Eustace,
That was a great story. IMO, many of the stories in the Vedic literature,
like the Srimad Bhagavatam, have hidden meanings in them. For example, some of
the stories have jyotish principles embedded in the them. Specifically, there
a story of Krishna and Balarama who jumped off a mountain cliff, after finding
that they were surrounded by a forest fire. In the end, they landed safely on
the ground 88 miles away from the mountain.
The embedded jyotish principle is the precarious and troublesome '64th
navamsha' which is the fourth house the Moon in the navamsha chart. If you
work it out, the number 88 is the same as the the fourth navamsa from the Moon
in the navamsha chart.
There's also another story which I've been trying to decipher which is about
Kardama muni. He was an ancient rishi who married a woman and lacked the money
to make her happy. But by sheer magic he was able to make a floating castle in
the sky, which was lined with precious stones.
If you or anyone here can figure out the jyotish principle being presented,
let us know.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
Mark Twain == 1following the Equator == Chapter 12
In Sydney I had a large dream, and in the course of talk I told it to a
missionary from India who was on his way to visit some relatives in New
Zealand. I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of God;
that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the
fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and the
other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the
corpuscles.
Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then said:
“It is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are the
metes and bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that it almost
accounts for a thing which is otherwise nearly unaccountable—the origin of the
sacred legends of the Hindoos. Perhaps they dream them, and then honestly
believe them to be divine revelations of fact. It looks like that, for the
legends are built on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that
plodding priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake.”
He told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly believed by all
classes of Hindoos, including those of high social position and intelligence;
and he said that this universal credulity was a great hindrance to the
missionary in his work. Then he said something like this:
“At home, people wonder why Christianity does not make faster progress in
India. They hear that the Indians believe easily, and that they have a natural
trust in miracles and give them a hospitable reception. Then they argue like
this: since the Indian believes easily, place Christianity before them and they
must believe; confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they will no
longer doubt. The natural deduction is, that as Christianity makes but
indifferent progress in India, the fault is with us: we are not fortunate in
presenting the doctrines and the miracles.
“But the truth is, we are not by any means so well equipped as they think.
We have not the easy task that they imagine. To use a military figure, we are
sent against the enemy with good powder in our guns, but only wads for bullets;
that is to say, our miracles are not effective; the Hindoos do not care for
them; they have more extraordinary ones of their own. All the details of their
own religion are proven and established by miracles; the details of ours must
be proven in the same way. When I first began my work in India I greatly
underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my task. A correction was not
long in coming. I thought as our friends think at home—that to prepare my
childlike wonder-lovers to listen with favor to my grave message I only needed
to charm the way to it with wonders, marvels, miracles. With full confidence I
told the wonders performed by Samson, the strongest man that had ever lived—for
so I called him.
“At first I saw lively anticipation and strong interest in the faces of my
people, but as I moved along from incident to incident of the great story, I
was distressed to see that I was steadily losing the sympathy of my audience. I
could not understand it. It was a surprise to me, and a disappointment. Before
I was through, the fading sympathy had paled to indifference. Thence to the end
the indifference remained; I was not able to make any impression upon it.
“A good old Hindoo gentleman told me where my trouble lay. He said ‘We
Hindoos recognize a god by the work of his hands—we accept no other testimony.
Apparently, this is also the rule with you Christians. And we know when a man
has his power from a god by the fact that he does things which he could not do,
as a man, with the mere powers of a man. Plainly, this is the Christian’s way
also, of knowing when a man is working by a god’s power and not by his own. You
saw that there was a supernatural property in the hair of Samson; for you
perceived that when his hair was gone he was as other men. It is our way, as I
have said. There are many nations in the world, and each group of nations has
its own gods, and will pay no worship to the gods of the others. Each group
believes its own gods to be strongest, and it will not exchange them except for
gods that shall be proven to be their superiors in power. Man is but a weak
creature, and needs the help of gods—he cannot do without it. Shall he place
his fate in the hands of weak gods when there may be stronger ones to be found?
That would be foolish. No, if he hear of gods that are stronger than his own,
he should not turn a deaf ear, for it is not a light matter that is at stake.
How then shall he determine which gods are the stronger, his own or those that
preside over the concerns of other nations? By comparing the known works of his
own gods with the works of those others; there is no other way. Now, when we
make this comparison, we are not drawn towards the gods of any other nation.
Our gods are shown by their works to be the strongest, the most powerful. The
Christians have but few gods, and they are new—new, and not strong; as it seems
to us. They will increase in number, it is true, for this has happened with all
gods, but that time is far away, many ages and decades of ages away, for gods
multiply slowly, as is meet for beings to whom a thousand years is but a single
moment. Our own gods have been born millions of years apart. The process is
slow, the gathering of strength and power is similarly slow. In the slow lapse
of the ages the steadily accumulating power of our gods has at last become
prodigious. We have a thousand proofs of this in the colossal character of
their personal acts and the acts of ordinary men to whom they have given
supernatural qualities. To your Samson was given supernatural power, and when
he broke the withes, and slew the thousands with the jawbone of an ass, and
carried away the gate’s of the city upon his shoulders, you were amazed—and
also awed, for you recognized the divine source of his strength. But it could
not profit to place these things before your Hindoo congregation and invite
their wonder; for they would compare them with the deed done by Hanuman, when
our gods infused their divine strength into his muscles; and they would be
indifferent to them—as you saw. In the old, old times, ages and ages gone by,
when our god Rama was warring with the demon god of Ceylon, Rama bethought him
to bridge the sea and connect Ceylon with India, so that his armies might pass
easily over; and he sent his general, Hanuman, inspired like your own Samson
with divine strength, to bring the materials for the bridge. In two days
Hanuman strode fifteen hundred miles, to the Himalayas, and took upon his
shoulder a range of those lofty mountains two hundred miles long, and started
with it toward Ceylon. It was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain,
the people of Govardhun heard the thunder of his tread and felt the earth
rocking under it, and they ran out, and there, with their snowy summits piled
to heaven, they saw the Himalayas passing by. And as this huge continent swept
along overshadowing the earth, upon its slopes they discerned the twinkling
lights of a thousand sleeping villages, and it was as if the constellations
were filing in procession through the sky.
While they were looking, Hanuman stumbled, and a small ridge of red
sandstone twenty miles long was jolted loose and fell. Half of its length has
wasted away in the course of the ages, but the other ten miles of it remain in
the plain by Govardhun to this day as proof of the might of the inspiration of
our gods. You must know, yourself, that Hanuman could not have carried those
mountains to Ceylon except by the strength of the gods. You know that it was
not done by his own strength, therefore, you know that it was done by the
strength of the gods, just as you know that Samson carried the gates by the
divine strength and not by his own. I think you must concede two things: First,
That in carrying the gates of the city upon his shoulders, Samson did not
establish the superiority of his gods over ours; secondly, That his feat is not
supported by any but verbal evidence, while Hanuman’s is not only supported by
verbal evidence, but this evidence is confirmed, established, proven, by
visible, tangible evidence, which is the strongest of all testimony. We have
the sandstone ridge, and while it remains we cannot doubt, and shall not. Have
you the gates?’”
