Chapter IX

What is it, then, that we see here elucidated? Just conceive. For the last three thousand years and more, the learning of the world has been employed to ascertain the origin of the doctrine of Budhism. The savants of France, the indefatigable inquirers of Germany, the affected pedants of Greece and Rome, and the pure and profound philosophers of ancient India and Egypt, have severally and ineffectually puzzled themselves to dive into the secrets of that mystic religion.[118]

“The conflicting opinions,” says Coleman, “which have prevailed among the most intelligent Oriental writers, respecting the origin and antiquity of this and the Jaina sects, and the little historical light that has yet been afforded to disperse the darkness that ages have spread over them, leave us, at the end of many learned disquisitions, involved in almost as many doubts as when we commenced upon them.”

“There was, then,” adds Gentil, “in those parts of India, and principally on the coast of Choromandel and Ceylon, a sort of worship the precepts of which we are quite unacquainted with. The god Baouth, of whom at present they know no more in India than the name, was the object of this worship; but it is now totally abolished, except that there may possibly yet be found some families of Indians who have remained faithful to Baouth, and do not acknowledge the religion of the Brahmins, and who are on that account separated from and despised by the other castes.... I made various inquiries concerning this singular figure, and the Zamulians one and all assured me that this was the god Baouth, who was now no longer regarded, for that his worship and his festivals had been abolished ever since the Brahmins had made themselves masters of the people’s faith.”

“The worship of Budha,” says Heeren, “concerning the rise and progress of which we at present know so little, still flourishes in Ceylon.” Again, “All that we know with certainty of Budha is, that he was the founder of a sect which must formerly have prevailed over a considerable part of India, but whose tenets and forms of worship were in direct opposition to those of the Brahmins, and engendered a deadly hate between the two parties, which terminated in the expulsion of the Budhists from the country.”[119]

“The real time,” say the Asiat. Res. viii. p. 505, “at which Budha propagated the doctrines ascribed to him, is a desideratum which the learned knowledge and indefatigable research of Sir W. Jones have still left to be satisfactorily ascertained.”

“If the Budhaic religion,” says the Westminster Review of January 1830, “really arrived at predominance in India, its rise in the first place, and more especially its extirpation, are not merely events of stupendous magnitude, but of impenetrable mystery.”

It will soon appear, that however impenetrable heretofore, it is so no longer. Indeed, a great deal of the principle of their faith has been at all times understood, but under different associations. It was that which Job alluded to when he said, “If I gazed upon Orus (the sun) when he was shining, or upon Järêcha (the moon) when rising in her glory; and my heart went secretly after them, and my hand kissed my mouth (in worship), I should have denied the God that is above.”

So far all have arrived at the discovery of this creed, and accordingly, if you look into any encyclopedia or depository of science for a definition of the word “Budhism,” you will be told that “it is the doctrine of solar worship as taught by Budha.” There never was such a person as Budha—I mean at the outset of the religion, when it first shot into life, and that was almost as early as the creation of man. In later times, however, several enthusiasts assumed the name, and personified in themselves the faith they represented. But the origin of the religion was an abstract thought, which while Creuzer allows, yet he must acknowledge his ignorance of what that thought was.

The sun and moon were the great objects of religious veneration to fallen man in the ancient world. Each country assumed a suitable form to their propensities and peculiarities; but all agreed in centering the essence of their zeal upon those resplendent orbs to whom they were indebted for so many common benefits. Those mysteries of faith to which the “initiated” alone had access, and which were disguised in the habiliments of symbols and of veils, were neither more nor less than representative forms of generation and production. These were the theme which made the canopy of the firmament to ring with their songs; and these the spring which gave vigour and elasticity to those graceful displays which, under the name of dances, typified the circular and semicircular rotations of those bright objects of their regard.[120]

The Eleusinian[121] rites themselves were essentially of this kind; for though the benefits of agriculture were said to be chiefly there commemorated, this after all resolves itself into the above: for as the process of the earth’s bearing is similar to that of our own species, and indeed of all creatures that rest upon her,—no seed bringing forth fruit until, as the apostle has affirmed,[122] it first dies,—the representation of this miracle of nature’s vicissitudes led the mind to the contemplation of general fecundity. And hence the culture of the ground, and the propagation of human beings, being both viewed in the same light, and sometimes even named by the same epithet, viz. tillage, were inculcated no less as beneficial exercises than as religious ordinances. Did a doubt remain as to the accuracy of this connection between the worship of the ancients and their sexual correspondence, it would be more than removed by attending to the import of the terms by which they mystified those celebrations, and which, with the sanctity attached to the parts themselves, will come consecutively under our review. One of them, however, is too apposite to be omitted here, and that is the term by which they designated a certain ceremony still practised on the coast of Guinea, and which neither the blandishments of artifice nor the terrors of menace could ever prevail upon them to divulge. This ceremony they call Belli-Paaro. The meaning they assign to it is regeneration, or the act of reviving from death to a new state of existence; and when we see that the name itself is but an inflection of the Baal-Peor of the Scriptures, the Baal-Phearagh of our forefathers, and the Copulative deity of the amative universe, it will not be hard to dive into its character, though so shrouded in types.

But the Budhists, not content with this ordinary veneration, or with paying homage in secret to that symbol of production which all other classes of idolators equally, though privately, worshipped,—I mean the Lingam,—thought they could never carry their zeal sufficiently far, unless they erected it into an idol of more than colossal magnitude—and those idols were the Round Towers. Hence the name Budhism, which I thus define, viz. that species of idolatry which worshipped Budh (i.e. the Lingam), as the emblem of Budh (i.e. the Sun)—Budh signifying, indiscriminately, Sun and Lingam.

Such was the whole substance of this philosophical creed, which was not—as may have been imagined—a ritual of sensuality, but a manual of devotion, as simple in its exercise as it was pious in its intent—a Sabian veneration and a symbolical gratitude. I shall now give a summary of their moral code, couched in the following Pentalogue, as presented by Zaradobeira, chief Rahan at Ava, to a Catholic bishop, who expressed a wish some years ago to be favoured with a brief outline of their tenets; it is this:—

1. Thou shalt not kill any animal—from the meanest insect up to man himself.

2. Thou shalt not steal.

3. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

4. Thou shalt not tell anything false.

5. Thou shalt not drink any intoxicating liquor.

The extension of this first commandment from the crime of homicide to the deprivation of life of any breathing existence, arose from their doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which they believed should continue ever in action, and, after release from one tenement of earthly configuration, enter into some other of a different species and order.

In this incessant alternation—which was to be one of ascent or of descent, according to the merits of the body, which the spirit had last animated, and which was all considered as a sort of lustral crucible, for the refining of the vital spark against its reunion with the Godhead, whence it had originally derived—it is manifest that such tenderness for the entire animal creation arose from the apprehension of slaying some relation in that disguise.—Or, did we ascribe it to no higher motive than a sympathy with fellow-creatures, which, if not equally responsible, are at all events susceptible of anguish and of pain, this in itself should teach us to suppress all ebullitions of irreverent sarcasm, and, if we yield not our acquiescence, to extend to it at least our commiseration.

The good works which they were additionally enjoined to perform were classified under the two heads of Dana and Bavana. By “Dana” was meant the giving of alms, and hence the whole fraternity were called Danaans or Almoners.[124] By “Bavana” was understood the thoughtfully pronouncing those three words, Anuzza, Docha, and Anatta: of which the first implies our liability to vicissitude; the second to misfortune, and the third our inability to exempt ourselves from either.[125]

The exposition of the terms Tuath and de, as prefixes to Danaans, forming with it the compound Tuath-de-danaan, I shall reserve for a more befitting place. Meantime I hasten to redeem my “pledge” as to the elucidation of the import of the name Hibernian.

In the wide range of literary disquisition there is no one topic which has so engrossed the investigation of studious individuals as the origin of the word Hibernia. The great Bochart, the uncertain Vallancy, the spiteful Macpherson, the pompous O’Flaherty, and the “antiquary of antiquaries,” Camden himself,—with a thousand others unworthy of recognition,—have been all consecutively shipwrecked upon its unapproachable sand-banks. But the most miserable failure of all is that of a namesake of my own, the author of a dictionary upon the language of his country, who, in his mad zeal for an outlandish conceit, foists into his book a term with which our language owns no kindred, and then builds upon that a superstructure which “would make even the angels weep.”

This gentleman would fain make out[126] that, because those islands have been denominated the Cassiterides, or Tin Reservoirs, therefore Eirin, our own one of them, must have been so called as an Iron Store! forgetting that the genius of our vocabulary has never had a term whereby to express that metal at all,—that by which we now designate it, namely, iarun, being only a modern coinage from the English word,—as the general voice of antiquity speaks trumpet-tongued on the point, and the fragments of our Brehon laws give it insuperable confirmation, that iron was the last metal which mankind has turned to profit, or even known to exist, while with us it was an exotic until a very recent period.[127]

But admitting that Eirin or Erin did signify the Land of Iron, then its Greek formation Ierne must convey the same idea, and so must Hibernia, their Latin inflection; and it would afford me a considerable portion of merriment to behold any champion for this iron-cased knight buckle on his etymological armour, and analyse these two last terms so as to make them indicate the Land of Iron.

Yet pitiable as this appears, for the author of an Irish dictionary, its ingenuity, at all events, must screen it from contempt. But how will the public estimate the brightness of that man’s intellect, who would state that Erin is but a metempsychosis of the word Green? Will it be believed that such is the sober utterance of the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? But lest I should misrepresent, I shall let him speak for himself, viz.: “Ireland, from its luxuriant vegetation, obtained the epithet Green, and has preserved, with a slight alteration, the name Erin.”[128]

So that a country which piques itself on its Irishry, has remained ever without a cognomen, until the English language has been matured; and then, in compliment to her sister, Britain, has borrowed an adjective from her rainbow, which, however, she had not the good manners to preserve pure, but allowed to degenerate so far, that the sagacity of a conjurer could not trace any resemblance between this vitiation and the original epithet which pourtrayed her verdure!

Have we not here the solution of that general disbelief which attaches to proofs deduced from etymology? It is so in all professions, when quacks break into the fold, and usurp the office of the legitimate practitioner. Etymology, in itself, is an exalted science, and an unerring standard; but the mountebanks that have intermeddled with her holy tools, and disjointed the symmetry of her fair proportions, knowing no more of the foundation of languages than they do of the origin of spirit, have sunk it into a pandemonium of hackling, mangling, and laceration, at which “the satirist,” perhaps, may laugh, but “the philosopher,” who has any regard for the right thinking of society, and the implanting in the tender mind a correct idea of words, at a moment when impressions are so wrought as to be ineffaceable, will feel differently on the subject; and, if he cannot reform, do all that he can to expose it!

How opposite has been the conduct of the learned Abbé MacGeoghegan as to the origin of this abstruse word! After reviewing in his able work[129] the opinions offered by the several persons who wrote before him upon the question, and none of them giving him satisfaction, he freely acknowledges, when unable to supply the deficiency, that “the derivation of this name is unknown.” He was right; but the spell is at last broken.

As a sequel to this avowal, I must be allowed to quote at full length the extract from Avienus,[130] which has been already referred to—

that is, two days’ sail will take you thence (from the Sorlings) to the Sacred Island; as so denominated by the men of old. A rich gleby soil distinguishes this favourite of the waters; and the race of the Hibernians cultivate it in its wide extent. Close by, again, is situated the isle of the Albiones.

Without dwelling upon the importance which he attaches to this “Sacred Island,” while he disposes of England in one single line, I ask any person at all conversant with letters, whether it was as a vernacular epithet, or not rather in compliance with his hexameters and the rules of metrical versification, which rendered inconvenient the exhibition of the name itself that the poet paraphrased its meaning, and gave insula sacra as its equivalent?

Is not the country inhabited by the Gauls called Gallia; that occupied by the Britons, Britannia; that possessed by the Indians, India; that peopled by the Germans, Germania; and that tenanted by the Arcadians, Arcadia? Consequently, the land inhabited by the people styled Hibernians must, by universal analogy, be denominated Hibernia. And if this signifies “Sacred Island,” of course “Hibernian” must mean “an inhabitant of the Sacred Island.”

Avienus wrote about the three hundredth year of the Christian era, and cites the authorities whence he derived his information to the following purpose, viz.:—

“Himilco, the Phœnician, has recorded that he has himself traversed the ocean, and with his own eyes and senses verified those facts. From the remote annals of the Phœnicians I copy the same, and present them to you as handed down from antiquity.”

Himilco, be it remarked, flourished six hundred years before the name of Christianity was mentioned in the world; and when his acquaintance with this isle, and that of his countrymen in general, is thus irrefutably premised, we shall be the more ready to do justice to that observation made by Tacitus, when, in his Life of Agricola, talking of Ireland relatively to England, he affirmed that “her coasts and harbours were better known, through commerce and mercantile negotiation,” than those of the latter country.[131]

Why do I introduce this notice here? To show that it was not to the Latins Avienus was indebted for his insight into that term, which we thus pursue. The Romans knew nothing even of the situation of the place that bore it, until their avarice and their rapacity brought their eagles to Britain; and, after effecting the subjugation of that heroic island, it is no small incentive to our vanity to see their historian constrained to confess that the exhibition of a similar project against the liberties of Ireland was more with a view to overawe, than from any hopes of succeeding;[132] while the ignorance which he evinces in another clause of that very sentence, whence the above extract has been quoted,—placing Ireland midway between Spain and England,—is proof incontrovertible of the position which has been assumed.

But it is to me immaterial whether Avienus was aware or otherwise that “Hibernia” and “Sacred Island” were convertible and synonymous. It is not by his authority that I mean to establish the fact; for even admitting his cognisance of the identity of these two terms, he must yet of necessity be unacquainted with the root whence they both had sprung; and, accordingly, I have only put him here in the foreground—as has been the plan all through—“to break the ice,” as it were, for the exordium of the promised dénouement.

Iran, then, and Irin, or, as more correctly spelled, Eirean and Eirin, with an e prefixed to each of the other vowels, as well initial as intermediate, is the characteristic denomination which all our ancient manuscripts affix to this country. There is no exception to this admitted rule. From the romance to the annal, the observation holds good; it is an inalienable landmark, and of inviolable unanimity.

Dionysius of Sicily, who wrote about fifty years before the Advent, and who cannot be suspected of much partiality towards our forefathers, calls the land they inhabited by the name of Irin.[133] Nor will the circumstance of his applying to it in another place, the variation Iris, detract from this fact; as it is evident that he only manufactured this latter, having occasion to use a nominative case which he thought that Irin would not well represent, and so, with the lubricity of a Greek, ever sacrificing sense to sound,[134] he gave birth to a conception which strangled the original.[135]

In the Life of Gildas, an early and eminent English ecclesiastic, we find it called Iren, when the biographer, talking of the proficiency made by his subject in literary pursuits, says that he betook himself to Ireland, which he designates as above, in order to ascertain, by communion with kindred teachers, the very utmost recesses of theology and philosophy.[136]

Ordericus Vitalis, in his Ecclesiastical History,[137] having occasion to mention the Irish, calls them by the name of Irenses, equivalent to Iranians, that is inhabitants of Iran, Iren, or Irin, whichever of them you happen to prefer. And as these are now established as the basis of our general search, I shall address myself without further digression to their syllabic analysis.

To do this the more effectually, and at the same time to comprise within one dissertation what otherwise might encroach upon two, it is to be noticed that the country known in the present day as Persia, and whither our labours will be directed at no distant hour, was by its primitive inhabitants called Iran also, and spelled as ours, with an initial E. The prefixing of this letter, in both instances of its occurrence, whether we regard the Eastern or the Western hemisphere, was neither the result of chance, nor intended as an operative in the import of the term. It was a mere dialectal distinction, appertaining to the court-language of the dynasty of the times, and what is astoundingly miraculous, retains the same appellation, with literal precision, unimpaired, unadulterated, in both countries, up to the moment in which I write.

Palahvi[138] is the appellation of this courtly dialect in Persia, and Palahver is the epithet assigned to it in Ireland; and such is the softness and mellifluence of its enchanting tones, and its energy also, that to soothe care, to excite sensibility, or to stimulate heroism, it may properly be designated as “the language of the gods.”

Thus we see that Ireland and Persia were both called Iran; that both equally admitted of the change of this name to Eiran; and that the style of this variation was similarly characterised in both. How, then, will the empyrics of etymology recover their confusion: they who would persuade us that Ireland was so denominated from Iar, the West—unless, indeed, they can substitute East for West, and show that Persia was denominated from Iar also.[139] Entangled in this dilemma, the amiable old General Vallancy, without intimating, however, that it was what extorted his remark,—after rigidly maintaining through a series of volumes, that the word had its origin in the above exploded Western Will o’ the Wisp,—exclaims, in a sentiment of unconscious self-conviction, that “nothing more can be said of this derivation than that the name was common to that part of the globe whence they (who imported it) originally came.”[140]

Arrived, then, at length, at the fountain-head of our inquiry, how shall we account for it in “that part of the globe whence we originally came”? I have seen but two efforts to develop the word, as applied to that quarter: one by Professor Heeren, of the Göttingen University; the other by “a learned priest of the Parsees,” as recorded by Sir John Malcolm, the late lamented author of a history of the place itself. And as the former of these is rather humorous, and as the latter contains in it a small ingredient of truth, it is worth while to parade them in the tail of our inspection.

“Anciently,” says the professor, “they were called by the Orientals themselves by the common term of Iran, and the inhabitants, inasmuch as they possessed fixed habitations and laws, were styled Iranians, in opposition to the Turanians, or wandering hordes of Central Asia.”[141]

I wonder did the German historian take his cue from the conjecture of the Irish lexicographer? It is literally marvellous if he did not; for, by a most unaccountable coincidence, while tracing the foundation of a name, descriptive of two localities at opposite points of this mundane ball, one boldly asserts, and the other more than insinuates, that its root is to be found in one and the same English word!—and this, too, when those countries were blazing in glory, before three words of the English language were broken into train!

A difference, however, breaks out amongst those partners, which seems to sever the prospects of their metallic union. It is, that though each would make iron to be the substratum of their respective hobbies, yet would my namesake have his so called as abounding therein; whereas, the professor, who betrays a respectable insight into geology, and fearing that the womb of Persia could not conceive so hard an ore, wishes us at once to believe that it acquired its ancient epithet from the fixedness of that metal; and thus would one ex abundantiâ, and the other ex similitudine, have the common name of Iran for Ireland and for Persia be derived from an English word, which was not concocted for many centuries after the decay of those two regions, when the very metal it represented first grew into use![142]

“Moullah Feroze, an excellent Palahvi scholar, tells me,” says Sir John Malcolm, “that Iran is the plural of Eir, and means the country of believers.” And again, when he had occasion to consult his oracle, he states the answer as follows:—

“I gave this inscription[143] to Moullah Feroze, a learned priest of the Parsees, at Bombay, and he assured me that the translation of De Sacy was correct. Feroze explained the word An-Iran to mean unbelievers. Eer, he informed me, was a Pehlivi word, which signified believer; Eeran was its plural: in Pehlivi, the a or an prefixed is a privative, as in Greek or Sanscrit; and consequently, An-Eeran meant unbelievers. The king of Eeran and An-Eeran he interpreted to mean king of believers and unbelievers; of Persia and other nations. It was, he said, a title like king of the world. This however,” adds Sir John, of himself, “is like all conjectures founded on etymology, very uncertain.”

It was natural enough that Sir John should express himself slightingly as to a mode of proof, the principle of which he must have seen violated in so many instances; and, independently of this, it is an infirmity in human nature to affect disregard for any knowledge which we do not ourselves understand. I do not mean, however, to vindicate Feroze’s interpretation; on the contrary, I purpose to show that it is not only imperfect, but incorrect; yet while doing so, I am bound to acknowledge, that, if he has not hit off the whole truth, he has a part of it; and even this is such a treat, in the wilderness through which we have been groping for some time back, that I welcome it as an oasis, and offer him my thanks thus beforehand.

To prove however, that he is in error, I need but confine myself to the unravelling of his own words. At first he affirms that Eeran is the plural of Eer, and means the country of believers; if so, the singular must mean the country of a believer; but he tells us afterwards, that Eer signifies a believer alone, consequently Eeran must believers alone, without any consideration of the word country. And the same inconsistency, which manifests itself here, applies with equal strictness to An-Eiran also.

Should these papers ever reach the observance of this distinguished foreigner, whom I appreciate even for his approximation to the precincts of the thought, they will, I doubt not, readily disabuse him of a radical misconception. Eeran is not a plural at all, but a compound word: its constituents being Eer and An,[144] of which the former signifies Sacred and the latter a Territory. So that the united import will be the Sacred Territory; and An-Eeran, of course, is but its negative.

This exposition I gain from the Irish language, which I take to be the primitive Iranian or Persic language. By it I am furthermore enabled to inform the German “professor” that Turan, though now inhabited by “Nomad tribes,” obtained not its name from that circumstance, but from a widely different one. Tur[145] means prolific, whether as regards population or rural produce; and An, as before, a territory—the whole betokening a prolific territory.[146] And he should remember, what he is not at all unconscious of, that eastern denominations are not varied by recent occupants, but continue in uninterrupted succession, from age to age, as imposed at the outset.