Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
origin of Indian faiths. Man, I think, grew upwards from the earth to heaven, not like
the drop of the Banian tree, from heaven to earth. 1 The old root was the first growth,
and only after it attained to a considerable maturity did it throw down bright tendrils,
fed by the riches of the aerial light, which had imparted to them warmth and moisture.
Thus I think that earth-born men were probably man’s first Gods, and that around a
god-like hero his posterity wove a subtle garment of all he loved, respected, and
feared, and that when such great man—probably truly great—died, the fancy of the
race idealized him still more, and added to his many good traits those loveable and
creative energies which they held to be truly god-like. Thus a real Brahma or Abram
became a Patriarch, a Creator, a Demi-God, and finally a God.
Man must have his personal God, as Europe, Arabia, and China, nay, every sect
exemplifies; and perhaps Brahmanism would not have vanquished Boodhism, had
it not received Boodha into its incarnations. The Indian student finds the forma-
tion of Gods constantly going on around him, of which I shall hereafter give some
striking examples; yet it may never again be that a Brahma, Siva or Krishna will
rise on the horizon of futurity, for education, accurate record, and critical times have
spoilt all chances of this. Mr. A. C. Lyall, 2 an accomplished writer of wide and practical
experience of Indian religions, in a Review which I only saw as this was going to press,
bears me out, I see, in the above, telling us how Gods and incarnations are made and
altered, until the rude image of the aborigine, nay, his deified pig, in time becomes
under due teaching, an incarnation of Vishnoo himself. “The nature God,” he says,
“condenses into man and is precipitated upon earth; the man-god more often refines
and evaporates into a deity up in the skies. . . . . Where the waters of earth end
and those of the sky begin, one cannot tell precisely, . . . . nor in the religion after
it has formed.” If the races of the Peloponnesus and Italy revelled in tales of
Lukanthropy, and punnings upon Leukos and Lukos, so Skands said, their Light-god
Odin had wolfish attendants, and these also do the faiths of India teach to this hour.
The Hindoo, says Mr Lyall, “by no means looks forward to meeting his Gods in
some future world and singing their praises, . . . . he desires absorption or extinction.”
He often brings his gods back to earth, deified, but to be worshipped in a way he can
comprehend; and in no faith is this so fully adopted as the Jain, nor so coarsely as
that of some aborigines like the Gonds of Central India. In all this the intellectual
amongst them principally contribute, just as did our own Christian priests of what we
now call our “dark ages.” Nothing so attracts the priestly mind as the manufacture
of stories regarding the Incarnation, his friends, relatives, and saints;; and we see Indian
priests thus continually weaving mysteries and metaphors, and dilating on their wondrous
“facts,” or explaining these to learned doubters as “mere allegories.” Priests,
says Mr Lyall, “call a man the embodiment of a God, and encourage their people to
1 The shoots of the Banian tree are constantly noticed in Eastern sacred literature.
2 Bengal Civil Service—Fortnightly for Sept. 1875.