CHAPTER I.--INTRODUCTION.


SOURCES.--DATES.--METHODS OF INTERPRETATION.--DIVISIONS OF SUBJECT.


SOURCES.


India always has been a land of religions. In the earliest Vedic
literature are found not only hymns in praise of the accepted gods,
but also doubts in regard to the worth of these gods; the beginnings
of a new religion incorporated into the earliest records of the old.
And later, when, about 300 B.C, Megasthenes was in India, the
descendants of those first theosophists are still discussing, albeit
in more modern fashion, the questions that lie at the root of all
religion. "Of the philosophers, those that are most estimable he terms
Brahmans ([Greek: _brachmanas_]). These discuss with many words
concerning death. For they regard death as being, for the wise, a
birth into real life--into the happy life. And in many things they
hold the same opinions with the Greeks: saying that the universe was
begotten and will be destroyed, and that the world is a sphere, which
the god who made and owns it pervades throughout; that there are
different beginnings of all things, but water is the beginning of
world-making, while, in addition to the four elements, there is, as
fifth, a kind of nature, whence came the sky and the stars.... And