The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.11

c10.11

On the other hand, there are in the earlier religion, whether it be hymn and sacrifice to the gods, or theosophic thought, no clear signs of belief in the transmigration of souls; no pessimistic view of life, and consequently no scheme of salvation, or rather release (*mukti*) from the eternal round of existences, in which birth, old age, decay, and death are the nodal points in the chain of lives. That this phase of the higher religion belongs to a later time, to a different geographical locality, and to an economic and social state different from that of the earliest Vedic time, seems exceedingly likely. So we are led to the conclusion that there was a period of monistic speculation, tentative in character, yet fairly advanced at the time of the composition of at least the later hieratic hymns of the Rig-Veda. But this higher religious thought lacked the twin factors of metempsychosis and pessimism which really determine its Hindu character. Pessimist view of transmigration, and release from transmigration are the true signs of Hinduism in the broadest sense of that word: through these twin conceptions the Hindu idea, as we may call it, is marked off from all the rest of human thought; without these, Hindu speculations about the divine might readily pose as a kind of Volapük, or Esperanto, for all the world of religious thought from the Prophets and Plato to Spinoza and Kant. We may safely date the entrance of metempsychosis and pessimism towards the end, rather than the beginning of Vedic tradition. It seems to mark a most important division of the Veda into two periods. Other marks, such as more or less advanced priestly ritual; the presence or absence of complicated witchcraft practices; the sudden and unexpected glint of a brilliant theosophic idea; or the varying forms of Vedic literary tradition involve real distinctions of time, but they are more gradual, and are easily construed subjectively. They do not, at any rate, involve anything as vital as the presence or absence of that pessimist doctrine of transmigration which holds India captive—to its cost—even at the present day.