The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6.s1.62

c6.s1.62

Here we find, first of all, the story of the flood, wonderfully analogous to the flood legends of all Western Asia, and especially the account of the book of Genesis.¹ Many echoes are called up by the story of Cyavana the Bhārgava who, old and decrepit as a ghost, is pelted with clods by the children of the neighborhood. Then he punishes their families by creating discord, so that "father fought with son, and brother with brother." Cyavana finally, through the help of the divine physicians, the Açvins, enters the fountain of youth (*queckbronn*) and marries the lovely Sukanyā.² Like an oasis in the desert comes the ancient tale of Purūravas and Urvaçī, whose mythic meaning has been much disputed or altogether denied.³ Already the Rig-Veda knows the story, and the Hindu master-poet Kālidāsa, perhaps a thousand years later, derives from it one of his loveliest dramas. It is a story which contains the same *motif* as the Undine, Melusine, and Lohengrin stories. A heavenly nymph (Apsaras), Urvaçī by name, loves and marries King Purūravas, but she abandons him again because he violates one of the conditions of this intrinsically ill-assorted union. Not, however, through his own fault, but on account of a trick played him by the Gandharvas, a kind of heavenly "sports," the natural mates of the heavenly nymphs, the Apsarases. He must not be seen in a state of nudity by his wife. But on a certain occasion the Gandharvas cause lightning to play: she sees him and vanishes. Then Purūravas roams wailing through the land of the Kurus, until he comes to a lotus pond in which nymphs in the form of swans disport themselves. One of them is Urvaçī. They engage in a poetic dialogue which is preserved without the rest of the story as one of the hymns of the Rig-Veda (10. 95). This finally relieves the intolerable situation. The Brāhmana story tells: