tality was due to knowledge or to works. Thus it happens that after death a man may either be reborn for immortality, or he may be born only to be fated to die again and again. This is but a specimen of the various means by which the gods escape death, for they are ever afraid of the Ender and must adopt rites of many kinds to be freed from his control.
Since both the gods and the Asuras ("Demons") were the offspring of Prajāpati, it becomes necessary to explain why they are differentiated as good and bad, and this is done in several ways. In one case the Asuras kept sacrificing to themselves out of insolence, while the gods sacrificed to one another; and as a result Prajāpati bestowed himself upon them, and sacrifice became theirs only. In another version the gods adopted the plan of speaking nothing but the truth, while the Asuras resorted to falsehood: because of this for a while the gods became weaker and poorer, but in the end they flourished, and so it is with man; while the Asuras, who waxed rich and prosperous, like salty ground came to ruin in the end. The gods, again, won the earth from the Asuras: they had only as much of it as one can see while sitting, and they asked the Asuras for a share; the latter replied that the gods could have as much as they could encompass, whereupon the gods encompassed the whole earth on four sides. Another legend accounts for the differences in greatness of the gods by the fact that three of them—Indra, Agni, and Sūrya—desired to win superiority, and for that purpose they went on sacrificing until in the long run they attained their aim.
Prajāpati might, it is clear, have become a much greater figure had it not been for the fact that the philosophic spirit which conceived him soon went beyond the original idea and transformed the male, as too personal for the expression of the absolute, into the neuter Brahman Svayambhū ("Self-Existent Prayer"). It still remained possible to ascribe the origin of the world to this Brahman and to account for it by ascetic austerity on its part, but the way was opened for the development of the
