of India is enormous:  the difficulty is to grasp it and select what is important.  The enquirer is confronted with a series of encyclopaedic works of great bulk and considerable antiquity, treating of every aspect of religion which interested the Brahmans.  But he continually feels the want of independent testimony to check their statements.  They set forth the views of their authors but whether those views met with general acceptance outside the Brahmanic caste and influenced Indian life as a whole or whether classes, such as the military caste, or regions, such as western India and Dravidian India, had different views, it is often hard to say.  Even more serious is the difficulty of chronology which affects secular as well as religious literature.  The feats of Hindus in the matter of computing time show in the most extravagant form the peculiarities of their mental temperament, for while in their cosmogonies aeons whose length the mind can hardly grasp are tabulated with the names of their superhuman rulers there are few[139] dates in the pre-Mohammedan history which can be determined from purely Indian sources.  The fragments of obscure Greek writers and the notes of a travelling Chinaman furnish more trustworthy data about important epochs in the history of the Hindus than the whole of their gigantic literature, in which there has been found no mention of Alexander’s invasion and only scattered allusions to the conquests of the Sakas, Kushans and Hunas.  We can hardly imagine doubt as to the century in which Shakespeare or Virgil lived, yet when I first studied Sanskrit the greatest of Indian dramatists, Kalidasa, was supposed to have lived about 50 B.C.  His date is not yet fixed with unanimity but it is now generally placed in the fifth or sixth century A.D.

This chronological chaos naturally affects the value of literature as a record of the development of thought.  We are in danger of moving in a vicious circle:  of assigning ideas to an epoch because they occur in a certain book, while at the same time we fix the date of the book in virtue of the ideas which it contains.  Still we may feel some security as to the sequence, if not the exact dates, of the great divisions in Indian religious literature such as the period of the Vedic hymns, the period of the Brahmanas, the rise of Buddhism, the composition of the two great epics, and the Puranas.  If we follow the opinion of most authorities and accept the picture of Indian life and thought contained in the Pali Tripitaka as in the main historical, it seems to follow that both the ritual system of the Brahmanas and the philosophic speculations of the Upanishads were in existence by 500 B.C.[140] and sufficiently developed to impress the public mind with a sense of their futility.  Some interval of mental growth seems to separate the Upanishads from the Brahmanas and a more decided interval separates the Brahmanas from the earlier hymns of the Rig Veda, if not from the compilation of the whole