178 The Religion of the Veda
I'—
myth whose three elements bring with them three questions: First, what are the waters? Secondly, who is Vritra that shuts them in ? Thirdly, who is Indra that liberates them after a struggle that puts him so very much on his mettle? Hindu tradition, commentators and later classical Sanskrit literature, has always had an unhesitating answer: The waters are rain; Vritra is the cloud that shuts them off from the earth; Indra, therefore, is the storm or thunder god that reads the clouds with his lightning bolt and frees their waters. This interpretation, at first sight thoroughly sensible and most satisfactorily suggestive, was for a good while held to be good by most western students of the Veda and Comparative Mythology. The trouble with it turned out to be that the Veda has the real storm and rain god Parjanya,lI and that the hymns addressed to him describe thunderstorms in language that is very dif- ferent, and cannot be mistaken for anything else than the phenomena of the thunderustorrn. The sober facts of the Indra—Vritra myth are as follows : A god armed with a bolt fights a dragon or serpent who holds the rivers in confinement within the mountains. He kills the dragon, cleaves the mount». ains. The rivers flow from the mountains to the sea. Thus the texts: there is nothing to show that
1 See above, p. III.
