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BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE.
[Chap.
The image of Çiva, as made in clay and marble, in the villages shows the quietness and composure of Buddha, and both are now so like one another! Yet nothing could have been more dissimilar than the original conception of Rudradeva—the Çiva of the Vedas.
Myth and history confounded in India.The best points of Buddha's life are ascribed to Çiva. The Purāṅas represent him as embodying all the attributes of Buddha's greatness. One point may be urged in favour of Buddha. He was a living person of flesh and blood, and as such, the influence of his sternly real personality might be presumed to produce far greater results than that of a mythological God. In India, however, this matter is viewed in a different light. Here, when a saint or great religious teacher dies, he is at once deified. He becomes one of the glorious gods and in popular estimation he occupies a place not far remote from that ascribed to the celestials. On the other hand, thousands of men and women in India, believe in every word of the Purāṅnas. To them Çiva is as real as any historical personage. Buddha, though deified, could not claim the grandeur of the back-ground which sets forth the luminous figure of the great God of the Hindu Trinity. Infinite space, the whole of heaven and earth and the solar regions, are represented as the incidents of that back-ground. Çiva has no birth, no death; his eyes never close, they are raised heavenward, lost in celestial reverie, and they scarcely look down towards this mundane world of ours, except for the sake of mercy. Buddha, already divested of his original glory, and reduced to Dharma Thākur,
