国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
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カラー New!IIIFカラー高解像度 白黒高解像度 PDF   日本語 English
0025 Southern Tibet : vol.7
南チベット : vol.7
Southern Tibet : vol.7 / 25 ページ(カラー画像)

New!引用情報

doi: 10.20676/00000263
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

Before leaving this field, from which we have nothing to gain regarding our mountain system, I will only insert a quotation giving an idea of the poetical garb in which the mountain giants north of India were dressed in Sanskrit literature. It is the beginning of the first Canto of KALIDASA'S poem *The Birth of the War-God:*¹

Far in the north Himâlaya, lifting high
His towery summits till they cleave the sky,
Spans the wide land from east to western sea,
Lord of the hills, instinct with deity.
For him, when Prithu ruled in days of old,
The rich earth, teeming with her gems and gold,
The vassal hills and Meru drained her breast,
And decked Himâlaya, for they loved him best;
And earth, the mother, gave her store to fill
With herbs and sparkling ores the royal hill.
Proud mountain-king! His diadem of snow
Dims not the beauty of his gems below.

And, indeed, there is very little reality in the following picture of the Meru, Second Canto, where it is said of Indra:

He roots up Meru's sacred peaks, where stray
The fiery coursers of the God of Day,
To form bright slopes, and glittering mounds of ease
In the broad gardens of his palaces.

In Canto Seven, finally, it is said of Nandi's bull:

Whose broad back covered with a tiger's hide
Was steep to climb as Mount Kailâsa's side.

It is, however, very probable that the Kara-korum Proper was known to a certain extent in some quarters of Ancient India. The missionaries who spread Buddhism to Eastern Turkestan and China, penetrated into the heart of the continent by roads that cross the Tibetan highlands where these are at their narrowest, *viz.,* to the north-west of India, and which, therefore, at least the eastern ones of them, have to cross the Kara-korum System. But of these Buddhist crusades we have no knowledge.²