'The vanquisher (i.e., of the five deadly sins), ... in the fifth
year of his buddhahood, while residing at the garden of (the prince)
Jeto, observing that, on account of a disputed claim for a gem-set
throne between the naga Mahodaro and a similar Chalodaro, a maternal
uncle and nephew, a conflict was at hand, ... taking with him his
sacred dish and robes, out of compassion to the nagas, visited
Nagadipo.... These mountain nagas were, moreover, gifted with
supernatural powers.... The Saviour and dispeller of the darkness
of sin, poising himself in the air over the centre of the assembly,
caused a terrifying darkness to these nagas. Attending to the prayer
of the dismayed nagas, he again called forth the light of day. They,
overjoyed at having seen the deity of felicitous advent, bowed down
at the feet of the divine teacher. To them the vanquisher preached
a sermon of reconciliation. Both parties rejoicing thereat, made an
offering of the gem-throne to the divine sage. The divine teacher,
alighting on the earth, seated himself on the throne, and was served
by the naga kings with celestial food and beverage. The lord of the
universe procured for eighty kotis of nagas, dwelling on land and in
the waters, the salvation of the faith and the state of piety.'
At every step in the conversion of the native Singhalese,--the demons
and serpent-men,--Buddha and his apostles are represented as being
attended by the devas,--the deities of India,--who are spoken of as
if glad to become menials of the new religion. But we find Zoroaster
using this term in a demonic sense, and describing alien worshippers
as children of the Devas (a Semite would say, Sons of Belial). And
in the conventional Persian pictures of the Last Judgment (moslem),
the archfiend has the Hindu complexion. A similar phenomenon may
be observed in various regions. In the mediæval frescoes of Moscow,
representing infernal tortures, it is not very difficult to pick out
devils representing the physical characteristics of most of the races
with which the Muscovite has struggled in early times. There are also
black Ethiopians among them, which may be a result of devils being
considered the brood of Tchernibog, god of Darkness; but may also, not
impossibly, have come of such apocryphal narratives as that ascribed
to St. Augustine. 'I was already Bishop of Hippo when I went into
Ethiopia with some servants of Christ, there to preach the gospel. In
this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two
great eyes in their breasts; and in countries still more southerly
we saw a people who had but one eye in their foreheads.' [114]
In considering animal demons, the primitive demonisation of the Wolf
has been discussed. But it is mainly as a transformation of man and
a type of savage foes that this animal has been a prominent figure
in Mythology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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