evolution of religious thought in India made such a comprehensive and revolutionary advancement upon Indo-Iranian religion, that it gave an altogether different form to the religions that originated during the millennium.
The Indian outlook on life changes. A thousand years of life upon the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges had softened and sombred the character of the robust and joyful Aryan settlers of India. In common with their Iranian cousins whom they had left behind the Hindukush, the Vedic singers had sung of this world in laudatory terms and feverently prayed for long life in it with its riches and joys. The hymns of these priestly sages throb with the cheerful, optimistic view of life. Their descendants of the later Brahmanic period who speculated on the problems of life showed a marked turn from this cheerful and optimistic attitude towards life upon earth to a gloomy and pessimistic one. The Kshatriyas or men of the ruling and fighting class produced the pessimistic philosophy of the Upanishads from about 800 b.c. onwards. They seem to have grown intensely sensitive to the stress of living. Climatic influences, political upheavals, racial contacts, and above all, metaphysical speculations of their great thinkers are the causes that have contributed to their altered attitude towards life upon earth. This new philosophical religion preaches that happiness or enjoyment of life while living or of the merited good after death reacts upon the person and condemns him to several lives in the woeful world This world is illusory and soaked in sorrow and suffering. Yet upon such a purgatorial world man's desire for happiness brings him again and again to go the dreary rounds of births and deaths, to live out the karma of his past lives until, divested of actions and their consequences, he may, at a dim and distant date, win liberation from the labyrinth of life and escape heavenward to rest his world-weary head on the breathless bosom of Brahma.
Such is the philosophy of life propounded by the leading thinkers of India by the sixth century b.c. It becomes the standard philosophy for all time and generally leaves its indelible impression upon the subsequent religious and philosophical thought in India. With the exception of some materialistic systems of philosophy of the type of the Charvaka which taught pure Hedonism, the various schools of thought generally agreed in their
