468 BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM 



of ancient India occupy a unique position among the peoples of 

 antiquity; the Indian spirit goes on willfully and obstinately its 

 own strange ways. Is it wonderful, then, that there is among Indian 

 scholars a widespread desire not to introduce non-Indian elements 

 in any consideration of Indian life and thought? "India for the 

 Indians! " Indeed, we should never really accustom ourselves to the 

 peculiar modes of Indian thought, our sympathy for the Indian soul 

 would always lack depth, if we did not understand how to keep 

 aloof all foreign issues. And how is the historian to set aside this 

 feeling of sympathy? Let him remember the words of Faust, "my own 

 self to them extend." Let him live in his imagination the glowing 

 fantasies of the Indian religion, long for the peace of Nirvana with 

 the longing of Buddhism. Let him experience the tragedy of the 

 conflict of the two souls in the breast of the Indian people, the one 

 Aryan and noble, the other humble and wild. And if all this seems 

 to take place far away from our own world, just for this reason 

 our growing familiarity with regions so distant may come to have 

 a peculiar charm. 



Are all demands that we make of our work met in this manner? 

 Certainly not. We have restricted the field of vision more than the 

 nature of the case really justifies. We do not regret it; it has been an 

 advantage. Now, however, something else remains to be done. In 

 the attempt to study deeply any one individual thing, we must not 

 forget that it is but one part of an all-embracing whole. It is a part 

 that has developed into very independent directions. It still re- 

 mains, however, a part of the whole. In order to understand it as 

 such, there is need of the comparative, systematic, and far-seeing 

 kind of research that finds lines of connection everywhere. To what 

 extent can such work be mastered by one and the same scholar, who 

 has become absorbed in the limited field? Must there be a division 

 of labor? This is a personal question that concerns scientists more 

 than the science itself. Science merely commands that, no matter 

 by what hands, both kinds of work shall be done. 



II 



Gates leading abroad are not wanting, you see, in the boundary 

 walls of our province. In order to discover the roads leading out 

 from them, however, we must first of all call to mind the dominating 

 event in the history of ancient India that prescribes the directions 

 that many of these roads shall take; namely, the migration of the 

 Aryans to India. These races, related as their language shows, 

 to the great European peoples, indeed forming in the distant past 

 one people with them, came in their long wanderings from the 

 northwest. For a long time they sat at the gates of India, in 



