Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/410

386 jar or vessel; the vessel filled with sauce representing the ocean and the continents, like masses of cooked rice floating in the same.

At p. 82, he quotes from the first-mentioned commentary a description of the mountain of Meru itself, illustrative of the habitual exaggeration of the Indian sacred writers. "Between Maha Méru and the Sakwala ridge are seven circles of rocks with seven seas between them. They are circular because of the shape of Maha Méru. The first or innermost, Yugandhara, is 210,000 miles broad; its inner circumference is 7,560,000 miles, and its outer, 8,220,000 miles; from Maha Méru to Yugandhara is 840,000 miles. Near Maha Méru, the depth of the sea is 840,000 miles, &c.," the seven circles being all described with analogous dimensions. Also p. 42, "Buddha knows how many atoms there are in Maha Méru, although it is a million miles in height."

1. "The five colours," see note 5, Tale IV.

"The seven precious things," are variously stated. Sometimes they are gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, red pearls, diamond and coral. Sometimes gold and silver are left out of the reckoning, and rubies and emeralds substituted. See Köppen, i. 540 et seq. The extravagant and incongruous description in the text is not artistic.

2. The month Pushja. Before the time of Vikramâditja astronomy was not studied in India as a science; the course of the heavenly bodies was observed, but only for the sake of determining the times and seasons of feasts and sacrifices. The moon was the chief subject of observation and of the more correct results of the same. Her path was divided into twenty-eight "houses" or "mansions" called naxatra. This division was invented by the Chinese, and India received it from them about 1100 B.C. The naxatravidjâ or the knowledge of the moon-mansions, is set down in one of the oldest Upanishad as a special kind of knowledge. In the oldest enumeration extant of the moon-mansions only twenty-seven are mentioned, and the first of them is called Krittikâ, and Abhigit, which is the 20th, according to the latest enumeration, is wanting; other lists have other discrepancies. It is worthy of notice that Kandramas, the earliest name by which the moon is invoked in the Vêda, is composed of kandra, "shining," and mas, "to measure," because the moon measured time, and the various names of the moon in all the