A History of Indian Literature v1.c7.s2.26

v1.c7.s2.26

Till the year 1830 it was almost entirely the so-called classical Sanskrit literature which occupied the attention of European students. The drama "Śakuntalā," the philosophic poem "Bhagavadgītā," the Law-Book of Manu, the proverbs of Bhartṛhari, the fable-book "Hitopadeśa," and selected portions of the great epics: these were practically the chief works with which research was occupied, and which were regarded as the original stock of Indian literature. The great and all-important province of Indian literature, the Veda, was almost entirely unknown, and of the whole of the great Buddhist literature nothing at all was known as yet. The little that was known of the Vedas up till the year 1830 was limited to meagre and incomplete information from the older writers on India. The first reliable information was given by Colebrooke in his abovementioned treatise on the Vedas in 1805.[^1) Comparatively more was known about the Upaniṣads, the philosophic treatises belonging to the Vedas. These Upaniṣads had been translated in the 17th century into Persian by the brother of Aurangzeb, the unfortunate Prince Mohammed-Dara Shakoh,[^2) the son of the Great Mogul Shah Jehan. From the Persian they were translated into Latin at the beginning of the 19th century by the French scholar Anquetil du Perron[^3) under the title "Oupnek'hat."[^4) Imperfect and full of misinterpretations as the Latin translation was, it has become of importance for the history of learning, through the fact that the German philosophers Schelling, and especially Schopenhauer, became enthusiastic for Indian philosophy by means of this book. It was not the Upaniṣads as we know and explain them now with all the material of Indian philology now accessible to us and our more definite knowledge of the whole philosophy of the Indians, but the "Oupnek'hat," that