A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"WhoTHE RELIGION WE ARE BORN IN. 533the sacrfice of goats ;and also we find here and there, ^^traces of the Vedic Kriya-kanda in the Mantras used YK<fcc.connection with our marriage and Shraddha ceremonies,But there is no chance of itsbeino^/rehabilitated onits original footing. Kumarilla Bhatt/once tried to do sobut ne was not successful in his attempt..^ The Jnana-kanda of the "Vedas comprises the TJpanisiadsand is 1 known by the name of V^danta, thepinnacle of the Srutis, as it is called. Wherever youfind the Acharyas quoting a passage from the Srutis, itis invariably from the* Upanishads. The Vedanta is nowthe religion of the Hindus. If any sect in India wantsits ideas establishedto^havewith a firm hold on thepeople, it must base them on the authority of the Vedanta.They all have to do it, whether they are Dvaitists orAdvaitists. Even the Vaishnavas have to go to theGopalatapani Upanishad to prove the truth of their owntheories. If a new sect does not find anything in theSrutis in confirmation of its own ideas, it will go even tothe length of manufacturing a new Upanishad, and makeit pass current as one of the old original productions.There have been many such in the past.Now as to the Vedas, the Hindus believe that theyare not mere books composed by men in some remote age.They hold them to be an accumulated mass of endlessDivine Wisdom, which are sometimes manifested or atother times remain unmanifested. The Sayanacharya sayssomewhere in his works,created the whole universe out of the knowledge of the Vedas." No one hasever seen the compiler of the Vedas, and it is impossibleto imagine one. The Kishis were only the discoverers of *the Mantras or Eternal Laws ; they merely came face to