Ancient India: Its Language and Religions

The volume is structured around three interrelated essays that together introduce ancient India through the lenses of language, Vedic religion, and Buddhism. “The Study of Sanskrit” traces the emergence of Sanskrit scholarship from late eighteenth-century colonial India to nineteenth-century European philology, emphasizing the role of Sanskrit in establishing comparative grammar and clarifying the relationship between Indian, Greek, Latin, Persian, Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic languages. “The Religion of the Veda” examines the Vedic world as preserved in ancient hymns and ritual texts, focusing on the religious imagination of early Indo-Aryan society, the gods, sacrificial forms, and the intellectual significance of the Veda as a primary witness to India’s earliest religious culture. “Buddhism” then turns to the historical and doctrinal emergence of the Buddhist tradition, presenting it as a major spiritual movement that developed against the background of older Indian religious ideas while reformulating questions of suffering, morality, renunciation, and liberation. Through these three essays, Oldenberg presents ancient India as a civilization whose language and religions must be studied together: Sanskrit opens the textual archive, the Veda reveals early religious foundations, and Buddhism shows one of India’s most influential transformations of religious thought.