Art. III.—Legends chiefly from the Śatapatha Brāhmana

The Brāhmanas may be generally described as occupying an intermediate position, both as regards chronology, character, language, and mythology, between the Vedic hymns, and the Indian epic poems and Purānas. They are liturgical works, connected with the different Sanhitās, or collections of hymns, and having it for their object to explain the application of those hymns to the different parts of the Brahmanical ritual, as practised at the period when they were compiled. In these works we encounter a great many legends of greater or less extent, which are introduced with the view of showing the occasion on which some particular hymn was first uttered, or of accounting for the origin, and enforcing the efficacy, of some particular ceremony, or for some other such purpose. Many of these stories have their germ in some brief notice or allusion in the hymns of the Rig Veda, while they occur in a greatly developed form in the epic poems and Purānas. The shape in which these legends occur in the Brāhmanas is thus an intermediate one between that in which they appear in the hymns, and that which they subsequently assume in mythological works of a later date. Of this description is the story of Śunahśepha in the Aitareya Brāhmana, which appeared about the same time in the 1st and 2nd vols. of Weber's “Indische Studien”, in the German translation of Professor R. Roth, and in the Journal of this Society, vol. xiii., pp. 96 ff., translated into English by the late Professor Wilson, and which has subsequently been given by Professor Max Müller, in his “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature”, pp. 408 ff. In this story the author of the Brāhmana quotes various hymns from the first Mandala of the Rig Veda, which he considers to have been uttered by Śunahśepha, at the time when he was in danger of being immolated. The legend was, at a later period, introduced into the Rāmāyana, Book i., sections 61, 62

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