The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s3.23

v2.c40.s3.23

The tendency of the Brāhmaṇas is certainly to diminish the personal aspect of the deity, but the influence of the popular religion must be borne in mind, as explaining the nature of the development of the philosophy of the Upaniṣads. The worship of Rudra was, it is perfectly clear from the Brāhmaṇas themselves, a very important thing indeed for the Brahmans and the people alike, and the inevitable tendency of this vivid belief in powerful and real gods, not an abstraction, was to make the character of the universal change. Prajāpati had been in some measure a god of the ritual: his name helped to make him more than mere priestly fiction, but he could not be expected to have that vivid nature, which is the characteristic of the form of Rudra. The effect of this personal adoration of great gods with the sense of dependence on them and trust in them, which is a real element in the religion of India,² shows itself in philosophy in the theism which begins to be clearly marked in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad and which is expressed in the doctrine of predestination there enunciated, in the form that the saving knowledge is not a matter of learning, but is revealed to the fortunate man by the highest power itself. It is only a step hence to the sectarianism of the Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad, a work which has often wrongly been deemed of much more modern date than it really is, because of the belief that the spirit of devotion to god was a product of the introduction of Christian influences. The theism of the Upaniṣads is, then, we may believe, a later stage than their pantheism and cosmogonism, and is due to the influence of the personal element in the religion of the priest and Brahmans alike.