fettered by the tradition of any school, but freely following the
promptings of their own heads and hearts. By the absence of school
traditions, I do not indeed mean that the great teachers who appear in
the Upanishads were free to make an entirely new start, and to assign to
their speculations any direction they chose; for nothing can be more
certain than that, at the period as the outcome of whose philosophical
activity the Upanishads have to be considered, there were in circulation
certain broad speculative ideas overshadowing the mind of every member
of Brahminical society. But those ideas were neither very definite nor
worked out in detail, and hence allowed themselves to be handled and
fashioned in different ways by different individuals. With whom the few
leading conceptions traceable in the teaching of all Upanishads first
originated, is a point on which those writings themselves do not
enlighten us, and which we have no other means for settling; most
probably they are to be viewed not as the creation of any individual
mind, but as the gradual outcome of speculations carried on by
generations of Vedic theologians. In the Upanishads themselves, at any
rate, they appear as floating mental possessions which may be seized and
moulded into new forms by any one who feels within himself the required
inspiration. A certain vague knowledge of Brahman, the great hidden
being in which all this manifold world is one, seems to be spread
everywhere, and often issues from the most unexpected sources.
/S/vetaketu receives instruction from his father Uddâlaka; the proud
Gârgya has to become the pupil of Ajâta/s/atru, the king of Kâ/s/î;
Bhujyu Sâhyâyani receives answers to his questions from a Gandharva
possessing a maiden; Satyakâma learns what Brahman is from the bull of
the herd he is tending, from Agni and from a flamingo; and Upako/s/ala
is taught by the sacred fires in his teacher's house. All this is of
course legend, not history; but the fact that the philosophic and
theological doctrines of the Upanishads are clothed in this legendary