Bruhat Katha kosha

Author(s): Harishen Acharya,
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

Page 39

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BṚHAT-KATHAKOSA
an enormous amount of religion and ritual which are connected very little with morality. Sacrifice assumes the form of a magnificent mechanism through which gods fulfil the worldly wishes of the sacrificer; and his enemies, on that very account, are made to suffer. In order to explain some sacrificial ceremony and its efficacy, to celebrate the greatness of gods and their bounty, to sing the praise of ancient heroes and to impress on the audience the important rôle of the priestly art, ancient tales, myths and legends are narrated here and there. Despite their professed association with priestly ends and sacrificial cult, some of the tales do contain popular elements. The myth of Pururavas and Urvasi, the tale of Hariścandra and the sacrificial victim Sunaśśepa, the legend about Prajapati are certainly interesting as narrative pieces. The nucleus of the basic story is hard to be detected from the exhuberant elaboration of the tale narrated to explain, justify and glorify some sacrificial ceremony. In fact the beginning of the epic poetry, with its manifold aspects, reaches back to this narrative stratum of the Brahmanic texts.
In
Coming to the Upanisads we enter altogether a different world. the intellectual life of the Upanisads, the priest is receding back and almost a new horizon is in view. A note of unity in theology, a complaint against the vanity of barren sacrifices and monopoly of all knowledge by the priest, yearning for the highest knowledge setting aside the conventional social disabilities, attempt to explain worldly inequality not from the favour and frown of the gods but from one's own deeds and according to the doctrine of transmigration, a gradual ousting of sacrifices and donations by pursuit of higher knowledge and asceticism, use of repeated ethico-moral exhortations to guide man as a member of the society: these are some of the outstanding traits of Upanisaḍs which distinguish them from the Brahmanas. To explain the origin of this fresh orientation in thought Winternitz remarks: "While, then, Brahmans were pursuing their barren sacrificial science, other circles were already engaged upon those highest questions which were at last treated so admirably in the Upanisads. From these circles, which originally were not connected with the priestly caste, proceeded the forest-hermits and wandering ascetics, who not only renounced the world and its pleasures, but also kept aloof from the sacrifices and ceremonies of the Brahmans. Different sects, more or less opposed to Brahmanism, were soon formed from these same circles, among which sects the Buddhists attained to such great fame." The Upanisadic stratum of literature, especially in the older tract, supplies us with some interesting narratives such as the dispute between Gärgi and Yajnavalkya, the story of Satyakāma Jābāla and the incidents about Ksatriyas like Pravahana and Aśvapati. Some of these deserve to be remembered as intellectual heroes of ancient India.
In the post-vedic Indian literature, there are three great narrative streams, which have already attracted the attention of critical scholars, viz.,
1 A History of Indian Literature, I, p. 231.