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SEPTEMBER, 1902.)
THE RELIGION OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLES.
873
These traditional accounts may not be incorrect in general, and one is warranted thus to concatenate the two versions; yet they must not be looked upon as more than a reminiscence of the manner and way in which the Avesta Scripture was once more brought together, after both the authentic copies of it had perished, either in the conflagration of Persepolis or otherwise. And at the same time, however, still to pursue the tradition, the texts were translated from the obsolete Baktrian into the Pehlevi, the court language of the Sassanides, and were furnished with commentaries more in a theological than in an exegetical vein.
Bat, according to Darmesteter, we have here to deal not merely with a compilation, nor even a redaction, and the working up of extant texts, bat with the actual composition of new writings. Not one of the ancient Zarathushtrian texts had survived, and the entire Apesla sprang up posteriorly to Alexander the Great, says Darmesteter. In view, however, of the testimony of the archaic Persian inscriptions and the narratives of the Greeks, he can scarcely dispute that the basis of dogma promulgated in the Avesta is primitive--a point to which we shall presently return.
Bat the books themselves are a latter-day production ; and the old doctrines bave been independently worked up into them to harmonize with the spirit of the age, or rather, and this is one of his chief contentions, under the influence of alien creeds and foreign philosophical systems. He detects in the Apesta undoubted traces of Indian (i. e., Brahmanic and Buddhistic), Hellenic, chiefly Hellenistio, and Jewish concepts and figures. Let us examine how far the assertion is true.
No one denies the unison between the Indian and the Iranian religions. A number of myths. legends, rituals, concepts, and names of existences to whom prayers are offered ap, they have in common.
The supreme deities of the Iranian, the Ahuras, are the formidable antagonists of the Indians' divinities, and, conversely, the Devas have become the abominated evil genii of the Iranian. But Mithre, Aryaman, Vayu, and diverse other gods claim equal adoration from both. Yama or Yima is among both nations the sovereign of the primordial human beings and of the kingdom of the dead. The service of soms - Haoms -occupies the premier place in the cult at orice of the Indian and the Iranian, particularly in later times. Darmesteter mast concede that all these phenomena can be most simply accounted for as the relics of an anterior period, when the two peoples still constituted one nation. There is certainly no borrowing either on the part of the Indian or the Iranian. Even the circumstance that the Indian paramount god Indra, Sarva, who probably stands for Siva, and the Nesatsyas are mentioned as idols in the Apesta does not tell against the antiquity of the latter, inasmuch as the Indians were not only the next-door neighbours of the ancient Persians, but Hapta Hindu, or the river-valley of the Indus, is accounted as Iranian territory in the Vendidad, and is reckoned among the provinces of the monarchy in the inscriptions of the Persian sovereigns of bygone ages.
As regards what is alleged to have been borrowed from Buddhism, it is confined to this. A certain demon Buiti is sought to be identified with the Buddha, another called Butasp with the Bodhisattva, and Gaotema again with the Buddha under his appellative of Gautama,80 That is all. and, strictly speaking, that is nought. If Buiti must needs have an Indian parallel, it can only be Bhuta, a goblin or sprite. Batasp does not occur in the Avesta, but only in a passage in the Bundahesh (XXVIII., 35), which is forcefully so read after great straining. And as for Gaotema, it can by no possibility correspond to the Indian patronymie of Gautama. It answers to Gotama, the name of the Vedic bard, who probably already belonged to the Aryan mythology.
The consonance between Israelite and Iranian legends and ideas is of equal import; that is, in respect of the Aventa the similarities are of no moment. We meet with something of more substantial significance in the Bundahesh ; in other words, in a volume dating irom the later Sassanides. And even if the resemblances belonged to the most ancient component part of the Bundahesh, which
>> With reforence to Gautama, Martin Hang fell into the same orror.
