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'THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST
plete the initiation of his young disciplc into the secret lore of his own true naturc, added: "Come, we shall go now for a hunt together in the jungle."
The history of Indian thought during the period just pre(eding the birth and mission of the Buddha (c. 563-183 13.C.) rcveals a gradual intensification of emphasis on this problem of the rediscovery and assimilation of the Self. The philosophical dialogues of the Upanişads indicate that during the cighth century B.C. a critical shiit of weiglit from the outer universe and tangible splicres of the body to the inner and the intangible was carrying the dangerous implications of this direction of the mind to their logical conclusion. A process of withdrawal from the normally known world was taking place. The powers of the macrocosm and corresponding faculties of the microcosm were being generally devaluated and left behind; and with such fearlessness that the whole religious system of the previous period was being placed in peril of collapse. The kings of the gods, Indra and Varuņa, and the divine priests of the gods, Agni, Mitra, Brhaspati, were no longer receiving their due of prayer and sacrifice. Instead of direcuing the mind to these symbolic guardians and models of the natural and the social orders, supporting them and kecping them cffective through a continuous sequence of rites and meditations, men were turning all of their attention inward, striving to attain and hold themselves in a state of unmitigated Self-awareness through sheer thinking, systematic self-analysis, breath control, and the stern psychological disciplines of yoga.
The antecedents of this radical introjection are already discernible in many of the hymns of the Vedas;' for cxample, the
3 Editor's note: For the reader unfamiliar with the chronology of Indian documents, it can be stated, briefly, that the four Vedas (Rg, Yajur, Sama, and Atharva) contain the hymns and magical charms of those nomadic Aryan cattle-herding families who entered India through the northwestern mountains during the second millennium B.C., about the time that the
