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774
GĪTA-RAHASYA OR KARMA-YOGA
some insufficiently sound grounds, are wrong; and the date of the starting-point of the Vedic era cannot be taken at less than 4500 years before Christ, as has been proved in my book Orion on the strength of the phrases in the Vedas, which show the then existing Udagayana (ie, period during which the Sun seems to travel towards the North-Trans.); and this conclusion has now been accepted by many Western scholars. When in this way, the date of the Rg-Veda has been taken back, a sufficient period of time can be allowed for the growth of all the various aspects of the Vedic religion, and there is no more any necessity for pushing forward the date of the rise of the Bhāgavata religion. As the Brāhmana treatises written after the Rg-Veda contain the astronomical calculation of the year starting with the Sun in the Krttikā constellation, their date has to be fixed at about 2500 years before Christ, as has been shown by the late Shankara Balkrishna Dikshit in his History of the Indian Astronomical Science (bhāratīya-jyotih-śāstra ) written in the Marathi language. But, I do not see this method of fixing the dates of ancient books by considering how the Udagayana was then started being applied to the Upanisads Some scholars have come to the conclusion that none of the Upanisads can be more than 400 to 500 years before Buddha, on the ground that the language and construction of devotional Upanisads like the Rāmatāpani, or Yogic Upanisads like the Yogatattva, is not archaic. But, if one considers the matter according to the abovementioned method of calculation of time, it will be seen that such a conclusion is wrong. It is true that the dates of all the Upanisads cannot be fixed according to the astronomical method of calculation ; yet, this method is very useful for fixing the date of the principal Upanisads. Prof. Max Muller* has said that, from the linguistic point of view, the Maitryupanisad is more ancient than Pānini, because, we find in this Upanisad, many compounds of words, used in a chanda, which had gone out of vogue at the date of Pānini, but which are to be found in the Maitrāyani Samhitā. But the Maiträyanyupanisad is not the very first nor a very ancient Upanisad. Not only has harmony been established between
See Sacred Books of the East Series Vol. XV Intro Pp. xlviii-lii.
