The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s2: I. Introduction. Origin of the Epic
The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s2
- Language
- English
Contents
- c2.s2.24 — 4 parts
I. Introduction. Origin of the Epic
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In order to a better understanding of the material from which are drawn the chief quotations preferred in this essay, a word will be necessary in regard to the present and past condition of the Hindu Epic. The poem is of obscure origin. History fails us, and who can trust Hindu tradition? More than this: the work when analyzed appears to be inwardly inconsistent. In the same heroes we discover different characters. Opposite tendencies seem at work. The highest god is at the same time a tricky mortal. The chief knights are depicted now as good and now as sinful men. The original theme is, as it were, diverted from its course.†
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† An abstract will indicate this. Of two possible heirs to the throne of Hāstinapura, Pāṇdu, the younger, having succeeded to the sovereignty on account of the blindness of his elder brother, Dhritarāṣṭra, finally grew weary of ruling, and, retiring into the woods, where he died, left his kingdom to the blind Dhritarāṣṭra. The latter, regarding Yudhishthira, Pāṇdu's eldest son, as rightful heir, caused him at first to be proclaimed crown prince; but subsequently, persuaded by Duryodhana and others of his sons, reconsidered the matter, yielded to sin, permitted Yudhishthira with his four brothers (called the Pāṇdus, as opposed to the Kurus, Duryodhana and his brothers) to be enticed out of the city, and then settled the whole kingdom on his own son. But the Pāṇdus, at first expelled and in mortal danger, after proceeding to Panchāla and forming an alliance with that king by a polyandrous marriage with his daughter, returned to Hāstinapura, backed by Pan-
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conversely, this Epic is regarded by native authorities as an ‘art-poem,’ as was long ago pointed out by Müller (tyayā ca kāvyam ity uktaṃ tasmāt kāvyam bhaviṣyati, Mbh. i. 1. 72; Müller, Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 41). The part of this Epic embraced by the twelfth and thirteenth books I call pseudo-Epic. In regard to the origin of the Mahābhārata I have briefly discussed Holtzmann's general argument (Epos) in my Introduction, but ignored his speculations on Epic Buddhism: in respect of which I can say only that they fail to convince me of his demonstrandum. On the important subject of the critique of our received text of the poem I have not touched in this essay. [See now a paper thereon by the writer reported in the Proceedings for October, 1888.]
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∗ A Pathfinder or concordance of references for the Bombay and Calcutta editions equated by verse-decades has been prepared by the writer, and will soon be published.
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From outside sources we know only that the poem is mentioned in the Sūtra of Ācvalāyana, and seems to be intended in a description of a Hindu epic given by Dio Chrysostomos, in a fragment that may have come from Megasthenes. In the event of the description being original with the first, 100 A. D. may be set as the date of this information; with the second, 400 B. C.* What other accounts we have are not less doubtful in date. Thus, the poem is known to the Mahābhāṣya; but the earliest date of this work is 140 B. C.,† while Pāṇini's evidence is negative, mentioning characters but not the poem by name. Of the war, only the Epic gives an account, and the date of the conflict is matter of inference. Thus, Schroeder reckons that it antedates the Yajur-Veda, because the Kuru-Panchāla alliance therein recorded must have been the result of the war; but this is absolutely uncertain. Analysis led Lassen to suppose that the original poem was an account of a war between Kurus and Panchālas, not between Kurus and Pāndus. There is no very weighty reason for the view thus expressed. The poem itself asserts that its theme is the Kuru-Pāndu war. Objections offered to believing this are based on the fact that the Kurus are an old family, known in more ancient literature, while the Pāndus are not. The working-over of the poem is also thought to be attested by the fact that its introductory part states it to have had different beginnings and different lengths—8800 couplets, 24,000, and 100,000; but as, aside from other proofs of recent time, it is evident that the last length could not have been noted till the work had been completed, this whole
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chāla's influence, made terms with their relatives, and took half the realm. In a corner of this they founded and occupied a new town, Indraprastha; and here, after years of conquests, they held a celebration that awakened the envy of Duryodhana, who soon challenged Yudhishthira to a deceitful game of dice. In its course the latter played away his newly acquired greatness, and then gambled again with the understanding that the loser should this time become a hermit. He lost, went into the woods with his brothers, and remained there in accordance with his promise for twelve years. At the close of one further year he found an ally, invoked anew the aid of Panchāla, elected Krishna (Vishnu) as his aid, marched against Hāstinapura with a large force, and routed the yet larger army of Duryodhana by means of desperate and unscrupulous fighting on the part of the Pāndu knights and the unfairly used influence of Krishna (whose help the Kurus had scorned). He found no one to oppose him within the town, and had himself crowned king of both Hāstinapura and Indraprastha; and finally, after a long reign, laid down the crown in order to climb up to heaven in company with his four brothers and the family wife: the successful accomplishment of this journey terminating the story.
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∗ The different views on this subject have lately been set forth by L. von Schroeder, in his Indiens Literatur und Cultur, p.
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⁴⁶⁴ Weber thinks the mention in Ācvalāyana an interpolation. Compare Lassen, Ind. Alt., i. 589-592. † Weber, Lit., p. 201, 241.
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statement can only be regarded as one of comparatively late origin, belonging to the final development of the Epic—a time when the writers knew little in regard to the working-over of their inherited verses. At present the text is overburdened with extraneous matter, tales, laws, moral codes, theologies, metaphysics, quite stifling the original body of living poetry.
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From another point of view, efforts have been made to prove not only a change, but a complete inversion (in our present story) of the original theme. This criticism bases itself on the want of unity in the characters. Starting with the two-fold nature of Krishna-Vishnu as man and god,* and with the glossed-over sins of the Pāndus, the critic argues that the first poem was written for the glory of the Kurus, and subsequently tampered with to magnify the Pāndus; and that in this latter form we have our present Epic, dating from before the fourth century B. C.; since the worship of Vishnu was in Megasthenes' time triumphant over that of Brahmā, and it is with the cult of the former god that the Pāndus are bound up. The first poem would thus be completely changed, or, as Schroeder in describing the theory says,† ‘set upon its head.’ Schroeder’s exposition of the theory, being the latest outcome of this criticism (we are indebted to Adolph Holtzmann for its tone), will serve as at once the clearest and most recent explanation of how the Epic may thus have been inverted. ‘The original poet (he says in substance) lived at a time when Brahmā was the highest god (700 to 500 or 400 B. C.); and this singer was a child of the Kuru-land. He heard reports of the celebrated Kuru race that once reigned in his land, but had been destroyed by the dishonorable fighting of a strange race of invaders. This tragical overthrow he depicted in such a way as to make his native heroes models of knightly virtue, while he painted the victors (Pāndus, Panchālas, Matsyas), with Krishna, hero of the Yādavas, at their head, as ignoble and shamefully victorious. This is the old Bhārata song mentioned in Āçvalāyana. After a time Krishna became a god, and his priests, supported by the Pāndus, sought to make Krishna (Vishnu) worthy to be set against Buddha. Their exertions were successful. Vishnu in the fourth century became the great god, and his grateful priests rewarded their helpers, the Pāndus, by taking the Bhārata poem in hand and making a complete change in the story, so as to relieve them of the reproaches of the old poet. Finally they worked it into such shape that it praised the Pāndus and blamed their opponents. About this time they inserted all the episodes that glorify Vishnu as the highest god. The Pāndus then pretended that they had originally belonged to the Kuru stock, and the cousinship portrayed in the poem was invented; whereas they were really an alien, probably a southern, race.*
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∗ On Krishna as shepherd, see Lassen, *Ind. Alt.* i. 770.
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† *Lit. u. Cult.*, p. 479.
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How differently the same set of facts may be converted into theories is seen by comparing the view of Ludwig.† This scholar holds that the original story was an account of a war between the Bharatas and Kurus, while the Pāndus are a sun and earth myth. Krishnā, the dark (earth), is an attractive solution of the polyandrous marriage. The Pāndus are the seasons, each in turn possessing the earth. But the same name in Krishna as the sun is somewhat objectionable. Ludwig's paper is ingenious, but to me unconvincing.
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The only basis that we have for inverting the theme of the present poem is in what Schroeder, who warmly supports the inversion-theory, calls ‡ ‘the justification of the hateful rôle evidently played by the Pāndus in the old form of the Epic, and the reproaches heaped upon the Kurus, the royal heroes of the old poem.’ Theories once started increase, as it were of their own accord, in force of statement. With each new advocate a surer color is given, whence the hypothesis gathers new strength, while the facts remain as at first. The quotation above given contains the last embodiment of a theory (now nearly forty years old) necessitating an entire inversion of the Epic story. What reason have we for believing in this ‘justification of the hateful rôle evidently played by the Pāndus?’ Do the Pāndus (relatively) play such a rôle? Does the ‘justification’ of the acts of the Pāndus require us to believe that they were first depicted as the ancestral foes of the original writer or writers? On the assumption that these points cannot be denied hangs the whole inversion-theory. From the religious point of view we have no unanimity of criticism; Schroeder considers Krishna as unitary, deified by the Pāndus, insulted by the Kurus; Holtzmann, with less probability, assumes two distinct Krishnas. The change in the human characters is the mainstay of the modern interpretation.
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To my mind, the assumptions on which this theory is based are more negatively wrong than positively untrue. It is true that reproaches are heaped upon the Kurus. But reproaches are also heaped upon the Pāndus. It is true that the Pāndus appear to have played a hateful rôle; but so do the Kurus. It is true that the Pāndus are justified; but is there no other reason for this than that assumed by the theory?
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∗ Scarcely reconcilable with the theory that the nucleus of the Epic is the war between the Kurus and Panchālas (see Schroeder, loc. cit., 457 and 479). † To which Schroeder does not allude. It is found in the Abhandl. d. Königl. böhm. Gesell. d. Wiss., vi. Folge, 12 Band. ‡ Lit. u. Cult., p.
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⁴⁷⁹ Holtzmann (Sr.), Sagen; (Jr.), Epos.
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Unless we are willing to reject upon a theory and then theorize upon the rejection, we must admit that the same book and age that contain the reproaches heaped upon the Kurus contain similar reproaches against the Pāndus. Now, passing for a moment the question of the relative sinfulness in the rôles of each party as given by the earliest poem, let us ask why it should naturally follow that the Pāndus alone were justified by the poet? We find many cases where the Pāndus do wrong, are reproached, and are then excused. The inversion-theory says that they sinned in the old poem, and that the poem was rewritten to make them appear good. Suppose we imagine the possibility of the poem being simply what it pretends to be—an account of the Pāndus' conquest of the Kurus. Imagine this poem added to from time to time, as we know it must have been, by the hands of priests bound to glorify, for religious or other reasons, the conquerors in the war. Is it not likely that they would have excused wrongs committed by their own party, which a more naive moral sense had long before depicted without shame? Is it likely, on the other hand, that in excusing their own side they would have taken the trouble to excuse the other, or to exalt their opponents' virtue? It seems to me that up to this point (given an old poem containing records of barbarous deeds done by both parties) it is not necessary to assume an inversion of theme merely because the conquering side is exalted and excused by the conqueror's bards. The inversion-theory, however, assumes that such one-sided extolment obliges us to believe in an original poet who painted the victors black, and in a new poet who re-painted them white. It is perhaps scarcely well to criticize Schroeder's poetical fancy of the sorrowing child of the Kuru-land; but it is a fair question to ask, considering the conditions under which Epic poetry was produced in India, what object a poet would have in writing a poem for public recitation or private circulation with the intent of vilifying those that now ruled his land?
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But we have, admitting for the moment that our Pāndus as victors might naturally be glorified by Pāndu priests, a further question to ask: why in process of glorifying the Pāndus was it necessary for later bards to justify their works as represented in the earlier poem?
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To answer this question (if we may assert for the time being that the inversion-theory is not yet established), let us consider what were the great developing factors of our Epic. What induced the insertion of this huge bulk of plainly late matter? In part, these additions consist of religious novelties; in part, they are of moral-didactic origin. Has not this last influence been under-estimated in treating of the ‘working-over’ of the poem? Let us reflect upon the fact, evident to anyone that has traced the lines of growth in Hindu civilization, that, as religion descended, morality ascended; that the later religious feeling was less simple and less pure than the earlier, but the later morality was higher and stricter than that of a former age; or that, at least, the didactic morality as last inculcated was superior to that recognized at first. Consider how penetrated is the Epic by this later morality; how ethical need imposes long sermons on us (not religious) at every turn; how it has added chapter after chapter at variance with earlier feeling and custom; how it everywhere teaches abhorrence of wrong acts, from a point of view often of sternest right; how it condemns the barbarities of an early uncivilized community; how it imposes its new law on the daily acts of life; how it has composed a formal ‘code of fighting’ that inculcates law more humane than was possibly consistent with the practices of the older times commemorated by the first form of the poem—and then let us ask this question: is it not reasonable to suppose that those same priests who framed the fighting code and endeavored to implant in their brutal warrior-kings a moral, not to say a chivalrous sentiment, might have been swayed by two opposing desires in handing down their national Epic? We know what happened to the text of Homer when his morality offended that of certain Alexandrians. Is it too much to suppose that the Hindu moral teachers (for they were truly that, while being as a body unscrupulous of rewards) felt this same necessity of expunging or excusing the sins of those heroes who had gradually become national models of royal and knightly honor? I conceive it possible that these priests, after spending much labor to expound what a king ought to be, should have made every effort to cause those heroes who had now become from success and glory of war popular types of perfect knights to appear in a light consonant with the moral principles that priestly ethics would inculcate. But how was this possible? The poem was there; it was the popular story; it teemed with records of acts harmonious with the older morality, inconsistent with that of the developed moral sense. So—might they not?—they modified what they could not erase; they excused what they could not pardon; they called in as a last resort the direct command of their deity to justify what to mortal apprehension was unjustifiable; for, if Vishnu commanded a hero to do this, who could question the right or the wrong? The early tale artlessly relates how Arjuna, the defender of the faith, shoots Karna when the latter is helpless. Did the old morality revolt at this? I think not. But the new morality comes, that says ‘no noble (Aryan) knight will fight except on equal terms.’
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What then are the priests to do? They turn to God. It was Vishnu who shouted to Arjuna ‘strike him now,’ and the great hero, questioning not the word of God, though with great reluctance, shoots his helpless foe. Here, says the priest, is the truth of this story. Certainly Arjuna killed Karna thus; but you may not cite it for a precedent against our ‘code of war,’ since God inspired the act from occult reasons, and that takes the deed out of our sphere of judgment.
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Another method of eliminating the evil consequences of a bad moral precedent is shown in the priest’s choosing the less of two evils. His two inclinations were to glorify the Pāndus, and to uphold a sound morality. In some cases he sacrifices the first to the second. Thus, he permits the justified reproaches of the Kurus to remain against his own heroes. The reproaches are based on a common-sense fairness, but always from the subjective point of view of the person interested and badly treated. Thus, the Kurus reproach the Pāndu bitterly for interfering between two men who are fighting, and for killing his friend’s foe who is getting the better of his friend. Arjuna laughs at this *ex parte* view of the case: ‘Why,’ says he, ‘what nonsense for you to blame me! I saw my friend worsted, and struck the man who was worsting him. How are we to have a conflict if every man is to go off and fight by himself? That is no way to fight.’ Now, as it seems to me, the Kurus’ position expresses an opinion not necessarily founded on any abstraction of right and wrong, though it may indicate an advance on Pāndu morality. But the perplexed priest, unable to omit this striking and vivid scene, finds that the reproaches of the Kurus coincide with his own abstract principles, and he lets them stand, strengthening them with a quotation from his own code, for the sake of moral fighting, even if it offends against his hero. For Arjuna has, from the later point of view, absolutely no valid excuse.
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We must remember, again, that if there is any truth at all in the legend of this war and the history of the combatants, then the long-established and noble house of Kurus represented in a modified form a higher degree of civilization than these *nouveaux riches*, these vulgar and modern Pāndus, who not till much later became an established house and men of mark in the civilized community into which they had intruded. Thus it may well have been that the Kurus had really a more developed conscience in the ceremony of right than had the Pāndus, albeit that of both stood far below the plane represented by the priestly poets of subsequent days. The social development of the Kurus was higher, as they had a longer civilization to fall back upon; and we shall perhaps be able to admit that the Kurus’ wrath in the above scene was not wholly *ex parte*, but embodied one of their earlier rules than led afterward to the full code of the completed ethic. Yet we cannot assert for them or their acts any great moral superiority over the Pāndus. Their peculiar sins, however, do seem to smack of a more cultivated wickedness. The Pāndus sin in a very ungentlemanly way. The Kurus sin likewise, but after the manner of adroit and polite rascals. They do not break their smaller laws of propriety. They do not play tricks openly and then exult in them. But they secretly seek to burn the Pāndus alive; they skillfully deceive the Pāndu king at dice and pretend it was fair play; they form a conspiracy and send ten men at once to kill Arjuna; they slay Arjuna's son in order first to weaken the father's heart (later imitated by the Pāndus); they are, in a word, cunning and sly, while the Pāndus are brutal and fierce. But in most cases the crimes of each must have appeared in their nakedness equally shocking to the codified morality of a later era.
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So it seems to me that the ethical sense of a subsequent age might have worked upon the legends it received. Not the inversion of the story and of the characters was, perhaps, the aim of the later poets. They only, as I think, blurred the picture where it was too suggestive of evil in should-be types of holiness. But if we accept the inversion-theory, we shall believe that the Pāndus and their partisans, the priests of Vishnu, took a poem that was written to defame the Pāndus and Vishnu, and wrote it over again as to represent these as perfect. Such is the opinion of scholars justly eminent in criticism of the Epic and in Sanskrit scholarship. As to what basis this theory rests upon enough has been said. We owe all our constructive criticism as well as destructive in this line to Holtzmann; and it is necessary to say that, in suggesting other possibilities than those advocated by him, one only re-builds the material that he has furnished. But supposing it were possible that our present Epic is the legitimate continuation of an original theme, and not a total inversion of it, let us look at the conditions under which it might have arisen. It would not be necessary to reject the supposition of a Pāndu-Panchāla alliance against the Kurus; but there would be no reason for supposing the war essentially Panchāla's, with the Pāndus added as adventitious adherents of that older royal family.
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The attempt to reconcile king Dhritarāshtra of the Yajur-Veda literature with the date of the late upstart Kurus may be abandoned, as common sense demands: and more than common sense. To that Brahmanic period king Dhritarāshtra is real; the Pāndus as a people are unknown. But to the Epic period the Pāndus are real, and the hypothecated king of the Kurus is a mere shadow. The real king of the Kurus (he receives the title of rājā in the poem as it stands to-day) is Duryodhana. It is only in the secondary fable that Dhritarāshtra is prominent. In the real action of the piece the latter is as good as silent, but becomes, first and last, conspicuous as a lay-figure on which to exhibit teachings of various sorts. To the writers of the Epic the Pāndus seem to have been genuine founders of a dynasty. What had they accomplished? They, a new race, not known by ancestors noble enough to be reflected in the older literature, became formidable through allying themselves with the Panchālas. They attacked and overthrew the venerable Kuru empire, and seated themselves upon the throne of these vanquished Kurus. And which Kurus? Those of the Vedic age? Is it likely that such an event could have taken place unnoticed in the light of the Dhritarāshtra of the Yajus? We must remember that Janamejaya is also of Brahmanic antiquity, but that the Pāndus are unknown. The solution of the difficulty seems to me to lie in a very likely assumption.
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It is this: that the Pāndus fought and conquered the Kurus, not the old Kurus in their height of renown, but the weak descendants of that race, who came long after the Dhritarāshtra of the Brahmanic period. And now what may we imagine to have followed? The priests of the Pāndus—who, as I think, wrote the poem originally on essentially the same lines as portrayed today, barring the inferior moral tone of the first version—in order to exalt the glory of the new house, made out the combat of their national heroes to have been not with the weaker man who really fell, but with the race in its early pride, supported and headed by the glory of the Dhritarāshtra of old, whose name perhaps, without his power, was really borne by this, his inferior descendant. It is not at all necessary to insist poetically on the double name. Hindu historical feeling is quite capable of simply introducing the ancient king into the new era—or, we may perhaps better say, of running the modern contest with all its appurtenances back into a remoter Vedic age. In this same spirit they also pretended that the ancient Janamejaya was the son of the modern hero: that is to say, they put back the hero into an antiquity obscure enough to father him upon Janamejaya. The older, the more venerable; the more venerable, the more glorious the contest. So, too, the eldest of the Pāndus, Yudhishthira, once called Dharma, draws about him the mantle of wisdom associated with that name from the early period;
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and while in the first stratum of the poem he is nothing but a headstrong, wilful, and cruel head of a family-clan, in the pseudo-Epic he is the incarnation of law and morality.
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As to the three periods of development in the poem, although I see no reason for believing any arithmetical statement made by a Hindu in regard to the verses contained in an unguarded poem, we may accept the conclusion that there has been in general a gradual enlargement, since we can plainly trace the rough outlines of growth.*
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We may even go farther, and admit a general threefold evolution (not inversion), judging by the appearance of the poem as it stands to-day. For, examining the work, we find that upon the original story, the Bhārata, have been grafted many ‘secondary tales’ (*upākhyāna*); and upon these, and apart from these, have been inserted whole poems of romantic, ethical, and theological character, having nothing to do with the course of the Epic itself. We must, however, remember that our Epic has been enlarged in two ways: first, by a natural expansion of matter already extant; secondly, by unnatural addition of new material. The twelfth book may serve as a type of the latter; the eighth, of the former. These dynamically added parts (the twelfth book etc.) bear about the same relation to the original that cars do to a locomotive. We may say, if we will, that the original has ‘grown,’ but in reality it only drags a load.†
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† The significance of a certain appearance of greater antiquity in the pseudo-Epic will be discussed below.
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Although not anxious at present to set up a scheme of distention and addition as the plan of growth of the Epic, I may indicate here what seems to me to have been the probable course of events.
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If we begin by discarding what appears of most recent origin, we shall certainly strike out first what I have called the pseudo-Epic, and with it the books that follow; for, though pretending to carry on the tale, the fourteenth book, depending on the thirteenth, and existing for the sake of the Anugītā, must fall into the same category with its immediate predecessors; and the fifteenth, with its system of *nīti* leading into the later tales of the heroes after the war is over, takes us to that stage where the Harivaṃśa is but a natural sequence of the un-Epic nonsense preceding. The last two books we further see omitted in one of the Epic’s own catalogues; and, upon the grounds of the complete catalogue in the first book, and the opening chapters bearing on their face every mark of posterity to the account of the main story, we shall be inclined to put the greater part of the first book into the same list as that of the last. This would leave us at the second stage; and beyond this we cannot reject by books, but by sections; for Vishnuism stands side by side with Çivaism and the older Brahmaism, and the chapters of didactic dreariness are interwoven with the thread of the story. These preaching chapters, with the theological chapters, seem to me to belong to the same period of addition as the mass of unnecessary stories here and there interpolated, although some of the latter bear the stamp of being older each as a whole than the time when they were inserted into the Epic. The Bhārata tale alone would remain after this second lightening of foreign elements, but by no means the original tale; for we must bear in mind that the second principle of increase, the natural evolution of old scenes, was at work contemporaneously with the dynamic principle of insertion. Thus, after discarding the foreign elements in any one of the battle-books, we have in our strictly Bhārata residuum not simply the Bhārata tale of old, but that tale expanded by repetition, colored by new descriptions, etc., all at one with the story, but increasing its extent. A certain amount of elimination can doubtless be done here by striking out repeated scenes; but it will be at best an unconvincing critique. In some cases, as in the fourth book, we have a perhaps original episode of the Pāndus seeking alliance at Upaplavya first expanded, and then added to by absurd and unnatural scenes betraying of themselves their lateness; yet we should do wrong to reject the book altogether on this account. Comparing again with the Rāmāyana, we see that the most conspicuous difference between the poems is this: that while the Epic is not wanting in scenes romantic enough to lie parallel to the general tone of the Rāmāyana, the latter is totally wanting in those scenes and touches, familiar to the Epic, that reveal a period older than either poem taken as a whole. But, again, the general character and style of our Epic approaches nearest to that of the other poem in the battle-scenes; so that, were the characters exchanged, we could scarcely say from the general description whether we were reading of the war of Arjuna or of that of Rāma. The Mahābhārata, then, in such portions clearly stands on a par with the Rāmāyana; although, on the one side, there are Epic points untouched in antiquity by Vālmīki’s poem, and, on the other, there are smaller points of dress and implements in the latter that seem to indicate posteriority to the Epic.
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∗ In i. 1. 75 ff. the çlokas are 8800; in the first version the thirteenth and the last two books of our present edition are not mentioned. In ib. 101 (b) ff. we read: *idaṃ çatasahasraṃ tu lokānāṃ (çlokānāṃ) puṇyakarmanāṃ, upākhyānāiḥ saha jñeyam ādyam Bhāratam uttamam; caturviṃçatisāhasrīṃ cakre Bhārata-saṃhitām, upākhyānāir vinā tāvad Bhāratam procyate budhāiḥ* (the first verse is omitted in the Calcutta edition); and in 107 we learn that the present length of the Epic as established among men is 100,000 verses, as opposed to the Bhārata of 24,000 verses, mythical ones, and the compilation in its shortest form of 150 verses just mentioned.
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To sum up the view that seems to me most free from objections, and least radically destructive of such tradition as does not on its face demand total unacceptance—I am inclined to think that our Epic originally described what it in general now pretends to describe, a war between the Kurus and the Pāndus united with the Pañcālas. This war occurred later than the Brahmanic literary period, but before the general acceptance of Vishnuism. Songs and ballads kept alive and popularized the history of the triumph of the Pāndus over the Kurus, who were naturally described as sinful. When the conquerors had died, and the war was already fading into history, the priests composed a metrical account of the events, incorporating the old current songs and ballads. With the steady rise of Vishnuism, and later of Çivaism, these theologies implanted themselves at the hands of the priests in the poem, crowding out for the most part the song-kept Brahmaism of the older period. With the development of morality, the priests sought to explain away the evil deeds of their heroes; for they could not with one breath exhort to virtue, and with the next extol those that disregarded their rules of virtue. But the evil deeds of their heroes' foes they allowed to remain, since these men were sinners anyway, and served as types of such. Furthermore, they ranked the exploits of their heroes higher by uniting them, now that time enough had elapsed to confuse the past, with the great heroes of antiquity, perhaps helped in their pretense by a fortuitous likeness of names. The gāthās, or songs of war-like deeds of kings, became absorbed into the itihāsa, or legendary tale, now used in its new sense of a story told per se and not as part of a religious rite. With this change, all completeness of the individual scenes vanished. The necessary links of connection became lengthened into new chains of stories. The moralizing tendency, in this weakening of the poem, now began to involve the whole tale. The work became thus on the one hand a great collection of 'various stories' grouped about the main story of 'the goodness of the Pāndus and badness of the Kurus,' and on the other a compendium, if the word be allowed, of all moral teachings; while a new religion acted on tale and moral alike, and rendered it finally the holiest of books, 'a new Veda, more weighty than all the Vedas.'*
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∗ i. 1. 3, 11, 100, 254, 266 ff. The latest historical audacity of the priests was probably to unite the two families of foes as cousins, in order to obtain a respectable genealogy for the Pāndus. These genealogical lists, such as i. 75 ff., have the appearance of age, but were probably often forged. It was customary to recite them on state occasions. For an attempt to discover the Vedic beginnings of some Epic legends, see Bradke, Z. D. M. G. xxxvi. 474; Oldenberg, ib. xxxvii. 54; xxxix. 52 ff., 79. For two scenes in the Epic compared with the Shâh-Nâmah, see Darmesteter, Journ. Asiat. viii. 38 ff., 52. For reference to Weber's quotations on the musical elements of the Epic, see the last paragraph of this paper.
Linked texts (1)
- Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit