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Scarcely less important was the influence of the great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata with their doctrine of Trimurti and the incarnations of Vishnu in the national heroes. This conciliated the soldier caste, subsidized the most popular characters in Hindu tradition, at the same time that it made them tenfold more glorious than before.
The inference seems to be that it was accepted as part of Hinduism just about the time that our edition of the Mahâbhârata was compiled. The old theory that it was borrowed from aboriginal and especially from Dravidian tribes is now discredited. In the first place the instances cited of phallic worship among aboriginal tribes are not particularly numerous or striking.
Antique in simplicity, singleness, superabundance of life, and in a sort of naturalism which is not of to-day; unselfconscious, trustful in others, forgiving, incapable of fear, abounding in compassion, Garibaldi's true place is not in the aggregation of facts which we call history, but in the apotheosis of character which we call the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Edda, the cycles of Arthur and of Roland, and the Romancero del Cid.
They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination. What is the Bible?
The braying of the battle conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life. This poem, like the Mahabharata, has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the Ramayana grew by the re-telling of old ones.
In the greatest of the ancient Hindu poems the sacred book of the Mahabharata there is a passage of exceptional beauty and tenderness, which records the reception of King Yudishthira at the gate of Paradise.
Instead of depending, however, on my own intelligence, I have consulted several friends who have read the Mahabharata thoroughly. The grammatical structure is easy. The only difficulty consists in the second half of the sloka. The meaning, however, I have given is consistent with the tenor of Bhishma's advice. Indicating the unobstructed completion of the sacrifice.
Many legends are connected with them which remind us of those of Europe, some attributing their erection to dwarfs or rants, to fairies or to genii, whilst others think they were the work of the Kauranas and Pandaves, the celebrated families whose long struggle is described in the Mahabharata, and were probably aboriginal races of the continent.
In 1799 we find him reading the Mahabharata epic with the hope of finding some allusion or fact which might enable him to equate Hindoo chronology with reliable history, as Dr. John Wilson of Bombay and James Prinsep did a generation later, by the discovery of the name of Antiochus the Great in two of the edicts of Asoka, written on the Girnar rock.
Carey and Joshua Marshman." Until Gorresio published his edition and Italian translation of the whole poem this was the first and only attempt to open the seal of the second great Sankrit epic to the European world. In 1802 Carey had encouraged the publication at his own press of translations of both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Bengali.
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