“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 their posterity are
found the different phases of the moon and the sacrificial fires. There are other
legends in explanation of the peopling of the earth. All seem to indicate that the
Prajapatis and Rishis were “real personages, the authors of the Hindu system of
social, moral, and religious obligations, and the first observers of the heavens,
and teachers of astronomical science.”
The genealogy is traced of the royal personages of this first race or dynasty, and
is continued into the second book; after which comes a detail of the geographical
system of the Puranas, with Mount Meru, the seven circular continents, and their
surrounding oceans, to the limits of the world. This (except so far as India or
Bharata is concerned) is purely mythological. In the early portion of the third
book, the arrangement of the Vedas and other sacred writings of the Hindus is
described. Then follows an account of the principal Hindu institutions, the duties
of castes, the obligations of different stages of life, and the celebration of funeral
rites, in a brief but primitive strain, and in harmony with the laws of Manu. “It is
a distinguishing feature of the Vishnu Purana, and it is characteristic of its being
the work of an earlier period than most of the Puranas, that it enjoins no sectarial
or other acts of supererogation; no Vratas, occasional self-imposed observances;