The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c3: Preface
The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c3
- Language
- English
Preface
c3.1
THIS volume reproduces with some little amplification six lectures on the Religion of the Veda given before various learned institutions of America during the fall and winter of 1906–07. The period of time and the amount of literature embraced in the term Vedic are large; moreover any discussion of this religion that deserves the name must also include a glance at the prehistoric periods which preceded the religion of the Veda. Consequently my treatment must be selective. It was not difficult to make the selection. I have not thought it necessary to include a complete account of Vedic mythology and legend; nor did the details of priestly ritual and religious folk-practices seem to me to call for elaborate exposition at this time and under the circumstances of a popular treatment of Vedic religion. On the other hand, it seemed both interesting and important to bring out as markedly as possible the development of the religious thought of the Veda in distinction from myth and ceremony. The reader of these pages will, I hope, learn to his satisfaction how the religion of the Veda rests upon a prehistoric foundation which is largely nature myth; how it continues in the Rig-Veda hymns as hieratic ritual worship of polytheistic gods; how this religion grew more and more formal and mechanical in the Yajur-Vedas and Brāhmanas, until it was practically abandoned; how and when arose the germs of higher religious thought; and, finally, how the motives and principles that underlie this entire chain of mental events landed Hindu thought, at a comparatively early period, in the pantheistic and pessimistic religion of the Upanishads which it has never again abandoned.
c3.2
MAURICE BLOOMFIELD.
c3.3
\textsc{Johns Hopkins University},\\
\textsc{Baltimore}, *April*, 1907.