s, and it is requited by a future experience of
corresponding pleasure or pain. So every birth and ultimately every
experience of a soul is determined by the righteousness of its
previous acts; and there is no release for the soul from this endless
chain of causes and effects unless it can find some supernatural way
of deliverance. The Aupanishadas point to what they believe to be the
only way: it is the Brahma-knowledge of the enlightened sage, which
releases his soul from the chain of natural causation and raises him
to everlasting union with Brahma.

The teaching of the Upanishads has had two very different practical
results. On the one hand, it has moved many earnest thinkers to cast
off the ties of the world and to wander about as homeless beggars,
living on alms and meditating and discoursing upon the teachings of
the Upanishads, while they await the coming of death to release their
souls from the prison of the flesh and bring it to complete and
eternal union with Brahma. These wandering ascetics--_sannyasis_,
_bhikshus_, or _parivrajakas_ they are called--form a class by
themselves, which is destined to have an immense influence in
moulding the future thought of India. The teaching of Brahmanism is
beginning to recognise them, too. It has already divided the life of
the orthodox man into three stages, or _asramas_, studentship, the
condition of the married householder, and thirdly the life of the
hermit, or _vanaprastha_, to which the householder should retire after
he has left a son to maintain his household; and now it is beginning
to add to these as fourth stage the life of the homeless ascetic
awaiting death and release. But this arrangement is for the most part
a fiction, devised in order to keep the beggar-philosophers within the
scheme of Brahmanic life; in reality they themselves recognise no such
law.

The other current among the Aupanishadas is flowing in a very
different direction. We have seen how the worship of Rudra-Siva has
grown since the old Rigvedic days, and how some souls have been able
to see amidst the terrors of the god a power of love and wisdom that
satisfies their deepest hopes and longings, as none of the orthodox
rituals can do. A new feeling, the spirit of religious devotion,
_bhakti_ as it is called, is arising among them. To them--and they
number many Brahmans as well as men of other orders--Siva has thus
become the highest object of worship, Isvara or "the Lord"; and having
thus