A Digit of the Moon

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Bain Francis William. A Digit of the Moon

PREFATORY NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION,

INTRODUCTION

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

DAY 5

DAY 6

DAY 7

DAY 8

DAY 9

DAY 10

DAY 11

DAY 12

DAY 13

DAY 14

DAY 15

DAY 16

DAY 17

DAY 18

DAY 19

DAY 20

Отрывок из книги

A Digit of the Moon is the sixteenth part of a much longer work, entitled The Churning of the Ocean of Time2. A well-known Hindoo legend recounts how the gods and antigods assembled to churn the ocean of milk3 for the nectar of immortality. After throwing in herbs of various kinds, they churned it with Mount Mandara, and obtained the nectar, with certain other things, one of which was the MOON, who by the way is often called 'the Lord of Herbs.'

But in Sanskrit, the Moon, like the Sun, is a male. Hindoo poets get over this difficulty, when they want a female Moon, by personifying his attributes, or making a part do duty for the whole. Thus, his disc is divided into sixteen parts, called 'streaks' or 'digits' and a beautiful woman is 'a digit of the moon.'

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Finally, the words which stand as a motto on the title-page have a history of their own. They are the closing lines of the Shakuntalá, and they mean, briefly: O Shiwa, grant that I may never be born again. There is a curiosa felicitas in their application to the conclusion of the story, where indeed I found them, scribbled in the margin by another hand; and though it cannot be proved, I am convinced that they were placed there by my old Brahman himself (who had Kálidás by heart), when he took his farewell of the MS., in an access of grief and despair at feeling his family annihilated and himself deprived of all that had made his life worth living, by the plague. Let us hope that the old man has had his wish, and that 'the purple-tinted god' has 'destroyed his rebirth.'

Mahábaleshwar, 1898.

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