A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c6.66

c6.66

Such was their state when the Greeks first became acquainted with them after the discovery of India by Alexander. What did these men, according to Megasthenes, most think and speak about? Their most frequent conversations, he says, were about life and death. This life they considered as the life of an embryo in the womb; but death as the birth to a real and happy life for those who had thought, and had prepared themselves to be ready to die.¹ Good and bad was nothing to them; not that they denied the distinction between good and bad in a moral sense. They recognised law and virtue, as we see in their sacred poetry¹, as well as in their codes of law. But they denied that anything that happened to men in this life could be called either good or bad, and they maintained that philosophy consisted in removing the affections of pleasure as well as of pain. Liking pain and hating pleasure was what they considered the highest state of indifference that man could arrive at.²