205 



recent work on Buddha is the most scholarly and reliable 

 that I have seen, when tracing the progress in Indian 

 thought which prepared the way for Buddhism, depicts 

 the Vedic religion as having been wholly philosophised, 

 so to speak, out of the inner consciousness of the Hindu. 

 Thus he finds disclosed in the " Brahmana of the hundred 

 paths,^^* what the Vedic texts themselves, he says, fail to 

 yield, "the genesis of the conception of the unity in all that is, 

 from the first dim indications of this thought, until it attains a 

 steady brilliancy." '^What the Indian thinker has conceived 

 in the particular 'ego,^ — the Atman [that is, himself], — 

 extends in his idea, by inevitable necessity, to the universe at 



large beyond him : the Atman, the central 



substance of the ' ego,^ steps forth on the domain of the bare 

 human individual, and is taken as the creating power that 

 moves the great body of the universe. '"t The rnan has thought 

 out this idea so perfectly, that at last the *' Atman is called 

 the Brahma." "Atman and Brahma converge in the one, in 

 which the yearning spirit, wearied of wandering in a world 

 of gloomy, formless phantasms, finds its rest." So " the 

 Brahmana of the hundred paths " says, " That which was, 

 that which will be, I praise, the great Brahma, the One, the 

 Imperishable. To the Atman let man bring his adoration, 

 with this Atman shall I, when I separate from this 

 state, unite myself. Whosoever thinketh thus truly, there is 

 no doubt." Then Dr. Oldenberg adds, "A new centre of 

 thought is found, a new God, greater than all old gods, for 

 he is the all ; nearer to the quest of man^s heart, for he is 

 the particular '' ego.' The name of the thinker," Dr. Olden- 

 berg goes on to say, " who was the first to propound this new 

 philosophy, we know not." 



1 6. In the margin of my copy of Dr. Oldenberg's book I 

 wrote on reading this passage, " Or is this 'new God ^ the 

 oldest of all ? " I should venture to reverse the reasoning of 

 Dr. Oldenberg here, and to find in the " Brahmana of the 

 hundred paths," and in the hymns of the Rig Veda, evidences 

 of a religious thought, not constructive but destructive, not 

 nearing the light, but receding from it, though still catching 

 its last rays. Do we not rather see in the supreme Atman, 



* Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 23, et seq. 



t Though the original meaning of Atman is obscure, yet the more 

 probable derivation is that which connects it with oai, "to breathe," or at, 

 "to go," than that which connects it with ahavi, the first personal pronoun. 

 Spiritus, not ego, seems to be the underlying idea of Atman, even when used 

 loj "4,he self" ; the original meaning seems to be stiU shadowed forth in the 

 Greek ctj-wc. 



