In order to understand a religion, in its origin at least, we must know some of the conditions out of which it arose.  Buddhism is one of the protestantisms of the world.  Yet, is not every religion, in one sense, protestant?  Is it not a protest against something to which it opposes a difference?  Every new religion, like a growing plant, ignores or rejects certain elements in the soil out of which it springs.  It takes up and assimilates, also, other elements not used before, in order to produce a flower or fruit different from other growths out of the same soil.  Yet whether the new religion be considered as a development, fulfilment, or protest, we must know its historical perspective or background.  To understand the origin of Buddhism, one of the best preparations is to read the history of India and especially of the thought of her many generations; for the landmarks of the civilizations of India, as a Hindu may proudly say, are its mighty literatures.  At these let us glance.[3]

The age of the Vedas extends from the year 2000 to 1400 B.C., and the history of this early India is wonderfully like that of America.  During this era, the Hindus, one of the seven Aryan tribes of which the Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Sclav and Teutonic form the other six, descending from the mid-Asian plateau, settled the Punjab in Northwest India.  They drove the dark-skinned aborigines before them and reclaimed forest and swamp to civilization, making the land of the seven rivers bright with agriculture and brilliant with cities.  This was the glorious heroic age of joyous life and conquest, when men who believed in a Heavenly Father[4] made the first epoch of Hindu history.

Then followed the epic age, 1400-1000 B.C., when the area of civilization was extended still farther down the Ganges Valley, the splendor of wealth, learning, military prowess and social life excelling that of the ancestral seats in the Punjab.  Amid differences of wars and diplomacy with rivalries and jealousies, a common sacred language, literature and religion with similar social and religious institutions, united the various nations together.  In this time the old Vedas were compiled into bodies or collections, and the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, besides the great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were composed.

The next, or rationalistic epoch, covers the period from 1000 B.C. to 320 B.C., when the Hindu expansion had covered all India, that is, the peninsula from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.  Then, all India, including Ceylon, was Hinduized, though in differing degrees; the purest Aryan civilization being in the north, the less pure in the Ganges Valley and south and east, while the least Aryan and more Dravidian was in Bengal, Orissa, and India south of the Kistna River.