The Development of Hindu Iconography c10.4.3

c10.4.3

125), the goddess Vāc is made to say, "I give wealth unto him who gives sacrifice;...I am that through which one eats, breathes, sees and hears;...him that I love, I make strong, to be a priest, a seer, a sage." Eliot remarks about this passage, "This reads like an ancient preliminary study for the Bhagavadgītā. Like Kṛṣṇa, the deity claims to be in all and like him to reward her votaries."⁵ In the Upaniṣads, on the other hand, the mental attitude of the thinkers to the one supreme entity, viz., Brahman-Ātman, gets a character which is, in no very uncertain manner, reminiscent of Bhakti. The growth and development of monotheism, a direct result of the pantheistic conception of the earlier Upaniṣads, was the certain background on which Bhakti was to develop among the intellectual section of the composite population of India. The impersonal-personal Brahman was no doubt ill-suited to play the rôle of the one god of devotion and the strictly monistic character of some of the earlier Upaniṣadic passages was logically inimical to the ideas of loving faith; still there are many passages in some of them, which are significant. We are told in one of them that ‘Ātman cannot be gained by the instruction, nor by understanding nor by much learning; he whom Ātman chooses, by him the Ātman can be gained;