Page:Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists.djvu/34

Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists and its lasting influence on Indian life and character ideals becomes easily understandable. It is hardly possible to turn aside from this aspect of the myth of Rāma and Sītā without expressing profound regret that this great means of education should have been eliminated from modern educational systems in India—in the name of religious neutrality. For it would scarcely be going too far to say that no one unfamiliar with the story of Rāma and Sītā can be in any real sense a citizen of India, nor acquainted with morality as the greatest of Indian teachers conceived it. Perhaps one might go further and say that no one unfamiliar with the story of Rāma and Sītā can be a true citizen of the world.

The Rāmāyana as Animal Epos

Here and there throughout the world we come upon whispers and echoes of the great animal epos of primitive man. As a whole it no longer exists; it is no longer even recoverable. It can only be guessed at and inferred from a hint here, a fragment there. But nowhere in the modern world is the material for its restoration so abundant as in India. To this day in the Indian imagination there is a unique sympathy with animal expression. Man or boy, gentle and simple alike, telling some story of mouse or squirrel, will bring the tale to a climax with the very cries and movements of the creature he has watched. It is assumed instinctively that at least the fundamental feelings, if not the thoughts, of furred and feathered folk are even as our own. And it is here, surely, in this swift interpretation, in this deep intuition of kinship, that we find the real traces of the temper that went to the making long ago of Buddhism and Jainism, the gentle faiths. 14