At this day Epic poetry lives in India in full force, just as it left the hands of the priests. At the close of the Mahabharata we are told: "What the Brahman is to the rest of mankind, the cow to all quadrupeds, the ocean to the pool, such is the Mahabharata in comparison with all other histories." To the readers and hearers of the Mahabharata and Ramayana the best rewards in this life and the next are promised: wealth, forgiveness of sins, entrance into heaven. At all festivals and fairs, at the marriages of the wealthy, episodes from one of the two poems are recited to the eager crowd of assembled hearers; the audience accompany the acts and sufferings of the heroes with cries of joy or signs of sorrow, with laughter or tears. In the village, the Brahman, sitting beneath a fig-tree, recites the great poems, in the order of the events no doubt, to the community. The interest of the audience never flags. If the piece recited touches on happy incidents—on victory, triumph, happy return home, the marriage or consecration of the heroes, the village is adorned with crowns as at a festival. The Indians live with the forms of their Epos; they know the fortunes of these heroes, and look on them as a pattern or a warning. The priests have fully realised their intention of setting before the nation in these poems a mirror of manners and virtue.
FOOTNOTES:
[120] This follows from the fact that the army of the confederates had to cross the Vipaça and Çatadru in order to reach the Tritsus.
[121] In the Rigveda king Sudas is at once a son of Divodasa and a scion of the house of the Pijavanas, possibly because Pijavana was the father or some ancestor of Divodasa. In the Samaveda (2, 5, 1, 5) Divodasa is called the noble. In the book of Manu (7, 41; 8, 110) Sudasa is the son of Pijavana. In the genealogy of the kings of the Koçalas, by whom the Tritsus were destroyed, the Vishnu-Purana mentions in the fiftieth generation after Ikshvaku, the founder of the race, a king Sudasa, the son of Sarvakama, grandson of Rituparna. So also the Harivança, and in the Vishnu-Purana (ed. Wilson, p. 381) Vasishtha is the priest of king Sudas as well as of Nimi, the son of Ikshvaku. On the other hand the Vishnu-Purana (p. 454, 455) is aware of a second Sudas, the grandson of Divodasa, in the race of the moon. Viçvamitra is himself called a Bharata; we shall see below that the Mahabharata connects Viçvamitra with the genealogy of the kings of the Bharata. Cp. Roth, "Zur Literatur," S. 142 ff. [On the names of Indian rivers, see Muir, loc. cit. 2, 345 ff.]
[122] Cf. Muir, loc. cit. 12, 339, where the hymn is translated.
[123] Roth, "Zur Literatur," S. 87, 91 ff. [Rigveda, 3, 33; 7, 83. Muir, loc. cit. 322, 323.]
[124] Manu, 1, 67 ff. [Muir, 1, 43 ff.]
[125] Weber, "Jyotisham, Abh. d. Berl. Akad." 1862, s. 23 ff. and below.
[126] With similar exaggeration "Duty" tells king Parikshit at the close of the Mahabharata that her four feet measured 20 yodhanas in the first age, 16 in the second, 12 in the third, whereas now in the Kaliyuga they only measure four yodhanas. The whole narrative is intended to point out that in the Kaliyuga even Çudras could become kings. The Vishnu-Purana (ed. Wilson, p. 467) calls the first Nanda who ascended the throne of Magadha in 403 B.C. the son of a Çudra woman.
[127] "Bhagavata-Purana," 9, 14.