1 Works, vol. x, p. 437. b 2
Xx Preface to the
myself grudged no praise to what to my mind is really
beautiful or sublime in the early revelations of reli-
vious truth, I feel the less hesitation in fulfilling the
duty of the true scholar, and placing before historians
and philosophers accurate, complete, and unembel-
lished versions of some of the sacred books of the
East. Such versions alone will enable them to form
a true and just estimate of the real development of
early religious thought, so far as we can still gain a
sight of it in literary records to which the highest
human or even divine authority has been ascribed
by the followers of the great religions of antiquity.
It often requires an effort to spoil a beautiful sen-
tence by a few words which might so easily be
suppressed, but which are there in the original,
and must be taken into account quite as much
as the pointed ears in the beautiful Faun of the
Capitol. We want to know the ancient religions
such as they really were, not such as we wish they
should have been. We want to know, not their
wisdom only, but their folly also ; and while we must
learn to look up to their highest points where they
seem to rise nearer to heaven than anything we were
acquainted with before, we must not shrink from
looking down into their stony tracts, their dark
abysses, their muddy moraines, in order to compre-
hend both the heighth and the depth of the human
mind in its searchings after the Infinite.
I can answer for myself and for those who have
worked with me, that our translations are truthful,
that we have suppressed nothing, that we have
varnished nothing, however hard it seemed some-
times even to write it down.
There is only one exception. There are in ancient
Sacred Books of the East. Xx!
books, and particularly in religious books, frequent
allusions to the sexual aspects of nature, which,
though perfectly harmless and innocent in them-
selves, cannot be rendered in modern language with-
out the appearance of coarseness. We may regret
that it should be so, but tradition is too strong on
this point, and I have therefore felt obliged to leave
certain passages untranslated, and to give the ori-
ginal, when necessary, in a note. But this has been
done in extreme cases only, and many things which
we should feel inclined to suppress have been left in
all their outspoken simplicity, because those who
want to study ancient man, must learn to study him
as he really was, an animal, with all the strength
and weaknesses of an animal, though an animal that
was to rise above himself, and in the end discover his
true self, after many struggles and many defeats.
After this first caution, which I thought was due
to those who might expect to find in these volumes
nothing but gems, I feel I owe another to those
who may approach these translations under the
impression that they have only to read them in
order to gain an insight into the nature and character
of the religions of mankind. There are philosophers
who have accustomed themselves to look upon reli-
gions as things that can be studied as they study the
manners and customs of savage tribes, by glancing
at the entertaining accounts of travellers or mis-
sionaries, and then classing each religion under such
wide categories as fetishism, polytheism, monotheism,
and the rest. That is not the case. Translations
can do much, but they can never take the place of the
originals, and if the originals require not only to be
XXil PREEACE TO THE
ee ee,
en eee
read, but to be read again and again, translations of
sacréd books require to be studied with much greater
care, before we can hope to gain a real under-
standing of the intentions of their authors or venture
on géneral assertions.
Such general assertions, if once made, are difficult
to extirpate. It has been stated, for instance, that
the religious notion of sin is wanting altogether in
the hymns of the Rig-veda, and some important con-
clusions have been based on this supposed fact. Yet
the gradual growth of the concept of guilt is one of
the most interesting lessons which certain passages
of these ancient hymns can teach us1. It has been
asserted that in the Rig-veda Agni, fire, was adored
essentially as earthly sacrificial fire, and not as an
elemental force. How greatly such an assertion has
to be qualified, may be seen from a more careful
examination of the translations of the Vedic hymns
now accessible. In many parts of the Avesta
fire is no doubt spoken of with great rever-
ence, but those who speak of the Zoroastrians
as fire-worshippers, should know that the true fol-
lowers of Zoroaster abhor that very name. Again,
there are certainly many passages in the Vedic
writings which prohibit the promiscuous communi-
cation of the Veda, but those who maintain that
the Brahmans, like Roman Catholic priests, keep
their sacred books from the people, must have for-
" M. M., History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, second edition, 1859, p. 540 Seq.
* Ludwig, Rig-veda, iibersetzt, vol. iii, p. 331 seq. Muir, Sanskrit Texts, vol. v, p. 199 seq. On the later growth of Agni, see a very useful essay by Holtzmann, ‘Agni, nach den Vorstellungen des Mahabharata,’ 1878.
SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. XXili
gotten the many passages in the Brahmamzas, the
Satras, and even in the Laws of Manu, where the
duty of learning the Veda by heart is inculcated for
every Brahmaza, Kshatriya, Vaisya, that is, for every
man except a Sidra.
These are a few specimens only to show how
dangerous it is to generalise even where there exist
complete translations of certain sacred books. It is
far easier to misapprehend, or even totally to mis-
understand, a translation than the original; and it
should not be supposed, because a sentence or a
whole chapter seems at first sight unintelligible in
a translation, that therefore they are indeed devoid
of all meaning.
What can be more perplexing than the beginning
of the AA#andogya-upanishad ? ‘Let a man medi-
tate, we read, or, as others translate it, ‘Let a man
worship the syllable Om. It may seem impossible
at first sight to elicit any definite meaning from
these words and from much that follows after.
But it would be a mistake, nevertheless, to con-
clude that we have here vox et preterea nihil.
Meditation on the syllable Om consisted in a long-
continued repetition of that syllable with a view
of drawing the thoughts away from all other sub-
jects, and thus concentrating them on some higher
object of thought of which that syllable was made to
be the symbol. This concentration of thought, eka-
grata or one-pointedness, as the Hindus called it, is
something to us almost unknown. Our minds are
like kaleidoscopes of thoughts in constant motion ;
and to shut our mental eyes to everything else, while
dwelling on one thought only, has become to most
of us almost as impossible as to apprehend one
Xxiv Preface to the
musical note without harmonics. With the life we
are leading now, with telegrams, letters, newspapers,
reviews, pamphlets, and books ever breaking in upon
us, it has become impossible, or almost impossible,
ever to arrive at that intensity of thought which the
Hindus meant by eka4grat4, and the attainment of
which was to them the indispensable condition of all
philosophical and religious speculation. The loss may
not be altogether on our side, yet a loss it is, and if we
see the Hindus, even’ in their comparatively mono-
tonous life, adopting all kinds of contrivances in
order to assist them in drawing away their thoughts
from all disturbing impressions and to fix them on
one subject only, we must not be satisfied with
smiling at their simplicity, but try to appreciate the
object they had in view.
When by means of repeating the syllable Om,
which originally seems to have meant ‘that,’ or ‘ yes,’
they had arrived at a certain degree of mental tran-
quillity, the question arose what was meant by this
Om, and to this question the most various answers
were given, according as the mind was to be led
up to higher and higher objects. Thus in one
passage we are told at first that Om is the beginning
of the Veda, or, as we have to deal with an Upanishad
of the Sama-veda, the beginning of the SAma-veda,
so that he who meditates on Om, may be supposed
to be meditating on the whole of the Sama-veda.
But that is not enough. Om is said to be the essence
of the Sama-veda, which, being almost entirely taken
from the Rig-veda, may itself be called the essence
of the Rig-veda. And more than that. The Rig-veda
stands for all speech, the Sama-veda for all breath
or life, so that Om may be conceived of again as the
Sacred Books of the East. Xxv
symbol of all speech and all life. Om thus becomes
the name, not only of all our physical and mental
powers, but especially of the living principle, the
Prava or spirit. This is explained by the parable
in the second chapter, while in the third chapter,
that spirit within us is identified with the spirit in
the sun. He therefore who meditates on Om, medi-
tates on the spirit in man as identical with the spirit
in nature, or in the sun; and thus the lesson that
is meant to be taught in the beginning of the
KAandogya-upanishad is really this, that none of the
Vedas with their sacrifices and ceremonies could
ever secure the salvation of the worshipper, i.e.
that sacred works, performed according to the rules
of the Vedas, are of no avail in the end, but that
meditation on Om alone, or that knowledge of
what is meant by Om alone, can procure true salva-
tion, or true immortality. Thus the pupil is led on
step by step to what is the highest object of the
Upanishads, viz. the recognition of the self in man
as identical with the Highest Self or Brahman.
The lessons which are to lead up to that highest
conception of the universe, both subjective and
objective, are no doubt mixed up with much that
is superstitious and absurd ; still the main object is
never lost sight of. Thus, when we come to the
eighth chapter, the discussion, though it begins with
Om or the Udgitha, ends with the question of the
origin of the world; and though the final answer,
namely, that Om means ether (4k4sa), and that
ether is the origin of all things, may still sound to
us more physical than metaphysical, still the descrip-
tion given of ether or Akasa, shows that more is
meant by it than the physical ether, and that ether
Xxvi Preface to the
is in fact one of the earlier and less perfect names
of the Infinite, of Brahman, the universal Self.
This, at least, is the lesson which the Brahmans
themselves read in this chapter!; and if we look
at the ancient language of the Upanishads as re-
presenting mere attempts at finding expression for
what their language could hardly express as yet,
we shall, I think, be less inclined to disagree with
the interpretation put on those ancient oracles by
the later Vedanta philosophers?, or, at all events,
we shall hesitate before we reject what is difficult to
interpret, as altogether devoid of meaning.
This is but one instance to show that even behind
the fantastic and whimsical phraseology of the sacred.
writings of the Hindus and other Eastern nations,
there may be sometimes aspirations after truth
which deserve careful consideration from the student
of the psychological development and the historical
growth of early religious thought, and that after
careful sifting, treasures may be found in what at
first we may feel inclined to throw away as utterly
worthless.
And now I come to the third caution. Let it
not be supposed that a text, three thousand
years old, or, even if of more modern date, still
widely distant from our own sphere of thought,
can be translated in the same manner as a book
1 The Upanishad itself says: ‘The Brahman is the same as the ether which is around us; and the ether which is around us, is the same as the ether which is within us. And the ether which is within, that is the ether within the heart. That ether in the heart is omnipresent and unchanging. He who knows this obtains omnipresent and unchangeable happiness.’ Ah. Up. III, 12, 7-9.
2 Cf. Vedanta-sftras I, 1, 22.
SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. XXVIi
written a few years ago in French or German.
Those who know French and German well enough,
know how difficult, nay, how impossible it is, to
render justice to certain touches of genius which
the true artist knows how to give to a sen-
tence. Many poets have translated Heine into
English or Tennyson into German, many painters.
have copied the Madonna di San Sisto or the so-
called portrait of Beatrice Cenci. But the greater
the excellence of these translators, the more frank
has been their avowal, that the original is beyond
their reach. And what is a translation of modern
German into modern English compared with a trans-
lation of ancient Sanskrit or Zend or Chinese into
any modern language? It is an undertaking which,
from its very nature, admits of the most partial
success only, and a more intimate knowledge of the
ancient language, so far from facilitating the task
of the translator, renders it only more hopeless.
Modern words are round, ancient words are square,
and we may as well hope to solve the quadrature of
the circle, as to express adequately the ancient
thoughts of the Veda in modern English.
We must not expect therefore that a translation
of the sacred books of the ancients can ever be more
than an approximation of our language to theirs,
of our thoughts to theirs. The translator, however,
if he has once gained the conviction that it is
impossible to translate old thought into modern
speech, without doing some violence either to the
one or to the other, will hardly hesitate in his choice
between two evils. He will prefer to do some
violence to language rather than to misrepresent
old thoughts by clothing them in words which do