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in the figures of Vaishanava poets, and they are to be found also in a certain way even in the modern poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The Veda helps us to understand the original shaping not only of the master ideas that govern the mind of India, but all its characteristic types of spiritual experience, its turn of imagination, its creative temperament and the kind of psychic forms in which we persistently interpret self and things and life and the universe.
There are three characteristics of the Vedic hymns: firstly, there is among them a constant sense of the infinite, of the cosmic; secondly, there is a tendency to see and render spiritual experience in a great richness of images taken from the inner psychic plane or in physical planes transmuted by the stress of a psychic significance and impression and line and idea colour; its third tendency is to image the terrestrial life often magnified, as in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, or else subtlised in the transparencies of a larger atmosphere. As a result, when we study the Veda, we find that the spiritual, the infinite, is near and real and the gods are real and the world beyond not so much beyond as immanent in our own existence.
Upanishads come much later than the Vedas, since they were preceded by Brahmanas and Aranyakas that intervened after the purity of the Vedic knowledge began to be forgotten or lost considerably. It appears that, but for the search of the Upanishads, the ancient truths of the Veda and the flowering of the intuitive faculties would have been followed by the pragmatic and theoretical intellectuality in such a way that the development of the Indian philosophy would have taken a turn quite different from what it actually took, and it could have been divorced gradually, as it happened in the West, from the earlier mystic and spiritual tradition. The way in which the Upanishads took birth and developed in India does not seem to have any parallel in the history of any country in the world, and the significance of the Upanishads, can, therefore, be perceived as a unique feature of the resurgence in the ancient cycle of the age of intuition.
We have to note that the Rishis of the Upanishads were, like the Vedic Rishis, seers of the truth and they cannot be described merely as philosophical thinkers, although the truth they perceived by
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