An Outline of the Religious Literature of India c3.5

c3.5

I was also conscious that during the last twenty years a very large number of elements in the religious and literary history have been illuminated by fresh discoveries. A good deal of work has been done on the vernacular literatures, and masses of sectarian works in Sanskrit have been unearthed. Yet most of these important advances lie buried in notes in learned journals, in prefaces to texts, in catalogues, in articles in encyclopaedias, or in obscure monographs. They have not yet found their way into any text-book of the literature or of the religions. For example, the problem of the date of the philosophical Sūtras has quite recently been brought much nearer solution, and the result is a general clarifying of the perspective in one of the most important periods. Numerous books, articles, and stray observations have shed welcome rays of light on these systems and their history. Professor Keith's Vedic works contain masses of historical and chronological observations referring to the whole of Vedic and sub-Vedic literature. Professor Hopkins's book, *The Great Epic of India*, throws a flood of light on the religious changes of the time when the epics were gradually being formed. The serried phalanx of details exhibited in Guérinot's splendid thesaurus has never been worked up into a history of Jain literature. Numerous works describe or throw light on sections of the literature of Buddhism; yet no one has reduced them to a single ordered narrative. H. P. Śāstrī's catalogues of Nepalese manuscripts, Vidyābhūṣaṇa's volume on mediaeval logic, Bhandarkar's work on the sects, and Schrader's volume on the Vaiṣṇava Saṃhitās, each contain notable contributions to religious and literary history. Finally, translations from various Indian tongues have in recent years brought many of the more interesting texts within reach of the student of religions.