________________
SEPTEMBER, 1908 ) THE NARAYANIYA AND THE BHAGAVATAS.
253
We see again the same state of affairs in the language of India; the Linguistic Survey of India shows that there is a central language of the Madhyadeśa, and round it, west, south and east, a group of languages which are all much more closely related to each other than any of them is to the central one. It has long been suggested that these facts point to what may, for convenience sake, be called the existence of two Aryan invasions of India at widely separate epochs.10 The descendants of one of these swarms were the Brahminized occupiers of the Madhyadêśa, while the descendants of the other were the people who inhabited what we may call the once unorthodox outer band. In this light, the war of the Mahabharata resolves itself into a struggle for supremacy between the two national:ties, as well as into a struggle between unorthodoxy and Brahmaism. In the struggle, the Kshattriya party vanquish the Brahmanical, but the victors were ultimately compelled to yield to those whom they had conquered. Nothing is more interesting in the history of Indian civi.ization than the skill displayed by the Brâbmaņs, in gradually, with their characteristic astuteness, drawing the unorthodox Bhagavatas, and their allies the followers of Samkhya-yôga, into their fold, and in enlisting their aid in the struggles against Buddhism.
The Bhagavata Religion was a very old one, - certainly older than Panini, who mentions bhakti applied to Vasudeva in one of his sútras (IV, iii, 95, 98).11 Its founder was Krishna Vasudeva, -not the mythological Křishna of later Hindú legend, but the actual person to whom the myths became attached, and who must be identified with the Krishna Dêvakiputra mentioned as a disciple of Ghôra Angirasa in Chiandígya Upanishad, III, xvii, 6. Kșishna Vasudêra was & Kshattriya, and a member of the Såtvata or Sattvata sept of the Y&dava tribe. In the older parts of the Mahabharata this Kļishņa appears in the two-fold character of a mighty warrior and of a religious teacher. He was the traditional founder of this religion which was strictly monotheistic, the object of worship being named Bhagavat, "the Adorable One," and its followers callicg themselves Bhagavatas, the worshippers of Bhagavat. Its practical teaching was strongly ethical from the Kshattriya point of view. The religion was at first adopted by the people of Vasudeva's tribe, the Yadavas, especially by those of the Satvata19 sept to wbich he himseli belonged; and gradually spread beyond the national limits into other parts of India. Hence, in later writings, we often find the name Sätvata used as a synonym for Bhagavata without any ethnic signification whatever.
Before the time of Påņini, its founder, as has bappened to other similar cases in India, became deified, and under his patronymic of Vasudeva, he was identified with the Bhagavat. Long afterwar:ls, his proper name, Krishna, received the same bononr. Other names given to the Supreme in later times were Purusha or “the Male" (probably borrowed from Samkhya-yoga) Narayana, and so forth, but the oldest and the original name was, as has been said, Bhagavat. The passage just quoted from Påņini shows that in bis time his worshippers were also called Vasudêvakas and ( from the name of Kțishna's chief disciple) Arjunakas.
We here no literary evidenco as to the train of reasoning by which this doctrine was reached, but to me it appears more than probable that it was a development of the Sun-worship that was the common heritage of both branches of the Aryan people, - the Eranian and the Indian. All the legends dealing with the origins of the Bhagavata Religion are connected in some way or other with the sun. According to the Mahalhdrata (xii, 12983),
10 Cr wo may pat it that the invasion lasted for several centuries, and that the latest comers were of a stock different from that of the earliest ones.
11 See Kielhorn in J.R.A.., 1908, p. 505. Neither Pagini nor Patrijali states in so many words that Vasudeva is the name of a deity. The latter treats it merely as a proper dane; but the application of the technical word bhakti to V Asudeva makes it difficult to imagine who else can be intended, if it be not the God. To the present day. the most holy verse of the Bhagavata teaching is the twelve syllable mantra, 3.6., ti nam Bhagavate Vasud&vdya.
13 cf. MBh., II, 1196-7.; 1585-7; IV, 85, 140; XVI, 74, 91-4, 113.
