sutras, and seems to have been the chief popular deity in the Buddha’s lifetime.  He was adopted into the new creed as a sort of archangel and heavenly defender of the faith.  In the epics he is still a mighty deity and the lord of paradise.  Happiness in his heaven is the reward of the pious warrior after death.  The Mahabharata and the Puranas, influenced perhaps by Buddhism, speak of a series of Indras, each lasting for a cycle, but superseded when a new heaven and earth appear.  In modern Hinduism his name is familiar though he does not receive much worship.  Yet in spite of his long pre-eminence there is no disposition to regard him as the supreme and only god.  Though the Rig Veda calls him the creator and destroyer of all things[151], he is not God in our sense any more than other deities are.  He is the personification of strength and success, but he is not sufficiently spiritual or mystical to hold and satisfy the enquiring mind.

3

One of the most interesting and impressive of Vedic deities is Varuna, often invoked with a more shadowy double called Mitra.  No myths or exploits are related of him but he is the omnipotent and omniscient upholder of moral and physical law.  He established earth and sky:  he set the sun in heaven and ordained the movements of the moon and stars:  the wind is his breath and by his law the heavens and earth are kept apart.  He perceives all that exists in heaven and earth or beyond, nor could a man escape him though he fled beyond the sky.  The winkings of men’s eyes are all numbered by him[152]:  he knows all that man does or thinks.  Sin is the infringement of his ordinances and he binds sinners in fetters.  Hence they pray to him for release from sin and he is gracious to the penitent.  Whereas the other deities are mainly asked to bestow material boons, the hymns addressed to Varuna contain petitions for forgiveness.  He dwells in heaven in a golden mansion.  His throne is great and lofty with a thousand columns and his abode has a thousand doors.  From it he looks down on the doings of men and the all-seeing sun comes to his courts to report.

There is much in these descriptions which is unlike the attributes ascribed to any other member of the Vedic pantheon and recalls Ahura Mazda of the Avesta or Semitic deities.  No proof of foreign influence is forthcoming, but the opinion of some scholars that the figure of Varuna somehow reflects Semitic ideas is plausible.  It has been suggested that he was originally a lunar deity, which explains his association with Mitra (the Persian Mithra) who was a sun god, and that the group of deities called Adityas and including Mitra and Varuna were the sun, moon and the five planets known to the ancients.  This resembles the Babylonian worship of the heavenly bodies and, though there is no record whatever of how such ideas reached the Aryans, it is not difficult to imagine that they may have come from Babylonia either to India[153] or to the