Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/346

318 God, in the sense of a personal creator of the universe, is not known in the Vedas, and the highest effort of rationalistic thought in India has been to see God in the totality of all that is, And indeed it is doubtful whether any philosophy, be it that of a Kant or a Hegel, has ever accomplished anything more. It hardly stands to reason that men who are so far admitted to be Kants and Hegels should, in other respects, be only in a state of childish wonderment at the phenomena of nature. I humbly beg to differ from those who see in Monotheism, in the recognition of a personal God apart from nature, the acme of intellectual development. I believe that is only a kind of anthropomorphism which the human mind stumbles upon in its first efforts to understand the unknown. The ultimate satisfaction of human reason and emotion lies in the realization of that universal essence which is the All. And I hold an irrefrayable evidence that this idea is present in the Vedas, the numerous gods and their invocations notwithstanding, This idea of the formless All, the Sut—Esse—called Âtman and Bradman in the Upanishads, and further explained in the Dars'anas, is the central idea of the Vedas, nay, the root idea of the Hindu religion in general.

There are several ideas for the opposite error of finding nothing more than the worship of many gods in the Vedas. In the first place, Western scholars are not quite clear as to the meaning of the word Veda. Native commentators have always insisted that the word Veda does not mean the Samhita only, but the Brâhmanas and the Upanishads as well; whereas, Oriental scholars have persisted in understanding the word in the first sense alone. The Samhita is, no doubt, a collection of hymns to different powers, and, taken by itself it is most likely to produce the impression that monotheism was not understood at the time. Apart, however, from clear cases to the contrary, observable by any one who can read between the lines, even in the Samhita, a consideration of that portion along with the other two parts of the Vedas, will clearly show the untenableness of the Orientalist position. The second source of error, if I may be allowed the liberty to touch upon it, is the religious bias already touched upon at the outset.

If then we grasp this central idea of the Vedas, we shall understand the real meaning of Hinduism as such. The other conditions of the world will unfold themselves, by and by, as we proceed. We need not go into any further analysis of the Vedas, and may come at once to the second phase of religious thought, the Sutras and Smritis, based on the ritualistic portion of Vedic literature.

II. Sutra means an aphorism. In this period we have aphoristic works beaming upon ritual, philosophy, morals, grammar, and other subjects. Though this period is distinct from the Vedic and subsequent periods, it is entirely unsafe to assume that this or any other period occurred historically in the order of succession adopted for the purpose of this essay. Between the Vedas and the Sutras lie the Brâhmanas, with the Upanishads and Âryanakas and the Smritis. The books called Brâhmanas and Upanishads