efinite myths and attributes.
Nor could a religion spread among the people, which regarded the
social and the domestic state as inferior, and could only be
practised by one who had left his home and family. The hermits and
ascetics and begging monks may form the religious aristocracy; but a
teaching of a different nature was necessary for the people. And we
find, in fact, two religions prevailing in India in the period of
Brahmanism; that which we have described for the enlightened, who
escapes in it from all law, all creed, all ritual, whose whole
religion more than any other which ever flourished in the world is
within the mind;[3] and on the other hand, a religion in which
outward gods are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is counted
sacred because a god or gods inspired it, and in which superstitions
gathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by no
means killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On the
contrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to a
region whither the people could not follow, left the religion of the
people to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine must
here be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism received
from the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to the
higher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; the atman or
self, which is identical with the supreme self, belongs to quite a
different order of thought from the soul which was formerly in some
one else, is now in me, and may yet come to be in many another being.
The doctrine is thought to have been an importation into India about
the time we are speaking of. It admits of being made a powerful
deterrent from vice and incentive to virtue. If my present sufferings
are due not to my acts, but to the acts of the person in whom my soul
dwelt before, it is possible for me so to act that my soul's future
existence may be better and not worse than this one, and that it
shall not sink but rise in the order of beings, and draw nearer to
its final deliverance. Of this we shall hear more in connection with
Buddhism.

[Footnote 3: "From the standpoint of unity with Brahma, the gods are
no-gods, the Vedas no-Vedas."]

The further development of Indian religion, apart from Buddhism, is
in two directions. There is a philosophical movement, in which the
Brahmanic ideas on God, the world, the soul and its changes, are
further worked out, and which