life, and in the grand hymn X. 29 of the Rig Veda the Aryan seers propounded the theory of the first cause and of the nature of the Great Unknown Spirit, which was the starting-point of later philosophical schools:
There was not Existence nor Non-Existence;
The Kingdom of Air nor the Sky beyond.
What was there to contain, to cover in—
Were there but vast unfathom'd depths of Water?
There was no Death there, nor Immortality;
No Sun was there, dividing Day from Night:
Then was there only That resting within Itself;
Apart from It there was not anything.
At first within the Darkness veil'd in Darkness,
Chaos unknowable, the All lay hid:
When sudden from the formless Void emerging,
By the great power of Heat was born that Germ.
Thereafter came Desire, the primal root of Mind;
Being from non-Being sprung, our Rishis tell:
But came the vital pow'r from earth or heav'n?
What hidden force impell'd this parting here?
·····
Who knows whence this was born or how it came?
The gods themselves are later than this time—
He only, the Creator, truly knoweth this.
And even He, perhaps, may know it not.
The Buddha took the agnostic attitude indicated in the last lines of the great hymn, and left it to Brahman philosophers to work out the full theory of the first cause propounded in the Vedanta. Their disciples, again, making an apotheosis of the Vedic seer in the person of the hermit-god dwelling among the eternal snows, joined the primitive Aryan sun-worship to this philosophic teaching, so as to make a "way of knowledge" easy for unlearned folk to follow. It is thus that there is so much primitive folk-lore mixed up
