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BUDDHIST INDIA
carned their livelihood by the sacrifices, have been now, for the most part, edited and translated; and a iarge part of the historical results to be won from them have been summarised and explained. But much remains to be done. The documents of the other two schools may be expected to throw fresh light on passages in the brahmin books now misunderstood. The unhappy system of taking these ancient records in the sense attributed to them by modern commentators with much local knowledge but no historical criticism, with great learning but also with considerable party bias, was very naturally adopted at first by European scholars who had everything to learn. The most practical, indeed the only then possible, course was to avail oneself of the assistance of those commentaries, or of the living pandits whose knowledge was entirely based upon them. In the interpretation of the Vedic hymns this method, followed in Wilson's translation, has now been finally abandoned. But it still survives in many places in the interpretation of the documents nearest to the date of the rise of Buddhism. And we still find, for instance, in the most popular versions of the Upanishads, opinions that are really the outcome of centuries of philosophic or theosophic discussions, transplanted from the pages of Sankara in the ninth century A.D. into these ancient texts of the eighth or seventh century B.C.
This method of interpretation takes effect in two ways. A passage in the vague and naïve style of those old thinkers (or, rather, poets) is made more exact and precise, is given what is, no doubt, a
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
