The article informs that during the last centuries BCE, when Buddhism developed in India, theism had not as yet become a predominant trend in Indian religious reflection. Certainly, the sacrificial cult of the Vedas proposed a world governed by a prolific pantheon, but the Vedic divinities were themselves by and large regarded as worldly agents, subservient to the priestly power exercised in the rites of the sacrifice. The aspects of early Brahmanical thought that involved a search for ultimate grounds, such as represented in the Upanishads, tended to reach beyond these divinities and to seek an abstract metaphysical principle at the root of existence, but not a personal god as conceived in monotheistic religions. The early Indian cosmos, therefore, resembled in some respects that of the Hellenistic world. Within such a framework, the ethically motivated refusal to engage in theological speculation was unexceptional, for here even the gods were held to be subject to the same impersonal order that governs the lives of ordinary mortals.
