The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c11.45

c11.45

Our first acquaintance with the Aryan Hindus in the hymns of the Veda shows them to us a sturdy, life-loving people on the banks, or in the region of the river Indus, the land of the five streams, the modern Punjab in Northwestern India. That country they had conquered, fresh from the highlands that separate India from Iran. By successive contests, hinted at in a very interesting legend of the Brāhmaṇa texts¹ they advanced eastward, until they had overrun the plain of the Ganges—the hottest civilised land on the face of the earth. This is the land of Hindu theosophy, the land of the Upanishads, the land where Buddha preached, some centuries after the earliest Upanishads. Buddha's most famous sermon was delivered at Benares, in the very centre of the plain of the Ganges. There in the land of Bengal, if anywhere on the face of the civilised earth, the doubts and misgivings that beset human life at its best might permanently harden into the belief that life is a sorry affair. Hindu literature that comes from these lands shows us that the Aryans did not succumb to this change, for they remain a great and remarkable people. But this habitat of theirs unquestionably left an indelible impression on their character. The mental subtleness of the race did not perish, but their bodies suffered; hypochondria, melancholia, dyspepsia—call it what we may—conquered the conquering Aryan, whose stock was no doubt the product of a more northerly and invigorating climate.