________________
IV - THE BHAGAVATA RELIGION AND THE GITĀ 773
literature itself establishes the order that the Rg.-Veda was followed by the Yajurveda and the Brāhmana treatises, and that the Upanisads dealing with Spiritual Knowledge and the Sāmkhya philosophy came afterwards, and that the devotional philosophical books came into existence last of all; and if one considers the treatises on the Bhāgavata religion themselves, one also clearly sees that the Spiritual Knowledge of the Upanisads, the Sāmkhya philosophy, Yoga in the form of 'Concentration of the Mind', and other aspects of religion were current long before the advent of the Bhagavata religion Even if we economise time considerably, we have to admit that a period of at least ten to twelve hundred years must have elapsed between the date of the Rg-Veda and the advent of the Bhāgavata religion, in order to give sufficient time for these various aspects of religion to have come into existence and fully developed themselves; and if it is believed that the Bhāgavata religion was promulgated by Sri Krsna in His own time, that is to say, about 1400 years before Christ, then a sufficient period of time is not allowed for the growth of these various aspects of religion according to the opinion of these scholars; because, these scholars place the Rg-Veda itself at 1500 to 2000 years before Christ; and on that computation, one has to say that the Bhagavata religion came into existence about 100 years or at most 500 to 600 years after that date; and therefore, some Western scholars have even come forward to dissociate Sri Krsna from the Bhagavata religion on this or on some other meaningless excuse, and to say that the Bhagavata religion must have come into existence after the date of Buddha. But, the references to the Bhāgavata religion, which the Jain and Buddhistic treatises themselves contain, clearly show that that religion must have been in existence before the date of Buddha; and therefore, Dr. Bühler has said that instead of placing the date of the advent of the Bhāgavata religion after the date of Buddha, the date of the Rg-Veda itself must be pushed back, as has been stated by me in my book called Orion. * The dates fixed by Western scholars for our Vedic literature on
* See the Review made by Dr. Bühler of my book Orion in the issue of the Indian Antiquary for September 1894 ( Vol. XXIII, pp. 238-249).
