The Mauryan Polity c11.s2.t11.8

c11.s2.t11.8

The practice of *dhyāna-yoga* in the third millennium B.C., bears the test that religion and its institutions were far older than that period. Again the sects of heterodox mendicants are as old as the *Ṛg Veda* when the *yatis* turned inimical to Indra and were reduced in the course of ages to the position of the *vrātyas*, the outcaste mendicants of the Vedic literature. If the term *yati* could mean *shamana*, as Von Schroeder would have it,¹ verily is our knowledge of ancient Indian history rapidly changing, partly on account of increasing archæological evidence and partly on account of the scientific interpretation of the technical terms in her ancient literature.