Certain members of this Order lead the most ascetic life imaginable, going completely naked; they worship the Ox. Most of them wear a small image of an ox, in brass, pewter, or gold, tied over the forehead. Moreover, they take cow-dung, and burn it, and make a powder of it; and then they make it into an ointment, with which they daub themselves as devoutly as Christians use holy water. Further, if they meet any person who treats them well, they daub a little of this powder on the middle of his forehead.
They do not eat from bowls or trenchers, but place their food on leaves of the Apple of Paradise and other large leaves; these, however, they use dry, never green. For they say the green leaves have a soul in them, and so it would be a sin. And they would rather die than do what their Law pronounces to be sin. If any one ask how it comes that they are not ashamed to go about in their nudity,
peculiarities of a more modern description, in the paramount importance which they assign to individual divinities, in the variety and purport of the rites and observances addressed to them, and in the invention of new legends illustrative of the power and graciousness of those deities, and of the efficacy of implicit devotion to them.
The form of composition adopted in the Puranas is that of a dialogue, in which its contents are related by one imaginary individual in reply to another. Several dialogues are eventually woven together; and they purport to have been held on different occasions between different individuals, in consequence of similar questions having been asked. Usually the immediate narrator is Lomaharshaná or Romaharshána, the disciple of Vyasa, who, as Plato did for Socrates, communicates to the reader his great masters utterances. The Vyasa or compiler here meant was Krishna Dwaipáyana, the son of Parásara; it is said of him that he taught the Vedas and Puranas to various pupils, but it seems more probable that he was at the head of a school or college, the members of which moulded the sacred literature of the Hindus into its present form.
There appear to have been eighteen Puranas: namely, 1, Brahma; 2, Padma; 3, Vaishnava; 4, Saiva; 5, Bhagavata; 6, Náradíya; 7, Márkándeya; 8, Agneya; 9, Bhavishya; 10, Brahma Vaivarta; 11, Lainga; 12, Váráha; 13, Skánda; 14, Vámana; 15, Kaurma; 16, Mátsya; 17, Gáruda; 18, Bráhmanda.
The Vishnu Purana is described as that in which Parásara, beginning with the events of the Varáha Kalpa, expounds mans moral and religious obligations in about seven thousand stanzas. It is divided into six books:
The first deals chiefly with the details of creation, primary (Sarga) and secondary (Pratisarga); the first explaining how the universe proceeds from Prakriti or eternal crude matter; the second, in what way the forms of things are developed from the elementary substances previously evolved, or how they reappear after their temporary destruction. Both these creations are periodical; the first does not end until the life of Brahma ends, when not only the gods and all other forms are annihilated, but the elements are resolved into the primary substance, besides which one only spiritual being exists. The latter occurs at the end of every Kalpa, æon, or day of Brahma, and is wholly limited to the forms of inferior creatures and the lower worlds; leaving untouched sages and gods and the substance of the heavens. A description of the ages or periods of time on which these events depend is involved in the explanation; and it is given accordingly in wearisome detail. Their character has been a source of very unnecessary perplexity to European writers; for they belong to a wholly mythological scheme of chronology, which has no reference to any real or supposed history of the Hindus, but prefigures, according to their system, the infinite and eternal revolutions of the universe.
By a singular incongruity the existence of Pradhána, or crude matter, is identified with Vishnu, who is declared to be both spirit and crude matter, and not only crude matter, but all visible substance, and Time. He is Purusha, spirit; Pradhána, crude matter; Vyakta, visible form; and Kála, time. This, says Professor Wilson, cannot but be regarded as a departure from the primitive dogmas of the Hindus, in which the distinctness of the Deity and His works was enunciated; in which, upon His willing the world to be, it was; and in which His interposition in creation, held to be inconsistent with the quiescence of perfection, was explained away by the personification of attributes in action, which afterwards came to be considered as real divinities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, charged severally, for a given season, with the creation, preservation, and temporary annihilation of material forms. In the Vishnu Purana, these divinities are declared to be no other than Vishnu.
The earth having been duly prepared for the reception of living creatures, it was peopled by the will-begotten sons of Brahma, the Prajapatis or patriarchs. But it was necessary to provide these grey forefathers of the early world with wives. For this purpose, the Manu Swayambhuva and his wife Satarupa, were invented; and their daughters supplied the patriarchs with female partners. Numerous legends were built up on this basis, and the whole story assumed an allegorical form. Swayhambhuva, the son of the self-born or uncreated, and his wife Satarupa, the hundred-formed or multiform, are themselves allegories; and their female descendants, who became the wives of the Rishis, are Faith, Devotion, Content, Intelligence, Tradition, and the like; whilst among