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His pupils frequent it and may become semi-resident: aged pilgrims may make it their last home, but the inmates are not a permanent body following a fixed rule like the monks of a Vihâra. The vast and complicated organization of caste is mainly a post-Vedic growth and in the Buddha's time was only in the making.
Such conceptions as Prakṛiti and the Guṇas colour most of the post-Vedic religious literature. Their working may be plainly traced in the Mahâbhârata, Manu and the Purâṇas, and the Tantras identify with Prakṛiti the goddesses whose worship they teach. The unethical character of the Sâṅkhya enabled it to form the strangest alliances with aboriginal beliefs.
He writes: "The evolution of religion in India has not provided the Hindus with any belief or practice common to all who now go by that name. The pre-Aryan tribes had their own religious beliefs and practices, on which were superimposed those of the Aryans. The Vedic age, the post-Vedic times, the Buddhist age, and the age of the Paranas, have each contributed innumerable ideas and customs.
It may appropriately be remarked here that the ordinary Hindu gods, of the post-Vedic period, like the gods of Ancient Greece and Italy, were simply a class of superhuman beings, distinctly contra-distinguished from the Supreme Spirit, the Paramatman or Parabrahma. After death, a virtuous man was supposed to be transformed into one of these so-called gods.
In India it appears in the late Vedic and post-Vedic periods, together with the ethical doctrine of metempsychosis, and though, as is natural in such a stage of development, various ideas are held respecting the destinies of the good and the bad, the ethical distinction between these classes of persons, with a systematic awarding of rewards and punishments, becomes firmly established: Yama becomes an ethical judge.
Whatever the origin of the idea may have been, its root in post-Vedic times is a sense of the transitoriness but continuity of everything. Nothing is eternal or even permanent: not even the gods, for they must die, not even death, for it must turn into new life. This view of life is ingrained in Indian nature.
In India respect for the cow is widespread, but is of post-Vedic origin; there is little actual worship, but the products of the cow are important in magic. Crow. The crow is the chief deity of the Thlinkit Indians of N.W. America; and all over that region it is the chief figure in a group of myths, fulfilling the office of a culture hero who brings the light, gives fire to mankind, &c.
He wrote popular hymns as well as commentaries on the Upanishads, Vedânta Sutras and Bhagavad-gîtâ, thus recognizing both Vedic and post-Vedic literature: he resided for some time on the Narbudda and at Benares, and in the course of the journeys in which like Paul he gave vent to his activity, he founded four maṭhs or monasteries, at Sringeri, Puri, Dwârakâ and Badrinath in the Himalaya.
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