In respect of its importance and sanctity we need only cite the following passages from the poem itself. “There is not a story current in this world, but doth depend upon this history, even as the body upon the food that it taketh.”
“The study of the ‘Bharata’ is an act of piety. He that readeth even one foot believing hath his sins entirely purged away.”
“The man who with reverence daily listeneth to this sacred work acquireth long life and renown and ascendeth to heaven.”
“A Brahmana whatever sins he may commit during the day through his senses, is freed from them all by reading the ‘Bharata’ in the evening. Whatever sins he may commit also in the night by deed, words, or mind, he is freed from them all by reading the ‘Bharata’ in the first twilight (morning).”
What effects such beliefs were likely to have upon the morals of a people we do not stop to inquire.
“Chaque peuple,” says Prévost-Paradol, “a dans son histoire un grand fait, auquel il rattache tout son passé et tout son avenir, et dont la mémoire est un mot de ralliement, une promesse de salut. La fuite d’Egypte, disaient les Juifs; le renversement des Mèdes, disaient les Perses; les guerres Médiques, disent à leur tour les Grecs. On les rappellera à tout propos pour en tirer des arguments, des prétentions politiques, des mouvements oratoires, des encouragements patriotiques dans les grandes crises, et plus tard, les regrets éternels.”[55]
For the Indian people it is the great war ending with Kurukshetra, which is the central event of their history. It closes for them their golden age. Before that was a world of transcendent knowledge and heroic deeds; since then intellectual decay and physical degeneracy. Nor is this merely a sentiment, it is a deeply-rooted belief, which the highly-educated Indian holds in common with his ignorant countryman. I have known an educated Hindu to maintain with much warmth that in the golden age the Rishis and others were well acquainted with the art of aërial navigation, and probably with other rapid modes of locomotion unknown to us moderns. I have heard him assert boldly that even the telephone, microphone, and phonograph had been known to the Hindu sages up to the time when the sciences and arts of the ancient world perished, wholesale and for ever, with the heroes of the “Mahabharata” on the fatal field of Kurukshetra. However little one might be disposed to import such romantic statements into a sober history of science, they are, at any rate, true as regards the non-existence of anything like even the germs of progressive science among the people of India from a very remote date up to the present time.
Of the one hundred thousand verses of the “Mahabharata” not more than a fourth part is concerned with the main story of the epic—the rest consists of more or less irrelevant, though often beautiful episodes, and of disquisitions on government, morals and theology. It is the main story that I have endeavoured to reproduce in brief outline in this volume, and I have also attempted to preserve, as far as possible, the important doctrinal features of the great epic.
CHAPTER II
THE STORY OF THE GREAT WAR