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INTRODUCTION.
27
would take up the position which Rammohun Roy took? Would he still rely on old authorities, but with sundry qualifications, and yet earnestly assail the current forms of orthodoxy? I do not think so. I think the true view to be, as already stated, very different. The Upanishads, with the Gita, and the precepts of Buddha appear to me to be the successive embodiments of the spiritual thought of the age, as it became more and more dissatisfied with the system of mere ceremonial then dominant.
There are several other points of much interest in the Bhagavadgitá, such as the reference to the Sankhya and Yoga; the place assigned to the Mârgasirsha month; the allusion to the doctrines of materialism; the nearly entire coincidence between a stanza of the Gîtà and one in the Manu Smriti. But in the present state of our knowledge, I do not think that we can extract any historical results from any of them. Without dwelling on them any further, therefore, I will only state it as my opinion, that the Sårkhya and Yoga of the Gità are not identical with the systems known to us under those names, and that the Manu Smriti has probably borrowed from the Gita the stanza common to the two works.
We now proceed to a discussion of some of the external evidence touching the age of the Bhagavadgita. It is, of course, unnecessary to consider any evidence of a date later than the cighth century A. C., that being the date generally received, though not on very strong grounds, as the date of Saskarakarya, the celebrated commentator of the Gita'. For the period prior to that limit, the first testimony to consider is that of Barabhaita, the author of the Kadam. bart. The date of Bana is now fairly well settled as the
"Toe word Brabma.nirvina, which occurs so often at the close of chapter V mod also at chapter 11, 72, seems to me to indicate that nirvana had not yet becues technically pinned down, so to say, to the meaning which Buddhism
becqueatly gave to it, us the name of what it deemed the sammum bonum. Nuria by itsell occurs at VI, 15.
See some farther remarks on these points in my Latroduction to the Glu
Professor Tiek (History of Ancient Religions, p. 140) un Sankan was born 788 A.D.; on the natbority, I presume, or the Aryanid, isudhikan, p. 176
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