stages; but on this point the law of Manu had evidently been broken from very early times. The Buddhist revolt was mainly based on this very argument, that if perfect spiritual freedom-considered as the privilege of the fourth stage was the highest goal, it was a mistake to wait for it till the very end of life. The Buddhist declined to pass through the long discipline of a pupil; he considered the performance of the duties of a householder, more particularly the performance of sacrifices, not only as unprofitable, but as mischievous. The penances performed by the hermit also had been declared by Buddha himself as leading man away from his true calling, and only the state of perfect freedom from the fetters of every passion was recognised by him as the true aim of life. In that sense every Buddhist Bhikshu, or friar, might be called a Sannyâsin, though he had renounced the Veda, the laws of Manu, and all Brâhmanic sacrifices as vanity and vexation of spirit.

This Buddhist spirit seems soon to have extended to the members of the Brâhmanic society also, and we meet at all times, both before and after the Buddhist reform, with men who had shaken off all social fetters; who had retired from their families and from society at large, lived by themselves in forests or in caves, abstained from all enjoyments, restricted their food and drink to the very utmost, and often underwent tortures which make us creep when we read of them or see them represented in pictures and photographs. Such men were naturally surrounded by a halo of holiness, and they received the little they wanted from those who visited them or who profited by their teachings. Some of these saints—but not many—were scholars, and became teachers of their ancient lore. Some, of course, were impostors and hypocrites, and have brought disgrace on the whole profession. But that there were Sannyâsins, and that there are even now, who have really shaken off the fetters of passion, who have disciplined their body and subdued their mind to a perfectly marvellous extent, cannot be doubted. Nor must it be forgotten that from very early times a complete system was elaborated in India, according to which a man by practising different kinds of inhaling and exhaling, by assuming certain postures, by fixing the eyes on certain objects, and by fasting, possibly by drugging himself, could bring himself to such a state of nervous exaltation that in his trance he felt no pain, and was able to do and suffer things which no ordinary mortal could endure. When we read of cases, more or less attested by trustworthy witnesses, of men in such a state seeing what ordinary mortals cannot see, reading the thoughts of others-nay, being lifted into the air without any visible support—we naturally withhold our belief; but that some of these men can go without food for many days; that they can sit unmoved in intense heat and cold; that they can remain in a long death-like trance; nay, that they can be buried and brought back to life after three or four days-these are facts testified to by such unex

ceptionable witnesses, by English officers and English medical men, that they have to be accepted, even though they cannot be accounted for.

It is generally supposed that these same persons, these so-called Sannyasins, are also very learned and wise persons. They may have been so in some cases, but, as a rule, I believe they are not. The best Sanskrit scholars of late years have not been among these Sannyâsins, but among the Pandits and professors at the Indian Universities, or in the Maths of Southern India.

Learning is very much specialised in India, and is generally acquired by an immense amount of learning by heart. One Pandit knows Panini's Grammar with commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries, but he remains dumb on logic or rhetoric. Another knows logic in all its branches, but would decline to answer difficult questions in Vedânta philosophy. Many Pandits know poetry and rhetoric to an extraordinary amount, but legal literature seems to have no existence for them. I have myself had to examine young Indian students who knew by heart the whole text in which they had to pass, but who failed altogether when they had to translate unseen passages. The cultivation of memory has been carried to an extraordinary extent in India, so that people who know a whole dictionary like the Amarakosha by heart are by no means uncommon. Works like the Bhagavad-gîtâ, nay, the Bhagavata-purâna, are committed to memory, and some of the people who have done that travel about the country as professional reciters and support themselves by the alms which they receive. But it is easily understood that all this does not produce anything like independent thought, and in the case of the Sannyasins of the present generation we look in vain either for great learning, even learning by heart, or for original thought and profound wisdom. Yet these Sannyâsins have often a large following. To visit them is considered meritorious, still more to support them by alms. Some of the descriptions given of these local saints are most repulsive. They are represented as filthy, as impostors, as abettors of crime, even as licentious and dissolute. Indian magistrates do not speak well of them, but with the people at large their prestige is considerable. Nor can it be doubted that, in spite of the black sheep, the true Sannyâsin is really a saint, and that his aloofness from the world is extraordinary. There was, for instance, Dayananda Sarasvatî, who tried to introduce some reforms among the Brahmans. He was a scholar in a certain sense. He actually published a commentary in Sanskrit on the Rig Veda, and was able to speak Sanskrit with great fluency. It is supposed that he was poisoned because his reforms threatened to become dangerous to the Brâhmans. But in all his writings there is nothing that could be quoted as original beyond his somewhat strange interpretations of words and whole passages of the Veda.

The late Ramakrishna Paramahansa was a far more interesting

specimen of a Sannyâsin. He seems to have been, not only a highsouled man, a real Mahâtman, but a man of original thought. Indian literature is full of wise saws and sayings, and by merely quoting them a man may easily gain a reputation for profound wisdom. But it was not so with Râmakrishna. He seems to have deeply meditated on the world from his solitary retreat. Whether he was a man of extensive reading is difficult to say, but he was certainly thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Vedânta philosophy. His utterances which have been published breathe the spirit of that philosophy; in fact are only intelligible as products of a Vedântic soil. And yet it is very curious to see how European thought, nay a certain European style, quite different from that of native thinkers, has found an entrance into the oracular sayings of this Indian saint. It is difficult to say whether the Vedânta is a philosophy or a religion, It seems to be both, according to the disposition of its followers or believers. Nor is it possible to speak of the Vedânta without distinguishing between its two schools. These schools, though they adopt the same name and follow the same authorities, chiefly the Upanishads and the Brahma-Sutras, differ on points which form the very essence of any philosophy or religion.

We have first of all the Advaita School (non-duality school), which holds that there is only one reality which we should call the Infinite or the Absolute; while whatever is or seems to be finite and conditional is looked upon as unreal, as the result of ignorance which is called Avidyâ or Mâyâ. The human soul is considered as identical with the infinite or the Brahman, separated from it in appearance only by Avidyâ, or ignorance, though in real reality always Brahman, nay, the whole undivided Brahman, which is supposed to be present or to form the substance of every apparently individual soul.

The second school, called Visishtâdvaita, or Advaita, non-duality with a difference, was evidently intended for a larger public, for those who could not bring themselves to deny altogether some reality to the phenomenal world, some individuality to their own souls. Which of the two schools was the more ancient and most in harmony with the teaching of the Veda is difficult to say. At the present moment, and as far back as about the eighth century of our era, the rigidly monistic school is represented by Sankara, the more practical and accommodating school by Râmânuga (twelfth century). Sankara makes no concession of any kind. He begins and never parts with his conviction that whatever is is one and the same in itself, without variableness or shadow of turning. This Brahman does not possess being and thinking as qualities, but it is both being and thinking. No qualities whatever can be predicated of Brahman, and to every attempt to define it Sankara has but one answer, No, no! When, however, the question is asked as to the cause of what cannot be denied, namely, the manifold phenomenal world, the individual subjects, and the individual objects,

all that Sankara condescends to say is that their cause is Avidyâ, or nescience. Here is what strikes a Western mind as the weak point of the Vedanta philosophy. We should say that even this Avidyâ, which causes the phenomenal world to appear, must have some real cause; but Sankara does not allow this, and repeats again and again that, as an illusion, nescience is neither real nor unreal, but is like our ignorance when, for instance, we imagine we see a serpent, while what we really see is a rope, and yet we run away from it as if it were a real cobra. This nescience being once granted, everything else proceeds smoothly enough. Brahman as held by Avidya seems modified into all that is phenomenal. First of all we get names and forms (nâmarûpa) coming very near to the Greek Móyou, or the archetypes of everything. Then follow the material elements, which constitute animal bodies and the whole objective world. But all this is illusive. There are no individual things, there are no individual souls (gîvas); they only seem to exist as long as nescience prevails over Brahman. If you ask what is real in all things and in all individual souls, the answer is, Brahman, the One without a Second; but this answer can be understood by those only who know Avidyâ, and by knowing it have destroyed it. Others believe that they are this or that, and that the world is this and that. Man thinks he is the ego dwelling in the body, seeing and hearing, comprehending and naming, reasoning and acting, while the true self lies deep below the ego or aham which belongs to the world of illusion. As an ego man has become an actor and an enjoyer, instead of a distant witness of the world. He is then carried along in the sansara, the concourse of the world; he becomes the slave of his acts (karman), and goes on from change to change, till in the end he discovers the true Brahman which alone exists, and which as being himself is called the Atman, or Self, and at the same time the Paramâtman, or the Highest Self. Good works are helpful in producing a proper state of mind for receiving knowledge but for nothing else, for it is by knowledge alone that man can be saved or obtain mukti, and not by good works. This salvation finds expression in the celebrated words tat tvam asi, thou art that, i.e. thou art not thou, but that, i.e. the only existing Brahman; thy Âtman (self) and Brahman are one and the same.

While Sankara is thus an unyielding Monist, and defies the evidence of the senses with a determined No, no, Râmânuga is less exacting. He is at one with Sankara in admitting that there can be only one thing, Brahman, but he allows what Sankara strenuously denies, that Brahman possesses attributes. His chief attribute, according to Râmânuga, is thought or intelligence, but he likewise possesses omnipotence, omniscience, kindness, and other good qualities. He possesses within itself or himself certain powers (Saktis), the seeds of plurality, so that both the material objects of our experience and the individual souls (gîvas) are real modifications of Brahman, not merely

phenomena or illusions. In this modified capacity Brahman is conceived as isvara, the Lord, and both the thinking (kit) and unthinking world (akit) are supposed to constitute his body. He is then called the antaryâmin, the ruler within, so that the objects and the souls which he controls are entitled in their individuality to an independent reality which Sankara denied them. Though Râmânuga would hardly accept creation in our sense, he teaches evolution, or a process by which all that existed potentially or in a subtle form in the one Brahman, while in his undeveloped state (pralaya), became individual, gross, material, and perceptible. He distinguishes, in fact, between Brahman as a cause and Brahman as an effect, but he teaches at the same time that cause and effect are always the same, though the cause undergoes parinâma, i.e. development in order to become effect. Instead of being merely deceived (by vivarta), Brahman, according to Râmânuga, really changes, and thus what was potential at first becomes real at last. Another difference is that while Sankara's highest goal consists in Brahman recovering itself by knowledge, Râmânuga recognises the merit of good works, and allows the pure soul to rise by successive stages to the world of Brahman and to enjoy there perfect felicity without fear of new births or of transmigration. The soul approaches Brahman, becomes like Brahman, and participates in all his powers except one, that of creating, that is sending forth the phenomenal world, governing it, and absorbing it again. Thus not only does Râmânuga allow reality to individual souls, but likewise to Îsvara, or the Lord, while with Sankara the Lord is as unreal as the individual soul, and both are real in their recovered identity only. What Râmânuga thus represents as the highest truth, and as the highest goal to be reached by a man seeking for salvation, is not altogether rejected by Sankara, but is looked upon by him as the lower knowledge. The Brahman reached on the lower stage is the aparam, the lower or the sagunam, i.e. the qualified Brahman. He is, in fact, the personal god, and often worshipped by the followers of Râmânuga under such popular names as Vishnu or Nârâyana. With Sankara this Îsvara would be the pratika, the outward appearance only; we might almost say the persona or the πроσшπоν of the highest Brahman and his worship (upâsanâ), though ignorant, might be tolerated as practically useful. It leads the virtuous man to eternal happiness after death, while true knowledge produces salvation, that is, recovered Brahmahood, even in this life (gîvanmukti), and freedom. from Karman (works) and from transmigration hereafter.

This explains why the followers of these two schools have so long lived in peace and harmony together, though differing on what we should consider the most essential point, whether of a philosophy or a religion. The followers of Sankara do not accuse the followers of Râmânuga of error (mithyâdarsana), but only of nescience, or inevitable Avidya. The phenomenal world and the individual souls, though due