Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/70

 The Religion of the Veda the Hindus called him during his latter days. It happens that moksha is the Sanskrit word for "sal- vation," and mila means "root." To the Hindus his name means" Root-of-salvation," or, as we might say, with a different turn, "Salvation Müller." I do not imagine that Müller believed in the Hindu salvation, which is release from the chain of lives and deaths in the course of transmigration. But if freedom of mind partakes of the flavor of salvation, "Salvation Müller" he was. Max Müller's eminence as a scholar and writer is well known to you; less generally well understood, perhaps, is the liberalising quality of his thought, which he exercised untiringly during more than half a century. Among Europeans he was pre-eminent for the spirit of sympathy and fairness which he brought to the study and criticism of Hindu religious thought. The Persian pronunciation of the word Upani- shad is Oupnekhat. It happened that the French- man Anquetil du Perron, the famous pioneer in the study of the Zoroastrian religion of the Parsis, was living in India in 1775. There he became interested in the Persian Oupnekhat, and later on made a Latin translation of Dãrã Shukho's version. This was published in Strassburg in two volumes (vol. i. in 1801; vol. ii. in 1802). This translation proved eventful in the West. At that comparatively recent 54