CHAPTER XII.
JAINISM.[1] One cannot read the Upanishads without feeling that he is already facing an intellectual revolt.

Not only in the later tracts, which are inspired with devotion to a supreme and universal Lord, but even in the oldest of these works the atmosphere, as compared with that of the earlier Brahmanic period, is essentially different.

The close and stifling air of ritualism has been charged with an electrical current of thought that must soon produce a storm.
That storm reached a head in Buddhism, but its premonitory signs appear in the Upanishads, and its first outbreak preceded the advent of Gautama.

Were it possible to draw a line of demarcation between the Upanishads that come before and after Buddhism, it would be historically more correct to review the two great schisms, Jainism and Buddhism, before referring to the sectarian Upanishads.

For these latter in their present form are posterior to the rise of the two great heresies.