not happen to be referred to in the older Upanishads, but which bear the stamp of great antiquity -such passages as Mahā-bhārata, xii. 11. 704, 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

them had, of course, no existence outside the brains of the men who made them. They were logical corollaries of the human soul. And the external souls, the gods, were therefore identical in origin and nature with the souls supposed to live inside human bodies. But the very men who made these external souls, the gods, looked upon them as objective realities, quite different from their own. souls. They-the gods-were always changingthat is to say, men's ideas about them were always changing, moving, being modified. The long history of Indian mythology is the history of such changes, by no means always dependent on theological reasons. And with each change the objective reality of the external souls, the gods, their difference from the souls of men, seemed more clear and certain than

ever.

Then came the reaction. The gods began, not in popular belief, but among thinkers, to be more and more regarded as identical one with the other until at last, just before Buddhism, the hypothesis was started of a one primeval soul, the world-soul, the Highest soul, the Paramatman, from whom all the other gods and souls had proceeded. There was a deep truth in this daring speculation. But the souls inside men were held in it to be identical with god, the only original and true reality; whereas, historically speaking, soul was the original idea, and the gods (and god) had grown out of it.

We have abundant evidence that this grand generalisation was neither due to the priests who 1 See American Lectures, pp 12-14.

adopted it, nor had its origin in the priestly schools. Precisely as regards the highest point of the generalisation, the very keystone of the arch, the priestly literature has preserved the names of the rajput laymen who thought it out and taught it to the priests. And among the priests who had the greatest share in adopting it, in procuring admission for it into their sacred books, is mentioned the very Uddālaka Aruni, the Gotama, whose defeat in argument on "spiritual matters" has been recorded above.

When this point had been reached, speculation on the basis of the soul theory could go no further. The only modification possible was in the ideas as to the nature and qualities of the souls, internal and external, and as to the relations between them. And to this point speculation reached, but later, and less clearly, in China also, and in Greece. But it was in India, and in India only, that the further step was taken, by Gotama the rajput and his disciples, to abandon the soul theory altogether; and to build up a new philosophy (whether right or wrong is not here the question) on other considerations in which soul or souls played no part at all.

That this thoroughgoing and far-reaching step was taken by laymen should not surprise us. To suppose that the Indians were more superstitious at that time than other folk, more under the thumb of their priests, is to misunderstand the evidence. On the contrary there was a well-marked lay feeling, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common-sense, a wide-spread feeling, in all such matters, of courtesy and liberality. How otherwise can we explain the

fact, already pointed out, of the most complete and unquestioned freedom, both of thought and expression, which the world had yet witnessed?

We shall probably be ignoring an important factor in the history of the time if we omit to notice that this state of things was due, in great part, to the very easy and simple economic conditions of those days.

WE

CHAPTER XIV

CHANDRAGUPTA

E have sketched in the opening chapters the political divisions of India at the time of the rise of Buddhism. We know, whether from native or foreign sources, very little of what happened during the century and a half that followed after the Buddha's death. When the curtain rises again it shows considerable changes in the picture. But the new picture is in harmony with the old; the principal figures and most of the minor ones are the same; and the changes in their position can be fairly understood in the light of their previous relations.

In the middle of the seventh century B.C., the paramount power was the great kingdom of Kosala, then at the height of its prosperity, under Pasenadi's father, the Great Kosalan (Mahākosala), whose dominions extended from the mountains to the Ganges, and from the Kosala and Ramaganga rivers on the west to the Gandak on the east. West and south of it a number of small kingdoms maintained their independence. Eastward Kosala had already extended its suzerainty over the Sākiyas; but was stopped in