The Great Indian Epics

by Unknown

Throughout the Epics we find the supernatural beings, who influence the destinies of mankind, arrayed in two distinctly hostile camps. On one side are the gods with the Gandharvas and Apsaras. On the other side the Asuras, including Daityas and Danavas, Rakshasas and Picáchas. The contest lies, be it noted, between the lesser gods and the Asuras with their allies. The superior gods interpose from time to time in the interests of the celestials; but behind and above the turmoil of existence the shadowy form of inexorable destiny reveals its overwhelming presence.

The part of man in the perpetual strife carried on between the two orders of superhuman beings is neither an ignoble nor a passive one. Man is not, as in most other religions, either the abject and unworthy recipient of gracious favours from the gods, or the unhappy victim of the malice of devils and demons. His position in the universe, as conceived by the authors of the Indian Epics, reflecting, no doubt, the prevailing ideas of their time, was a far higher one. Man is no nonentity in the struggle between the good and the evil forces of nature, but is rather a very important factor; for it is his especial duty to piously assist and nourish the celestials by perpetual sacrifices, so that they on their part might have the strength to perform their respective duties in the government of the universe, and insure the repression of the forces of evil. Neither is man a merely useful but servile auxiliary of the celestials; since he may by austerities, sacrifices, and ceremonies, earn and acquire rights and power for himself, and use his accumulated store of energy at his own will and for his own purposes.

Now it is a noteworthy fact that this high ideal of man’s dignity in the scale of beings has led in India to a degradation of the gods. It would seem as if you could not raise man without pulling down the deity; as if you could not exalt the human race without abasing the celestials. Hence we see the irreverent familiarity with which the highest gods, even Mahadeva, is personated by the Hindus in religious processions, or even on the occasion of the wild saturnalia of the Holi festival, when a man painted white with a wig of long yellow hair on his head, a string of huge beads about his neck, and a trident in his hand—the Supreme Deity personified—is borne aloft amidst a crowd of excited men who are indulging in the grossest license of obscene speech and gesture.

In regard to a life beyond the grave the writers of the Epics hold very decided opinions, a fact of great interest, if we remember that the Jews acquired their ideas about existence after death and of good and evil spirits for the first time in their Babylonian captivity, and passed them on as a heritage to Christianity; the conceptions of our great Christian poet, Milton, being strongly coloured by ideas which, undoubtedly, had their roots in Persian Mazdeism.

The heavens of the Hindu gods are essentially material and sensuous, with their palaces and gardens, music and dancing, their lively Gandharvas and frail Apsaras. Yet the goddesses play a very subordinate part, indeed, in India’s heroic age. We find in the Epics no powerful Hera, no wise Pallas Athene, no lovely Venus, no silver-footed Thetis—bright creations which lend such a charm to the myths of Hellas. Ganga, it is true, acts a minor and appointed part in the great drama, and Parbati is mentioned, while Durga and Kali only flit across the stage. But it is quite evident that in the Olympus of the Aryan Indians the goddesses had not attained the power and dignity they enjoy to-day. The frequent boasts in the Epics against the celestials with Indra at their head, the way in which every chief or leader, even of the Venars, is said to be a match for Indra’s self, seem to indicate an unmistakable, if covert, hostility to the old gods of the Aryan invaders, which is well worthy of notice, as indicating a transition period in the religious development of the Hindus, a period of doubt and confusion, which is emphasized by the fulsome flattery addressed to anyone of whom a favour is desired, be he man or god. He is the best of men, the greatest of kings; equal to gods, he is a god; he is Indra; he is Yama; he is Prajapati; he is superior to all the gods; he is the ruler of the three worlds; he is, in fact, anything and all things to the uncertain suppliant who craves his help. And in these perplexities we seem to have a share too; for under the influence of the pantheistic notions of the writers, combined with their conceptions of endless transmigrations and utter indifference to permanent shapes of any kind, individuality seems lost (as when we find Krishna addressed as the younger brother of Indra[130]), and a world of confused phantasmagorial forms seems to dance before us, till we feel dizzy contemplating this distracting and impermanent universe.

But amidst the ever-shifting pageant of existence the Hindu seems to have arrived at and firmly grasped the idea of a periodic law which has given a certain grandeur to his speculations about both the past and the hereafter.

From the orderly sequence of natural phenomena, as in the succession of day and night; in the measured march of the seasons of the revolving year; in the periodic movements of the heavenly bodies; the Hindu recognized an appointed, unvarying and endless cycle of changes. Generalizing from these facts he concluded that this law must hold for the entire Cosmos as well, which would pass through its grand but destined cycle of changes, over and over again, in the æons of eternity. He held these ideas in common with the Greek of old, and, like the Greek of old, he never rose to the conception of progress, development, evolution.[131]

How the Hindu thinker accounted, by his doctrine of Karma, for the striking inequalities and apparent injustice inseparable from mundane existence, the reader has learned in sufficient detail already. As to the moral responsibility of man for his actions, the poets of the Epics had thought out the problem in its various aspects and despairingly left it unsolved. For as Sanjaya, the envoy of the Pandavas to their cousins, sadly says, in the true spirit of agnosticism: “In this respect three opinions are entertained; some say that everything is ordained by God;[132] some say that our acts are the results of free will; and others say that our acts are the results of those of our past lives.”[133]

The attribution of righteousness to the gods does not seem to be insisted upon; for Krishna, as we have seen, is particularly prone to guileful arts in order to compass his objects, like the Pallas Athene of Homer, at whose suggestion Pandaros treacherously and unjustifiably wounded Menelaus with an arrow.

In regard to the political condition of India in those earlier times we may, I think, gather from the Epics that the petty rulers who shared the land amongst themselves were very numerous—thousands,[134] indeed, if the poet’s statements could be relied upon,—and we need not doubt that it was the perpetual endeavour of the more able and ambitious of these kings to get as many as possible of their fellow chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy.