Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/246

 by Brahma at the end of a cosmic age (kalpa), as well as its periodic renewal out of Brahma, and especially the explanation of the world as an illusion (māyā) produced by Brahma. At the same time the author shows a strange predilection for the personified forms of Brahma as Savitṛi, Īçāna, or Rudra. Though Çiva has not yet become the name of Rudra, its frequent use as an adjective connected with the latter shows that it is in course of becoming fixed as the proper name of the highest god. In this Upanishad we meet with a number of the terms and fundamental notions of the Sānkhya, though the point of view is thoroughly Vedāntist; matter (prakṛiti), for instance, being represented as an illusion produced by Brahma.

To the White Yajurveda is attached the longest, and, beside the Chhāndogya, the most important of the Upanishads. It bears even clearer traces than that work of being a conglomerate of what must originally have been separate treatises. It is divided into three parts, each containing two chapters. The last part is designated, even in the tradition of the commentaries, as a supplement (Khila-kāṇḍa), a statement fully borne out by the contents. That the first and second parts were also originally independent of each other is sufficiently proved by both containing the legend of Yājnavalkya and his two wives in almost identical words throughout. To each of these parts (as well as to Book x. of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa) a successive list (vaṃça) of teachers is attached. A comparison of these lists seems to justify the conclusion that the first part (called Madhukāṇḍa) and the second (Yājnavalkya-kāṇḍa) existed during nine generations as independent Upanishads within the school of the White Yajurveda, and were then combined by a