story of Çunaḥçepa may serve as a specimen of the gāthās found in the Brāhmaṇas. These verses are addressed by a sage named Nārada to King Hariçchandra on the importance of having a son:—
- In him a father pays a debt
- And reaches immortality,
- When he beholds the countenance
- Of a son born to him alive.
- Than all the joy which living things
- In waters feel, in earth and fire,
- The happiness that in his son
- A father feels is greater far.
- At all times fathers by a son
- Much darkness, too, have passed beyond:
- In him the father's self is born,
- He wafts him to the other shore.
- Food is man's life and clothes afford protection,
- Gold gives him beauty, marriages bring cattle;
- His wife's a friend, his daughter causes pity:
- A son is like a light in highest heaven.
To the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa belongs the Aitareya Āraṇyaka. It consists of eighteen chapters, distributed unequally among five books. The last two books are composed in the Sūtra style, and are really to be regarded as belonging to the Sūtra literature. Four parts can be clearly distinguished in the first three books. Book I. deals with various liturgies of the Soma sacrifice from a purely ritual point of view. The first three chapters of Book II., on the other hand, are theosophical in character, containing speculations about the world-soul under the names of Prāṇa and Purusha. It is allied in matter to the Upanishads, some of its more valuable thoughts recurring, occasionally even word for word, in the
