Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/318

178 life, and in the grand hymn X. 29 of the Rig Veda the Aryan seers propounded the theory of the first cause and of the nature of the Great Unknown Spirit, which was the starting-point of later philosophical schools:

The Buddha took the agnostic attitude indicated in the last lines of the great hymn, and left it to Brahman philosophers to work out the full theory of the first cause propounded in the Vedanta. Their disciples, again, making an apotheosis of the Vedic seer in the person of the hermit-god dwelling among the eternal snows, joined the primitive Aryan sun-worship to this philosophic teaching, so as to make a "way of knowledge" easy for unlearned folk to follow. It is thus that there is so much primitive folk-lore mixed up