________________
14.
The Vedas, Brāhmaṇas and their Philosophy [CH.
system, unparalleled anywhere but among the Gnostics. It is now generally believed that the close of the Brāhmaṇa period was not later than 500 B.C.
The Aranyakas. As a further development of the Brāhmaṇas however we get the Aranyakas or forest treatises. These works were probably composed for old men who had retired into the forest and were thus unable to perform elaborate sacrifices requiring a multitude of accessories and articles which could not be procured in forests. In these, meditations on certain symbols were supposed to be of great merit, and they gradually began to supplant the sacrifices as being of a superior order. It is here that we find that amongst a certain section of intelligent people the ritualistic ideas began to give way, and philosophic speculations about the nature of truth became gradually substituted in their place. To take an illustration from the beginning of the Brhadāranyaka we find that instead of the actual performance of the horse sacrifice (ašvamedha) there are directions for ineditating upon the dawn (Uşas) as the head of the horse, the sun as the eye of the horse, the air as its life, and so on. This is indeed a distinct advancement of the claims of speculation or meditation over the actual performance of the complicated ceremonials of sacrifice. The growth of the subjective speculation, as being capable of bringing the highest good, gradually resulted in the supersession of Vedic ritualism and the establishment of the claims of philosophic meditation and self-knowledge as the highest goal of life. Thus we find that the Āranyaka age was a period during which free thinking tried gradually to shake off the shackles of ritualism which had fettered it for a long time. It was thus that the Āranyakas could pave the way for the Upanişads, revive the germs of philosophic speculation in the Vedas, and develop them in a manner which made the Upanişads the source of all philosophy that arose in the world of Hindu thought.
The æg-Veda, its civilization. The hymns of the Rg-Veda are neither the productions of a single hand nor do they probably belong to any single age. They were composed probably at different periods by different sages, and it is not improbable that some of them were composed
