The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c11.100

v1.c11.100

Exception might also be taken to the identification of Viṣṇu with the sun, the greatest god of the Aryans, on the ground of his having been made the theme of a very few hymns only. Dr. Muir, after quoting or referring to nearly all the hymns of the Ṛk-saṃhitā says, “It is also a fact notorious to all the students of the Ṛgveda, that the hymns and verses which are dedicated to the praises of Indra, Agni, Mitra, Varuṇa, the Maruts the Aśvins &c, are extremely numerous ; whilst the entire hymns and separate verses in which Viṣṇu is celebrated are much fewer. . . . . . . The reader will also have noticed that, in a large number of shorter passages which I havd cited, Viṣṇu is introduced as the subject of laudation among a great crowd of other divinities from whom he is there in no way distinguished as being in any respect superior. From this fact we may conclude that he was regarded by those writers as on a footing of equality with the other deities”. 46 These objections do not, however, stand much in the way of the identification. It is universally admitted that Mitra and Pūṣan are names of the sun, and since their identity is by no means invalidated by the fact of the entire hymns and separate verses dedicated to Mitra and Pūṣan being comparatively limited, the same may very fairly be said in the case of Viṣṇu. If Viṣṇu be, as he is here assumed to be, but another personification of the sun, every hymn, whether addressed [ 151 ] to Sūrya, Āditya, Mitra, or Pūṣan, is *ipso facto* addressed to him, and it would not be reasonable to expect that the number of hymns or verses on account of each name should bear a fair proportion to the others. It may even be admitted that the name Viṣṇu had not obtained the same importance at the time when the hymns were composed as Sūrya or Āditya, but that would not contradict or militate against the identification. The fact of Viṣṇu’s being placed on an equality with the other gods, is also not antagonistic to his being the same with Āditya, for Āditya himself is so treated in a large number of verses without in any way detracting from his lofty position as one of the three principal gods. It is well-known to Vedic scholars that the hymns generally speak in the superlative degree, and extol the immediate subject of their laudation with the highest praise without any reference to its actual rank, or the attributes elsewhere assigned to the other gods. Adverting to this circumstance, Dr. Muir justly observes : “When these individual gods are invoked, they are not conceived as limited by the power of others as superior or inferior in rank. Each god is to the mind of the supplicants as good as all the gods. He is felt, at the time, as a real divinity, as supreme and absolute, in spite of the necessary limitations which to our mind, a plurality of gods must entail on every single god. All the rest disappear for a moment from the vision of the poet, and he only who is to fulfil their desires stands in full light before the eyes of the worshippers. ‘Among you, O gods, there is none that is small, none that is young : you are all great indeed,’ ( R. V. VIII. 30. 1 ) is a sentiment which though, perhaps, not so distinctly expressed as by Manu Vaivasvata, nevertheless underlies all the poetry of the Veda. Although the gods are sometimes distinctly invoked as the great and the small, the young and the old [ R. V. I. 27. 13 ] this is only an attempt to find the most comprehensive expression for the divine powers, and nowhere is any of the gods represented as the slave of others”.⁴⁷