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For Krishna, when he ingeniously plots to have Bh[=i]ma slay Jar[=a]sandha, is said to have renounced killing Jar[=a]sandha himself, 'putting Brahm[=a]'s injunction before him' (ii. 22. 36), i.e. recalling Brahm[=a]'s admonition that only Bh[=i]ima was fated to slay the foe. And when Krishna and S[=a]tyaki salute Krishna's elder brother they do so (for being an elder brother Baladeva is Krishna's Guru) respectfully, 'just as Indra and Upendra salute Brahm[=a] the lord of devas (ix. 34. 18). Upendra is Indra's younger brother, i.e., Vishnu (above). But these passages are scanty proof for the statement that Brahm[=a] appears throughout the early epic as the highest god;[30] nor is there even so much evidence as this in the case of Çiva. Here, too, it is in the tale of the churning of ocean, of Sunda and Upasunda, of the creation of the death-power, and in late didactic (Brahmanic) passages, where Brahm[=a] makes Çiva to destroy earth and Çiva is born of Brahm[=a], and only in such tales, or extracts from the Book of Peace, etc, that Brahm[=a] appears as superior. In all other cases, in the real action of the epic, he is subordinate to Vishnu and Çiva whenever he is compared with them. When he is not compared he appears, of course, as the great old Father-god who creates and foresees, but even here he is not untouched by passion, he is not all-knowing, and his rôle as Creator is one that, with the allotment of duties among the gods, does not make him the highest god. All the old gods are great till greater appear on the scene. There is scarcely a supreme Brahm[=a) in the epic itself, but there is a great Brahm[=a], and a greater (older) than the sectarian gods in the old Brahmanic legends, while the old Brahmanhood reasserts itself sporadically in the Ç[ra]nti, etc, and tells how the sectarian gods became supreme, how they quarrelled and laid the strife.
Since the adjustment of the relations between the persons of the later trinity is one of the most important questions in the theology of the completed epic, it will be necessary to go a little further afield and see what the latest books, which hitherto we have refrained as much as possible from citing, have to say on the subject. As it seems to be true that it was felt necessary by the Civaite to offset the laud of Vishnu by antithetic laud of Çiva,[31] so after the completion of the Book of Peace, itself a late addition to the epic, and one that is markedly Vishnuitic, there was, before the Genealogy of Vishnu, an antithetic Book of Law, which is as markedly Çivaitic. In these books one
