The History of Buddhist Thought c15.38

c15.38

There can be no doubt, says Oldenberg, about the chronological conclusions. Buddhist literature is later than the Bṛhadāraṇyaka or Chāndogya Upanishad, and it is unthinkable that it should be the immediate successor of those works. Here Oldenberg is in opposition to scholars like Hopkins, who cannot believe that even the oldest upanishads “go back of the sixth century”.² But it is surely a great assumption to speak of succession at all. We do not know that the upanishads had any connection with the region or social conditions in which Buddhism originated.¹ They may have been going on in the seclusion of their hermitages at the very time when the Buddhists were attacking the brahmin pretensions in Magadha.