the realization of the All. A Hindu would not condemn any man for his religion, for he has well laid to heart the celebrated couplet of the Bhagavat: "Worship, in whatever form, rendered to whatever God, reaches the Supreme, as rivers, rising from whatever source, all flow into the ocean."
V. And thus, gentlemen, we come to the fifth period, the Sampradayas. The word Sampradaya. means tradition, the teaching handed down from teacher to pulpil. The while Hindu religion, considered from the beginning to the present time, is one vast field of thought, capable of nourishing every intellectual plant, of whatever degree of vigor and luxuriance. The one old teaching was the idea of the All, usually known as the Advaita or the Vedanta. In the ethical aspect of this philosophy, stress has been laid on knowledge (gnosis) and free action. Under the debasing influence of a foreign yoke, these sober paths of knowledge and action had to make room for devotion and grace. On devotion and grace rest their principal ethical tenets. Three important schools of philosophy arose in the period after the Puranas. Besides the ancient Advaita we have the Dvaita, the Visuddhadvaita, and the Visishthadvaita schools of philosophy in this period. The first is purely dualistic postulation, the separate yet co-ordinate existence of mind and matter. The second and third profess to the Unitarian, but in a considerably modified sense of the word. The Visuddhadvaita teaches the unity of the cosmos, but it insists on the All having certain attributes which endow it with the desire to manifest itself as the cosmos. The third system is purely dualistic, though it goes by the name of modified Unitarianism. It maintains the unity of chit (soul), achet (matter), and Isvara (God), each in its own sphere, the third number of this trinity governing all and pervading the whole, though not apart from the cosmos. Thus widely differing in their philosophy from the Advaita, these three Sampradayas teach a system of ethics entirely opposed to the one taught in that ancient school called Dharma in the Advaita. They displaced Jnana by Bhakti, and Karma by Prasada; that is to say, in other words, they placed the highest happiness in obtaining the grace of God by entire devotion, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual. The teachers of each of these Sampradayas are known as Acharyas, like Sankara, the first great Acharya' of the ancient Advaita. The Acharyas of the new Sampradayas belong all to the Ilth and 12th centuries of the Christian era. Every Acharya develops his school of thought from the Upanishads, the Vedanta Sutras, and from that sub-sublime poem, "The Bhagvadgita," the crest jewel of the Maha Bharata. The new Acharyas, following the example of Sankara, have commented upon these works; and have thus applied each his own system to the Veda.
In the Sampradayas we see the last of the pure Hinduism, for the sacred Devanigari ceases henceforth to be the medium even of religious thought. The four principal Sampradayas have found numerous imitators, and we have the Saktas, the Saivas, the Pasupatas, and many others, all deriving their
