III
The Vedic-Vedantic Truth of the Mandukya
It is a capital error, vitiating the original sense of the Upanishads no less than the Vedas, to regard the former scripture as a revolt against the latter. No doubt the sages of Vedanta inveighed in no mild expletives against the crude popular restriction of the Vedic images to their ritualistic surface-significance. But even in the Mundaka where the condemnation is at its most ruthless an undertone of deep reverence is discernible for the ancient forefathers who saw in their visions the path of divine works leading to Immortality. The fact that the true Yogi is said by the Mundaka to pass "through the gates of the Sun to the immortal Purusha whose spirit wastes not nor perishes"1 is enough to show that the author of the most anti-ritualistic of the Vedantic scriptures was aware of the mystic core of the Vedic hymnal of Sacrifice and recognised its double meaning, esoteric and exoteric, when he expressly laid it down that the God-knowledge was to be imparted only to those doers of the Vedic works who are given up to Brahman and who offered their sacrifice with faith to the one Master of all knowledge.2
The Vedic worship of the Sun was conducted by means of the inspired chant uttered by the priest-poet, the physical flame on the alter of the Fire-God Agni, the intoxicating Soma-wine and the "clarified" butter-offering. But this elaborate ritual symbolised an internal namas or psychological act of obeissance to the Sun of Knowledge, the mind's paean of praise and prayer and progressive realisation born of the mounting flame of aspiration with its cry of light for the Light and its purification of the lower desires into clarities of the Godward will drunk with ecstasy. The lay mentality, however, was unable to sustain the tension of an esoteric symbolism, till at last in the age of the Upanishads the Vedas came to be popularly distinguished as a Book of Works from the Upanishads which were considered a Book of Knowl-
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edge; but it was not forgotten by the true inheritors of the secret doctrine that the word Veda meant Knowledge and not Work and that even if it connoted the knowledge of Works there was really no line of sharp demarcation because Indian philosophy was always a Yogic realisation of the spiritual truth and so essentially a practical science, a work of Knowledge. Just as the Knowledge spoken of in the Upanishads implied a work of the soul, so also the Vedic Works concealed a soul of knowledge. That is Why the Upanishads, for all their opposition to the then prevalent form of the Vedic cult, gloried in being called Vedanta or the grand finale of the lore of the Vedas, possessing as they did that psycho-spiritual clue to the Sun-symbol which alone explains what was meant by the first fathers of the race when they prayed to the solar godheads: "O Sons of the Infinite Mother, may we become infinite beings like you!"3 Taking advantage of the double sense of certain words, the Chhandogya4 most clearly says that what exoterically passes as the Vedic Sacrifice and worship is really nothing save brahmacharya or abiding in the ways of Brahman by which one obtains the status of the Self whence overflows on earth for the God-lover the divine Delight called Soma. And we find the Katha actually describing the Self, which was the object of its search, as "Aditi the Mother of the gods, who was hidden deep in the heart of things" and "Agni the Knower of all births whom all should worship with ever-wakeful sacrifice."5
For, if Surya the Sun-God represented the Seer-Will in the empyrean of our being, Agni the Fire-God stood for the Conscious-Force of the Infinite at work in physical Nature, labouring secretly towards Nature's God through her many births and becomings, emerging, as the Vedas indicated, from his first covering of material heat in the form of wood and pastures, turning back on them with a ravenous hunger as he broke out into animal sensibility and desire, converting lastly his appetite into a longing heart of hope and up-faced thought, the soul of man with its consecrations and poetic dreams. It is Agni who in the Vedas is "the Priest of the
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Oblation"6 — the Earth-Spirit evolving the divine potentialities involved in the vast "darkness engulfed in darkness" from which the human soul emerges in its physical embodiment; it is when Agni comes to the forefront in a human being and is kept burning in "the middle of the house", in the heart of man's wakeful consciousness, to conduct the inner sacrifice of the human to the Divine by his soaring flame of long and constant Yoga that man, even in his physical consciousness, is able to receive and hold the plenitudes of the Spirit.
In fact, the symbol of the Vedic fire is instinct with all the metaphysical implications of the Mandukya, affording us also a true insight into its psychological ideal. The Vedic name of Agni is, characteristically, Vaishwanara who in his hidden being includes everything, even the highest heaven of light,7 but whose first function here is to spread out the earth as a field for the glimmering herds of the divine Sun8 — the Sun which is, after all, his own otherwise manifested form since in the Vedas each god is but a different name of the same Infinite and holds in himself all the other gods.9 Figured as Indra, whom the Taittiriya invokes as a divine face and form of the universal Intelligence,10 and whom the Vedas in the mystical language of a pastoral age call variously the Bull and the Ram, Agni uplifts for the true sacrificer a shining strainer made out of the fleece of that radiant godhead11 — a strainer through which, purified of all the profane mixture of the lower realms of Indra which the Upanishads significantly named indriyam or the sense-mentality, there pours down the moonlit maddening nectar of Soma12 declared by the Chhandogya to be the essence of Atman and by the Aitareya as being first expressed in mortal existence by sense-delight. What receives this flow of rapture is the earthen jar of the body strenghtened by fire-baptism,13 so that the supreme Beatitude may fulfil in their essential truth all the desires perverted here by the ego.
Bearing the purified thought upwards, Agni Vaishwanara stands out foremost in the front of our days and nights, his
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honeyed tongue increasingly eloquent with the illumined words by which as Agni Angirasa, the irresistible heat of inspiration divinising the subtle being, he cleaves the hard and difficult darknesses of the physical mind wherein the Sun is concealed,14 till he succeeds in expressing himself fully as Agni Jatavedas, the Master-Consciousness tense with the wisdom of all births, the effective Will of the Seer, kavikratuḥ, whose Self of Spirit has become by means of its solar puissance the ever-radiant thought-gods as well as the One extended in everything. He reveals himself as the wide measure of the universe, Varuna,15 and, as Mitra16 the divine Friend, harmonises in his Law the One with the Many and in his highest sessions encompasses all his god-forms as the sole Being17 enthroned on his three infinite seats.18 Yet it is this very Infinite who is addressed as the increaser of life by his rich felicities and who works, covert or overt, in the human sacrifice as the progressive fashioner of those universalities of consciousness by which the gods take their "second birth" as "the sons of men".
In the light of this symbolism we can understand that in its last four verses the Isha, with OM as the mantra, really invokes Agni who works covertly in the human will, kratu, to help the latter to remember what — behind the veil, during various rebirths subsequent to several dissolutions of the body — has been done by the Fire-God after the descent of his divinity from the firmament of being whence his original self looks down as the Sun of Knowledge, the universal Fosterer and Controller. This Sun alone can remove "the brilliant golden lid", which covers "the face of Truth", by marshalling his rays, vyuha, and drawing together his light, samuha, in order that the aspiring soul may assume Seerhood, dṛṣṭi, and behold the Lustre which is its most blessed form of all, the absorbing oneness of Atman in which the Sun is poised as in limitless ether. But just because the Isha is cognisant of the double Vedic ideal of Works and Knowledge it is most careful to avoid the extreme asceticism of those who, in their world-weary leap towards the Transcendent, seek to deny the
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reality and importance of the three other states of Atman; for in six memorable verses19 it teaches that he who knows That as both the One and the Many, as the Unmanifest and the Manifest, is alone the true knower, while they who follow after the unmanifest unity to the exclusion of multiplicity enter into a darkness as blind as of those who devote themselves to the enjoyment of Ignorance and fail to realise the divine Knowledge. For, unless the divine consciousness is possessed in the midst of waking earthly existence, there would be no sense in the "going abroad" of that ever-unobscured Infinite who is in full possession of a consciousness of eternal unity which, in the Vedic phrase, is neither today nor tomorrow and vanishes before the effort of the temporal mind to fix it.20 There would be no sense in its becoming a universal Master of Life, mātarisvan, who brings down "the Mighty Rivers of Heaven", the honey-milk and honey-water of Immortality known to the Vedic adepts as "the seven ecstasies", and who works in secrecy among them as Agni throughout the cosmos21 — there would be no sense in this mobile and evolutionary representation by That of Its own eternal Self if the cosmos were a mere fata morgana somehow conjured up in the sole being of the Infinite and did not serve as a field for the dynamic manifestation of all that is hidden behind the superficies of the physical consciousness.
Alive to this cogent argument, the Mandukya also has wisely based itself, as we have seen, on a metaphysical theory which does not shut out the phenomenal world as an illusion. But its immediate object was to indicate rather the increasing depths to which yogic trance recedes according as it plunges more and more inward to mark the different stages lying between the pure Spirit and the waking mind which is normally incapable of having an open communication with it. This has been responsible for the common failure to recognise the definitely Vedic form of its psychological ideal in close correspondence with that envisaged in the Isha under the double figure of Surya and Agni, and even led
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commentators with illusionist bias to ignore those fine shades of its classic and restrained expression which actually suggests that very ideal. For the Vedic Immortality was the rapturous union and harmony effected by Agni22 on all the planes of conscious being between "the Lord and his Spouse" — that is to say, a free enjoyment of the infinite existence by the Soul in a perfect mastery of its inmost Self, svarāt, and at the same time an acceptance of Nature as its bride delivered from discords and divisions into the harmonious truth which is behind all these first perversities of the idea of being, force of being and form of being which constitute manifestation. It would thus become not only self-ruler but also world-ruler, samrāt; not an impotent god imprisoned in an ivory tower of trance but a royal centre of opulent world-vision, "the conscious measure of everything", its whole being full in all its parts and members with the knowledge of Brahman, and its life permeated with a divine Content which is not a slave to the treacherous dualities of ephemeral pleasure and pain. Genuine Vedanta is never oblivious of this perfect goal set before posterity by the ancient fathers: only when a less vigorous age succeeded the great pioneers who strove for a divinised human life of "a hundred years", their spiritual pragmatism got replaced by an ascetic Yoga. But even such a pronounced Vedantic doctrine as the various statuses of the Self is yet purely Vedic, as proved by the fifth section of the Prashna, and is nothing save a philosophical rendering of the hymn23 of Dirghatamas Auchathya celebrating the triple movement of Vishnu the all-pervading godhead towards his own supreme abode, the abode whose guardian is declared in another hymn24 to be the same Agni Vaishwanara who is extended in the earth-principle.
In the threefold steps of Vishnu's universal movement all the worlds are said to find their dwelling place. He is eternally climbing up in order to fulfil the lowest in the highest; his is the wide-striding of a long evolution, for he has placed his feet at the beginning of a journey from below upwards and is the secret deity who leads forward our
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strength and thought to that lair on the mountain-top of our being where his energy, leonine and resilient here, discovers its own supreme counterpart in that higher and infinite self of his which being One has yet measured out the hierarchy of conscious states and holds in the self-harmony of his highest nature a triple ecstasy of manifestation. For That which is beyond the subtle regions environing his second step is the seat of man's self-accomplishing, "the Delight, where souls that seek the godhead have their rapture", because, crossing over Mahat Swar, the world of the Sun's manifestation which is said elsewhere to lie between the subtle heavens and the Infinite, his third step is on the threshold of "the triple principle" whence shines down on us here "that Friend of men who is the fount of the Sweetness" and who comprehends in his unity both his immutable reality and his multiple motion, downwards and upwards, of creation and evolution. That triple principle which by its being, conscious-force and beatitude, Sat-chit-ananda, possesses the double sweetness of the unmanifest and the manifest is the goal of the rishi's yearning, that self-existent goal "where the many-horned herds of Light go travelling...." Here, in this hymn we have in the clearest yet most poetic terms the philosophy of the One, the Infinite, who is the higher Brahman possessing the lower Brahman from his bases of unity. His double consciousness floods with secret sweetness from on high — in a single act as Kavi, Manishi and Paribhu, — the planes of Prajna, Taijasa and Vaishwanara. It is this consciousness that is the objective of all Aryans moved to realise OM, the fourfold Atman who from his supracosmic poise of Self-being permeates and rules all his Self-becomings in Space and Time.
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