In old India, as elsewhere, the minds of the leading men were of many complexions; so that we have great idealists, great thinkers of the atomic school, great nihilists, and great preachers of doctrines wholly agnostic. It is the custom to gather a certain group of these teachings together, with the title of the Six Philosophies; while all others, considered as heterodox, are outside the pale of sympathy, and, therefore, to be ignored. Chiefest among the outcast philosophies is the doctrine of Prince Siddharta, called also Sakya Muni, and Gautama Buddha. Of the others, it would be hard to find many students of more than three - namely, the Yedanta, Sakya, and Yoga: while the Vaiseshika, Nyaya, and first Mimamsa are little more than a name, even to professed students of Indian thought. They have their followers, doubtless; but there has not been found one among them of such mental force as to give them a modern expression, or to show that they bear any message to the modern world. We shall speak, here, only of the three most popular among the orthodox schools: and this chiefly in connection with a single noteworthy book, - the Bhagavat Gita, or "Songs of the Master." If we were asked, off hand, to which of the three schools the Bhagavat Gita belonged, we should most likely answer, off-hand, that it was, undoubtedly a text-book of the Vedanta, and indeed one of the weightiest works of the Vedanta School. For is it not commented on by the Great Sankara, chiefest light of the Vedanta, and does he not quote from it as of divine authority, a fully inspired scripture?

Yet, for all this, I think there are other aspects of the Bhagavat Gita which show that this answer is too simple; and that, while the Songs of the Master undoubtedly form a bulwark of Vedantic orthodoxy, there is very much in them which belongs to the Sankhya,and even more that is the property of the Yoga School. It seems pretty certain that the Bhagavat Gita has grown up gradually, beginning with a ballad on Krishna and Arjuna, much of which is preserved in the first book, and which suggests all through, the burden of Krishna's admonition : Therefore fight, Oh son of Kunti! It seems likely that the next element in the structure of the Bhagavat Gita is drawn from the great Upanishats, the Katha Upanishat more especially. And this suggests a very interesting thought; side by side with many direct quotations from the Upanishats in our possession, there are a number of verses, notably in the second book, which have the true ring of the old sacred teachings, and yet are not in them as they now stand.

And this suggests that we have only fragments; that there was once much more, in the form of verses and stones, which made up the mystery teaching of the Rajput Kings, - that secret doctrine spoken of so clearly in the Upanishats themselves as the jealously guarded possession of Kshatriya race. The fourth book of the Bhagavat Gita fully endorses this idea, since Krishna traces his doctrine back through the Rajput sages to the solar King, Ikshvaku, to Manu,)the Kshatriya, and finally to the sun, the genius of the Rajput race. And this, in connection with that teaching of successive re-births, which, we know from the two greatest Upanishats, was the central point of the royal doctrine. So we are inclined to suggest that we have in many verses of the Bhagavat Gita, additional portions of the old mystery doctrine, parts of which form the great Upanishats. And it is quite credible that Krishna, - whom we believe to be as truly historical as Julius Cesar, - as an initiate in these doctrines did actually quote to Arjuna a series of verses from the mystery teaching, and that these verses are faithfully preserved for us to the present day. However that may be, there the verses are: a series of verses from the Upanishats, had a second series, entirely resembling these in style and thought.

As a third element in the Bhagavat Gita we have the Puranic episode of the transfiguration, and, we must say, it reproduces all that grim and gruesome ugliness of many armed gods, with terrible teeth, which the puranas have preserved most probably from the wild faiths of the dark aboriginals and demon worshippers of Southern India.

* Extract from the Madras Mail, 23rd December 1897 by Charles Johnston, m.r.a.s., b.c.s, ret.

Finally, there is a very important element, into the midst of which the episode of the transfiguration is forcibly wedged ; and of this element we shall more especially speak. It consists of the characteristic Sankhya doctrine of the three potencies of Nature completely developed along physical, mental, and moral lines. A word about this doctrine, which we may, with great likelihood, refer to Kapila himself, the founder of the School. His conception seems to be this; there is the consciousness in us, the spirit, the perceiver: and, over against this there is Nature, the manifested world. This duality of subject and object has great gulf fixed between its two elements, whose characteristics, wholly and irreconcilably opposed. Of the subject, the spirit, consciousness, we can only say that it perceives. To predicate of consciousness any characteristic drawn from our experience of objects, such for instance as mortality, beginning or end, is to be guilty of a cardinal error. Of Nature, the opposite element of existence, Kapila's teaching, it seems, was something like this; Nature may be divided into three elements: the substance of phenomena; the force of phenomena; and thirdly the dark space or void, in which phenomena take place. Take a simple illustration.

The observer, with closed eyes, is the spirit or consciousness, not yet involved in Nature. He opens his eyes, and, instead of the dark space, or void, sees the world of visible objects, or substance, and there is perpetual movement among the things thus observed. This is force. Thus we have the three elements of Nature, - the three qualities, as they are generally called, - which make up the central idea of Kapila's cosmic system, and which are not to be found, in that shape, in any of the oldest Upanishats: they are, therefore, no part of the Vedanta, properly so called, but distinctively Sankhya teachings. Now, these distinctive teachings form a very important part of the Bhagavat Gita, and are woven into many passages, besides the-chief passages already referred to, in the seventeenth and eighteenth books. Thus, as early as the second book, we have a reference to the Sankhya teachings: "The Vedas have the three Nature-powers as their object; but thou, Arjuna become free from the three powers." It is needless to quote the many passages that refer to the same teaching ; to the divisions of the knower, the knowing, the known; the doer, the doing, the deed; the gift, the giving, the giver; and so forth, according to the three-Nature-powers. All this is carried out with much intellectual skill, and dialectic acumen: but it has nothing in the world to do with the main motive of the book, - Arjuna's action under the calamity of civil war; and Krishna's assertion of the soul, as the solution of Arjuna's dilemma.