Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c15.5

v2.c15.5

costly precious stone. Schroeder could without more ado have referred to our Purāṇa passage (cp. “Wurzeln d. Sage v. hl. Gral”, Wiener Sitzungsber., Bd. 166, pp. 4-5). The Christian stone thus probably comes from India. Mention must be here made also of the well-known breast-jewel of the sun god Viṣhṇu-Kṛiṣhṇa, the Kaustubha. This might probably likewise be set beside the Brisingamen, often identified by Schroeder with the sun. From the Epic much other matter could be adduced. Here we only mention those “ear-rings of precious stone” (akin to the ear-rings of the sun god) which for the wearer drive away hunger, thirst, danger from poison, fire, and from wild beasts, sweat (syand) gold, suck up by night the brightness of the stars, and so on. With them too care must be taken (xiv, 57.22 ff.). Truthfulness, honour, faithfulness, chastity, etc., are, indeed, very often demanded in the case of these fairy things, and in Old India also this was so well known a conception that the rule imagined for the “pearl of a leather pouch” in Apahāravarman’s adventures seemed quite in order (my Daçakumārac., p. 224). Is it the pure and purifying light of their mother, the sun, that ever shines on them, even on the chastity—and kindred beakers, as on the renowned beaker of Djemshid, which also was made of a jewel?—Schroeder, anyhow, has been more right than I in deriving the cooking-pot bestowed by the sun god on Yudhiṣhṭhira directly from the old conception of the sun as a pot (“Sage vom hl. Gral,” p. 16). In iii, 3.172, it is called a tāmra pīthara (copper pot).