through old age, no man in the house asks after him.

Having given up lust, anger, avarice, and distraction, meditate on thyself, who thou art. Fools without a knowledge of Self are hidden in hell and boiled.

In these sixteen verses the whole teaching of the disciples has been told. Those in whom this does not produce understanding, who can do more for them?'

Different Ways of Studying Philosophy.

This may not be exactly moral teaching as we understand it. But there are two ways of studying philosophy. We may study it in a critical or in a historical spirit. The critic would no doubt fasten at once on the supersession of morality in the Vedanta as an unpardonable flaw. One of the corner-stones, without which the grandest pyramid of thought must necessarily collapse, would seem to be missing in it. The historian on the other hand will be satisfied with simply measuring the pyramid or trying to scale it step by step, as far as his thoughts will carry him. He would thus understand the labour it has required in building up, and possibly discover some counteracting forces that render the absence even of a corner-stone intelligible, pardonable, and free from danger. It is surely astounding that such a system as the Vedanta should have been slowly elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a system that even now makes us feel giddy, as in mounting the last steps of the swaying spire of an ancient Gothic cathedral. None of our philosophers, not excepting Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, or Hegel, has

ventured to erect such a spire, never frightened by storms or lightnings. Stone follows on stone in regular succession after once the first step has been made, after once it has been clearly seen that in the beginning there can have been but One, as there will be but One in the end, whether we call it Atman or Brahman. We may prefer to look upon the expansion of the world in names and forms as the work of Sophia or as the realised Logos, but we cannot but admire the boldness with which the Hindu metaphysician, impressed with the miseries and evanescence of this world, could bring himself to declare even the Logos to be but the result of Avidyâ or Nescience, so that in the destruction of that Avidyâ could be recognised the highest object, and the summum bonum (Purushârtha) of man. We need not praise or try to imitate a Colosseum, but if we have any heart for the builders of former days we cannot help feeling that it was a colossal and stupendous effort. And this is the feeling which I cannot resist in examining the ancient Vedanta. Other philosophers have denied the reality of the world as perceived by us, but no one has ventured to deny at the same time the reality of what we call the Ego, the senses and the mind, and their inherent forms. And yet after lifting the Self above body and soul, after uniting heaven and earth, God and man, Brahman and Âtman, these Vedânta philosophers have destroyed nothing in the life of the phenomenal beings who have to act and to fulfil their duties in this phenomenal world. On the contrary, they have shown that there can be nothing phenomenal without something that is real, and that goodness and virtue, faith and works, are necessary as a prepara

tion, nay as a sine quá non, for the attainment of that highest knowledge which brings the soul back to its source and to its home, and restores it to its true nature, to its true Selfhood in Brahman.

And let us think how keenly and deeply Indian thinkers must have felt the eternal riddles of this world before they could propose so desperate a solution as that of the Vedânta; how desperate they must have thought the malady of mankind to be before they could think of so radical a cure. A student of the history of philosophy must brace himself to follow those whom he wants to reach and to understand. He has to climb like a mountaineer, undismayed by avalanches and precipices. He must be able to breathe in the thinnest air, never discouraged even if snow and ice bar his access to the highest point ever reached by the boldest explorers. Even if he has sometimes to descend again, disappointed, he has at all events strengthened his lungs and his muscles for further work. He has done his athletic exercise, and he has seen views such as are never seen in the valleys below. I am myself not a mountaineer, nor am I altogether a Vedântist; but if I can admire the bold climbers scaling Mount Gauri-Samkar, I can also admire the bold thinkers toiling up to heights of the Vedanta where they seem lost to us in clouds and sky. Do we imagine that these ascents were undertaken from mere recklessness, from mere love of danger? It is easy for us to call those ancient explorers reckless adventurers, or dispose of them with the help of other names, such as mystic or pantheist, often but half understood by those who employ them. The Vedantists have often been

R

called Atheists, but as the gods which they denied were only Devas, or what we call false gods, they might thus far have been forgiven. They have been called Pantheists, though their theos, or their theoi, were not the Pân, but the Pân was their theos. They have been called Nihilists, but they themselves have drawn a sharp line between the upholders of the Sûnya-vâda 1, the emptiness-doctrine, and their own teaching, which, on the contrary, insists throughout on the reality that underlies all phenomenal things, namely Brahman, and inculcates the duties which even this world of seeming imposes on all who are not yet in possession of the highest truth. That this phenomenal world has no exclusive right to the name of real is surely implied by its very name. Besides, whatever perishes can never have been real. If heaven and earth shall pass away; if we see our body, our senses, and all that has been built up on them, decaying and perishing every day before our very eyes; if the very Ego, the Aham, is dissolved into the elements from which it sprang, why should not the Vedântist also have held to his belief that Brahman alone is really real, and everything else a dream; and that even the Nâma-rûpas, the words and things, will vanish with each Kalpa?

To sum up, the Vedânta teaches that in the ~ highest sense Creation is but Self-forgetfulness, and Eternal Life remembrance or Self-consciousness. And while to us such high abstractions may seem useless for the many, it is all the more surprising that, with the Hindus, the fundamental ideas of the

An important distinction between Buddhists and Vedântists is that the former hold the world to have arisen from what is not, the latter from what is, the Sat or Brahman.

Vedanta have pervaded the whole of their literature, have leavened the whole of their language, and form to the present day the common property of the people at large. No doubt these ideas assume in the streets a different garment from what they wear among the learned in the Asramas or the forests of the country. May even among the learned few stand up for the complete Advaita or Monism as represented by Samkara.

The danger with Samkara's Vedântism was that what to him was simply phenomenal, should be taken for purely fictitious. There is, however, as great a difference between the two as there is between Avidyâ and Mithyâgñâna. Mâyâ1 is the cause of a phenomenal, not of a fictitious, world; and if Samkara adopts the Vivarta (turning away) instead of the Parinâma (evolution) doctrine, there is always something on which the Vivarta or illusion is at work, and which cannot be deprived of its reality.

Ramânuga.

There are schools of Vedântists who try to explain the Sutras of Bâdarâyana in a far more human spirit. The best known is the school of Râmânuga, who lived in the twelfth century A.D.2 If we place Samkara's literary activity about the eighth century3, the claim of priority and of prior authority would belong to Samkara. But we must never forget that in India more than anywhere else, philosophy was not the

1 In the only passage where the Sûtras speak of Mâyà (III, 2, 3), it need not mean more than a dream.

2 Wilson, Works, I, p. 35.

I-tsing, Introduction, p. xv, 788-820 A.D.; Kumarila, 750 A.D.