Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/158

 distances, or substitutes had to be used on account of its rarity. Thus the identity of the original plant came to be lost in India. The plant which is now commonly used is evidently quite another, for its juice when drunk produces a nauseating effect, widely different from the feeling of exhilaration dwelt on by the poets of the Rigveda. Nor can the plant which the Parsis still import from Persia for the Haoma rite be identical with the old soma. Again, rice, which is familiar to the later Vedas and regarded in them as one of the necessaries of life, is not mentioned in the Rigveda at all. Its natural habitat is in the south-east, the regular monsoon area, where the rainfall is very abundant. Hence it probably did not exist in the region of the Indus river system when the Rigveda was composed, though, in later times, with the practice of irrigation, its cultivation spread to all parts of India. Corn (yava) was grown by the tillers of the Rigveda, but the term is probably not restricted, as later, to the sense of barley.

Among large trees mentioned in the Rigveda, the most important is the Açvattha ("horse-stand") or sacred fig-tree (Ficus religiosa). Its fruit (pippala) is described as sweet and the food of birds. Its sacredness is at least incipient, for its wood was used for soma vessels, and, as we learn from the Atharva-veda, also for the drill (later-called pramantha) employed in producing the sacred fire. The latter Veda further tells us that the gods are seated in the third heaven under an Açvattha, which may indeed have been intended in the Rigveda itself by the "tree with fair foliage," in whose shade the blessed revel with Yama. This tree, now called Peepal, is still considered so sacred that a Hindu would be afraid to utter a falsehood beside it. But the Rigveda does not mention at