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RELIGION-THE BRAHMIN POSITION 255
not happen to be referred to in the older Upanishads, but which bear the stamp of great antiquity -such passages as Mahā-bhārata, xii. 11704, where we are told that if, as the dying man draws up his knees, the soul goes out of him by way of the knees, then it goes to the Sadhyas.
But there is an almost entire unanimity of opinion in these Upanishads that the soul will not obtain release from rebirth either by the performance of sacrifice in this birth or by the practice of penance. It must be by a sort of theosophic or animistic insight, by the perception, the absolute knowledge and certainty, that one's own soul is identical with the Great Soul, the only permanent reality, the ultimate basis and cause of all phenomena.
The ideas had therefore just made, at the time when our history begins, a complete circle. The hypothesis of a soul-a material, but very subtle sort of homunculus within the body-had been started to explain the life and motion, sleep and death, of human beings. By analogy, logically enough, it had been extended, ever more and more widely, to explain similar phenomena in the outside world. There must be a soul in the sun. How else could one explain its majestic march across the heavens, evidently purposeful, its rising and its setting, its beauty and light and glow? If its action was somewhat mysterious, who was to limit or define the motives of the soul of so glorious a creature? There was no argument about it. It was taken for granted; and any one who doubted was simply impious. These souls in nature-gods they called
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
