"Let there be light."-GENESIS I, 3.

There never was a false god, nor was there ever really a false religion, unless you call a child a false man."-MAX MÜLLER.

IN

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

THE PURPOSE OF THIS WORK

'N speaking of the Sacred Books of the East, that great American sage and teacher, Emerson, called them that "class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for each the supreme result of their experience. . . . All these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience. They are for the closet, and to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible."

Emerson spoke with but a shadow of our present knowledge of the East. Mighty books unknown to him have since been recovered by modern scientific search. Yet the reader may well take Emerson's words as a hint of how profoundly EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE, even when only the barest fragments of it were known, began at once to shape the thought of our foremost men.

EARTH'S EARLIEST LITERATURE

We ask therefore of the reader a moment's consideration of the sources of the earliest human thought and books. In

what far distant epoch man first began to think for himself, we do not know. Those half-brutish minds of some longforgotten "stone age " have left no trace of the vague first "Why?" with which they began mankind's eternal struggle to pierce the infinite. Feeble indeed must have been these earliest efforts of men to reach beyond immediate physical sensation, to understand themselves and the world around them, and the spiritual world which they felt expanding above them and beyond. So completely blank is the abyss of ignorance which our climbing forefathers have left behind them that, up to a century or so ago, mankind had scarcely a grain of knowledge of what had happened in the world three thousand years before.

Back of the Greek wars sung by Homer, we had almost no guide to earlier ages except in our Scriptures, the Old Testament account of the creation, so brief and so often misinterpreted and misunderstood. Beyond this one mighty Book of the past, with its attention centered on the Hebrew race, we possessed only a few loose references in old Greek authors, who mentioned Babylon and Egypt as fading lands of the past, in which the Greeks took little interest.

The nineteenth century changed this widely. The world of three thousand years ago is now almost as clear to us as yesterday's world. Moreover, we can look back twice as far, six thousand years perhaps, and know more of that distant date than our fathers knew of Homer's time. Even beyond six thousand years we have now well-defined glimpses of an earlier age, of races at least semi-civilized in an antiquity for which we have no measuring terms of years.

THE RECENT REDISCOVERY OF THE PAST

Whence has come this tremendous unfolding of the leaves of the past? It is one of the chief triumphs ever gained by human intellect. With wonderful patience and ability, our scientists have sought and compared and studied over all the scattered fragments of antiquity which they have found throughout Asia and North Africa. Not only Egypt and Babylonia, but India, China, Persia, and a score of

other regions have contributed, sometimes a few words, sometimes whole wonderful mysterious literatures, to enlarge our knowledge of man's older days and older thoughts. We may have little cause to boast of any higher wisdom than our fathers, or any deeper spiritual insight, but we have at least established a far broader base of knowledge, both physical and intellectual, from which to uplift our eyes and thoughts — and look beyond.

While our knowledge of the physical laws of the world may continue to increase, there is little likelihood that we shall ever again enlarge our mental horizon by such stupendous finds as have come to us with the sacred books of the Hindus, the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians, and all these other marvels of the past. Hence it is well to pause and take more careful account of our recovered treasure, to place side by side the richest gems of this "wisdom of the East," and so add all their wealth of knowledge to our own.

THE PRESENT SERIES

That is what the present series of volumes seeks to do. From each of the great centers of Oriental thought, it gathers the chief writings. Only the greatest works are given. These are offered with brief explanations of their value and their origin. Minor points of note and comment have been avoided, the purpose being to let the reader study the ancient books themselves, rather than our modern discussion of them.

The volumes offer, first, the oldest discovered documents of each ancient civilization, so that the reader may see for himself what vague stirrings of thought first came to men. Sometimes these earliest fragments embody religious ideas from days far, far older than the Divine revelations to Moses. Sometimes they deal with the moral rather than the spiritual world, proverbs which show how man had resolved to deal with man, thousands of years before Christ's great command, "Love one another." Sometimes they are boasts of a vain conqueror; sometimes songs of joy; more often cries of terror. But in each case they are the earliest visions which open to us the human heart.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Following these most ancient recovered fragments, our series gives for each race its great religious book, its Bible, Koran, or whatever else it has held most sacred as the gift of God to man. For, never a race rose to civilization, but it seems to have regarded some portion of its thought as being divine. Some one of its writings was declared an inspiration which had come to man from a higher source than he.

Then is given the chief- or oldest - historical writing of each race, its most valued poems, its travels, a specimen of its drama, if it ever developed drama, its chief romance, and something of its simpler household tales. Thus the effort is made to let the reader see for himself the best of all the literature of the East. Thus he can follow Oriental wisdom from its beginning.

A SUMMARIZED HISTORY OF EASTERN LITERATURE

As far as possible the books of each nation have been not only kept by themselves, but arranged chronologically. Thus each of our volumes is also a history of a nation's literature. Read first the brief introductory sketch to each, telling what the nation's course has been in literature, what its chief books and writers, and what the progress of its thought. Guided by this general knowledge, turn then to whatever class of works most please you in the body of the volumes. Read the strangely differing romances of the varied races, their quaintly worded travels, their boastful histories. Or balance, one against the other, the varied human passions of their poems. Or, best of all, compare their Sacred Books, and gather how, amid all the thousand diversities of man's physical growth and culture, his spiritual thought remains ever in its elements the same, because it is guided by some Wisdom older, stronger, and more all-enveloping than human intellect.

CHARLES F. HORNE.