Page:The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás.djvu/32

xii prosaic character may be gathered from his own works and from tradition: thus we learn from the prologue to the Rámáyana that he commenced its composition at Ayodhyá in the Sambat year 1631, corresponding to 1575 A.D., and that he had studied for some length of time at Soron. He was by descent a Bráhman of the Kanaujiya clan, and in the Bhakt-Sindhu—a modern poem: of no great authority, the writer when at a loss for facts being, as it seems, in the habit of supplying them out of his own imagination—it is stated that his father's name was Atmá Ram, and that he was born at Hastinapur. Others make Hájipur, near Chitrakút, the place of his birth. The greater part of his life was certainly spent at Benares, though he also passed some years in visits to Soron, Ayodhyá, Chitrakút, Allahabad, and Brindá-ban. He died in the Sambat year 1680 (1624 A.D.) Two copies of the Rámáyana in his own hand-writing are said to be still in existence, the one being preserved at Rájapur and the other in the temple of Sitá Ráma, which he himself founded, at Benares. The MS., however, is regarded as a fetish and not allowed to be handled. In addition to this his great work he composed at least six other poems, all of them having the one object of popularizing the cultus of his tutelary divinity. They are the Rámgítávali, the Dohávali, the Kabit-sambandh, the Binay Patriká, the Pad Rámáyana, and the Chhandávali. Of these the Rámgítávali is a text-book in the Government examination for a degree of honour in Hindi, though it exists only in MS., which is also the case with all the others, excepting the Binay Patriká, which was printed in good type by Sri Lallú Ji for the use of the College of Fort William in the year 1826; but copies of this edition are now very scarce. The list is not unfrequently extended by the addition of the following minor works, as to the genuineess of which there is considerable doubt, viz., the Ráin-Saláká, the Hanumán Báhuka, the Jánaki Mangal, the Párvati Mangal, the Karká Chhand, the Rora Chhand and the Jhulná Chhand.

His theological and metaphysical views are pantheistic in character, being based for the most part on the teaching of the later Vedantists as formulated in the Vedánta-Sára and more elaborately expounded in the Bhagavad Gíta, which is the most popular of all Sanskrit didactic poems. The whole visible world, as they maintain, is an unreal phantasm, induced by ignorance or illusion, and it is only by a concession to conventional speech that it can be said to exist at all. The sole representative of true existence is the supreme spirit, Brahm, conceived as absolute and unchangeable unity; invisible, eternal and all-pervading, but having no relation to the world—since that would involve a notion of dualism—and for the same reason void of cognition, will, activity and all other qualities; a potentiality, in the ordinary use of language, rather than