Hindu ethics Author:John McKenzie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II BUDDHIST AND JAIN ETHICS, AND EGOISTIC HEDONISM There are contained in the Upanishads the germs of the great Hindu philosophical systems. The mo... more »st famous of these is the Vedanta, a system of philosophy which found its ablest and most impressive exponent in Sankaracharya. In our discussion of the ethics of the Upanishads, for the sake of clearness, we went on the assumption that their philosophical groundwork was on the lines of Vedantic monism. This assumption was justifiable. The great Upanishads, at any rate so far as the main lines of their teaching is concerned, admit of this monistic explanation, while, on the other hand, where other philosophical tendencies appear, their distinctive conceptions have but comparatively slight influence on the ethical outcome. At this point, however, attention may be drawn to the fact that the foundations of other systems are present in the Upanishads, and that when these systems came to be clearly differentiated from each other, certain of them were recognized as orthodox, in spite of the divergences in their doctrine. The ground for this ascription of orthodoxy was their supposed agreement with Vedic teaching. They were not the speculations of schools which rejected all authority but that which reason would admit. They were nothing more than expositions of more ancient teaching from particular standpoints. We propose to consider now in as brief space as possible three systems of thought which lay no claim to orthodoxy, rejecting as they do the authority of the Vedic writings. They are taken at this point because they were evolved before the six great systems received the form given to them by their chief exponents. The first two, Buddhism and Jainism, have much in common with each other, while the last, the system of th...« less