Hinduism / by Monier Williams.

  • Monier Monier-Williams
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hinduism / by Monier Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be regarded as representing the Eclectic school of Indian philosophy. As the regular systems were developments of the Upanishads, so the Eclectic school is connected with those mystical treatises through the £veta^vatara Upanishad. This last is a comparatively modern Upanishad, but whether it was composed before or after the Bhagavad-gita, the design of both is evidently the same. They both aim at reconciling the conflicting views of different systems, by an attempt to engraft the Sankhya and Yoga upon Vedanta doctrines. Although, therefore, the order of creation and much of the cosmogony of the Sankhya system are retained in both, the sovereignty of the Supreme Soul of the universe {Brahman, neut.) with which Krishna is identified, as the source and end of all created things, and yet wholly independent of all such creations, is asserted by both. The real author of the Bhagavad-gita is unknown. Nor is it known when the work was inserted in the Bhishma-parvan of the Maha-bharata, in which poem it lies inlaid like a pearl, contributing, with other numerous episodes, to the tesselated character of that immense epic.1 The author was probably a Brahman and nominally a Vaishnava, but really a philosopher and thinker, whose mind was cast in a broad mould. He is sup- posed to have lived in India about the second or third century of our era.. Finding no rest for his spirit in the extreme dogmatism of any one system of philo- sophy, as commonly taught in his own time, much less in the narrow-minded exclusiveness and utter corruption of the Brahmanism which surrounded him, he was driven to construct an eclectic school of his ' It commences at line 830 of the 25th chapter of the Parvan, and ends at line 1,532.
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