[Footnote 729:  One explanation given is that she was so elated with her victories over giants that she began to dance which shook the Universe.  Siva in order to save the world placed himself beneath her feet and when she saw she was trampling on her husband, she stopped.  But there are other explanations.

Another of the strangely barbaric legends which cluster round the Sakti is illustrated by the figure called Chinnamastaka.  It represents the goddess as carrying her own head which she has just cut off, while from the neck spout fountains of blood which are drunk by her attendants and by the severed head itself.]

[Footnote 730:  Yet the English mystic Julian, the anchoress of Norwich (c. 1400), insists on the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God.  “God is our mother, brother and Saviour.”  “As verily God is our father, so verily God is our mother.”

So too in an inscription found at Capua (C.I.N. 3580) Isis is addressed as una quae es omnia.

The Power addressed in Swinburne’s poems Mater Triumphalis, Hertha, The Pilgrims and Dolores is really a conception very similar to Sakti.]

[Footnote 731:  These ideas find frequent expression in the works of Bunkim Chandra Chatterjee, Dinesh Chandra Sen and Sister Nivedita.]

[Footnote 732:  See Dinesh Chandra Sen, Hist.  Beng.  Lang, and Lit. pp. 712-721.  Even the iconoclast Devendranath Tagore speaks of the Universal Mother.  See Autobiog. p. 240.]

[Footnote 733:  So I was told, but I saw only six, when I visited the place in 1910.]

[Footnote 734:  Rudhiradhyaya.  Translated in As.  Researches, V. 1798, pp. 371-391.]

[Footnote 735:  See Frazer, op. cit. p. 246.]

CHAPTER XXXIII

HINDU PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy is more closely connected with religion in India than in Europe.  It is not a dispassionate scientific investigation but a practical religious quest.  Even the Nyaya school, which is concerned chiefly with formal logic, promises that by the removal of false knowledge it can emancipate the soul and give the bliss of salvation.  Nor are the expressions system or school of philosophy, commonly used to render darsana, altogether happy.  The word is derived from the root dris, to see, and means a way of looking at things.  As such a way of looking is supposed to be both comprehensive and orderly, it is more or less what we call philosophical, but the points of view are so special and so various that the result is not always what we call a philosophical system.  Madhava’s[736] list of Darsanas includes Buddhism and Jainism, which are commonly regarded as separate religions, as well as the Pasupata and Saiva, which are sects of Hinduism.  The Darsana of Jaimini is merely a discussion of general questions relating to sacrifices:  the Nyaya Darsana examines logic and rhetoric:  the Paniniya Darsana treats of grammar and the nature of language, but claims that it ought to be studied “as the means for attaining the chief end of man."[737]