Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/264

240 personages, the account of whose lives is not even to be set down to the exaggerations of ill-preserved tradition, but to pure fabrication of the imagination.

More reliance on the whole is to be placed on the great epic poems, and, chiefly, the Purâna and Mahâ Bhârata.

The works which we now find extant, with the title of Purâna (ancient)—eighteen in number,—are, however, at best but the reproduction of six older compilations, either collected from the recitations of Sûtas (bards), or themselves reproductions of still older compilations, which have probably perished for ever. They contain pretty well all that is known concerning the origin, mode of life, heroic deeds, and ways of theological thought, of those Indian nations who acknowledged either Vishnu or Shiva for their highest god; and traces are to be distinguished by which the statement of earlier and purer belief has been distorted or biassed according to the tenets of the later compiler.

The Mahâ Bhârata concerns itself more exclusively with the deeds of the gods and heroes, and is itself often referred to in the Purânas. Both of them bear witness that it was the frequent custom, on occasions of great gatherings of the people for public sacrifices and popular festivals, and also in the places of retirement of religious teachers round whom disciples gathered, that the stories of gods and heroes should