Page:The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás.djvu/47

 CHILDHOOD. presence : as opposite as a lotus and a leech, though both alike are produced in water. Good and bad thus resemble nectar and intoxicating drink, which were both begotten by the one great ocean : each by its own acts attains to pre- eminence ; the one in honour, the other in dishonour : compare with the good, ambrosia, or the moon, or the Ganges; and with the bad, poison, or fire, or the river Karmnásá. Virtue and vice are known to all; but whatever is to a man's taste that seemeth him good. Dohá 6. The good aim at goodness, and the vile at vileness; ambrosia is esteemed for giving immortality, and poison for causing death. Chaupái. Why enumerate the faults and defects of the bad and the virtues of the good ? both are a boundless and unfathomable ocean. Hence occasionally virtue is reckoned as vice, improperly and from want of discrimination. For God hath created both, but it is the Veda that has distinguished one from the other. The heroic legends and the Puránas also, no less than the Vedas, recognize every kind of good and evil as creatures of the Creator; pain and pleasure, sin and religious merit; night and day; saint and sinner; high caste and low caste; demons and gods; great and small; ambrosia and life; poison and death; the visible world and the invisible God ; life and the lord of life ; rich and poor; the beggar and the king ; Kási and Magadhá ; the Ganges and the Karmnásá; the desert of Márwár and the rich plain of Málwá; the Bráhman and the butcher; heaven and hell; sensual passion and asceticism; the Vedas and the Tantras, and every variety of good and evil. Dohá 7. The Creator has made the universe to consist of things animate and inanimate, good and evil ; a saint like a swan takes the milk of goodness and rejects the worthless water. 1 The churning of the ocean is one of the commonplaces of Hindú poetry, and the allasions to it in the Rimáyana are innumerable. With Mount Mandara as a churning-stick, the great serpent Vásuki as a rope, and Náráyan himself in tortoisc form as the pivot on which to work, the gods and demons combined to churn the milky ocean. Thus were proluced from its depth the moon; the sacred cow, Surabhi or Káma-dhenu; the goddess of wine, Varuni ; the tree of paradise, Párijáta, or Kalpa-taru; the heavenly nymphs, the Apsarás; the goddess of beauty, Lakhsmi or Sri ; and the physician of the gods, Dhanvantari. The cup of nectar which the latter held in his hand was seized and quaffed by the gods; while the poison, which also was produced, was either claimed by the snake gods or swaliowed by Mahádeva; whence comes the blackness of his throat, that gives him the name of NEL-kanth. 2 Magadiná (Bihár) is taken as the opposite to Kási, in consequence of its being the birth- place of Buddhism. 3 To the swan (ráj-hans) is ascribed the fabulous faculty of being able to separate milk fro:n water, after the two have been mixed together. 2