Hindu myths, p.1
Hindu Myths, page 1
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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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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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 foll
‘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).
