Caste in India: The Facts and the System c5.22

c5.22

The Brāhmaṇas and their associated literature gravitate solely around the Veda and the Vedic sacrifice. Yet how artificial in character is everything in them which bears upon Vedic interpretation—etymologies, legends, theories! How many incongruities and misunderstandings seem to betray a time when the meaning of the hymns was already obscure, when the ideas which animated them had ceased to be living and had become a field for the exercise of mysticism! The language has in the interval been much modified. Is the epoch of the Brāhmaṇas, therefore, immediately connected, without interruption, with the epoch of the hymns? Does it carry on the tradition intact? Or has there occurred between the two some kind of break?