Story of Nation Buddhist India

SR No.: 035274
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: T Fisher Unwin Ltd
Publication Year: 1916
Total Pages: 356
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 88 MB

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BUDDHIST: 7.1DIA
the ritual) show already a stage very much advanced beyond the simpler faith which they, in fact, presup. pose. The gods more usually found in the older systems—the dread Mother Earth, the dryads and the dragons, the dog-star, even the moon and the sun—have been cast into the shade by the new ideas (the new gods) of the fire, the exciting drink, and the thunderstorm. And the charın of the mystery and the magic of the ritual of the sacrifice had to contend, so far as the laity were concerned, with the distaste induced by its complications and its expense.
I am aware that these views as to Vedism are at variance with opinions very widely, not to say cominonly, held. Professor Max Müller insisted to the last on the primitive nature of the beliefs recorded in the Rig Veda. Those beliefs scem to us, and indeed are, so bizarre and absurd, that it is hard to accept the proposition that they give expression to an advanced stage of thought. And one is so accustomed to consider the priesthood as the great obsta. cle, in India, in the way of reform, that it is difficult to believe that the brahmins could ever, as a class, have championed the newer views.
But a comparison with the general course of the evolution of religious beliefs elsewhere show's that the beliefs recorded in the Rig Veda are not primitive. A consideration of the nature of those beliefs, so far as they are not found elsewhere, show's that they must have been, in the view of the men who formulated them, a kind of advance on, or reform of, the previous ideas. And at least three lines of