The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s3.5

v2.c41.s3.5

It is clearly impossible to accept this evidence as establishing the doctrine enunciated. That in one passage¹ Varuṇa’s palace with a thousand doors should be spoken of, is not the slightest proof that the Vedic Indian normally regarded the firmament as a building filled with light, whose doors were the sun and the stars, and the rendering of Rigveda viii. 63. 1, which ascribes to Manu the making of flames in the heaven of Indra, is clearly impossible;² even on Hertel’s hypothesis, all that Manu could naturally be said to do would be to enter by a flaming door, not to create it, and in fact the term *dhiyaḥ* here used refers clearly to devotion and not to flames. The version of Vala is wholly implausible, while the interpretation of the Vendīdād passage is accomplished merely by the process of inventing a meaning and explaining away everything which contradicts it by the theory of adaption to Zoroastrian ideas. Peculiarly gratuitous is the interpretation of Rigveda x. 14. 2, which has not the slightest reference to an overburdened earth, but merely to the winning of an abode which knows no ending in the sky. The whole doctrine that Yama removed the surplus population to the heaven because the earth was overcrowded is un-Vedic, and even the epic³ knows it not. For the Veda we have merely the aetiological legends of the expansion of the earth from a small nucleus, often by the action of a cosmic boar,⁴ and the wholly unconnected and late legend of the sinking of the earth in the ocean because the evil-minded Viçvakarman, son of Bhuvana, sought to bestow it upon the priest Kaçyapa, though no mortal had the right to do so.⁵