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communal life, which resulted in authoritative social treatises or shastras.
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But after centuries of what may be called the strong early manhood of the people and its culture, there came about a long and opulent maturity and, as its sequence, an equally opulent and richly coloured decline. The Veda continued throughout this long period as a major influence and its offshoots developed like a huge banyan tree. A stage was reached when the grand basic principles and lines of Indian religions, philosophies, and social and political institutions had already been found and built; but there was still ample room for creation and discovery, and there were powerful developments of science, art and literature. We also find great development of the hedonistic and sensuous sides of experience in a pre-eminent manner. We notice that a tendency that had begun in earlier times and created. Buddhism, Jainism and great schools of philosophy reached its greatest time of elaborate and careful reasoning, minute criticism and analysis and forceful logical construction and systematisation in the abundant philosophical writings of the period between the 6th and 13th centuries marked specially by the works of the great Vedantic philosophers, Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhwa. Thereafter, too, the intellectual rigour did not cease but survived its greatest days and continued even up to the 18th and 19th centuries. For we find, even in these later periods, emergence of great creative thinking and often new subtle philosophical ideas in the midst of incessant stream of commentary and criticism on established lines. As a result, there was a tremendous diffusion of the philosophical intelligence with the consequence that even an average Indian, once awakened, responds with. a surprising quickness to the most subtle and profound ideas.
But there was no doubt a gradual decline and even a great eclipse, although something of spiritual light continued to burn and the lamp of the Veda and the Upanishads never got extinguished. Nevertheless, there came about increasing ignorance, superstition and obscurity.
It is, however, remarkable that at the moment when the Indian intellectual light seemed to have drawn to a close, it began to revive at the first chance and there has begun again another cycle.
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