India: What can it teach us? / A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge

by F. Max Müller

And again: "Stir up the rainy cloud" (parganya).

In several places it makes no difference whether we translate parganya by cloud or by rain, for those who pray for rain, pray for the cloud, and whatever may be the benefits of the rain, they may nearly all be called the benefits of the cloud. There is a curious hymn, for instance, addressed to the frogs who, at the beginning of the rains, come forth from the dry ponds, and embrace each other and chatter together, and whom the poet compares to priests singing at a sacrifice, a not very complimentary remark from a poet who is himself supposed to have been a priest. Their voice is said to have been revived by parganya, which we shall naturally translate "by rain," though, no doubt, the poet may have meant, for all we know, either a cloud, or even the god Parganya himself.

I shall try to translate one of the hymns addressed to Parganya, when conceived as a god, or at least as so much of a god as it was possible to be at that stage in the intellectual growth of the human race.[239]

1. "Invoke the strong god with these songs! praise Parganya, worship him with veneration! for he, the roaring bull, scattering drops, gives seed-fruit to plants.

2. "He cuts the trees asunder, he kills evil spirits; the whole world trembles before his mighty weapon. Even the guiltless flees before the powerful, when Parganya thundering strikes down the evil-doers.

3. "Like a charioteer, striking his horses with a whip, he puts forths his messenger of rain. From afar arise the roarings of the lion, when Parganya makes the sky full of rain.

4. "The winds blow, the lightnings[240] fly, plants spring up, the sky pours. Food is produced for the whole world, when Parganya blesses the earth with his seed.

5. "O Parganya, thou at whose work the earth bows down, thou at whose work hoofed animals are scattered, thou at whose work the plants assume all forms, grant thou to us thy great protection!

6. "O, Maruts, give us the rain of heaven, make the streams of the strong horse run down! And come thou hither with thy thunder, pouring out water, for thou (O Parganya) art the living god, thou art our father.

7. "Do thou roar, and thunder, and give fruitfulness! Fly around us with thy chariot full of water! Draw forth thy water-skin, when it has been opened and turned downward, and let the high and the low places become level!