490 BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM 



practices. All at once, says Professor Garbe, lofty thought appears 

 upon the scene. To be sure, even then the traditional god-lore, 

 sacrificial lore, and folk-lore are not rejected, but the spirit is no 

 longer satisfied with the cheap mysteries of the sacrificial altar; a 

 passionate desire to solve the riddle of the universe and its relation 

 to the own self holds the mind captive; nothing less will satisfy. 

 In this observation of Professor Garbe everything is correct, nay even 

 familiar, except the words "all at once." Mental revolutions rarely 

 come all at once; least of all in India. The evidence of fairly con- 

 tinuous records shows that every important Hindu thought has its 

 beginning, its middle, and its final development. Now the Vedic 

 riddle is certainly a product which has been fostered up to its actual 

 scope, an extraordinary scope, as we have seen, by the Brahmans. It 

 is tied by so many threads to Brahmanical literature and Brah- 

 manical performances that there can be no doubt. All the riddles 

 occur in the midst of unquestioned Brahmanical texts; most of them 

 are in the standard metres of the Brahmanical Vedas; a reasonable 

 explanation why they were taken up and propagated by the Brah- 

 mans, namely, to enhance the interest and importance of their 

 intellectual performances, has been stated above. No other reason 

 has ever been suggested. 



Now the boundary line between theosophic riddle and the more 

 set efforts at theosophic speculations cannot be found. " They call 

 it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and Agni, or the heavenly bird Garutmant; 

 the sages call the One Being in many ways," etc. This is a riddle, as 

 we have seen. How far is this from another statement in a hymn 

 of the Rig- Veda (10, 129, 2): "That One breathed (itself), without 

 breath, through its own will; other than it there nothing since has 

 been." Here we have the severest monism in a Brahmanical hymn 

 in the same metre (trishtubh} in which the Vedic poets loved to call 

 upon their fustian god Indra. Even Brahmanical nature-worship 

 is dashed again and again with monism. Rig- Veda, 1, 115, 1, says of 

 Surya, the sun: "The sun is the Self or Soul of all that moves or 

 stands." Another stanza (Rig-Veda, 3, 62, 10), the famous so-called 

 Savitrl, which remains sacrosanct at all times, and is recited to this 

 day by every orthodox Hindu, turns to Savitar, another form of the 

 sun: 



"We meditate on the adorable light of divine Savitar, that he 

 may arouse our holy thoughts." 



Here is almost the first touch of that inimitable combination of the 

 Upanishads, the Atman "breath" and the Brahma "holy thought," 

 that is, the combination of physical and spiritual force into one 

 pantheistic One and All. As a modern Hindu, the late Rajendralal 

 Mitra, says of the Savitrl: 1 "It is, of course, impossible to say 

 1 Introduction to his edition of the Gopatha-Brahmana, p. 24. 



