Dhammapada

SR No.: 007674
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2540
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 808

xxiv
SATAPATHA-BRAHMANA.
tions, it is pretty evident that the ground-work of many of them goes back to times preceding the composition of the Brahmnanas. From a mythological, and to some extent from a linguistic, point of view these legends thus form a connecting link between the latter and the Vedic hymns. In the case of some of these legends-as those of Sunahsephal and the fetching of the Soma from heaven 2-we can even see how they have grown out of germs contained in the Vedic hymns; their relation to the latter being thus not unlike that of the Sagas of the younger Edda to the songs of the older Edda. The Kaushitaki Brâhmana, at the end of a story of this kind about Soma, remarks that it is thus told by those versed in legend (åkhyånavidan). We may perhaps infer from this passage that there was a class of people who took a special interest in such legends, and made it their business to collect and repeat them. Indeed, many of the elaborate mythical stories with which we meet in the later epical and Purânic literature doubtless owe their origin to simple popular legends of this kind 4.
Besides the genuine myths which we find in the Brahmanas, there is also a large number of stories which were evidently invented by the authors of these treatises for the purpose of supplying some kind of traditional support for particular points of ceremonial 6. However small the intrinsic merit of such passages, they, too, are not entirely devoid of interest, especially from a linguistic point of view, since the style of narrative and the archaic mode of diction which they affect, readily lend themselves to syntactic turns of expression rarely indulged in by the authors in the purely explanatory and exegetic parts of their works. And, indeed, whatever opinion the general reader may form of the Brâhmanas, as purely literary com
See R. Roth in Weber's Ind. Stud. I, 475 seq. ; II, 111 seq.; Max Müller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 408 seq.
See the present volume, p. 183. Compare also Professor Aufrecht's remarks on the myth of Apâlâ, Ind. Stud. IV, p. 8.
3 K. B. III, 25; cf. Weber, Ind. Stud. II, 313. • Cf. Max Müller, Upanishads, I, p. 39 note.
. See, for instance, Sat. Br. II, 4, 3, 1, where a legend of this kind seems to be directly ascribed to Yågñavalkya.
Diglized by Google