gods are full of mystery and
illusion."

The queen, for all the world like that wise woman in the Upanishads,
whose argument, as we showed in a preceding chapter, is cut short not
by counter-argument, but by the threat that if she ask too much her
head will fall off, recants her errors at this rebuke, and in the
following section, which evidently is a later addition, takes back
what she has said. Her new expression of belief she cites as the
opinion of Brihaspati (32. 61, 62); but this is applicable rather to
her first creed of doubt. Perhaps in the original version this
authority was cited at the end of the first speech, and with the
interpolation the reference is made to apply to this seer. Something
like the queen's remarks is the doubtful saying of the king himself,
as quoted elsewhere (III. 273. 6): "Time and fate, and what will be,
this is the only Lord. How else could this distress have come upon my
wife? For she has been virtuous always."

We turn now to the great sectarian gods, who eventually unite with
Brahm[=a] to form a pantheistic trinity, a conception which, as we
shall show, is not older than the fifth or sixth century after Christ.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The rival heresies seem also to belong to the
East. There were thus more than half a dozen heretical
bodies of importance agitating the region about Benares at
the same time. Subsequently the Jains, who, as we have
shown, were less estranged from Brahmanism, drifted
westward, while the Buddhist stronghold remained in the East
(both, of course, being represented in the South as well),
and so, whereas Buddhism eventually retreated to Nep[=a]l
and Tibet, the Jains are found in the very centres of old
and new (sectarian) Brahmanism, Delhi, Mathur[=a], Jeypur,
[=A]jm[=i]r.]

[Footnote 2: 'The wandering of R[=a]ma,' who is the
sectarian representative of Vishnu.]

[Footnote 3: The 'Bh[=a]rata (tale)', sometimes called
Mah[=a]-Bh[=a]rata, or Great Bh[=a]rata. The Vishnuite
sectarianism here advocated is that of Krishna. But there is
as much Civaism in the poem as there is Vishnuism.]

[Footnote 4: Dramatic and lyric poetry is artificial even in
language.]

[Footnote 5: Schroeder, p. 453, compares the mutual relation
of the Mah[=a]bh[=a]rata and R[=a]m[=a]yana to that of the
Nibelungenlie