Stories of India's Gods & Heroes
Chapter I
THE TALE OF VISWAMITRA
OF old there lived a king named Gadhi, to whom was born a son named Viswamitra. Father and son naturally both belonged to the Kshatriya caste, the second of the four great Hindu castes, consisting of warriors and kings. But it so happened that the child Viswamitra was born with an instinctive longing to become a Brahman, that is, a member of the priestly caste, the highest of all.
Now it is a well-understood doctrine of the Hindu scriptures that a man born in a certain caste can in no wise pass from that caste to a higher one during his lifetime. Such a passage can, it is written, only come through a man's being born again, after death, into the higher caste, after having lived a full life in the lower scale. But Viswamitra's desire was that even in the one lifetime he should enjoy the triumph of overcoming the strict rule and fierce
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