One Of The Most Attractive Of Those Ancient Books That I Have Met
With Is The Laws Of Menu.
According to Sir William Jones,
"Vyasa, the son of Parasara, has decided that the Veda, with its
Angas, or
The six compositions deduced from it, the revealed
system of medicine, the Puranas or sacred histories, and the code
of Menu, were four works of supreme authority, which ought never
to be shaken by arguments merely human." The last is believed by
the Hindoos "to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by
Menu, son or grandson of Brahma," and "first of created beings";
and Brahma is said to have "taught his laws to Menu in a hundred
thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive world in
the very words of the book now translated." Others affirm that
they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of
mortals, "while the gods of the lower heaven and the band of
celestial musicians are engaged in studying the primary
code." - "A number of glosses or comments on Menu were composed by
the Munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with
that before us, constitute the Dherma Sastra, in a collective
sense, or Body of Law." Culluca Bhatta was one of the more modern
of these.
Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith
that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;
but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment
to the traveller, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan
or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing
of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not
sentenced to any caste.
I know of no book which has come down to us with grander
pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that
it is never offensive nor ridiculous. Compare the modes in which
modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book,
and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it
expects. It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit,
with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you
cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the
table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of
the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior to
criticism as the Himmaleh Mountains. Its tone is of such
unrelaxed fibre, that even at this late day, unworn by time, it
wears the English and the Sanscrit dress indifferently; and its
fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the
stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined.
The whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many
words unnecessary. English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom
never perspired. Though the sentences open as we read them,
unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of
a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom
which could only have been learned from the most trivial
experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth
which subsides to the bottom of the ocean.
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