492 BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM 



India when the Aryas, that is, the three upper castes, were excluded 

 from Brahmanical piety. Now as theosophy, by its very terms, 

 shuts down on the ritual, the special profession of the Brahmans, 

 there is nothing at all in it to exclude occasional intelligent and 

 aspiring men of the other noble castes. This is true up to the present 

 day. Here is where the good Brahman, of whom Professor Garbe 

 will not hear, pomes in. The compilers of the Upanishads were honest 

 enough to recognize this participation, to express their unbounded 

 admiration of it, because after all there was to them something 

 unexpected in it. They are carried away by it to a certain amount 

 of ecstasy, the kind of ecstasy that goes with a paradox, as when the 

 son of a peasant becomes a professor at a university. We must not 

 forget either that the Rajas were after all the source from whom 

 all blessings flow. Even in theosophic occupation the Brahman 

 remains the poor cleric with the Raja as his Maecenas. I think that 

 any one who reads these statements of royal proficiency attentively 

 will acknowledge that they are dashed in the Upanishads, as they are 

 in the Ritual, with a goodly measure of captatio benevolentiae. In 

 other words, the genuine admiration of high-minded nobles is not 

 necessarily divorced from the sub-consciousness that it is well to 

 admire in high places. Even really good Brahmans might do that. 

 If King Janaka of Videha punctuates Yajnavalkya's brilliant expo- 

 sition of theosophy by repeated gifts of a thousand cows, King 

 Ajatagatru of Benares, real intellectual as he is, will not allow ad- 

 miring Brahmans to starve. So we find here at the end of the relig- 

 ious development, when the riddle of the universe has been solved, 

 the same economic conditions which govern the singing of Vedic 

 hymn, the sacrifice to the gods, and the propounding of those hum- 

 bler riddles which form the starting-point of our discussion. But 

 with all their faults we love them still : some Brahmans, though not 

 all Brahmans, were at all times, as they are to the days of Qankara 

 and Kumarila, the intellectual leaders of India; brilliant helpers 

 from the other castes lend occasional aid. 



