India, like other civilizations, has myths that deal with themes shared by all human beings—the great themes of life and death, of this world and the world beyond—which she inflects with her own personal colorations and thus makes different from the myths of other civilizations. Moreover, Indians have been inspired to create myths on themes that have not appealed to other civilizations with the same intensity, or on themes that simply do not exist outside of India. One can go further in laying out this spectrum of the general and the particular, beginning with the universals and moving through large shared cultures (such as the Indo-European) down through India as a whole until one reaches the many particular, local traditions within India. This approach views myths on the analogy of languages (as F. Max Müller taught), which can be broken down into language...