Great Indian Religion

Author(s): G T Bettany
Publisher: Ward Lock Bowden and Co

Page 70

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MODERN HINDUISM.
and later, and of Buddhist priests from China who visited India in the fifth and seventh centuries, that Brahman priests were equally honoured with Buddhist monks, and temples of the Hindu gods adjoined the Buddhist religious houses.
The Hindus date the final triumph over Buddhism from the preaching of Kumarila, a Bengal Brahman, who Downfall of powerfully advanced the Vedic teaching of a
Indian personal Creator and supreme Being, against Buddhism. the impersonal negations of Buddhism; but he also shone as a persecutor. Sir W. W. Hunter, however, traces the change which followed to deeper-seated causes
-such that the rise of Hinduism was a natural development of racial characters and systems. According to him, it rests upon the caste system and represents the coalition of the old Vedic faith with Buddhism, as well as with the rude rites of pre-Aryan and Mongolian races. We cannot here give an account of the caste system. The immense subdivision of castes is the result partly of intermarriages, partly of varied occupations, partly of locality, The caste partly of the introduction of outside tribes to
system. Hinduism. Religious exclusiveness and trades unionism, once grasped, made easy progress, and converted India into a vast grouping of separate classes. Caste is a powerful instrument for personal discipline and the maintenance of convention and custom, but it is a weakener of united popular action and national unity. Its great force is in its hereditary instincts and in social and religious excommunication. The offender against caste laws may be fined by his fellow-members, may be forbidden to eat or intermarry with them, and may be boycotted by the community.
We cannot understand the growth of modern Hinduism without reference to the two great Indian epic poems,
The the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Mahabharata.former is a vast aggregation of poems and episodes, arranged into a continuous whole, and is the longest poem in the world, being fourteen times as long as the Iliad. It includes many portions dating back to Vedic times, with others of later date up to a compara