The place where the river consisting of flowers, incense and clothes. In the month of July the famous ceremony of the car of Juggernaut is celebrated. This ceremony was instituted to commemorate the departure of Krishna from his native land. The car of Juggernaut is shaped like a pyramid, consisting of several stories, some as high as fifty feet. These cars, found in all parts of India, are the offerings of the rich, and some of them have costly statues of the god. They are drawn by hundreds of men, as it is believed that each one who pulls the rope will assuredly go to the heaven of Krishna at death. Vast multitudes accordingly crowd around the rope so as to pull, and in the general excitement they often fall under the wheels of the car and are crushed to death. This, however, is simply accidental, as Krishna does not wish his worshipers to suffer. He is a mild deity, and unlike the fierce Siva, who delights in self-torture. Car of Juggernaut. of Krishna. In the month of August the Hindoos celebrate the nativity of Nativity Krishna, the account of whose birth resembles that of Christ in one particular. The tyrant whom he came to destroy endeavored to kill him, but a voice from heaven told the father to flee with the infant across the Jumna; and the tyrant, like Herod, killed the infants in the village. In August there is also a feast upon which no fire must be kindled and no food cooked, and on which the cactus-tree and serpents are worshiped. Festival In September the great festival of the worship of Doorga, the wife of Siva, occurs. It begins on the seventh day of the full moon and of Doorga continues three days. It commemorates a visit of the goddess to her parents. The idol has three eyes and ten hands. The ceremony is very costly, and can therefore only be celebrated by rich people, who also give presents to the poor on this occasion. The image is placed in the middle of the hall of the rich man's house. One Brahman sits before the idol with flowers, holy water and incense. Near the idol are trays laden with rice, fruit, and other kinds of food, which are given to the Brahmans. Goats and sheep are then sacrificed to the image on the altar in the yard of the house. When the victim's head falls the people shout: "Victory to thee, O mother!" The bells are then rung, the trumpets sounded, and the people shout for joy. The lamps are waved before the idol, and a Brahman reads aloud from the Vedas. A dinner follows on each of the three days, to which the poor and the low-caste Hindoos are invited with the others, and are served by the Brahmans. The people visit house after house, and in the even Other Festivals. Ascetic Pious A Denial, Many Sides of ing are entertained with music and dancing, and public shows. Thus the worship of the Hindoos, especially in Bengal, is social and joyful. In October, November and December there are not so many ceremonies. January is devoted to religious bathing. In the same month the religious Hindoos invite Brahmans to read and expound the sacred books in their houses, which are open to all who wish to hear. In February there are festivals to Krishna. The month of March is devoted to ascetic exercises, particularly the well-known one of swinging suspended by hooks, which is a festival in honor of Siva. A procession marches through the streets, enlisting followers by putting a thread around their necks. Every one so enlisted is required to join the party and go with it until the end of the ceremony under the penalty of losing caste. On the day before swinging, men are required to thrust iron or bamboo sticks through their arms or tongues. The day following they go in procession to the swinging tree, where the men are suspended by hooks and whirled round the tree four or five times. The Hindoos regard building temples, digging tanks, or planting trees by the roadside as pious acts. The wealthy have idols in the houses, and pay a priest who appears every morning to wake up the idols, washes and dresses them, and offers them food. He comes again in the evening to give them their supper and put them to bed. Mr. Gangooly, in his book on the Hindoos, denies most emphatically the oft-repeated statement that Hindoo mothers cast their infants into the Ganges as a religious sacrifice. He says that the motherly instinct is as strong with them as with others; and also that their religion. teaches them to offer sacrifices for the life and health of their children. The Hindoo philosophy is as acute, as profound and as spiritual, Brahman- as any other that has ever been developed, yet it exists side by side with the grossest of superstitions. "With a belief so abstract as to escape the grasp of the most speculative intellect," the people cherish the idea that they can atone for sin by bathing in the Ganges, or by reciting a text from the Veda. With an ideal pantheism resembling that of Hegel, they believe that Brahma and Siva can be driven from the throne of the universe by any one who will sacrifice a sufficient number of wild horses. ism. Contradictions. The true road to felicity is supposed to be abstracting one's self from matter, the renunciation of all gratification of the senses, the maceration of the body; yet luxury, licentiousness and the gratification of the appetites are carried farther in India than in any other part of the world. A code of laws and a system of jurisprudence older than the Christian era, and an object of universal reverence, fixes every right and privilege of ruler and subject, but the application of these laws depends upon the arbitrary decisions of the priests, and their execution upon the will of the sovereign: "The constitution of India is therefore like a house without a foundation and without a roof." Not to kill a worm or to tread on a blade of grass for fear of destroying or endangering animal life is a principle of the Hindoo religion; "but the torments, cruelties and bloodshed inflicted by Indian tyrants would shock a Nero or a Borgia." About half the best-informed writers on India call the Brahmanical religion a pure monotheism, while the other half declare that it is a polytheism of a million gods. Some say that the Hindoos are spiritualists and pantheists, while others contend that their idolatry is more gross than that of any other living people. Thus it will be seen that the prevailing belief which pervades the whole system of Brahmanism is an ideal pantheism, which conceives of God as the soul of the universe, or as the universe itself. "In Him the whole universe is absorbed; from Him it issues; He is intwined and interwoven with all creation." "All that exists is God; whatever we smell, or taste, or see, or hear, or feel, is the Supreme Being." We have also seen that the Invisible Supreme Being manifests himself under the three forms of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer. We have likewise seen that the central point of Hindoo theology is the doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls; according to which the human soul is joined to earthly bodies for purposes of punishment, and the soul's aim and effort are to reunite itself with the Divine Spirit of the universe. The Hindoos therefore take a very pessimistic view of this earthly life, which they regard as a time of trial and punishment, from which man can only be released by a holy life, by prayer and sacrifice, by penance and purification. If a person neglects these duties and sinks deeper into vice and sin, the soul after death will enter the body of an inferior animal and will have to commence its wanderings afresh. Ideal Panthe ism. No Although the Hindoos have sacred books of great antiquity, and a copious literature reaching back twenty or thirty centuries, they have History. no history, no chronology, no annals. In India the entire tendency of thought is ideal; the whole religion is a pure spiritualism. An extreme one-sided idealism is the central tendency of the Hindoo mind. "The God of Brahmanism is an intelligence absorbed in the rest of profound contemplation. The good man of this religion is the one who retires from an evil world into abstract thought." The Hindoos are a very religious people, but their one-sided spiritualism, their extreme idealism, is the cause of all their incongruities, their irreconcilable inconsistencies. They have no history and no authentic chronology; because history belongs to this world and chron Idealism and Spiritual ism. Incon sistencies. Asceticism. Opposites. Maya, or Polytheism. Panthe ology to time, and this world and time do not interest them, God and eternity being all in all. The Hindoos, from religious motives, are extremely given to asceticism. They torture their bodies with self-inflicted torments, because the body is the soul's great enemy, and they must keep it down by ascetic mortifications. But in India, as everywhere else, ultra asceticism leads to extreme self-indulgence, as one extreme tends to produce another. Thus in one portion of India religious devotees swing on hooks in honor of Siva; hang themselves by the feet, head downwards, over a fire; roll on a bed of prickly thorns; jump on a couch filled with sharp knives; bore holes in their tongues, and stick their bodies full of pins and needles, etc. In the meantime in other places entire regions are given to self-indulgences, and companies of abandoned women connected with different temples consecrate their gains to the support of their worship. A one-sided spiritualism displays itself in morals in the extremes of austerity and sensuality, and it exhibits itself in religion in the opposites of an ideal pantheism and a gross idolatry. The Brahmanic spiritualism fills the world full of God, and, denying the real existence of this world, degenerates into a false pantheism. It declares that there is nothing without God, and that there is nothing but God. This second view was the result of the doctrine of Maya, or Illusion. Maya signifies the delusive appearance assumed by spirit. It is maintained that there is nothing but spirit, which neither creates nor is created, which neither acts nor suffers, which cannot change, and into which all souls are absorbed when they liberate themselves by meditation from the belief that they suffer or are happy, that they are able to experience pleasure or pain. This spiritualism leads to polytheism. Because if God does not really create or destroy, but only appears to do so, these appearances are not combined as the acts of one Being, but are distinct, independent phenomena. The removal of will and personality from the conception of God involves the removal of unity. If creation is an illusion and there is really no creation, the appearance of creation is nevertheless a fact. There being no substance, only spirit, this appearance of creation necessarily has its cause in spirit, being a divine appearance, God. In the same way, destruction is an appearance of God, and reproduction is an appearance of God, and every other appearance in nature is a manifestation of God. But as the unity of will and person is taken away, there is a plurality of gods, not only one God, and thus we have polytheism. An ultra spiritualism tends to pantheism, and pantheism degenerates ism. into polytheism. Thus, in India there exists a spiritualism denying the existence of everything but motionless spirit, or Brahm, and a polytheism which believes in and worships Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, Siva the Destroyer, Indra the God of the Sky, the Sactis or energies of the gods, Krishna the Hindoo Apollo, Doorga, and a multitude of other deities as countless as the changes and appearances of things. This system necessarily tends to idolatry. Men are so constituted Idolatry. that they must worship something. If they believe in one Being, the Absolute Spirit, the Supreme and Only God-Para Brahm-they cannot worship him, because he is literally an unknown God. He possesses no qualities, no attributes, no activity. He is not the object of hope, fear, love or aversion. All things in the universe except spirit are illusive appearances, which are nevertheless divine appearances; and which, having some traits, qualities and character, are objects of hope and fear. They cannot, however, worship them as appearances, and must therefore worship them as persons. If they possess an outward personality or soul they become real beings, distinct from Brahm, though they are his appearances. Consequently they must have an outward personality-a body, a form, symbolical and characteristicthey become idols. As a result, idol-worship is universal in India. The most horrible and grotesque images are carved in the stone of the grottoes, stand in rude, black statues in the temples, or are roughly painted on the walls. Figures of men with heads of elephants or other animals, or with six or seven human heads-often rising in a pyramid, one out of the other, frequently with six hands joined to one shoulder-" grisly and uncouth monsters, like nothing in nature, yet too grotesque for symbols-such are the objects of the Hindoo worship." Idolatry Universal in India. SECTION IV.-BUDDHISM. Siddartha, Sakyamuni, or Gautama, the A WISE and good king reigned in his capital city, Kapila-vastu, north of Central India and of the Kingdom of Oude, near the borders of Nepaul, at the end of the seventh century before Christ. He was one of the last of the great Solar race, so celebrated in the ancient epics of India. His wife, called Maya on account of her great beauty, Buddha. became the mother of a prince named Siddârtha, Sakya-muni, or Gautama, and afterwards known as the Buddha. Buddha is not a proper name, but an official title. As we should always say Jesus the Christ, and not Jesus Christ, so we should always say Siddartha the Buddha, or Sakya-muni the Buddha, or Gautama the Buddha. The name Siddartha (contracted from Sarvârtha-siddha) was the baptismal |