The most valuable heritage of Hindu society lie in the myriad parables and legends that constitute the most vital and salutary influence on its life. A large number of myths and legends narrated here deal with the gods and rishis. It is with these gods and rishis that the sources from which stories are drawn chiefly deal. ° There are tales of another kind that primarily deal with men and women. They tell us their thoughts and fears, their joys and sorrows, their speculations about this life and the here after. They dwell on the dangers of anger and pride, on the beauty of truth and purity; and their sense and sensibilities. India has heard God speaking to her soul, with the result that there has been expressed for her in living parables, and legends that wonderful variety of moral teaching which has helped to make her people what they are.
The literature of Hinduism is primarily contained in the two great epics of India, the Ramayana and the Maha- bharata, and in the Puranas. That statement does not ignore the fact that the roots of the tree of Hinduism are to be found in a still earlier literature, in the Hymns of the Vedas, the ritual of the Brahmanas and the philo- sophic speculations of thé Upanishads.1 But it has too often been the case that those who sought to understand India’s religions have been detained so long studying the foundations, that they have never got the length of examining the building itself. And it is the building itself which the succeeding pages seek to explain, not by means of analysis and exposition, but by setting forth in a series of stories taken from the literature itself, what men and women thought and said and did. The literature which is here employed is itself very ancient. It is true that the hymns of the Rig-Veda probably belong to a date not later than 1500 B.c. But both the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, though neither of them may have been completed in their present form before the fifth century a.D., certainly began to be composed nearly a thousand years earlier, and some of the legends they contain are earlier still.
In a book such as this no purpose would be served by seeking to bridge the gulf which divides the teaching of the Vedas from the epics and the Puranas. In the notes some attempt is in de to show I ow the germs of certain legends and the sources of certain theories a practices are to be found in the earlier literature) Nor ust it be forgotten that the more ancient portions of the epics are as old as some of the Upanishads. But whil that is so, the student of both periods recognises that i passing. from the Vedas to the epics he is passing to a new world, where new gods rule and where new ideas have taken root and flourish This is specially manifest with regard to the gods " There are thirty-three god;," says the Rig-Veda ; and the Shatapath,a Brantona, which is some centuries later t la the Rig-Veda, says : " There are thirty-three gods, and Prajapati is the thirty-fourth." But in one of the oldest legends which the epics contain, while the thirty-three gods still receive lip-service, three new gods have already emerged to whom the whole future of Ili] din" belongs These are Brahma the creator, who is th e successor of Praja-pati, and Vishnu and Shiva, who were destined to push even Brahma- aside in the estimate of later w rshi pers. It is true that Vishnu was one of the thirty-three gods, and so also was Shiva under the older naive of Ru ra, but their functions and attributes are entirely different. Along with Brahma the creator, they go to for the Hindu triad, in which Vishnu plays the part of the preserver, and Shiva of the destroyer god. we shall find that these three are reckoned as manifestations of Brahin the universal Spirit As he reads the earlier legends the reader may be disposed to doubt that statement. Brahma,in particular seems to play an important part. He appears constantly as the court of appeal to whom ods and men hasten in Two legends, " A Ala unusual length in the Bra hmana8. To been placed in the text alongside the sSacrifice " and " The Flood," are given at how the contrast, they have e legends taken from the epics.
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