For this fault, Yayâtis, from being young, is fated to become old. He then beseeches the two eldest of the three sons that he had by Çarmishṭhâ to take on themselves the old age of their father; they refuse, but the third son, Pûrus, out of reverence for his father, consents to become old in his stead, to give up his youth to his father. After a thousand years, the king Yayâtis, satiated with life, restores to his son Pûrus his youth, and although he is the youngest, along with his youth, the kingdom, because he found him the only one of the three who respected the paternal will; and he expels the two eldest brothers.[253]
Sometimes, however, the blind old father is entirely abandoned by his sons. Thus the old Dîrghatamas (of the vast darkness), blind from birth, is deprived of food, and thrown into the water by his wife and sons,[254] but a heroic king saves him, in order, by his wife, to beget sons for him. We have in Dîrghatamas and Yayâtis, King Lear in embryo.
In the same legend of Dîrghatamas, we find an exchange of wives. Queen Sudeshnâ, instead of going herself, sends her servant-maid, her foster-sister, to be embraced by Dîrghatamas.[255] In the cunning Sudeshnâ we have an ancient variation of Queen Berta.
Other blind men occur frequently in the Hindoo legends. I shall here cite only Andhakas (the blind one) and Vṛishṇis (the sheep, as the lame one),[256] who appear in the Harivanças[257] as the two sons of Mâdrî. But we know from the Mahâbhâratam, that the two sons of Mâdrî are a human incarnation of the celestial twins, the Açvinâu; and here we come again upon the blind-lame one of the Vedas, the solar hero in his twin forms, the two Açvinâu protected by Indras, and companions of the dawn.
The Pańćatantram[258] represents the blind and the crooked, or hunchbacked,[259] in union with the three-breasted princess (i.e., the triple sister, the aurora in the evening, the aurora in the night, the aurora in the morning; the breast of the night nourishing the defective, the monstrous, which the morning sweeps away). The crooked guides the blind with a stick; they both marry the three-breasted princess. The blind recovers sight by the steam of the poison of a black serpent, cooked in milk (the darkness of night, or of winter, mixed with the clearness of day, or of the snow); he then, being a strongly-built man, takes the hunchback by the legs, and beats his hunch against the third and superfluous breast of the princess. The anterior prominence of the latter, and the posterior one of the former, enter into their respective bodies;[260] thus the blind, the crooked, and the three-breasted princess help and cure each other; the two Açvinâu and the aurora (or the spring) reappear together in beauty. The Açvinâu and the aurora also come forth together from the monstrous shades of night; the Açvinâu contend for the aurora; as we shall see soon, and in the next chapter, the delivered bride disputed for by the brothers.
The sun and the aurora flee from each other; this spectacle has been represented in different ways by the popular imagination; and one of the most familiar is certainly that of a beautiful young girl who, running more quickly than the prince, escapes from him. This incident, which is already described in the Ṛigvedas, occurs again in the Mahâbhâratam,[261] in the legend of the loves of the virgin Tapatî, daughter of the sun (the luminous and burning aurora, and also the summer season, ardent as Dahanâ), with the king Saṁvaraṇas, son of the bear (ṛikshaputras, a kind of Indras). The king Saṁvaraṇas arrives on horseback with his retinue at the mountain, in order to hunt; he ties his horse up and begins the chase, when he sees on the mountain the beautiful girl, the daughter of the sun, who, covered with ornaments, shines like the sun; he declares his love and wishes to make her his own; she answers not a word, but flees and disappears like the lightning in the clouds;[262] the king cannot overtake her, because his horse, while he was hunting, has died of hunger and thirst; he searches in vain through the forest, but not seeing her, he throws himself almost breathless to the ground. As he lies there the beautiful girl appears again, approaches and wakens him; he again speaks to her of love, and she answers that he must ask her father the sun, and then, still quite innocent, she disappears swiftly on high (ûrdhvam). The king again faints; his minister sprinkles him with the water of health, and makes him revive, but he refuses to leave the mountain, and having dismissed his hunting company, he awaits the arrival of the great purohitas Vasishṭhas, by whose mediation he demands from the sun his daughter Tapatî to wife; the sun consents, and Vasishṭhas reconducts to Saṁvaraṇas, for the third time, the beautiful girl as his legitimate wife. The husband and wife live together happily on the mountain of their loves; but as long as King Saṁvaraṇas remains with Tapatî upon this mountain, no rain falls upon the earth; wherefore the king, out of love for his subjects, returns to his palace, upon which Indras pours down the rain, and begins again to fructify the earth.[263]
We said a little ago that Vasishṭhas himself caused it to rain (abhyavarshata); and the mention of Vasishṭhas reminds us of the particularly rain-giving, cloudy, and lunar function of his cow Kâdmadhenus, whose wonderful productions are again described in the Mahâbhâratam.[264] Besides milk and ambrosia, she yields herbs and gems, which we have already referred to, as analogous products in mythology. The cow of Vasishṭhas is, besides her tail, celebrated for her breasts, her horns, and even her ears ending in a point; whence her name of çañkukarṇâ (the masculine form of which is generally applied to the ass). And in the Mahâbhâratam, also, the wise Viçvâmitras is covetous of this wonderful cow; the cow bellows and drops fire from her tail, and radiates from every part of her body armies which disperse those of the son of Gadhis. Viçvâmitras then avenges himself in other ways upon the sons of Vasishṭhas; having, e.g., become a cannibal, he eats them.
Vasishṭhas cannot endure the pain this causes him: he tries to throw himself down from the summit of Mount Merus, but he falls without hurting himself; he throws himself into the fire, but does not burn himself; and, finally, he leaps into the sea, but is not drowned. These three miracles are accomplished every day by the solar hero, who throws himself down from the mountain into the gloomy ocean of night, after having passed through the burning sky of evening.
Vasishṭhas ends by freeing, with the help of charmed water, the monster Viçvâmitras from his curse; and the latter is no sooner delivered from the demon who possessed him, than he begins again to illumine the forest with his splendour, as the sun illumines a twilight cloud. The friendships, enmities, and rivalries of Vasishṭhas and Viçvâmitras seem to be another version of those of the two Açvinâu, whom we shall particularly describe in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, it is high time, as the reader will think, to conclude this part of our study, which treats of the mythical cow of India. We might easily, indeed, have made it much larger, had our design been to chain together, link by link, all the traditions and legends in which the cow plays a primary or subordinate part. But it is better to stop short, lest, by expatiating further, we should lose sight of the essential aim of our work, and be tempted into digressions from the legends relating to beasts to those relating to men; besides, we think that we have sufficiently proved the thesis of this chapter, and shown how the principal mythical subjects of the Vedic hymns are not only preserved, but developed, in the posterior Hindoo traditions. It is not entirely our fault if, from cows, we pass so often to princesses, and from bulls to princes; the myth itself involves and indicates these transformations. Hence we find the bull Indras, the winner of the cows, become a winner and a seducer of women; we see the bull Wind, who aids Indras in the conquest of the cows, become the violator of a hundred damsels;[265] we read of the bull and god Rudras, as husband of Umâ, given up to sensual indulgence for a hundred years without a pause; that the son of the bull, or of the wind, Hanumant, does prodigies of valour and strength for the sake of a beautiful woman, and receives, as a reward for his zeal, from the king Bharatas, a hundred thousand cows, sixteen wives, and a hundred servant-maids.[266] What could Hanumant have done with so many wives and maids, if he were simply a bull? or what could he have done with so many cows, if he had been an ape? It is these inconsistencies which have caused mythology to be condemned by the crowd of old but prolific pedants, as a vain science; whereas, on the contrary, it is precisely these inconsistencies which raise it, in our esteem, to the rank of a valid science. He who handed down to us the feats of Hanumant, took care also to tell us how he had the faculty of changing his form at will; and this faculty, attributed to this impersonation of a celestial phenomenon, is the fruit of one of the most naïve but just observations of virgin and grandiose nature.