[Footnote 2:  Weber (Hist.  Ind.  Lit., p. 11, note) says that the word Brahma@na signifies “that which relates to prayer brahman.”  Max Muller (S.B.E., I.p. lxvi) says that Brahma@na meant “originally the sayings of Brahmans, whether in the general sense of priests, or in the more special sense of Brahman-priests.”  Eggeling (S.B.E.  XII.  Introd. p. xxii) says that the Brhama@nas were so called “probably either because they were intended for the instruction and guidance of priests (brahman) generally; or because they were, for the most part, the authoritative utterances of such as were thoroughly versed in Vedic and sacrificial lore and competent to act as Brahmans or superintending priests.”  But in view of the fact that the Brahma@nas were also supposed to be as much revealed as the Vedas, the present writer thinks that Weber’s view is the correct one.]

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system, unparalleled anywhere but among the Gnostics.  It is now generally believed that the close of the Brahma@na period was not later than 500 B.C.

The Ara@nyakas.

As a further development of the Brahma@nas however we get the Ara@nyakas or forest treatises.  These works were probably composed for old men who had retired into the forest and were thus unable to perform elaborate sacrifices requiring a multitude of accessories and articles which could not be procured in forests.  In these, meditations on certain symbols were supposed to be of great merit, and they gradually began to supplant the sacrifices as being of a superior order.  It is here that we find that amongst a certain section of intelligent people the ritualistic ideas began to give way, and philosophic speculations about the nature of truth became gradually substituted in their place.  To take an illustration from the beginning of the B@rhadara@nyaka we find that instead of the actual performance of the horse sacrifice (as’vamedha) there are directions for meditating upon the dawn (U@sas) as the head of the horse, the sun as the eye of the horse, the air as its life, and so on.  This is indeed a distinct advancement of the claims of speculation or meditation over the actual performance of the complicated ceremonials of sacrifice.  The growth of the subjective speculation, as being capable of bringing the highest good, gradually resulted in the supersession of Vedic ritualism and the establishment of the claims of philosophic meditation and self-knowledge as the highest goal of life.  Thus we find that the Ara@nyaka age was a period during which free thinking tried gradually to shake off the shackles of ritualism which had fettered it for a long time.  It was thus that the Ara@nyakas could pave the way for the Upani@sads, revive the germs of philosophic speculation in the Vedas, and develop them in a manner which made the Upani@sads the source of all philosophy that arose in the world of Hindu thought.

The @Rg-Veda, its civilization.