A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c11.200

c11.200

In the same hymn one verse occurs which boldly declares the existence of but one Divine Being, though invoked under different names. (Rv. i. 164. 46.) "They call (him) Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; then he is the well-winged heavenly Garutmat; that which is One the wise call it many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariśvan." Many of these verses have been incorporated in the Upanishads, and are there explained by later sophists who wish to represent them as a guarantee for the scholastic doctrines of the Vedânta philosophy. It was in the Upanishads and in the Sûtras of Vyâsa that most Sanskrit scholars became first acquainted with these quotations from the Veda, and hence, even after they had been discovered in their original place in the hymns of the Rig-veda-sanhitâ, a prejudice remained against their antiquity. The ideas which they expressed were supposed to be of too abstract a nature for the uneducated poets of the Vedic age. I am far from defending the opinion of those who maintained the existence of a school of priests and philosophers in the remotest ages of the world, and who discovered the deepest wisdom in the religious mysteries and mythological traditions of the East. But the reaction which these extravagant theories has produced goes too far, if every thought which touches on the problems of philosophy is to be marked indiscriminately as a modern forgery, if every conception which reminds us of Moses, Plato, or the Apostles, is to be put down as necessarily borrowed from Jewish, Greek or Christian sources, and foisted thence into the collections of the ancient poetry of the Hindus.