Outlines of Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 001178
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Paul Deussen
Publisher: Crest Publishing House
Publication Year: 1996
Total Pages: 72
Language: English
Classification: Book_English & Philosophy
File Size: 3 MB

Page 16

PHILOSOPHY OF THE RIGVEDA
mutandis they are originally in every religion of the world, namely, personifications of natural forces and natural phenomena. Man in passing from the brute state to human consciousness found himself surrounded by and dependent on various natural powers: the nourishing earth, the fertilising heaven, the wind, the rain, the thunderstorm, etc., and ascribed to them not only will, like that of man, which was perfectly correct, but also human personality, human desires and human weaknesses, which certainly was wrong. These personified natural powers were further considered as the origin, the maintainers and controllers of what man found in himself as the moral law, opposed to the egoistic tendencies natural to man. Thus the religion of the Rigveda may teach us that gods, wherever we meet them in the world, are compounded of two elements—a mythological, so far as they are personifications of natural powers and phenomena, and a moral element so far as these personifications are considered as the authors and guardians ofthe moral law. Let us add that the better religion is that in which the moral element preponderates, and the less perfect relition that in which the mythological element is developed at the cost of the moral. If we apply this criterion to the religion of the Rigveda, we must recognize that, notwithstanding its high interest in so many respects, it cannot as a religion claim a specially high position; for the Rigvedic gods, though at the same time the guardians of morality (gopâ ritasya), are mainly regarded as beings of superhuman powers but egotistic tendencies. This moral deficiency of the Rigvedic religion has certainly