It is not possible to realize all that the Buddha achieved in the world unless we have some conception of the religious and social condition of Asia at the time of his great renunciation. That condition was the result of the two great inroads of the Aryas, the one of the south into Persia, the other to the south and east overrunning India. The one was that of the fire-worshippers and Zarathustra (Zoroaster), whose sacred canon was the Zend Avesta; the other that of the Brahmans, whose inspired message was the Rig Veda. From the former are descended the modern Parsees and Guebres, and there is some justification for believing that the separation of these two streams of invasion may have been due to religious dissent; for to the Parsee—the believer in Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), the one God, Creator of the Universe—the gods of the Brahmans are an abomination, and no book is to a pious Parsee so much to be abhorred as the Rig Veda. In the Veda the Gods are called Deva. This word in Sanskrit means bright, brightness or light being one of the most general attributes shared by the various manifestations of the Deity, invoked in the Veda as Sun, or Sky, or Fire, or Dawn, or Storm.... In the Zend Avesta the same word Deva means evil spirit. Like the Buddha, Zarathustra was a heretic and a dissenter, and his sacred book, the Zend Avesta, was an attempt to replace the worship of the forces of nature by a religion—purer and more spiritual—under one Divine Creator, Ahura Mazda, the wise spirit. It is much to be regretted that, like our Lord, the Buddha should have left no written word of his own. It would have been interesting to know whether he held the Brahmanic gods in the same contempt as did Zarathustra and his followers. Inasmuch as he denied the inspiration of the Veda, he obviously must have repudiated them, and in his teaching, as it has been recorded, they play no part. But Max Müller certainly underestimates the respect assigned to them in the later Buddhism of the monks when he says: “In Buddhism we find these ancient Devas, Indra and the rest, as merely legendary beings carried about at shows, as servants of Buddha, as goblins or fabulous heroes; but no longer worshipped or even feared by those with whom the name of Deva had lost every trace of its original meaning.”