Page:Agastya in the Tamil land.djvu/95

Epic Mahābhārata. When not the original author, he was often traditionally claimed as connected some way or other with the authors of the other systems, who themselves in most cases bore the sacred names of or claimed some affinities with the old Vedic seers. To seek therefore to fix a historic age from some alleged connection of the name of Vyāsa or a Vedic seer is to court disaster. We must leave Veda Vyāsa at about 3,100 B.C. and allow other Vyāsas to take care of themselves."

To the Vasiṣṭhas, who figure as numerously as the Vyāsas, Mr. F. E. Pargiter feels justified in giving a different treatment. Being committed to the position of finding greater authenticity in the Kṣatria tradition than in the Brahman, he is forced to conclude that the later Vasiṣṭhas were as historical as the kings with whom they lived. He is not disposed to apply the pruning knife to the requisite extent and grapples with the Pūraṇic traditions to extract from them some genealogical facts for the construction of history. How in this heroic attempt he gets hopelessly entangled in the legendary quagmire will be seen if one tries to follow the identifications and discriminations of the many Vasiṣṭhas he makes in pp. 203-211 of his work Ancient Indian Historical Tradition. He dismisses the first two Vasiṣṭhas (the mind-born son of Brahma and one, the contemporary of Ikshuwaku) as mythical, and considers the later Vasiṣṭhas as historical. But when we find these later Vasiṣṭhas described as having most of the characteristics attendant on their mythical prototype, we have to doubt the validity of the procedure, adopted by Mr. F. E. Pargiter in the valuation of the testimony of the Puranic annalists—accepting it as trustworthy in one portion and rejecting it as entirely worthless in another. How, for instance, could each one of the fourth, the fifth and the seventh Vasiṣṭhas possess Arundhati as his wife, the Arundhati, the companion of their mythical progenitor? Much the safer rule in such cases would have been to accept all or none. Nothing in these regions will enable us to distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It is