The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6). Duncker Max
of the later period is not troubled by the fact that Bhishma, Çantanu's eldest son, renounces the throne in order to allow a blind nephew to reign in his place; that even as a great-uncle he is the mightiest hero of the Kurus, and can only be slain on the battle-field by treachery.
Thus, rightly or wrongly, the Pandus were brought into the family of the Kurus. But why should the elder branch make way for the younger? To explain this circumstance, the blind king, the honourable Dhritarashtra, i. e. "firmly holding to the kingdom," must first fix on Yudhishthira as his successor, to the exclusion of his own sons, and then, even in his own lifetime, divide the kingdom with Yudhishthira. Hence the Pandus could advance claims, and the more fiercely Duryodhana opposed the surrender of his legitimate right, the more does he lose ground from a moral standard against the Pandus. His persecutions and villainies provide the revision with the means to bring the Pandus repeatedly into banishment, and into the forest, from which in the old poem they had been brought to stand at the head of the Panchalas. It is Duryodhana who causes the house of Pandu to be set on fire, who by false play wins Draupadi from Yudhishthira, and treats her despitefully, and takes from him the half of the kingdom. On the other hand, the sons of the Pandus, so far as the lines of the old poem allow, are changed into persecuted innocents, patterns of piety, virtue, and obedience to the Brahmans. It is naturally the form of Yudhishthira which undergoes the main change from these points of view, since he twice succumbs to the passion for the game. By these interpolations his brother Bhima is fortunately put in a position to answer the reproach of the dying Duryodhana – that the Pandus had conquered by treachery and shame – by asserting that they had not laid fire for their enemies as he had, or cheated them in the game, or outraged their women.
The revision carries the justification and legitimisation of the Pandus even beyond the destruction of Duryodhana and the Kurus. Owing to his blindness the king Dhritarashtra could not be brought into the battle and slain there. Where the old poem represents the mother of the slain Kurus as cursing Krishna, the revision interpolates a reconciliation between the aged Dhritarashtra and the destroyers of his race, a reconciliation naturally accomplished through the instrumentality of a Brahman. Hence Yudhishthira is allowed to ascend the throne of Hastinapura with the consent of the legitimate king, and reign in his name. Lastly, in order to remove every stain from the Pandus, they are represented as renouncing the world, and dying on a pious pilgrimage to the divine mountain.
A second revision of the poem – which, as will become clear below, cannot, in any case, have been made before the seventh century B.C. – represents the Pandus as becoming the sons of gods, and thus makes still easier the task of their justification. It was not by Pandu that Kunti became the mother of Yudhishthira, Arjuna, and Bhima, but the first and most just of all rulers she bore to the very god of justice. Hence his claim to the throne and his righteous life were established from the first. The second brother, the great warrior Arjuna, owed his birth to Indra; the third, Bhima, to the strong wind-god, Vayu; the twin-sons of Madri are then naturally the children of the twins in heaven, the two Açvins. More serious is the change of Krishna, i. e. the black, into the god Vishnu, assumed in a third revision, which was completed in the course of the fourth century B.C. (Book VI. chap. viii.). Krishna, after whom the city of Krishnapura on the Yamuna is said to have been named,148 belongs to the tribe of the Yadavas, who were settled on the Yamuna, in the district of Mathura. He is the son of the cow-herd Nanda and his wife Yaçoda; he is himself a cow-herd, drives off herds of cows, carries away the clothes of the daughters of the herdsmen while they are bathing, and engages in many other exploits of a similar kind. He rebels against the king of Mathura, and slays him. His crafty and treacherous plans then bring the heroes of the Kurus to destruction; at length, with his whole nation, he succumbs to the curse hurled against him by the mother of Duryodhana. Out of this form of the ancient poem the later revision has made an incarnation of Vishnu, the beneficent, sustaining god. The child of Vasudeva and Devaki, who bears all the marks of Vishnu, is no other than Vishnu, who permits himself to be born from Devaki; he is changed with the child of Yaçoda, which was born in the same night. But these new points of view are not thoroughly carried out; the Mahabharata is not consistent about the origin of Krishna or his divine nature. At one time he is a human warrior, at another the highest of the gods, and the original position both of Krishna and the Pandus is still perceptible.149
The second great Epic of the Indians – the Ramayana – is essentially distinguished from the poems of the great war. Here also a legend, or ancient ballads, may have formed the basis; here, too, it is clear that a later redaction has changed the hero of the poem into an incarnation of a god. But the legend is already changed into the fairy tale, of which the scene is principally the Deccan, the banks of the Godavari, the island of Lanka (Ceylon) where the Aryas first arrived about the year 500 B.C. The cast of the poem as a whole is essentially different from that of the Mahabharata. The old legend may have related the story of a prince who wins his wife by his power to string the great bow of her father, and who, when banished from the banks of the Sarayu, contends in the Himavat, or in the south of the Ganges, against the giants dwelling there. These giants carried off his wife from the forest hut, and he is only able to regain her after severe struggles. Rama, the banished prince, is supposed to be a son of a king of the Koçalas (the Tritsus of the Rigveda), who had taken up their abode on the Sarayu. Daçaratha, the father of Rama, had apparently reigned a long time before the great war; he was descended from Ikshvaku, the son of Manu. According to the Vishnu-Purana, Daçaratha is the sixtieth king of this family, the eleventh after Sudas, who repelled the attack of the Bharatas.150 In their battle the Tritsus were aided by the priest Vasishtha, to whom in the poem of Rama the same place is allotted which in the Mahabharata is first allotted to Viçvamitra and then to Vyasa. Without regard to the ancient poems and their strongly-marked traits of great battles and mighty contests, the priests entirely transformed the legend of Rama from their point of view into the form in which it now lies before us; and this took place at a period of Indian life, when the warlike impulse had long given way to peaceful institutions, and the requirements of the priests had driven out the military code of honour and martial glory – a time when the weaker sides of the Aryan disposition, submission and sacrifice, had won the victory over the hard and masculine qualities of activity and self-assertion. The Ramayana gives expression to the feeling of calm subjection, virtuous renunciation, passionless performance of duties, patient obedience, unbroken reticence. Throughout, prominence is given to the system of priestly asceticism, of the eremite's life in the forest, of voluntary suicide. Here we can scarcely find any echoes of that desire of honour, that jealousy, that lust of battle, and eagerness for revenge, which occur unmistakably in the Mahabharata; nothing remains of the knightly pride which scorns to give a blow forbidden by the rules of the battle. The hero of the Ramayana is a hero of virtue, not of the battle. He commends without ceasing renunciation and the fulfilment of duties; he abandons throne and kingdom; he gives up his right out of obedience to his father, and respect for a promise made by him; his wife leads him against his will into the desert, because she also knows her duties. Respect, devotion, and sacrifice in the relation of children to their parents, of younger brothers to the elder, of the wife to her husband, of subjects to their lords, are described with great poetical beauty and power, but often with the weakest sentimentality. The mission of the hero in his banishment is the defence of the settlements of holy penitents against the giants. But his battles are no merely human struggle; he not only strings the bow of Çiva, he breaks it, so that it sounds like the fall of a mountain or like Indra's thunder. He fights with the bow of Indra and the arrows of Brahman, and at length even with the chariot of Indra against the giants. These battles are no less legendary than are his confederates' against the giants of Lanka, the vulture Jatayu, the apes and bears, which build him a bridge into that island. These are all described with an exaggeration and monstrous unreality into which Indian poetry only strayed after traversing many stages. We do indeed once hear, even in the Ramayana, of heroes "who never turned in the battle, and fell struck in front." Even here, in isolated passages, the old manly independence breaks forth, which, conscious of its strength, beats down injustice instead of enduring it, and makes a path for itself, but only in order to place in a still clearer light a quick compliance, a patient fulfilment of duties, and thus allow to the latter a greater advantage.
At this day Epic poetry
"Vishnu-Purana," ed. Wilson, p. 440. Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 12, 68 ff.
In Panini Krishna is called a god, but also a hero. M. Müller, "Hist. of anc. Sanskrit Lit." p. 45
On the form of the Rama legend in the Daçaratha-Jataka, cf. A. Weber, "Abh. Berl Akad." 1870. The Vishnu-Purana enumerates 33 kings of the Koçalas from Daçaratha to Brihadbala, who falls in the great battle on the side of the Kurus. Including these this Purana makes 60 kings between Manu and Daçaratha. For the same interval the Ramayana has only 34 names, of which some, like Yagati, Nahusha, Bharata, are taken from the genealogical table of the kings of the Bharata, others, like Pritha and Triçanku, belong to the Veda. We have already seen that the series of the Bharata kings give about ten generations between the time when they gained the upper hand on the Yamuna and upper Ganges,