Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/185

 according to the custom of the times, went out to tend his teacher's cattle. In time he learnt the great truths which nature, and even the brute creation, teach those whose minds are open to instruction. He gained wisdom even from the herd that he was tending, from the fire that he had lighted, and from a flamingo and a diver-bird which flew near him, when in the evening he had penned his cows and laid wood on the evening fire, and sat behind it. Then the young student came back to his teacher, and his teacher said: "Friend, you shine like one who knows Brahma: who then has taught you?" "Not men," was the young student's reply. And the truth which the young student had learnt, though clothed in the fanciful style of the period, was that the four quarters of heaven, and the earth, the sky, the ocean, the sun, the moon, the lightning, and the fire, and the organs and minds of living beings were none other than Brahma, or God.

This legend shows that the rules of caste had not yet become rigid when such legends were composed. We find in the legend that the son of a servant girl, who did not know his own father, became a religious student simply through his love of truth, learnt the lessons which nature and the learned men of the time could teach him, and subsequently became classed among the wisest religious teachers of the time. Surely the caste of that ancient time must have been freedom itself compared to the system of later times, when the Kshatriya, the Vaisya, and the Sudra were doomed