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HISTORY OF THE SIKHS
24
Shankar
Acharj
methodizes
polytheism,
A. D.
800-1000
people, and Shankar Acharj, who could silence the
Buddha materialist, and confute the infidel Charvak,.^
was compelled to admit the worship of Virtues and
Powers, and to allow images, as well as formless types,
to be enshrined in temples. The 'self-existent' needed
no longer to be addressed direct, and the orthodox
could pay his devotions to the Preserving Vishnu, to
the Destroying Siva, to the Regent of the Sun, to
Ganesh, the helper of men, or to the reproductive
energy of nature personified as woman, with every
assurance that his prayers would be heard, and his
offerings accepted, by the Supreme Being.-
Reaction of
Buddhism
on Erah-
manism.
Shankar
Acharj
establishes
ascetic
orders, and
gives pre-
eminence
CHAP. II
The old Brahman worship had been domestic
or
and that of the Buddhists public or congregational; the Brahman ascetic separated himself from
his fellows, but the Buddhist hermit became a coeno-
solitary,
bite, the member of a community of devotees; the
Brahman reared a family before he became an anchorite, but the Buddhist vowed celibacy and renounced
most of the pleasures of sense. These customs of the
vanquished had their effect upon the conquerors,
and Shankar Acharj, in his endeavour to strengthen
orthodoxy, enacted the double part of St. Basil and Pope
Honorius.^ He established a monastery of Brahman
to Saivism.
Wilson (Asiatic Researches, xvi. 18) derives the
of the Charvak school from a Muni or seer of that name;
but the Brahmans, at least of Malwa, derive the distinctive
name, both of the teacher and of the system, from Charu,
persuasive, excellent, and Vak, speech thus making the school
simply the logical or dialectic, or perhaps sophistical, as it
has become in fact. The Charvakites are wholly materialist,
and in deriving consciousness from a particular aggregation
or condition of the elements of the body, they seem to have
anticipated the physiologist, Dr. Lawrence, who makes the
brain to secrete thought as the liver secretes bile. The system
is also styled the Varhusputya, and the name of Vrihaspati,
the orthodox Regent, of the planet Jupiter, became connected
with Atheism, say the Hindus, owing to the jealousy -with
which the secondary or delegated powers of Heaven saw the
degree of virtue to which man was attaining by upright living
and a contemplation of the Divinity; wherefore Vrihaspati descended to confound the human understanding by diffusing
(Cf. Wilson, As. Res., xvii. 308, and Troyer's Dahistan,
error.
ii.
198, note.)
- The five
sects enumerated are still held to represent
the most orthodox varieties of Hinduism, [and of the eighteen
Purans, five only give supremacy to one form of Divinity over
others. (Colonel Kennedy, Res. Hind. Mythol., pp. 203, 204.)
—J. D. C]
" All scholars and inquirers are deeply indebted to Professor Wilson for the account he has given of the Hindu sects in
the sixteenth and seventeenth volumes of the Asiatic Researches. The works, indeed, which are abstracted, are in the hands
1 Professor
title
—