2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 80 



not the recluse who refrains from actions Whatsoever thou 



doest, do thou that as an offering to Me ; thus shalt thou be liberated. 

 .... He who offereth to Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, 



or water, that I accept Howsoever men approach Me, even 



so do I welcome them, for the path men take from every side is 

 Mine." 



In the earlier Vedic books there is a total absence of many of these 

 most fundamental features of Hinduism properly so called ; it is only 

 in the Brahmanas and Upanisads (and afterwards, much more defi- 

 nitely in the Epics) that the ideas of Samsara (the cycle of birth and 

 rebirth), Karma (causality), religious asceticism and Yoga, and 

 Bhakti (devotion to a personal deity) begin to appear, and the same 

 applies to the cults of Siva, Krishna, Yaksas, Nagas, innumerable 

 goddesses, and localized deities generally. It is natural and reason- 

 able to assume that these ideas and deities derive, not from the Vedic 

 Aryan tradition, but, as De la Vallee-Poussin expresses it, from " un 

 certain fond commun, tres riche, et que nous ne connaissons pas 

 parfaitement." * 



There is much to be said for Fergusson's view {Tree and Serpent 

 Worship, p. 244) that " Tree and Serpent worship," i. e., the worship 

 of Yaksas and Nagas, powers of fertility and rainfall, " was the primi- 

 tive faith of the aboriginal casteless Dasyus who inhabited northern 

 India before the advent of the Aryans." But in using language of 

 this kind, a certain degree of caution is necessary ; for, in the nature 

 of things, it is only the popular and devotional aspect of these " primi- 

 tive faiths " of which we are able to recover the traces, and there may 

 well have existed esoteric and more philosophical phases of the same 

 beliefs. We do not know how much of Indian philosophy should 

 really be traced to Agamic rather than Vedic origins. Indians them- 

 selves have always believed in the existence of theistic scriptures, the 

 Agamas, coeval in antiquity with the Vedas ; and if the existence of 



* For these groups of ideas as foreign to the Vedas, and for their indigenous 

 source, see De la Vallee-Poussin, Indo-Europeens et Indo-Iraniens; L'Inde 

 jusque vers 300 av. J. C, Paris, 1924, pp. 303, 315-6, 320, etc. ; Senart, E., 

 Castes, pp. xvi-xvii ; Jacobi, H., The Gaina Sutras, S. B. E., XXII, p. xxi ; 

 Keith, A. B., Religion and philosophy of the Veda, Harvard Oriental Series, 

 vols. 31, 32, pp. 132, 193, 258; Macdonell, A., Vedic Mythology, pp. 153, 1541 

 Vogel, J. Ph., Indian Serpent lore, ig26; Charpentier, J., Vber den Bcgriff 

 und die Etyuiologie von piija, Festgabe Hermann Jacobi, 1926. 



It is to be noticed that all the clans particularly associated (so far as the 

 materials here relied upon are concerned) with Yaksa worship, are by no means 

 completely Brahmanised, and probably are not of Aryan origin (De la Vallee- 

 Poussin, LTnde p. 182). 



