The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse
766 Frequent mention has been made of the three steps of Vishṇu
typifying the rising, culmination, and setting of the sun.
767 For the _Churning of the Sea_, see Book I, Canto XLV.
768 Kuvera, the God of Wealth.
769 The architect of the gods.
770 Garuḍa, son of Vinatá, the sovereign of the birds.
771 “The well winged one,” Garuḍa.
772 The god of the sea.
773 Mahendra is chain of mountains generally identified with part of the
Gháts of the Peninsula.
774 Mátariśva is identified with Váyu, the wind.
775 Of course not equal to the whole earth, says the Commentator, but
equal to Janasthán.
776 This appears to be the Indian form of the stories of Phaethon and
Dædalus and Icarus.
777 According to the promise, given him by Brahmá. See Book I, Canto
XIV.
778 In the Bengal recension the fourth Book ends here, the remaining
Cantos being placed in the fifth.
779 Each chief comes forward and says how far he can leap. Gaja says he
can leap ten yojans. Gavaksha can leap twenty. Gavaya thirty, and so
on up to ninety.
780 Prahláda, the son of Hiraṇyakaśipu, was a pious Datya remarkable for
his devotion to Vishṇu, and was on this account persecuted by his
father.
781 The Bengal recension calls him Aríshṭanemi’s brother. “The
commentator says ‘Aríshṭanemi is Aruṇa.’ Aruṇa the charioteer of the
sun is the son of Kaśyapa and Vinatá and by consequence brother of
Garuḍa, called Vainateya from Vinatá, his mother.” GORRESSIO.
782 A nymph of Paradise.
783 Hanu or Hanú means jaw. Hanumán or Hanúmán means properly one with a
large jaw.
784 Vishṇu, the God of the Three Steps.
785 Náráyaṇ, “He who moved upon the waters,” is Vishnu. The allusion is
to the famous three steps of that God.
786 The Milky Way.
787 This Book is called Sundar or the Beatiful. To a European taste it
is the most intolerably tedious of the whole poem, abounding in
repetition, overloaded description, and long and useless speeches
which impede the action of the poem. Manifest interpolations of
whole Cantos also occur. I have omitted none of the action of the
Book, but have occasionally omitted long passages of common-place
description, lamentation, and long stories which have been again and
again repeated.
788 Brahmá the Self-Existent.
789 Maináka was the son of Himálaya and Mená or Menaká.
790 Thus Milton makes the hills of heaven self-moving at command:
“At his command the uprooted hills retired
Each to his place, they heard his voice and went
Obsequious”
791 The spirit of the mountain is separable from the mountain. Himalaya
has also been represented as standing in human form on one of his
own peaks.
792 Ságar or the Sea is said to have derived its name from Sagar. The
story is fully told in Book I, Cantos XLII, XLIII, and XLIV.
793 Kritu is the first of the four ages of the world, the golden age,
also called Satya.
_ 794 Parvata_ means a mountain and in the Vedas a cloud. Hence in later
mythology the mountains have taken the place of the clouds as the
objects of the attacks of Indra the Sun-God. The feathered king is
Garuḍa.
795 “The children of Surasá were a thousand mighty many-headed serpents,
traversing the sky.” WILSON’S _Vishṇu Puráṇa_, Vol. II. p. 73.
796 She means, says the Commentator, pursue thy journey if thou can.
797 If Milton’s spirits are allowed the power of infinite self-extension
and compression the same must be conceded to Válmíki’s supernatural
beings. Given the power as in Milton the result in Válmíki is
perfectly consistent.
798 “Daksha is the son of Brahmá and one of the Prajápatis or divine
progenitors. He had sixty daughters, twenty-seven of whom married to
Kaśyapa produced, according to one of the Indian cosmogonies, all
mundane beings. Does the epithet, Descendant of Daksha, given to
Surasá, mean that she is one of those daughters? I think not. This
epithet is perhaps an appellation common to all created beings as
having sprung from Daksha.” GORRESSIO.
799 Sinhiká is the mother of Ráhu the dragon’s head or ascending node,
the chief agent in eclipses.
800 According to De Gubernatis, the author of the very learned,
ingenious, and interesting though too fanciful _Zoological
Mythology_. Hanumán here represents the sun entering into and
escaping from a cloud. The biblical Jonah, according to him,
typifies the same phenomenon. Sá’dí, speaking of sunset, says _Yùnas
andar-i-dihán-imáhi shud_: Jonas was within the fish’s mouth. See
ADDITIONAL NOTES.
801 The Buchanania Latifolia.
802 The Bauhinia Variegata.
803 Through the power that Rávaṇ’s stern mortifications had won for him
his trees bore flowers and fruit simultaneously.
804 Viśvakarmá is the architect of the Gods.
805 So in Paradise Lost Satan when he has stealthily entered the garden
of Eden assumes the form of a cormorant.
806 Priests who fought only with the weapons of religion, the sacred
grass used like the verbena of the Romans at sacred rites and the
consecrated fire to consume the offering of ghee.
807 One of the Rákshas lords.
808 The brother Rávaṇ.
809 Indra’s elephant.
810 Rávaṇ’s palace appears to have occupied the whole extent of ground,
and to have contained within its outer walls the mansions of all the
great Rákshas chiefs. Rávaṇ’s own dwelling seems to have been
situated within the enchanted chariot Pushpak: but the description
is involved and confused, and it is difficult to say whether the
chariot was inside the palace or the palace inside the chariot.
811 Pushpak from _pushpa_ a flower. The car has been mentioned before in
Rávaṇ’s expedition to carry off Sítá, Book III, Canto XXXV.
812 Lakshmí is the wife of Vishṇu and the Goddess of Beauty and
Felicity. She rose, like Aphrodite, from the foam of the sea. For an
account of her birth and beauty, see Book I, Canto XLV.
813 Viśvakarmá is the architect of the Gods, the Hephaestos or Mulciber
of the Indian heaven.
814 Rávaṇ in the resistless power which his long austerities had endowed
him with, had conquered his brother Kuvera the God of Gold and taken
from him his greatest treasure this enchanted car.
815 Like Milton’s heavenly car, “Itself instinct with spirit.”
816 Women, says Válmíki. But the Commentator says that automatic figures
only are meant. Women would have seen Hanumán and given the alarm.
817 Rávaṇ had fought against Indra and the Gods, and his body was still
scarred by the wounds inflicted by the tusks of Indra’s elephant and
by the fiery bolts of the Thunderer.
818 The Vasus are a class of eight deities, originally personifications
of natural phenomena.
819 The Maruts are the winds or Storm-Gods.
820 The Ádityas originally seven deities of the heavenly sphere of whom
Varuṇa is the chief. The name Áditya was afterwards given to any
God, specially to Súrya the Sun.
821 The Aśvins are the Heavenly Twins, the Castor and Pollux of the
Hindus.
822 The poet forgets that Hanumán has reduced himself to the size of a
cat.
823 Sítá “not of woman born,” was found by King Janak as he was turning
up the ground in preparation for a sacrifice. See Book II, Canto
CXVIII.
824 The six _Angas_ or subordinate branches of the Vedas are 1.
_Sikshá_, the science of proper articulation and pronunciation: 2.
_Chhandas_, metre: 3. _Vyákarana_, linguistic analysis or grammar:
4. _Nirukta_, explanation of difficult Vedic words: 5. _Jyotishṭom_,
Astronomy, or rather the Vedic Calendar: 6. _Kalpa_, ceremonial.
825 There appears to be some confusion of time here. It was already
morning when Hanumán entered the grove, and the torches would be
needless.
826 Rávaṇ is one of those beings who can “climb them as they will,” and
can of course assume the loveliest form to please human eyes as well
as the terrific shape that suits the king of the Rákshases.
827 White and lovely as the Arant or nectar recovered from the depths of
the Milky Sea when churned by the assembled Gods. See Book I, Canto
XLV.
828 Rávaṇ in his magic car carrying off the most beautiful women reminds
us of the magician in _Orlando Furioso_, possesor of the flying
horse.
“Volando talor s’alza ne le stelle,
E poi quasi talor la terra rade;
E ne porta con lui tutte le belle
Donne che trova per quelle contrade.”
829 Indian women twisted their long hair in a single braid as a sign of
mourning for their absent husbands.
830 Janak, king of Míthilá, was Sítá’s father.
831 Hiraṇyakaśipu was a king of the Daityas celebrated for his
blasphemous impieties. When his pious son Prahlada praised Vishṇu
the Daitya tried to kill him, when the God appeared in the
incarnation of the man-lion and tore the tyrant to pieces.
832 Do unto others as thou wouldst they should do unto thee, is a
precept frequently occurring in the old Indian poems. This charity
is to embrace not human beings only, but bird and beast as well: “He
prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.”
833 It was the custom of Indian warriors to mark their arrows with their
ciphers or names, and it seems to have been regarded as a point of
honour to give an enemy the satisfaction of knowing who had shot at
him. This passage however contains, if my memory serves me well, the
first mention in the poem of this practice, and as arrows have been
so frequently mentioned and described with almost every conceivable
epithet, its occurrence here seems suspicious. No mention of, or
allusion to writing has hitherto occurred in the poem.
834 This threat in the same words occurs in Book III, Canto LVI.
835 Rávaṇ carried off and kept in his palace not only earthly princesses
but the daughters of Gods and Gandharvas.
836 The wife of Indra.
837 These four lines have occurred before. Book III, Canto LVI.
838 Prajápatis are the ten lords of created beings first created by
Brahmá; somewhat like the Demiurgi of the Gnostics.
839 “This is the number of the Vedic divinities mentioned in the
Rig-veda. In Ashṭaka I. Súkta XXXIV, the Rishi Hiraṇyastúpa invoking
the Aśvins says: Á Násatyá tribhirekádaśairiha devebniryátam: ‘O
Násatyas (Aśvins) come hither with the thrice eleven Gods.’ And in
Súkta XLV, the Rishi Praskanva addressing his hymn to Agni (ignis,
fire), thus invokes him: ‘Lord of the red steeds, propitiated by our
prayers lead hither the thirty-three Gods.’ This number must
certainly have been the actual number in the early days of the Vedic
religion: although it appears probable enough that the thirty-three
Vedic divinities could not then be found co-ordinated in so
systematic a way as they were arranged more recently by the authors
of the Upanishads. In the later ages of Bramanism the number went on
increasing without measure by successive mythical and religious
creations which peopled the Indian Olympus with abstract beings of
every kind. But through lasting veneration of the word of the Veda
the custom regained of giving the name of ‘the thirty-three Gods’ to