Myths and Legends of India: An Introduction to the Study of Hinduism

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Myths and legends from Brahmanical literature like the Ramayana, Mahabarata, Puranas and Vedas. These tales from India reveal the essential nature of Hinduism, its strength as well as its weakness.

Presented in a fashion that should enable the reader to appreciate what constitutes the most vital, and in some respects, the most salutary influences of Hinduism.

THE literature from which these myths and legends have been chosen is of very great extent. The excellent translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, prepared under the editorship of Mr. M. N. Dutt, alone occupy five large volumes of more than eight thousand closely printed pages. And the present writer has to acknowledge, that in making his selection he has confined himself to what he considers the most interesting and characteristic narratives. In doing so, he has passed over much that is insipid, and also much that is unsuitable for reproduction. But it is hoped that what has been chosen will reveal the essential nature of Hinduism, in its strength as well as in its weakness. There are writers, who in their interpretation of Hinduism seem deliberately to ignore its lower elements: there are others, who in their readiness to criticise have failed to do justice to its merits: while it has also suffered at the hands of those who have offered to the public little more than its shell, in what are sometimes described as translations of India's epics, in slim volumes of less than two hundred pages, books which can afford no conception or understanding of what those great storehouses of Hindu thought and feeling really contain. This last defect is specially glaring in relation to the moral and philosophical teaching, which Hinduism has always sought to convey to its adherents. And in Part Two of this work, an effort has been made to correct that defect by the presentation of parables and legends which should enable the reader to appreciate what constitute the most vital, and in some respects, the most salutary influences of Hinduism.

Some of the legends described in the following pages have already appeared in A Summary of the Mahabharata and The Ramayana of Valmiki. I have to thank the publishers, The Christian Literature Society for India, Madras, for permission to reproduce them in this work.

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 the Upanishads. 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 Rāmāyana 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 made to show how the germs of certain legends and the sources of certain theories and practices are to be found in the earlier literature.¹ Nor must it be forgotten that the more ancient portions of the epics are as old as some of the Upanishads. But while that is so, the student of both periods recognises that in 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 gods," says the Rig-Veda; and the Shatapatha Brahmana, which is some centuries later than 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 Hinduism belongs. These are Brahma the creator, who is the successor of Prajapati, and Vishnu and Shiva, who were destined to push even Brahma aside in the estimate of later worship- pers. It is true that Vishnu was one of the thirty-three gods, and so also was Shiva under the older name of Rudra, but their functions and attributes are entirely different. Along with Brahma the creator, they go to form the Hindu triad, in which Vishnu plays the part of the preserver, and Shiva of the destroyer god. And as we proceed, we shall find that these three are reckoned as manifestations of Brahm the universal Spirit.

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