one has probably to refer the first of the modern sectarian Pur[=a]nas, though the ritualistic Tantras and [=A]gamas of the lower Civaite sects doubtless belong rather to the end than to the beginning of the period.  We are strengthened in this belief by the fact that the oldest of these works do not pretend to antedate Kum[=a]rila’s century, though the sects mentioned in the epic are known in the first centuries of the Christian era.  The time from the first to the seventh centuries one may accordingly suppose to have been the era during which was developing the Brahmanized form of the early Hindu sects, the literature of these and subsequent sects being composed in the centuries succeeding the latter term.  These sects again divide into many subdivisions, of which we shall speak below.  At present we take up the character of the Pur[=a]nas and their most important points of difference as compared with the sectarian parts of the earlier pseudo-epic, examining especially the trinitarian doctrine, which they inculcate, and its history.

Save in details, even the special ‘faith-scriptures’ called Tantras go no further than go the Pur[=a]nas in advocating the cult of their particular divinities.  And to this advocacy of special gods all else in this class of writings is subordinated.  The ideal Pur[=a]na is divided into five parts, cosmogony, new creations, genealogies of gods and heroes, manvantaras (descriptions of periodic ‘ages,’ past and future), and dynasties of kings.  But no extant Pur[=a]na is divided thus.  In the epic the doctrine of trinitarianism is barely formulated.  Even in the Harivanca, or Genealogy, va[.n]ca, of Vishnu, there is no more than an inverted triunity, ‘one form, three gods,’ where, in reality, all that is insisted upon is the identity of Vishnu and Civa, Brahm[=a] being, as it were, perfunctorily added.[10] In the Pur[=a]nas, on the other hand, while the trinity is acknowledged, religion is resolved again into a sort of sectarian monotheism, where the devotee seems to be in the midst of a squabbling horde of temple-priests, each fighting for his own idol.  In the calmer aspects of religion, apart from sectarian schism, these writings offer, indeed, much that is of second-rate interest, but little that is of real value.  The idle speculations in regard to former divinities are here made cobweb thin.  The philosophy is not new, nor is the spirit of religion raised, even in the most inspired passages, to the level which it has reached in the Divine Song.  Some of these Pur[=a]nas, of which eighteen chief are cited, but with an unknown number of subordinate works,[11] may claim a respectable age; many of them are the most wretched stuff imaginable, bearing about the same literary and historical relation to earlier models as do the later legal Smritis.  In fact, save for their religious (sectarian) purport, the Pur[=a]nas for sections together do not differ much in content from legal Smritis, out of which some may have been evolved,