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It is a very curious fact that the English Gipsies call the Scripture or Bible the Shaster, and I record this with the more pleasure, since it fully establishes Mr Borrow as the first discoverer of the word in Rommany, and vindicates him from the suspicion with which his assertion was received by Dr Pott. On this subject the latter speaks as follows:
The word shaster was given to me very distinctly by a Gipsy, who further volunteered the information, that it not only meant the Scriptures, but also any written book whatever, and somewhat marred the dignity of the sublime association of the Bible and Shaster, by adding that "any feller's bettin'-book on the race-ground was a shasterni lil, 'cos it's written."
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.
Afterwards Major-General Sir James Russell, G.C.B. He died at Ashestiel in 1859 in his 78th year. December 1st. It seems the Shaster positively enjoins that the pile shall be so constructed that, if the victim should repent even at the moment when it is set on fire, she may still have the means of saving herself.
That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.
A shaster or shastra, from the Sanskrit root ças, to govern, relates to discipline. Of those shastras and sutras we must frequently speak. In India and China some of those sutras are exponents, of schools of thought or opinion, or of views or methods of looking at things, rather than of organizations. In Japan these schools of philosophy, in certain instances, become sects with a formal history.
And thus the ultimate point of Brahma, and the infinite depth of all transcendental philosophy, may reappear in a cheap, portable, and convenient form, as a declaration that the real meaning of some mysterious transaction was that it amounted to a sixpenny swindle at thimble-rig; for to such base uses have the Shaster and the Vedas come in England. "She pirryed adree the bar lellin ruzhers."
But for another quarter of a century the funeral pyres were to blaze with the living also, because that caveat was set aside, that fundamental maxim of the constitution of much more than the British Government of the conscience of humanity, was carefully buried up. The judges asked the pundits whether the woman is "enjoined" by the shaster voluntarily to burn herself with the body of her husband.
Such are the laws of the Shaster, so far as they regard all the superior casts, except the Bramins; but if any of the most inferior casts commit adultery with a woman of the casts greatly superior, he is not only to be dismembered, but tied to a hot iron plate, and burnt to death; whereas the highest casts may commit adultery with the very lowest, for the most trifling fine; and a Bramin, or priest, can only suffer by having the hair of his head cut off; and, like the clergy of Europe, while under the dominion of the Pope, he cannot be put to death for any crime whatever.
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