Sacred Texts Zoroastrianism Index Previous Next
Buy this Book at Amazon.com
Pahlavi Texts, Part I (SBE05), E.W. West, tr. [1880], at sacred-texts.com
1. As he (Aharman) came fourthly to the plants—which have struggled (kûkhshî-aîtŏ) against him with the whole vegetation—because the vegetation was quite dry 1, Amerôdad, by whom the essence of the world's vegetation 2 was seized upon, pounded it up small, and mixed it up with the rain-water of Tîstar. 2. After the rain the whole earth is discerned sprouting, and ten thousand 3 special species and a hundred thousand 4 additional species (levatman sardakŏ) so grew as if there were a species of every kind; and those ten thousand species are provided for 5 keeping away the ten thousand 3 diseases.
3. Afterwards, the seed was taken up from those hundred thousand species of plants, and from the collection of seed the tree of all germs, amid the wide-formed ocean, was produced, from which all species of plants continually grow. 4. And the griffon bird (sênô mûrûvŏ) has his resting-place upon it; when he wanders forth from within it, he scatters the dry seed into the water, and it is rained back to the earth with the rain.
5. And in its vicinity the tree was produced which is the white Hôm, the counteractor of decrepitude,
the reviver of the dead, and the immortalizer of the living.
6. This was the fourth contest, about the plants.
176:1 This chapter is a paraphrase of Bund. IX.
176:2 Or, perhaps, 'the worldly characteristics of vegetation.'
176:3 Written like 'one thousand,' but see the context and Bund. IX, 4.
176:4 In Bund. IX, 4, the MSS. have '120,000,' which is probably wrong, as Bund. XXVII, 2, agrees with the text above.
176:5 The MS. has barâ instead of pavan, a blunder due probably to some copyist reading the Huzvâris in Persian, in which language bih (= barâ) and bah (= pavan) are written alike. In Pâzand they are usually written be and pa, respectively.