Tale I.
[1.] Songs commemorating the deeds of the departed, were sung at their funeral rites, often instead of erecting monuments to them; the fixing their acts in the memory of the living being considered a more lasting memorial than a tablet of stone. Probably the custom originated before the discovery of the art of writing; it seems, however, to have been continued afterwards. Gâthâ was the name given to these songs in praise of ancestry, particularly the ancestors of kings, usually accompanied by the lute. Weber, Indische Studien, i. p. 186, gives specimen translations from such.
[2.] The elephant is the subject of frequent mention in the very oldest writings of India. He is mentioned as a useful and companionable beast just as at the present day, in the Vêda, and the Manu (e. g. Rig-Vêda, i. 84, 17, “Whoso calls upon Indra in any need concerning his sons, his elephants, his goods and possessions, himself or his people, &c.”). In the epic poems, he is constantly mentioned as the ordinary mount of warriors. There is no tradition, however, as to his being first tamed and brought under the service of man, though the art penetrated so little into the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, that the inhabitants used to smear themselves and their plants with poison as the best protection against being devoured by him as a wild beast.
The elephant is distributed over the whole of India from Ceylon to China, wherever there is sufficient growth of foliage. In a domestic state he may live to 120 years, probably nearly double that time when left wild; he is reckoned at his strongest prime in his sixtieth year. His habit is to live in herds.
A beast so intelligent and available as an aid to man, and particularly to a primitive people, naturally took an important place in the mythology of the country. We find this saliently impressed on the architectural decorations of the country; constantly he is to be seen used as a karyatyd; the world is again seen resting on the backs of four huge elephants, or the king of gods carried along by one. It is a curious instance of appreciativeness of the acuteness of the sensibility of the elephant’s trunk, that Ganesha, the god who personifies the sense of touch, is represented gifted with such an appendage. It is among the Buddhistic peoples we find him most especially honoured. In Ceylon the white elephant (a variety actually found in the most easterly provinces) is regarded as a divine incarnation; “Ruler of the white elephant,” is one of the titles of the Birmese Emperor; in Siam also it is counted sacred. In war he was an invaluable ally: they called him the Eightfold-armed one, because his four tramping feet, his two formidable tusks, his hard frontal bone and his tusk supply eight weapons. The number of elephants a king could bring into the field was counted among his most important munitions of war and constituted one principal element of his power.
The derivation of the word elephant does not seem easy to fix, but the best supported opinion is that it is a Greek adoption of the Sanskrit word for ivory ibhadanta, compounded with the Arabic article al from its having been received along with the article itself through Arabian traders; the transition from alibhadanta to Ἐλέψας, Ἐλέψαντος, is easily conceived[64].
Among the Brahmanical writers the most ordinary designation was gag′a; also ibha, probably from ibhja, mighty, but they had an infinite number of others; such as râg avâhja, “the king-bearer;” matanga, “doing that which (he) is meant (to do); dvirada, “the two-toothed;” hastin or karin, “the handed” (beast), or beast with a hand, for the Indians, like the Romans, call his trunk a hand; dvipa, dvipâjin, anêkapa, “the twice drinking,” or “more than once drinking,” in allusion to his taking water first into his trunk and then pouring it down his throat. Among the facts and early notions concerning him, collected and handed down by Ælianus, are the following:—that elephants were employed by various kings to keep watch over them by night, an office which their power of withstanding sleep facilitated; that in a wild state, they frequently had encounters with the larger serpents, whose first plan was to climb up into the trees and then dart upon and throttle them. But the most curious remark of all is, that they were endowed with a certain kind of religion, and that when wounded, overladen, or injured, it was their custom to look up to heaven, asking why they had been thus dealt with. (Ælianus, De Nat. Anim. v. 49 and vii. 44; also Pliny, viii. 12. 2.) There are also legends about their paying divine honours to the sun and moon, and in the Indian collection of fables called the Hitopadesha, there is one of an elephant being conducted by a hare to worship the reflection of the moon in a lake.
In peace they were equally serviceable as in war, and were employed not only for riding, but for ploughing. A beast so useful was naturally treated with great regard, and we read of Indian princes keeping a special physician to attend to the ailments of their elephants, and particularly to have care of their eyesight (Ælianus, De Nat. Anim. xiii. 7).
[3.] The office of the erliks or servants of Erlik-Khan, (see next note) was to bring every soul before this judge to receive from him the sentence determining their state in their next re-birth, according to the merits or demerits of their last past existence. (Schmidt’s translation of sSanang sSetsen, 417–421, quoted by Jülg.)
[4.] Erlik-Khan is the Tibetian name of Jama (Sanskrit), the Judge of the Dead and Ruler over the abode of the Departed; he is son of Vivasvat or the Sun considered as “the bringer forth and nourisher of all the produce of the earth and seer of all that is on it.” Vivasvat has another son, Manu, the founder of social life and source of all kingly dynasties. (Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 19, 20.) As with all mythological personages or embodiments, however, the characteristics of Jama have undergone considerable modifications under the handling of different teachers and peoples in different ages, and in some Indian writings he is spoken of as if he were the personification of conscience. Thus, in the ancient collection of laws called the Manu (viii. 92) occurs the following passage, “Within thine heart dwells the god Jama, the son of Vivasvat: when thou hast no variance with him, thou hast no need to repair to the Gangâ, nor the Kuruxêtra;” meaning clearly, “If thou hast nothing on thy conscience, thou hast no object in making a pilgrimage.” Muni, “who keepeth watch over virtue and over sin,” however, more properly represents conscience. Sir William Jones, in quoting the above passage, inserts the words “subduer of all” after “Jama,” probably not without some good reason or authority for assigning to him that character.
Lassen finds early mention of a people living on the westernmost borders of the valley of the Indus (iii. 352, 353) who paid special honour to Jama as god of death, deprecating his wrath with offerings of beasts; and he connects with it a passage in Ælianus, who wrote on India in the 3rd century of our era, making mention of a bottomless pit or cave of Pluto, “in the land of the Aryan Indians,” into which “every one who had heard a divine voice or met with an evil omen, threw a beast according to the measure of his possessions; thousands of sheep, goats, oxen and horses being sacrificed in this way. He says further that there was no need to bind or drive them, as a supernatural power constrained them to go without resistance. He appears also to have believed that notwithstanding the height from which they were thrown, they continued a mysterious existence in the regions beneath.
“To walk the path of Jama,” is an expression for dying, in the very early poems; and a battle-field was called the camp of Jama (Lassen, i. 767). In the Vêda, the South, which is also reckoned the place of the infernal regions, is spoken of as the kingdom of Jama (i. 772).
[5.] Mandala, a magic circle. (Wassiljew, 202, 205, 212, 216, quoted by Jülg.)