Lehal Library

_Binh of Sikhism 17 that are attached to them, the social order of the caste system, and the poetry and philosophy of its Sanskrit classics. The first two were the direct outcome of the Aryan impact on India's aboriginal people and their culture. The third was the work of Aryan scholarship, some brought from the Aryan's original homeland, much of it produced in India. It appears that when the Aryans came, the inhabitants of northern India had no defined religion of their own. They worshipped a variety of gods and goddesses (Eke the female and male deities of Mohenjodaro) which frequently symbolized the things they dreaded. They offered sacrifices to images of reptiles and animals, and propitiated epidemics like smallpox and plague. The Aryans were worshippers of the beautiful in nature. They chanted hymns to the sky and co I.be rising sun, to thunder and lightning, and they raised goblets of soma juice to the full moon. Out of the frightened faith of the animists and the rapturous faith of the lovers of nature was created the Hindu pantheon. The aboriginal gods were either pushed into the background or reincarnated in Aryan garb. The relationships between the gods themselves underwent many changes until there came to the fore the triumvirate of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer, the three facets of the One God who was fshvara. Thus out of the polytheism of the pantheon had emerged the idea that the ultimate power to create, keep, or kill resided in the one Supreme Being. community to community. 11 meant one thing in the Vedic period, another in the Brnhmanical, and a third in the Buddhist. It seems one thing to the Sai\'ite, another to the Vaishnavite, a third 10 the Sak.ta.' S. Raclhakrisbnan, The Hindu View of Uf,. 'The question what is Hinduism is one IO which no one is likely ever to be able to give a simple or quite intelligible answer. It has no need summing up authoritati\'ely its tenets. [1 has no historical personality as its centre whose life dates its beginning that can be discerned. It may be described rather as an encyclopaedia of religion than as a religion, a vast conglomeration, comprehensive in the widest sense, an amalgam of often conu-adicLOry beliefs and practices, held togeLher in one by certain powerfttl ideas and by a system of social regulations.' N. MacNicol, Indian Theism.