Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c22.s4: § 4. The First of Men

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c22.s4

Language
English

§ 4. The First of Men

v1.c22.s4.1

In the Rigveda there can be no doubt as to who is the real first man: it is Manu or Manus, whose name, cognate perhaps with the Gothic *manna*, and the root *man*, ‘think’, appears as a definite forefather of men nearly forty times in the Rigveda. He is essentially the first of sacrificers, and the establisher of sacrifice, though he appears with other old sacrificers also, Aṅgiras, Bhṛgu, Atharvan, Dadhyañc, Atri, and Kaṇva. The gods, Mātariçvan, or Kāvya Uçanā, are said to have given Agni to Manu.⁸ Again it is the three lakes of the Soma of Manus that Indra drinks to strengthen himself for the fight with Vṛtra. A bird brings Soma to Manu. In the Brāhmaṇas he constantly appears as connected with the sacrifice, and the dictum is laid down that, whatever Manu said, was medicine, a fact which accounts in part for the tradition which makes him the great legal authority of India.

v1.c22.s4.2

⁸ RV. i. 36. 10; 128. 2; viii. 23. 17.

v1.c22.s4.3

Of the legends of Manu¹ the most important is that of the deluge, of which he is warned by a fish, and which he escapes through the agency of the fish, which carries his ship about until it rests on a mountain peak, in post-Vedic mythology called Naubandhana.² The fish in the epic becomes Brahman, and in the Purāṇas the full legend of the Avatar of Viṣṇu is recounted. Thereafter Manu with his daughter Iḍā, the personification of the sacrificial food, produces the human race. The legend may be alluded to in a very late book of the Atharvaveda,³ but its late appearance, at a time when the Nakṣatras had probably been borrowed from a Semitic source, renders the theory of its independent Indian and even Indo-European origin, defended by Lindner,⁴ rather dubious, though not impossible.

v1.c22.s4.4

¹ Rhys (*Celtic Heathendom*, pp. 377, 659 ff.) believes in Manu's identity with Tacitus's Mannus, ancestor of the Germans, the Celtic Manann, and Greek Minos, and holds the theory of an Aryan deluge.

v1.c22.s4.5

² ÇB. i. 8. 1. 1–10.

v1.c22.s4.6

³ xix. 39. 8.

v1.c22.s4.7

⁴ *Festgruss an Roth*, pp. 213–16; Max Müller, *India*, pp. 133–8; Hopkins, *Rel. of India*, p. 160; above, Part I, Chap. 2. For a rational explanation, see A. C. Das, *Rig-Vedic India*, i. 221 f.

v1.c22.s4.8

Another story connects him with the law of the division of property. Nābhānediṣṭha was deprived by his brothers of a fair share in the patrimonial heritage, which they divided up, when he was keeping his period of studentship. Manu, however, enables the young man to console himself by obtaining, in place of his share in the heritage, a boon from the Ādityas, after he has appeased Rudra who appears on the place of sacrifice to claim all the cattle which had been left by the sacrificers as a fee for Nābhānediṣṭha.⁵

v1.c22.s4.9

⁵ AB. v. 14.

v1.c22.s4.10

It seems that Manu was already in the Rigveda considered to be the son of Vivasvant, whose name he actually bears in one case.⁶ In the later texts he is quite regularly called son of Vivasvant.⁷ He is accordingly a brother of Yama, or a duplication of that personage, but Manu unlike Yama is concerned with the living, and Yama with the dead: hence in the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa⁸ the difficulty is reconciled by making Manu the ruler of men, Yama of the dead. Yāska,⁹ relying on an obscure passage of the Rigveda, finds in him the son of Vivasvant, and the *savarṇā* who was substituted for Saraṇyū, when that lady left her husband,¹⁰ and in the Rigveda¹¹ we actually hear of Manu Sāṁvaraṇi, whose epithet may be either a mistake for Sāvarṇi which would point to a very early date for the legend, or may have been misunderstood and have created the legend.

v1.c22.s4.11

⁶ RV. viii. 52. 1.

v1.c22.s4.12

⁷ AV. viii. 10. 24; ÇB. xiii. 4. 3. 3.

v1.c22.s4.13

⁸ xiii. 4. 3. 3–5.

v1.c22.s4.14

⁹ Nir. xii. 10.

v1.c22.s4.15

¹⁰ RV. x. 17. 2.

v1.c22.s4.16

¹¹ RV. viii. 51. 1; cf. Scheftelowitz, *Die Apokryphen des Ṛgveda*, p. 38, with Oldenberg, GGA. 1907, p. 237.

v1.c22.s4.17

The alternative connexion of the origin of man is from the union of the pair Yama and Yamī, an idea which is found also in the Avesta;¹ in an interesting dialogue of the tenth book of the Rigveda, Yamī is represented as having to persuade Yama that their wedlock is desirable and right against his doubts. Yama, however, is so intimately connected with the dead that further treatment of him can best be deferred to the discussion of Vedic eschatology. By a quite different order of ideas the four castes are elsewhere deemed to be derived from the body of the giant offered in sacrifice by the gods.²

v1.c22.s4.18

¹ RV. x. 10; see below, Part V, Chap. 26.

v1.c22.s4.19

² RV. x. 90; AV. xix. 6; TS. vii. 1. 1. 4-6; PB. vi. 1. 6-13; JB. i. 68 f., &c. See below, Appendix B.

Linked texts (8)