Page:The Advaita philosophy of Śaṅkara.pdf/2

96 be mentioned the names of Kabira, Dâdu, Nânaka, Chaitanya, Sahajânanda and many others in succession. It is, therefore, possible to classify the apparently interminable sects of the Indian religion, under three or four principal heads, the Jainas and the Buddhas completing the list.

It is piain, then, that we shall be able to understand Śankara best through his commentaries on the Prasthânatraya, and chiefly through that on the Brahmasûtras. It is impossible to proceed in our inquiry without trying, at the outset, to comprehend, the relation in which the Sûtras stand to the general mass of religious literature. The Vedas are, indeed, the fountain-head of all that underlies Indian society in its widest sense. The nature-worship of the Veda was, however, not sufficient to satisfy the wants of inquiring minds; and even in the Vedic period itself, hymns like the Purushasûkta point to those early glimmerings, which proclaim the approaching dawn of Truth. The thought thus awakened crystallizes itself in the Upanishads, the end of the Veda (Vedânta), both historically and spiritually; as the spirit of seeking after God beyond His works, becomes formulated into a System of ceremonial worship in the intermediate Brâhmanas. Then follows a period, when, for ready reference and easy application, we find the Brâhmanas reduced to short Sûtras or mnemonic rules; and the Upanishads also must have obtained similar help at the same time. But by this time the great problem of life had engaged various intellects, and the Darśanas were gradually forming: chief among them the Mimâmsâ or inquiry into the explanation and force of Vedic texts. As the Mimâmsâ of the ceremonial came to be called the prior or Pûrv-Mimâmsâ, so the Mimâmsâ of the final aim of all knowledge, obtained the epithet Uttara-Mimâmsâ, or the final inquiry into the nature of the Godhead, — thus tacitly admitting between the two the relation of subordinate and principal. Clearly, the teaching of the Upanishads had begun to influence the whole range of Indian thought; and religion, which, in India, means not theology pure and simple but philosophy, politics, morals and the like, was moulded in accordance therewith. It became difficult for the rays