The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

The Aryans brought with them a social order presided over by priests or brahmins, the trustees of ancient hymns, rituals, and deities related to those of other lands, especially Persia, where Aryan tribes had spread. India seems to have dealt with this new religion as it has dealt with cultural imports ever since: it absorbed the new into the old. As a result, in even the earliest of the Indian scriptures – the Rig Veda, whose oldest hymns go back at least to 1500 B.C. – we find Aryan nature-gods integrated with the loftiest conceptions of mysticism. There is no inconsistency in this integration, only a very early recognition that life’s supreme reality is described in many ways. “Truth is one,” says a hymn of the Rig Veda; “the wise call it by different names.”