Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit

CONTENTS

Introduction

I PRAJĀPATI AND BRAHMĀ, 1–12

CREATION IN THE Ŗg Veda, 1–2

CREATION IN THE BRĀHMAŅAS AND UPANIṢADS, 3–6

CREATION IN THE Mahābhārata, 7–8

CREATION IN THE PURĀŅAS, 9–12

II INDRA, 13–28

THE VEDIC CYCLE OF INDRA AND VŖTRA, 13–26

THE DEGRADATION OF INDRA IN THE LATER EPICS, 27–28

III AGNI, 29–33

IV RUDRA AND ŚIVA, 34–46

THE VEDIC MYTH OF RUDRA, 34–36

THE EPIC MYTH OF THE TRIPLE CITY, 37

THE PURĀŅIC MYTHS OF liṅga-WORSHIP, 38–40

THE PURĀŅIC MYTHS OF ŚIVA AND PĀRVATĪ, 41–45

THE SAGE MAŅKAŅAKA DANCES FOR ŚIVA, 46

V VIṢŅU, 47–63

THE VEDIC AVATAR OF VIṢŅU: THE DWARF, 47–49

THE BRĀHMAŅA AVATARS: THE FISH AND THE BOAR, 50–55

THE EPIC AVATARS: RĀMA AND KŖṢŅA, 56–61

THE PURĀŅIC AVATARS: THE BUDDHA AND KALKIN, 62–63

VI DEVĪ, THE GODDESS, 64–69

VII GODS AND DEMONS, 70–75

VEDIC MYTHOLOGY: THE BATTLE FOR IMMORTALITY, 70–7I

EPIC MYTHOLOGY: THE CHURNING OF THE OCEAN, 72

PURĀŅIC MYTHOLOGY: THE SECRET OF IMMORTALITY, 73–75

APPENDICES

A Abbreviations

B Selected Bibliography

C Bibliographical Notes

D Glossary and Index of Proper Names

HINDU MYTHS

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

WENDY DONIGER was born in New York in 1940 and trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham before beginning the study of Sanskrit at Radcliffe College in 1958. She holds doctoral degrees in Indian literature from Harvard and Oxford universities, and is now the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Shiva: The Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts; Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities; Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes; Mythologies, an English edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Dictionnaire des Mythologies; and, most recently, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1999) and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000). She has also translated The Rig Veda and (with Brian K. Smith) The Laws of Manu for Penguin Classics.

Hindu Myths

A Sourcebook translated from

The Sanskrit

with an Introduction and Notes by

WENDY DONIGER

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 1975

5

Copyright © Wendy Doniger, 1975

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EISBN: 978–0–141–90375–0

for Denny and Mike

Guide to Pronunciation

Sanskrit vowels are pronounced very much like Italian vowels, with the exception of the short a, which is pronounced like the u in the English word ‘but’: long ā is pronounced like the a in ‘father’.

As for the consonants a reasonable approximation will be obtained by pronouncing c as in ‘church’, j as in ‘jungle’, ṣ as in ‘shun’, s as in ‘sun’, ś as something halfway between the other two s’s.

The aspirated consonants should be pronounced distinctly; bh as in ‘cab-horse’, dh as in ‘mad-house’, gh as in ‘dog-house’, ph as in ‘top-hat’, and th as in ‘goat-herd’. ṛ is a vowel, pronounced midway between ‘ri’ as in ‘rivet’ and ‘er’ as in ‘father’.

INTRODUCTION

Chaos out of Order

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Second Coming (1921)

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest (1611–12)

EVERY Hindu myth is different; all Hindu myths are alike. In spite of the deep-seated, totally compelling world-view that moulds every image and symbol, every word and idea of any Hindu myth, in spite of the stress placed upon traditional form at the expense of the individual artist, each myth celebrates the belief that the universe is boundlessly various, that everything occurs simultaneously, that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other. This concept is consciously expressed in at least one myth (myth 9 of this collection, p. 46): the creatures that the lord created were ‘harmful or benign, gentle or cruel, full of dharma or adharma, truthful or false. And when they are created again, they will have these qualities; and this pleased him. The lord Creator himself diversified the variety and differentiation of all the objects of the senses, properties, and forms.’

In making the present selection, I have tried to give the reader as varied a taste of this delicious repast as possible: indeed, at times I fear the mixture may be a bit too rich and highly spiced for the unsuspecting browser, for Hindu mythology is a feast perhaps better suited to the gourmand than to the gourmet. Yet in spite of all attempts to preserve this essential variety, the pattern of the mythology has emerged and reasserted itself. The more myths one encounters, the more the basic themes seem to be reinforced; no matter what direction one sets out in, one is drawn back again and again to this centre of gravity, the still centre, the eye of the storm, just as Alice found herself always walking back in at the door of the Looking Glass House no matter what part of the magic garden she had hoped to reach.

The content of this pattern is merely another aspect of the form out of which it emerges, the tension between variety and pattern: the resolution of chaos into order, and its dissolution back into chaos. The reader will note that most of the myths in this collection are about birth or death, usually about both; this preponderance does not merely reflect the tastes of the translator, nor the peculiarities of Hinduism, but is basic to the concerns of mythology everywhere. The way that the Hindu myths deal with these basic concerns, however, is not so universal and merits closer scrutiny.

It is almost a truism in most mythologies that the act of creation is the process of developing order out of chaos. This traditionalist view that reveres order and fears chaos is mirrored in Yeats’s famous description of a destructive anarchy: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ One may even point out – recalling Yeats’s love of Indian mythology – the Hindu symbolism of the falcon (myth 73, p. 281) and the blood-dimmed tide of the doomsday flood (myth 51, p. 183). Traditional Hindu philosophy accepted these values, which can be detected at the heart of several of the creation myths translated here; the Hindu universe is a closed system, a ‘world-egg’ with a rigid shell, so that nothing is ever ‘created’ ex nihilo; rather, things are constantly rearranged, each put in its proper place, and by doing this – propping apart heaven and earth, distinguishing male from female, separating the classes of mankind on earth – ordered life emerges out of lifeless chaos. Thus the disparate energies of the gods are combined and reintegrated in order to create the chariot of Śiva (myth 37, pp. 131–2) or the Goddess herself (myth 64, p. 241).

But against this Apollonian structure there flows another, Dionysian, current in Indian thought, which views the act of creation as the transformation of order into chaos. Only when living creatures are in conflict – the gentle against the cruel, the truthful against the false – only when the powers of evil are allowed to rise up against the powers of good (albeit only to be inevitably, if temporarily, quelled), only when death exists to threaten life, can life realize its full value. This philosophy is reflected in Freud’s discussion of the pleasure and pain principle: the death instinct, Thanatos, seeks always to regress to an earlier stage when all was in perfect order, before disintegration and differentiation took place, but the life principle, Eros, strives forward into further chaos.

The orthodox, Apollonian, order-oriented Hindu view of time regards the Golden Age, the Kṛta Yuga, as having occurred in the distant past, and tries to recapture it. Similarly, classical Indian philosophy has always followed the Thanatos principle and rejected the principle of Eros; the ideal state, the goal, is the reintegration of the self into the perfect whole, the ‘release’ of the individual life force from the debasing influence of the senses so that it may be reabsorbed into the un-differentiated godhead. This is the ‘blowing out of the flame’ (nirvāņa). But the force of mythology often goes directly against the grain of philosophy, revering the flame of life more than the ocean of release. Although the tenets of classical Indian philosophy often form the basis from which the Hindu myths depart, the myths do in fact depart and range far afield; myth carefully builds up the assumptions of philosophy only to tear them down with equal care, like Penelope unravelling at night what she had woven by day.

‘Things fall apart’ – this state of chaos in the myths is no longer a threat to life but the only premiss on which life can take place. Things fall apart when the primeval Man is dismembered – and the human race is created (myth 2, pp. 27–8); things fall apart when Satī’s corpse is torn limb from limb – and her shrines appear on earth (myth 67, p. 251); things fall apart when Agni is distributed among plants and animals, giving fire to mankind (myths 30–32, pp. 99–104), or when Śiva’s fever is dispersed so that it will not destroy the universe (myth 35, p. 122). Things fall apart when the seed of Agni is divided, or the Six Embryos are divided, in order to give birth to Skanda (myth 33, p. 110) or Kṛṣņa (myth 57, pp. 207–11). The disintegration into primal elements which appears to signify death is in fact the first step of the life transformation; that which seems to ‘fade’ actually undergoes Shakespeare’s ‘sea-change into something rich and strange’. For the sea is the womb of the Hindu universe, and to return to the womb is to die. The cosmic waters are the ultimate undifferentiated form of order – death. But when the ocean is churned into chaos (myth 72, pp. 275–8), the life forces – good and evil, ambrosia and poison – undergo their sea-change and are set free.

Problems and Methods

SOURCES

The major sources of Hindu mythology in the ancient and medieval periods are a series of texts composed in Sanskrit, an Indo-European language closely related to Greek and Latin. The earliest source – and, indeed, the earliest known Indo-European document – is the Ŗg Veda, a collection of more than a thousand sacrificial hymns dedicated to a pantheon of gods and handed down orally for many centuries before they were consigned to writing. The next important texts are the Brāhmaņas, elaborate, often stupefyingly detailed priestly treatises which deal with mythology only in order to elucidate ritual. An entirely new corpus of legends is introduced in the Mahābhārata, the great Epic of India, a compendium of over 100,000 verses (ten times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined); here, interwoven with the main thread of the Epic battle between the Pāņḍavas and their cousins the Kauravas, are numerous myths as well as dynastic histories of obscure kings, explicit recipes for ritual offerings, hairsplitting philosophical arguments, and tedious discussions of caste law. The Rāmāyaņa, the other great Sanskrit Epic, is far more homogeneous than the Mahābhārata, shorter and more sophisticated in its literary style; the core of the poem narrates the adventures of Rāma, but the first and last books (later accretions) incorporate many important myths.

By far the most extensive sources of Hindu mythology, however, are the eighteen ‘great’ Purāņas and the numerous ‘minor’ Purāņas, veritable encyclopedias of Indian thought. Most Purāņas have a strong sectarian bias, so that the same myths appear in very different versions in different Purāņas. During the many centuries of the recension of the Sanskrit Epics and Purāņas, a number of classical myths were retold – and other local South Indian texts composed – in Tamil; this large body of literature is as yet largely untranslated and untapped, a deficit which the present work is unfortunately not prepared to remedy.¹ The Purāņas remain the basis of most ‘modern’ Hindu retellings of the myths, which seldom deviate far in any essential point from the spirit – or, indeed, from the letter – of the traditional texts. More significant divergences may be found in the mythologies of the isolated, primitive tribes of India, which often utilize Hindu motifs but transform them into different, sometimes almost unrecognizable tales when absorbing them into their non-Hindu ideological frameworks.²

DATES

The myths translated in this collection range in date from before the twelfth century B.C. (the Ŗg Veda) to after the sixteenth century A.D. (the late Purāņas). In tracing the historical developments of the myths, it would be most useful to be able to compare the earlier and later versions of the stories; it is, however, impossible to arrive at any accurate estimate of their dates. The primary obstacle is inherent in the subject matter: the myths do not have dates; since the Epics and Purāņas represent an oral tradition that was constantly revised over a period of several thousand years, a passage actually composed in the twelfth century A.D. may represent a surprisingly accurate preservation of a myth handed down since the twelfth century B.C. – or a completely original retelling of that myth. The second obstacle is a technical one: we cannot be certain of the dates of the various texts in which the myths occur. The ancient Indians did not care to include in their sacred works sufficient worldly references to historical events to allow us to date them; even in those rare instances where datable material is present, its value is greatly undercut by the realization that, since many of the works were subject to frequent interpolations over a period of many centuries, two adjacent passages may have been composed hundreds of years apart, and any ‘date’ we may have established applies only to the short passage where the factual data occur. The absence of critical editions of most of the Purāņas greatly compounds this problem, but even the best critical editions cannot build a firm chronological structure upon the shifting sands of oral tradition.

The dating of the Purāņas is thus an art – it can hardly be called a science – unto itself. Yet in spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles, many Indologists have undertaken this Heraclean – one might even say Augean – task. In addition to many articles in scholarly journals, the most useful sources for the study of the dates of the Epics and Purāņas are the works of Farquhar, Gonda, Hazra, Kirfel, Pargiter, Pusalker, and Winternitz.³ Their estimates vary widely, often to the extent of more than a thousand years, but in general they agree upon several broad areas of Indian mythology: Ŗg Veda (c. 1200 B.C.); Atharva Veda and Brāhmaņas (c. 900 B.C.); Upaniṣads (c. 700 B.C.); Mahābhārata (300 B.C. to A.D. 300); Rāmāyaņa (200 B.C. to A.D. 200); early Purāņas (Brahmāņda, Harivaṃśa, Mārkaņḍeya, Matsya, Vāyu, Viṣņu: A.D. 300–500); middle Purāņas (Agni, Bhāgavata, Devī, Garuda, Kūrma, Liṅga, Saura, Vāmana, Varāha: A.D. 500–1000); and late Purāņas (all others, A.D. 1000–1500).

One hesitates to spill yet more ink in this chimerical pursuit, but a broad outline of the most likely approximate dates of recension of the relevant sources may be of use to the general reader:

Ŗg Veda: 1200 B.C.; Sāyaņa’s commentary, A.D. 1350.

Atharva Veda: 900 B.C.

Brāhmaņas: 900–700 B.C.

Upaniṣads: 700 B.C.

Nirukta of Yāska: 500 B.C.

Bṛhaddevatā of Śaunaka: 450 B.C.

Mahābhārata: 300 B.C.–A.D. 300.

Rāmāyaņa: 200 B.C.–A.D. 200.

Purāņas (in alphabetical order. All dates are A.D.): Agni: 850; Bhāgavata: 950; Bhaviṣya: 500–1200; Brahma, 900–1350; Brahmāņḍa: 350–950; Brahmavaivarta: 750–1550; Bṛhaddharma: 1250; Bṛhannaradīya: 750–900; Devī: 550–650; Devībhāgavata: 850–1350; Garuḍa: 900; Harivaṃśa: 450; Kālikā: 1350; Kalki: 1500–1700; Kūrma: 550–850; Liṅga: 600–1000; Mahābhāgavata: 1100; Mārkaņḍeya: 250 (but the Devīmāhātmya section, from which myth 66 is taken, is a later interpolation, c. 550); Matsya: 250–500; Narasiṃha: 400–500; Padma: 750 (except for the Sṛṣṭi Khaņḍa, which is earlier, c. 600); Sāmba: 500–800; Saura: 950–1150; Śiva: 750–1350 (with great variation between individual Khaņḍas); Skanda: 700–1150 (also with great variations); Vāmana: 450–900; Varāha: 750; Vāyu: 350; Viṣņu: 450.

SELECTION

Any selection of texts from such a rich treasury of mythology is necessarily arbitrary, and I must confess to having chosen many myths simply because I like them. But I have tried to strike a balance between variety and pattern – to select myths of as many different types as possible while remaining within the mainstream of Hindu tradition, so that all the myths, however various, fit somewhere within the general pattern which underlies that tradition. I have included some myths from each major period of religious development: some fairly long (19, 25, 33, 37, 72, 75), some consisting of a single verse (13a, 14a, 21, 53) or a short passage (1, 17, 20, 47, 52); some famous and already anthologized (2, 58–61, 72), others obscure even to scholars (11, 12, 42, 69); some in ‘critical editions’ (26, 28, 35, 56), others with interpolations rejected by these editions (8, 25, 32–3, 37, 40, 72, 74); some – about two thirds – from works available in translation, the other third from untranslated works. (I have made my own translations of all of the myths in this collection, but the reader may use the existing translations, despite their occasional inaccuracies, to supply the full context of a myth or to indicate the main points of other variants.) I have also tried to choose myths of different types: some straightforward, almost primitive in their simplicity (1, 27, 50, 73), others more elaborate and sophisticated both in language and in concept (8, 18, 37, 56, 62, 68); some deeply devotional (39, 54, 59, 66), others almost satirical in their attitude toward the gods (12, 28, 40, 55, 68, 75).

In order to demonstrate how myths develop in the course of time, and how different changes can be rung upon a single theme, I have thought it best to translate groups of myths about a few of the most important Hindu gods, rather than to offer single myths about unrelated minor gods (though these figures do appear in supporting roles in the course of the collection). Implicit in this point is a rather arbitrary principle of selection that should be admitted at the outset: these myths are about gods, rather than about men or ideas. This is in part a practical rule of thumb which facilitates a greater focus on a pattern that might be obscured by the inclusion of some of the thousands of Indian legends and fables; but, more important, I think it can be well argued as a matter of principle that, just as ‘biography is about chaps’, so mythology is about gods. The range of texts upon which I have drawn for this collection is, in spite of its great extent in time and sheer volume, a coherent body of literature concerning an interrelated group of figures who, rather like a repertory theatre group, fill all the major parts in the cosmic drama, exchanging roles from time to time and sometimes undergoing significant character developments, but always remaining in character.

As the Hindu gods are ‘immortal’ only in a very particular sense – for they are born, and they die – they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals only in a few trivial details (gods do not sweat or blink, for example) and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however ‘archetypal’ his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces. For this reason, stories about gods – to which I would restrict the use of the term ‘myths’ – have an impact totally different from that of stories about men – which I would call ‘legends’, and I have limited my selection to the former.

This yardstick has necessarily excluded a number of famous and important Hindu stories about men which might otherwise have been considered myths: the story of Śunaḥśepha, who was offered as a human sacrificial victim until the gods themselves rescued him at the last minute;⁴ the tale of Yayāti, whose infidelity to Devayānī brought upon him the curse of premature old age from her father Śukra (see myth 74, pp. 282–9), whereupon Yayāti – in order to make love to a nymph sent to seduce him – transferred his infirmity to one of his five sons, whom he later restored to youth;⁵ the legend of Sagara, whose sacrificial horse was stolen and carried away to the subterranean regions, after which Sagara’s sixty thousand sons dug down for it (creating the great chasm known as the ocean) and were burnt to ashes, to be revived later by the Ganges’ descent from heaven;⁶ the story of Ŗṣyaśṛṅga, who lived in the forest unaware of the existence of women until a courtesan (whom he mistook for an ascetic like himself) seduced him and brought him to court in order to put an end to a drought.⁷ These stories do indeed shed considerable light upon the human condition, particularly upon the ideas of life and death encountered in the myths, but they do not explain the causes of the great events of life in terms of the function of divine powers as effectively as do the myths centring upon the gods. The Hindus themselves consigned the legends of Śunaḥśepha and the others to the parts of the Purāņas dealing with ‘history’ – the histories of the solar and lunar dynasties – in contrast with the stories of the gods, which they grouped under the headings of cosmic creation and destruction.

TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION

In translating the myths, I have remained as literal as possible, allowing the texts to speak for themselves in their own idiom. I have added nothing but a few names or pronouns to clarify oblique references and occasional glosses on obscure epithets, and I have omitted nothing but long hymns of praise. Footnotes provide only the information necessary for an understanding of the myth; other terms and names, as well as glosses on repetitions of terms first explained in footnotes, will be found in the glossary (Appendix D). Introductory material has been kept to a minimum, merely supplying the essential factual background, establishing the context of each myth, and pointing out links with other myths; in this way, it is hoped that the reader will discover his own patterns and meanings directly from the texts.

There is no single ‘basic’ version of a Hindu myth; each is told and retold with a number of minor and major variations over the years. I have translated several variants of some myths where significant changes have taken place in the course of historical development (myths 10–11, 24–6, 29–33, 47–9, 52–5); in other instances I have chosen a typical variant (or, occasionally, an atypical variant, such as myths 11, 35, 36, 41, 55, 67, and 75). For those readers who wish to read other versions of the myths or to acquaint themselves with some of the interpretations offered by other scholars, a further bibliography is provided for each myth (Appendix C) as well as a general bibliography of Indian mythology (Appendix B).

Whether the reader chooses to accept the scattered hints of my own approach to the myths, or to consult the opinions of other scholars, or to seek in the myths the answers to his own questions, he would be well advised to remember that a myth, by its very nature, has no one single meaning. The elemental simplicity of its plot, the transparent innocence of its world-view, allows a good myth to function like a perfect prism through which are refracted simultaneously all the possible ways of regarding the problems encountered in the myth. The first level that we encounter is the narrative, usually quite a good story, though often with a rather predictable ending. Closely related is the divine level, which concerns mythology as it used to be understood by scholars of the classics: the metaphorical struggles of divine powers and personalities. Above this is the cosmic level of the myth, the expression of universal laws and processes, of metaphysical principles and symbolic truths. And below it, shading off into folklore, is the human level, the search for meaning in human life. Great myths are richly ambiguous and elusive; their truths cannot be filed away into the scholar’s neat categories.⁸ Moreover, myths are living organisms that change constantly; the tale of Indra and Vṛtra in the Ŗg Veda (myth 24, pp. 74–6) does not have the same ‘meaning’ as the tale of Indra and Vṛtra in the Mahābhārata (myth 26, pp. 86–90); nor do either of these myths mean to me today what they meant when I first read them some fifteen years ago.

In harnessing these myths, exotic and inspired creatures that they are, to the leaden yoke of the critical apparatus, having already lamed them with my own prosaic translation, I hope that I have not belaboured all the life out of them.⁹ Indeed, I take heart from the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has said that while poetry may be lost in translation, ‘the mythical value of myths remains preserved through the worst translation’.¹⁰

Acknowledgements

It was my father who first suggested that I write this book; but it was not until my friend A. J. Sherman independently hit upon the idea, and cheered me on in the enterprise, that I decided to undertake it. Since then, Richard Gombrich, Raymond Allchin, Betty Radice, Susan Gorodetsky, David Shulman, and Audrey Hayley have made a number of extremely useful suggestions, and my husband has tirelessly feigned interest in the hundreds of oral variations on each theme to which I have subjected him. To all of them, my gratitude and thanks.

 1 

PRAJĀPATI AND BRAHMĀ

Creation in the Ŗg Veda

To begin at the beginning of both the story and the telling of the story, one must begin with the mythology of creation as it appears in the Ŗg Veda. The creation hymns – and indeed most of the Ŗg Vedic hymns which allude directly to myths – appear in the two latest books (the first and the tenth), which already show the seeds of the philosophical speculation that was to emerge fully in the Brāhmaņas and Upaniṣads within a few centuries. The most basic form of Vedic cosmogony is implicit in many early hymns, though never explicitly described: it is the formation of distinct elements out of the primeval cosmic flux, the evolution of order out of chaos, the propping apart of heaven and earth. This concept of creation as separation remains at the heart of much of later Hindu mythology (as well as Hindu social thought) and forms the animating spark of the conflict between gods and non-gods (demons or human beings).

INCEST: THE FATHER COMMITS INCEST WITH HIS DAUGHTER

One concept of creation which begins in the Ŗg Veda and persists through later Hindu mythology is the idea of primeval incest. No single hymn tells this story, but scattered references may be collected to give a summary of the Vedic myth, which never actually names the father or the daughter and may simply express in anthropomorphic terms the idea of the One who creates a Second with whom he unites as a pair.¹ Heaven and earth, once so carefully and safely propped apart, meet here in an act which is creative but dangerous.

1. FROM THE Ŗg Veda

As his phallus was stretched out in eagerness for the act of a man, the manly one pulled back. He drew back again from the maiden, his daughter, that tireless phallus which had been thrust in. As they were in the midst of the very act of union, when the father was satisfying his desire for the young girl, the two of them left a little of the out-flowing seed shed upon the back of the earth in the womb of good deeds. When the father shed his seed in his own daughter, he spilt his seed on the earth as he united with her. The benevolent gods created sacred speech and fashioned Rudra Vāstoṣpati, the protector of sacred rites… As Agni² made the seed for the great father, heaven, he entered into the womb, having noticed that she was inclined to him. The hunter shot an arrow at him boldly. The god satisfied his lust in his own daughter… As the heat of passion came to the king for his enjoyment, heaven laid aside on the ground the bright seed that had been spilt. Agni caused to be born the blameless benevolent group of youths³ and made them great… Heaven is my father, the engenderer, the navel here. My mother is this wide earth, my close kin. Between these two outstretched bowls is the womb;⁴ in it the father placed his daughter’s embryo.

PRAJĀPATI AND BRAHMĀ

DISMEMBERMENT: THE PRIMEVAL MAN IS SACRIFICED

One cosmogonic myth is the subject of an entire Ŗg Vedic hymn, which explains original creation as the result of a primeval sacrifice – not a true blood sacrifice, but a dismemberment and distribution; not an actual creation of something out of nothing, but rather a rearrangement, another instance of order out of chaos. The primeval Man is not changed into the various forms of life; rather, he is those forms, always. It is worthy of note that creation produces not only the physical elements of the universe but also the social order, the basis of life in the Hindu view, as well as the seasons and the parts of the very sacrifice from which creation proceeds.

2. FROM THE Ŗg Veda

The Man [Puruṣa] has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. He pervades the earth everywhere and extends beyond for ten fingers’ breadth. The Man himself is all this, whatever has been and whatever is to be. He is the lord of immortality and also lord of that which grows on food. Such is his greatness, and the Man is yet greater than this. All creatures make up a quarter of him; three quarters are the immortal in heaven. With three quarters the Man has risen above, and one quarter of him still remains here, whence he spread out everywhere, pervading that which eats and that which does not eat. From him Virāj⁵ was born, and from Virāj came the Man, who, having been born, ranged beyond the earth before and behind. When the gods spread the sacrifice, using the Man as the offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation. They anointed the Man, the sacrifice, born at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods, Sādhyas, and sages sacrificed. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the clarified butter was obtained, and they made it into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the verses and the chants were born, the metres were born, and the formulas⁶ were born. From it horses were born, and those other animals which have a double set of incisors; cows were born from it, and goats and sheep were born from it.

When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they disperse him? What became of his mouth, what of his arms, what were his two thighs and his two feet called? His mouth was the brahmin, his arms were made into the nobles, his two thighs were the populace, and from his feet the servants⁷ were born. The moon was born from his mind; the sun was born from his eye. From his mouth came Indra⁸ and Agni, and from his vital breath the wind [Vāyu] was born. From his navel the atmosphere was born; from his head the heaven appeared. From his two feet came the earth, and the regions of the sky from his ear. Thus they fashioned the worlds. There were seven enclosing fire-sticks for him, and thrice seven fire-sticks when the gods, spreading the sacrifice, bound down the Man as the sacrificial beast. With this sacrifice the gods sacrificed; these were the first dharmas.⁹ And these powers reached the dome of heaven where dwell the ancient Sādhyas and gods.

Creation in the Brāhmaņas and Upanisads

The Brāhmaņas deal at great length with the question of cosmogony, utilizing the various strands of Ŗg Vedic belief. The incestuous father is now identified as Prajāpati, the lord of creatures, and his seed is cast into the fire in place of the usual liquid oblation – clarified butter or Soma juice – in a form of Vedic sacrifice more sophisticated than the dismemberment of a victim, an actual ritual symbolically re-enacting primeval creation.

INCEST AND OBLATION

Prajāpati commits incest and Rudra is born

A series of Brāhmaņa texts develops the full consequences of the incestuous act, particularly its iniquities and dangers. The astral symbolism which appears in these texts persists in later myths, as do the distinction between the mortal and immortal parts of man, the idea of the distribution of the seed into various life forms (concepts already present in nuce in the hymn of the dismemberment of the cosmic Man), and the use of false etymologies and word-play upon names.

3. FROM THE Aitareya Brāhmaņa

Prajāpati approached his daughter; some say she was the sky, others that she was the dawn. He became a stag and approached her, as she had taken the