Page 152 - Hinduism

a whole, one discovers a doctrine, not of oneness, but of one divine substance pervading all. It is stated that the One Being is contemplated by the sages in many forms: Ekam santam bahudha kalpayanti. It may also be observed that the Vedic ritual or Yajna is a uniform ceremonial; whatever deity is worshipped the ritual is the same.
The universality of the Vedas is not often realized. The Rig Veda asserts that God is the God of Dasa as well as of Arya - "Lord God is he to whom both Arya and Dasa belong”. There is a special prayer for the forgiveness of sins against the foreigner (Rig- Veda). According to the Atharva Veda, God is of the foreigner (Videsya) no less than of our own land (Samdesya). There are mantras which extend This principle to all living beings (sarvani bhutani) so that we come to a grand conception of universal peace and serenity - the harmony with Nature (sarvam santhi)
IX.3 Many schools of thought
Panini is one of the worlds’ earliest as well as the greatest of scientific grammarians. The consensus of opinion fixed his date not later than the 5th century B.C. At that period Yajna or sacrifice and the worship of various deities were current and popular, and theistic devotion to particular divinities, generally expressed by the term Bhakti, had become prevalent. Panini refers to Vasudev as the object of devotion, and Paramatma Devata Visesa, a form of
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