Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/345

Rh inclination towards his native land and language, and particularly towards the religion in which he is brought up. It, however, behooves men of impartial judgment to look upon all religions as but so many different explanations of the ways of the Supreme to men of varying culture and nationality. It is impossible to do justice to these themes in this place, but we may well start with these necessary precautions that the following pages may not appear to make any extraordinary demands upon the intelligence of those brought up in the atmosphere of so-called “Oriental Research” in the West.

We may now address ourselves to the subject before us. At least six different and well-marked stages are visible in the history of Indian philosophic thought; and each stage appears to have left its impress upon the meaning of the word Hinduism. The six stages may be enumerated thus: (1) The Vedas; (2) the Sutra; (3) the Dars'ana; (4) the Purâna ; (5) the Sampradâya ; (6) the Samâja. Each of these is enough to fill several volumes, and all I can attempt here is a cursory survey, imperfect and incomplete, with a view to determine the proper meaning of “Hinduism,” in the religious sense of the word.

Ι. Let us begin with the Vedas. The oldest of the four Vedas is admittedly the Rigveda. It is the most ancient record of the Âryan nation, nay, of the first humanity our earth knows of. Traces of a very superior degree of civilization and art found at every page prevent us from regarding these records as containing only the outpourings of the minds of pastoral tribes ignorantly wondering at the grand phenomena of nature. We find in the Vedas a highly superior order of rationalistic thought pervading all the hymns, and we have ample reasons to conclude that the gods invoked are each and all more than the childish poetry of primitive hearts, Agni and Vishne and Indra and Rudra are, indeed, so many names of different gods, but each of them has really a three-fold aspect. Vishne, for example, in his terrestrial or temporal aspect, is the physical sun; in his corporeal aspect he is the soul of every being, and in his spiritual aspect he is the all-pervading essence of the cosmos. In their spiritual aspect all gods are one, for well says the well-known text : “One only essence the wise declare in many ways.” And this conception of the spiritual unity of the cosmos as found in the Vedas is the crux of western Oriental research. The learned doctors are unwilling to see only the slightest trace of this conception in the Vedas, for, say they, it is all nature-worship, the invocation of different independent powers which held the wandering mind of this section of primitive humanity in submissive admiration and praise. However well this may accord with the psychological development of the human mind there is not the slightest semblance of evidence in the Vedas to show that these records belong to that hypothetical period of human progress. In the Vedas there are marks everywhere of the recognition of the idea of one god, the god of nature manifesting himself in many forms. This word “God " is one of those which have been the stumbling-block of philosophy.