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those in the Atharva. But we cannot avoid the conclusion that the priests who made the older collection were consciously exercising a choice, that they purposely omitted to include certain phases of current belief because those phases did not appeal to them, did not suit their purposes, or did not seem to them worthy of their deities. And when we remember that what they shut out, or nearly shut out, was the lowest kind of savage superstition and sorcery, it is not easy to deny them any credit in doing so.
BUDDHIST INDIA
The second is the general view of religious beliefs, as held by the people, given to us in the Epics, and especially in the Maha Bhārata. It is, in many respects, altogether different from the general view as given in the Vedic literature. We do not know as yet exactly which of the conceptions in the Maha Bharata can be taken as evidence of the seventh century B.C. The poem has certainly undergone one, if not two or even three, alterations at the hand of later priestly editors. But though the changes made in the poems are due to the priests, they were so made because the priests found that ideas not current in their schools had so much weight with the people that they (the priests) could no longer afford to neglect them. They must have recast the poem with two main objects in view-in the first place to insist on the supremacy of the brahmins, which had been so much endangered by the great popularity of the anti-priestly views of the Buddhists and others; and in the second place to show that the brahmins were in sympathy with, and had formally
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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