THE THIRD HYMN TO MITRA-VARUNA V.64 THE LEADERS TO THE BLISSFUL HOME [The Rishi invokes the Lords of the infinite wideness and harmony whose arms embrace the soul's highest plane of the Truth and Bliss, to extend to him those arms of awakened consciousness and knowledge, so that he may have their all-embracing delight. He aspires by the path of Mitra to the joy of his harmonies in which there is no wound nor hurt; conceiving and holding the highest by the power of the illumining word, he would aspire to an increase in that plane, the proper home of the gods. Let the two great gods create in his being that wide world of their divine strength

THE SECRET OF THE VEDA CHAPTER I The Problem and Its Solution Is there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda? According to current conceptions the heart of that ancient mystery has been plucked out and revealed to the gaze of all, or rather no real secret ever existed. The hymns of the Veda are the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and still barbarous race written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and replete with a confused mass of half-formed myth and crude astronomical allegories yet in the making. Only in the later hymns do we perceive the first app

THE THIRD HYMN TO AGNI THE DIVINE FORCE, CONQUEROR OF THE SUPREME GOOD [The Divine Will-Force is that of which all the other godheads are forms and 'he manifests all these powers of supreme Truth as he grows in us. Thus the supreme state of conscious being is attained and by that our complex and manifold existence is maintained in the Light and the Joy. The Rishi prays that the evil may not be allowed to express itself again in him, that the secret soul in us who is the Father of things but in us appears as the child of our works and our evolution, may open itself to the vast Truth-Consciousness. The Divine Flame will destroy all the powers of falsehood an

THE ELEVENTH HYMN TO MITRA-VARUNA V.72 AN INVOCATION TO THE SACRIFICE [The Rishi invokes Mitra and Varuna to the sacrifice as the godheads who lead man on the path according to the law of the truth and confirm our spiritual gains by its workings.] With the words we sacrifice to Mitra and to Varuna as the Atri. Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine. By your working you keep firm the gettings of good and you make men to walk the path by your law. Sit on the seat of the largeness for the drinking of the wine. May Mitra and Varuna take delight in

THE TWENTY-EIGHTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE HIGH-BLAZING FLAME, KING OF IMMORTALITY [The Rishi celebrates the flame of the Will high-blazing in the dawn of knowledge as the King of Immortality, the giver to the soul of its spiritual riches and felicity and of a well-governed mastery of Nature. He is the bearer of our oblation, the illumined guide of our sacrifice to its divine and universal goal.] The Flame of Will burning high rises to his pure light in the heaven of mind; wide he extends his illumination and fronts the Dawn. She comes, moving upward, laden with all desirable things, seeking the gods with the oblation, luminous with the

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Sri Aurobindo's various writings on the Veda and his translations of some of the hymns, originally published in the Arya between August 1914 and 1920, were brought together and published in book-form in 1956 under the general title ON THE VEDA. They were reissued in 1964. The title of the volume, however, has now been changed to the more significant, THE SECRET OF THE VEDA. For the purposes of the Centenary Edition the same arrangement as in ON THE VEDA has been maintained except for the following additions and alterations in Part III and Part IV. In Part III a number of translations of Hymns to Indra, found in his manuscripts and

CHAPTER XIX The Victory of the Fathers THE hymns addressed by the great Rishi Vamadeva to the divine Flame, to the Seer-Will, Agni are among the most mystic in expression in the Rig-veda and though quite plain in their sense if we hold firmly in our mind the system of significant figures employed by the Rishis, will otherwise seem only a brilliant haze of images baffling our comprehension. The reader has at every moment to apply that fixed notation which is the key to the sense of the hymns; otherwise he will be as much at a loss as a reader of metaphysics who has not mastered the sense of the philosophical terms that are being constantly used or, let u

THE TWENTIETH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE WORK AND THE ATTAINMENT [The Rishi desires a state of spiritual wealth full of the divine working in which nothing shall fall away to the division and the crookedness. So, increasing by our works the divine Force in us daily, we shall attain to the Bliss and the Truth, the rapture of the Light and the rapture of the Force.] O Will, O conqueror of our plenitude, the felicity which thou alone canst conceive in the mind, that make full of inspiration by our words and set it to labour in the gods as our helper. They who are powers increased of thee in the fierceness of thy flame and strength, yet

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE STRENGTH AND ILLUMINATION The Rishi under the figure of the demigod, Traivrishna Tryaruna Trasadasyu, and the seer Ashwamedha, symbolises the fulfilment in the human mentality of the illumination of the God-Mind Indra, and the power of the God-Will, Agni in the vitality. The Mind-Soul, destroyer of the demons, awakened to knowledge as the human-born Indra, has given to the seer his two cows of light that draw his wain, his two shining horses that draw his chariot and the ten times twelve cows of the dawn of knowledge. He has assented to and confirmed the desire with which the Life-Soul has given the sacrif

PART TWO SELECTED HYMNS* THE COLLOQUY OF INDRA AND AGASTYA Rig-veda 1.170 It is not now, nor is It tomorrow; who knoweth that which is Supreme and Wonderful? It has motion and action in the consciousness of another, but when It is approached by the thought. It vanishes. Why dost thou seek to smite us, O Indra ? The Maruts are thy brothers. By them accomplish perfection; slay us not in our struggle. • These translations are offered here only in their results for the interest of the general reader and as an illustration of the theory advanced. Their philological and critical justifi