The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.41

c10.41

Mental revolutions rarely come all at once, least of all in India. The evidence of India’s remarkably continuous records shows that every important Hindu thought has its beginning, middle, and final development. As regards theosophy, its beginnings are found in the Vedic hymns; its middle in the Upanishads; and its final development in the “Systems” of Philosophy, like the Vedānta and Sānkhya of later times. I am afraid that Professor Garbe has somehow gotten into the state of mind that there is only one kind of good Brahman, namely, a dead Brahman, to paraphrase a saying about that other Indian, the American Indian. Selfishness, foolishness, bigotry, and cruelty galore—the marks of these *some* Brahmans have left in their compositions, foolishly as behooves knaves. But there were, and there are, Brahmans and Brahmans. The older Upanishads, written in approximately the same language and style as the so-called prose Brāhmaṇa (Talmudic) texts, figuring largely as parts of these compositions, were composed by Brahmans who had risen to the conviction that not “the way of works” lies the salvation that is knowledge. Countless Brahman names crowd these texts: Naciketas and Çvetaketu, Gārgya and Yājnavalkya, and many others. Even the wives or daughters of great Brahmans, Gārgī and Maitreyī, take part in spiritual tourneys, and occasionally, as in the case of Gārgī in the Great Forest-Upanishad (3. 6 and 8), rise to a subtler appreciation than the Brahman men of the mystery of the world and the riddle of existence.