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Rh flagellated themselves, emaciated, tortured, and mortified their bodies by rigorous devices. They laboured to induce ecstatic state by fasting, vigil, and use of narcotics, as aspirants to magical power have been known to do from primitive times. The austerities and devotional exercises of some advanced ascetic monks, known by the name of Shramanas, excited great admiration and reverence of the people. Even gods, it is alleged, gained their supernatural power by practising austerities. They were mortals originally, say the Atharva Veda and the Brahmanas, and austerities enabled them to defy death. Sages and saints attained miraculous power by the same means. Manu speaks of the practice of austerities as the best means of purifying one's life. By the close of the Vedic period, life was divided into four stages, being those of discipleship, householdership, hermitage, and renunciation. The great legislator lays down that when a householder finds his skin wrinkled and his hair grown gray and witnesses sons born to his sons, he should give up his possessions, wear a tattered garment, resort to the forest, and fare on what grows in the forest or beg his food in adjoining villages. There he should practise austerities and concentrate his mind on Brahma. The ascetic ideal rose in great esteem. People whose lives were saddened with sorrow and suffering, those of highly emotional nature who were extremely sensitive to the jars and buffets of life, those who were temperamentally subject to intense alternating elation and depression, or those in the autumn of their lives who were anxious for their spiritual edification, severed all ties with their families and the busy world and returned to the forest solitudes. The cloister attracted recluses from all grades of society. King Janaka renounced his throne in old age and became a hermit.

The philosophical religion. Among the forest dwellers there arose a class of persons to whom the ascetic life, with its concomitant mortification of body, failed to bring mental satisfaction. There were already germs of theosophy in the Vedic hymns, and such persons, prone to reflection, began to think deeply on the great problems of life and death.

Philosophy has generally led its distinctive existence as a parallel attempt of man to think out for himself the eternal verities of life, which religion has claimed to impart through divine revelation. Religion has acknowledged it as an aid in its