Religious Reform - 1890 Author:John Murdoch 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: The Time When The Vedas Week Composed. The Cambridge Professor of Sanskrit says, " The very word history has no corresponding Indian expression. From the very... more » earliest ages down to the present time, the Hindu mind seems never to have conceived such an idea as an authentic record of past facts based on evidence." Hindu writers framed their chronology, like their geography and astronomy, out of their own heads. It was as easy to write a crore of years as a century, and the former was the more marvellous. There is no date in India known with certainty till the time of Chandragupta, about 300 B. c., which was ascertained through the Greeks. The precise time when the Vedas were written cannot, therefore, be known with certainty. Indeed, their composition probably extended over several centuries. Ma.x Miiller estimates that they were composed, such as we now have them, about 1500 B. c. In his Hibbert Lectures, (p. 340), he expresses the opinion that the Samhita (collection) was closed about 1000 B. c. The Brahmaras may date from 800 to 600 B. c. The Sutras may range from GOO to 200 B. c. The Vedas At First Handed Down By Tradition. The oldest inscriptions in India are those of Asoka, the Buddhist king, who reigned from 259 to 222 B. c. Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, who sailed down the Indus (325 B. c.), mentions that the Indians wrote letters on cotton that had been well beaten together," but that their laws were not written." Writing was used by merchants and others, but not for literary purposes. The Vedas, for many centuries, were handed down entirely by memory. The Guru recited a portion, and his pupils repeated it after him. There is a reference to this in the hymn about the frogs: " the one repeats the sounds of the other, as a pupil the words of ...« less