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 LECTURE VII.

VEDA AND VEDANTA.

I DO not wonder that I should have been asked by some of my hearers to devote part of my last lecture to answering the question, how the Vedic literature could have been composed and preserved, if writing was unknown in India before 500 B.C., while the hymns of the Rig-veda are said to date from 1500 B.C. Classical scholars naturally ask what is the date of our oldest MSS. of the Rig-veda, and what is the evidence on which so high an antiquity is assigned to its contents? I shall try to answer this question as well as I can, and I shall begin with a humble confession that the oldest MSS. of the Rig-veda, known to us at present, date not from 1500 B.C. but from about 1500 A.D.

We have therefore a gap of three thousand years, which it will require a strong arch of argument to bridge over.

But that is not all.

You may know how, in the beginning of this century, when the age of the Homeric poems was discussed, a German scholar, Frederick August Wolf, asked two momentous questions :

1. At what time did the Greeks first become acquainted with the alphabet and use it for inscrip-