Essays Lectures on Religion of Hindu Vol 02

Author(s): H H Wilson
Publisher: Trubner and Company London

Page 65

OF THE HINDUS.
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the Guru, to whom extravagant deference, such as is due to deity alone, is paid, is a very different individual, very usually not a Brahman at all, but a member of some of the mendicant orders that have sprung up in comparatively modern times, a vagrant equally destitute of knowledge, learning, and principle.
Again: although Brahmá, Vishnu, and Śiva are named in the Vedas, yet it is very doubtful if even the names of those incarnations and types, under which they are now exclusively worshipped, occur. Ráma the son of Dasaratha, Krishna the son of Vasudeva, are, it is believed, unnoticed in authentic passages of the Sanhitá or collected prayers, and there is no mention of the latter as Govinda or Gopála the infant cowherd, or as the uncouth and anomalous Jagannáth. The only form in which Śiva is now worshipped, the Linga or Phallus, it is generally agreed, has no place whatever amongst the types and emblems of the mythos of the Vedas. It is clear therefore that the great body of the present religious practices of the Hindus are subsequent in time and foreign in tenor to those that were enjoined by the authorities which they profess to regard as the foundations of their system.
Some parts of the private and domestic ceremonial of the Vedas are however still in use, although mixed up with much extraneous matter. For these I may again refer to Mr. Colebrooke, who published originally in the fifth and seventh volumes of the Asiatic Researches three papers on the religious ceremonies