There were others again who went into the other extreme, and from sheer despair at Sâyana’s commentary, translated the Veda according to what they thought it ought to mean. Langlois, a professor of eloquence at Paris, carried this principle very far indeed, yet we find that his translation is still followed by some writers on ancient religion and mythology.

In the meantime a new school was slowly gaining ground who held that the only satisfactory way of translating the Veda was to construct, first of all, a complete Index Verborum[[13]], to examine every passage in which the same word occurs, and then to assign that meaning to each word which would satisfy the context wherever it occurred. I published such an Index Verborum at the end of my edition of Sâyana’s commentary, and it is easy to see the influence which it exercised at once on the translations of the Rig-Veda which we owe to Grassmann, to Ludwig, and to Ralph T. H. Griffith, and to others who tried their hands on single hymns or single verses. Still greater was the influence exercised by the Sanskrit Dictionary of Boehtlingk and Roth, and the Vedic Vocabulary of Grassmann, though, of course, neither the one nor the other professed to give a complete index of every word and every form in every passage in which it occurred.

The method which I recommended, and which I followed in the specimens published (in 1859, in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” in 1869, in the “Hymns to the Storm-gods,” and again in the “Sacred Books of the East,” 1891), was so tedious, however, that few scholars only felt tempted to follow it. Professor Roth, the scholar most qualified, through his lexical labours, to give us a real translation of the Veda, was honest enough to say again and again that such a work belonged to the next generation of Sanskrit scholars, and to the next century. I myself, having accepted the appointment to a new professorship of Comparative Philology at Oxford, had other things to do, and after I had given the best part of my life to supplying the materials necessary for such a task, I hoped that the ambition of younger scholars would have been roused to undertake this no doubt difficult, but very grateful work. I did not go so far as to say, as has been supposed, that every word, whenever it occurred, should again and again be followed by every translator through all its hiding-places. A number of words have once for all been fixed in their meanings, and when that was the case, they were naturally passed, as known to every Sanskrit scholar. Still the mere physical exertion in collecting all parallel passages became too much for me, and I had reluctantly to give it up to younger and more vigorous hands.

We are now at the beginning of a new era in Vedic scholarship whenever the Complete Concordance, promised by Professors Bloomfield and Lanman, shall have been published. This will be a gigantic work, but it is really the sine quâ non for the Vedic exegesis of the future, and we may expect much help from it. But though many passages may be unravelled by a more complete intercomparison, my own impression is that, through the influence of a long-continued oral tradition a great amount of real corruption has crept into our texts which no amount of conjectural emendation will ever entirely remove. This may sound very discouraging, but fortunately, after deducting ever so much that is hopeless, there remains enough of the 1,017 hymns to give us that insight into the first development of religious thought in India and indirectly among the Aryan nations in general, which is so full of interest to us psychologically, even more than historically. So many conflicting theories have lately been started about the origin of religion, that it must seem to many people as if, like other beginnings, that of religion also was really beyond our grasp. But this is to a great extent our own fault, because philosophers are bent on discovering the origin of religion, instead of being satisfied with studying the origin of religions, or of each individual religion with which it is possible to do so, that is of which we possess old literary documents. For that purpose the study of the Veda is invaluable. But who would try to discover the origin of Islam, without studying the Korân? or of Buddhism without knowing the Suttas? Who would offer an opinion about the beginning of Christianity, unless he had read the Gospels? Even then, it is well known how far removed the Gospels are from the Nativity, and the Korân from the Hejrah. But if we approach the religions of Greeks and Romans, where shall we find the Sibylline leaves telling us of their real parentage? If there lived many heroes before Agamemnon, there lived many poets and prophets before Homer; but who can pierce through the cruel darkness that hides them from our sight?

And what shall we do when we have to deal with religious customs and mythological lore of savage, uncivilised, and illiterate tribes? A study of their languages is no doubt an immense help towards a correct understanding of their traditions; and we cannot be sufficiently grateful to men like Hahn, Codrington, Tregear, and others who did not shrink from that drudgery, before writing on the myths or customs of uncivilised tribes. The most useful materials may be found where some popular poetry has been preserved to the present day, as among the Maoris or of some of the Ugro-Finnic tribes.

It is well known how much labour has been spent on establishing the date and the authenticity of the Vedic hymns. Their authenticity is now admitted by all Sanskrit scholars. Their date has been fixed by me in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature” (1859) at about 1200 to 1500 B.C. But though this date has met with very general acceptance, I am the very last person to consider it as firmly established, and I have again and again given my reasons why I should gladly escape from the force of my own arguments. If other scholars have clamoured for a higher age, for 2000 or 5000 B.C., they are quite welcome to these dates if they can establish them by any kind of historical evidence, and not merely by their wishes; but as yet these guesses are outside the sphere of practical scholarship, quite as much as the date assigned by a Babylonian scholar to the immigration of the Âryas into India, so late as 500 or at the utmost 600 B.C.!

But no literary or traditional documents which we possess, whether in Greek or Latin or in any other Oriental language, to say nothing of barbarous dialects, bring us so near, if not to the origin, at least to the early historical development of any of the ancient religions of mankind as the hymns of the Veda. If the study of single religions must precede the study of religion in general, nowhere can we get so near to the origin of any single religion as in the hymns of the Rig-Veda. Other religions may be older, and religion by itself may be beyond all conception old, but no single religion, as far as I know, has been preserved in documents so old, and so near to the very cradle of a religion as that which we see growing before our eyes in the Veda. Let those who want to know the origin of religion, a priori, take refuge in metaphysics; but those who care to understand the origin of one single religion will find no better oracle to consult than the poems of the Vedic Rishis.

The chronological date of the Vedic hymns, which has been fixed by some at 1200, by others at 2000, nay at 4500 B.C., are, no doubt, very uncertain, and can be no more than constructive. But though Egyptian and Babylonian dates go far beyond any date in India, we can see more of the real beginnings of religion in India than even in Egypt or Babylon. Nor would anybody accept the principle laid down by students of the religion of savages, that whatever is savage or barbarous in religion, must be old. This is a major premiss that would play fearful havoc with our chronology.

What is quite clear is that, between the Vedic hymns and the next period, that of the prose Brâhmanas, there is a great gulf. The hymns of the three Vedas had not only been collected, such as we have them, but had already been invested with a divine authority, such as is seldom ascribed to works of recent date. Besides, it is clear that the language of the hymns had often been completely misunderstood by the authors of the Brâhmanas, and that a new style had sprung up in the place of that of the old poetical compositions. From the time of the Brâhmanas, which precede the rise of Buddhism (500 B.C.), to the present day, the old hymns of the Veda have retained their unique position in India. Invested with the character of a divine revelation, they have been to the people of India what the Bible has been to us.

And yet how different is this Bible of India from all other Bibles! No doubt we meet in the Veda with some exalted, and some very abstract ideas also, but its general character is very different. It is simple, straightforward, natural, without any attempt at systematic treatment, without any effort for poetical beauty. When we take day and night, spring and winter, as they come and go, we shall find in the hymns thoughts such as would naturally spring up in the minds of any unsophisticated observers who felt that there must be something behind the visible world, some powers or persons directing the course of nature, possibly some power even beyond the powers, whom they called Devas or Bright ones. It was chiefly the phenomena which recurred regularly that impressed themselves on their minds and evoked in time the idea of order and law as pervading the whole of nature, even its very thunderstorms and lightnings.