-04_The First Hymn of the Rig-veda

MANDALA I, SUKTA 1

(1)

1. Fire I pray, the priest set in front of the sacrifice, the god Ritwik, the flamen of the call, who gives most the ecstasies.

2. Fire, desirable by the ancient sages and by the new,¹ is he that brings here the gods.

3 By the Fire man enjoys a treasure that grows day by day, riches glorious, (most) armed with the heroes (to which most are joined the heroes).

4. O Fire, the pilgrim sacrifice around which thou comest into being on every side, that alone goes to the gods.

5. May the Fire, the priest of the call, the Seer-Will, true and most full of rich inspirations, come to us a god with the gods.

6. The happiness that thou wilt make for him that gives is That Truth of thee, O Flame-Seer.²

7. To thee, O Fire, day by day, in the light and in the night, we come bearing by the thought our surrender,³ —

8. To the luminous guardian of the Truth ruling over the (pilgrim) rites increasing in his own home.

9. But⁴ thou be easy of approach to us like a father to his son, O Fire, — cling to us for our weal.⁵

(2)

1. I adore Agni the god, the Purohit of the sacrifice, the Ritwik, the Hota, most delight-placing.

1 Or sages of today 2 Or O Angiras 3 Or obeisance 4 Or Then 5 Or peace

I seek with adoration the God-Will, divine priest of the sacrifice placed in front, sacrificer in the seasons, offerer of the oblation, who most ordains the ecstasy.

Agni (अग् and अज्) is the brilliant, the strong, the preeminent, he who moves, leads, drives, acts. He is the Flame, at once Heat and Light, Force and self-possessing Consciousness in the Force, Will with perfect revealing and intuitive knowledge in the will and its acts,— the Seer-Will of the one and infinite Divine Conscious-Existence at work in the universe.

The Rishi, seeker and finder of knowledge, adores and seeks this divine Seer-Will as the priest of the inner sacrifice by which man seeks the godhead. He is the priest in the three chief functions of that divine priesthood. He as divine Seer-Will is the Purohit, that power which is placed in front of our consciousness to act for the human being; replacing the fallible human will, this divine force as soon as it is kindled conducts the sacrifice; he leads it in its journey through the stages by which the sacrificer rises to the supramental divine consciousness; he is its vanguard and front-fighter in the battle of the divine with the undivine and the march of man to his goal, पूरएता, प्रणेता. The Seer-Will is the Ritwik; he sacrifices in the order, the right seasons, the right periods, the twelve months, the hundred years of the sacrificial session: he knows the time, place, order by which the Swadha, the self-arranging self-movement of the divine Nature in man that is developing itself, progresses till it turns itself into the Swaha, the luminous self-force of the fulfilled divine Nature of the gods. This order of the sacrificial seasons is called ऋतु and represents the progressive movement of development of the hidden truth of things in man. The Seer-Will is also the Hota, the power that brings the divine powers into the physical consciousness of man by his flaming force in the revealed Word, manifests and forms them there and offers to them the whole activity of the being as a sacrifice of the lower human to the higher divine. The result of this progressive action is the divine delight or ecstasy, the Ananda of the infinite and divine Consciousness, brought into man, there established, held, expanding till it possesses the whole being and occupies all the energies. The Seer-Will is the godhead in us which is most powerful to establish, hold, order the action of the Delight in us. This delight is represented as the wealth

of the divine existence by the words रयिः, राधः, रा, रत्न, each of which has a different connotation. रयिः is simply the accumulation of the riches, the mass of the felicity: राधः its riches as affecting the mental, emotional heart-consciousness, its vital and sensible abundance; रा is the bliss, the higher joy of these riches, more than mental in its touch on man ; रत्न is its pure ecstasy of the Ananda. This last aspect, as it is the culmination of the Vedic वेदस्, the finding, conscious possession of the Divine, is rightly put here in front in the first rik of the Veda. The Seer-Will is the first means, the Ananda of the divine riches the ultimate aim and last achievement of the Vedic Yoga.

A Commentary on the Kena Upanishad

FOREWORD

The Upanishads are an orchestral movement of knowledge, each of them one strain in a great choral harmony. The knowledge of the Brahman, which is the Universality of our existence, and the knowledge of the world, which is the multiplicity of our existence, — but the world interpreted not in the terms of its appearances as in Science, but in the terms of its reality, — is the one grand and general subject of the Upanishads. Within this cadre, this general framework, each Upanishad has its smaller province; each takes its own standpoint of the knower and its resulting aspect of the known; to each there belongs a particular motive and a distinguishing ground-idea. The Isha Upanishad, for example, is occupied with the problem of spirituality and life, God and the world; its motive is the harmonising of these apparent opposites and the setting forth of their perfect relations in the light of Vedantic knowledge. The Kena is similarly occupied with the problem of the relations between God and the soul and its motive is to harmonise our personal activities of mental energy and human will with the movement of the infinite divine Energy and the supremacy of the universal Will. The Isha, therefore, has its eye more upon the outward Brahman and our action in and with regard to the world we see outside us; the Kena fixes rather on our psychological action and the movements within us. For on this internal relation with the Brahman must evidently depend, from it must evidently arise that attitude towards the external world, the attitude of oneness with all these multitudinous beings which the Isha gives to us as the secret of a perfect and liberated existence." For we are not here in the phenomenal world as independent existences; we appear as limited beings clashing with other limited beings, clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the physical senses but with the mind. We must become this multitudinous world, become it in our souls, obviously, not in our body and senses. The body and senses are intended to keep the multitudinousness, — they are there to prevent God's worldwide time-filling play from sinking back into the vague

and inchoate. But in the soul there must be nothing but the sense and rapture of oneness in the various joy of multitude. How is that possible? It is possible because our relations with others are not in reality those of separate life-inspired bodies, but of the great universal movement of a single soul — ekah sanatanah — broken up into separate waves by concentration in these many life-inspired bodies which we see appearing like temporary crests, ridges and bubbles in the divine ocean, apah. This soul in us is in relation to the outside world through the senses, through vitality, through mind. But it is entangled in the meshes of its instruments; it thinks they alone exist or is absorbed in their action with which it tends to identify itself pre-ponderatingly or wholly; — it forgets itself in its activities. To recall the soul in man to self-knowledge, to lift it above the life of the senses

[One line of the manuscript has been lost here.]

always [to] refer its activities to that highest Self and Deity which [we] ultimately are, so that we may be free and great, may be pure and joyous, be fulfilled and immortal. — this is the governing aim of the Kena Upanishad. I propose in the commentary to follow with some minuteness and care the steps by which the Upanishad develops its aim, to bring out carefully the psychological ideas on which the ancient system was founded and to suggest rather than work out the philosophical positions which are presupposed in the ancient sage's treatment of his subject. To work them out in a volume of the present size and purpose, would not be possible, nor, if possible, would it be convenient, since it would need a freer and ampler method delivered from the necessity of faithful subordination to the text. The first principle of a commentary must be to maintain the order of ideas and adhere to the purpose and connotation of the text which it takes as its authority.

Evolution in the Vedantic View

We must not however pass from this idea, as it is easy to pass, into another which is only a popular error, — that evolution is the object of existence. Evolution is not an universal law, it is a particular process, nor as a process has it any very wide applicability. Some would affirm that every particle of matter in the universe is bound to evolve life, mind, an individualised soul, a finally triumphant spirit. The idea is exhilarating, but impossible. There is no such rigid law, no such self-driven and unintelligent destiny in things. In the conceptions of the Upanishads Brahman in the world is not only Prajna, but Ishwara. He is not subject to law, but uses process. It is only the individual soul in a state of ignorance on which process seems to impose itself as law. Brahman on the other hand has an omnipotent power of selection and limitation. He is not bound to develop self-conscious individuality in every particle of matter, nor has He any object in such a colossal and monotonous application of one particular movement of things. He has nothing to gain by evolving, nothing to lose by not evolving. For to Him all being is only a play of His universal self-consciousness, the will so to exist the only reason of this existence and its own pleasurability its only object in existence. In that play He takes an equal delight in all, He is sama in ananda — an equal delight in the evolved state, the unevolved and the evolving. He is equal also in Being; when He has evolved Himself in the perfect man, He is no more than He already was in the leaf and clod. To suppose that all existence has one compelling purpose of growth, of progress, of consummation is to be guilty of the Western error and misunderstand the nature of being. Existence is already consummate, all change and variety in it is for delight, not for a gain or a development. The Vedantist cannot admit that anything is really developed in the sense of something new emerging into existence by whatever combination or accident which had no previous being. Nasato vidyate bhavah. That which was not cannot come into existence. The play of Brahman is not in its real nature an evolution, but a manifestation. It is not an adding of something that was wanting or a developing of something that was non-existent, but merely a manifesting of something

that was hidden. We are already what we shall become. That which is still future in matter, is present in spirit.

We say, then, in the Vedanta that if the human form appears on earth or the tree grows out of the seed, it is because the human form already exists in the seed that is cast into the womb and the form and nature of the tree already exists in the seed that is cast into the earth. If there were not this preexistence as idea or implied form in the seed, there would be no reason why any seed should bring forth according to its kind. The form does not indeed exist sensibly in the form of consciousness which we see as matter, but in the consciousness itself it is there, and therefore there is a predisposition in the matter to produce that form and no other, which is much more than tendency, which amounts to a necessity. But how came this preconception into unintelligent matter? The question itself is erroneous in form; for matter is not unintelligent, but itself a movement of conceiving Spirit. This conceiving Spirit which in man conceives the idea of human form, being one in the mind of the man, in his life-principle, in every particle of his body, stamps that conception on the life-principle so that it becomes very grain of it, stamps it on the material part so that it becomes very grain of it, so that when the seed is cast into the woman, it enters full of the conception, impregnated with it in the whole totality of its being. We can see how this works in man; we know how the mental conceptions of the father and mother work powerfully to shape body, life and temperament of the son. But we do not perceive how this works in the tree, because we are accustomed to dissociate from the tree all idea of mind and even of life. We therefore talk vaguely of the law of Nature that the tree shall produce according to its kind without understanding why such a law should exist. Vedanta tells us that the process in the tree is the same as in man, except that mind not being active and self-conscious cannot produce those variations of delicate possibility which are possible in the human being. The supra-mental conceiving Spirit stamps, through unconscious mind, on the life-principle in the tree and on all matter in the tree the conception of its nature and kind so that the seed falls into earth with every atom of its being full of that secret conception and every moment of the tree's growth is presided over by the same fixed idea. Not only in thinking man and living tree but in substances in which life and mind

are inactive, this conceiving Spirit presides and determines its law and form. So'rthan vyadadhac chasvatibhyah samabhyah.

We must not for a moment imagine that Brahman of the Upanishads is either an extracosmic God entering into a cosmos external to Him or that last refuge of the dualising intellect, an immanent God. When Brahman the conceiving Spirit is said to be in life and mind and matter, it is only as the poet is said to be in his own thought and creations; as a man muses in his mind, as the river pours forward in swirls and currents. It would be easy, by quoting isolated texts from the Upanishads, to establish on them any system whatever; for the sages of the Upanishads have made it their business to see Brahman in many aspects, from many standpoints, to record all the most important fundamental experiences which the soul has when it comes into contact with the All, the Eternal. This they did with the greater freedom because they knew that in the fundamental truth of this All and Eternal, the most varied and even contradictory experiences found their harmony and their relative truth and necessity to each other. The Upanishads are Pantheistic, because they consider the whole universe to be Brahman, yet not Pantheistic because they regard Brahman as transcendental, exceeding the universe and in His final truth other than phenomena. They are Theistic because they consider Brahman as God and Lord of His universe, immanent in it, containing it, governing and arranging it; yet not Theistic because they regard the world also as God, containing Himself and dwelling in Himself. They are polytheistic because they acknowledge the existence, power and adorability of Surya, Agni, Indra and a host of other deities; yet not polytheistic, because they regard them as only powers and names and personalities of the one Brahman. Thus it is possible for the Isha Upanishad to open with the idea of the indwelling God, isa vasyam jagat, to continue with the idea of the containing Brahman, tasminnapo matarisva dadhati, and at the same time to assert the world, the jagat, also as Brahman, tad ejati, sa paryagat. That this catholicity was not born of incoherence of thinking is evident from the deliberate and [...]¹ statement both in the Gita and the Upanishad. The Gita continually dwells on God in all things, yet it says, naham tesu te mayi, "I am not in them, they are in me"; and

1 One or two words illegible.

again it says God is bhutabrt not bhutastha, and yet na ca matsthani bhutani pasya me yogam aisvaram, "I bear up creatures in myself, I do not dwell in them; they exist in me, and yet they do not exist in me; behold my divine Yoga." The Upanishads similarly dwell on the coexistence of contradictory attributes in Brahman, nirguno guni, anejad ekam manaso javiyah, tad ejati tannaijati. All this is perfectly intelligible and reconcilable, provided we never lose sight of the key word, the master thought of the Upanishads, that Brahman is not a Being with fixed attributes, but absolute Being beyond attributes yet, being absolute, capable of all, and the world a phenomenal arrangement of attributes in Intelligent Being, arranged not logically and on a principle of mutual exclusion, but harmoniously on a principle of mutual balancing and reconciliation. God's immanence and God's extramanence, God's identity with things and God's transcendence of things, God's personality and God's impersonality, God's mercy and God's cruelty and so on through all possible pairs of opposites, all possible multiplicity of aspects, are but the two sides of the same coin, are but different views of the same scene and incompatible or inharmonious to our ideas only so long as we do not see the entire entity, whole vision.

In Himself therefore God has arranged all objects according to their nature from years sempiternal. He has fixed from the beginning the relations of His movements in matter, mind and life. The principle of diversity in unity governs all of them. The world is not comprised of many substances combining variously into many forms,— like the elements of the chemist, which now turn out not to be elements, — nor yet of many substances composing by fusion one substance, — as hydrogen and oxygen seem to compose water, — but is always and eternally one substance variously concentrated into many elements, innumerable atoms, multitudinous forms. There are not many lives composing by their union and fusion or by any other sort of combination one composite life, as pluralistic theories tend to suppose, but always and eternally one Life variously active in multitudinous substantial bodies. There are not many minds acting upon each other, mutually penetrative or tending to or consciously seeking unity, as romantic theories of being suppose, but always and eternally one mind variously intelligent in innumerable embodied vitalities. It is because of this unity that there is the possibility of contact, interchange,

interpenetration and recovery of unity by and between substance and substance, life and life, mind and mind. The contact and union is the result of oneness; the oneness is not the result of contact and union. This world is not in its reality a sum of things but one unalterable transcendental integer showing itself to us phenomenally as many apparent fractions of itself, — fractional appearances simultaneous in manifestation, related in experience. The mind and sense deal with the fractions, proceed from the experience of fractions to the whole; necessarily, therefore, they arrive at the idea of an eternal sum of things; but this totality of sum is merely a mental symbol, necessary to the mind's computations of existence. When we rise higher, we find ourselves confronted with a unity which is transcendental, an indivisible and incomputable totality. That is Parabrahman, the Absolute. All our thoughts, perceptions, experiences are merely symbols by which the Absolute is phenomenally represented to the movements of its own Awareness conditioned as matter, life, mind or supermind.

Just as each of these tattvas, principles of being, movements of Chit, conditions of Ananda which we call life, matter, mind, are eternally one in themselves embracing a diversity of mere transient forms and individual activities which emerge, abide in and one day return into their totality, material form into the substance of the pancabhutas, individual life into the oceanic surge of the world-pervading life-principle, individual mind, whenever that is² dissolved, into the secret suksmatattva or sea of subtle mind-existence, so also these three tattvas and all others that may exist are a diversity embraced in an eternal unity — the unity of Brahman. It is Brahman who moves densely as the stability of matter, forcefully as the energy of life, elastically in the subtlety of mind. Just as different vibrations in ether produce the appearances to sense which we call light and sound, so different vibrations in Chit produce the various appearances to Chit which we call matter, life and mind. It is all merely the extension of the same principle through stair and higher stair of apparent existence until, overcoming all appearances, we come to the still and unvibrating Brahman who, as we say in our gross material language, contains it all. The Sankhya called this essential vibration the ksobha,

2 Or may be

disturbance in Prakriti, cosmic ripple in Nature. The Vedanta continually speaks of the world as a movement. The Isha speaks of things as jagatyam jagat, particular movement in the general movement of conscious Being steadily viewed by that Being in His own self-knowledge, atmani atmanam atmana, self by self in self. This is the motion and nature of the Universe.

This then is Matter, a particular movement of the Brahman, one stream, one ocean of His consciousness fixed in itself as the substance of form. This is life, mind; other movements, other such streams or oceans [are] active as material of thought and vitality. But if they are separate, though one, how is it that they do not flow separately — for obviously in some way they meet, they intermingle, they have relations. Life here evolves in body; mind here evolves in vitalised substance. It is not enough to say, as we have said, that the conception of Brahman is stamped in grain of mind, through mind in grain of life, through life in grain of matter and so produces particular form. For what we actually start with seems to be not life moulding matter, but life evolving out of matter or at least in matter. Afterwards, no doubt, its needs and circumstances react on matter and help to mould it. Even if we suppose the first moulding to be only latent life and mind, the primacy of matter has to be explained.

That which to the scientist is gradual formation by circumstances is to the Vedantist process of gradual manifestation under conditions. The scientist is right from his point of view, because he is explaining the Brahman according to its appearances, and since the appearances are material and sensory, he must use the ideas created by the appearance of matter, by the senses on the sense-governed mind. The business of the Vedantist is to exceed the sense-governed mind and know things in their reality by the vijnana or comprehensive supra-mental self-knowledge. When, therefore, he uses the terms of modern Science, he must take care to do it from the Vedantic standpoint, with the Vedantic meaning illuminated by the touch of their supreme reality. He must not be led away by the hope of securing the immediate orbs³

3 Doubtful reading.

of man's contemporary knowledge, but cleave to the eternal Truth of Veda. He must not compel Vedanta to agree with Science, but wait for Science to agree with Vedanta.