Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/134

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
118
The Religion of the Ved

two peoples, the Hindus and the Iranians.[1] Separated only by a chain of mountains, they are entirely unconscious of the close relationship of their languages, literatures, and religions. Nowhere in the Veda is there the slightest knowledge of the Avesta; nowhere is the Avesta conscious that there is going on across the Himālaya Mountains in India an intense and characteristic religious development which started with a good many of the same primitive beliefs as were absorbed by the religion of Zoroaster, As time went by the religions of the two peoples became about as different as it is possible for religions of civilised peoples to be. On the one side, Parsism or Zoroastrianism, molded by the mind of a single prophet, Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster: a dualistic religion, believing in God and Satan; an ethical, optimistic, but at the bottom really unphilsophical religion; yet sufficient, as the modern Parsis show, to guide a people into a very superior form of life. On the other side, higher Hinduism, monistic, pessimistic, and speculative; without real leadership, except that which is present in the own spirit of each individual bent upon finding the way out of a hated round of existences through a keen conviction that there is only one fundamental truth, the Brahma in the universe and in one's self; that, consequently, this world of things is illusory,

  1. ↑ See above, p. 13.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.