The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c10.36

c10.36

The poets and philosophers of Vedic India pictured the night sky spanned by the Milky Way, with the seven bright planets of the Great Bear glittering athwart it, as Vishnu-Nârâyana sleeping on the seven-headed Serpent of Eternity, whose coils encircled the universe. These planets had once been the seven great Rishis who taught the Aryans divine wisdom. Buddhist India adopted the same symbolism with a different connotation. The seven great Rishis were the seven Buddhas. The serpent was the cycle of countless existences through which they had at last attained to Pari-Nirvana. These were narrated in the jâtakas, as told by village story-tellers on starlight nights under the mystic tree of Vishnu. The kathaks, or professional story-tellers, were probably the most successful propagandists of Buddhism among the uncultured non-Aryan masses; for it is easy to believe that these delightful old-world tales appealed more strongly to popular imagination than the abstract philosophy of the Vedas, especially as the doctrine taught by them relieved the people from the intolerable sacrificial ritual of the Brahmans.