Tradition has preserved the names of many of these acute, argumentative, fee-loving priests, but of few can we form any clear picture. The most distinguished is Yâjñavalkya who, though seen through a mist of myths and trivial stories about the minutiae of ritual, appears as a personality with certain traits that are probably historical. Many remarks attributed to him are abrupt and scornful and the legend indicates dimly that he was once thought a dangerous innovator. But, as has happened so often since, this early heretic became the corner stone of later orthodoxy. He belonged to the school of the Yajur Veda and was apparently the main author of the new or White recension in which the prayers and directions are more or less separate, whereas in the old or Black recension they are mixed together. According to the legend he vomited forth the texts which he had learnt, calling his fellow pupils "miserable and inefficient Brahmans," and then received a new revelation from the Sun[220]. The quarrel was probably violent for the Śatapatha Brâhmaṇa mentions that he was cursed by priests of the other party. Nor does this work, while recognizing him as the principal teacher, endorse all his sayings. Thus it forbids the eating of beef but adds the curious remark "Nevertheless Yâjñavalkya said, I for one eat it, provided it is tender[221]." Remarkable, too, is his answer to the question what would happen if all the ordinary materials for sacrifices were absent, "Then indeed nothing would be offered here, but there would be offered the truth in faith[222]." It is probable that the Black Yajur Veda represents the more western schools and that the native land of the White recension and of Yâjñavalkya lay further east, perhaps in Videha. But his chief interest for us is not the reforms in text and ritual which he may have made, but his philosophic doctrines of which I have already spoken. Our principal authority for them is the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka Upanishad of which he is the protagonist, much as Socrates is of the Platonic dialogues. Unfortunately the striking picture which it gives of Yâjñavalkya cannot be accepted as historical. He is a prominent figure in the Śatapatha Brâhmaṇa which is older than the Upanishad and represents an earlier stage of speculation. The sketch of his doctrines which it contains is clearly a preliminary study elaborated and amplified in the Upanishad. But if a personage is introduced in early works as expounding a rudimentary form of certain doctrines and in later works is credited with a matured philosophy, there can be little doubt that he has become a great name whose authority is invoked by later thought, much as Solomon was made the author of the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the Song which bears his name.