20 HISTORY OF INDIA. [Book IV
AD.— endued with principles of action, depart from their several acts, and the mind
itself becomes inert ; and when they once are absorbed in that supreme essence,
Transmigra- then the divinc soul of all beings withdraws his energy and placidly slumbers ;
tion of the . . . o x ^
soul. then, too, this vital soul, with all the organs of sense and of action, remains
long immersed in darkness, and performs not its natural functions, but migrates from its corporeal frame; when being composed of minute elementary prin- ciples, it enters at once into vegetable or animal seed, it then assumes form. Tlius that immutable Power, by waking and reposing alternately, revivifies and destroys in eternal succession this whole assemblage of locomotive and immoveable creatures." Human Meuu, after this description, prepares to quit the scene. His code of law,
periods. made known to him fully "in the beginning" by Brahma, he taught to the "ten lords of created beings" whom he had produced, and to one of those, Bhrigu, who had learned to recite the whole of it, he assigns the task of com- municating it to the sages "without omission." Bhrigu accordingly becomes the narrator, and continues thus: — "From this Menu, named Swayambhuva, came six descendants, other Menus, each giving birth to a race of his own, all exalted in dignity, eminent in power." The duration of the reign of a Menu or his Manwantara, is calculated as follows: — The sun by his alternate presence and absence, gives mortals their day and night. A month of mortals is a da}^ and a night of the Pitris (or inhabitants of the moon). The division being into two equal halves, "the half beginning from the full moon is their day for actions, and that beginning from the new moon is their night for slumber." A year of mortals "is a day and night of the gods," their day being "the northern, and their night the southern course of the sun." Four thousand years of the gods form a yuga or age of mortals ; but the whole four yugas — the satya, treta, dwapara, and call — are necessary to form an age of the gods, which, of course, includes 12,000 divine years. Multiply this age of the gods by seventy-one, and you have the duration of a Manwantara. It is added that "there are num- berless Manwantaras, creations also, and destructions of worlds." The Being "supremely exalted performs all this as if in sport again and again," and has ample scope for working, because it takes a thousand ages of the gods to form a single day, and another thousand to form a single night of Brahma. The Supreme In the abovc Hindoo cosmogony there is much vagueness and extravagance.
Being of
iimdooiflru. and we look in vain for anything so exj)licit as the first verse of Genesis: — "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ;" or so sublime as its third verse : " God said. Let there be light, and there was light." It is not to be denied, however, that it contrasts favourably with all other heathen cosmogonies, and in some instances so closely resembles the Mosaic record, not only in thought Ijut in language, as to leave little doubt that it has incorporated with its fables frag- ments of the earliest truths communicated by primitive revelation to the human race. The one object on which Menu had his attention fixed when the divine
