Page:The religions of India.djvu/45

Rh genuine stock, we have in these writings, as a whole, an authentic literature, which professes to be what it is, which neither asserts for itself a supernatural origin nor seeks to disguise its age by recourse to the devices of the pastiche. Interpolations and later additions are numerous enough, but these have all been made in good faith. It is nevertheless difficult to fix the age of these books, even in any approximate degree. The most recent portions of the Brahmanas which have come down to us do not appear to go farther back than the fifth century before our era. The rest of the literature of the Yeda must be referred to a remoter antiquity, and assigned, in a sequence impossible to determine with any precision, a duration, the first term of which it is absolutely impossible for us to recover. In a general way, it must be conceded that the mantras are, beyond a doubt, older than the regulations which prescribe the use of them ; but we must also admit that the entire body of these books is of more or less simultaneous growth, and conceive of each of them, in the form in which it actually exists, as the last term of a long series, the initial epoch of which must have been obviously the same for all of them. An exception, however, will require to be made as regards the great majority of the hymns of the Rig-Veda. This Samhita is, in fact, composed of several distinct collections, which proceeded, in some cases, from rival families, and belonged to tribes often at war with one another. Now, in the liturgy which we meet with in the most ancient portions of the other books, not only are