stematically according to topics, we
can see with ease how, together with a certain uniformity of general
leading conceptions, there runs throughout divergence in details, and
very often not unimportant details. A look, for instance, at the
collection of passages relative to the origination of the world from the
primitive being, suffices to show that the task of demonstrating that
whatever the Upanishads teach on that point can be made to fit into a
homogeneous system is an altogether hopeless one. The accounts there
given of the creation belong, beyond all doubt to different stages of
philosophic and theological development or else to different sections of
priestly society. None but an Indian commentator would, I suppose, be
inclined and sufficiently courageous to attempt the proof that, for
instance, the legend of the atman purushavidha, the Self in the shape of
a person which is as large as man and woman together, and then splits
itself into two halves from which cows, horses, asses, goats, &c. are
produced in succession (B/ri/. Up. I, 1, 4), can be reconciled with the
account given of the creation in the Chandogya Upanishad, where it is
said that in the beginning there existed nothing but the sat, 'that
which is,' and that feeling a desire of being many it emitted out of
itself ether, and then all the other elements in due succession. The
former is a primitive cosmogonic myth, which in its details shows
striking analogies with the cosmogonic myths of other nations; the
latter account is fairly developed Vedanta (although not Vedanta
implying the Maya doctrine). We may admit that both accounts show a
certain fundamental similarity in so far as they derive the manifold
world from one original being; but to go beyond this and to maintain, as
/S/a@nkara does, that the atman purushavidha of the B/ri/hadara/n/yaka
is the so-called Virag of the latter Vedanta--implying thereby that that
section consciously aims at describing only the activity of one special
form of I/s/vara, and not simply the whole process of creation--is the
ingenious shift of an orthodox commentator in difficulties, but nothing
more.

How all those more or less conflicting texts came to be preserved and
handed down to posterity, is not difficult to understand. As mentioned
above, each of the great sections of Brahminical priesthood had its own
sacred texts, and again in each of those sections there existed more
ancient texts which it was impossible to d