[Footnote 40: This is the earliest formula. Later law-books describe the length and strength of the bow, and some even give the measure of distance to which the arrow must be shot. Two runners, one to go and one to return, are sometimes allowed. There is another water-ordeal "for religious men." The accused is to drink consecrated water. If in fourteen (or more or less) days no calamity happen to him he will be innocent. The same test is made in the case of the oath and of poison (below).]
[Footnote 41: In the case of witnesses Manu gives seven days as the limit. When one adopts the oath as an ordeal the misfortune of the guilty is supposed to come 'quickly.' As an ordeal this is not found in the later law. It is one of the Greek tests (loc. cit.). When swearing the Hindu holds water or holy-grass.]
[Footnote 42: AV. ii. 12 is not a certain case of this, but it is at least Brahmanic. The carrying of the axe is alluded to in the Ch[=a]ndogya Upanishad (Schlagintweit, Die Gattesurtheile der Indier, p. 6).]
[Footnote 43: Y[=a]jñavalkya (loc. cit.) restricts this
test to women, children, priests, the old, blind, lame, and
sick. On ph[=a]la for agni, ib. ii. 99, see ZDMG. ix.
677.]
[Footnote 44: Schlagintweit, loc. cit. p. 26 (Hiouen
Thsang).]
* * * * *
CHAPTER XII.
JAINISM.[1]
One cannot read the Upanishads without feeling that he is already facing an intellectual revolt. Not only in the later tracts, which are inspired with devotion to a supreme and universal Lord, but even in the oldest of these works the atmosphere, as compared with that of the earlier Brahmanic period, is essentially different. The close and stifling air of ritualism has been charged with an electrical current of thought that must soon produce a storm.
That storm reached a head in Buddhism, but its premonitory signs appear in the Upanishads, and its first outbreak preceded the advent of Gautama. Were it possible to draw a line of demarcation between the Upanishads that come before and after Buddhism, it would be historically more correct to review the two great schisms, Jainism and Buddhism, before referring to the sectarian Upanishads. For these latter in their present form are posterior to the rise of the two great heresies. But, since such a division is practically uncertain in its application, we have thought it better in our sketch of the Upanishads and legal literature to follow to the end the course of that agitated thought, which, starting with the great identification of jiva, the individual spirit, and [=a]tm[=a], the world-spirit, the All, continues till it loses itself in a multiplication of sectarian dogmas, where the All becomes the god that has been elected by one communion of devotees.[2]