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The Final Philosophy of the Veda
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must, owing to caste laws, find his own keep, and possibly that of a family besides. India's nature is more malignant than that of any other civilised country. The floods of great rivers devastate at times entire districts; per contra, when the rains are withheld at the time of the capricious monsoons, famine with plague or cholera in its wake, decimate the population. The tribe of venomous serpents and the blood-lust of the tiger claim their regular quota of victims.

Our first acquaintance with the Aryan Hindus in the hymns of the Veda shows them to us a sturdy, life-loving people on the banks, or in the region of the river Indus, the land of the five streams, the modern Punjab in Northwestern India. That country they had conquered, fresh from the highlands that separate India from Iran. By successive contests, hinted at in a very interesting legend of the Brāhmana texts[1] they advanced eastward, until they had overrun the plain of the Ganges – the hottest civilised land on the face of the earth. This is the land of Hindu theosophy, the land of the Upanishads, the land where Buddha preached, some centuries after the earliest Upanishads. Buddha's most famous sermon was delivered at Benares, in the very centre of the plain of the Ganges. There

  1. ↑ Çatapatha Brāhmana 1. 4. 1. 10-18.
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