[14] But, as has
been already noted, a strain of pantheism existed in the Hindu mind from
early times.
Accordingly, these hermit sages, these mystic dreamers, soon came to
identify the human soul with God. And the chief end of man was to seek
that the stream derived from God should return to its source, and,
ceasing to wander through the wilderness of this world, should find
repose in the bosom of the illimitable deep, the One, the All. The
Brahmans attached the Upanishads to the Veda proper, and they soon came
to be regarded as its most sacred part. In this way the influence these
treatises have exercised has been immense; more than any other portion
of the earlier Hindu writings they have molded the thoughts of
succeeding generations. Philosophy had thus begun.
[Sidenote: Six philosophic schools.]
The speculations of which we see the commencement and progress in the
Upanishads were finally developed and classified in a series of writings
called the six Sastras or _darsanas_. These constitute the regular
official philosophy of India. They are without much difficulty reducible
to three leading schools of thought--the Nyaya, the Sankhya, and the
Vedanta.
Roundly, and speaking generally, we may characterize these systems as
theistic, atheistic, and pantheistic respectively.
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