Chamunda who is about to immolate Malati.  He kills the priest and apparently the other characters consider his conduct natural and not sacrilegious.  But it is not suggested that either the police or any ecclesiastical authority ought to prevent human sacrifices, and the reason why Madhava was able to save his beloved from death was that he had gone to the uncanny spot where such rites were performed to make an offering of human flesh to demons.

In Buddhism religion and the moral law are identified, but not in Hinduism.  Brahmanical literature contains beautiful moral sayings, especially about unselfishness and self-restraint, but the greatest popular gods such as Vishnu and Siva are not identified with the moral law.  They are super-moral and the God of philosophy, who is all things, is also above good and evil.  The aim of the philosophic saint is not so much to choose the good and eschew evil as to draw nearer to God by rising above both.

Indian literature as a whole has a strong ethical and didactic flavour, yet the great philosophic and religious systems concern themselves little with ethics.  They discuss the nature of the external world and other metaphysical questions which seem to us hardly religious:  they clearly feel a peculiar interest in defining the relation of the soul to God, but they rarely ask why should I be good or what is the sanction of morality.  They are concerned less with sin than with ignorance:  virtue is indispensable, but without knowledge it is useless.

17. The Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures

The history and criticism of Hindu and Buddhist scriptures naturally occupy some space in this work, but two general remarks may be made here.  First, the oldest scriptures are almost without exception compilations, that is collections of utterances handed down by tradition and arranged by later generations in some form which gives them apparent unity.  Thus the Rig Veda is obviously an anthology of hymns and some three thousand years later the Granth or sacred book of the Sikhs was compiled on the same principle.  It consists of poems by Nanak, Kabir and many other writers but is treated with extraordinary respect as a continuous and consistent revelation.  The Brahmanas and Upanishads are not such obvious compilations yet on careful inspection the older[63] ones will be found to be nothing else.  Thus the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, though possessing considerable coherency, is not only a collection of such philosophic views as commended themselves to the doctors of the Taittiriya school, but is formed by the union of three such collections.  Each of the first two collections ends with a list of the teachers who handed it down and the third is openly called a supplement.  One long passage, the dialogue between Yajnavalkya and his wife, is incorporated in both the first and the second collection.  Thus our text represents the period when the Taittiriyas brought their philosophic thoughts together in a complete form, but that period was preceded by another in which slightly different schools each had their own collection and for some time before this the various maxims and dialogues must have been current separately.  Since the conversation between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi occurs in almost the same form in two collections, it probably once existed as an independent piece.