Hindu gods and heroes

by Lionel D. Barnett

CHAPTER III

THE EPICS, AND LATER

I. VISHṆU-KṚISHṆA

We now enter upon an age in which the old gods, Indra and Brahmā, retire to the background, while Vishṇu and Śiva stand in the forefront of the stage.

The Hindus are of the same opinion as the Latin poet: ferrea nunc aetas agitur. We are now living in an Iron Age, according to them; and it began in the year 3102 b.c., shortly after the great war described in the Mahābhārata. The date 3102, I need hardly remark, is of no historical value, being based merely upon the theories of comparatively late astronomers; but the statement as a whole is important. The Great War marks an epoch. It came at the end of what may be called the pre-historic period, and was followed by a new age. To be strictly correct, we must say that the age which followed the Great War was not new in the sense that it introduced any startling novelties that had been unknown previously; but it was new in the sense that after the Great War India speedily became the India that we know from historical records. A certain fusion of different races, cultures, and ideals had to take place in order that the peculiar civilisation of India might unfold itself; and this fusion was accomplished about the time of the Great War, and partly no doubt by means of the Great War, some ten centuries before the Christian era.

The story of the Great War is told with a wild profusion of mythical and legendary colouring in the Mahābhārata, an epic the name of which means literally "The Great Tale of the Bharata Clan." It relates how the blind old King Dhṛitarāshṭra of Hastināpura had a hundred sons, known as the Kuru or Kaurava princes, the eldest of whom was Duryōdhana, and Dhṛitarāshṭra's brother Pāṇḍu had five sons, the Pāṇḍava brethren; how the Pāṇḍavas were ousted by the Kauravas from the kingdom, the eldest Pāṇḍava prince Yudhishṭhira having been induced to stake the fortunes of himself and his brethren on a game of dice, in which he was defeated; how the five Pāṇḍavas, with their common wife Draupadī (observe this curious and ugly feature of polyandry, which is quite opposed to standard Hindu morals, but is by no means unparalleled in early Indian literature[20]) retired into exile for thirteen years, and then came back with a great army of allies, and after fierce and bloody battles with the Kauravas and their supporters in the plain of Kurukshētra at last gained the victory, slew the Kauravas, and established Yudhishṭhira as king in Hastināpura. Among the Pāṇḍavas the leading part is played by the eldest, Yudhishṭhira, and the third, Arjuna; of the others, Bhīma, the second, is a Hercules notable only for his strength, courage, and fidelity, while the twins Nakula and Sahadēva are colourless figures. Kṛishṇa plays an important part in the story; for on the return of the Pāṇḍavas to fight the Kauravas he accompanies Arjuna as his charioteer, and on the eve of the first battle delivers to him a discourse on his religion, the Bhagavad-gītā, or Lord's Song, which has become one of the most famous and powerful of all the sacred books of India.

Now if the Mahābhārata were as homogeneous even as the Iliad and Odyssey, which give us a fairly consistent and truthful picture of a single age, we should be in a very happy position. Unfortunately this is not the case. Our epic began as a Bhārata, or Tale of the Bharata Clan, probably of very moderate bulk, not later than 600 b.c., and perhaps considerably earlier; and from that time onward it went on growing bigger and bigger for over a thousand years, as editors stuffed in new episodes and still longer discourses on nearly all the religious and philosophic doctrines admitted within the four walls of Hinduism, until it grew to its present immense bulk, which it claims to amount to 100,000 verses. Thus it pictures the thought not of one century but of more than ten, and we cannot feel sure of the date of any particular statement in it. Nevertheless we can distinguish in a general way between the old skeleton of the story, in which the theme is treated in simple epic fashion, society is far freer than in later days and no one objects to eating beef, from the additional matter, in which the tale is recast in a far more grandiose vein and is padded out with enormous quantities of moral, religious, and philosophic sermons. The religion too is different in the different parts. In the older portions the gods who are most popular are Indra, Agni, and Brahmā—not the neuter abstract Brahma, but the masculine Brahmā, the Demiurge, who corresponds more or less to Prajāpati of the Brāhmaṇas and is represented in classical art as a four-headed old man reciting the Vēdas—and Kṛishṇa seems to figure only as a hero or at best as a demigod; but the later parts with fine impartiality claim the supremacy of heaven variously for Śiva, Brahmā, and Vishṇu; and Vishṇu, as we have seen, is sometimes identified with Kṛishṇa, notably in the chapters known as the Bhagavad-gītā.

The gods have changed somewhat since earlier days. Indra has settled down in the constitutional monarchy of Paradise assigned to him by the Brāhmaṇas; he now figures as the prototype of earthly kings, leading the armies of the gods to war against the demons when occasion requires, and passing the leisure of peace in the enjoyment of celestial dissipation. His morals have not improved: he is a debonair debauchee. Brahmā the Creator, a more popular version of Prajāpati, is still too impersonal to have much hold on the popular imagination; the same is the case with Agni the Fire-god. Plainly there was a vacancy for a supreme deity whose character was powerful enough to move men's souls, either through awe or love; and for this vacancy there were two strong candidates, Vishṇu and Śiva, who in course of time succeeded to the post and divided the supremacy between them.

Vishṇu has altered immensely since last we met him. First, after an extraordinary change in his own character, he has been identified with Nārāyaṇa, and then both of them have been equated with Kṛishṇa. The development is so portentous that it calls for a little study.

We have seen that in the Vēdas Vishṇu appears to be, and in the Brāhmaṇas certainly is, the embodied Spirit of the Sacrifice, and that ritual mysticism has invented for him a supreme home in the highest heaven. But in the Epics he has developed into a radiant and gracious figure of ideal divinity, an almighty saviour with a long record of holy works for the salvation of mankind, a god who delights in moral goodness as well as in ritual propriety, and who from time to time incarnates himself in human or animal form so as to maintain the order of righteousness. Symbolism has further endowed him with a consort, the goddess Śrī or Lakshmī, typifying fortune; sometimes also he is represented with another wife, the Earth-goddess. The divine hawk or kite Garuḍa, who seems to have been originally the same as the eagle who in the Ṛigvēdic legend carried off the sōma for Indra, has been pressed into his service; he now rides on Garuḍa, and bears his figure upon his banner. I have already suggested a possible explanation of this evolution (above, p. 41): owing to his close association with Indra, the most truly popular of Ṛigvēdic deities, the laic imagination transfused some of the live blood of Indra into the veins of the priestly abstraction Vishṇu. To the plain man Indra was very real; and as he frequently heard tales of Indra being aided in his exploits by Vishṇu, he came to regard Vishṇu as a very present helper in trouble. The friend of Indra became the friend of mankind. The post of Indra had already been fixed for him by the theologians; but the functions of Vishṇu, outside the rituals, were still somewhat vaguely defined, and were capable of considerable expansion. Here was a great opportunity for those souls who were seeking for a supreme god of grace, and were not satisfied to find him in Śiva; and they made full use of it, and wholly transformed the personality of Vishṇu.