The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.119

c10.119

All this is far from being the final form of the higher religion. When Hindu theosophy has reached its full growth and has stretched its limbs we find that all its various intellectual movements still keep on differing among themselves considerably, to the end, as they did at the beginning. But they are absolutely agreed on one point, namely, their final purpose. Their final purpose is salvation; release from the endless chain of existences in which death marks the passage from link to link. This salvation can be effected in only one way, namely, profound and genuinely religious appreciation of the identity of one's own self with the One True Being. This rests upon the twin doctrine of Transmigration and Monism without which India would not be India. The earlier forms of monotheistic and monistic speculation show no sign of a belief in transmigration. I thought it advisable to let this belief mark the division between the tentative, purely speculative philosophy of the earlier time, and the thought of the Upanishads, which is in its essence truly religious. The Upanishads, with all their curvy movements and through all their fluttering thought, never lose sight of that great purpose of salvation. How came the belief in transmigration in India; how it led to a pessimistic view of life; how Brahma, the One, the Universal, the True, finally shaped himself from out of the mass of conflicting and yet converging thoughts about the Divine which we have sketched to-day; and how release from the chain of existences through union with Brahma may be obtained—that will be the theme of our concluding lecture on the religion of the Veda.