has to see first, whether they satisfy the most important pre-requisite, absence of internal inconsistencies and contradictions and secondly, whether they can claim an unbroken continuity with the remote past. Let us see how the Agastya tradition fares judged as it should be by these fundamental tests.
Antiquity of Tra-
dition.
However ancient this tradition has been made to look like in later times, certainly it cannot be anterior to the founding of the earliest settlement of the Aryans beyond the Vindhya mountains, which for a long time stood as an impenetrable barrier in their way to the South. The north-eastern and south-western ends of this chain of mountains were known to the inhabitants of Āryāvarta as Pāriyātra, because they marked the boundary of their yātrā or range of communication. The tide of Aryan Migration which was thus stemmed in, towards the south, flowed on in an easterly direction along the course of the Ganges up to its very mouth in the Bay of Bengal. Later on, it seems to have overflowed in this corner taking a south-westerly course as far as Utkala—the modern Orissa. Reference is made in Aitarēya Brāhmaṇa to the Sage Viśwāmitra having condemned by a curse the progeny of fifty of his sons to live on the borders of the Aryan settlement and these were "the Āndhras, Puṇḍras, Śabaras, Pulinḍas, and Mutibās and the descendants of Viśwmitra formed a large proportion of the Dasyus."[1]
- ↑ Aitarēya Brāhmaṇa, VII, 18.
cf. Prof. Max Muller's conclusion in pp. 334–335 of his History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature.
"At all events the Taittirīya Āryaṇyaka represents the latest period in the development of the Vedic religion, and shows a strong admixture of post-vedic ideas and names. The same applies also to several parts of the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa, the last part of which does not belong to Taittiri, but is
