IN the last chapter we have seen that in the sixth century B.C.
there was in India a very considerable amount of literature of
a special sort. Hampered as it was by the absence of written
books, by the necessity of learning by heart, and of constantly
repeating, the treatises in which it was contained, the extent
of the literature is evidence of a considerable degree both of
intelligence and of earnestness in effort among the people of
India in tho se days. A great deal of it, perhaps the larger
portion of it, has absolutely perished. But a considerable part
of the results of the literary activity of each of three different
schools has survived. It is by a comparison of three sets of
documents, each of them looking at things from a different
point of view, that we have to reconstruct the history of
the time.

Of these three the surviving books--if books they may
be called which had never yet been written--composed and
used by those of the brahmins who earned their livelihood
by the sacrifices, have been now, for the most part, edited
and translated; and a large part of the historical results to
be own from them have been summarised and explained.
But much remains to be done. The documents of the other
two schools may be expected to throw fresh light on passages
in the brahmin books now misunderstood. The unhappy
system of taking these ancient records in the sense attributed
to them by modern commentators with much local knowledge
but no historical criticism, with great learning but also with
considerable party bias, was very naturally adopted at first by
European scholars who had everything to learn. The most
practical, indeed the only then possible, course was to avail
oneself of the assistance of those commentaries, or of the living
pandits whose knowledge was entirely based upon them. In
the interpretation of the Vedic hymns this method, followed
in Wilson's translation, has now been finally abandoned.
But it still survives in many places in the interpretation of
the documents nearest to the date of the rise of Buddhism.
And we still find, for instance, in the most popular versions
of the Upanishads, opinions that are really the outcome of
centuries of philosophic or theosophic discussions, transplanted
from the pages of Sankara in the ninth century A.D. into these
ancient texts of the eighth or seventh century B.C.

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