It plays a prominent part in the battles of Indras against the monsters; hence Râvaṇas, the monster king of Lañkâ, still bears the scars of the wounds given him by the elephant Airavatas, in the war between the gods and the demons,[145] although this same Râvaṇas boasts of having one day defeated Indras, who rode upon the elephant Âiravaṇas.[146]
But the mythical elephant did not always preserve the character of an animal beloved of the gods; after other animals were admitted into special favour, it too assumed, in time, a monstrous aspect. The sun hides itself in the cloud, in the cloudy or nocturnal mountain, in the ocean of night, in the autumn or the snowy winter. Hence we have the white elephant (Dhavalas), the malignant killer of wise men (ṛishayas, the solar rays); the wind, father of Hanumant, in the form of a monkey, lacerates him with his claws, and tears out his tusks; the elephant falls like a mountain[147] (the mountain of snow, or white cloud, dissolve themselves; this white elephant and the white mountain, or Dhavalagiris, are the same; the equivoque easily arose between nâgas, elephant, and nagas, mountain and tree; the word cṛiñgin, properly horned, means tree, mountain, and elephant; the wind breaks through and disperses the cloud, and pushes forward the avalanches of snow). Thus it is said that the monkey Sannâdanas was one day victorious over the elephant Âiravatas.[148] (The northern path of the moon is called âiravatapathâ.)
We have already seen the elephant that crushes the hares under his feet on the shores of the moon-lake, and disturbs with his trunk the waters of this lake. In the Râmâyaṇam,[149] Bharatas considers it as of a sinister omen his having dreamed of a great elephant fallen into marshy ground. The sun plunges into the ocean of night, and of the autumnal rains.
The elephant near or in the waters is mythically equivalent to the lunar and solar tortoise that dwells on the shores of the lake and sea, or at the bottom of the sea. In the Hindoo cosmogony, it is now the elephant and now the tortoise that supports the weight of the world. For this reason there is rivalry between these two mythical animals. . Therefore the eagle, or king of birds, or the bird Garuḍas, the solar bird, is represented as a mortal enemy now of the serpent, now of the elephant (the word nâgas means equally serpent and elephant; Âiravatas is also the name of a monstrous serpent), and now of the tortoise. In the Râmâyaṇam,[150] the bird Garuḍas carries into the air an elephant and a tortoise (the relative occidental fables are evidently of Hindoo origin), in order to eat them. The same legend is developed in the Mahâbhâratam,[151] where two brothers dispute with each other about the division of their goods, each curses the other, and they become, the one a colossal elephant, and the other a colossal tortoise, and, as such, continue to fight fiercely against each other in a lake, until the gigantic bird Garuḍas (the new sun), takes them both and carries them to the summit of a mountain.
In the fifteenth story of the first book of the Pańćatantram, we find birds represented as enemies of the elephant, on account of the ravages it commits, where the bird, the fly, and the frog work the ruin of the elephant; the fly enters into one of the elephant's ears; the bird pecks at its eyes, and blinds it; the frog croaks on the banks of a deep pool; the elephant, impelled by thirst, comes to the pool and is drowned.
The Vedic elephant has a divine nature, being connected with the pluvial Indras; but when Indras fell, to give place to Brahman, Vishṇus, and Çivas, his elephant was also fated to become the prey of the bird of Vishṇus, of the bird Garuḍas (or the sun). In the fable of the Pańćatantram quoted above, the elephant brings upon its head the vengeance of the sparrow, because it had rooted up a tree upon which the sparrow had made its nest and laid its eggs, which were broken in consequence. The Vishṇuitic legend of the Mahâbhâratam relating to the bird Garuḍas, which carries the elephant into the air, offers several other analogous and interesting particulars. The bird Garuḍas flies away with the elephant and the tortoise; on the way, being tired, it rests upon the huge bough of a tree; the bough breaks under the enormous weight. From this bough are suspended, with their heads down, in penitence, several dwarf hermits, born of the hairs of Brahman; then the bird Garuḍas takes in its beak the whole bough, with the little hermits, and carries them up in the air till they succeed in escaping. These hermit dwarfs upon the branch (who remind us of the ants), had one day cursed Indras. Kaçyapas Praǵâpatis, wishing one day to make a sacrifice in order to obtain the favour of a son, orders the gods to provide him with wood. Indras, like the four elephants who support the world, places upon his shoulders a whole mountain of wood. Laden with this weight, he meets on the way the hermit dwarfs, who were carrying a leaf in a car, and were in danger of being drowned in a pool of water, the size of the foot-print of a cow. Indras, instead of coming to their assistance, smiles and passes by; the hermit dwarfs, in indignation, pray for the birth of a new Indras; on this account the Indras of birds was born—the bird of Garuḍas, the steed of Vishṇus, which naturally makes war against the steed of Indras, the elephant.