APROPOS OF A NOTE BY NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
Consciousness is existence turning back upon itself in order to experience that it is.
Knowledge is consciousness turning back upon itself in order to experience what it is.
This is true of consciousness and knowledge in overmind and on the lower planes; but in the supermind consciousness is existence eternally aware both that it is and of what it is and also of what it intends to do with itself and become for its own Ananda. Consciousness and knowledge there are one.
Bugles of Light, bugles of Light, shatter the heart of the darkness.1
Children of Immortality, we march through the Abyss and the Shadow
Over us hustle the feet of the Fates and the wings of Erinnys
In front is the screech of the Death horn, behind the red-eyed monster haunts2 and howls the tornado.
Our steps search for the road and find the morass and the pitfall
Follow the Gleam, follow the Gleam to the city of God and the pavements of Dream!
Bugles of Light, bugles of Light, shatter the heart of the Darkness
*
In gleam Konarak—Konarak of the Gods
A woman sits her body a glimmering ray
At her feet the moon trails its silvery dreams,
On her head is the sun and the purple day.
Always she sits there turning a wheel
Whose summit is lost in lights, its base in the abyss3
In the temple she sits of the wide white sun
That burns unsetting in the immortal space beyond Time.
Around her chant the world-poem the deathless Nine
And the feet of the Fates dance out the rhyme.
1 Alternative: blare through the[? mist] and the darkness.
2 These two words doubtful.
3 This stanza was not completed.
[A]
Chapter I
IN A WORK devoted to the formulation of the early Vedantic philosophy of the Upanishads — and especially to that philosophy as we find it massively concentrated into some of its greatest principles in the Isha Upanishad, I hazarded the theory that the Vedas were not a collection of sacrificial hymns to material Nature-gods, as supposed by the Europeans, but something more profound and noble, that they were indeed, I thought, the true substance and foundation of the Upanishads, if not of all Hindu religion and spirituality. Certain considerations were added which, it seemed to me, delivered me from the intellectual necessity of implicit submission to European standards and modern theories. Modern Science might not be infallible; some suggestions there are that lead us to the possibility of a fundamental error in her way of narrating the progress of human civilisation and her account of the origin and growth of our religious notions and practices. Western philology is admittedly imperfect and as applied to the Veda boldly conjectural and in the absence of a more perfect science of language we are not bound by its conclusions. We might even go so far as to assert the presence in the Vedas not only of a strong moral and spiritual element in its conceptions and the symbolism of sacrifice, but a conscious and elaborate psychological rationale for the assignment of their various functions to the Vedic deities.
This was the substance of the argument, an argument then only suggested, not pursued. The present work proposes some opening spadework with the object of rescuing this profounder significance from the ancient obscurity of the Veda. Like the labours of the European scholars, my work must be, from the intellectual standpoint, inductive and conjectural; — it is a large suggestion that I am offering to the religious consciousness of India, a suggestion time and human knowledge may confirm, if it is true and fortunately supported, but will reject, if it turns out to be an error or a premature discovery. It
would be highly out of place in such a tentative to be positive or dogmatic. For although the position I take, that the Veda contains the foundations of Brahmavidya, is old and hoary in Indian tradition, it is an audacious novelty to the modern intellect. Sayana does not establish it for us. Shankara acknowledges only to turn away from it and take refuge in the trenchant division of Karmakanda from Jnana-kanda. The Europeans believe themselves to have shattered it for ever and buried it away among the numerous delusions of the unscientific and superstitious past. What does this ancient ghost here, [one]1 may ask, revisiting the glimpses of the moon; we thought it had received its quietus; we had repeated Credos and Aves for its peaceful repose and sealed its tomb by sprinkling on it the holy waters of Science. Where a man presumes thus to differ from all the enlightenment and all the orthodoxy of his time, it behoves him to walk carefully, to content himself with the tone of suggestion only, and, however firm his own convictions, assert them to others with modesty and some hesitance.
My method in this book will be to separate from the first Mandala the eleven hymns of Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitri and his son Jeta with which the Rigveda opens and selecting from them the verses which seem to me to give a clear indication and a firm foundation for my theory, explain adequately the meaning I attach to them, coordinating as I proceed other verses from various hymns of this small group which set forth the same psychological notion. From this basis I shall ascend to the interpretation of the shlokas which are of an inferior clarity and modernity of language or are already in the firm possession of the ceremonial interpretation and construct from them whatever rendering of the hymns seems to me their true and ancient sense. I have selected the Madhuchchhanda group because, in my opinion, he troubles himself less than many other Rishis, less for instance than Medhatithi Kanwa who follows him in the received order of the Veda, with the external symbols of sacrifice and ceremony and is more clearly and singlemindedly occupied with moral and spiritual ideas and aspirations. He presents, therefore, a favourable ground for the testing of my theory.
I have already explained in the work, God and the World, the
1 MS apparently may
main ideas of the psychological system which I suppose to be discoverable in the Veda. I shall not therefore take up any space with a fresh formulation of its principles, but simply expose their application in the different and more antique language of the Veda. Nor shall I trouble myself, more than is necessary for clearing the ground, either with Sayana or the Germans. My process being constructive and synthetic, its defence against other theories must necessarily be left aside until the construction is complete and the synthesis appreciable in its entirety.
[B]
Chapter I
Surya, Sarasvati and Mahi.
Who are they, the gods of the Rigveda? Ancient and yet ever youthful powers, full of joy, help and light, shining ones with whose presence the regions of earth and the hearts of men were illuminated, angels and deputies of the mysterious unknown God, worshipped in India, worshipped in Mesopotamia and Central Asia fifteen hundred years before the Christian era, worshipped by the wild Scythians, — for the name of Bhaga is still the Russian name for God, — worshipped in Iran before Ahuramazda replaced them,—for A[h]riman, the dark spirit of the Persians, preserves the name of the strong Vedic deity, worshipped at some time by Greek and Roman and Celt and Scandinavian, they have long given way even in India to the direct adoration of their Master whom they revealed, the Deva Adhiyajna whom through them the ancient masters of the sacrifice so persistently sought and finally attained. What were they, then? — vain imaginations of men? personifications of material realities? the idea of God behind phenomena? or even — for we know too little of the worlds, are still, as Newton was, children picking up pebbles on the shore of the infinite ocean of knowledge, — were there and are there — behind the names men give them — real personalities who stand in spirit behind the functions of man and of Nature, hidden masters, now unworshipped gods? If they were nothing, wherefore did the fire of the sacrifice flame up to them so persistently from the hearts and the hearths of men? —
from what vague primeval terror and need of propitiation or supernatural assistance, or if something, from what higher knowledge of the secrets of force that lie behind these outward movements of the machinery of the world? Wherefore did they yoke the bright flaming coursers to their chariots of bliss and hasten down so swiftly to rejoice in the fires of the Aryan altar and drain the outpourings of the Soma-wine?
The Europeans believe that these Vedic gods were personifications of the material powers of Nature; Sky, Rain, Sun, Moon, Wind, Fire, Dawn and the Ocean are the gods of the Aryans. The names, they think, carry with them their own interpretation, and the language of the hymns, as translated by them, consents to this modern insight. Vayu blows, Agni burns, Indra opens the cloud and hurls the thunderbolt. There are passages that do not agree with this theory, do not, at least, permit us to accept it as an all-sufficing explanation, but we can account for them by a progressive moralising of the old naturalistic religion destined [to] culminate in the idea of the universal God and open the way for Vedanta. In the sacrifice we see the systemisation of the old savage sense of dread and weakness, having as its result according to temperament or culture the propitiation of terrible and maleficent powers or the invocation of bright and helpful deities. These shadows of our own terror or yearning were given their share of meat and wine, — because primitive men were naturally anthropomorphic in their conceptions of deity, — and imagined their gods to resemble their own chiefs and rulers. And if so much stress was laid on the Soma wine, was it not because the Vedic Rishis loved to get frequently drunk and naturally thought their gods would have the same robust inclination? For, it seems, heaven is only a magnified shadow of our own vain aspiration towards perfect strength, beauty and happiness and, if God did not make us in His image, we at least atone for His failure by making Him in ours!
The Indian Pundits, with Sayana at their head, give us little help against these ideas which attack fatally the ancient bedrock of our religion; servant and passive minds, they make no inquiry of their own, but preserve for us the traditions of Puranic mythology, which, themselves symbols, cannot, unless themselves first explained, help us to explain more ancient images. Consequently, these European notions have had a sweeping victory, until at last an Indian hater of India's past, brought up in their school of thought was able to say,
not without some plausibility, that the best way to destroy popular faith in the Hindu religion would be to print and publish broadcast cheap translations of the Veda, — of course, as they are now, by those foreign minds, understood and interpreted. But the method might be partially effective, without the effect being just. The European theory of the Vedas well supported though it seems may not be the true theory or even the only rational theory now available. A past race of men, great thinkers, whose writings are the source and fountainhead of some of the sublimest philosophies in the world, much nearer to the Vedic Rishis in time, more capable of understanding and entering into their mentality, did not hold this view of the ancient deities. They considered them to be divine beings whose nature was vital, moral and spiritual, not simply material; they thought sacrifice to be a helpful and even a necessary symbolism. Throughout the Brahmanas and Upanishads we see this constant idea and the great pains taken to penetrate into the meaning not only of Vedic language but of Vedic ritual. We have therefore two different clues to the inner sense of these ancient words and obsolete practices. The European clue has been followed for many decades; the Vedantic clue perhaps might also be not unprofitably pursued. We know what European scholars understand by the Vedas; it may not be labour lost to know what the Vedantic sages understood by the Vedas.
In this book I intend to make the attempt even with such limited qualifications as I possess — for it seems to me of importance to our religion and future culture that the attempt should be made even if it should prove unsuccessful. In order to avoid the danger of a merely futile industry, I must first make myself sure that the Rigveda is not plainly and entirely a naturalistic document, but contains utterances inconsistent with the naturalistic, consistent with the Vedantic explanation.
I open then the Rigveda, — open it at its commencement and cast my glance over the eleven hymns ascribed to Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitri and his son Jeta. In the very first hymn, a hymn to Agni, I am struck with certain expressions which do not agree very well with the naturalistic conception of Agni. A divine personification of Fire may be described poetically as the Purohit, Ritwik and Hota of the sacrifice (purohitam Yajnasya devam ritwijam hotaram ratnadhatamam), though it is curious — the old clear and rigid ideas on these subjects
being given—to find these different functions heaped pellmell together without any clear appropriateness; for granting Agni to be in his place as Purohit, how is he the Ritwik, how is the Hota? Agni is adorable to the sages of the past and of the future because he carries the gods to the sacrifice, sa devan eha vakshati. There seems to be no clear and firm idea in this talk of Fire carrying or bringing the gods — for what are we to think of Fire carrying thunder, rain, wind, moon and sun to the sacrifice? We will suppose however that the ideas of these early savages were not, could not have been clear and firm and, for want of this lucidity, they confused the idea of Fire carrying the sacrifice to the Gods with the contrary idea of Fire carrying the Gods to the sacrifice. We read next that by Agni one gets substance and increase or plenty day by day; by him one gets puissant fame. It may pass; — for were not the Vedic Rishis carpenters, greengrocers, chariotmakers? and perhaps the poet was a renowned blacksmith or a primitive iron-master or even, like Draupadi,2 a successful and famous cook. But when we find that Agni is said to exist encompassing the adhwara Yajna on every side, the expressions already strike us as strange and almost unintelligible in their form if there is no supra-naturalistic suggestion. Adhwara yajna stands in need of explanation (for both words in more modern Sanscrit mean sacrifice), unless indeed we are to take it as a parallel expression to Homer's theleiai gunaikes which scholars long persisted in understanding as "female women". Visvatah paribhur asi has a singularly Vedantic ring. Nevertheless I will refrain from pressing any of these points for fear of being misled by my own associations. I will put by these expressions as vague poetical tropes, the result of a loose imaginative diction. But when I read in the next line Agni described as kavikratuh satyash chitrasravastamah, the strong in wisdom, the true, the rich in various knowledge, I reach the limit of my powers of complaisance, I shake off the yoke of the materialist. The naturalistic interpretation sinks under the triple blows of these epithets and from my mind at least passes away never to return. Fire, material fire, has nothing to do with wisdom, truth and various knowledge — except indeed to burn them when from Holy Office or enthroned bigotry it gets the chance. Agni of whom wisdom, truth and various knowledge are the attributes,
2 Doubtful reading.
cannot be the personification of fire or the god of the material flame, but must be and is something greater. The Rishi of the Veda is raising his hymn to a mighty god, moral and intellectual, a god before whom sages can bow down, not to a savage and materialistic conception. He is not thinking of the burning fire, he is thinking of the helper of man who fortifies his character and purifies his intellect, vaisvanara, pavaka, jatavedas.
Many objections can be urged against so rapid a conclusion. Originally it may be argued Agni was the personification of fire, and although [in] the present hymn Vedic religious conceptions have reached a stage of ennoblement and moral progress in which the primitive idea could no longer satisfy, we must even here take account of the original conception. But I am concerned with the ideas of the gods as conceived by Vedic men and not with the far-off origins of these ideas in the minds of their unknown ancestors. For the one question about the Veda that is not only of interest, but vital to us in India, is not what some remote savages who may or may not have existed, thought about fire and the sun, — a matter on which we have no real evidence, — but what our Vedic ancestors thought about fire and the sun and their relations to the Godhead. My conclusion touches this question alone. Anthropologists may be interested in hunting in the dark for undiscoverable origins — my purpose, more practical and immediate, need only take into account the actual facts of the Veda. But there are passages, in which Agni is clearly the material flame; these, it may be contended, bring us back to the European theory. But so is the Agni of the Vedanta the material flame and yet preeminently a moral and spiritual deity. The question we have put to ourselves is whether it is worth while following the clue given us by the Upanishads, — whether, relying only on the plain meaning of the words, we can find Vedanta implied or explicit in the terms and notions of the Veda. The occasional materiality of Agni is not inconsistent with the Vedanticity of Veda; it is his essential materiality, if established, that would convict the Vedantic hypothesis of unreality. For to the Vedantist also the material flame is not only so much carbon and oxygen. It is the manifestation of a force; it is also the expression of a Personality and not only a God, but God Himself. For when he sees the flames of Agni burning up towards heaven, it is God whom the Vedantist watches burning up towards
God. The Vedantic explanation of Veda does not therefore suffer, it gains by the occasional materiality of Agni. And from this single hymn we have it established that his materiality in the physical flame was only one circumstance in the personality of the Vedic Agni; we find the conception of him in this hymn identical in important respects with the fiery god of the Vedanta. In the Vedanta we already know him to be Agni Vaisvanara, an universal might filling the worlds, jatavedas, one to whom the highest knowledge has appeared, visvani vayunani vidvan, he who has known all phenomena, who in his might and his knowledge attacks the crooked attractions of the world, asmaj juhuranam eno. And here, in the very opening hymn of the Veda, we find him visvatah paribhuh, universally encompassing —the word used being the very one employed to describe Virat Vaisvanara, the Master of the physical universe. We find him to be satya, serving the fundamental law of the world (satyadharmanam adhware), opposed to all deviation and crookedness — chitrasravas, he, shall we not say, who has detailed knowledge of the Sruti,—jatavedas Agni — kavi-kratu, the mighty in divine knowledge, well fitted therefore to be our helper and saviour, to "lead us by the good path to felicity." When the Rishi proceeds to describe Agni as3 the guardian of immortality, a brilliant splendour increasing in its home, and appeals to him to be as accessible as a father to his child and to cleave to us for our weal, we may say with some confidence that the altar4 is not the altar of sacrifice, that in the appeal for accessibility there is [no]5 mere request to the god not to give us too much trouble when the pieces of tinder are struck together to produce him; that the Sage is surely not entreating the fire of his hearth or of his altar to cling to him for his weal! Whatever else may be in store for me in my inquiry, I can feel that I have made at the very beginning a great stride forward. For we are rid of that pervading character of barbarous childishness which the modern scholars have stamped upon the Vedas; we have thus opened the doors of rational interpretation to admit deeper ideas and a subtler psychology.
3 The beginning of this sentence, cancelled in the manuscript, has been retained by the editors. Sri Aurobindo began to rewrite it as follows: "Pursuing the terms of the hymn we find him to be", but the later part of the sentence was not altered to agree with this revision.
4 Or home
5 MS not
No doubt the gain is only negative until we can determine precisely what sense to attach to these notions about Agni. For it may be argued that these Vedic terms have not as yet the developed Vedantic significance, but are merely the vague beginnings to which Vedanta afterwards gave shape and brought into a state of precision and philosophic lucidity. We need therefore before we can go very far with our Vedantic hypothesis, passages in which the thoughts of Veda and Vedanta coincide exactly and clearly in the more subtle and precise ideas of the later Transcendentalism. But meanwhile we have perfectly established that to one of the Rishis, to the son of Visvamitra,— surely no late or modern voice, — the character of Agni as a mere personification of fire does not exist. Here at least we have him as a greater type of deity; we have moral notions of a high order, religious emotions of great depth and sweetness underlying the thought and diction. The religious ideas of the fatherhood of God, of a divine friend and lover, a recompenser of virtue, a Master of Truth and Knowledge are already present to this early Indian consciousness. The idea of Zeus pater or Jupiter existed in European antiquity but it evoked in the Greeks and Latins no such emotions as break out in the piteva sunave of Madhuchch[h]andas and is parallelled by the intimacy of his claim, later on, of special and dear comradeship with Indra, the master of the thunderbolt. The Fatherhood of Zeus was the distant fatherhood of the Prajapati, general and remote, not this near and moving personal relationship. But we have done more than ascertain the religious ideas and temperament of this single Rishi. We have established the right [to] look for similar ideas in other hymns, if not in the whole strain of the Veda; — we cannot do otherwise for we must surely suppose that Madhuchchhandas was no solitary mind, alien to the surrounding conceptions, a single flower6 of advanced spirituality in a desert of naturalistic barbarism. These thoughts must, to some extent, have been current; this attitude must have been partly created for him by his environment.
All this will be admitted. It may be suggested at the same time, that it does not carry us very far on our journey. Some of the hymns, it is said, are frankly naturalistic; others moralistic and religious as modern minds have understood religion. Madhuchchhanda, [who]
6 Doubtful reading.
was a Rishi of the second and later order, naturally brings with him this accent of a moralised and partly spiritual worship into the opening hymns of the first Mandala. For as the old Nature-worshippers progressed in civilisation, they would naturally come to attach deeper ideas to godhead. Without rising to the exalted level of Semitic monotheism, — for they kept their gods of the flame and the lightning-stroke and the storm-blast, — they would seem to have yielded to an uni-versalising tendency — they did not, indeed, roll up all their gods into one, but they expanded each into the whole. Thus they established an universality of godhead which did the same elevating work as the Semitic monotheism and through which the Indian mind, released from materialistic religion, travelled towards the Vedanta. By following this line the Hindus missed monotheism; but they found henotheism and made it a half way house to their destined Pantheistic development.
The theory has a plausible ring — the question for us, is whether it is as true as it is plausible? From some of its suggestions we must guard ourselves carefully — for example, from the vulgar error that Vedanta is Pantheism. It is not that, but a Transcendentalism of which Theism, Pantheism, polytheism are all single circumstances and carefully harmonised factors. It is doubtful whether pure Pantheism can be discovered anywhere in Indian thought or Indian religion — for even when the Vedantist sees the flame as God, he is able to do so because he regards the flame not as a flame but as intrinsically something else, a supramaterial presence which has the appearance of a material fiery tongue. We must remember too that the henotheism discovered by Max Muller in the Veda, [is] no obsolete eccentricity of the human mind but the still existent Indian theory of the ishta devata which sees God in many forms and names but chooses one name and form in preference to all others as the centre of its spiritual experiences and emotions. Henotheism is merely a permanent circumstance in Indian transcendentalism for the sake of a more intimate relation with Him. It is not a useful aberration from which it rose to Pantheism but itself a result of the transcendental view of the Universe. Neither should we lend ourselves to the view of some European scholars who see in the Visve devah of the Veda a movement towards the idea of universality in godhead. The description of the Visve devas in the hymns does not support that view. It does not go beyond a
special application of the idea that all activities in the world have behind them hosts of divine personages whose function it is to support and maintain the inert forgetfulness of matter with the secret consciousness of spirit. Pantheism, Henotheism, Vaisvadevism (taken as a self sufficient religious synthesis) are European notions imported into Veda and Vedanta. The Vedic data from which they seem to arise, are more perfectly explained by ideas which are still persistent actualities of the Indian religious consciousness.
We are left, therefore, still in ignorance as to the means and possibility of this extraordinary rapid stride from a superstitious poetical materialism to profound moral and spiritual conceptions and even to the Transcendentalism which alone makes henotheism possible to the Indian intellect. We will suppose, however, that the Vedic worshippers, even when they saw Agni flaming before them on the altar, were able without the aid of any transcend[ent]alism, to forget his material aspects, to regard him only as a god, and not as the particular god of fire, and therefore clothe him with the general attributes of godhead. But are we then to suppose that such an expression as gopamritasya didivim, vardhamanam swe dame, guardian of immortality, a splendour increasing in its home, has no special meaning, that it is in vain that Varuna and Mitra are continually referred to as kavi ritavridhav ritasprisha, as seers, as increasing by law and truth, as desiring or enjoying that always and finding in it their strength and fullness? In the henotheistic theory, the theory which differentiates only the material aspects of Varuna, Agni, Indra and confounds their moral aspects in the general notion of universal deity — a half-fledged Pantheism roughly doing duty for monotheism, — these and a host of other powerful expressions become vague and almost meaningless; or at any rate without distinct meaning, — the terms of a vague and fluid poetry which catches at ideas and images without mastering them. This is possible, though with the concrete, clear-thinking ancients improbable. But it is also possible and more probable that we have here religious notions of another order than the modern, but quite as firm and clear — a religion which knew its own ideas and its own psychology. If we can find out what precisely are these ideas, what notions of God and the world are covered by these images of Indra, Agni, Vayu, the Aswins, Varuna, we may find out the real secret which the lapse of ages keeps concealed from us in the hymns.
We may even find that our opening conjecture was justified and we were only speaking an ancient truth when we hazarded the use of the phrase, the Vedanticity of the Veda.
Still, whatever the precise nature of these higher religious concepts and emotions, their development from the alleged primitive and materialistic naturalism has to be explained. The safest course is to get away from these terms, henotheism, pantheism, Nature worship and keep our [eyes]7 fixed firmly on the concrete facts supplied to us by Veda. There is a flame burning on the altar; that, say the Europeans, was personified to the Vedic consciousness as Agnidevata, fire the god; Agni had originally no other significance. But now we see Madhuchchhanda with his eyes on that flame beholding in it a vision of wisdom, truth, knowledge, fatherhood, moral force, spiritual helpfulness. How has this psychological miracle been effected? By the anthropomorphic tendency in man, say the Europeans, — Fire the god, given in imagination the shape of a man, he of the tongue of flame, came to be regarded as a personality independent of the fire — a personality first with the qualities of fire, speed, brightness, des-tructiveness, helpfulness, — but afterwards with the general qualities of godhead, — whatever qualities the developing Aryan consciousness came to attribute to godhead. Agni is wise, true, beneficent not because he is fire, but because he is a god — that is to say an idealised man. He keeps his peculiar material qualities, but morally he cannot be very different from Indra or Varuna. All three, with whatever slight variations, are shaped on common lines by a common religious and moral mentality. They must differ if this theory is true, only as the thunder, fire and sky, not as moral forces. The wisdom of Agni is also the wisdom of Indra, it is the common divine wisdom; the moral helpfulness of Agni is also the moral helpfulness of Varuna, it is the common divine helpfulness. This is the reason why sometimes Agni, sometimes Varuna, sometimes Indra appear as the supreme god, because the poet has no reason to distinguish, he has about them all different physical images but the same moral conceptions.
These ideas give us a better explanation than the other fancy of a naturalistic henotheism. On the surface it explains the Veda; it explains at least the Vedas as they are interpreted in Europe. If I find
7 MS ways
that the actual terminology and ideas of the Vedic hymns coincide with this theory, I am bound unhesitatingly to accept it. But if, on the other hand, I find that there are clear, precise and firm psychological and moral conceptions attached to the Vedic deities, that though they belong to one moral family, they have strong personal differences, I shall then be free to follow, undisturbed, my original Vedantic hypothesis.
What is the actual meaning, the precise force we are to attach to Vedic language and terminology? If the European theory is to stand, we must suppose that the expressions applied to Agni, Gopamritasya didivim vardhamanam swe dame, have no clear and settled significance— there is the shapeless idea of a helpful immortal godhead coupled confusedly with the physical image of a domestic or sacrificial flame increasing upon altar or hearth. There is no appropriateness in swe dame — we are not to gather from it that Agni could not increase quite as well elsewhere! And when, proceeding to the second hymn, we read the striking lines about Mitra and Varuna, when we find them continually described with a peculiar emphasis on ritam, a noble reiteration of the conception of truth and law, ritavridhav ritasprisha, increasing by law and truth, desiring and enjoying it always, finding in law and truth their strength and fullness, we must here too suppose that these powerful and stirring expressions have no definite force and application, — though they may have been suggested originally by the majesty and fixity of the sky and the regular and regularising movements in it of the sun. They are the terms of a vague and fluid poetry, reaching out through half forgotten physical impressions to moral ideas and images which they have not mastered, in which as yet there is no fixity. Yet the moral ideas of other ancient races,— Aryan races — seem to have been otherwise clear, concrete and definite. The Greeks knew well what they meant by Fate, Necessity, Ate, Themis, Dike, Koros, Hubris; we are in no danger of confusing morally Zeus with Ares, or Ares with Hephaistos, Aphrodite with Pallas or Pallas with Artemis! We will suppose, however, that the higher spiritual development of the Indians, their urge towards universality, prevented them from arriving at this clearness of individual conception. Or else that they were arrested by this tendency at an early and fluid stage of the mythological imagination, when material distinctions were clear and unblurred, the moral ideas which were to obscure or hide them not yet sifted and organised.
What then is the desideratum, if we are to have clear authority to proceed with the Vedantic hypothesis—for it is not yet a theory. We must have, obviously, some clear and indubitable passage to start with, assigning definite and minute psychological, moral or intellectual functions to a particular Vedic deity, in a sense which shall be identical with or closely related to the ideas and the psychology of the Upanishads. If I can find one such passage, and if it is of a nature to shed light upon others of a less indubitable clarity I shall have firm hold of our clue. I shall be in a position to build up my hypothesis, and to posit and test, as I go, by means of a number of particular indications this truth so dim to us, but which to our forefathers was so clear, the Vedanticity of the Veda.
[FIRST VERSION]
[A]
Prefatory
THE BELIEFS and conclusions of today are, in these rapid and unsettled times, seldom the beliefs and conclusions of tomorrow. In religion, in thought, in science, in literature we march daily over the bodies of dead theories to enthrone fresh syntheses and worship new illuminations. The realms of scholarship are hardly more quiet and secure than these troubled kingdoms; and in that realm nowhere is the soil so boggy, nowhere does scholastic ingenuity disport itself with such light fantastic footsteps over such a quaking morass of hardy conjecture and hasty generalisation as in the Sanscrit scholarship of the last century. But the Vedic question at least seemed to have been settled. It was agreed — firmly enough, it seemed—that the Vedas were the sacred chants of a rude, primitive race of agriculturists sacrificing to very material gods for very material benefits with an elaborate but wholly meaningless and arbitrary ritual; the gods themselves were merely poetical personifications of cloud and rain and wind, lightning and dawn and the sky and fire to which the semi savage Vedic mind attributed by crude personal analogy a personality and a presiding form, the Rishis were sacrificing priests of an invading Aryan race dwelling on the banks of the Panjab rivers, men without deep philosophical or exalted moral ideas, a race of frank cheerful Pagans seeking the good things of life, afraid of drought and night and various kinds of devils, sacrificing persistently and drinking vigorously, fighting the black Dravidians whom they called the Dasyus or robbers; — crude prototypes these of Homeric Greek and Scandinavian Viking. All this with many details of the early civilisation were supposed to be supplied by a philological — and therefore scientific — examination of the ancient text yielding as certain results as the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyph and Persian inscription. If there are hymns of a high moral fervour, of a remarkable philosophical depth and elevation, these are later compositions of a more sophisticated
age. In the earlier hymns, the vocabulary, archaic and almost unintelligible, allows an adroit and industrious scholarship waving in its hand the magic wand of philology to conjure into it whatever meaning may be most suitable to modern beliefs or preferable to the European temperament. As for Vedanta, it can be no clue to the meaning of the mantras, because the Upanisads represent a spiritual revolt against Vedic naturalism and ceremonialism and not, as has been vainly imagined for some thousands of years, the fulfilment of Vedic truth. Since then, some of these positions have been severely shaken. European Science has rudely scouted the claims of Comparative Philology to rank as a Science; European Ethnology has dismissed the Aryo-Dravidian theory of the philologist and tends to see in the Indian people a single homogeneous race; it has been trenchantly suggested and plausibly upheld that the Vedas themselves offer no evidence that the Indian races were ever outside India but even prove the contrary — an advance from the south and not from the north. These theories have not only been suggested and widely approved but are gaining upon the general mind. Alone in all this overthrow the European account of Vedic religion and Vedic civilisation remains as yet intact and unchallenged by any serious questioning.1 Even in the minds of the Indian people, with their ancient reverence for Veda, the Europeans have effected an entire divorce between Veda and Vedanta. The consistent religious development of India has been theosophic, mystical, Vedantic. Its beginnings are now supposed to have been naturalistic, materialistic, Pagan, almost Graeco-Roman. No satisfactory explanation has been [given]2 of this strange transformation in the soul of a people, and it is not surprising that theories should have been started attributing to Vedanta and Brahmavada a Dravidian origin. Brahmavada was, some have confidently asserted, part of the intellectual property taken over by the Aryan conquerors from the more civilised races they dispossessed. The next step in this scholars' progress might well be some counterpart of Serji's Mediterranean theory, — an original dark, pacific, philosophic and civilised race overwhelmed by a fair skinned and warlike horde of Aryan savages.
The object of this book is to suggest a prior possibility, — that
1 Dayananda [rest of note apparently left unwritten]
2 MS giving
the whole European theory may be from beginning to end a prodigious error. The confident presumption that religion started in fairly recent times with the terrors of the savage, passed through stages of Animism and Nature Worship and resulted variously in Paganism, monotheism and the Vedanta has stood in the way of any extension of scepticism to this province of Vedic enquiry. I dispute the presumption and deny the conclusions drawn from it. Before I admit it, I must be satisfied that a system of pure Nature-worship ever existed. I cannot accept as evidence Sun and Star myth theories which, as a play of ingenious scholastic fancy, may attract the imagination, but are too haphazard, too easily self contented, too ill-combined and inconsequent to satisfy the scientific reason. No other religion of which there is any undisputed record or sure observation, can be defined as a system of pure Nature worship. Even the savage-races have had the conception of gods and spirits who are other than personified natural phenomena. At the lowest they have Animism and the worship of spirits, ghosts and devils. Ancestor-worship and the cult of snake and fourfooted animal seem to have been quite as old as any Nature-gods with whom research has made us acquainted. In all probability the Python was worshipped long before Apollo. It is therefore evident that even in the lowest religious strata the impulse to personify Nature-phenomena is not the ruling cult-idea of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that at any time this element should have so far prevailed as to cast out all the others so as to create a type of cult confined within a pure and rigid naturalism. Man has always seen in the universe the replica of himself. Unless therefore the Vedic Rishis had no thought of their subjective being, no perception of intellectual and moral forces within themselves, it is a psychological impossibility that they should have detected divine forces behind the objective world but none behind the subjective.
These are negative and a priori considerations, but they are supported by more positive indications. The other Aryan religions which are most akin in conception to the Vedic and seem originally to have used the same names for their deities, present themselves to us even at their earliest vaguely historic stage as moralised religions. Their gods had not only distinct moral attributes, but represented moral and subjective functions. Apollo is not only the god of the sun or of pestilence — in Homer indeed Haelios (Saurya) and not Apollo is the Sun God — but the divine master of prophecy and poetry;
Athene has lost any naturalistic significance she may ever have had and is a pure moral force, the goddess of strong intelligence, force guided by brain; Ares is the lord of battles, not a storm wind; Artemis, if she is the Moon, is also goddess of the free hunting life and of virginity; Aphrodite is only the goddess of Love and Beauty. There is therefore a strong moral element in the cult and there are clear subjective notions attached to the divine personalities. But this is not all. There was not only a moral element in the Greek religion as known and practised by the layman, there was also a mystic element and an esoteric belief and practice practised by the initiated. The mysteries of Eleusis, the Thracian rites connected with the name of Orpheus, the Phrygian worship of Cybele, even the Bacchic rites rested on a mystic symbolism which gave a deep internal meaning to the exterior circumstances of creed and cult. Nor was this a modern excrescence; for its origins were lost to the Greeks in a legendary antiquity. Indeed, if we took the trouble to understand alien and primitive mentalities instead of judging and interpreting them by our own standards, I think we should find an element of mysticism even in savage rites and beliefs. The question at any rate may fairly be put, Were the Vedic Rishis, thinkers of a race which has shown itself otherwise the greatest and earliest mystics and moralisers in historical times, the most obstinately spiritual, theosophic and metaphysical of nations, so far behind the Orphic and Homeric Greeks as to be wholly Pagan and naturalistic in their creed, or was their religion too moralised and subjective, were their ceremonies too supported by an esoteric symbolism?
The immediate or at any rate the earliest known successors of the Rishis, the compilers of the Brahmanas, the writers of the Upanishads give a clear and definite answer to this question. The Upanishads everywhere rest their highly spiritual and deeply mystic doctrines on the Veda. We read in the Isha Upanishad of Surya as the Sun God, but it is the Sun of spiritual illumination, of Agni as the Fire, but it is the inner fire that burns up all sin and crookedness. In the Kena Indra, Agni and Vayu seek to know the supreme Brahman and their greatness is estimated by the nearness with which they "touched" him, — nedistham pasparsha. Uma the daughter of Himavan, the Woman, who reveals the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle and mystical of human scriptures, the gods and Titans are the masters,
respectively of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces and functions of sense, mind and intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the Vedic ritual, to their very syllables a profound significance is everywhere attached; several incidents related in the Upanishads show the deep sense then and before entertained that the sacrifices had a spiritual meaning which must be known if they were to be conducted with full profit or even with perfect safety. The Brahmanas everywhere are at pains to bring out a minute symbolism in the least circumstances of the ritual, in the clarified butter, the sacred grass, the dish, the ladle. Moreover, we see even in the earliest Upanishads already developed the firm outlines and minute details of an extraordinary psychology, physics, cosmology which demand an ancient development and centuries of Yogic practice and mystic speculation to account for their perfect form and clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the three Vyahritis, the five sheaths, the five (or seven) psychological strata, (bhumi,—kshiti of the Vedas), the worlds that await us, the gods who help and the demons who hinder go back to Vedic origins. All this may be a later mystic misconception of the hymns and their ritual, but the other hypothesis of direct and genuine derivation is also possible. If there was no common origin, if Greek and Indian separated during the naturalistic period of the common religion supposed to be recorded in the Vedas it is surprising that even the little we know of Greek rites and mysteries should show us ideas coincident with those of Indian Tantra and Yoga.
When we go back to the Veda itself, we find in [the]3 hymns which are to us most easily intelligible by the modernity of their language, similar and decisive indications. The moralistic conception of Varuna, for example, is admitted even by the Europeans. We even find the sense of sin, usually supposed to be an advanced religious conception, much more profoundly developed in prehistoric India
3 MS thy
than it was in any other old Aryan nation even in historic times. Surely, this is in itself a significant indication. Surely, this conception cannot have become so clear and strong without a previous history in the earlier hymns. Nor is it psychologically possible that a cult capable of so advanced an idea, should have been ignorant of all other moral and intellectual conceptions reverencing only natural forces and seeking only material ends. Neither can there have been a sudden leap filled up only by a very doubtful "henotheism", a huge hiatus between the naturalism of early Veda and the transcendentalism of the Vedic Brahmavada admittedly present in the later hymns. The European interpretation in the face of such conflicting facts threatens to become a brilliant but shapeless monstrosity. And is there no symbolism in the details of the Vedic sacrifice? It seems to me that the peculiar language of the Veda has never been properly studied or appreciated in this connection. What are we to say of the Vedic anxiety to increase Indra by the Soma wine? Of the description of Soma as the amritam, the wine of immortality, and of its forces as the indavah or moon powers? Of the constant sense of the attacks delivered by the powers of evil on the sacrifice? Of the extraordinary powers already attributed to the mantra and the sacrifice? Have the neshtram, potram, hotram of the Veda no symbolic significance? Is there no reason for the multiplication of functions at the sacrifice or for the subtle distinctions between Gayatrins, Arkins, Brahmas? These are questions that demand a careful consideration which has never yet been given for the problems they raise.
The present essays are merely intended to raise the subject, not to exhaust it, to offer suggestions, not to establish them. The theory of Vedic religion which I shall suggest in these pages, can only be substantiated if it is supported by a clear,full, simple, natural and harmonious rendering of the Veda standing on a sound philological basis, perfectly consistent in itself and proved in hymn after hymn without any hiatus or fatal objection. Such a substantiation I shall one day place before the public. The problem of Vedic interpretation depends, in my view, on three different tests, philological, historic and psychological. If the results of these three coincide, then only can we be sure that we have understood the Veda. But to erect this Delphic tripod of interpretation is no facile undertaking. It is easy to misuse philology. I hold no philology to be sound and valid which has only discovered
one or two bye laws of sound modification and for the rest depends upon imagination and licentious conjecture, — identifies for instance ethos with swadha, derives uloka from urvaloka or prachetasa from prachi and on the other ignores the numerous but definitely ascertainable caprices of Pracritic detrition between the European and Sanscrit tongues or considers a number of word-identities sufficient to justify inclusion in a single group of languages. By a scientific philology I mean a science which can trace the origins, growth and structure of the Sanscrit language, discover its primary, secondary and tertiary forms and the laws by which they develop from each other, trace intelligently the descent of every meaning of a word in Sanscrit from its original root sense, account for all similarities and identities of sense, discover the reason of unexpected divergences, trace the deviations which separated Greek and Latin from the Indian dialect, discover and define the connection of all three with the Dravidian forms of speech. Such a system of comparative philology could alone deserve to stand as a science side by side with the physical sciences and claim to speak with authority on the significance of doubtful words in the Vedic vocabulary. The development of such a science must always be a work of time and gigantic labour.
But even such a science, when completed, could not, owing to the paucity of our records be, by itself, a perfect guide. It would be necessary to discover, fix and take always into account the actual ideas, experiences and thought-atmosphere of the Vedic Rishis; for it is these things that give colour to the words of men and determine their use. The European translations represent the Vedic Rishis as cheerful semi-savages full of material ideas and longings, ceremonialists, naturalistic Pagans, poets endowed with an often gorgeous but always incoherent imagination, a rambling style and inability either to think in connected fashion or to link their verses by that natural logic which all except children and the most rudimentary intellects observe. In the light of this conception they interpret Vedic words and evolve a meaning out of the verses. Sayana and the Indian scholars perceive in the Vedic Rishis ceremonialists and Puranists like themselves with an occasional scholastic and Vedantic bent; they interpret Vedic words and Vedic mantras accordingly. Wherever they can get words to mean priest, prayer, sacrifice, speech, rice, butter, milk, etc, they do so redundantly and decisively. It would be at least interesting to test the results of
another hypothesis, — that the Vedic thinkers were clear-thinking men with at least as clear an expression as ordinary poets have and at least as high ideas and as connected and logical a way of expressing themselves—allowing for the succinctness of poetical forms — as is found in other religious poetry, say the Psalms or the Book of Job or St Paul's Epistles. But there is a better psychological test than any mere hypothesis. If it be found, as I hold it will be found, that a scientific and rational philological dealing with the text reveals to us poems not of mere ritual or Nature worship, but hymns full of psychological and philosophical religion expressed in relation to fixed practices and symbolic ceremonies, if we find that the common and persistent words of Veda, words such as vaja, vani, tuvi, ritam, radhas, rati, raya, rayi, uti, vahni etc, — an almost endless list, — are used so persistently because they expressed shades of meaning and fine psychological distinctions of great practical importance to the Vedic religion, that the Vedic gods were intelligently worshipped and the hymns intelligently constructed to express not incoherent poetical ideas but well connected spiritual experiences,—then the interpreter of Veda may test his rendering by repeating the Vedic experiences through Yoga and by testing and confirming them as a scientist tests and confirms the results of his predecessors. He may discover whether there are the same shades and distinctions, the same connections in his own psychological and spiritual experiences. If there are, he will have the psychological confirmation of his philological results.
Even this confirmation may not be sufficient. For although the new version may have the immense superiority of a clear depth and simplicity supported and confirmed by a minute and consistent scientific experimentation, although it may explain rationally and simply most or all of the passages which have baffled the older and the newer, the Eastern and the Western scholars, still the confirmation may be discounted as a personal test applied in the light of a previous conclusion. If, however, there is a historical confirmation as well, if it is found that Veda has exactly the same psychology and philosophy as Vedanta, Purana, Tantra and ancient and modern Yoga and all of them indicate the same Vedic results which we ourselves have discovered in our experience, then we may possess our souls in peace and say to ourselves that we [have discoverd]4 the meaning of Veda;
4 Cancelled in MS, incompletely replaced by are
its true meaning if not all its significance. Nor need we be discouraged, if we have to disagree with Sayana and Yaska in the actual rendering of the hymns no less than with the Europeans. Neither of these great authorities can be held to be infallible. Yaska is an authority for the interpretation of Vedic words in his own age, but that age was already far subsequent to the Vedic and the sacred language of the hymns was already to him an ancient tongue. The Vedas are much more ancient than we usually suppose. Sayana represents the scholarship and traditions of a period not much anterior to our own. There is therefore no authoritative rendering of the hymns. The Veda remains its own best authority.
But all this triple labour is a work of great responsibility, minute research, and an immense and meticulous industry. Meanwhile I hold myself justified in opening the way by a purely hypothetical entrance into the subject, suggesting possibilities for the present rather than seeking to enforce a settled opinion. There is a possible theory that may be proposed, certain provisional details of it that may be formulated. A few initial stones may be laid down to help in crossing by a convenient ford this great stream of the Veda.
The statement of a few principal details of the Vedic system according to the theory I wish to suggest, a simple enumeration without comments may help the reader to find his way through the following pages.
(1) Vedic religion is based on an elaborate psychology and cosmology of which the keyword is the great Vedic formula OM, Bhur Bhuvah Swah; the three vyahritis and the Pranava. The three Vyahritis are the three lower principles of Matter, Life and Mind, Annam, Prana and Manas of the Vedanta. OM is Brahman or Sacchidananda of whom these three are the expressions in the phenomenal world. OM and the vyahrities are connected by an intermediate principle, Mahas, Vijnanam of the Vedanta, ideal Truth which has arranged the lower worlds and on which amidst all their confusions they rest.
(2) Corresponding roughly to the vyahrities are three worlds, Bhurloka (Prana-Annam, the material world), Bhuvarloka (Prana-Manas, the lower subjective world), Swarloka (Manas-Buddhi, the higher subjective world). These are the tribhuvana of Hinduism.
(3) Corresponding to Mahas is Maharloka or Mahi Dyaus, the great heavens (pure Buddhi or Vijnana, the ideal world). The Pranava
in its three essentialities rules over the three supreme worlds, the Satya-loka (divine being), Tapoloka (divine Awareness and Force), Ananda-loka (divine Bliss) of the Puranas, which constitute Amritam, immortality or the true kingdom of heaven of the Vedic religion. These are the Vedic sapta dhamani and the seven different movements of consciousness to which they correspond are the sapta sindhu of the hymns.
(4) According to the Vedanta, man has five koshas or sheaths of existence, the material (Annamaya), vital (Pranamaya), mental (Manomaya) which together make up the aparardha or lower half of our conscious-being; the ideal (vijnanamaya) which [links]5 the lower to the parardha or higher half; the divine or Anandamaya in which the divine existence (Amrita) is concentrated for communion with our lower human being. These are the pancha kshitis, [five]6 earths or rather dwelling places of the Veda. But in Yoga we speak usually of the five koshas but the sapta bhumis, seven not five. The Veda also speaks of sapta dhamani.
(5) In each of the seven strata of consciousness all the other six work under the law of the stratum which houses them. This means seven sub-strata in each; in the three vyahritis there are therefore thrice seven, trih saptani.
(6) Man, although living here in Bhu, belongs to Swar and Bhuvar. He is manu, the Thinker, — the soul in him is the manomayah pranasarira neta of the Upanishad, "the mental captain and guide of life and body". He has to become vijnanamaya (mahan) and anandamaya, to become in a word immortal, divine in all his laws of being (vrata and dharman). By rising to Mahas in himself he enters into direct touch with ideal Truth, gets truth of knowledge by drishti, sruti and smriti, the three grand ideal processes, and by that knowledge truth of being, truth of action (satyadharma), truth of bliss (satya-radhas) constituting amritam, swarajyam and samrajyam, immortality, self rule and mastery of the world. It is this evolution which the Vedic hymns are intended to assist.
(7) In his progress man is helped by the gods, resisted by the Asuras and Rakshasas. For the worlds behind have their own inhabitants,
5 MS apparently likes
6 MS (inserted) seven
who, the whole universe being inextricably one, affect and are affected by the activities of mankind. The Bhuvar is the great place of struggle in which forces work behind the visible movements we see here and determine all our actions and fortunes. Swar is man's resting place but not his final or highest habitation which is Vishnu's highest footing, Vishnoh paramam padam, high in the supreme parardha.
(8) The 33 great gods belong to the higher worlds but rest in Swar and work at once in all the strata of consciousness, for the world is always one in its complexity. They are masters of the mental functions, masters also of the vital and material. Agni, for instance, governs the actions of the fiery elements in Nature and in man, but is also the vehicle of pure tapas, tu, tuvis or divine force. They are therefore mankind's greatest helpers.
(9) But in order that they may help, it is necessary to reinforce them in these lower worlds, which are not their own, by self surrender, by sacrifice, by a share in all man's action, strength, being and bliss, and by this mutual help man's being physical, vital, mental, spiritual is kept in a state of perfect and ever increasing force, energy and joy favourable to the development of immortality. This is the process of Yajna, called often Yoga when applied exclusively to the subjective movements and adhwara when applied to the objective. The Vritras, Panis etc of the Bhuvarloka who are constantly preventing man's growth and throwing back his development, have to be attacked and slain by the gods, for they are not entirely immortal. The sacrifice is largely a battle between evolutionary and reactionary powers.
(10) A symbolic system of external sacrifice in which every movement is careful[ly] designed and coordinated to signify the subjective facts of the internal Yajna, aids the spiritual aspirant by moulding his material sheath into harmony with his internal life and by mastering his external surroundings so that there too the conditions and forces may be all favourable to his growth.
(11) The Yajna has two parts, mantra and tantra — subjective and objective; in the outer sacrifice the mantra is the Vedic hymn and the tantra the oblation; in the inner the mantra is the meditation or the sacred formula, the tantra the putting forth of the power generated by mantra to bring about some successful spiritual, intellectual, vital or mental activity of which the gods have their share.
(12) The mantra consists of gayatra, brahma and arka, the formulation of thought into rhythmic speech to bring about a spiritual force or result, the filling of the soul (brahma) with the idea and name of the god of the mantra, the use of the mantra for effectuation of the external object or the activity desired.
(13) The tantra is composed of neshtra, savanam, potra and hotra, the intensifying of the vasu or material (internal or external) so as to prepare it for activity, the production of it in a usable form, the purification of it from all defects and the offering of it to the god or for action.
(14) The Veda proper is karmakanda, not jnanakanda; its aim is not moksha, but divine fulfilment in this life and the next. Therefore the Vedic Rishis accepted plenty and fullness of physical, vital and mental being, power, and joy as the pratistha or foundation of immortality and did not reject it as an obstacle to salvation. It is supposed that in the Kaliyuga this is no longer possible, or possible only by direct selfsurrender to the Supreme Deity. Therefore the complexity of the Vedic system has been removed from the domain of our religious practice and in its place there has been increasingly substituted the worship of the Supreme Deity through Love.
(15) The world being one in all its parts every being in it contains the universe in himself. Especially do the great gods contain all the others and their activities in [themselves],7 so that Agni, Varuna, Indra, all of them are in reality one sole-existent deity in many forms. Man too is He, but he has to fulfil himself here as man, yet divine (that being his vrata and dharma) through the puissant means provided for him [by] the Veda.
[B]
Chapter I
Saraswati and the Great Ocean.
One of the greatest deities of the Vedic Pantheon is a woman, Gna,— a feminine power whether of material or moral nature, — whether her
7 MS himself
functions work in the subjective or the objective. The Hindu religion has always laid an overpowering stress on this idea of the woman in Nature. It is not only in the Purana that the Woman looms so large, not only in the Shakta cult that she becomes a supreme Name. In the Upanishads it is only when Indra, in his search for the mysterious and ill-understood Mastering Brahman, meets with the Woman in the heaven of things — tasminn evakashe striyam ajagama Umam Haima-vatim, "In that same sky he came to the Woman, Uma, daughter of Himavan", — that he is able to learn the thing which he seeks. The Stri, the Aja or unborn Female Energy, is the executive Divinity of the universe, the womb, the mother, the bride, the mould and instrument of all joy and being. The Veda also speaks of the gnah, the Women, — feminine powers without whom the masculine are not effective for work and formation; for when the gods are to be satisfied who support the sacrifice and effect it, vahnayah,yajatrah, then Medha-tithi of the Kanwas calls on Agni to yoke them with female mates, patnivatas kridhi, — in their activity and enjoyment. In one of his greatest hymns, the twenty-first of the first Mandala, he speaks expressly of the patnir devanam, the brides of the Strong Ones, who are to be called to extend protection, to breathe a mighty peace, to have their share in the joy of the Soma wine. Indrani, Varunani, Agnayi,— we can recognise these goddesses and their mastering gods; but there are three — in addition to Mother Earth — who seem to stand on a different level and are mentioned without the names of their mates if they have any and seem to enjoy an independent power and activity. They are Ila, Mahi and Saraswati, the three goddesses born of Love or born of Bliss, Tisro devir mayobhuvah.
Saraswati is known to us in the Purana, — the Muse with her feet on the thousand leaved lotus of the mind, the goddess of thought, learning, poetry, of all that is high in mind and its knowledge. But, so far as we can understand from the Purana, she is the goddess of mind only, of intellect and imagination and their perceptions and inspirations. Things spiritual and the mightier supra-mental energies and illuminations belong not to her, but to other powers. Well, we meet Saraswati in the Vedas; —and if she is the same goddess as our Puranic and modern protectress of learning and the arts, the Personality of the Intellect, then we have a starting point — we know that the Vedic Rishis had other than naturalistic conceptions and could call
to higher powers than the thunder-flash and the storm-wind. But there is a difficulty — Saraswati is the name of a river, of several rivers in India, for the very name means flowing, gliding or streaming, — and the Europeans identify it with a river in the Punjab. We must be careful therefore, whenever we come across the name, to be sure which of these two is mentioned or invoked, the sweet-streaming Muse or the material river.
The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchch[h]anda Vaisva-mitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invoked — apparently in order to conduct an ordinarily material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen, — to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?
The passage devoted to her occupies the three final and culminating verses of the sacred poem. Pavaka nah Saraswati vajebhir vajinivati Yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. Chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam Yajnam dadhe Saraswati. Maho arnas Saraswati pracheta-yati ketuna Dhiyo visva vi rajati. Now there is here mention in the last verse of a flowing water, arnas, whether sea or river, but this can be no material stream, since plainly the rest of the passage can only refer to a goddess whose functions are subjective. She is dhiyavasuh, stored or rich with understanding, she is the impelling power of truths, she is the awakener of or to right thoughts. She awakens something or brings it forward into consciousness (pra-chetayati) by the perceptive intelligence and she governs or shines through all the movements of the fixing and discerning mind. There are too many words here that do ordinarily and ought here to bear a purely subjective sense for any avoidance of the clear import of the passage. We start then with the conception of Saraswati as a goddess of mind, if not the goddess of mind and we have then to determine what are her functions or activities as indicated in this important passage and for what purpose she has been summoned by the son of Visvamitra to this sacrifice.
What exact sense are we to apply to vajebhir vajinivati when it is spoken of a subjective Power? It is a suggestion I shall make and work out hereafter by application to all the hundreds of passages in
which the word occurs that vaja in the Veda means a substantial, firm and copious condition of being, well-grounded and sufficient plenty in any thing material, mental or spiritual, any substance, wealth, chattels, qualities, psychological conditions. Saraswati has the power of firm plenty, vajini, by means of or consisting in many kinds of plenty, copious stores of mental material for any mental activity or sacrifice. But first of all she is purifying, pavaka. Therefore she is not merely or not essentially a goddess of mental force, but of enlightenment; for enlightenment is the mental force that purifies. And she is dhiyavasu, richly stored with understanding, buddhi, the discerning intellect, which holds firmly in their place, fixes, establishes all mental conceptions. First, therefore she has the purifying power of enlightenment, secondly, she has plenty of mental material, great wealth of mental being; thirdly, she is powerful in intellect, in that which holds, discerns, places. Therefore she is asked, as I take it, to control the Yajna — vashtu from Root vash, which bore the idea of control as is evident from its derivatives vasha, vashya and vashin.
But greater capacities, mightier functions are demanded of Saraswati. Mind and discerning intelligence, however active and well-stored, may give false interpretation and mistaken counsel. But Saraswati at the sacrifice is chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam. It is she who gives the impulsion to the truths that appears in the mind, it is she who, herself conscious of right thoughts and just processes of thinking, awakens to them the mental faculties. Therefore, because she is the impelling force behind intellectual Truth, and our awakener to right thinking, she is present at the sacrifice; she has established and upholds it, yajnam dadhe. This sacrifice, whatever else it may be, is controlled by mental enlightenment and rich understanding and confirmed in and by truth and right-thinking. Therefore is Saraswati its directing power and presiding goddess.
But by what power of Saraswati's are falsehood and error excluded and the mind and discerning reason held to truth and right-thinking? This, if I mistake not, is what the Rishi Madhuchchhanda, the drashta of Veda has seen for us in his last and culminating verse. I have said that arnas is a flowing water whether river or sea; for the word expresses either a flowing continuity or a flowing expanse. We may translate it then as "the river of Mah or Mahas", and place arnas in apposition with Saraswati. This goddess will then be in our
subjective being some principle to which the Vedic thinkers gave the names of Mah and Mahas for it is clear, if the rest of our interpretation is at all correct, that there can be no question of a material stream and arnas must refer to some stream or storehouse of subjective faculty. But there are strong objections to such a [collocation].1 We shall find later that the goddess Mahi and not Saraswati is the objectivising feminine power and divine representative of this Vedic principle Mahas; prachetayati besides demands an object and maho arnas is the only object which the structure of the sentence and the rhythm of the verse will allow. I translate therefore "Saraswati awakens by the perceptive intelligence the ocean (or, flowing expanse) of Mahas and governs diversely all the movements (or, all the faculties) of the understanding."
What is Mah or Mahas? The [word]2 means great, embracing, full, comprehensive. The Earth, also, because of its wideness and containing faculty is called mahi, —just as it is called prithivi, dhara, medini, dharani, etc. In various forms, the root itself, mahi, mahitwam, maha, magha, etc it recurs with remarkable profusion and persistence throughout the Veda. Evidently it expressed some leading thought of the Rishis, was some term of the highest importance in their system of psychology. Turning to the Purana we find the term mahat applied to some comprehensive principle which is supposed itself to be near to the unmanifest, avyaktam but to supply the material of all that is manifest and always to surround, embrace and uphold it. Mahat seems here to be an objective principle; but this need not trouble us; for in the old Hindu system all that is objective had something subjective corresponding to it and constituting its real nature. We find it explicitly declared in the Vishnu Purana that all things here, are manifestations of vijnana, pure ideal knowledge, sarvani vijnana-vijrimbhitani — ideal knowledge vibrating out into intensity of various phenomenal existences each with its subjective reason for existence and objective case and form of existence. Is ideal knowledge then the subjective principle of mahat? If so, vijnanam and the Vedic mahas are likely to be terms identical in their philosophical content and psychological significance. We turn to the Upanishads and find mention made more than once of a certain subjective state of the soul,
1 MS collection
2 MS words (cf. the verb and "term" below)
which is called Mahan Atma, a state into which the mind and senses have to be drawn up as we rise by samadhi of the instruments of knowledge into the supreme state of Brahman and which is superior therefore to these instruments. The Mahan Atma is the state of the pure Brahman out of which the vijnana or ideal truth (sattwa or be-ness of things) emerges and it is higher than the vijnana but nearer us than the Unmanifest or Avyaktam (Katha: III.10,11,13 and VI. [7,]8). If we understand by the Mahan Atma that status of soul existence (Purusha) which is the basis of the objective mahat or mahati prakriti and which develops the vijnanam or ideal knowledge as its subjective instrument, then we shall have farther light on the nature of Mahas in the ancient conceptions. We shall see that it is ideal knowledge, vijnanam, or is connected with ideal knowledge.
But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice, — the final and conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahrities, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Maha-chamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic and Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter and material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar and Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality and vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manas — either in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted and enlightened by buddhi — predominates and by the laws of mind determine[s] the life and movements of the existence which inhabits it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya, — not unknown to the Veda — constitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyakta — lost for us in
the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain and only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength and being. Between the upper hemisphere and the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge and pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, [the] wide and immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth and right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth and ideal knowledge.
We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers and know[s] by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know. Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knows — as it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively and know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole and therefore in the part, in the mass and therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first and reasons afterwards,— to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled and frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them and thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if[it] looks at things
in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth and error, against onesided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt, — about the past and the present. Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past and present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition and his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations and perceptions and it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements and the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world and end always in a conflict of transitory opinions, doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed and firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible and persistent, are indications that pure Truth exists. We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from
our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts and creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless and selfregarding emotions and disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions and her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth and distorts and misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless and luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kant's pure reason; bids it divine truth and learn to hold the true divination and reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason and its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited and seen and understood. Therefore error maintains and even extends her reign. At last come the logician and modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason and intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon and thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation and a rigid logic. To live on these dry and insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind and senses — until man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts and either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening and upward march.
It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Maha-chamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being, — therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth and ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat, — the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam and ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihat — Sacchidananda objectivised — is the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth,
the principle of infinite and divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine selfaware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things self-arranged; Brihat is full content and fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being and law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or half illumined things of mind and sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true and self-existent. Nalpena sukham asti bhumna sukham asti. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness and constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power and peace. The harmony of creative power and peace, pravritti and nivritti, jana and shama, is the divine state which we feel — as Wordsworth felt it — when we go back to the brihat, the wide and infinite which, containing and contented with its works, says of it "Sukritam", What I have made, is good. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smriti — sees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memory—just as we say of a friend "This is he" and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselves — though we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam, in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied and divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati and atmastha, confines itself to itself and does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satya-pratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees, —he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya is in all things "true". Truth is his characteristic,
his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works and destinies from decay and dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas. The psychological conceptions of our remote forefathers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought and experience that they may be a little difficult to follow and more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand and grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre and keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides and connects the human in us from the divine, and to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small and divided finite to that one, great and infinite, from [this] death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation and final aim of Veda and Vedanta.
We can now understand the intention of the Rishi in his last verse and the greatness of the climax to which he has been leading us. Saraswati is able to give impulsion to truth and awaken to right thinking because she has access to the Maho Arnas, the great ocean. On that level of consciousness, we are usually it must be remembered asleep, sushupta. The chetana or waking consciousness has no access; it lies behind our active consciousness, is, as we might say, super-conscious, for us, asleep. Saraswati brings it forward into active consciousness by means of the ketu or perceptive intelligence, that essential movement of mind which accepts and realises whatever is presented to it. To focus this ketu, this essential perception on the higher truth by drawing it away from the haphazard disorder of sensory data is the great aim of Yogic meditation. Saraswati by fixing essential perception on the satyam ritam brihat above makes ideal knowledge active and is able to inform it with all those plentiful movements of
mind which she, "dhiyavasu, vajebhir vajinivati", has prepared for the service of the Master of the sacrifice. She is able to govern all the movements of understanding without exception in their thousand diverse movements and give them the single impression of truth and right thinking — visva dhiyo vi rajati. A governed and ordered activity of soul and mind, led by the Truth-illuminated intellect, is the aim of the sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda son of Viswamitra is offering to the Gods.
For we perceive at once that the yajna here can be no material sacrifice, no mere pouring out of the Soma-wine on the sacred flame to the gods of rain and cloud, star and sunshine. Saraswati is not even here the goddess of speech whose sole function is to inspire and guide the singer in his hymn. In other passages she may be merely Bharati,— the Muse. But here there are greater depths of thought and soul-experience. She has to do things which mere speech cannot do. And even if we were to take her here as the divine Muse, still the functions asked of her are too great, there is too little need of all these high intellectual motions, for a mere invitation to Rain and Star Gods to share in a pouring of the Soma wine. She could do that without all this high intellectual and spiritual labour. Even, therefore, if it be a material sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda is offering, its material aspects can be no more than symbolical. Unless indeed the rest of the hymn contradicts the intellectual and spiritual purport which we have discovered in these closing verses, full, on the face of them and accepting the plainest and most ordinary meaning for each single word in them — of deep psychological knowledge, moral and spiritual aspiration and a supreme poetical art.
I do not propose to study the earlier verses of the hymn with the same care as we have expended on the closing dedication to Saraswati,— that would lead me beyond my immediate purpose. A rapid glance through them to see whether they confirm or contradict our first results will be sufficient. There are three passages, also of three verses each, consecrated successively to the Aswins, Indra and the Visve Devah. I shall give briefly my own view of these three passages and the gods they invoke.
The master word of the address to the Aswins is the verb chanas-yatam, take your delight. The Aswins, as I understand them, are the masters of strength, youth, joy, swiftness, pleasure, rapture, the pride
and glory of existence; and may almost be described as the twin gods of youth and joy. All the epithets applied to them here support this view. They are dravatpani subhaspati, the swift-footed masters of weal, of happiness and good fortune; they are purubhuja, much enjoying; their office is to take and give delight, chanasyatam. So runs the first verse, Aswina yajwaririsho dravatpani subhaspati, Purubhuja chanasyatam. O Aswins, cries Madhuchchhanda, I am in the full rush, the full ecstasy of the sacrificial action, O swiftfooted, much-enjoying masters of happiness, take in me your delight. Again they are puru-dansasa, wide distributing, nara, strong. "O strong wide-distributing Aswins" continues the singer, "with your bright-flashing (or brilliantly-forceful) understanding take pleasure in the words (of the mantra) which are now firmly settled (in the mind)". Aswina purudansasa nara shaviraya dhiya, Dhishnya vanatam girah. Again we have the stress on things subjective, intellectual and spiritual. The extreme importance of the mantra, the inspired and potent word in the old Vedic religion is known nor has it diminished in later Hinduism. The mantra in Yoga is only effective when it has settled into the mind, is asina, has taken its seat there and become spontaneous; it is then that divine power enters into, takes possession of it and the mantra itself becomes one with the god of the mantra and does his works in the soul and body. This, as every Yogin knows, is one of the fundamental ideas not only in the Rajayogic practice but in almost all paths of spiritual discipline. Here we have the very word that can most appropriately express this settling in of the mantra, dhishnya, combined with the word girah. And we know that the gods in the Veda are called girvanah, those who delight in the mantra; Indra, the god of mental force, is girvahas, he who supports or bears the mantra. Why should Nature gods delight in speech or the god of thunder and rain be the supporter or bearer of any kind of speech? The hymns? But what is meant by bearing the hymns? We have to give unnatural meanings to vanas and vahas, if we wish to avoid this plain indication. In the next verse the epithets are dasra, bountiful, which, like wide-distributing is again an epithet appropriate to the givers of happiness, weal and youth, rudravartani, fierce and impetuous in all their ways, and Nasatya, a word of doubtful meaning which, for philological [reasons],3 I take to mean gods of movement. As the movement indicated by this and kindred words na, (natare), especially meant a
3 MS meaning
gliding, floating, swimming movement, the Aswins came to be especially the protectors of ships and sailors, and it is in this capacity that we find Castor and Polydeuces (Purudansas) acting, their Western counterparts, the brothers of Helen (Sarama), the swift riders of the Roman legend. "O givers, O lords of free movement" runs the closing verse of this invocation, "come to the outpourings of my nectar, be ye fierce in action; — I feel full of youthful vigour, I have prepared the sacred grass,"—if that indeed be the true and early meaning of barhis. Dasra yuvakavah suta nasatya vriktabarhishah, Ayatam rudra-vartani. It is an intense rapture of the soul (rudravartani) which Madhuchchhandas asks first from the gods. Therefore his first call is to the Aswins.
Next, it is to Indra that he turns. I have already said that in my view Indra is the master of mental force. Let us see whether there is anything here to contradict the hypothesis. Indra yahi chitrabhano suta ime tu ayavah, Anwibhis tana putasah. Indrayahi dhiyeshito viprajutah sutavatah Upa brahmani vaghatah. Indrayahi tutujana upa brahmani harivah Sute dadhishwa nas chanah. There are several important words here that are doubtful in their sense, anwi, tana, vaghatah, brahmani; but none of them are of importance for our present purpose except brahmani. For reasons I shall give in the proper place I do not accept Brahma in the Veda as meaning speech of any kind, but as either soul or a mantra of the kind afterwards called dhyana, the object of which was meditation and formation in the soul of the divine Power meditated on whether in an image or in his qualities. It is immaterial which sense we take here. "Indra," sings the Rishi "arrive, O thou of rich and varied light, here are these life-streams poured [forth],4 purified, with vital powers, with substance. Arrive, O Indra, controlled by the understanding, impelled forward in various directions to my soul faculties, I who am now full of strength and flourishing increase. Arrive O Indra, with protection to my soul faculties, O dweller in the brilliance, confirm our delight in the nectar poured." It seems to me that the remarkable description[s] dhiyeshito viprajutah are absolutely conclusive, that they prove the presence of a subjective Nature Power, not a god of rain and tempest, and prove especially a mind-god. What is it but mental force which comes controlled by the understanding and is impelled forward by it in various
4 MS fourth
directions? What else is it that at the same time protects by its might the growing and increasing soul faculties from impairing and corrupting attack and confirms, keeps safe and continuous the delight which the Aswins have brought with them? The epithets chitrabhano, harivas become at once intelligible and appropriate; the god of mental force has indeed a rich and varied light, is indeed a dweller in the brilliance. The progress of the thought is clear. Madhuchchhanda, as a result of Yogic practice, is in a state of spiritual and physical exaltation; he has poured out the nectar of vitality; he is full of strength and ecstasy. This is the sacrifice he has prepared for the gods. He wishes it to be prolonged, perhaps to be made, if it may now be, permanent. The Aswins are called to give and take the delight; Indra to supply and preserve that mental force which will sustain the delight otherwise in danger of being exhausted and sinking by its own fierceness rapidly consuming its material in the soul faculties. The state and the movement are one of which every Yogin knows.
But he is not content with the inner sacrifice. He wishes to pour out this strength and joy in action on the world, on his fellows, on the peoples, therefore he calls to the Visve Devas to come, A gata! — all the gods in general who help man and busy themselves in supporting his multitudinous and manifold action. They are kindly, omasas, they are charshanidhrito, holders or supporters of all our actions, especially actions that require effort, (it is in this sense that I take charshani, again on good philological grounds), they are to distribute this nectar to all or to divide it among themselves for the action, — dasvanso may have either force, — for Madhuchchhanda wishes not only to possess, but to give, to distribute, he is dasush. Omasas charshanidhrito visve devasa agata, daswanso dasushah sutam. He goes on, Visve devasa apturah sutam a ganta turnayah Usra iva swasarani. Visve devaso asridha ehimayaso adruha[h], Medham jushanta vahnayah. "O you all-gods who are energetic in works, come to the nectar distilled, ye swift ones, (or, come swiftly) like calves to their own stalls, — (So at least we must translate this last phrase, till we can get the real meaning, for I do not believe this is the real or, at any rate, the only meaning.) O you all-gods unfaltering, with wide capacity of strength, ye who harm not, attach yourselves to the offering as its supporters." And then come the lines about Saraswati. For although Indra can sustain for a moment or for a time he is at present a mental, not an ideal force; it is Saraswati
full of the vijnana, of mahas, guiding by it the understanding in all its ways who can give to all these gods the supporting knowledge, light and truth which will confirm and uphold the delight, the mental strength and supply inexhaustibly from the Ocean of Mahas the beneficent and joy giving action, — Saraswati, goddess of inspiration, the flowing goddess who is the intermediary and channel by which divine truth, divine joy, divine being descend through the door of knowledge into this human receptacle. In a word, she is our inspirer, our awakener, our lurer towards Immortality. It is immortality that Madhuchchhandas prepares for himself and the people who do sacrifice to Heaven, devayantah. The Soma-streams he speaks of are evidently no intoxicating vegetable juices; he calls them ayavah, life-forces; and elsewhere amritam, nectar of immortality; somasah, wine-draughts of bliss and internal well being. It is the clear Yogic idea of the amritam, the divine nectar which flows into the system at a certain stage of Yogic practice and gives pure health, pure strength and pure physical joy to the body as a basis for a pure mental and spiritual vigour and activity.
We have therefore as a result of a long and careful examination the clear conviction that certainly in this poem of Madhuchchhanda, probably in others of his hymns, perhaps in all we have an invocation to subjective Nature powers, a symbolic sacrifice, a spiritual, moral and subjective effort and purpose. And if many other suktas in this and other Mandalas confirm the evidence of this third hymn of the Rigveda, shall we not say that here we have the true Veda as the Rishis understood it and that this was the reason why all the ancient thinkers looked on the hymns with so deep seated a reverence that even after they came to be used merely as ceremonial liturgies at a material sacrifice, even after Buddha impatiently flung them aside, the writer of the Gita had to look beyond them and Shankara respectfully put them on the shelf of neglect as useless for spiritual purposes, even after they have ceased to be used and almost to be read, the most spiritual nation on the face of the earth still tenaciously, by a sort of divine instinct, clings to them as its supreme Scriptures and refers back all its spirituality and higher knowledge to the Vedas? Let us proceed and see whether this is not the truest as well as the noblest reading of the riddle—the real root of God's purpose in maintaining this our ancient faith and millennial tradition.
[C]
III.
Varouna and the Law.
The characteristics of Varouna in the Veda have given pause even to its naturalistic interpreters and compelled them to admit the presence of moral ideas and a subjective element in the Rishis' conception of their divinities. They admit it grudgingly and attempt to give it as crude and primitive an appearance as possible, but the moral and supernatural functions of Varuna are undeniable. Yet Varuna is the Greek Ouranos, which is simply and plainly the sky, Akasha. Ouranos in Greek myth is a colourless presence, parent by his union with Earth, Akasha with Prithivi, of all beings but especially of Kronos and the Titans, the elder gods, the first masters of heaven. There is no resemblance here to Varuna. Farther to complicate the task of the modern mythologists, Varuna in later Sanskrit has fallen from his skies and become the god of the Ocean. By what extraordinary chemical process of the imagination was the god of the sky converted into the god of the Ocean? Because both are blue, one is driven to suppose! That would be material enough and crude enough to satisfy the firmest believer in the intellectual crudity and semi-savagery of the Vedic Rishis. But let us leave aside the shadowy Greek Ouranos and look a little from our own standpoint at this mighty Vedic Varuna.
We get our first mention of Varuna at the end of the second hymn in the Rigveda, the hymn of Madhuchchhandas in which he calls, as in the third, on several gods, first to Vayu, then to Vayu and Indra together, last, Varuna and Mitra. "Arrive," he says "O Vayu, O beautiful one, to these Soma-powers in their array (is it not a battle-array?), protect them, hear their call! O Vayu, strongly thy lovers woo thee with prayers (or, desires), they have distilled the nectar, they have found their strength (or, they know the day?). O Vayu, thy abounding stream moves for the giver, it is wide for the drinking of the Soma-juice. O Indra and Vayu, here are the outpourings, come to them with outputtings of strength, the powers of delight desire you both. Thou, O Vayu, awake, and Indra, to the outpourings of the Soma, you who are rich in power of your plenty; so (that is, rich in power) come to me, for the foe has attacked. Come O Vayu, and
Indra, to the distiller of the nectar, expel the foe, swiftly hither strong by the understanding." And then come[s] the closing call to Mitra and Varuna. "I call Mitra of purified discernment and Varuna who destroys the foe, they who effect a bright and gracious understanding. By Law of Truth, Mitra and Varuna, who by the Truth increase and to the Truth attain, enjoy a mighty strength. Mitra and Varuna, the seers, born in Force, dwellers in the Vast, uphold Daksha (the discerning intelligence) in his work."
There are here a number of words whose exact meaning is exceedingly important for any fruitful enquiry into the religious significance of the Vedas. The most important, the decisive and capital word in the passage is Ritam. Whatever it may be held to mean, it will decide for us the essential character of Varuna and his constant comrade Mitra. I have already suggested in my first chapter the sense in which I understand Ritam. It is its ordinary sense in Sanscrit. Ritam is Truth, Law, that which is straight, upright, direct, rectum; it is that which gives everything its place and its motion (ritu), that which constitutes reason (ratio) in mind and rectitude in morals, — it is the Tightness or righteousness which makes the stars move in their orbits, the seasons occur in their order, thought and speech move towards truth, trees grow according to their seed, animals act according to their species and nature, and man walk in the paths which God has prescribed for him. It is that in the Akasha — the Akasha where Varuna is lord — which develops arrangement and order, it is the element of law in Nature. But not only in material Nature, not only in the moral akasha even, the akasha of the heart of which the Rishis spoke, but on higher levels also. I have pointed out that Ritam is the law of the Truth, of vijnana. It is this ideal Truth, the Truth of being, by which everything animate or inanimate knows in its fibres of being and serves in action and feeling the truth of itself, in which Law is born. This Law which belongs to Satyam, to the Mahas, is Ritam. Neither of the English words, Law and Truth, gives the idea; they have to be combined in order to be equivalent to ritam. Well, then Varuna is represented to us as increasing in his nature by this Truth and Law, attaining to it or possessing it; Law and Truth are the source of his strength, the means by which he has arrived at his present force and mightiness.
But he is more than that; he is tuvijata, urukshaya. Uru, we shall
find in other hymns, the Vast, is a word used as equivalent to Brihat to describe the ideal level of consciousness, the kingdom of ideal knowledge, in its aspect of joyous comprehensive wideness and capacity. It is clearly told us that men by overcoming and pass[ing] beyond the two firmaments of Mind-in-vitality, Bhuvar, and mind in intellectuality, Swar, arrive in the Vast, Uru, and make it their dwelling place. Therefore Uru must be taken as equivalent to Brihat; it must mean Mahas. Our Vedic Varuna, then, is a dweller in Mahas, in the vastness of ideal knowledge. But he is not born there; he is born or appears first in tuvi, that is, in strength or force. Since Uru definitely means the Vast, means Mahas, means a particular plane of consciousness, is, in short, a fixed term of Vedic psychology, it is inevitable that tuvi thus coupled with it and yet differentiated, must be another fixed term of Vedic psychology and must mean another plane of consciousness. We have found the meaning of Mahas by consulting Purana and Vedanta as well as the Veda itself. Have we any similar light on the significance of Tuvi? Yes. The Puranas describe to us three worlds above Maharloka, — called, respectively, in the Puranic system Jana, Tapas and Satya. By a comparison with Vedantic psychology we know that Jana must be the world of Ananda of which the Mahajana Atma is the sustaining Brahman as the Mahan Atma is the sustaining Brahman of the vijnana, and we get this light on the subject that, just as Bhur, Bhuvah, Swar are the lower or human half of existence, the aparardha of the Brahmanda, (the Brahma-circle or universe of manifest consciousness) and answer objectively to the subjective field covered by Annam, Prana and Manas, just as Mahas is the intermediate world, link between the divine and human hemispheres, and corresponds to the subjective region of Vijnana, so Jana, Tapas and Satya are the divine half of existence, and answer to the Ananda with its two companion principles Sat and Chit, the three constituting the Trinity of those psychological states which are, to and in our consciousness, Sacchidananda, God sustaining from above His worlds. But why is the world of Chit called Tapoloka? According to our conceptions this universe has been created by and in divine Awareness by Force, Shakti, or Power which [is] inherent in Awareness, Force of Awareness or Chit Shakti that moves, forms and realises whatever it wills in Being. This force, this Chit-shakti in its application to its work, is termed in the ancient phraseology Tapas.
Therefore, it is told us that when Brahma the Creator lay uncreative on the great Ocean, he listened and heard a voice crying over the water. OM Tapas! OM Tapas! and he became full of the energy of the mantra and arose and began creation. Tapas and Tu or Tuvi are equivalent terms. We can see at once the meaning. Varuna, existing no doubt in Sat, appears or is born to us in Tapas, in the sea of force put out in itself by the divine Awareness, and descending through divine delight which world is in Jana, in production or birth by Tapas, through Ananda, that is to say, into the manifest world, dwells in ideal knowledge and Truth and makes there Ritam or the Law of the Truth of Being his peculiar province. It is the very process of all creation, according to our Vedic and Vedantic Rishis. Descending into the actual universe we find Varuna master of the Akash or ether, matrix and continent of created things; in the Akash watching over the development of the created world and its peoples according to the line already fixed by ideal knowledge as suitable to their nature and purpose — yathatathyato vihitam sashwatibhyah samabhyah — and guiding the motion of things and souls in the line of the ritam. It is in his act of guidance and bringing to perfection of the imperfect that he increases by the law and the truth, desires it and naturally attains to it, has the spriha and the sparsha of the ritam. It is from his fidelity to ideal Truth that he acquires the mighty power by which he maintains the heavens and orders its worlds in their appointed motion.
Such is his general nature and power. But there are also certain particular subjective functions to which he is called. He is risha-dasa, he harries and slays the enemies of the soul, and with Mitra of pure discernment he works at the understanding till he brings it to a gracious pureness and brightness. He is like Agni, a kavih, one of those who has access to and commands ideal knowledge and with Mitra he supports and upholds Daksha when he is at his work; for so I take Daksham apasam. Mitra has already been described as having a pure daksha. The adjective daksha means in Sanscrit clever, intelligent, capable, like dakshina, like the Greek
We may also compare the Greek
, meaning judgment, opinion etc and
, I think or seem, and Latin doceo, I teach, doctrina etc. As these identities indicate, Daksha is originally he who divides, analyses, discerns; he is the intellectual faculty or in his person the master of
the intellectual faculty which discerns and distinguishes. Therefore was Mitra able to help in making the understanding bright and [pure],1 — by virtue of his purified discernment.
So much Varuna does but what is he actually? We cannot tell with accuracy until we have separated him from his companion Mitra. We come across him next no longer in company with Mitra, but still not by himself, accompanied this time by Indra and helping him in his work, in the seventeenth sukta of the first Mandala, a hymn of Medhatithi Kanwa, a hymn whose burden is joy, calm, purity and fulfilment. "Of Indra and Varuna, the high rulers, I choose the protection, may they be gracious to us in this our state (of attainment). For ye are they who come to the call of the enlightened soul that can contain you, you are they who are up bearers of his actions. Take ye your pleasure to your hearts' content in the felicity, O Indra, O Varuna; so we desire you utterly near to us. May we gain the full pitch of the powers, the full vigour of the right thoughts that give us the assured plenty. Indra is the desirable Strength of all that gives force, Varuna of all that is ample and noble. By their protection may we remain in safety and meditate, may there be indeed an utter purification. Indra and Varuna, I call you for rich and varied ecstasy, do ye render us victorious. Indra and Varuna now may our understandings be entirely obedient to you, that in them you may give to us peace. May the good praise be grateful to you, O Indra and Varuna, which I call aloud to you, the fulfilling praise which you bring to prosperity."
We are no longer with Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitri. It is Medhatithi of the Kanwas who has taken the word, a soul of great clearness and calmness who is full of a sort of vibrating peace. Yet we find the same strain, the same fixed ideas, the same subjective purpose and spiritual aspiration. A few words here and there in my translation may be challenged and given a different meaning. Throughout the Veda there are words like radhas etc to which I have given a sense based on reasons of context and philology but which must be allowed to remain conjectural till I am able to take up publicly the detailed examination of the language and substance of the Rigveda. But we have sumati again and the ever recurring vaja, the dhartara charshani-nam, holders of actions, and rayah which certainly meant felicity in
1 MS cure
the Veda. It is clear from the third verse that Varuna and Indra are called to share in the felicity of the poet's soul, — that felicity is his material of sacrifice; — "anukamam tarpayetham," he says, Delight in it to your hearts' content; and again in the seventh shloka he tells them Vam aham huve chitraya radhase, a phrase which, in view of verse 3, I can only translate "I call you for rich and varied ecstasy"; for it is evidently meant to describe that felicity, that heart-filling satisfaction which he has already offered in the third sloka. In return he asks them to give victory. Always in the Veda there is the idea of the spiritual battle as well as the outer struggles of life, the battle with the jealous forces of Nature, with Vala, the grudging guardian of light, with the great obscuring dragon Vritra and his hosts, with the thieving Panis, with all the many forces that oppose man's evolution and support limitation and evil. A great many of the words for sacrifice, mean also war and battle, in Sanscrit or in its kindred tongues.
Indra and Varuna are called to give victory, because both of them are samrat. The words samrat and swarat have in Veda an ascertained philosophical sense. One is swarat when, having self mastery and self knowledge, being king over his whole system, physical, vital, mental and spiritual, free in his being, [one] is able to guide entirely the harmonious action of that being. Swarajya is spiritual Freedom. One is Samrat when one is master of the laws of being, ritam, rituh, vratani, and can therefore control all forces and creatures. Samrajya is divine Rule resembling the power of God over his world. Varuna especially is Samrat, master of the Law which he follows, governor of the heavens and all they contain, Raja Varuna, Varuna the King as he is often styled by Sunahshepa and other Rishis. He too, like Indra and Agni and the Visvadevas is an upholder and supporter of men's actions, dharta charshaninam. Finally in the fifth sloka a distinction is drawn between Indra and Varuna of great importance for our purpose. The Rishi wishes, by their protection, to rise to the height of the inner energies (yuvaku shachinam) and have the full vigour of right thoughts (yuvaku sumatinam) because they give then that fullness of inner plenty (vajadavnam) which is the first condition of enduring calm and perfection and then he says, Indrah sahasradavnam, Varunah shan-shyanam kratur bhavati ukthyah. Indra is the master-strength, desirable indeed, (ukthya, an object of prayer, of longing and aspiration) of one class of those boons (vara, varyani) for which the Rishis praise him, Varuna is the master-strength, equally desirable, of another class
of these Vedic blessings. Those which Indra brings, give force, sahas-ram, the forceful being that is strong to endure and strong to overcome; those that attend the grace of Varuna are of a loftier and more ample description, they are shansya. The word shansa is frequently used; it is one of the fixed terms of Veda. Shall we translate it praise, the sense most suitable to the ritual explanation, the sense which the finally dominant ritualistic school gave to so many of the fixed terms of Veda? In that case Varuna must be urushansa, because he is widely praised, Agni narasansha because he is strongly praised or praised by men, — ought not a wicked or cruel man to be nrisansha because he is praised by men? — the Rishis call repeatedly on the gods to protect their praise, and Varuna here must be master of things that are praiseworthy. But these renderings can only be accepted, if we consent to the theory of the Rishis as semisavage poets, feeble of brain, vague in speech, pointless in their style, using language for barbaric ornament rather than to express ideas. Here for instance there is a very powerful indicated contrast, indicated by the grammatical structure, the order and the rhythm, by the singular kratur bhavati, by the separation of Indra and Varuna who have hitherto been coupled, by the assignment of each governing nominative to its governed genitive and a careful balanced order of words, first giving the master Indra then his province sahasradavnam; exactly balancing them in the second half of the first line the master Varuna and then his province shansyanam, and the contrast thus pointed, in the closing pada of the Gayatri all the words that in their application are common at once to all these four separated and contrasted words in the first line. Here is no careless writer, but a style careful, full of economy, reserve, point, force, and the thought must surely correspond. But what is the contrast forced on us with such a marshalling of the stylist's resources? That Indra's boons are force-giving, Varuna's praiseworthy, excellent, auspicious, what you will. There is not only a pointless contrast, but no contrast at all. No, shansa and shansya must be important, definite, pregnant Vedic terms expressing some prominent idea of the Vedic system. I shall show elsewhere that shansa is in its essential meaning "self-expression", the bringing out of our sat or being that which is latent in it and manifesting it in our nature, in speech, in our general impulse and action. It has the connotation of self-expression, aspiration, temperament, expression of our ideas in speech; then divulgation, publication,
praise — or in another direction, cursing. Varuna is urushansa because he is the master of wide self expression, wide aspirations, a wide, calm and spacious temperament, Agni narasansha because he is master of strong self expression, strong aspirations, a prevailing, forceful and masterful temperament; — nrishansa had originally the same sense, but was afterwards diverted to express the fault to which such a temper is prone, — tyranny, wrath and cruelty; the Rishis call to the gods to protect their shansa, that which by their yoga and yajna they have been able to bring out in themselves of being, faculty, power, joy, — their self expression. Similarly, shansya here means all that belongs to self expression, all that is wide, noble, ample in the growth of a soul. It will follow from this rendering that Indra is a god of force, Varuna rather a god of being and as it appears from other epithets, of being when it is calm, noble, wide, selfknowing, self-mastering, moving freely in harmony with the Law of things because it is aware of the Law and accepts it. In that acceptance is his mighty strength; therefore is he even more than the gods of force the king, the giver of internal and external victory, rule, empire, samrajya to his votaries. This is Varuna.
We see the results and the conditions of the action of Varuna in the four remaining verses. "By their protection we have safety from attack", sanema, safety for our shansa, our raya, our radhas, by the force of Indra, by the protecting greatness of Varuna against which passion and disturbance cast themselves in vain, only to be destroyed. This safety and this settled ananda or delight, we use for deep meditation, ni dhimahi, we go deep into ourselves and the object we have in view in our meditation is prarechanam, the Greek katharsis, the cleansing of the system mental, bodily, vital, of all that is impure, defective, disturbing, inharmonious. Syad uta prarechanam! In this work of purification we are sure to be obstructed by the powers that oppose all healthful change; but Indra and Varuna are to give us victory, jigyushas kritam. The final result of the successful purification is described in the eighth sloka. The powers of the understanding, its various faculties and movements, dhiyah, delivered from self will and rebellion, become obedient to Indra and Varuna; obedient to Varuna, they move according to the truth and law, the ritam; obedient to Indra they fulfil with that passivity in activity, which we seek by Yoga, all the works to which mental force can apply itself when it is in
harmony with Varuna and the ritam. The result is sharma, peace. Nothing is more remarkable in the Veda than the exactness with which hymn after hymn describes with a marvellous simplicity and lucidity the physical and psychological processes through which Indian Yoga proceeds. The process, the progression, the successive movements of the soul here described are exactly what the Yogin experiences today so many thousands of years after the Veda was revealed. No wonder, it is regarded as eternal truth, not the expression of any particular mind, not paurusheya but impersonal, divine and revealed.
This hymn differs greatly, interestingly and instructively, from the hymn in which Varuna first appears. There the object is to ensure the ananda, the raya and radhas spoken of in this hymn by the advent of the gods of Vitality and Mind-Force, Indra and Vayu, to protect from the attack of disintegrating forces the Soma or Amrita, the juice of immortality expressed in the Yogin's system. Varuna and Mitra are then called for a particular and restricted purpose to perfect the discernment and to uphold it in its works by the sustaining force of a calm, wide, comprehensive self expression full of peace and love. The Rishi of that sukta is using the amrita to feed the activity of a sattwic state of mind for acquiring added knowledge. The present hymn belongs to a more advanced state of the Yoga. It is sadha stuti, a hymn of fulfilment or for fulfilment, in which peace and a calm, assured, untroubled activity of the soul are very near. Varuna here leads. He is here for Indra's purposes, but his activity predominates; it is his spirit that pervades the action and purpose of the hymn.
MANDALA I, SUKTA 179
1. Many Autumns have I been toiling night and day, dawns aging me. Age is diminishing the glory of our bodies. Now let the males come to their spouses.
2. Even the men of old, who were wise of the Truth, and they spoke with the gods the things of the Truth—even they cast (all) downward, yea, they reached not an end. Now let the males come to their spouses.1
3. Not in vain is the labour which the gods protect. Let us have the taste2 of even all the contesting forces, let us conquer indeed even here, let us run3 this battle-race of a hundred leadings, a complete couple.
4. Let not4 desire come on me of the stream that stays me—desire born from here or from somewhere in those other worlds, Lopa-mudra goes in to her spouse; she drains deep her panting Lord, she ignorant, him the wise.
5. Now to this Soma I speak drunk near into our hearts, all the impurity we have done, that let its grace wholly forgive: for, mortal man is a creature of many desires.
6. Agastya digging with spades, desiring offspring, the child and strength, he, the forceful Rishi, nourished both the Races5 (of either colour) and reached in the gods the true blessings.
MANDALA VII, SUKTA 56, RLKS 1-15
Who are these souls that to us come suddenly and are in a moment
1 सं = completely.
2 अश्नवाव = "Taste".
3 यदभ्यजाव lit. that which let us run (indicating the action in which to conquer).
4 मा In the sense of "Not"
| 5 Or, Colours. वर्णः — | 1. human | 1. Arya | ||||
| or | ||||||
| 2. Divine | 2. Dasa |
revealed? Who are you that fly to us, children of one home, birds of one nest? who are you riding hastily, O you great horsemen and warriors of the Violent One. None knoweth their births; they alone can know from one another the secrecy whence each was born. They flow plentifully in their own floods, and each casts in the other his seed, they strive like runners in a race and wing like eagles and their voice is a voice of many winds. When their vast1 many hued mother brings her teats of plenty, then man the thinker awakes and knows the mystery of hidden things. Let this race of the thoughtgods be mighty in me and heroic, let them put forth eternally their violent power, let them nurse manhood divine. They are moved with their speed of movement and eager for their journey, they are lovely with the beauty of their joy, and mingled together in light, yea, they embrace each other with their splendours, and are mighty with many mights. Because, O gods, you are fierce and swift and bold, yet firm the steps of your luminous strengths therefore are you now this mighty troop and company. They are white and bright in their battle fury,2 and their minds are wroth with all the darkness that stands against them, the meditations of this advancing host are like the rushing of a torrent. Let not their eternal lightnings turn against us, nor their destroying mood come near to us, it is their names of pleasant loveliness to which we call when they are satisfied with the voice of their yearnings. Pure offerings we must give to them, for they are pure; they are stainless from3 their birth, they are very flames of purity and it is by the law of the truth that they march to the truth which they discover, their thoughts come from the foundation and are its greatnesses; by the steps of their sacrifice they extend the names of their godheads; they shall have their thousandfold joy of their portion in the house of my soul, in the rites of this homestead. When you have come, when you listen to the voice of the seer and his call and his hymn of plenitude soon give your riches, soon bestow your force that the other, the enemy shall not crush beneath his feet.
1 Or mighty
2 Or strength
3 Or in