We turn now to the great sectarian gods, who eventually unite with Brahm[=a] to form a pantheistic trinity, a conception which, as we shall show, is not older than the fifth or sixth century after Christ. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: The rival heresies seem also to belong to the East. There were thus more than half a dozen heretical bodies of importance agitating the region about Benares at the same time. Subsequently the Jains, who, as we have shown, were less estranged from Brahmanism, drifted westward, while the Buddhist stronghold remained in the East (both, of course, being represented in the South as well), and so, whereas Buddhism eventually retreated to Nep[=a]l and Tibet, the Jains are found in the very centres of old and new (sectarian) Brahmanism, Delhi, Mathur[=a], Jeypur, [=A]jm[=i]r.] [Footnote 2: 'The wandering of R[=a]ma,' who is the sectarian representative of Vishnu.] [Footnote 3: The 'Bh[=a]rata (tale)', sometimes called Mah[=a]-Bh[=a]rata, or Great Bh[=a]rata. The Vishnuite sectarianism here advocated is that of Krishna. But there is as much Çivaism in the poem as there is Vishnuism.] [Footnote 4: Dramatic and lyric poetry is artificial even in language.] [Footnote 5: Schroeder, p. 453, compares the mutual relation of the Mah[=a]bh[=a]rata and R[=a]m[=a]yana to that of the Nibelungenlied and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Jacobi, in his 'R[=a]m[=a]yana,' has lately claimed a considerable antiquity for the foundation legends of the R[=a]m[=a]yana, but he does not disprove the late completed form.] [Footnote 6: i. 78. 10; see Bühler's Introduction.] [Footnote 7: Jacobi seeks to put the completed nucleus at the time of the Christian era, but it must have been quite a large nucleus in view of the allusions to it in precedent literature. Holtztmann puts the completion at about 1000 A.D.; but in 700 A.D., it was complete, and most scholars will agree with Bühler that the present Mah[=a]-Bh[=a]rata was completed by the sixth or seventh century. In 533 A.D. it contained 100,000 distichs, that is, it was about the size it is now.] [Footnote 8: By the time the drama began the epic was become a religious storehouse, and the actual epic story represented not a fifth of the whole work, so that, with its simple language, it must have seemed, as a literary production, very wearisome to the minds that delighted in the artificial compounds and romantic episodes of the drama and lyric. But even to-day it is recited at great fêtes, and listened to with rapt attention, as the rhapsodes with more or less dramatic power recite its holy verses.]