APRIL 5, 1872.]
the text.” In this legend the Ikshv 3 k u king,
Amb at thar ájan, to please a young wife, exiles all his elder children, four sons and five daughters.
The young princes, when they have reached the forest, intermarry with their sisters, with the view of providing a mutual safeguard against the degeneracy of their race through mésalliance ; and
they instal their eldest sister Pi y á in the place of mother. When, after a time, the latter is stricken with leprosy, they remove her to another part of the forest ; and there she is found by a king R ima, who has also been driven by leprosy into the forest but has recovered; and by him she is cured and
wedded.
121
WEBER ON THE RAMAYANA.
pura, on opposite banks of the river Rohini if and thus we are brought into the immediate neigh bourhood of Ayodhyá. And now with regard to the expedition to Lanka. In opposition to the hitherto received view $ that the poet intended under this representation to depict the spread of Aryan civilisation toward the south, and especially to Ceylon, Talboys Wheelerſ has recently given to the world his opinion that the account of this expedition only gives expression to the hostile feeling entertained by the Brahmans toward the Buddhists of Ceylon, who are to be identified with the Rakshasa of the
Now, whatever points of difference the
poem. This view receives support from the fact
legendhere presents,the mutual relations of these three
that Rá v an a and his brothers are represented as
forms of thestory cannot be mistaken. In the Daša
having themselves sprung from the Brahmanical race," and as having by their penances won
rathafátaka, in addition to the reasons for the exile and the intermarriage of the brothers and sisters, we find mention made of the names D a 3 a rath a, Lak s h m an a, B h a rat a, and S it à ; and R à ma is spoken of, not as a prince who was un acquainted with the exiled family, but as one of their number and occupying the chief place among them. And the poet of the Rāmāyana, following the main idea of the story thus presented, has not only represented R 3 m a and Sí tá as lovers, but, what is most important, has added the rape of S it ā and the expedition to La ſika. He has also changed the home of the exiles from V 4 ran a si to A y o dh y á, and, on the other hand, he has shifted the scene of the banishment
the favour of Brahma, Agni and other gods ; and in this representation there may lurk an allusion to the Aryan origin of the royal race of Ceylon.” And it is at least quite as consis tent with the circumstances (if not even more so) that an Indian poet writing about the begin ing of the Christian era (and the work of Vālmīki can hardly date earlier than this, as we shall presently see) should have taken as the subject of his representation the conflicts with the Bud dhists, which were by that time being fiercely waged, and have depicted a conquest of their chief seat in the South—as that he should have selected
for his theme an idea so abstract as a picture of the
from the Him a vant to the Dekh an (Dan
“spread of Aryan civilisation.” The Monkeys of
daka forest, &c.)
the poem, too, which are undoubtedly to be regarded as the representatives of the aborigines of the Dekhan, appear throughout (with the single ex
Now, when we consider this question of the change of locality, it becomes evident that the re moval of the place of the exile to the Dekhan can easily be explained by the poet's intention to de scribe an expedition to Lañká; while the alteration
of Váránasí into Ayodhyá is perhaps connected with an older form of the Saga, and one no doubt cur
rent at the time of the Dasaratha jataka, according to which both Brahm ad atta and
A m b at th a rājan lived in Várán as ſ, but the exiled children of the latter, or at least their de scendants, the Sák ya and Koliya, settled in K a pil a pura (Kapilavatthu) and Koliya Monatsherichte K. Ak.I, d. 330ft. Ing* Vide, Ætta. W 415 ºf Ind.der Streiſen. 235W.f.,1859 and p.Rogers, Buddhaghosa's Parables” p. 175. The legend had already been made known by Turnour, Csoma Körösi, and Hardy, if not textually, at all events in substance. See also Emii jºintwell, Die Könige von Tibet (München, 1866) p. 13 t In the Mahāvanso, p. 184-185, mention is made of a
place, Rómagama on the banks of the Gangá (with a sacred stºpg) as existing in the time of Asoka, and as belonging to the Koliya (Cf. also Bigandet, § of Buddha p. 346.) Contemporaneously therewith Fa-Hian (Chap. 22, at the end,) and later also Hwen Thsang mention a land bordering on, Kapil a vast u called f a n m o ; which
Stan, Julien (II., 325) and Beal (Fa-Hian p. 89) translate by R tº m a grai m a. f “By said to come from the mountains of
Kiº.
Rapti, andnear after Gorakhpur.”—Hardy. uniting with the Mahanada
the Nepal,
to fall int Into
ception of Bálin) as the allies of R 4 m a, and therefore as already brought completely within the influence of the Aryan culture. This holds true
also of king Gu h a with his N i s h & d a. And though Wheeler certainly presses his theory too far when, for instance, he talks of the molestations which the sages of Chitrak it a and of the Dan daka-forest suffered at the hands of the Rák sh as a and to save them from which R 4 m a took them
under his protection, and makes these refer solely to the Buddhists;f yet it must be allowed that § Wide Lassen, Ind. A. K. I. 535 and my Worles, liber Ind. L. G., p. 181.
-
.
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..
| In the ‘second volume of his History of India (Ion don 1869), a work which can hardly indeed, be said to correspond to its title, but which notwithstanding its ex travagant Euhemerism, is rich in valuable views and sug gestions.
- As grandchildren of Pulastya, I. 22, 15, 17. IV. 10, 13.
- In the Uttarakanda it appears pretty certain that
in the quite decided separation of the Rakshasa ºf lººk t into the Paul a stya and the Sălakatamkata (? VIII. 23 24) or Sălamkatamkatá (? IV. 20, 23), we are to recog mise the double peopling of Ceylon by aborigines and by ans of the Brahmanical stock.
-
while the special description of these Rikshasa, for instance in Ram, III, 1, 15 f., points unmistakably, not to the fuddhists, but to hostile aborigines, who wºre still leading a sayage life. Wide Muir, Orig. S. Texts, II, 426ff.; Monier Williams, Ind. Epic Poetry p. 10.
