The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c10.66

c10.66

The absence of a strong chronological scaffolding is felt not only for the events of Hindu history, but also for the events of Hindu thought. It is the custom to speak rather glibly of "late" and "early" in these thought movements. As a matter of fact we are at the beginning of higher Hindu thought confronted with its most important and most permanent idea. Some poets of the Vedic time, writing, not badly, in Vedic metre, see more or less clearly that the idea of God, in so far as it can be conceived at all, presupposes the idea of absolute unity. It is a thought both independent and of leonine boldness. Independent, because there is no suspicion of foreign thinkers, or foreign literature. Bold, because it will soon lead to the conclusion that there is but one real thing, one "That," one *ding an sich*, which exists both in the universe and in man, and that all else is illusion. Whatever else we may say of this conception, a bolder conception has not emanated from the brain of man; a bolder conception cannot, perhaps, come from the brain of man. We have become acquainted with one expression of this unity in the hymn of Dīrghatamas¹: "They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and Agni, or the heavenly bird Garutmant (the sun). The sages call the one being in many ways; they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariçvan." Professor Deussen, in his History of Philosophy,² remarks that no more epoch-marking word has been uttered in India until we come to the famous *tat tvam asi*, "thou art the That," of the Chāndogya Upanishad. Lest some one should suspect this to be a mere blundering thought for the nonce, a kind of freak or sport of mental rumination, the same Dīrghatamas hymn contains the idea several times more; for instance in stanza 6: