5 QUESTIONS OF CHRONOLOGY

QUESTIONS OF CHRONOLOGY are among those which perplex orientalists most, and their embarrassment is usually not without justification; but they are mistaken on the one hand in attaching such enormous importance to these questions, and on the other hand in believing that they can solve them for certain by resorting to their usual methods, whereas in actual fact the conclusions they arrive at amount to so many more or less fanciful hypotheses, over which they are far from reaching any agreement even among themselves.

There are some cases however which present no real difficulty, if only people would abstain from complicating them deliberately by the introduction of 'critical' and 'hypercritical' arguments and quibbles of a useless kind. Such a case, for instance, is that of documents like the old Chinese annals, which contain an accurate description of the state of the heavens at the time to which they refer; the calculations for determining their exact date, based as they are on indisputable astronomical data, leave no room for any doubt. Unfortunately this case is not general, in fact it can almost be called exceptional, and other documents, Hindu documents in particular, provide nothing of the kind as a guide to research, which merely goes to show, however, that their authors were not in the least interested in 'dating themselves' for the purpose of establishing a priority of one kind or another.

The claim to intellectual originality, which has played a considerable part in calling the schools of philosophy into being, is, even among Westerners, quite a modern tendency, which in the Middle Ages was still unknown; pure ideas and traditional doctrines have at no time been the property of this or that individual, and the biographical particulars of those who expounded or interpreted them are of minimal importance. Besides, even in the case of China, our earlier remark hardly applies to any but historical documents, and these after all are the only ones where the determining of chronological details offers any real interest, since this verifying of dates has meaning and importance from the point of view of history alone. Moreover, to add to the difficulty, it must be pointed out that there exists in India, as also no doubt in some of the vanished civilizations, a system of chronology or, to be more exact, something having the appearance of chronology, that is based on symbolical numbers, which must not be taken as literally representing numbers of years; and is not something analogous to be met with even in biblical chronology? This so-called chronology, however, is really meant to apply to cosmic and not to historical periods; a confusion of the two should be impossible unless it be as a result of astonishing ignorance; nevertheless it must be recognized that orientalists have only too frequently fallen into errors of this kind.

Among these same orientalists there is noticeable a common tendency to try to discount the antiquity of the civilizations they are dealing with as far as they possibly can, often beyond all reason, as if they feel embarrassed by the fact that these civilizations had been able to exist and were already in a full state of development in such remote ages, long before the earliest origins that can be claimed for our present civilization or rather for those civilizations from which it is directly derived; this seems to be the only excuse for their preconceived ideas on the subject—a lame excuse indeed. Moreover, this same bias has been allowed to affect things much closer to the West in every respect than the civilizations of China and India, or even Egypt, Persia, and Chaldea: thus for instance, an attempt was made to advance the date of the Hebraic Kabbalah in such a manner as to suggest that Alexandrian and Neoplatonist influences had been at work there, whereas it is most certainly the opposite that took place. The reason for this confusion resides, as usual, in the fact that it is agreed a priori that everything must have come from the Greeks, that it is the Greeks who held the monopoly of knowledge in antiquity, just as the Europeans imagine themselves to possess it today, and that they were the appointed educators of humanity—just as these same Europeans claim to be at the present moment—and the fountain of its inspiration. Nevertheless, Plato, whose evidence ought not to be doubted in this connection, was not afraid of recording in his Timaeus that the Egyptians looked on the Greeks 'as children'; Easterners today could still find ample reasons for saying as much about the Westerners, were it not that an almost excessive politeness has often prevented them from going to such lengths. However, we can recall an occasion when just this same opinion was expressed by a Hindu who, on hearing the ideas of certain Western philosophers expounded for the first time, was so far from being impressed that he declared them fit, at best, for a child of eight years.

Anyone who feels that we unduly belittle the part played by the Greeks by presenting them entirely in the part of 'adapters' might object that we are not acquainted with all their ideas and that there are many things that have not come down to us. In certain respects, no doubt, this is true, particularly as regards the oral teachings of the philosophers; but is not what we do know of their ideas amply sufficient to enable us to judge of the remainder? Analogy, which is our only available means of proceeding to a certain extent from the known to the unknown, cannot but bear us out; moreover, according to the written teachings we possess, there are at least strong reasons for supposing that the corresponding oral teaching, precisely insofar as it contained something special and 'esoteric', that is to say something of a more inward nature, was even more strongly inspired by the East, to which it must in many ways have been related. Indeed the very inwardness of that teaching cannot but provide a confirmation of the fact that it had remained nearer to its sources and was less deformed than the other teachings of the time, because it had been less adapted to the general mentality of the Greek people; otherwise its comprehension would clearly not have demanded a special training, above all a training so long and arduous as that, for example, in force in the Pythagorean schools.

Besides, archaeologists and orientalists would hardly be in a position to contradict us by invoking an oral teaching, or even lost works, since the 'historical method' of which they are so enamored has, as its essential characteristic, the consideration only of visible monuments and of documents that can be handled; and it is here precisely that we see the 'historical method' revealed in all its insufficiency. In this connection we would draw attention to a point that is too often lost sight of, which is the following: if the manuscript of a certain work is discovered, the date of which is ascertainable by one means or another, then this undoubtedly proves that the work in question is not of a later date; but that is all, and the possibility of the work having originally been composed much earlier is in no wise excluded. It may quite easily happen that older manuscripts of the same work are found later, and moreover, even if none such are discovered, it is not right to conclude that none are extant, nor, with all the more reason, that none have ever existed. Furthermore, in a civilization that has lasted down to our own time, it is hardly likely that such books as still remain will be abandoned to the chances of an archaeological discovery, as might have occurred in the case of an extinct civilization; nor on the other hand is there any reason to believe that their custodians would one day feel themselves compelled to part with them for the benefit of learned Westerners, all the less so as there may be a special interest, on which we will not dwell at present, attaching to their preservation compared with which curiosity, even when garnished with the epithet of 'scientific', is of very little account. On the other hand, in the case of civilizations which have vanished, one is bound to admit that, in spite of unremitting research and many discoveries, there must be a great number of documents that will never come to light for the simple reason that they have been destroyed accidentally. As accidents of this kind often took place contemporaneously with the civilizations themselves and not necessarily after their disappearance, and as similar accidents can be observed taking place quite frequently around us today, it is extremely probable that much the same thing must have occurred in the case of the other civilizations that have continued down to our time; there is even all the more likelihood of this having happened in that a longer succession of centuries has elapsed since the origin of these civilizations. But there is yet a further point to note: even without accidents, old manuscripts can disappear in quite a natural and so to speak normal fashion, simply as the result of wear and tear; in that case they are replaced by others that necessarily bear a more recent date and that become in course of time the only ones the existence of which can be confirmed. A particularly good idea of this process can be obtained by observing what takes place constantly in the Islamic world: a manuscript circulates and is transferred according to requirements from one center of learning to another, often in very remote localities, until it is so badly damaged by use that it becomes practically unserviceable; a copy is then made, as accurately as possible, and this copy will henceforth take the place of the older manuscript and will be used in the same way, itself to replaced by another when it has deteriorated in its turn, and so on indefinitely. These successive replacements may certainly prove a great hindrance to the special researches of the orientalists; but those engaged on this kind of work give no thought to any such considerations, and even if they were conscious of them, they would certainly not consent to alter their habits for so unimportant a reason. All these remarks are so obvious that it might seem hardly worthwhile making them, were it not that the prejudice we have pointed out as affecting orientalists blinds them so completely as to conceal this evidence from their eyes.

There is yet another fact that the partisans of the 'historical method' could hardly take into account without finding themselves in disagreement with their own tenets; it is that oral teaching almost everywhere preceded written teaching and that it has been the only method of teaching in use for periods of possibly very long duration, though it may be difficult to determine their exact length. In a general way and in most instances a traditional text is no more than a recording, at a relatively recent date, of a teaching that was originally transmitted by word of mouth and to which an author can rarely be assigned; thus even were one entirely certain of being in possession of the original manuscript—though there is perhaps actually no recorded case of this having happened—it would still be necessary to know for how long the previous oral transmission had continued, and this question is likely, far oftener than not, to remain unanswered.

This rooted preference for oral teaching may have been due to various causes and therefore does not necessarily imply the absence of writing, the origin of which is certainly extremely remote, at any rate in its ideographic form, of which the phonetic form is but a degeneration brought about by the wish for simplification. It is known, for instance, that the teaching of the Druids always remained entirely oral, even at a time when the Gauls were certainly acquainted with writing, since they made free use of a Greek alphabet in their commercial relations; moreover, the Druidic teaching left no authentic traces, and the most one can do perhaps is to piece together, as best one can, a few very sparse fragments. It would however be a mistake to suppose that oral transmission was bound, in the long run, to alter the teaching: given the importance attaching to its integral preservation, there is on the contrary every reason for thinking that all necessary precautions were taken in order that it might be maintained uncorrupted, not only in its essence but even in its form; one may also realize how this preservation is perfectly possible by observing what occurs even today among all the Eastern peoples, for whom the written record has by no means entailed the suppression of oral tradition, for they have never considered it an entirely adequate substitute. Curiously enough, it is commonly recognized that certain works were not written down at the moment of their composition; for example this is admitted in the case of the Homeric epics in classical antiquity and of the heroic poems of the Middle Ages; why then are people unwilling to admit this when it is no longer a question of works referring merely to the literary order but to the purely intellectual order, where oral transmission rests on much more profound reasons? There is really no need to stress this point further, and as for those profound reasons we have alluded to, the present is not a suitable moment for going into them; we shall have an opportunity of saying something about them later on.

There remains one last point that we would like to mention in this chapter: while a particular period in the existence of an ancient people may be difficult to situate accurately in time, it is sometimes just as difficult, strange as this may seem, to situate it in space—by which we mean that certain peoples may have migrated at various times from one place to another and that there is nothing to prove, for instance, that the works bequeathed by the ancient Hindus or Persians all originated in the countries where their descendants are now living. One can go further and say that the case is not proved, even when these works contain a mention of certain places, such as the names of rivers and mountains that are still familiar to us, for these same names might easily have been applied successively in the various regions where the people in question halted in the course of its migrations. There is nothing unnatural in this: are not present-day Europeans often in the habit of giving names borrowed from their own country to towns they have founded in their colonies or to other geographical features they may come across there? It has sometimes been debated whether the Hellas of the Homeric age actually was the Greece of more recent times or whether biblical Palestine really was the land we still refer to by that name; discussions of this kind are perhaps not as pointless as is generally supposed, and it is at least justifiable to ask the question even if, as in the two examples just cited, it seems fairly probable that the answer should be given in the affirmative. On the other hand, in the case of Vedic India, there are many reasons for giving a negative reply to a question of this kind. The ancestors of the Hindus, at a time which remains undetermined, must have inhabited a very northerly region, since, according to certain texts, there were occasions when the sun circled the horizon without setting; but when did they forsake that earliest abode, or at the end of how many stages did they reach the India of today? These are interesting speculations from a certain point of view, but we must be content only to mention them here without embarking on their closer examination, as they do not enter into our subject. The questions we have so far been considering constitute no more than a preamble, which, however, appeared to us necessary before we could approach subjects relating directly to the interpretation of Eastern doctrines; and in connection with these last-named questions, which are the principal object of our study, we have yet to draw attention to another kind of difficulty.