The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c9.25

v1.c9.25

A second line of argument is based on the war which forms the main topic of the Mahābhārata; by various modes of reckoning of dynasties recorded in the Purāṇas the date of 1000 or 1100 B. C.³ is attained for the war, and, as the Pāṇḍus are unknown to the Saṁhitās and the Brāhmaṇas, it is contended that they must fall before the war of the Kurus and the Pāṇḍavas. It is difficult to appreciate the naïve credulity which accepts as having any value these late lists of kings, which are preserved to us in works dating at soonest fifteen hundred years after the alleged date of the war, and which, when they come into contact with known facts, immediately reveal themselves as without value. Thus into the dynastic list of Kosala we find that the eponymous founder of the Çākya line, the Buddha’s father, he himself, and Rāhula have all been interpolated without the slightest historical justification, and it seems puerile, in the face of these facts, to insist on regarding these lists as the basis for chronological calculations of any kind. When the conflict between the Kurus and the Pāṇḍavas took place we do not know, and the assumption that it represented a vast struggle in which all the peoples of Northern India at any rate were engaged, because in the Mahābhārata in its final form it is so represented, argues a signal forgetfulness of the powers of poetic and popular imagination, and of the history of the Roland Romance among others or of the Odysseus or Aineias legend. Hence it appears wholly unwise to seek to derive a high date for the Saṁhitās and Brāhmaṇas from any argument based on the date of the epic war.