The Cosmic Origin Of The Rigveda PDF Download

Excerpt from The Cosmology of the Rigveda: An Essay The almost entire neglect of the chronological sequence of the hymns in this essay, which is a more serious omission, is the unavoidable consequence of the failure that has as yet attended every attempt to find a criterion by which to determine their relative dates. It is generally supposed that the occurrence of a hymn in the tenth book affords a suspicion of the lateness of its composition. Forms and meanings of words and grammatical constructions, which are of rare occurrence in the Rigveda, and become more frequent later, would also seem to indicate a late date for the hymns in which they occur; but it has not yet been found possible to establish any rules of general applicability on this score. Even if we were able to determine the dates of the hymns, we should still be very far from deciding the relative ages of the ideas contained in them. The cosmo logical guesses strung together in the other Vedic collections, and even in the Brahmanas, occasionally bear a more primitive character than those in the Rigveda, though the task of separating them from later accretions is encumbered with greater difficulty. The illustrations from' geology which are frequently introduced in this connection fail to apply in one important particular. The opinions held by a single man or a body of men are not lifeless as a fossil nor arranged in strata according to age; they are continually growing or dying, and 'shifting' their relative positions through interaction one on another; they derive' their vitality and force of meaning from association with the whole complex of thought in which they live. A chronological arrangement of the ideas could have no other basis than such general principles as may be abstracted from a comprehensive study of the mythology and ideology 'of all nations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.