The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s2.t1.3

c12.s2.t1.3

This rarest of all changes of inclination may be traced nowhere more clearly than in India, where deliverance, unmodified by the play upon it of the accidental events of history, appears not as a ransom, an atonement, a propitiation, etc., but merely as a release from empirical existence with all its desires, these last being regarded as fetters (*bandha, graha*), as bonds (*granthi*), which bind the soul to the objects of sense. Even in India it was not always so, and a long period of development, a vast interval, separates the poets of the Rigveda, who, filled with a warm desire for life, shrink from death,¹ and wish for themselves and their posterity a life of a hundred years, from the words with which the greatest Indian poet closes his masterpiece :—