red by the Supreme Being while the contending hosts
awaited the signal for fratricidal carnage.

The grotesqueness which characterizes all Hindu literature is not
wanting in this story of Krishna and Arjuna, as given in the great poem
of which the Bhagavad Gita forms a part. The five sons of Pandu are
representatives of the principle of righteousness, while the hundred
brothers of the rival branch are embodiments of evil. Yet, when the
victory had been gained and the sceptre was given to the sons of Pandu,
they despised it and courted death, though the "Adorable One" had urged
them on to strife.

Bishma, the leader of the hostile force, in a personal encounter with
Arjuna, had been filled so full of darts that he could neither stand nor
lie down. Every part of his body was bristling with arrows, and for
fifty-eight days he lingered, leaning on their sharp points. Meanwhile
the eldest of the victors, finding his throne only a "delusion and a
snare," and being filled with remorse, was urged by Krishna to visit his
unfortunate adversary and receive instruction and comfort. Bishma, lying
upon his bed of spikes, edified him with a series of long and tedious
discourses on pantheistic philosophy, after which he asked the
tender-hearted Krishna for permission to depart. He is no longer the
embodiment of evil: the cruel arrows with which the ideal of goodness
had pierced him fall away, the top of his head opens, and his spirit
soars to heaven shining like a meteor. How strange a reversal is here!
How strange that he who had been the representative of all evil should
have been transformed by his suffering, and should have been made to
instruct and comfort the man of success.

Mr. Chatterji falls into a fatal inconsistency when, in spite of his
assumption that this poem is the very word of Krishna spoken at a
particular time, in a particular place, he informs us that "all Indian
authorities agree in pronouncing it to be the essence of all sacred
writings. They call it an Upanishad--a term applied to the wisdom, as
distinguished from the ceremonial, part of the Vedas, and to no book
less sacred." More accurately he might have said that it is a compend of
all Hindu literatures, the traditional as well as the inspired, and with
a much larger share of the former than of the latter. Pantheism, which
is its quintessence, did not exist in the early Vedic times. Krishna was
not known as a god even in the period of the Buddha.[78] And th