if we except the Vedas and the literature connected with them, there is again no literary work in India which, so far as we know at present, can with certainty be referred to an earlier date than that of the Sacred Canon of the Buddhists. Whatever age we may assign to the various portions of the Avesta and to their final arrangement, there is no book in the Persian language of greater antiquity than the Sacred Books of the followers of Zarathustra, nay, even than their translation in Pehlevi. There may have been an extensive ancient literature in China long before Khung-f@-3ze and L&o-jze, but among all that was rescued and preserved of it, the five King and the four Sh claim again the highest antiquity. As to the Koran, it is known to be the fountain-head both of the religion and of the literature of the Arabs.

This being the case, it was but natural that the attention of the historian should of late have been more strongly attracted by these Sacred Books, as likely to afford most valuable information, not only on the religion, but also on the moral sentiments, the social institutions, the legal maxims of some of the most important nations of antiquity. There are not many nations that have preserved sacred writings, and many of those that have been preserved have but lately become accessible to us in their original form, through the rapid advance of Oriental scholarship in Europe. Neither Greeks, nor Romans, nor Germans, nor Celts, nor Slaves have left us anything that deserves the name of Sacred Books. The

SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. xli

Homeric Poems are national Epics, like the Ramayama, and the Nibelunge, and the Homeric Hymns have never received that genera] recognition or sanction which alone can impart to the poetical effusions of personal piety the sacred or canonical cha- racter which is the distinguishing feature of the Vedic Hymns. The sacred literature of the early inhabitants of Italy seems to have been of a liturgical rather than of a purely religious kind, and whatever the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves may have possessed of sacred traditions about their gods and heroes, having been handed down by oral tradition chiefly, has perished beyond all hope of recovery. Some portions of the Eddas alone give us an idea of what the religious and heroic poetry of the Scandinavians may have been. The Egyptians possessed Sacred Books, and some of them, such as the Book of the Dead, have come down to us in various forms. There is a translation of the Book of the Dead by Dr. Birch, published in the fifth volume of Bunsen’s Egypt, and a new edition and translation of this important work may be expected from the combined labours of Birch, Chabas, Lepsius, and Naville. In Babylon and Assyria, too, important fragments of what may be called a Sacred Literature have lately come to light. The interpretation, however, of these Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform texts is as yet so difficult that, for the present, they are of interest to the scholar only, and hardly available for histo- rical purposes,

Leaving out of consideration the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, it appears that the only great and original religions which profess to be founded on Sacred Books’, and have preserved them in manuscript, are :—

1. The religion of the Brahmans.

2. The religion of the followers of Buddha.

3. The religion of the followers of Zarathustra. 4. The religion of the followers of Khung-ff-3ze. 5. The religion of the followers of Lio-;ze.

6. The religion of the followers of Mohammed.

A desire for a trustworthy transiation of the Sacred Books of these six Eastern religions has often been expressed. Several have been translated into English, French, German, or Latin, but in some cases these translations are difficult to procure, in others they are loaded with notes and commentaries, which are intended for

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1 Introduction to the Science of Religion, by F. Max Miiller (Longmans, 1873), p. 104.

xlii PREFACE TO THE