THE Doctrine of Maya - HolyBooks.com

"""DEVELOPMENT OF ITS CONCEPTION 39This marks the beginnings of philosophicalthought in India. The same conception of the basalunity of the world afterwards gave rise to Greekphilosophy in the Eleatic monism. Xenophanesstarted his polemic against the anthropomorphismin popular Greek religion and was the first amongGreek thinkers to declareAll is one." A littlelater Parmenides too developed, as his chief principle, the same idea of the essential oneness of beingand thought. We point out this fact simply to showthat it was quite natural and legitimate that theVedic poets should begin their philosophical speculation with their yearning to comprehend the underlying unity of the world. That the yearning wasnatural isamply shown by almost exactly the sametendencies being found in other philosophies, especially in that of Greece. As in Greece, so in India,philosophy was born as the child of wonder."Garbe, who has done a good deal of useful work inthe Sankhya, has unfortunately failed to realizethe spiritin which the above hymn was composedby the Vedic Aryans, and finds in it as well as inother philosophical hymns in the R.V., unclearand self-contradictory trains of thought." * Wefail to perceive any such contradictions. The various explanations are in themselves demanded by thevery mysterious nature of the problem.remarked in passing that the Being and Non-BeingItmay bei Richard Garbe, The Philosophy of Ancient India,Chicago, 1897, p. i.