The Puranas, eighteen in number, are more recent books. Their age has been supposed to be from the 2d to the 16th century A.D., though their name means old. These are all in verse; give a cosmogony, celebrate the powers and works of the gods, and give the history of the Solar and Lunar dynasties who ruled in Northern India ; and to them have been appended 18 Upa Puranas. Later than these are the Tantras, which are reli gious and magical works, that give prominence to the female energy of the deity, his active nature being personified in the person of his sakti or wife, each of whom has a gentle and a fierce form, as Radha, Devi, Uma, Gauri, Durga, and Kali, and these are worshipped both symbolically and in the actual woman.
In the Puranas the Vedic deities are forgotten, and marvellous legends have gathered round the favourite divinities, full of wild imaginings, and evidencing a corrupt state of society and religion. Vishnu and Siva have obtained respective sects as followers. Krishna has become the object of a sensuous, joyous worship ; the worship of Devi, the consort of Siva, has become established, and the foundation has been laid of the obscene and bloody rites afterwards developed in the Tantras. The Puranas and the Tantras are the religious books of the Hinduism of the present day. The Veda is a mere name : its gods, and rites, and language are only known to the learned, and the modern system is quite at variance with the Vedic writings,—the Puranas and later writings being the great authorities of modern Hinduism. Their mythology and legends fill the popular mind, and mould its thoughts. The great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with their heroes, the Pandava, the Kaurava, Rama and his wife Sita, Hanuman, and Ravana, are listened to with delight ; and the stories about Krishna, from his infancy till his death, are the never-ending source of joy to the young. The mild and gentle Rama, the husband of one wife,' pure in thought and noble in action, and his faithful wife Sita, are, however, objects of the devotion of many, and theirs is the least degrading of the many forms of Hindu worship.
Philosophies.— Concurrent with the ritualistic worship of the modern Hindu gods and goddesses, there are six schools of philosophy,—the Nyaya, the Vaiseshika, the Sankhya, the Yoga, the Purva mimansa, and Uttara mimansa. All of them have the same final object,—the emancipation of the soul from future birth and existence, and its absorption into the supreme soul of the universe. They are supposed to have had their origin between the 5th and 3d centuries B.C. The Nyaya and Vaiseshika recognise a Supreme Being; the Yoga is theistical ; the Sankhya, atheistical ; the two Mimansas are the Vedanta. The object of these two Vedanta schools is to teach the art of reasoning, with a view to aid in the interpretation of the Vedas. The Purva mimansa is generally known as the Mimansa, and the Uttara mimansa as the Vedanta; and the principal doctrines of the latter are that the Supreme Being is the omniscient and omni potent cause of the existence, continuance, and dissolution of the universe. The Vedanta or Mimansa philosophy is treated as a scholastic philosophy, which, basing itself on the sacred books and the popular religion, seeks for unity of thought only as a means of introducing order amid the divine personages and legends, and has sought to give a spiritual import, a sort of new birth, to the gods of Brahmanism. In the Vedanta
philosophy, Brahma is placed in the foreground as the soul of the universe, the primal being, which alone has true existence. To this school, not matter only was a semblance, even the soul was a transient phenomenon. The Sankhya philosophy is contrasted with it, as a purely pantheistic system. In this view this philosophy has broken completely with the popular creed, and with the doctrines of the Vedas and the Brahmanas. The Sankhya philosophy occupies itself more with life in manifestation, therefore especially with the life of the individual spirit connected by its body to the outward world. Both of these leave the Vedas unassailed, nay, the whole Brahmanic reli gion, in so far as it concerns rites and customs.
A census was taken of the people of British India in 1881, and the numbers following these creeds were found to be 187,957,450, out of a total population of 253,891,821 souls :— Christianity and Mahomedanism have modified the doctrines of the Aryan Hindus. Since Buddhism disappeared from India, its nations have been conquered by races professing creeds with followers nearly as numerous as Buddhism had ever acquired. Rapid as was the progress of Buddh ism, the gentle but steady swell of its current shrinks into nothing before the sweeping flood of Mahomedanism, which in a few years spread over one-half of the civilised world, from the Atlantic Ocean to the swampy fens of the Oxus, to China, and to the Eastern Archipelago. From the llth century, when the inroads into India of Mahomedans began, up to the present time, when they too, as a ruling race in India, have in their turn almost disappeared, Semitic Arabs, Aryan Persians, Scythic Tartars, Turk and Mongols, and Anglo-Saxons, have successively swayed the destinies of the Hindu races, and each of the new-corners has to some extent modified the beliefs and social customs of the conquered. Legislation by the Mahomedan rulers, and after them by the British, has effected many changes. Repulsive forms of fanatical penance are phenomena seldom seen ; the immolation of widows is a criminal occurrence ; ghat murder, or the exposure of the sick and dying upon the banks of sacred rivers, is matter of past history ; open in fanticide has been in a great measure suppressed. Further changes have been retarded by the cir cumstance that the Mahomedan and the Chris tian came amongst them as soldiers, with all the licence to be found in camps, and the contempt for strange things which youth engenders. Never theless the great bulk of the 23 millions who follow Mahomedanism in Bengal and Assam, as also its followers who speak the Malay language, are descendants from idol - worshipping races ; while in N.1V. India many Rajput and Jat tribes have also embraced the faith of Islam ; and the Hindu Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, and Kabir and other reformers, drew their views pro minently from the Mahoinedans. Christianity has been preached in India since the early years of the era, and there has lately been a belief that parts of the ritual of the worship of Krishna had been taken from Christian texts, but the Christians throughout the E. Indies, China, and the Archi pelago may not as yet exceed three millions.