-02_Talk of Fifteenth August 1909

Talk of Fifteenth August 1909

A TRANSLATION OF A BENGALI NEWSPAPER REPORT

Birth-day of Mr. Arabindo Ghose

The Bharat Mitra [Calcutta] of the 21st August reports the following speech of Mr. Arabinda Ghosh said to have been delivered by him to the young men who met him in the Sanjivani Office on the 15th August last to congratulate him on his birth-day:—

"In my childhood before the full development of my faculties, I became conscious of a strong impulse in me. I did not realise what it was then, but it grew stronger and stronger as I gained in years till all the weakness of my childhood, fear, selfishness, etc., vanished from my mind. From the day of my return to the mother country, the impulse is surging forth in great force, and my set purpose and devotion are becoming more confirmed with the trials and oppressions to which I am subjected. When some Divine power by the grace of God manifests itself in a human being any efforts to develop it give a new force to the national life. You will have to sacrifice yourself at the feet of your mother. You should, therefore, devote yourself with firm faith and whole heart to her service. Service of our motherland is our highest duty at this moment. This must be our duty in this iron age. It is now the time for us to conserve our energy. Do not be impatient, do not despair. Do not lose faith. The present fatigue and inactivity are natural; you will find instances of them in the history of every nation. Every one must store up energy. Be prepared with fresh hope and vigour for the worship of the mother. Divine power has infused this nation with a new power. This power will exalt the nation one day."

Speech at the Hooghly Conference

SPEECH BY ARABINDA GHOSE.

Arabindo Ghose spoke to Resolution No. IV— "that this conference urges the people to continue the boycott of foreign goods inaugurated on August 7th 1905, which is, in its opinion, a perfectly legitimate movement and is calculated to promote the political as well as the industrial and economical welfare of the country."

Moulvi Dedar Bux moved and Sasankajiban Roy seconded it.

Arabinda Ghose said:—

Mr. President and Members:—I desire to say two words before I say anything further—I entreat you to hear me out without expressing or giving any sign either of approval or dissent; I pray you to hear me in perfect silence. This is a resolution which nobody can oppose. It is not my intention to bring any amendment with regard to it, but I have simply to make a brief statement without argument of any kind from the standpoint of myself and those who are of the same way of thinking as myself. You are aware that we have a certain theory of politics, a certain view with regard to political action in this country. We hold that as we have no effective share in the administration of this country, and our position is such that there is no means of having even our prayers and petitions listened to, therefore the only effective course for us to take is, as far as possible, to withhold our co-operation from the Government, until they give us some effective control over the administration and some constitutional means by which we can bring the voice of the people and the weight of public opinion to bear upon the management of the affairs of this country. We hold that in these circumstances we ought to put forward the interests of the country partly by a movement of self-help and so far as we have power to deal with the Government by means of passive resistance, peaceably and within the law. And this passive resistance we do not wish to confine merely to commercial boycott. We hold that it can and should be extended to other kinds of boycott (hear, hear). We don't hold that it should be done with absolute thoroughness but so far as is possible and rational and so far as is wise in the interests of the country. Last

year at Pabna a resolution was passed which gave room for our view of politics and it was our intention to press this resolution upon the Subjects Committee. But we found that by pressing the point on the Committee the hope of a United Congress and the unity of Bengal and this Provincial Conference might be seriously imperilled. Now we are extremely anxious for the unity of the Congress. We are anxious we should throw no obstacle in the way of any hope of union, therefore we have decided not to press that amendment in the Subjects Committee, nor to bring forward our full amendment with regard to reforms. At the same time we want it to be clearly understood that in taking this course we are not for a moment receding from the policy and line we have taken up, and we consider for obvious reasons that it is absolutely necessary for us, especially at this time, to make it clear that we have not receded so far as the resolution goes. We thoroughly support it. But at the same time we wish it to be understood that we keep our position and we adhere to our policy of a boycott — of a boycott movement without any qualification, as a measure of policy for this country, as a political weapon, and as a measure of economical protection. ([Cries of] Bande Mataram.)

A United Congress

We regret to announce to the country that there is not the least possibility of having a united Congress. The efforts of the committee appointed at the Hooghly Provincial Conference have failed. At the committee's first meeting, the Moderate representatives suggested that the three main proposals decided on at last year's meeting in the Amrita Bazar office should be accepted, and after making some necessary changes to them, one should again correspond with the Bombay people. These three proposals are as follows, — the Nationalist Party must accept the creed; the Nationalist Party must accept the rules of the Convention, but those rules will be adopted by the Congress; the four resolutions of the Calcutta Session will be adopted. Those who came at that time as delegates of the Maharashtra Nationalist Party, in their eagerness to have the Congress again accept boycott, agreed to accept the creed and the constitution. But Pherozshah Mehta did not at all agree to accept the boycott resolution passed by the Calcutta Congress.

This time the Moderate representatives proposed that since Pherozshah was unwilling to accept the boycott, it would be a waste of time to bring up the four resolutions. We shall make an effort for boycott in the Subjects Committee of a united Congress; for the present let us keep it under our hat. The creed must be accepted and signed without reservation. The Convention rules too must be accepted, but let a committee to amend the rules be appointed at Lahore. This fantastic proposal could not satisfy the Nationalist representatives, and Srijut Aurobindo Ghose replied bluntly that he would never consent to sign the creed, but for a few days he would consider the proposal put forward and study the rules, and then would let the Moderates know what changes in the proposal he found necessary. It was decided that the committee would meet again after the Puja holidays and come to some firm conclusion. After the holidays the Nationalist representatives proposed that they would accept the aim of the Convention as the aim of the Congress but would never accept it as their own view of the matter; they would never consent to confine themselves to this narrow aim and would never sign the creed. They would not accept the Convention rules as the constitution of the Congress, but to facilitate union they might consent to one or two meetings being held under the rules. The rule that has been framed to prevent the election of delegates from new associations would have to be nullified, and at the second meeting of the united Congress instead of these rules a real constitution would have to be adopted by the Congress. They would not make the acceptance of the four Calcutta resolutions a condition for coming together, but they would ask the Moderate leaders to promise to give them a full opportunity to bring up the four resolutions in the Subjects Committee

or the Congress. The second time the committee met, the Moderate leaders did not consent to accept this proposal. They said that the creed had to be signed, otherwise any attempt at union was useless. First accept the creed and the rules, and then come with us to Lahore; there we shall insist on a committee being appointed for the purpose of amending the rules. The Nationalist delegates refused to sign the creed. There could thus be no united Congress.

We have repeatedly affirmed that the Nationalist Party of Bengal will never accept the "Mehta Majlis" as the Congress, that it is not anxious to be admitted to that Majlis, that it will at no time agree to sign the creed. The implication of the proposal put forward by the Moderate leaders is that the Nationalists would admit their error, cast to the winds their own convictions and devotion to truth and enter the Majlis with folded hands, kowtowing all the time to Mehta and Gokhale; and there the minority Nationalist delegates could beg favours from the majority Moderates. We do not see why the Nationalists should submit to such an indignity and dishonour. Have the Moderates come to the conclusion that the Nationalists, scared by two years of harsh and merciless persecution, have come to long for unity simply out of a demented desire to take refuge in the Mehta Majlis? When there are two mutually opposed sides, can only one side ever tolerate all the caprices of the other, forget all its own views, objections and high hopes and bow down at the other's feet? In the proposal made last year in the Amrita Bazar office — with which the Bengal Nationalists were not in agreement — the four Calcutta resolutions were included by Srijut Motilal Ghose. Now even these do not form part of the Moderates' proposal. None of the Nationalist Party's ideas will be kept; whatever the Moderates affirm must be accepted in full — this is the basis of this strange agreement.

It was decided at Calcutta that the Congress would put forward colonial self-government within the British Empire as its demand. Although we did not subscribe to this view, still, because it was the view held by most of the delegates, we agreed to accept it. But at Surat it was decided at the Convention that those who were unwilling to accept this ideal as the ultimate political aim of the Congress could not enter. To sign the creed and to accept this principle are one and the same thing. Now, firstly, why should we sign something that we do not agree to? Dharma is our only recourse. Why should we forsake that Dharma and incur the wrath of God for the satisfaction of Mehta? In the second place, if you say that when the demand of the Congress has been turned into the goal of the Congress and no other change has been made, why not accept it? — well, we may agree to that too in the hope of achieving unity, but we will not sign the creed. The Indian National Congress belongs neither to the Moderates nor to the Nationalists. Whosoever the Indian people elect as delegates will have to be accepted as delegates, otherwise yours is not a National Congress, but only a deliberating board of Moderates. The Indian National Congress does not belong to the Moderates,

nor to cowards. To make one sign the creed would mean that the self-sacrificing heroic children of the Mother who actively seek the freedom of India will be deemed unfit to enter the Indian National Congress. To sign the creed would bring disgrace to the ideal of the nation, disgrace to the nation, disgrace to nationalism, disgrace to the patriotic, persecuted sons of Mother India.

Your rules are a monument to autocratic conduct and a violation of the code of democracy. All this is an attempt to bind the Congress, at the whim of a few powerful men, to these rules, although they have never been adopted by the Congress. If we accept it as a constitution, this attempt of yours to harm the interests of this country will be successful. Nevertheless, if you promise to frame, within two years, a right set of rules for the Congress, we are willing to accept the convention's present rules as a temporary arrangement. Only one rule must be rescinded, the one by which Nationalist delegates are effectively barred from entering. If this rule is not withdrawn, what are a handful of Nationalist delegates going to do in a party made up of numerous Moderates? It is because this sort of rule has been incorporated in the administrative reforms offered by the English that you make the horizon resound with lamentations and protests. You refuse to stand as candidates on the plea that the government has boycotted you; but your unjust rule-reform, too, has for its purpose the expulsion of us from the Congress. So long as this rule remains, why should we form a part of your working committee? If you do not consent to the abrogation of this rule, we shall assume that your talk of coming together with us is a pretence, and that it is simply for some temporary selfish purpose of your own that you are calling us, a minority group, to enter.

The proposal of the Nationalist representatives is reasonable and motivated by a desire for union. They have accepted the aim of the Congress and the rules of the Convention so far as possible, preserving whatever had to be preserved for the freedom of their own opinion, the respect for truth, the welfare of the country — in this the Moderates' interests will in no way be compromised, the Government also will not be able to say that the Congress is a seditious gathering and there will be no possibility of any obstacle being put in the way of the functioning of the Congress. Give and take is the law of any agreement. For one party to receive everything, and for the other to give everything, — what country has such a rule? And when by such a rule has there been any real union? If we had been defeated in battle, supplicants suing for peace, then we could understand the overbearing demands of the Moderates. But we are not defeated, nor are we supplicants. We engaged ourselves in efforts to have a united Congress for the good of the country, because it was the desire of the country — otherwise we have the strength, the energy, the courage; the future belongs to us. The people of the country are behind us and the youth is ours alone. We are always ready to stand on our own.

Selected Hymns

HYMNS OF VASISHTHA MAITRAVARUNI

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 42

1. May the brilliant (or mighty) lords of the soul¹ move forward, forward may he come who cries aloud² in the region of ether, may the Fosterers of being move forward pouring out its waters, may the two Stones (mind and body) be yoked to their work, that are the form³ of the material of sacrifice.

2. Easy of going and securely known⁴ to thee is the path, O Agni; yoke in the Soma-offering thy bright steeds and thy fierce red or those who in their seat are ruddy-active⁵ and bearers of energy. I sit and I invoke the births of the gods.

3. Greatening for you the sacrifice with obeisances of adoration the Offerer in your presence overaboundeth in his rapture. Sacrifice perfectly to the gods, O multitudinous in force ;⁶ set in movement the energy of the sacrificial activities.

4. When in the house of the strong and the joyous the Guest resting at his ease awakens to knowledge, Agni well-pleased, rightly established in his home, gives so to the creature for his journey to the supreme bliss (or gives so the bliss that he may travel to it).

5. Cleave in love, O Agni, to this our sacrifice; in Indra, in the Maruts make us victorious; let the Nights and the Dawn[s] sit on the seat of fullness; sacrifice here to Mitra and Varuna

1 ब्रह्माण: the Brahmanaspatis as priests of the inner sacrifice.

2 क्रदनु: either Indra or Parjanya.

3 Or mould. पेश: distinguished form from पिश् to separate, distinguish. . or पिष् to crush, mould, shape.

4 सनवित्त चिरलब्ध. This establishes the sense of सानः in रुषिसानः etc.

5 अरुषाः indicative passage for the double sense of अरुष.

6 अणीक life, force (cf. अनीकिनी army). . appearance; object; face.

and let them have joy of their desire.

6. Thus has Vasistha desiring bliss in all its forms (or masteries, energies) affirmed in praise Agni of the Strength; may he extend in us impulsive force and felicity and plenty and do ye protect us always with glad states of our being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 43

1. For you the seekers of the godhead in the sacrifices have realised in the word Earth and Heaven (the bodily and mental states) by submission and adoration that they may impel us (upward), — even they whose soul-thoughts yet unequal, O ye illumined ones, spread out on all sides like the branches of a forest tree (as branchings of the growth of lower delight).

2. Let the sacrifice move forward (or let him, Agni, move forward in the sacrifice) like a horse swift-galloping (as the nervous force impelled forward towards the attainment); with one mind strain upwards the thoughts enriched with brightness (the sacrificial image is of ladles dripping with clarified butter); spread the seat of fullness effective for the sacrifice; high rise the flames of light seeking the godhead (or the flames of light effective for the sacrifice of the lower being).

3. Like sons sustaining wholly their mother let the gods sit on the high level of the seat of fullness; may the universal power of thee set in action the force of knowledge; create not for us enemies to smite us in the extension of the God.

4. The Lords of sacrifice have attained the enjoyment of Love, for they pressed out, skilful milkers, the streams of the Truth. Today attain to the eldest vastness of the riches of being and with one mind stand in the divine endeavour.

5. Thus do thou for us, O Agni, be bountiful in the peoples; by

thee, O master of force, we [ ]¹ by thy felicity and thy fellowship have the joy of fulfilment (or a common joy) and are free from all hurt. Do ye protect us always with glad states of our being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 44

1. Dadhikra first of you (or for you) I call, the Aswins, Dawn and Agni kindled high and Bhaga for my increase; Indra and Vishnu and Pushan, Brahmanaspati and the sons of Aditi, Earth and Heaven and the waters¹ and Swar.

2. Let us awaken by adoration Dadhikra and impel him upward, let us approach the sacrifice and seating Ila the goddess on the seat of fullness, let us invoke the Aswins illumined and swift to the call.

3. I awaken Agni Dadhikravan and express by speech Dawn and the Sun and the Light and the red wideness² of Varuna when he hews³ the foe; let these remove from us every kind of evil.

4. Dadhikra, first and full of strength and action, appeareth in front of the chariots (the movements of Delight) consciously perceiving, one in knowledge with Surya and the sons of Aditi and the Vasus and the Angiras⁴ (with the divine illumination and the gods of the infinite Being and the lords of Substance and the lords of Puissance).

5. May Dadhikra in us work out a way of going that he may follow the path of the Truth. May the Divine Might (or host) hear us, even Agni, — may all They hear, the vast Gods illimitable.

1 Blank in manuscript, आस्क्राः not translated.

1 अपः waters or the Antariksha?

2 ब्रध्न Probably "broad, wide" = महत् .

3 मांश्र्चतोः contrasted in IX [97.54] with पृशने cleaving and clinging.

4 अंगिरस् here evidently a class of gods.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 45

1. May Savitri the divine arrive, perfect in delight,¹ filling the mid-world, borne by his steeds (the nervous forces), holding in his hand many human fulfilments,² bringing forth and establishing here the fullness of being (or, that which becometh).³

2. Loose and wide his arms of the bright-golden Light reached up to the ends of Heaven (the mind); now may that might of him labour and the Sun⁴ also give to him according to that labour his own activity (i.e. the divine Truth manifest in the creative illumined consciousness of man here).

3. Verily may that divine creative Savitri create for us, master of substance, his many possessions; when he goeth abroad in a wide energy, then he abounds⁵ for us in the enjoyment of this mortality.

4. Lo, these are the words of my hymn and they seek after Savitri who has the tongue of perfect enjoyment,⁶ the arms of light that are full, the effective hands of action. May he establish for us a vast manifestation of being rich in content. And do ye always protect us with states of happy being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 46

1. Bring ye these Words (as offerings) to Rudra; firm is his bow (of acquired possession) and swift are his arrows (of impulsion),¹the god who possesses the self-state of his nature (i.e. who firmly

1 सुरत्नः or else, perfect in light. But Savitri in this verse is not the Sun, see l[ine] 2. or not the Sun in his lightgiving aspect, but the creator, the bringer out, from the divine being, of its human manifestations, नर्या पुरूणि.

2 नर्या or mightinesses.

3 भूम hardly here the earth. Lit[erally] "becoming", so "abundant [or] full becoming".

4 सुरः. Note the difference between Savitri and Surya.

5 रासते expressing rather rich enjoyment or having than the limited sense of giving.

6 सुजिह्वं recalling सुरत्न of the first verse.

1 स्थिरघन्वने—क्षिप्रेषवे double meaning.

holding the acquired state of being shoots from it like a bow the fresh impulsions that lead to farther progress); unconquerable and conquering, sharp are his weapons. May he hearken to us.

2. For he awakens to knowledge by secure dwelling in the earthly birth and utter empire of the heavenly; fixed in his presence let him move to our doors that keep us;² O Rudra, be free from unfriendly powers in the forms that we create.

3. That brilliant force of thine which is loosed downwards from on thy heavens and ranges on the earth, may it encompass us around; O easily dawning upon us thou hast a thousand powers of healing; do not harm to the things of our creation and the things of our extending.

4. Slay us not, O Rudra, nor deliver us over; let us not be in the path of thy onset when thou art wroth. Enjoy in us in that seat of fullness which is the expression of the living creature. And do ye protect us always by states of happy being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 47

1. O ye Waters of being, that supreme flood of yours, a flood of revealed knowledge, which the seekers of godhead made as a drink for Indra, may we enjoy today pure and free from all rejection and raining the mind's brightness and full of the sweetness.

2. That flowing abundance of yours, utter sweet, O ye Waters, may he of the swift-movement keep in manifestation who is the child of the waters, and that in which Indra with the Masters of substance groweth drunk with rapture, may we taste in you today growing to the godhead.

2 अवत्रवंती or protecting to our doors that protect.

3. Full of a hundredfold purification, rejoicing in the self-state of the nature the divine waters move to the ranging-field¹ of the gods and they measure not nor limit the activities of Indra. Do ye to the Rivers offering — an offering full of the mind's richness.

4. They whom the Lord of Illumination by his rays extended and for whom Indra clove out their abundant movement, — may those Rivers establish for us that which has the supreme good. And do ye protect us always with states of happy being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 48

1. Ye of the plenty who hold the shaping knowledge, take joy in us of the Soma distilled, O Purushas great in your fullnesses; may your downward powers come as force of action to us and set in motion the human car.

2. Informed by your powers of knowledge, wide-pervading by your powers of pervasion may we overcome by your force all opposing forces; may he of the plenty keep us in the possession of the plenty, with Indra for our yokefellow may we pass through the coverer.

3. They also master the many states that have been expressed, yea, in the upward struggle they conquer all and pass beyond. Indra and the Pervader and the Possessor of the shaping knowledge and he of the plenty, fighting our battle, scatter the strength of the foe in confusion.

4. Now, O ye gods, create for us that which has the supreme good, be all together in us for our continued being and may the masters of substance utterly give force to us. And do ye protect us always by states of happy being.

1 पाथः or move onto the path.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 49

1. Eldest of the ocean they go amidst this water purifying all, not resting in any, they whom Indra with the lightning, the Male, [clove out]¹ — may those divine waters keep me here in my being.

2. The waters divine, — whether they that flow in the channels we dig for them or they that are self-born, they who are substance of the Ocean pure and purifying — may those divine waters keep me here in [my] being.

3. They in whose midst moveth Varuna the King looking down on the truth and falsehood in creatures, they who stream sweetness and are pure and are purifying, may those divine waters keep me here in my being.

4. They in whom Varuna the. King, in whom Soma, in whom all the gods have ecstasy of the fullness of force, in whom Agni, the universal Power, has entered in, may those divine waters keep me here in my being.

MANDALA VII, SUKTA 50

1. Mitra and Varuna, protect me here; may neither that reach me which houses itself in the body nor that which universalises itself; vanished has the evil that resides in the activities and that of imperfect vision; let not the Serpent find me with the attack.

2. That which becomes a pleasant evil in the various parts of the solid being and enters the knees and the ankles, may Agni burning purely repel it hence; let not the serpent find me with the attack.

3. The poison that is born in the shalmali tree and in the rivers and

1 Verb omitted in manuscript; cf. The Secret of the Veda (1971), p. 106.

from the herbs, may all the gods press it out of me. Let not the serpent find me with the attack.

4. [Not translated.]

[Chapters for a Work on the Isha Upanishad]

[A]

The Isha Upanishad.

The Puranic account supposes us to have left behind the last Satya period, the age of harmony, and to be now in a period of enormous breakdown, disintegration and increasing confusion in which man is labouring forward towards a new harmony which will appear when the spirit of God-descends again upon mankind in the form of the Avatara called Kalki, destroys all that is lawless, dark and confused and establishes the reign of the saints, the Sadhus, those, that is to say,— if we take the literal meaning of the word Sadhu, who are strivers after perfection. Translated, again, into modern language more rationalistic but, again, let me say, not necessarily more accurate this would mean that the civilisation by which we live is not the result of a recent hotfooted gallop forward from the condition of the Caribbee and Hottentot, but the detritus and uncertain reformation of a great era of knowledge, balance and adjustment which lives for us only in tradition but in a universal tradition, the Golden Age, the Saturnia regna, of the West, our Satyayuga or age of the recovered Veda. What then are these savage races, these epochs of barbarism, these Animistic, Totemistic, Naturalistic and superstitious beliefs, these mythologies, these propitiatory sacrifices, these crude conditions of society? Partly, the Hindu theory would say, the ignorant fragmentary survival of defaced and disintegrated beliefs and customs, originally deeper, simpler, truer than the modern, — even as a broken statue by Phidias or Praxiteles or a fragment of an Athenian dramatist is at once simpler and nobler or more beautiful and perfect than the best work of the moderns, — partly, a reeling back into the beast, an enormous movement of communal atavism brought about by worldwide destructive forces in whose workings both Nature and man have assisted. Animism is the obscure memory of an ancient discipline which put us into spiritual communion with intelligent beings and forces living behind the veil of gross matter sensible to our limited material organs. Nature-

worship is another side of the same ancient truth. Fetishism remembers barbarously the great Vedic dogma that God is everywhere and God is all and that the inert stone and stock, things mindless and helpless and crude, are also He; in them, too, there is the intelligent Force that has built the Himalayas, filled with its flaming glories the sun and arranged the courses of the planets. The mythologies are ancient traditions, allegories and symbols. The savage and the cannibal are merely the human beast, man hurled down from his ascent and returning from the sattwic or intelligent state into the tamasic, crumbling into the animal and almost into the clod by that disintegration through inertia which to the Hindu idea is the ordinary road to disappearance into the vague and rough material of Nature out of which we were made. The ascent of man, according to this theory, is not a facile and an assured march; on the contrary, it is a steep, a strenuous effort, the ascent difficult, though the periods of attainment and rest yield to us ages of a golden joy, the descent frightfully easy. Even in such a descent something is preserved, unless indeed we are entirely cut off from the great centres of civilisation, all energetic spirits withdrawn from our midst and we ourselves wholly occupied with immediate material needs. An advanced race, losing its intelligent classes and all its sources of intelligence and subjected to these conditions, would be in danger of descending to the same level as the Maori or the Basuto. On the other hand individuals of the most degraded race — a son of African cannibals, for instance — could under proper conditions develop the intellectual activity and high moral standard of the most civilised races. The spirit of man, according to the Vedic idea, is capable of everything wherever it is placed; it has an infinite capacity both for the highest and the lowest; but because he submits to the matter in which he dwells and matter is dominated by its surrounding contacts, therefore his progress is slow, uncertain and liable to these astounding relapses. Such is the Hindu explanation of the world and, so expressed, freed from the Puranic language and symbols which make it vivid and concrete to us, I can find nothing in it that is irrational. Western thought with its dogmatic materialism, its rigid insistence on its own hastily formed idea of evolution, its premature arrangements of the eras of earth, animal and man, may be impatient of it, but I see no reason why we Hindus, heirs of that ancient and wise tradition should so long as there is no definite disproof rule it out of court in obedience

to Western opinion. We can afford at least to suspend judgment. Modern research is yet in its infancy. We, a calm, experienced and thoughtful nation, always deep and leisurely thinkers, ought not to be carried away by its eager and immature conclusions.

I will take this Puranic theory as a working hypothesis and suppose at least that there was a great Vedic age of advanced civilisation broken afterwards by Time and circumstance and of which modern Hinduism presents us only some preserved, collected or redeveloped fragments; I shall suppose that the real meaning and justification of Purana, Tantra, Itihasa and Yoga can only be discovered by a rediscovery of their old foundation and harmonising secret in the true sense of the Veda, and in this light I shall proceed, awaiting its confirmation or refutation and standing always on the facts of Veda, Vedanta and Yoga. We need not understand by an advanced civilisation a culture or a society at all resembling what our modern notions conceive to be the only model of a civilised society — the modern European; neither need or indeed can we suppose it to have been at all on the model of the modern Hindu. It is probable that this ancient culture had none of those material conveniences on which we vaunt ourselves, — but it may have had others of a higher, possibly even a more potent kind. (Perfection of the memory and the non-accumulation of worthless books might have dispensed with the necessity of large libraries. Other means of receiving information and the habit of thinking for oneself might have prevented the growth of anything corresponding to the newspaper, — it is even possible that the men of those times would have looked down on that crude and vulgar organ. Possibly the power of telepathy organised — it seems to persist disorganised,— in some savage races, — might make the telegraph, even the wireless telegraph unnecessary.) The social customs of the time might seem strange or even immoral to our modern sanskaras,—just as, no doubt, many of ours will seem incredible and shocking to future ages. The organisation of Government may have been surprisingly different from our own and yet not inconsistent with civilisation; there may have been a simple communism without over-government, large armies or wars of aggression, or even an entire absence of government, a human freedom and natural coordination such as Tolstoy and other European idealists have seen again in their dreams, — for it is at least conceivable that, given certain spiritual conditions which would

constitute, in the language of religion, a kingdom of Heaven on earth or a government of God among men, the elaborate arrangements of modern administration whose whole basis is human depravity and the needs of an Iron Age, — would become unnecessary. The old tradition runs that in the Satyayuga there was neither the desire nor the need of modern devices; the organised arrangement of men's actions, duties and institutions by an external compulsion representing the community's collective will began in the Bronze Age with the institution of government in Kingship. The Vishnu Purana tells us, conformably with this idea, that Vishnu in the Satya incarnates as Yajna, that is to say as the divine Master in man to whom men offer up all their actions as a sacrifice, reserving nothing for an egoistic satisfaction, but in the Treta he descends [as] the Chakravarti Raja, sustains society's righteousness, its sword of justice and defence, its preserver of the dharma, and standing forward as the King gathers a number of human communities under his unifying sway. But it is unnecessary to my present purpose to consider these speculations, for which much might be said and many indications collected. It is sufficient that an ancient society might differ in every respect from our modern communities and yet be called advanced if it possessed a deep, scientific and organised knowledge and if it synthetised in the light of large and cultured conceptions all human institutions, relations and activities. This is all with which I am here and at present concerned. For I have only to inquire whether we have not at any rate some part of such a profound and organised knowledge in the surviving Upani-shads and the still extant Sanhitas of the Veda; — written long afterwards, mostly in the Dwapara and Kali when, chiefly, men sought the aid of the written word and the material device to eke out their failing powers and their declining virility of mind and body, we need expect from them no picture of that ancient civilisation, nor even the whole of its knowledge for the great mass of that knowledge has been lost to us with the other numberless Sanhitas of Veda. The whole of it we cannot reconstitute, since a great mass of Vedic material has been lost to us, possibly beyond hope of recovery until Vishnu descends once more as the Varaha into the sea of oblivion and lifts up the lost Veda on his mighty tusks into the light of our waking consciousness and on to the firm soil of our externalised knowledge.

Not therefore the conception of semi-savages or half civilised

philosophers, but the disjecta membra of a profound spiritual culture, a high and complex Yogic discipline and a well-founded theory of our relations with the unseen is what we shall expect in Veda and Vedanta. It is here that Comparative Philology intervenes. For it professes to have fixed for the Vedas a meaning which will bring them well within the savage theory and for the Vedanta an ambiguous character, half of it barbarous foolishness and half of it sublime philosophy such as we might expect from a highly gifted nation emerging out of a very primitive culture into a premature and immature activity of the higher intellectual faculties. A worship of the personified Sun, Moon, Fire, Wind, Dawn, Sky and other natural phenomena by means of a system of animal sacrifices, this is the Veda; high religious thinking and profound Monistic ideas forcibly derived from Vedic Nature-worship marred by the crudest notions about physics, psychology, cosmology and material origins and relations generally and mixed up with a great mass of unintelligible mystical jargon, this is the Upanishads. If that be so, our preoccupation with these works is misplaced. We must put them away as lumber of the past, interesting records of the beginnings and crude origins of religion and philosophy but records only, not authorities for our thought or lamps for our steps in life. We must base ourself not on the Vedas and Upanishads, but, as for that matter many of us are well inclined to do, on Badara-yana, Kapila, Shankara and Buddha, not on the ancient Rishis but on the modern philosophers and logicians.

Such an abandonment is only obligatory on us after we have fixed the precise scientific value of these philological conclusions,¹ this modern naturalistic interpretation of which so much is made. We are too apt in India to take the European sciences at their own valuation. The Europeans themselves are often more sceptical. In ethnology the evidence of philology is increasingly disregarded. The ethnologists tend to disregard altogether, for example, the philological distinction between Aryan and Dravidian with its accompanying corollary of an immigration from the sub-Arctic regions or the regions of the Hindu-Kush and to affirm the existence of a single homogeneous Indo-Afghan race in immemorial occupation of the peninsula. Many great scientific thinkers deny the rank of a science to philology or are so much impressed

1 Here Sri Aurobindo wrote: "their [?] view of", but abandoned the phrase without completing it.

by the failure of this branch of nineteenth-century inquiry that they doubt or deny even the possibility of a science of language. We need not therefore yield a servile assent to the conclusions of the philologists from any fear of being denounced as deniers of modern enlightenment and modern science; for we shall be in excellent company, supported by the authority of protagonists of that enlightenment and science.

When we examine the work of the philologists, our suspicions will receive an ample confirmation; for we shall find no evidence of any true scientific method, but only a few glimpses of it eked out by random speculation sometimes of a highly ingenious and forcible character but sometimes also in the last degree hasty and flimsy. A long time ago European scholars comparing what are now called the Indo-Aryan tongues were struck by the close resemblance amounting to identity of common domestic and familiar terms in these languages. "Pitar, pater, pater, vater, father", "matar, meter, mater, [mutter], mother", — here, they thought, was the seed of a new science and the proof of an affiliation of different languages to our parent source which might lead to the explanation of the whole development of human speech. And indeed there was a concidence and a discovery which might have been as important to human knowledge as the fall of Newton's apple and the discovery of gravitation. But this great possibility never flowered into actuality. On the contrary the after results were disappointingly meagre. One or two bye-laws of the modification of sounds as between the Aryan languages were worked out, the identity of a certain number of terms as between these kindred tongues well-established and a few theories hazarded or made out as to the classification not scientific but empirical of the various extant dialects of man. No discovery of the laws governing the structure of language, no clear light on the associations between sound and idea, no wide careful and searching analysis of the origins and development even of the Aryan tongues resulted from this brilliant beginning. Philology is an enquiry that has failed to result in the creation of a science.

In its application to the Vedas modern philology has followed two distinct methods, the philological method proper and the scholastic, derivation of words and the observation of the use of words. From comparative philology in its present imperfect and rudimentary condition all that Vedic research can gain is the discovery of a previously

unsuspected identity of meaning as between some peculiarly Vedic words or forms or the Vedic use of Sanscrit words or forms and the sense of the same vocable or form, whether intact or modified, in other Aryan tongues. Wherever Philology goes beyond this limit, its work is conjectural, not scientific and cannot command from us an implicit assent. Unfortunately, also, European scholars permit themselves a license of speculation and suggestion which may sometimes be fruitful but which renders their work continually unconvincing. I may instance — my limits forbid more detail — Max Muller's extraordinary dealings in his Preface to the Rigveda with the Vedic form uloka (for loka). He derives this ancient form without an atom or even a shadow of proof or probability from an original uruloka or urvaloka, rejecting cavalierly the obvious and fruitful Tamil parallel uloku — the same word with the same meaning — on the strength of an argument which proceeds from his ignorance of the Tamil tongue and its peculiar phonetic principles. The example is typical. These scholars are on firmer ground when they attempt to establish new meanings of words by legitimate derivation from Sanscrit roots and careful observation of the sense suitable to a particular word in the various contexts in which it occurs. But here also we may be permitted to differ from their arguments and reject their conclusions. For their work is conjectural; not only is the new meaning assigned to particular words conjectural but the interpretation of the context on which its correctness depends is also very often either doubtful or conjectural. We are moving in a field of uncertainty and the imposing careful method and system[at]isation of the European scholars must not blind us to the fact that it is a method of conjecture and a systematisation of uncertainties.

Is a more certain application of philology to the Veda at all possible? I believe it is. I believe that by following a different clue we can arrive at least at the beginnings of a true science which will explain in its principles and details the origin, structure and development first of the Sanscrit, and then of the other Aryan and Dravidian tongues, if not of human speech generally in its various families. The scholars erred because they took the identity "pitar, pater, vater, father" as the master-clue to the identities of these languages. But this resemblance of familiar terms in only an incident, a tertiary result of a much deeper, more radi[c]al, more fruitful identity. The real clue is not

yet discovered, but I believe that it is discoverable. Until, however, it is found and followed up, a task which demands great leisure and a gigantic industry, I am content to insist on the inconclusiveness of the initial work of the philologists. I repeat, the common assumption in Europe and among English-educated Indians that the researches of European scholarship have fixed for us correctly, conclusively and finally the meaning of Veda and the origin and process of development of Vedanta, is an assumption not yet justified and until it is justified no one is bound by it who does not choose to be bound. The field is still open, the last word still remains to be pronounced. I refuse, therefore, at this stage, my assent to the European idea of Veda and Vedanta and hold myself free to propound another interpretation and a more searching theory.

[B]

Chapter [ ]¹

I have combated the supremacy of the European theory — not seeking actually to refute it but to open the door for other possibilities, because the notions generated by it are a stumbling block to the proper approach to Vedanta. Under their influence we come to the Upani-shads with a theory of their origin and in a spirit hostile to the sympathetic insight to which alone they will render up their secret. The very sense of the word Vedanta indicates clearly the aim of the seers who composed the Upanishads as well as the idea they entertained,— the true and correct idea, I believe, of their relations to the Veda. They were, they thought, recording a fulfilment of Vedic knowledge, giving shape to the culmination to which the sacred hymns pointed, and bringing out the inner and essential meaning of the practical details of the Karmakanda. The word, Upanishad, itself meant, I would suggest, originally not a session of speculative inquirers (the ingenious and plausible German derivation) but an affirmation and arrangement of essential truths and principles. The sense, it would almost seem, was at first general but afterwards, by predominant practice, applied

1 Left blank by Sri Aurobindo.

exclusively to the Brahmi Upanishad[s], in which we have the systema-tisation particularly of the Brahmavidya. In any case such a systema-tisation of Vedic knowledge was what these Rishis thought themselves to be effecting. But the modern theory denies the claim and compels us to approach the Upanishads from a different standpoint and both to judge and to interpret them by the law of a mentality which is as far as the two poles asunder from the mentality of the writers. We shall therefore certainly fail to understand the workings of their minds even if we are right in our history.

But I am convinced that the claim was neither a pretence nor an error. I believe the Vedas to hold a sense which neither mediaeval India nor modern Europe has grasped, but which was perfectly plain to the early Vedantic thinkers. Max Muller has understood one thing by the Vedic mantras, Sayana has understood another, Yaska had his own interpretations of their antique diction, but none of them understood what Yajnavalkya and Ajatashatrou understood. We shall yet have to go back from the Nature-worship and henotheism of the Europeans, beyond the mythology and ceremonial of Sayana, beyond even the earlier intimations of Yaska and recover—nor is it the impossible task it seems — the knowledge of Yajnavalkya and Ajatashatrou. It is because we do not understand the Vedas that three fourths of the Upanishads are a sealed book to us. Even of the little we think we can understand, much has been insecurely grasped and superficially comprehended, so that these sublimest of all Scriptures have become, latterly, more often a ground for philosophic wranglings than an illumination to the soul. For want of this key profound scholars have fumbled and for want of this guidance great thinkers gone astray, — Max Muller emitted his wonderful utterance about the babblings of humanity's nonage, Shankara left so much of his text unexplained or put it by as inferior truth for the ignorant, Vivekananda found himself compelled to admit his non-comprehension of the Vedantin's cosmological ideas and mention them doubtfully as curious speculations. It is only Veda that can give us a complete insight into Vedanta. Only when we thoroughly know the great Vedic ideas in their totality shall we be able entirely to appreciate the profound harmonious and grandiose system of thought of our early forefathers. By ignoring the Vedas we lose all but a few rays of the glorious sun of Vedanta.

But whether this view is sound or unsound, whether we decide that the sense of those ancient writings was best known to the ancient Hindus or to the modern Europeans, to Yajnavalkya or to Max Muller, two things are certain that the Vedantic Rishis believed themselves to be in possession of the system of their Vedic predecessors and that they surely did not regard this system as merely a minute collection of ritual practices or merely an elaborate worship of material Nature-Powers. Minds that saw the world steadily as a whole, they did not repel that worship or disown that ritual. Surya was to them the god of the Sun; Agni they regarded as the master of fire; but they were not — and this is the important point—simply the god of the sun and simply the master of fire. They were not even merely a Something behind both, unknown and vague, although deep, mighty and subtle; but because of the nature and origin of the sun, Surya was also a God of a higher moral and spiritual function and Agni possessed of diviner and less palpable masteries. I will cite the single example of the Isha Upanishad in support of my point. The bulk of this poem is occupied with the solution of problems which involve the most abstruse and ultimate questions of metaphysics, ethics and psychology; yet after a series of profound and noble pronouncements on these deep problems the Upanishad turns, suddenly, without any consciousness of descent, without any lowering of tone to appeal with passion and power not to some Supernal Power but to Surya, to Agni. Is it to the earthly Fire and the material Sun that the Rishi lifts his mighty song? Does he pray to Surya to give him the warmth of his beams or to drive away night from the sky? Does he entreat Agni to nourish the sacrificial fire or to receive for the gods on his flaming tongues the clarified butter and the Soma-juice? Not even for a moment, not even by allusion; but rather to Surya to remove from the sight of his mind the distracting brilliance which veils from mankind the highest truth and form of things, to enable him to realise his perfect identity with God and to Agni to put aside this siege of the devious attractions of ignorance and desire and raise our kind to that sublime felicity reserved for purified souls. It is for the fulfilment of the loftiest spiritual ends that he calls upon Surya; it is for support in the noblest moral victories that he appeals to Agni. This is not Helios Hyperion but another Vivasvan, master of this sun and its beams (that is also evident) but master too of the soul's illumination, sa no dhiyah prachodayat;

this is not the limping blacksmith Hephaistos, but another Hiranya-retas, master no doubt of this fire and its helpful and consuming flames, but master also of purified and illuminated action and force, hota kavikratuh satyas chitrasravastamah — agnih purvebhir rishi-bhir idyo nutanair [uta,] the priest, the seer, the true, the full of rich inspirations, Agni adorable to the sages of the past, adorable to the great minds of today. Here is no lapse of a great philosophic mind into barbarous polytheistic superstition, no material and primitive Nature-worship, no extraordinary intellectual compromise and vague henotheism. We are in the presence of an established system of spiritual knowledge and an ordered belief in which matter, mind and spirit are connected and coordinated by the common action of great divine powers. When we know according to what idea of cosmic principle Surya and Agni could be at once material gods and great spiritual helpers, we shall have some clue to the system of the early Vedantins and at the same time, as I believe, to the genuine significance and spiritual value of that ancient and eternal bedrock of Hinduism, the Vedas.

But European scholars have their own explanation of the development of this remarkable speculative system out of the superstitious ritual and unintelligent worship which is all they find in the Vedas and, since the utmost respect in intellectual matters ought to be paid to the king of the day even when we seek to persuade him to abdicate, I must deal with it before I close this introductory portion and pass to the methods and substance of the Upanishads. It is [held] that there was a development of religious thought from polytheism to henotheism and from henotheism to pantheism which we can trace to some extent in the Vedas themselves and of which the Upanishads are the culmination. Some even, notably the Indian disciples of European scholarship — interpreting these ancient movements by the light of our very different modern intellectuality or pushed by the besetting Occidental impulse to search in our Indian origins for parallels to European history, even assert that the Upanishads represent a pro-testant and rationalistic movement away from the cumbrous ritual, the polytheistic superstition and the blind primitive religiosity of the Vedas and towards a final rationalistic culmination in the six Darsha-nas, in the agnosticism of Buddha, in the atheism of Charvaka and in the loftiness of the modern Adwaita philosophy. It would almost

seem as if this old Indian movement contains in itself at one and the same time the old philosophic movement of [the Greeks],² Luther's Protestant reformation and the glories of modern free thought.³These are indeed exhilarating notions and they have been attractively handled — some of them can be read, developed with great lucidity and charm, in that remarkable compilation of European discoveries and fallacies, Mr Romesh Chandra Dutt's History of Ancient Indian Civilisation. Nothing indeed can be more ingenious and inspiriting, nothing more satisfactory at once to the patriotic imagination and our natural human yearning for the reassuringly familiar. But are such ideas as sound as they are ingenious? are they as true as they are exhilarating? One may surely be permitted to entertain some doubt! I profess myself wholly unable to find any cry of revolutionary protest, any note of rationalism in the Upanishads. I can find something one might almost call rationalism in Shankara's commentary — but an Indian rationalism entirely different in spirit from its European counterpart. But in the Upanishads the whole method is supra-rational; it is the method of intuition and revelation expressed in a language and with a substance that might be characterised rather as the language of mysticism than of rationality. These sages do not protest against polytheism; they affirm the gods. These spiritual Titans do not protest against ritual and ceremony, they insist on the necessity of ritual and ceremony. It is true that they deny emphatically the sufficiency of material sacrifices for the attainment of the highest; but where does the Rigveda itself assert any such efficacy? From this single circumstance no protestant movement against ritual and sacrifice can be inferred, but at the most we can imagine rather than deduce a spiritual movement embracing while it exceeded ritual and sacrifice. But even this seems to me more than we can either infer or hazard without more light on the significance of early Vedic worship and the attitude on the subject of the Vedic Rishis. It is also true that

2 Sri Aurobindo at first wrote "the old Greek philosophic movement", then, apparently, "the old philosophic revelation", then "the old philosophic movement of", leaving the phrase unfinished. The editors have supplied "the Greeks".

3 The following sentence was written at the top of the manuscript page. Its place of insertion was not indicated:

One would sometimes almost think that this upheaval of thought anticipated at once Plato and Empedo-cles, Luther, Erasmus and Melanchthon, Kant, Hegel and Berkeley, Hume, Haeckel and Huxley — that we have at one fell blast Graeco-Roman philosophy, Protestant Reformation and modern rationalistic tendency anticipated by the single movement from Janaka to Buddha.

certain scattered expressions have been caught at by Theistic minds significant of a denial of polytheistic worship. I have heard the phrase, no yad idam upasate, not this to which men devote themselves, of the Kena Upanishad given this sense by reading the modern sense of upasana, worship, into the old Vedantic text. It can easily be shown from other passages in the Upanishads that upasate here has not the sense of religious worship, but quite another significance. We have enough to be proud of in our ancient thought and speculation without insisting on finding an exact anticipation of modern knowledge or modern thought and religion in these early Scriptures written thousands of years ago in the dim backwards of our history. The tendency will perhaps last as long as these ideas and conclusions keep their hold on the human mind.

The theory of a natural and progressive development of Pantheistic ideas is far more rational and probable than this adhyaropa of European ideas and history onto the writings of the ancient world. But that theory also I cannot accept. Because the clearly philosophical passages in the Vedas — those that are recognised as such, — occur in the later hymns, — in which the language is nearest to modern Sanscrit, — it is generally supposed that such a development is proved. It is, however, at least possible that we do not find philosophical ideas in the more ancient hymns merely because we are not mentally prepared to find them there. Not understanding their obscure and antique diction we interpret conjecturally with a confidence born of modern theories, led by our preconceived ideas, to grasp only at what, we conceive, ought to be the primitive notions of a half-savage humanity. Any indications of more developed religious motives, if they exist, will from this method, get no chance of revealing themselves and no quarter even if they insisted on lifting their luminous heads out of the waves of oblivion. In hymns with an almost modern diction, we have on the contrary no choice but to recognise their presence.

We cannot then say that there was no philosophy in the earlier and obscurer hymns unless we are sure that we have rightly interpreted their difficult language. But there are also certain positive considerations. The Vedantic thinkers positively believed that they were proceeding on a Vedic basis. They quote Vedic authority, appeal to Vedic ideas, evidently thinking themselves standing on the secure rock of Veda. Either, then, they were indulging in a disingenuous

fiction, inconsistent with spiritual greatness and that frank honesty, arjavam, on which the nation prided itself, — either they were consciously innovating under a pretence of Vedic orthodoxy or else quite honestly they were reading their own notions into a text which meant something entirely different, as has often been done even by great and sincere intellects. The first suggestion — it has, I think, been made,— is inadmissible except on conclusive evidence; the second deserves consideration.

If it were only a matter of textual citation or a change of religious notions, there would be no great difficulty in accepting the theory of an unconscious intellectual fiction. But I find in the Upanishads abounding indications of a preexisting philosophical system, minute and careful at least and to my experience profound as well as elaborate. Where is the indication of any other than a Vedic origin for this well-appointed metaphysics, science, cosmology, psychology? Everywhere it is the text of the Veda that is alluded to or quoted, the knowledge of Veda that is presupposed. The study of [Veda] is throughout considered as the almost indispensable preliminary for the understanding of Vedanta. How came so colossal, persistent and all-pervading a mistake to have been committed by thinkers of so high a capacity? Or when, under what impulsion, and by whom was this great and careful system originated and developed? Where shall we find any documents of that speculation, — its initial steps, its gradual clarifying, its stronger and more assured progress? The Upanishads are usually supposed themselves to be such documents. But the longer I study these profound compositions, the less I feel able to accept this common and very natural hypothesis. If we do not prejudge their more recondite ideas as absurd, if we try sympathetically to enter into the thoughts and beliefs of these Rishis, to understand what precise facts or experiences stand behind their peculiar language, especially if we can renew those experiences by the system they themselves used, the system of Yoga, — a method still open to us — it will, I think, very soon dawn upon our minds that these works are of a very different nature from the speculative experiments they are generally supposed to be. They represent neither a revolt nor a fresh departure. We shall find that we are standing at a goal, not assisting at a starting-point. The form of the Upanishads is the mould not of an initial speculation but of an ultimate thinking. It is a consummation, not a

beginning, the soul of an existing body, not the breath of life for a body yet to come into being. Line after line, passage after passage indicates an unexpressed metaphysical, scientific or psychological knowledge which the author thinks himself entitled to take for granted, just as a modern thinker addressing educated men on the ultimate generalisations of Science takes for granted their knowledge of the more important data and ideas accepted by modern men. All this mass of thought so taken for granted must have had a previous existence and history. It is indeed possible that it was developed between the time of the Vedas and the appearance of these Vedantic compositions but left behind it no substantial literary trace of its passage and progress. But it is also possible that the Vedas themselves when properly understood, contain these beginnings or even most of the separate data of these early mental sciences. It is possible that the old teachers of Vedanta were acting quite rationally and understood their business better than we understand it for them when they expected a knowledge of Veda from their students, sometimes even insisting on this preliminary knowledge, not dogmatically, not by a blind tradition but because the Veda contained that basis of experimental knowledge upon which the generalisations of Vedanta were built. There is a chance, a considerable chance—I must lay stress again and more strongly on a suggestion already hazarded, — that minds so much closer to the Vedas in time and in the possibility of spiritual affinity may have known better the meaning of their religion than the inhabitant of different surroundings and of another world of thought speculating millenniums afterwards in the light of possibly fanciful Greek and German analogies. So far as I have been able to study and to penetrate the meaning of the Rigvedic hymns, it seems to me that the Europeans are demonstrably wrong in laying so predominant a stress on the material aspects of the Vedic gods. I find Varuna and Mitra to be mainly moral and not material powers; Surya, Agni, Indra have great psychical functions; even Sarasvati, in whom the scholars insist on seeing, wherever they can, an Aryan river, presents herself as a moral and intellectual agency, — "Pavaka nah Sarasvati Vajebhir vajinivati, Yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. Chodayitri sunritanam Chetanti sumatinam, Yajnam dadhe Sarasvati. Maho arnas Sarasvati Pra-chetayati ketuna, dhiyo visva virajati." If we accept the plain meaning of the very plain and simple words italicised we are in the presence

not of personified natural phenomena, but of a great purifying, strengthening and illuminating goddess. But every word in the passage, pavaka, yajnam dadhe, maho arnas, ketuna, it seems to me, has a moral or intellectual significance. It would be easy to multiply passages of this kind. I am even prepared to suggest that the Vritras of the Veda (for the Sruti speaks not of a single Vritra but of many) are not — at least in many hymns — forces either of cloud or of drought, but Titans of quite another and higher order. The insight of Itihasa and Purana in these matters informed by old tradition seems to me often more correct than the conjectural scholarship of the Europeans. But there is an even more important truth than the high moral and spiritual significance of the Vedic gods and the Vedic religion which results to my mind from a more careful and unbiassed study of the Rigveda. We shall find that the moral functions assigned to these gods are arranged not on a haphazard, poetic or mythological basis, but in accordance with a careful, perhaps even a systematised introspective psychology and that at every step the details suggested agree with the experiences of the practical psychology which has gone in India from time immemorial by the name of Yoga. The line Maho Arnas Sarasvati prachetayati ketuna dhiyo [visva] virajati is to the Yogin a profound and at the same time lucid, accurate and simple statement of a considerable Yogic truth and most important Yogic experience. The psychological theory and principle involved, a theory unknown to Europe and obscured in later Hinduism, depends on a map of human psychology which is set forth in its ground lines in the Upanishads. If I am right, we have here an illuminating fact of the greatest importance to the Hindu religion, a fact which will light up, I am certain, much in the Veda that European scholarship has left obscure and will provide our modern study of the development of Hindu Civilisation with a scientific basis and a principle of unbroken continuity; we may find the earliest hymns of the Veda linked in identity of psychological experience to the modern utterances of Vivekananda and Sri Rama-krishna. Meanwhile the theory I have [suggested] of the relations of Veda to Vedanta receives, I contend, from these Vedic indications a certain character of actuality.

But I have to leave aside for the present the[se] great and interesting but difficult questions. Although I believe the knowledge of Veda to be requisite for a full understanding of Vedanta, although 1 have

considered it necessary to lay great stress on that relation, I shall myself in this book follow a different method. I shall confine my inquiry principally to the evidence of the Upanishads themselves and use them to shed their light on the Veda, instead of using the light of the written Veda to illumine the Upanishads. The amount and quality of truth I shall arrive at by this process may be inferior in fullness and restricted in quantity [and] instead of the written mantras, authoritative to many and open to all, I shall have to appeal largely to Yogic experiences as yet accessible only to a few; but I shall have in compensation this advantage that I shall proceed from the less disputed to the more disputed, from the nearer and better known to the obscurer and more remote, advancing, therefore, by a path not so liberally set with thorns and strewn with impeding boulders. By the necessity of the times my object must be different from that of the mighty ones who went before us. The goal Shankara and other thinkers had in view was the intellectual assurance of the Brahmavada; ours will be the knowledge of the Veda. Mighty Jnanis and Bhaktas, they sought in the Upanishads only those metaphysical truths which base upon reason and Vedic authority the search for the Highest; all else they disregarded as mean or of little moment. From those secure and noble heights, facile of ascent to our ancestors, we of the present generation are compelled to descend. Obliged by the rationalistic assault to enquire into much which they, troubled only by internal and limited disputes, by Buddhism and Sankhya, could afford to take for granted, called upon by modern necessity to study the ideas of the Upanishads in their obscure details no less than in their clear and inspiring generalities, in their doubtful implications no less than in their definite statements, in physical and psychological limb and member no less than in their heart of metaphysical truth, we must seek to know not only the Brahman in Its Universality, but the special functions of Surya and the particular powers of Agni; devote thought to the minor and preliminary "Vyuha rashmin samuha" as well as to the ultimate and capital So'ham asmi; neglect neither the heavenly fire of Nachicatus nor the bricks of his triple flame of sacrifice nor his necklace of many colours. We have behind the Upanishads a profound system of psychology. We must find our way back into that system. We perceive indications of equally elaborate ideas about the processes underlying physical existence, human action and the subtle connections of mind, body and

spirit. We must recover in their fullness these ideas and recreate, if possible, this ancient system of psychical mechanics and physics. We find also a cosmology, a system of gods and of worlds. We must know what were the precise origin and relations of this cosmology, on what experiences subjective or objective they rested for their justification. We shall then have mastered not only Vedantadarshana but Vedanta, not only the truth that Badarayana or Shankara arrived at but the revelation that Yajnavalkya and Ajatashatru saw. We may even be compensated for our descent by a double reward. By discovering the early Vedantic interpretation of Veda, we may pour out a great illumination on the meaning of Veda itself, — to be confirmed, possibly, by the larger and more perfect Nirukta which the future will move inevitably to discover. By recovering the realisations of Yajnavalkya and Ajatashatru, we shall recover perhaps the inspired thoughts of Vasishta and Viswamitra, or Ghora from whom perhaps Srikrishna heard the word of illumination, of Madhuchchhandas, Vamadeva and Atri. And we may even find ourself enriched in spiritual no less than in psychological knowledge; rejoice in the sense of being filled with a wider and more potent knowledge and energy, with jnanam, with tapahshakti, and find ourselves strengthened and equipped for the swifter pursuit and mightier attainment of the One whom both Veda and Vedanta aspire to know and who is alone utterly worth possessing.

[C]

Chapter V.

The Interpretation of Vedanta.

In an inquiry of this kind, so far as we have to use purely intellectual means — and I have not concealed my opinion that intellectual means are not sufficient and one has to trust largely the intuitions of a quiet and purified mind and the experiences of an illuminated and expanding soul, — but still, so far as we are to use purely intellectual means, the first, most important, most imperative must be a submissive acceptance of the text of the Sruti in its natural suggestion and in its simple and straightforward sense. To this submissiveness we ought to attach the greatest importance and to secure it think no labour or self discipline

wasted. It is the initial tapasya necessary before we are fit to approach the Sruti. Any temperamental rebellion, any emotional interference, any obstinacy of fixed mental association, any intellectual violation of the text seems to me to vitiate the work of the interpreter and deprive it, even when otherwise noble and brilliant, of some of its value. It is for this reason that the mind, that restless lake of sanskaras, preferences, prejudices, prejudgments, habitual opinions, intellectual and temperamental likes and dislikes, ought to be entirely silent in this matter; its role is to be submissive and receptive, detached, without passion; passivity, not activity, should be its state, na kinchid api chintayet. For the Sruti carries with it, in its very words, a certain prakash, a certain illumination. The mind ought to wait for that illumination and receiving it, should not because it is contrary to our expectation or our desire, labour to reject or alter what has been seen. Our pitfalls are many. One man has an active, vital and energetic temperament; he is tempted to read into Sruti the praise of action, to slur over anything that savours of quietism. Another is temperamentally quietistic; any command, enjoining action as a means towards perfection, his heart, his nerves cannot endure, he must get rid of it, belittle it, put it aside on whatever pretext. This is the interference of temperamental preference with the text of the Sruti. A man is attached to a particular thinker or teacher, enamoured of a definite view of life and God. Any contradiction of that thinker, teacher or view irritates his heart and cannot be borne, even though the contradiction seems to stand there plainly on the face of sacred writ; the mind at once obeying the heart sets about proving to itself that the words do not mean what they seem to mean. This is the interference of emotional preference. Or else the mind has always been accustomed to a particular philosophy, mode of thinking, idea of religion or dogma. Whatever contradicts these notions, strikes our fixed mental idea as necessarily wrong. Surely, it says, the philosophy, the thought, the dogma to which I am accustomed must be the thought of the Scripture; there cannot, in the nature of things, be anything in them inconsistent with what I believe; for what I believe is true and the Scriptures are repositories of truth. So begins the interference which arises from association and fixed opinions. There is, finally, the intervention of the intellect when a speculative philosopher with a theory or a scholar reaching out after novelty or conscious of an

opening for scholastic ingenuities, meddles powerfully with the plain drift of the text. All these interferences, however brilliantly they may be managed, are injuries to the truth of Veda; they diminish its universality and limit its appeal. It is for others to judge whether I have myself been able to avoid all of them, — especially the intellectual interference to which my temperament is most open, but I have had certainly the will to avoid it if not the power, the intention if not its successful performance.

I [do not mean, however,] that the received or dictionary sense of the word has to be always accepted. In dealing with these ancient writings such a scholastical puritanism would be less dangerous indeed than the license of the philosophic commentators, but would still be seriously limiting. But in departing from the dictionary sense one must not depart from the native and etymological sense of the word; one ought to abide within its clear grammatical connotation as in a hedge of defence against one's own intellectual self-will and any superstructure of special sense or association must be consistent with that connotation and with the general usage of the Upanishads or of the Veda on which they rest. I have myself suggested that the scope of dhanam in the first verse of the Isha exceeds the contracted idea of material wealth and embraces all sorts of possessions; eno in the last verse still keeps to me its etymological association and is different from papa; the word vayunani meaning no doubt actions or activities, has been supposed by me to keep a colour of its proper etymological sense "phenomena" and to denote universal activities and not solely the individual or human; but none of these suggestions in the least meddle with the grammatical connotation, the etymological force or even the dictionary meaning of the words used; only a deeper or more delicate shade of meaning is made to appear than can ordinarily be perceived by a careless or superficial reader. A more serious doubt may arise when I suggest special associations for drishtaye and satya in the [fifteenth] verse. It will be seen however that in neither case do I depart from the basic meaning of the words, sight for drishti, truth for satya. It will be seen also, as I proceed in my larger task, that I have good Vedic warrant for supposing these special senses to be applied sometimes and indeed often to sight and to Truth in the Sruti and that they agree with the whole drift and logical development of this and other Upanishads.

For the fixing of the actual sense of separate words in Sruti is not the only condition of the interpretation nor is the acceptance of their natural sense the only standard for the interpreter. A great value, indeed an immense value must be attached, in my opinion, to the rhythm and structure and the logical connection with each other in thought of the separate clauses and shlokas. The language of the Upanishads is largely regarded by the modern readers as sublime and poetical indeed, full of imagery and suggestion, but not to be too much insisted on, not always to be pressed as having a definite meaning but often allowed to pass vaguely as rather reaching out at truths than accurately expressing them. My experience forbids me to assent to this view, in itself very natural and superficially reasonable. I have been forced to believe in the plenary inspiration of the Upanishads in word as well as in thought; I have been continually obliged to see that the expressions they use are the inevitable expression for the thought that has to be conveyed, and even when using poetical language the Rishis use it with a definite purpose, not vaguely reaching out at truth, but keeping before their vision a clear and firm thought or experience which they clearly and firmly express. No interpretation would impress me with a sense of satisfaction which did not give its clear and due weight to each word or account for the choice of one word over another where the choice is unusual. In accordance with this fullness of inspiration is the perfection of the chhandas, the rhythm and structure of verse and sentence which corresponds felicitously with the rhythm and structure of the thought. I may instance for this importance of the rhythm and structure of sentence such a juxtaposition as jagatyam jagat in the first verse; while the remarkable development and balance, supremely wedded to the thought, of the six verses about Vidya and Avidya may stand as an example of the importance of rhythm and structure of both sentence and verse. The jagatyam jagat of the first verse, already alluded to, is a striking instance of the perfect and pregnant use of language, but there are numerous other examples such as the powerful collocation of kavir manishi paribhuh swayam-bhur in one of the most noble and profound of the revelatory shlokas, the [eighth]. It is easy for a careless translator or interpreter to accept kavir and manishi loosely as words with the same essential meaning used a little tautologically for a rhetorical effect. In reality, they differ widely in sense, are used in this passage with great correctness and

pregnancy and on a right understanding of them depends our right understanding of the whole system of philosophy developed in the Isha. Much depends on whether we take the hiranmaya patra of the [fifteenth] shloka as mere vague poetical rhetoric or an image used with a definite intention and a lucid idea. But almost every step in the Isha will give us examples.

Even an observation of formal metre as an element of the rhythm is of some importance to the Vedantic interpreter. The writers of the Upanishads handle their metres, whether Anushtup or Tristubh, not entirely in the manner of the Vedic Rishis, but very largely on Vedic principles. They permit themselves to avoid elision even in the middle of a pada, e.g. vidyancha avidyancha, and always avoid it between the different padas; their principle is to keep not only the two lines of the shloka but all its four part[s] separate and not to run them into each other by sandhi. This peculiarity disappears in the manuscript and printed copies where the post-Vedic sandhi is observed usually though not with absolute consistency. But the disregard of Vedic practice is ruinous to the rhythm and sweetness of the verse, for it disregards the first conditions of the Vedic appeal to the ear. What for instance can be more clumsy than the junction of the padas in the seventh shloka, with its heavy obstruction and jar as of a carriage wheel jolting momentarily over a sudden obstacle,

yasminstu sarvabhutanyatmaivabhud vijanatah or what can be more rhythmical, sweet and harmonious than the same verse properly written and read with an observation of the pause between the padas

yasminstu sarvabhutani atmaivabhud vijanatah?

There are other antique peculiarities, the use of two short matras as the equivalent of one long syllable, the occasional introduction of one or more excessive feet into a pada, resembling the use of the Alexandrine in English dramatic verse, the optional quantity of the vowel before a conjunct consonant of which the second element is a liquid, especially the semivowels y or v, and, — although this is more doubtful, — the Vedic use of these semivowels optionally as actual vowels which turns a dissyllable frequently into a trisyllable—a freedom possible only in a living language appealing to a[n] ear tuned to the flexibility of living and daily intonations. It is possible that we have an example of this use in vidyancha avidyancha, but although it would introduce

a very beautiful and delicate poetical effect, we cannot speak with certainty. These minutiae are not merely interesting to the literary critic and the philologist. Their importance will appear when we find that Max Muller would almost tempt us, for the sake of regularity of metre, to eject the important, if not indispensable yathatathyato, which gives such profundity, so many reverberations of meaning to the closing thought in the majestic [eighth] shloka, kavir manishi paribhuh swayambhur, yathatathyato'rthan [vyadadhach] chaswa-tibhyah samabhyas; or that Shankara's desperate dealings with the line, from his point of view almost unmanageable,

vinashena mrityum tirtwa sambhutyamritam asnute his forcing of vinasha to mean sambhava and reading of tirtwa asam-bhutya are negatived by the metre and rhythm of the verse no less than by the rhythm and structure of the thought throughout these six crucial verses.

The ordinary view of the Upanishads ignores another equally important, if not more important characteristic, the closeness of their logical structure, the intimate subjective linking of clause with clause, the logical stride from shloka to shloka, the profound relations of passage to passage. The usual treatment of these works seems to go on the assumption that this high logical strenuousness does not exist. They might often be loose collections of ill connected speculations, haphazard and illogical structures, for all the importance that is given to this element of their divine inspiration. I shall try to show how mighty are the architectonics of thought in the Isha, how movement leads into movement, how intimately, for instance, the closing invocations to Surya and Agni are related to the whole thought-structure and how perfectly they develop from what precedes. The importance of the logical relation in the interpretation will be manifest, if I mistake not, at every step of our progress.¹

[I have spoken so far of the intellectual tests that we can employ. Before I pass from this subject, it may be well to insert a word of explanation, of self-defence, almost of apology. Among the intellectual interpreters of Sruti, Shankara towers like an unreachable giant above his fellows. As a philosopher, as a metaphysician, as a powerful logician and victorious disputant his greatness can hardly be measured.

1 The paragraph that follows was cancelled in the manuscript by Sri Aurobindo.

For a thousand years and more he has stood in the heavens of Indian thought, his head far away in the altitudes of Adwaita, his feet firmly planted on the lifeless remnants of crushed systems and broken philosophies, the wreckage of his logical conquests, his mouth like Trishira's swallowing up the world, lokan grasantam, annihilating it in the white flame of the Mayavada, his shadow covering our intellects and stunting the efforts of all who have dared to think originally and dispute his conclusions. Not Madhwa, not even Ramanuja can prevail against this colossal shadow. Yet I have ventured throughout to differ from this king of commentators — almost even to ignore this great and invincible disputant. If I have done so, it is because I think the decree of our liberty has already been pronounced by another giant of thought When the great Vivekananda, potent seedsower of the future, [in] answer to the objection of the Pundits, "But Shankara does not say that," replied simply but finally, "No, but I, Vivekananda, say it," he pronounced the decree of liberation not only for himself but for all of us from the yoke, the golden but heavy yoke, of the mighty Dravidian. For this was Vivekananda's mission to smite away all obstacles, however great and venerable, and open the path to the resurgence of Indian originality and the direct confrontation of the soul of man with the living Truth. He was our deliverer not only from ignorance and weakness, but from the systems of knowledge that would limit us and impose a premature finality.

In truth,]

[D]

Part II.

The Instruments and Field of Vedanta.

Chapter I.

The Textual Inference.

The three principal means of intellectual knowledge are anumana, pratyaksha and aptavakya. Anumana, inference from data, depends for its value on the possession of the right data, on the right observation

of the data including the drawing of the right analogies, the unerring perception of true identity and rejection of false identity, the just estimate of difference and contrast, and finally on the power of right reasoning from the right data. Pratyaksha is the process by which the things themselves about which we gather data are brought into our ken; aptavakya is evidence, the testimony of men who have themselves been in possession of the knowledge we seek. An error in pratyaksha, an error committed by the apta, an error of data or of reasoning from the data may, if serious in its bearing or extent, vitiate all our conclusions even if all our other means are correct and correctly used. Especially is this danger present to us when we are reasoning not from things but from words; when we are using the often artificial counters of traditional logic and metaphysics, we are apt to lose ourselves in a brilliant cloud, to be lifted from the earth, our pratistha, into some nebulous region where even if we win high victories we are not much advanced, since we get thereby nothing but an intellectual satisfaction and cannot apply our knowledge to life. This is the great advantage of the scientist over the metaphysician that he is always near to facts and sensible things which, when the truth of them is outraged by the freaks of the mind, present a much more formidable and tangible protest than words, those vague and flexible symbols of things which have been habituated to misuse ever since human thinking began. The metaphysician is too apt to forget that he is dealing with the symbols of things and not with the things themselves; he should but is not always careful to compare his intellectual results with the verities of experience; he is apt to be more anxious that his conclusions should be logical than that they should be in experience true. Much of the argumentation of the great Dravidian thinkers, though perfect in itself, seems to be vitiated by this tendency to argue about words rather than about the realities which alone give any value to words. On the other hand scientists as soon as they go beyond the safe limits of observation and classification of data, as soon as they begin to reason and generalise on the basis of their science, show themselves to be as much subject to the errors of the intellect as ordinary mortals. They too like the metaphysicians use words in a fixed sense established upon insufficient data and forge these premature fixatures into fetters upon thought and enquiry. We seem hardly yet to possess the right and sufficient data for a proper understanding of the universe in which we

find ourselves; the habit and power of right reasoning from data, even if with insufficient materials right reasoning were possible, seem yet to be beyond the reach of our human weakness. The continued wrangles of philosophy, dogmatisms of science and quarrels of religion are so many proofs that we are yet unripe for the highest processes of thought and inquiry. How few of us have even the first elementary condition of truth-seeking, a quiet heart and a silent, patient and purified understanding? For the Vedantins were surely right in thinking that in order to be a discoverer and teacher of truth one must first be absolutely dhira, — live that is to say in a luminous calm of both heart and understanding.

[E]

Part II.

The Field and Instruments of Vedanta.

Chapter I.

Historically, then, we have our Hindu theory of the Vedanta. It is the systematised affirmation, the reaffirmation, perhaps, of that knowledge of God, man and the universe, the Veda or Brahmavidya, on which the last harmony of man's being with his surroundings was effected. What the Vedanta is, intrinsically, I have already hinted. It is the reaffirmation of Veda or Brahmavidya, not by metaphysical speculation or inferential reasoning, but by spiritual experience and supra-intellectual inspiration. If this idea be true, then by interpreting correctly the Vedanta, we shall come to some knowledge of what God is, what man, of the nature and action of the great principles of our being, matter, life, mind, spirit and whatever else this wonderful world of ours may hold. In fact, this is my sole object in undertaking the explanation of the Upanishads. The essential relations of God and the world, so far as they effect our existence here, this is my subject. A philological enquiry into the meaning of ancient Hindu documents, an antiquarian knowledge of the philosophising of ancient generations, although in itself a worthy object of labour and a patriotic occupation,

— since those generations were our forefathers and the builders of our race, — would not to me be a sufficient motive for devoting much time and labour out of a life lived in these pregnant and fruitful times when each of us is given an opportunity of doing according to our powers a great work for humanity. I hold with my forefathers that this is an age of enormous disintegration and reconstitution from which we look forward to a new Satyayuga. That Satyayuga can only be reconstituted by the efforts of the sadhus, the seekers after human perfection, by maintaining in however small a degree that harmony of man's being with his surrounding and containing universe which is the condition of our perfection. The knowledge of the principles of that harmony is therefore man's greatest need and should be the first preoccupation of his lovers and helpers. This knowledge, this perfection is within us and must ultimately be found and manifested by plunging into the depths of our own being, into that karanasamudra or causal ocean from which our beings emerge and bringing out from thence the lost Veda and the already existing future. Within us is all Veda and all Vedanta, within us is God and perfected humanity — two beatitudes that are the same and yet different. But to effect this great deliverance, to push aside the golden shield of our various thought from the face of Truth, to rescue the concealed Purusha, future Man, out of those waters in which he lies concealed and give him form by the intensity of our tapas, let no man think that it is a brief or an easy task in which we can dispense with the help that the wisdom of the past still offers us. We must link our hands to the sages of the past in order that we may pass on the sacred Vedic fire, agnir idyah, to the Rishis of the future. The best beginning for this great inquiry is, therefore, to know what the Vedanta has to say on these profound problems. Afterwards we many proceed to confirmation from other sources.

Three questions at the very beginning confront us. What is the nature of the truth that the Vedanta sets out to teach, — what, that is to say, are its relations to the actual thought and labour of humanity? What are these methods of inspiration and experience by which they arrive at the truths of which they are the repositories? And granting that they are inspired in word and thought, how are we to arrive at the right meaning of words written long ago, in the Sanscrit language by ancient thinkers with ideas that are not ours and a knowledge from

which we have receded? Is it the method of the darshanik, the logical philosopher, that we must follow? Shall we arrive by logic at this knowledge of the Eternal? Or is [it] the scientist and scholar, who must be our guides? Shall grammar and analysis from outside help us? But the scientist does not admit inspiration, the logician does not use it.

[F]

Part II.

The Field and Instruments of Vedanta.

Chapter I.

Intellect and Revelation.

If in the progression of the ages there are always golden periods in which man recovers self-knowledge and attunes the truth of himself to the truth of his surroundings — or may it not even be, may not this be the true secret of his evolution — attune[s] his surroundings to his fulfilled and triumphant self, not being merely determined by his environment, but using it freely for infinite purposes and determining it, and if the Veda keeps, even fragmentarily, the practical application and the Vedanta, the theoretical statement of that self-knowledge, the importance of the inner meaning of these books to the progress of humanity, will be self-evident. It is perfectly true, or so at least the Indian Yogin has always held, that we have in ourselves the eternal Veda. Available by God's grace or our own effort there is always in each human being that hidden salvation. But it is hard to arrive at, harder to apply. Many of the greatest, not seeing how it can be applied to the conditions of phenomenal life, carry it away with them into the eternal Silence. They put away from them the Veda, they seek in the Vedanta or in their souls only so much knowledge as will help them to loosen the coils of thought and sense wound round them by the Almighty Magician. But the Vedanta is not useful only for the denial of life; it is even more useful for the affirmation of life. If it affirms the evil of bondage to the idea of this world, it also affirms the bliss of harmony between

the world and God. Neither Shankara nor Schopenhauer have for us the entirety of its knowledge.

It is this supreme utility of Vedanta for life, for man's individual and racial evolution that I hope to rescue from the obscuration of quietistic philosophies born of the pessimism of the iron age. I have said that I do not deny the truth of these philosophies. The Asad Brahman, Nirvana, annihilation of the manifest soul in the unmanifest are all of them great truths and, if we regard them without the fear and shrinking of the ignorant existence-loving mind, they are not only great but also blissful truths; they are an eternal part of Vedanta and it is well that they should have been brought out though with exaggeration and the exclusion of other verities. But they are only a part, a side of Vedantic truth. There are other sides, in a way even greater and more blissful, and at any rate much more helpful to mankind as a whole. God and the World is my subject, — not the incompatibility of God with the world He has created in Himself, but the fulfilment of Himself in it for which it was created — the conditions in which the kingdom of heaven on earth can be converted from a dream into a possibility, — by the willed evolution in man of his higher nature, by a steady selfpurification and a development in the light of this divine knowledge towards the fulfilment of his own supra-material, supra-intellectual nature. For that purpose he must know God and not only the physical laws of Nature. He must know his soul and not only the open or secret machinery of his body. This knowledge he can only get from his own soul or from Vedanta explained to him by the Master, the one who knows, and awakening by its contact the knowledge in his own soul. He cannot get it from Science or from speculative Philosophy, — but only from God's revelation. Nayam atma pra-vachanena labhyah. If Vedanta had not this high utility, if it only brought a philosophical satisfaction or were good for logical disputation, I should not think it worth while to write a word about it, much less to delve deep for its meaning.

We wish to know, we enlightened moderns, what man is, what God, the nature and relation of matter, mind, life in order to satisfy an intellectual craving. If we can systematise our guesses about these things, if we can present the world with a theory intellectually interesting or logically flawless, we are satisfied. But the ancients wished to know these things because they thought they were of the greatest

importance for man's life and being. Whether they had their knowledge by thought or by religion, from the judgment or from the heart, their first preoccupation was to live according to their knowledge,— the Stoic and the Epicurean quite as much as the Christian or the Jew held his knowledge as a means towards life, towards the highest fulfilment of his being. It has been left for enlightened Europe to profess a religion, yet avowedly separate its precepts from practical life, and it has been first the privilege of Teutonic thinkers to speculate in the void, using great words and high ideas as if [they] were ornaments of a bright lustre and great costliness but of no living utility. The Vedanta is above all a rule of life, a law of being and a determination of relation and conduct; for its ideas are sovereign, potent, insistent to remould a man's whole outlook upon existence; it is at once a philosophy and a religion and it owes this sovereign force and double mastery not only to the substance of its message, but to the instrumentality of that message, the sources from which it is drawn and the principles of knowledge and activity in our complex being to which it appeals.

For although the determination to live by the best light we have is important, it is equally important to know what that light is and how we came by it, whether by the inspiration of the heart and the satisfaction of the emotional being, as in ordinary religion, or by the working of the observation and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition as in the methods of the great founders of religion or by a higher principle in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of the Jnanam Brahma. It is such a higher undivided principle from which Vedanta professes to derive its knowledge. For the ancient Hindus, alone of earth's nations, seem to have not only trusted to the internal revelation in preference to the external, which, however, they also recognized and highly valued, but to have known and commanded the psychological sources of internal revelation and mastered to a certain extent its secret, its science and its workings. They claim to have found a principle of knowledge as superior to reason as reason itself is to sensational perception and animal instinct — to have laid their grasp on workings and results which can satisfy the demands of the intellect but transcend intellectual ideation, meet the test of observation and logic but act in a sense wider, more direct and more penetrating than observation and logic,

and fulfil all the demands of the heart while preserving our freedom from the heart's vagaries. All existence is a staircase by which we are climbing in God and through God Godwards. We start here at the bottom rung, from involution, the obscuration in matter and ascend from the obscurer manifestation to the less obscure, from an air in which light comes to us from above to emergence in the very light itself. The spirit in the stone, clod and metal is at the bottom of that ladder; tree and plant and all vegetable life a little higher; animal life dwelling in vitality but using from below the lower functions of mind and a reason entirely dependent on memory and observation and almost consisting in memory and observation climbs yet higher; man dwelling in the lower mind but using matter and vitality from above and from below taking possession of reason and imagination, seems, of all beings on earth, to be at the top. But above man's present position, above the heart in which he dwells and the imagination and reason to which he rises there opens out a wider atmosphere of life, there shoots down on him a more full and burning splendour of strength and knowledge, a more nectarous lustre of joy and beauty. There there is another sun, another moon, other lightnings than ours. To this the poet and the artist aspire in the intoxication of the vision and the hearing, chakshush cha shrotran cha; from this the prophet and the Pythoness draw the exaltation of their inspiration or its frenzy; genius is a beggar at the doors of that bounty. But all these are like men that dream and utter ill-understood fragments of their dream. For man in his heart is awake; in his reason and imagination, half awake, not yet buddha, but in that higher principle he is asleep. It is to him a state of sushupti. Yet secretly, subliminally, unknown to the Egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought and knowledge, though he is compelled by the limitations of mind to mistake and misuse it. For that slumber is the real waking and our waking is a state of dream and delusion in which we use a distorted truth and establish a world of false relations. Therefore the Gita says, "[Yasyam jagrati] bhutani sa nisha pashyato muneh." In that which is night to all creatures, he who has mastered his own being is awake; that in which these creatures are awake, is night to the eye of the awakened seer. The Vedantists call this principle by the name, vijnanam, an entire and pervading principle of knowledge which puts everything in its true light and its right relations. It is from vijnanam that Veda descends to us; the movement of this higher

principle is the source of all internal revelation. It is the drishti of which the Veda is the result, it is the sruti which in its expression the Veda is, it is the smriti of the Rishi which gives to the intelligent part, the manishi in him a perfect account of the vision and inspired hearing of the seer in him, the Kavi.

For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in the mind. He has to be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into the vijnanamaya self, — the mahan atma, —just as, in his animal state, he had to be fulfilled in body and vitality before he could develop freely in mind. Thus it comes about that even when Veda manifests in the mental world, it has although the higher and truer, to give an account of itself to the lower and more fallible, to Science, to Philosophy and to Religion. It must answer their doubts and questions, it must satisfy all their right and permissible demands. For although from the ideal point of view it is an anomaly that the higher should be cross-questioned by the lower, the source of truth by the propagators of half-truth and error, yet from the evolutionary point of view an anomaly is often the one right and indispensable process. For if we act otherwise, if we deny for instance the claims of the reason in order to serve revelation only and exclusively — [...]¹ we ought to serve her first and chiefly — we are in danger of defeating man's evolution, which consists in self-fulfilment and not, except as a temporary means to an end, in self-mortification. Otherwise, we are in danger of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration self-injurers, self-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless and gloomy states beyond of which the Isha Upanishad speaks. Religion makes this mistake when she attempts to destroy the body and the vitality in order to satisfy the aspirations of the heart; philosophy, when she stifles the heart in order to enthrone the pure intellect; Science when she denies the power of vision of the heart and the pure intellect in order to strengthen and serve solely the analytical reason — denying herself thus the benefit of the great benediction "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God," denying herself the fullness of the great secular effort of humanity summed up in the gnothi seauton of the sages, binding herself to a barren Agnosticism, urging mankind towards the gran rifiuto, the great refusal and renunciation

1 Illegible word.

of its past and its future. Mayavada commits this error when not content with trampling the tyranny of cosmic Illusion underfoot, it seeks to deny and destroy the world in order to attain That which has chosen to express itself through the world. For God has expressed us in many principles and not one. He has ranged them one over the other and commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicide, but to rise from one principle to the other, taking it up with us as we go, fulfilling the lower first in itself and then in the higher. We have to dissociate our sense of being from body and vitality and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness and being, Sachchid-anandam manifest in phenomenal existence, to dissociate it from Sachchidanandam and become That which is in the world Sac[h]-chidanandam, not in order to destroy body, vitality, mind, knowledge, manifested bliss and being but to transcend and satisfy them more mightily, without being limited by their conditions, to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine and universal. Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering into the Sunyam Brahma; but we can maim ourselves in the world by the attempt to destroy them. For thus are we made and we can be no other,— evam twayi nanyatheto'[sti]. "Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression.

Therefore all attempts to deny and slaughter the reason are reprehensible and should be strongly opposed and discouraged. The revolt of Rationalism against the tyranny of the creeds and the Churches is justified by God's law and truth. And not only the Churches and creeds, but Veda must bend down from its altitudes and justify itself before reason even as God descends from his heavens of infinity to humour our weakness and limitations and take us into His embrace. On the other hand, to deny Veda in order to give reason a supremacy which its natural limitations, its stumbling imperfections make impossible to it, is to go against Nature and restrict our evolution. It has been well said that to deny Veda by hetuvada, divine revelation by intellectual rationality, is, in the end, to become a pashanda, — a word which has now acquired only the significance of an abusive epithet but meant originally and etymologically a materialist, one who denies his higher self in order to enthrone and worship the brute

matter in which he is cased. A harmony is needed in which the higher shall illumine the lower, the lower recognise and rise to the higher. The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science and Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers. Religion, putting Veda away into a sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of the undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of the vital impulses, chittam pranair [otam], and becomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual selfsufficiency, ends by living in words, a thing of vain disputations and exultant logic-splitting, abstract, impractical and visionary. Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant and bigoted in her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda. For all her analytical knowledge she knows not that that in man which believes only in matter is the beast in him, — the beast so long and with such difficulty subdued and disciplined by Philosophy, Religion and Veda; she keeps telling him, "Thou, O brute body and nerve system, art Brahman" Annam vai Brahma, Pranam vai Brahma until his whole nature begins to believe it. One day, while she yet reigns, he is sure to rise, — the egoistic heartless lust of power and pleasure in man, — and demand that she shall be his servant, with her knowledge, her sophistries, her organisation, her appliances shall justify to him his selfishness, lusts and cruel impulses and arm them with engines of irresistible potency. Already the shadow of this terrible revival is cast upon the world; already Science is bowing her head to this tremendous demand. What the Hindus foresaw and dreaded and strove to organise their society against it, erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as their own knowledge and grasp upon Veda diminished, is now growing actual and imminent. The way to avoid it is not to deny the truth of Science, but to complete, correct and illuminate it. For the Veda also says with Science, Annam vai Brahma, Pranam vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man and God as the Master of the Animal, the Pashupati; but by completing the knowledge and putting it in its right relations, it completes him also and liberates him, lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the supramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by

an universal mastery and helpfulness and egoistic and unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine and universal.

In any explanation, therefore, that we may offer of Veda and Vedanta we must give an account to Science, Philosophy and Religion in their own terms of that which we mean by Veda and Vedanta and our reasons for attaching a supreme importance to the conclusions we reach by them. In order that this satisfaction may be given the Vedantist must make it clear what he means by knowledge, what he holds to be the value of the criteria relied on respectively by Science, Philosophy and Religion and how he determines their relation to the standards used by Vedanta. Science takes her stand upon two means of knowledge only; she admits observation by the physical senses aided by physical instruments and she admits inference from this observation, or to use our Indian terms physical pratyaksha and anu-mana from physical pratyaksha. All else she puts by as misleading and unreliable. She admits neither aptavakya nor analogy, neither the statements of well-equipped and credible witnesses nor argument from the perception of like circumstances as between the various objects or movements observed. Aptavakya is in this system only an uncertain makeshift, a secondhand pratyaksha; analogy is only a doubtful and often a false inference. But the Vedantist in common with all Indian thinkers admits in intellectual reasoning aptavakya and analogy as well as pratyaksha and anumana.

At bottom all human thinking is some sort of perception; either perception by the mind of something that seems to be outside itself or of something that seems to be within itself, either, as we say, physical perception or mental perception. Logic itself is only the science of placing our perceptions in their proper order, — nothing more. If we take things physical with which alone the modern scientific method is really at home, it must be clear to us that the whole basis of knowledge is the right perception of objects. We have first to bring it under observation by the mind through some sense-organ usually or predominantly the eye, — we have to bring not only the eye, but the mind into concentrated contact with the object; for if only the eye dwells on it, the mind is likely to retain nothing in memory or only a vague impression of what has been seen. This process I may be allowed to call simply bodha or taking into the observation. Once I have the

object in my mind's grasp, I proceed to separate it clearly in my observation from all surrounding object or circumstance foreign to it even if contiguous or attached — by separation in observation, by prithakbodha. Finally, I take it completely into my mind by a perfect observation of it in its parts, its circumstance and its entirety, by totality in observation, samyagbodha. Only if I have accomplished these three movements of perception perfectly, can I be said to have properly or scientifically observed the object; only then can I be sure of its dwelling in my memory or of my power to reproduce it accurately before my imagination.