1876.] F. S. Growse— The Prologue to the Edmdyana of Tulsi Das, 7 



Doha 5. 

 I know wlien they hear of philosophers, who regard friend and foe both 

 as friends, they are enraged ; but I clasp my hands and entreat them pite- 

 ously. 



Chaup&i. 

 I have performed the role of supplication, nor will they forget their 

 part. However carefully you may bring up a crow, it will still be a crow 

 and a thief. I propitiate at once the feet of saints and sinners, who each 

 give pain, but with a difference : for the first kill by absence, while the 

 second torture by their 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 glory, the other in dis- 

 grace : compare with the good, ambrosia, or the moon, or the Ganges • and 

 with the bad, poison, or fire, or the river Karmnasa. Virtue and vice may 

 be known to all by their natural development. 



Doha 6. 

 The good acquire goodness, and the vile vileness. Thus ambrosia has 

 its proper effect in immortality, and poison has its effect in death. 



Chaupai. 



Why enumerate the faults and defects of the bad and the virtues of 

 the good ; both are a boundless and unfathomable ocean. Hence occasion- 

 ally virtue is reckoned as vice, improperly and from want of discrimination. 

 For God has created both, but it is the Veda that has distinguished one from 

 the other. The heroic legends and the Puranas 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 ; life-giving ambro- 

 sia and deadly poison ; the visible world and the invisible God ; life and the 



* The churning of the ocean is one of the common-places of Hindu poetry, and the 

 allusions to it in the Kamayana are innumerable. "With mount Mandara as a churning- 

 stick, the great serpent Vasuki as a rope, and Narayan himself in tortoise-form as the 

 pivot on which to work, the gods and demons combined to churn the milky ocean. 

 Thus were produced from its depth the moon ; the sacred cow, Surabhi or Kama-dhe- 

 nu ; the goddess of wine, Varuni ; the tree of Paradise, Parijata, or Kalpa-taru ; the 

 heavenly nymphs, the Apsaras ; 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 ei- 

 ther claimed by the snake gods, or swallowed by Mahadeva ; whence comes the blackness 

 of his throat, that gives him the name of Nil Kanth. 



