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 The Final Philosophy of the Veda 265

must, owing to caste laws, ﬁnd his own keep, and possibly that of a family besides. India’s nature is more malignant than that of any other civilised country, The floods of great rivers devastate at. times entire districts; per contra, when the rains are withheld at the time of the capricious monsoons, famine with plague or cholera in its wake, decimate the population. T he tribe of venomous serpents and the blood~lust of the tiger claim their regular quota of victims.

Our ﬁrst acquaintance with the Aryan Hindus in the hymns of the Veda shows them to us a sturdy, life~loving people on the banks, or in the region of the river Indus, the land of the ﬁve streams, the modern Punjab in Northwestern India. That coun... try they had conquered, fresh from the highlands that separate India from Iran. By successive con- tests, hinted at in a very interesting legend of the Brahmana texts ’ they advanced eastward, until they had overrun the plain of the Gangeswthe hottest civilised land on the face of the earth. This is the land 0f Hindu theosophy, the land of the Upani- shads, the land where Buddha preached, some centuries after the earliest Upanishads. Buddha’s most famous sermon was delivered at Benares, in the very centre of the plain of the Ganges, There

3 Catapatha Brihmana I. 4. I. IO—IS.