Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/328

 from the royal Bharata, and brought up under the same roof. King Pándu, smitten by a curse, has resigned his kingdom to his brother Dhrita-ráshtra, retired to a hermitage and there died, leaving the five Pándavas, his sons, to the care of his brother now ruling in his stead. Dhrita-ráshtra has himself one hundred sons, named Kauravas, from an ancestor Kuru; but, acting as the faithful. guardian of his nephews, he chooses the eldest of the five Pándavas as heir to the family kingdom. His own sons resent the act; hence the quarrel of the hundred Kauravas with the five Pándavas which forms the central story of Mahábhárata.

The period to which this story refers is not later than 1200 ; but the composition of the Mahábhárata bears internal marks of later date than that of the Rámáyana. Though the later epic includes in its post-Vedic mythology many myths which have their germs in the Veda, its religious system is "more popular and comprehensive than that of the Rámáyana;" and when it is remembered that Bráhmanism never gained in the more martial north that ascendancy which it acquired in the neighbourhood of Oudh, we are prepared to find that the Rámáyana, to which this neighbourhood gave birth, "generally represents one-sided and exclusive Bráhmanism,” while the Mahábhárata, celebrating the Delhi kings, is less inspired by the exclusiveness of the sacred caste, and (as Professor Williams observes) "represents the multilateral character of Hinduism." In the Mahábhárata the individualising spirit of Buddha is marked by the introduction of more human and popular personages and less mythical allegory than are to be found in the Rámáyana—a humanising process which may be compared with that which has been previously observed in the Athenian drama, and which will hereafter be noticed