Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India, their Religion and Institutions v2.c18.s10.87

v2.c18.s10.87

"It is impossible not to perceive that the Brāhmaṇas are based upon a pre-existing, widely-ramified, and highly-developed system of worship. The further the practice of sacred institutions has advanced, the less distinctly are those who practise them conscious of their meaning. Gradually, around the central portion of the ceremony, which in its origin was perfectly transparent and intelligible, there grows up a mass of subordinate observances, which in proportion as they are developed in detail, become more loosely connected with the fundamental thought. The form, becoming more independent, loses its symbolical purport. The Indian worship had already reached such a stage, when the religious reflection exhibited in the Brāhmaṇas began to work upon it. Here, as in all the other religious systems of antiquity, the observation is verified that it is not religious dogmas, and reflection upon these, that give birth to forms of worship, but that it is religious worship, which (itself the product of religious feeling, inspired by, and become subservient to, a conception of the divine) becomes, in its turn, the parent of a more developed and firmly defined theology. Such was the relation of the Brāhmaṇas to the current worship. The Brāhmaṇa does not appeal to the dicta of the sacred hymns as its own first and most immediate source, but rather rests upon the customary ceremonial, and upon the earlier conceptions of that ceremonial. The Aitareya-brāhmaṇa, for instance, from which I borrow details, appeals not only to authorities (to whom written compositions are never ascribed), such as the Ṛishi S'rauta (vii. 1); Saujāta, son of Arāḷha (vii. 22); Rāma, son of Mṛigū (vii. 34); Maitreya, son of Kushāru (viii. 38), etc., or to preceding sacrificial ceremonials of the same kind; but further, the whole form of its representation is based upon the tradition of earlier custom. Its customary formula for this, which is continually recurring at the head of a new passage, is *tadā 'hus*, ‘it is further said,’ or *atho khalv āhus*, ‘it is moreover said;’ and frequent reference is made to difference of opinions; ‘so do or say the one set of persons, and the others otherwise.’ But I have never met with a citation of an older writing.