Great Indian Religion

Author(s): G T Bettany
Publisher: Ward Lock Bowden and Co

Page 74

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MODERN HINDUISM. to respect for common humanity of black and white alike; for Krishna is the teacher of Arjuna, “white."
This doctrine about Krishna brings into view the essential link by which the intellectual Brahmans connected Immortality their higher philosophy with the common be
taught. liefs of the people. Krishna manifests the noblest traits of Hindu genius; he also condescends to the most ordinary pursuits of men and children, and even to sportive recreation. The higher doctrine of immortality is preached in such passages as the following in the Bhagavad-gita, “ There is an invisible, eternal existence, beyond this visible, which does not perish when all things else perish, even when the great days of Brahman's creative life pass round into night, and all that exists in form returns unto God whence it came; they who obtain this never return.... Bright as the sun beyond darkness is He to the soul that remembers Him in meditation, at the hour of death, with thought fixed between the brows,-Him the most ancient of the wise, the primal ruler, the minutest atom, the sustainer of all, —in the hour when each finds that same nature on which he meditates, and to which he is conformed...They who put their trust in me, and seek deliverance from decay and death, know Brahma, and the highest spirit, and every action. They who know me in my being, my person, and my manifested life, in the hour of death, know me indeed.”
The other great epic poem, the Ramayana, or the goings of Rama, is a chronicle which relates primarily to
The another region of Aryan conquest, Oudh, and Ramayana. then recounts the advance of the Aryans into Southern India. It represents perhaps a later stage than the earlier parts of the Mahabharata, but was arranged into something like its present form a century earlierperhaps about the beginning of the third century B.C. Like the sister epic, it presents the Brahman idea of the Godhead in the form of an incarnation, Rama, of Vishnu, to destroy a demon. Briefly stated, the story is as follows. It begins by relating the sonlessness of the king of Oudh, a descendant of the sun-god. After a sacrifice to the