United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Her twin sons, Kusa and Lava, are born and entrusted to the care of the sage Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, who brings them up in his hermitage. The boys have no knowledge of their royal descent. An incident now occurs which leads Rama to revisit the Dandaka forest, the scene of his former exile. The child of a Brahman dies suddenly and unaccountably. His body is laid at Rama's door.
This work, which relates to the twelfth century A.D., describes the struggle of the Hindus against their Mohammedan conquerors. The poem of "Ramayana," by Tulsi-Das, and that of the "Ocean of Love," are extremely popular in India. The modern dialects contain many religious and national songs of exquisite beauty and delicacy.
The undoubted works of Aśvaghosha treat the Buddha with ornate but grave rhetoric as the hero of an epic. His progress is attended by miracles such as Indian taste demands, but they hardly exceed the marvels recounted in the Pali scriptures and there is no sign that the hero is identified, as in the Ramayana of Tulsi Das or the Gospel according to St. John, with the divine spirit.
As the name "War of the Bharatas" is applicable, strictly speaking, to only one-fifth part of the whole poem, it is probable that the great epic was not yet known under this title at the time when it was transported from India to Java. The Ramayana appears in a slightly changed form in the Kavi version.
Our prose, he had been telling us, was indicative of our mediocre level of consciousness, so we wrote and rewrote and we tried to revise, guided by his comments in the margin. Stories about Rama a figure from Hindu mythology can be found in the classic Indian text, The Ramayana. The stories portray Rama as a warm, intelligent servant of Truth with enough mystical power to light up a city.
These hills of the Góndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Máhábháráta and Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas.
I would remark in passing that many of the most poetic and striking adjectives in both the Raghu and the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa are borrowed unblushingly from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Padma patrabha-nibha may also mean 'of the splendour of the gem called Marakata. Nilakantha, however, shows that this would militate against the adjective Kankojwalatwacham below.
I had read in the Ramayana of the tribulations of Sita for having left the ring drawn by Lakshman, so it was not possible for me to be sceptical of its potency. Just below the window of this room was a tank with a flight of masonry steps leading down into the water; on its west bank, along the garden wall, an immense banyan tree; to the south a fringe of cocoanut palms.
Dancing has ever been a great institution in Cambodia, the dances, which have behind them traditions of two thousand years, being illustrative of incidents in the poem of the Râmâyana and adhering faithfully to the classical examples which are depicted on the walls of the great temple at Angkor, such as the dancing of the goddess Apsaras, her gestures, and her dress.
Other books on Hinduism to which more or less reference is made, are: "The Vedic Religion," by McDonald; "India and the Indians," by Duff; "The Life and Letters of Colbrooke;" "The Bhagavad Gita," as translated by Chatterji; "The Vishnu Puranas," by Wilson; "The Ramayana," by Griffiths; "Brahmoism," by Bose; "The Oriental Christ," by Mozoomdar; "Christianity and Hindu Philosophy," by Ballantyne.
Word Of The Day