Is there a secret to the Vedas or are they simply manuals for performing rituals with possible benefits in the material world? Indologists and Western scholars approached the Vedas with a purely materialistic interpretation. This does not do justice to the deep relevance placed on it by India’s traditions. The metaphysical components, deeper philosophy, and the ultimate value it holds in gaining moksha were the focus of Indian practitioners. This was articulated well in English by intellectuals like Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy. Both were severely critical of western scholarship on Vedas and their ideas still holds true for contemporary Western scholarship on the Vedas represented best by the work of Brereton and Jamison. This is a three part article comparing some of the perspectives of Sri Aurobindo and Western scholarship regarding the Vedas. Sanatana dharma is a conglomerate of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions. The Vedic traditions have laid the civilizational and cultural foundations of the country, but there was deep harmony and syncretism with non-Vedic traditions too. Willingly or not, western scholarship tends to distort important Indian texts. Unfortunately, Indian intellectuals rarely question these narratives. Finally, when one culture tries to explain another culture in their own frameworks, there is a lot of epistemic violence. The scholarship on Vedas is one such example.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN INDICA TODAY AS A THREE PART SERIES. LINKS AT THE END
PART 1
The Rigveda is the most ancient text in Indian culture and also the most sacred. Along with the other three (Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda), it forms the bedrock of Vedic culture in our country. Generally, we classify Indian darshanas as orthodox or non-orthodox based on their acceptance of the Vedic authority. Accordingly, the Nyaya, Vaisesika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa, and Uttara Mimansa are the orthodox darshanas, while Buddhism, Jainism, and Charvakism fall into the non-orthodox philosophies. India’s rich traditional culture allowed for a rich interaction between philosophical traditions, both orthodox and non-orthodox, without violence.
Ananda Coomaraswamy aptly points out that while a superficial reading may distinguish Buddhism from Brahmanism (a term he uses for Vedic culture), a deeper study reveals their similarities and questions the validity of calling Buddhist thought non-orthodox. Non-orthodox philosophies, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, might have said the Vedas are not required for human moksha, but their messages are in close correspondence with the Upanishidic ideas. Contrary to popular belief, this did not imply a rebellious rejection of the Vedas.
However, the Vedas have been the core of Indian civilization for at least five thousand years, and our culture has taken enormous pains to preserve and protect them. The enormous corpus of Indian Knowledge Systems dealing with the widest variety of subjects in philosophy, science, and arts roots in the Vedas. The Vedic recitation today is perhaps an exact tape recording of the chanting five thousand years ago. Tradition claims that the Vedas have an “apaurusheyatva” status, which does not imply that the author is unknown but that the text is not of human origin. It is of divine origin, derived from the Brahman, the Supreme Principle. In their deepest states of contemplation, the Vedic Rishis are drishtas, (seers or hearers) of the mantra. Therefore, the Vedas hold the status of srutis (heard), in contrast to the smritis (remembered and human-originated).
A Veda pandit would inform us that learning each of the four Vedas takes approximately six to seven years. Learning the four Vedas is almost an impossible task in today’s times. Learning each mantra to perfection requires extensive grounding in various subjects such as grammar, prosody, meter, etymology, and correct pronunciation. As with all scriptures, Indian traditions dictate that a Guru guides the learning of the Vedas. A knowledge of Sanskrit, however profound, is of no help in understanding the depth and mysteries of the Veda. The Vedas deeply embed Indian metaphysical ideas like Brahman, or the one single Self, karma, rebirth, and moksha, which also serve as the basis of both its ontology and epistemology.
For a few centuries, Europeans have developed an interest in the Vedas, with some possessing knowledge of Sanskrit and others lacking it. They largely disregarded the traditional Guru-Shishya system as they began their speculative and imaginative interpretations of the Veda. Their approach to uncovering the Vedic “secret” was significantly flawed, leading to an attack on both the Vedas and Indian culture. Western ontology and epistemology are based on a completely different framework, essentially a form of scientific materialism, leading to an incommensurability problem when one culture tries to explain another. In this case, consciousness, instead of being a primary entity, is a secondary consequence of matter, and there are no concepts of moksha, rebirth, or karma. Clearly, this framework could never do justice to the interpretation of the Vedas, but this did not prevent hordes and hordes of translators and interpreters attacking the Vedas with gusto. Jamison and Brereton’s (2014) English translation of the Rigveda, claimed as the most authoritative, best exemplify this.
Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda, written a century ago, not only gives an Indian perspective on the Veda’s understanding but also explains in some chapters the problems with the western approach. They are relevant even today. He is harsh in his criticism of European writers, including the celebrated Max Müller, for their many inconsistencies, ambiguities, and contradictions in approaching the text. Sri Aurobindo regarded the Vedas as the pinnacle of Indian culture and thought. For Sri Aurobindo, subsequent chronological periods and texts represented actually a degeneration from these lofty pedestals. This contradicts the beliefs of most European writers, who posit a primitive civilization that gradually progresses towards greater heights. Of course, for most European writers, Christianity (especially the Protestant variety) represented the highest thought in this evolving religious thought of humanity.
Western metaphysics, its ontology, and epistemology belong to a completely different framework than Indian metaphysics. The fundamental issue with most European or contemporary Indological scholarship on the Vedas is the ‘incommensurability’ or use of one paradigm to evaluate a completely different one. This gives rise to the intellectual violence on the Vedas and all other texts that Indologists try to interpret or understand. Ultimately, it represents an attack on the cultural heritage of India. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Indian traditional scholars show an indifference to the Indological approach.
This series of essays aims to compare Sri Aurobindo’s ideas on the Vedas with the contemporary Indological understanding of the Vedas, using the introduction by Jamison and Brereton as a representation of the most contemporary views on the Veda. It summarises, paraphrases, and abridges the key chapters from Sri Aurobindo’s book The Secret of the Veda to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Indian approach. The series also examines Jamison and Brereton’s book’s introduction and the criticism it received from various scholars. Finally, it provides some actual examples concerning Agni and the Soma ritual to show the amount of epistemic violence caused by European and modern Indological scholarship, clearly forewarned by Sri Aurobindo a century ago in his deep and powerful writings.
SRI AUROBINDO
The Problem and Its Solution
Sri Aurobindo (henceforth SA) first assesses contemporary Vedic scholarship’s claims that either the mystery of the Vedas is open, or none existed in the first place. The latter view sees the Vedic hymns as the compositions of a primitive race addressed to personified powers of nature. The later and deeper ideas are simply borrowings from the conquered Dravidians. SA writes that the young and conjectural fields of Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology, and Comparative Religion, characterised by shifting results, lend support to these modern theories of social progress from the savage to the modern.
Ancient forms and words do not appear in later speech, and the “fixation” attempts have been ambiguous and conjectural, giving rise to many difficulties. Over millennia, there have been three attempts to understand the Vedas:
- Prehistoric: fragments in the Brahmanas and Upanishads.
- Traditional interpretation of the Indian scholar Sayana.
- Finally, the interpretation, comparison, and conjecture of modern European scholarship.
SA scathingly writes that the latter two of the above suffer from extraordinary incoherence, poverty of meaning, garish diction, and verbiage that make the Vedic writers incapable of coherent expression. Both portray the hymns as naive superstitious fancies of materialistic barbarians, devoid of any spiritual content. SA says, “Yet these allegedly ‘obscure and barbarous’ compositions have been the source of the profoundest religions and their subtlest metaphysical philosophies. Veda, or knowledge, is the received name for the highest spiritual truth.”
SA then says that the modern scholars speculate that the true foundation of later philosophies is the Upanishads, which were a revolt of philosophical and speculative minds against the ritualistic materialism of the Vedas. SA refutes this notion, asserting that the profound ideas of the Upanishads suggest significant origins that predate them. He writes, “The hypothesis that the barbarous Aryan invaders borrowed loftier Upanishidic ideas from the civilised Dravidians is a conjecture supported only by other conjectures, especially those of philologists.”
SA then talks about contemporary Vedic scholarship, which divides the material worship of external Nature-Powers in the Veda (like Agni, Surya) and the psychological-spiritual functions of the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas (like Saraswati as Goddess of Learning, Vishnu expressing creative processes). However, this is incorrect, as the Vedas also include moral conceptions of gods. Surya, a God of revelatory knowledge, is invoked daily as the Gayatri mantra, which is a Rigvedic recitation. But modern scholars have concluded some evolutions that suggest a “mysterious” period between the naturalistic element in the Vedas and the psychological conceptions of the later Upanishads and Puranas.
Such a gulf does not really exist in the ancient sacred writings, says SA. The veil of material figures and symbols concealed spiritual and psychological knowledge from the very beginning. This protected the deep meaning from the profane but revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness of self-knowledge. This wisdom was unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind. The Vedic rishis clothed their language in words and images that had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect and a concrete meaning for the ordinary worshippers. Vedic hymns were based on this principle. Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward ritual devised for Nature-Worship involving many deities. Covertly, the ceremonies were symbols of a spiritual experience, knowledge, and a psychological discipline of self-culture.
The ritual system recognised by Sayana and the naturalistic sense of European scholarship may, in their externalities, stand. However, behind them there is always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge. Fixing the real import of Vedic terms, symbols, and the psychological functions of the gods is a difficult but necessary task, says SA. Furthermore, such an enterprise will elucidate the parts of the Upanishads and Puranas that remain unintelligible; rationally justify the whole ancient tradition of India (Vedanta, Purana, Tantra, the philosophical schools, and the great Indian religions) as having a Vedic origin; and dissolve the incoherencies of the Vedic texts appearing on a superficial reading. The Veda, then, ranks among the most important of the world’s early scriptures.
A Retrospect of Vedic Theory
In this essay, SA begins by saying that the Vedas evolved when the wisest relied on inner experience and intuitive knowledge for illumination that went beyond ordinary perceptions, logical conviction, or accurate reasoning. The Rishi was the seer (draṣṭā) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda is śruti, a divine Word heard that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit. SA writes that there is nothing miraculous in the Vedic idea of revelation. Knowledge itself was about travelling, ascending, and reaching. The light of revelation was a final victory.
The poems have a finished metrical form, subtlety, skill, and style variations that are not the work of primitive craftsmen. The art of expression was only a means for spiritual progress and to express the divine in oneself and others. The invariable fixity of Vedic thought, along with its depth, richness, and subtlety, points out that it cannot be the beginnings of thought in a civilisation but rather the close of an earlier period. Or the whole voluminous mass may be only a selection by the traditional author Veda Vyasa. The Veda is the final testament to the Ages of Intuition.
The next Vedantic age struggled to recover the ancient knowledge. The Vedic language was deliberately ambiguous, holding its secrets obstinately. Traditional knowledge, passed down from those who memorised the Vedic text or were in charge of the Vedic ritual, served as one source for understanding the Vedas. The two functions had originally been one; the priest was also the teacher and seer. But gradually, even Purohits performed the rites with an imperfect knowledge of the meaning of the sacred words.
The material aspects of Vedic worship became a thick crust over the inner knowledge, stifling what they once served to protect. The Brahmanas and the Upanishads, revivals of the Vedantic age, had two complementary aspects: the conservation of forms and the revelation of the Veda’s soul, respectively. SA says that a new symbolism working upon an old one that is half lost is likely to overgrow rather than reveal it; therefore, the Brahmanas, though full of interesting hints, help us little in Vedic interpretation. The Upanishads, too, sought to recover waning knowledge through meditation and spiritual experience, and they used the ancient mantras as a prop and authority for their own intuitions and perceptions. Their handling of the texts was not driven by the scholar’s scrupulous desire to arrive at the exact intention of the words. They often employed a method of symbolic interpretation of component sounds. Hence, while the Upanishads are invaluable in shedding light on the principal ideas, they are of as little use as the Brahmanas in determining the accurate sense of the Vedic texts.
The Vedantic movement, on the other hand, had two main tendencies. First, it increasingly subordinated the outward ritual to a more purely spiritual aim. There was more leaning towards asceticism and renunciation. However, it also overemphasised the significance of external factors. Irrationally enforcing the minutiae, a sharp practical division came into being: “the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages.” The second tendency was to replace the symbolic language of the Mystics with a clearer statement and more philosophical language. Thus, as the Upanishads became the fountainhead of the highest Indian thought, the scholars no longer studied the Vedas with the same zeal. Their symbolic language lost its inner meaning for new generations. The Ages of Intuition were passing away into the Age of Reason.
Buddhism, completing the revolution, sought to abolish the Vedic sacrifice and use the popular vernacular in place of the literary tongue. In order to counter the rising popularity of the new religion, it became necessary to present the texts in a simplified, more modern form of Sanskrit. The Puranas pushed aside the Veda, and a new religious system took the place of the ancient ceremonies. The Veda had been passed from the sage to the priest, then to the scholar. Despite the loss of its secret, the Pandits’ scrupulous diligence preserved the Veda itself.
The Scholars: Yaska and Sayana
For thousands of years, the absolutely uncorrupted Vedic text was of paramount importance to the Vedic ritualists. There is the story of Twashtri, who, performing a sacrifice to produce an avenger of his son slain by Indra, produced, owing to an error of accentuation, one of whom Indra must be the slayer instead. This prodigious accuracy and sanctity prevented interpolations, alterations, and modernising revisions.
Vedic prosody, differing from classical Sanskrit, employed a greater freedom in the euphonic combination of separate words (sandhi). The Rishis followed the ear rather than a fixed rule. However, during the Vedas’ composition, the euphonic combination law became more authoritative. Padapatha, an important accompanying text, resolved all euphonic combinations into their original and separate words. This does not allow for anything similar to the licentious revisions of some European classics. When hymns seem incoherent, it is because we do not understand them. Once we find the clue, they become perfect wholes, admirable in the structure of their thoughts, language, and rhythms.
However, ancient scholarship by Yaska (presumed 7th–5th century BCE) and Sayana (14th century CE) on interpreting the Veda creates the most doubts, says SA. The ritualistic view of the Veda was already dominant, long obscuring the original meaning. Yaska’s dictionary has two elements. As a lexicographer giving the various meanings of Vedic words, his authority is great. But Yaska the etymologist (studying the origin of words and their evolution) does not rank with Yaska the lexicographer. The old etymologists, down even to the nineteenth century, whether in Europe or India, were ingenious, fanciful, and lawless, writes SA.
Sayana’s commentary represents an enormous labour of erudition by a coordinating mind. It drew admiration from the first Vedic scholars in Europe. However, there are instances of linguistic license, implausible conclusions, and inconsistent interpretations of common Vedic terms and formulae. The central flaw is the obsession with the ritualistic formula and the constant attempt to fit the Veda’s meaning into a narrow framework. The representation of the Rishi’s thoughts, culture, and aspirations becomes narrow and poverty-stricken. Accepting such a meaning renders the reverence for the Veda as blind faith incomprehensible to the reason.
Sayana had to deal with three things: 1) the old spiritual, philosophical, or psychological interpretations of the Shruti, which were what made it sacred; 2) the mythological, or Puranic, with its deeper meanings; and 3) the legendary and historic, with stories of old kings and Rishis that were told in the Brahmanas or later on as a way to explain the vague references in the Veda. Sayana admits the first, but it only forms a small component of his work. Sayana’s dealings with the latter two elements were hesitant and unsatisfactory.
Sayana’s naturalistic interpretations become the true parent of the European Science of Comparative Mythology. Indra, the Maruts, Agni, Surya, Usha, Mitra (day), Varuna (night), Aryaman (sun), Bhaga (sun), and the Ribhus (sunrays) follow a naturalistic explanation of gods. The pervasive ritualistic conception makes the hymns a “book of works,” even though, in reality, they serve as a supreme authority for knowledge. Sayana shapes words such as food, priest, giver, wealth, praise, prayer, rite, and sacrifice into their ritualistic meanings. In the most materialistic sense, wealth and food solely refer to power, children, servants, gold, horses, cows, victory, plunder of enemies, and the destruction of rival critics. Hymn after hymn is in this sense only.
According to SA, the most unfortunate outcome of Sayana’s commentary has been the Veda’s binding to the lowest of its possible meanings. When another civilization set itself to study the Veda, its suggestions led to the emergence of new errors. Yet, Sayana’s work can be an important key, and all European erudition has not been able to replace its utility. It can still be a springboard, which we must leave behind to pass forward.
Modern Theories
European scholarship developed an exaggerated material sense, writes SA in this important essay where he is particularly harsh. Standing on Sayana’s commentary, it developed Vedic mythology, history, and civilisation through amplifications of the existing data, ingenious speculation, and unification of the scattered indications. The sureness of method built an edifice, but mostly upon conjecture. Modern theory views the Vedas as the poetry of an early, primitive, and barbaric society, characterised by crude moral and religious conceptions. These were hymns and sacrifices to imaginary superhumans with good or bad personalities. This aligns with the scientific theories of human development, which traced human evolution from the savage to the modern era throughout the nineteenth century. The historical element sought to uncover clues about primitive history, manners, and institutions. The naturalistic element—the identification of the Vedic gods with nature powers—was the starting point for a comparative study of Aryan mythologies.
However, knowledge of advanced civilisations in China, Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria, and Greece undermines this theory of progress from the savage to the civilized. Vedic Indians do not get the benefit of this revised knowledge because of the Aryan theory with which European erudition started. These Aryan races were allegedly northern barbarians who broke into the old and rich civilisations of Mediterranean Europe and Dravidian India.
However, the distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan indicates a cultural rather than a racial difference. Aryan’s spiritual culture included worship of Light and Truth, as well as the aspiration to Immortality—Ritam and Amritam. SA categorically says that there is nothing in the Veda or in the country’s present ethnological features to prove the descent of fair-skinned Aryans into a civilised Dravidian peninsula. The continuation of the ideas sown by the Vedic forefathers should have been the hallmark of Indian civilisation. We can trace the extraordinary vitality of these early cultures, thought, art, and religion to no primitive savagery.
Comparative Mythology and Philology were both inventive expressions of poetic imagination and fantasies rather than meticulous scientific research, writes SA. There is a gulf between the patient, scrupulous and exact physical sciences, and Vedic scholarship, relying on scanty data but sweeping theories filled with an excess of conjecture and hypothesis. Comparative mythology assumes that early religions were founded on a childlike wonder towards natural phenomena and then progressed from there. It has established a few rules that govern language and detect related words in kindred tongues. However, “its maturity has not fulfilled the high expectations that accompanied its birth.” As an example, Parame vyoman is a Vedic phrase that most translate as “in the highest heaven,” but Paramasiva Aiyar (The Riks), employing modern methods, tells us that it means “in the lowest hollow”; for vyoman, “means break, fissure, being literally absence of protection, (ūmā)”. This reasoning is flawed because “absence of protection” cannot possibly refer to a fissure, and human language was not built on these principles.
In modern times, Indian scholars have made three contributions. Two of them, Mr. Tilak and T. Paramasiva Aiyar, accept the general lines of European scholarship. The third by Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, is based on Nirukta. The Vedas, as a plenary revelation of religious, ethical, and scientific truth, govern Dayananda’s ideas. For him, the religious teaching is monotheistic, and the Vedic gods are different descriptive names for the one Single Being. However, SA asserts that the monotheism of the Veda encompasses monistic, pantheistic, and even polytheistic views of the cosmos, and it is by no means the rigid and simplistic creed of modern Theism. SA summarizes that Sayana and Yaska, who supply the ritualistic framework; Upanishadic philosophy; the critical methodology of European scholarship; and Dayananda, who re-emphasize the central Vedic idea of One Being with the Devas in numerous names, all contribute to a gain a better understanding of the Vedas, but they are strictly springboards for the final secret.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the Rishis arranged their thoughts in a parallelism in which the same deities were both internal and external powers of universal nature. They managed its expression through a system of double values by which the same language served for their worship in both aspects. However, the psychological sense predominates and is more pervasive and coherent than the physical. The primary purpose of the Veda is to facilitate spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. Therefore, the restoration of this sense must come first.
The Foundations of the Psychological Theory
The central idea of the “great passage” discovered by the Vedic Rishis was the transition of the human soul from a state of death to a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for the Truth, of divided and limited being for integrality and infinity. Death is the mortal state of matter with mind and life involved; immortality is a state of infinite being, consciousness, and bliss. The interpretations of Vedas should fit naturally, illuminate, give a logical succession of thoughts, and finally become the basis for subsequent Indian thought. The Veda, with its profound psychological discipline and self-conscious unity, is not a confused or primitive thought. According to European scholarship, the Upanishads are generally considered the most ancient source of Indian thought, while the Rigveda provides historical and ethnological clues.
SA rejects the Aryan-Dravidian divide and the Aryan Invasion Theory in clear and unambiguous terms. In Pondicherry, the Aryan issue apparently turned SA towards the Veda. Racially, Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians were supposedly based on physical and linguistic differences. SA discovered that the physical differences between the supposed Aryans and Dravidians were impossible. He asserts that there was a physical and cultural unity throughout India. Again, guided by words meant to be pure Tamil in relation to Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, SA says, “It certainly seems to me that the original connection between the Dravidian and Aryan tongues was far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed, and the possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue.” Finally, SA concludes that the Vedic hymns themselves, as the sole evidence of invading Aryans against indigenous Dasus, showed flimsy indications.
A deep study of Vedic mantras reveals a clear psychological experience that European scholarship and even Yoga or Vedanta failed to adequately explain. His study also illuminated many obscure passages of the Upanishads and Puranas, writes SA. Due to the “fortunate ignorance” of Sayana’s works, SA could understand the natural significance of many words of the Veda: dhī (thought or understanding); manas (mind); mati (thought, feeling, or mental state), manīṣā (intellect), ṛtam (truth), kavi (seer), manīṣī (thinker), vipra or vipaścit (enlightened in mind), and so on. Sayana’s variable interpretation of words like Ṛtam (“truth” or often “sacrifice”), Dhī (“thought,” “prayer,” “action,” “food”) obliterates fine shades between words to give their vaguest general significance.
The Vedic Rishis would not have used words randomly. Throughout, the Veda is filled with the richest thought and spiritual experience. The Veda is also full of words like rāye, rayi, rādhas, ratna, dhana, vāja, poṣa with both an external (or material) and an internal (or psychological) value according to general purpose. Whole hymns naturally took on a psychological sense, proceeding with a perfect and luminous coherency from verse to verse.
The Vedic sacrifice consists of a) persons who offer, b) the offering, and c) the fruits of the offering. Yajña is works, internal or external; the yajamāna is the doer. But who were the officiating priests- hotā, ṛtvij, purohita, brahma, and adhvaryu in the symbolism? The gods are continually spoken of as priests of the offering. In many passages, it was undeniably a non-human power or energy that presided over the sacrifice. Applying this rule inversely, the priest’s person in the external figure represented a non-human power or energy, says SA.
Regarding the offerings, scholarship that constructs ghṛtam as clarified butter dropping from heaven or the horses of Indra was “grotesque nonsense.” Ghṛta was constantly in connection with the thought or the mind, even as the heaven in Veda was a symbol of the mind. The Veda sometimes speaks plainly of offering the intellect (dhiṣaṇā) as purified ghṛta, to the gods. The word ghṛta also has the meaning of a rich or warm brightness.
The fruits appear purely material—cows, horses, gold, offspring, men, physical strength, or victory in battle. But the Vedic cow was an exceedingly enigmatical animal. “Go” means both cow and light. Psychologically, the physical light represented the divine knowledge. The cow and horse, go and aśva, constantly associated, represent the two companion ideas of light and energy, the double or twin aspect of all the activities of existence. Cows and horses, the two chief fruits of the Vedic sacrifice, were symbolic of a richness of mental illumination and an abundance of vital energy.
Vedic symbolism has four cosmic divisions of the world: 1) Earth, 2) the antarikṣa or middle region, 3) Heaven (dyau), and the 4) Vast (bṛhat or ṛtam bṛhat). The last corresponds to Upanishadic Mahas. In the Puranic formula, the four are completed by three other supreme worlds of Hindu cosmology: Jana, Tapas, and Satya. The Vedas also speak of three unnamed worlds. In the Vedantic and Puranic systems, the seven worlds correspond to seven psychological forms of existence: Sat, Chit, Ananda, Vijnana, Manas, Prana, and Anna. As a result, the two systems are identical, and both rely on the same idea of seven principles of subjective consciousness formulating themselves in seven objective worlds.
The gods, described as children of light, Aditi, or infinity, lead men to the great goal, which is perfect bliss. On the other hand, the demons who oppose them (Coverers, Tearers, Devourers, Confiners, Dualisers, and Obstructers) are powers against the free and unified integrality of the being. These Vritras, Panis, Atris, Rakshasas, Sambara, Vala, and Namuchi are not Dravidian kings and gods, but they represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire.
The Philological Method of the Veda
Ingenious conjecture is both a great attraction and a serious weakness of modern philology, says SA. Philologically, Vedic interpretation firstly needs the acceptance of several new meanings for fixed technical terms, like ūti, avas, vayas. Secondly, a philologist should explain how a single word came to be capable of so many different meanings: the psychological; the old grammarian’s meaning; and later Sanskrit meaning. The psychological interpretation depends often on a double meaning for important words, the keywords of the secret teaching. Thirdly, there is a “multi-significance” use of Sanskrit roots to pack as much meaning as possible into a single word. For example, aśva, usually a horse, is used as a figure of the Prana, the nervous energy, and the vital breath that links mind and matter.
Notably, SA asserts that the study of Tamil words appears to provide insight into the origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit language. With sufficient data, the laws governing language must be discoverable. The clues and data are in Sanskrit. Words are living growths of sound with certain seed sounds as their basis, from which develop initially some primitive root words and later an immense progeny of tribes, clans, families, and groups.
Initially, language sounds were vocal equivalents of general sensations and emotional values. These evolved into the intellectual use of language. Originally, the word had a wide range of applications, sharing many similar sounds. Their individuality lay in the subtle variations in how they expressed the same ideas, rather than in a single, exclusive idea. The transition from the communal life of words to an individual property was initially fluid, but later became more rigid, leading to the emergence of word families and, ultimately, single words that could stand on their own. “In the first state, the word is a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In its last state, the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important, the sound secondary.” The progression is from the general to the particular, the vague to the precise, and the physical to the mental.
This knowledge of the laws makes it clear how the same word came to express ideas widely divergent in their meanings. We can also understand the enormous number of words to represent a single idea. Later, a developing intellect typically cuts down on this luxuriance. However, according to SA, the Sanskrit tongue, which disintegrated too early into Prakrit dialects, never quite reached the final stages of this development.
Thus, Vedic Sanskrit, the parent of ideas, was governed by this ancient psychology of the Word. In English, “wolf” or “cow” is simply the animal designated by custom. But for the Vedic Rishi, vṛka meant the tearer and therefore also a wolf; dhenu meant the fosterer, nourisher, and therefore a cow. It is in the light of this pliability and psychology of the old language that we understand Vedic symbolism for words like ghṛtam, the clarified butter, or soma, the sacred wine. Bhaga, enjoyment, and bhāga, share, were for the Vedic mind one word that had developed two different uses. By using it in one sense, Rishis could keep the other in mind or use it equally in both.
Giving further examples, Canas and Soma-wine meant food for the gods in the profane sense, but for the initiated, it was the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss. For the average worshipper, Agni may have simply meant the god of the Vedic fire or the physical principle of heat and light.In psychological terms, Agni meant the illumined energy that exalts man to the highest. Thus, SA says, the names of the gods are only descriptions, not personal appellations. So Mitra is the Lord of love and harmony, Bhaga of enjoyment, Surya of illumination, etc. “The Existent is One,” says the Rishi Dirghatamas, “but the sages express It variously. “However, in the later ages, Vedic language rejected its earlier pliability, and the word contracted into its outer and concrete significance. The body of the doctrine remained, but the soul of knowledge had fled.“
Hymn To the Atris
In the foreword to the section A Hymn to the Atris, SA writes that it is impossible to translate the Veda. A literal rendering would result only in a false meaning and interpretation. SA says he takes the middle path: a free form following the turns of the original, yet admitting interpretative devices for revealing the universal and impersonal Vedic truth from the concrete hymns. Highly prescient of modern scholarship, he writes that a literal translation presents a “bizarre, unconnected sequence of sentences to the uninitiated.” Only when the figures and symbols suggest their concealed equivalents do transparent and well-linked spiritual, psychological, and religious ideas emerge from the obscurity.
Sanskrit word translations into English would not suffice. We need to convey the symbolic image appropriately. SA laments that the Vedic ritual has lost its profound symbolic meaning, with scholars suggesting forced interpretations. For example, “Laxmi and Saraswati refuse to dwell under one roof,” which means “wealth and learning seldom go together,” is a common understanding for every Indian. A culture that lacks knowledge of Indian culture would likely find this phrase meaningless. Some scholars would even speculate that Laxmi was the Dawn and Saraswati the Night, and the two were irreconcilable. This represents the current state of modern Vedic European scholarship, according to SA. The statement, “Sarama by the path of the Truth discovers the herds,” may suggest to an untrained mind that Sarama, the hound of heaven, represents a prehistoric embassy to Dravidian nations, aimed at recovering stolen cattle. Its true idea, however, would be, “Intuition by the way of the Truth arrives at the hidden illuminations.”
A literal translation would always need a competent interpretation. “Dawn and Night, two sisters of different forms but of one mind, suckle the same divine Child” would be unintelligible in a literal translation of this Vedic verse. However, here the Rishi is thinking of the alternations in his own spiritual experience, periods of golden illumination and obscuration that gradually strengthen his divine life. In both states, the same divine intention works.
The seer of the house of Atri cries, “O Agni, O Priest of the Offering, loose from us the cords.” SA says that the hymn is for release from the triple cord of mind, nerves, and body and the uprising of the knowledge where the real transcendent truth of all things becomes manifest in a vast illumination. This profound and inner sense cannot be evident in a translation unless we translate in a proper interpretative manner. Agni is the force of the divine Will already awakened and at work within. These associations lose their meanings if we imagine the son of Atri bound as a victim in an ancient barbaric sacrifice, crying to the god of Fire for a physical deliverance! Agni, known as the “vast light,” symbolises a vast, unrestricted, and radiant consciousness that extends beyond the confines of the mind.
Finally, SA writes that the Vedic language is a powerful instrument that follows the natural flight of thought rather than smooth constructions and logical syntax. Translation without modification into English would make the Veda harsh, abrupt, and obscure. Sri Aurobindo says he uses devices best suited to modern speech while preserving the original thought. The goal is to make the Veda’s inner sense clear to today’s cultured intelligence. According to SA, the Rishis sought to hide their knowledge from the unfit, believing that the corruption of the best might lead to the worst. “The secret of the Veda, even when it has been unveiled, to the materially trapped mind, remains still a secret.”
PART 2
JAMISON AND BRERETON: THE RIGVEDA
The Introduction of the Book
In the introductory chapter of The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (2014), authors Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (henceforth J and B) claim that India’s religious literature reflects on the ability of mortals to contact and affect the divine and cosmic realms through sacrifice and praise. The two translators write that after fifteen years of effort on the translation and more than forty years of working with the text, they laid down the essentials of the Vedas in the introduction. They acknowledge that the Rigveda, in an archaic form of Vedic Sanskrit, is the oldest Sanskrit text. But they hasten to clarify that though it is old, it is not the most ancient, as it stands at the end of an Indo-European long tradition of praise poetry.
There are four Vedas: the Rgveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda, with individual priests Hotar, Udgatar, and Adhvaryu attached respectively to the first three. The Atharvaveda apparently stands outside of this ritual system and consists of hymns of a more “popular” nature, often magical or healing. The authors, using diffuse arguments, including the absence of metals like iron, place the Rigveda within the period 1400-1000 BCE or within the second half of the second millennium BCE. There is a strong need to confirm the Aryan invasion theory, which allegedly happened around 1500 BCE, and the Rigveda was produced within the next few centuries.
This dating is important because any dating of the Vedas before 2000 BCE collapses the Aryan theory completely. The foundation of Indological scholarship rests heavily on the Aryan theory. Rejecting the Aryan theory leads to the collapse of numerous aspects of Indological scholarship. The authors also claim that internal chronology suggests a movement of peoples from north-west regions (Russian Steppes, as per recent consensus amongst Aryan proponents) to the east (India). Shrikant Talageri says otherwise, contradicting the authors’ claims. As Talageri demonstrates in his books (The Rigveda, an Analysis, and The Veda and the Avesta), the Vedas predate 2000 BCE, and the Rigveda provides ample evidence of migration from north-west India, encompassing present-day Haryana and Punjab, to further westward, eventually spreading to other parts of Europe, a phenomenon known as the Out of India migration. The Aryan proponents consistently ignore or even ridicule scholars and archaeologists such as Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, Nicholas Kazanas, BB Lal, James Shaffer, KD Sethna, and many others who have either refuted the Aryan invasion/migration scenario or supported the Out-of-India migration (OIT) theory. Problematically, there is not a single shred of archaeological evidence to show any kind of Aryan invasion of India. However, for western Indologists, there is a driving need to confirm this theory of invading Aryans.
J and B make an extraordinary claim that “the text did not directly address the religious lives of women or of other social classes, nor indeed even other aspects of the religious lives of elite males. However, we can gather information on non-elite concerns and on the daily life and pursuits of the elite incidentally, often through similes or imagery.” (italics mine) The question would be, if Rigveda is indeed a religious text, why should one be trying to find ethnological clues about non-elite classes or of women? This was one of the criticisms of Sri Aurobindo against European scholarship more than a century ago.
The authors write that the majority of Rgvedic hymns have as their major aim to praise the god(s) to whom the hymn is dedicated and to induce said god(s) to repay the praise with requested favors. “There is an all-pervasive system of reciprocity and exchange that might be termed the dominant social ideology underlying the Rgveda.” Therefore, the Rigvedic hymns essentially boil down to a harsh negotiation between humans and gods. The purpose cannot get more material since it is principally for the “good things”—wealth, a long lifespan, and defeating opponents. How does this extraordinary power originate? It is the “power of the word.” They do not clearly state whether this is simply a belief or whether the word truly has the power to bring about tangible results. However, they allow the akhyana hymns to be of a special type, not intended for ritual use, but more philosophical. These were apparently the forerunners of the Brahmana and Aranyaka texts that interpret the rituals. They frequently use phrases and placeholders in their interpretation of the Rigveda, such as “Perhaps,” “maybe,” and “could have been.”
They claim that the poets have an elaborate patronage system. They are “superior” hirelings and provide the praise poetry that the patron needs to put the gods in his debt! Such silly explanations and speculations make up for the introduction of the holiest of Indian scriptures. This only reveals their utter ignorance of the metaphysics of Indian thought and the incorrect paradigm they appear to be operating under. One cannot approach a culture whose inbuilt philosophy begins with the Self (Consciousness or Brahman) and the multiplicity arising from it using a materialistic philosophy that places the notion of Self or consciousness as secondary to matter. The incommensurability of paradigms arises when one attempts to explain the other. The authors do exactly this and, in the process, end up causing immense epistemic damage to the text. What they do not understand becomes a matter of discrepancies, confusions, and ambiguities on the part of the Vedic Rishis.
Writing about its history, they use the authority of a western Indologist, Michael Witzel, to claim that the complete collection of the Rgveda was under the Kurus of ancient India. The closed circle of scholarship, in which one western scholar quotes another, ignoring the traditional commentaries, is characteristic of Indological scholarships beginning with the Germans. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee demonstrate this phenomenon in excellent detail in their classic The Nay Science, in which they deconstruct the German Indology enterprise.
J and B discuss the early “freezing” of the text, highlighting its significant value in understanding the linguistic, religious, and literary history of South Asia. In addition to Sri Aurobindo’s criticism of the Rigveda’s use as a social text for clues about people, another problematic aspect is the inherent notion of the “evolution” of texts. This notion of evolution of thoughts and texts, typical of European scholarship, is something that clashes inherently with the Indian idea of the Rigveda. For the Indologists studying the text, there is an evolution of thoughts, keeping in mind a linear progression of history from the primitive to the advanced. According to Sri Aurobindo, the Vedas represent the highest state, while the thoughts represent the most evolved. The passage of time actually signifies a decline in both the culture and the complexity of thought. Clearly, intellectual violence ensues when the two paradigms meet.
The authors then make a claim about Indian traditional commentary systems by saying that “later Vedic texts do carry “commentary” but are based more on adaptation, speculation, or fancy than on a direct transmission of the purport of the text.” They acknowledge that Sayana, who made the most influential and lasting commentary on the text in the fourteenth century CE in South India, outperformed many earlier works and continues to play a significant role in both indigenous and Western interpretations of the text. Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo severely criticised Sayana because his flawed interpretation served as the foundation for all subsequent erroneous European scholarship.
J and B argue that the Rgveda transmission has remarkably well preserved the text, making it trustworthy and uniform. However, the commentaries fail to live up to this claim. They mention the commentaries of Max Muller, Theodor Aufrecht, N. S. Sontakke, Louis Renou, Wendy Doniger, and Walter H. Maurer, but they apparently create a distorted view of the Rigveda. However, the authors point out that over the past fifty years, research on the Rigveda has significantly advanced our understanding of the text. Rather than attempting to emend the texts as previous scholars did, twentieth-century scholars recognised a much better understanding of the text by accepting it as it was transmitted. They write, “We too are committed to accepting the traditional text and, more importantly, to allowing the poetry of the Rgveda to remain complex, elusive, jagged, unsettled, and even unsettling.” There is absolutely no mention of Sri Aurobindo, Ananda Coomaraswamy, or the need for a guru to understand the Vedas.
The authors explain that a web of equivalences among elements in the ritual, cosmic, and everyday realms structures the Vedic universe. These homologies, or hidden connections, give the priests the power to manipulate the universe through ritual manipulation. These are the authors’ explanations for the power of rituals. Do gods really exist? Do the priests actually control them through the power of the word? Or is it just a belief that bards, laypeople, and kings have held for thousands of years? Typically, the arguments oscillate between these powers as “facts” and “beliefs.”
As a typical example of the most materialistic interpretation of the Vedas, they write about the Soma ritual, apparently the target of most hymns of the Rgveda. Soma juice, the central rite of this sacrifice, was an offering to the gods to be shared by male participants in the rite. They stop short of regularly placing the Avestan before the Vedas, but they are keen to suggest that they share a common origin. They write that the haoma plant is the Iranian Avestan equivalent to the Soma plant. The authors claim that they have more textual evidence to support the interpretation of the Soma juice as a stimulant than as a hallucinogen. Sri Aurobindo would have surely laughed his head off with such an interpretation of the Soma ritual. One has to read Sri Aurobindo on the Soma ritual to understand how absolutely wrong the authors go in understanding the Soma ritual. The ritual’s metaphysics and symbolism are clearly beyond their comprehension.
Next, the introduction categorises the gods into three types (real or belief of the Vedic Rishis?): gods of the earth, gods of the midspace, and gods of heaven. Indra apparently stands apart from all the other gods. The archetypal parents are Heaven and Earth (mother); the progeny are the gods, especially the Sun. Their fantastic interpretation and subtle undermining of the Veda’s importance is evident when they write, “A less beneficent aspect of Heaven’s fatherhood is found in a myth, obliquely but vividly referred to a few times in the Rgveda and told more clearly in Vedic prose (though with Prajapati substituting for Heaven)—namely his rape of his own daughter.”
The authors describe danastuti as frequently brimming with puns, often obscene, and obscure terms. Apparently, the “most significant and salient feature of the poets’ relationship to language is their deliberate pursuit of obscurity and complexity.” Why do they do that? They explain, “On the conceptual level, it has to do with the audience—or the most important members of the audience—as well as the target of the composition, namely the gods. The aim of the poets is to praise the gods at the sacrifice. But it can’t be just any praise, tired repetitions of already hackneyed formulae—for the gods are connoisseurs.” The poets apparently prize the “obscurity” characteristic of the hymns because they are working to create something new while keeping the old traditions intact.
This is a snapshot of the scholarship evident in the most authoritative translation of the Rigveda in English. This book will undoubtedly distress any traditionally bound Indian or anyone with even a modicum of respect for the Rigveda. Next, we will see how contemporary scholars like Karen Thomson and Dr. SN Balagangadhara raise objections to this book.
Karen Thomson
Karen Thomson (Speak for itself: How a long history of guesswork and commentary on a unique corpus of poetry has rendered it incomprehensible, 2016) is scathing in her review of Jamison and Brereton’s Rigveda book. She begins by saying:
Within its soberly academic trio of hardback volumes, however, seethes an incoherent mix of mumbo-jumbo and misplaced obscenity, most of it apparently meaningless. It reads like a burlesque version, in the style of Hamlet Travestie, of a long lost original – except that the original is not lost on the contrary, it has been immaculately preserved.
Thomson describes how the Vedas reached the West in 1733 via a traveler, and there have been numerous attempts to translate the Vedas since then using the Sanskrit of 500 BCE, including, of course, Max Müller. Without the help of commentaries, as one French Orientalist Burnouf had insisted, the output in the form of translations was depressing for the scholars, as they hardly made sense. One publisher dismissed these attempts as “misapprehensions and deliberate perversions of their text, their ready invention of tasteless and absurd legends to explain the allusions, real or fancied, which it contains, their often atrocious etymologies.” Thomson talks about one author’s description of the fundamental importance of the division between priests and warriors, brahmin and kshatriya, in “Vedic civilization.” Thomson, however, says that this has no place in the ancient Rigveda poems, where kshatriya is an epithet of gods.
She mentions that a ray of hope emerged from the figure of Sri Aurobindo in distant Pondicherry when European scholars were “caught in the web like flies.” Sri Aurobindo had described the European scholarly attempts at translation as “grotesque nonsense.” Thomson provides numerous examples from the Jamison book to demonstrate how Sri Aurobindo’s criticisms remain relevant to most Western scholars working on the Vedas till date. However, a limited-circulation journal published Sri Aurobindo’s articles, and the Second World War left his work largely unknown and unreceived by most western libraries.
The prose texts called Brahmanas are important to understand the Vedic rituals, says Thomson. However, Western scholars did not give them much importance until Karl Hoffmann, a Vedic scholar, finally gave respect to the long-despised authors of the prose texts. This was a grave mistake on the part of Western scholars.
Thomson describes a conference where Stephanie Jamison discusses the need for a “magic decoder ring” in Vedic translations, which is achieved by placing square brackets after the Vedic words. Among the two thousand Vedic words, some examples of “decoding rings” include “weapons [=soma drinks]”, “offspring [=soma drinks]”, “dawns anoint their beam [=sacrificial post]”, and “gods lay down good wood in the belly [=the hearth(s) of the ritual fires].” This, Thomson says, is at odds with the statement in their introduction, “By translating the text literally, we hope to leave the interpretive opportunities open for the readers.”
Thomson continues, stating that once the requirement for making sense is removed, a vogue la galère (keep on, come what may: away we go) atmosphere pervades the entire book. For instance, Thomson notes that Jamison and Brereton frequently use the word “thrusting” to translate at least six unrelated verbs. Similarly, she writes that although the “precise sense of the complex word dhấman, “foundation, law, precept,” related to Greek thémis and to Old English dóm, is debated, it surely never means “buttocks.” Though the authors claim that they accept the traditional text without falling into the tendency of previous scholars, Thomson says that they, in fact, silently incorporate a large proportion of the emendations of earlier scholars. She provides many examples for these. She writes that this process of editing text based on assumed meaning has been ongoing since medieval times.
Another glaring contradiction that Thomson mentions is the firm statement in the introduction that “the Rigveda does not attest rice cultivation.” However, their text regularly incorporates the god Indra’s supposed theft of something they translate as “rice porridge.” Similarly, elsewhere, Indologist Michael Witzel and Jamison claim that the word armaká, translated as “mudflat” and implying “ruins,” is evidence that its composition postdates the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation. This suggests evidence for an Aryan invasion scenario, a theory that Indologists are eager to validate. Archaeological circles often cite this interpretation as well. Surprisingly, the word only occurs in one verse of the 10,000 or so in the Rigveda—a hapax legomenon! Similar is the desperate search for evidence of “spoked wheels” in the remains of the Indus Valley civilisation, making translations irresponsible.
She makes a significant statement in the final paragraph:
I have argued the sophistication and decipherability of this ancient anthology elsewhere. The approach that is required is straightforward. First, we need to begin with a different assumption: that the poems are as meaningful as their complex grammar, consistent language and word formation, and highly sophisticated metre would suggest. All later emendations should be set aside. But the most important thing is that this still undeciphered body of ancient poetry needs to be studied independently of “the clog.”
Thomson acknowledges that modern scholars owe a huge debt of gratitude to the ancient Indian tradition, which has preserved the text of these poems so faithfully. However, this tradition has presented both advantages and disadvantages. We must firmly put away prehistoric guesses about the Rigveda’s subject matter and meaning if we are to allow it to take its place in world literature. Until then, she says, the absence of scholarly engagement with its decipherment continues to present a block to our knowledge of early Indo-European history.
Dr. SN Balagangadhara On Jamison And Brereton
In his book Cultures Differ Differently (2022), Dr. SN Balagangadhara (Balu) deconstructs Jamison and Brereton’s Rig Veda book. In an illuminating chapter, The Vedic Society and a Brain Stasis, Balu dissects the introduction of the authors, whose book is considered to be the most recent and authoritative English translation of the Rigveda. The introduction perhaps summarises the state of Vedic studies today. According to Jamison and Brereton, Rigveda is supposedly the product of a small group of people called priests. Balu demonstrates that the text offers no evidence for either the priest-laity duo or the priests themselves. However, the existence of the Vedic rituals is the only evidence of the “religion” and its “priests.”
Scholars repeatedly affirm that, apart from rituals, one can learn nothing about social or political organisation from the Rigvedic texts. However, Indologists piece together disjointed remarks (incidental similes, asides, and few direct references) to extract historical and cultural information about society. This philological method based on oral and written texts makes “educated guesses” about the society and culture that produced them. Balu writes that the incoherence of these guesses becomes sharper if we believe the translators who fix the “Vedic period” dates between 1750 BCE and 400 BCE—a period of 1300 years. Balu says sharply that no amount of creative interpretation from disjointed fragments will provide us with any information about the political, social, and religious developments of a 1300-year period over a region bigger than Europe from 4000 years ago.
Jamison and Brereton define the Vedic people, or “Aryas,” as those “who sacrifice to the gods, who adhere to Vedic customs, who speak Indo-Aryan languages, and who in other ways identify themselves with Vedic culture.” Balu says that this is an empty statement. Who are the gods? What are the Vedic customs and sacrifices? How does one adhere to a Vedic culture? Jamison and Brereton interpret “manu” as a single individual and “manusa” as a tribe that belongs to “manu”, despite the fact that “manu” can also refer to “man” in general, and “manusa” could potentially refer to human beings rather than only “the tribe belonging to Manu.” The Indologists are keen to see people banding together as migratory tribes bound by lineage, kinship, language, religion, culture, etc. Therefore, in their interpretations, there is a necessity for a shared ancestor and common descent.
Who composed the Rigveda? The invading Aryans from Central Asia. The infamous Indo-Aryan debate has persisted for 200 years without a resolution. Balu asserts that Europeans seem to have a weakness when it comes to migration stories, a weakness they have also attributed to other groups, such as the barbarians. European scholarship by the nineteenth century fixed the image of concrete groups bound by race, kin, blood, language, and culture.
Indologists think that the fundamental unit of the Vedic society was a ‘tribe’. It appears that five major tribes primarily organised the Vedic people. Balu shows how speculation thrives in these statements concerning clans, kings, tribes, and federations with absolutely no evidence in the text. Thus, one is interpreting words from an allegedly “religious” text as though they are evidence of sociological facts and organisational charters.
According to Indologists, one of the tribes established a religious, political, and socially centralised authority by combining a set of hymns. Thus, an “emperor” (or a ‘king’, ‘chieftain’, ‘lesser king’, a ‘clan lord’) established the Vedic religion as a state religion; simultaneously, the priest also established it as a religion that controlled the masses, given the absence of a state in Ancient India. What would a political scientist make of this wisdom? After investigating different peoples across centuries, anthropologists have moved away from the notion of tribal society. If neither anthropologists nor sociologists have been able to develop a coherent understanding of tribal societies with their copious data, how plausible is it that Indologists are right regarding a society 4000 years ago by uncontrolled speculations on fragmentary texts?
Jamison and Brereton say the Rigvedic text is about the ability of mortals to causally affect both the divine realm and the cosmos through words (fulsome and elegant praise) and “sacrifice.” The Indologists also claim that the hymns’ aim is to persuade, induce, and constrain the gods to mobilise their powers to benefit the worshippers. In such simplistic ways, scholars rely on the success of hymns and rituals to explain the spread of Hinduism in India.
They now propose their own concept of “homology.” Jamison and Brereton assert that a web of equivalences in the ritual, cosmic, and everyday realms structure the Vedic mental universe. These homologies allow the priest to know the hidden connections between apparently disparate elements and give some power to control the cosmic by manipulation of the ritual. Therefore, Balu says, this Vedic text is not just a sociological text, but it possesses a level of power that surpasses even the most influential books in the sciences. If this is what Indian texts accomplish, and these ‘translations’ bring them to life, Balu poses a question: have Indians merely been the greatest mental retards of modernity, or have they truly enjoyed this singular honour throughout human history?
PART 3
COMPARING SRI AUROBINDO WITH JAMISON AND BRERETON: A FEW EXAMPLES
One of the most profound thinkers and prolific writers of modern India is Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The latter’s clear insights into various aspects of Indian culture could have served as the foundation for a modern India. For unknown reasons, our intellectuals, academics, and political leaders largely ignored him. His poor view of Western scholarship on the Vedas is clear when he mentions that approaching them with no knowledge of Indian metaphysics amounts to epistemic violence. A profound knowledge of Sanskrit does not help matters. As he always insisted while laying out the principles of the Indian education system, a guru was vital in perpetuating and transmitting knowledge.
To understand Coomaraswamy’s perspectives on European translations of the Vedas, perhaps it would be appropriate to quote verbatim what he wrote in the introduction of his book A New Approach to the Vedas in 1932:
Existing translations of Vedic texts, however etymologically “accurate,” are too often unintelligible or unconvincing, sometimes admittedly unintelligible to the translator himself. Neither the “Sacred Books of the East,” nor for example such translations of the Upanisads as those of R. E. Hume, or those of Mitra, Roer, and Cowell, recently reprinted, even approach the standards set by such works as Thomas Taylor’s version of the Enneads of Plotinus, or Friedlander’s of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Translators of the Vedas do not seem to have possessed any previous knowledge of metaphysics, but rather to have gained their first and only notions of ontology from Sanskrit sources. As remarked by Jung…, with reference to the study of the Upanisads under existing conditions, “any true perception of the quite extraordinary depth of those ideas and their amazing psychological accuracy is still but a remote possibility.” It is very evident that for an understanding of the Vedas, a knowledge of Sanskrit, however profound, is insufficient. Indians themselves do not rely upon their knowledge of Sanskrit here, but insist upon the absolute necessity of study at the feet of a guru. That is not possible in the same sense for European students…
…As regards the commentary; here I have simply used the resources of Vedic and Christian scriptures side by side. An extended use of Sumerian, Taoist, Sufi, and Gnostic sources would have been at once possible and illuminating, but would have stretched the discussion beyond reasonable limits. As for the Vedic and Christian sources, each illuminates the other. And that is in itself an important contribution to understanding, for as Whitman expresses it, “These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me. If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing. Whatever may be asserted or denied with respect to the “value” of the Vedas, this at least is certain, that their fundamental doctrines are by no means singular.
Interpretation Of the Veda: A Rejoinder to An Early Criticism
Sri Aurobindo had his share of criticisms for his interpretation of the Veda. In a letter published in The Hindu (Madras) on August 27, 1914, Sri Aurobindo answers to these criticisms. The article cites Sri Aurobindo as stating, “We must necessarily disregard or discard knowledge that has no trace to previous sources!” Sri Aurobindo writes that this would be a monstrous proposition. The idea was that knowledge only needs a historical explanation if it expresses a developed philosophy and psychology—a different matter.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
If we accept the European idea of an evolving knowledge in humanity, we must find the source of the Brahmavada either in an extraneous origin (such as a previous Dravidian culture, a theory inadmissible, since the so-called Aryans and Dravidians are one homogeneous race) or in a previous development, of which the records have either been lost or are to be found in the Veda itself.
Regarding the Upanishads, SA writes that there is no description of them as a revolt of philosophic minds against the ritualistic materialism of the Vedas. This view would imply that Aurobindo should not regard the earlier Sruti as an inspired scripture or the Upanishads as Vedanta (the end portion of the Vedas). Sri Aurobindo says he would not have troubled himself about the Veda secret. According to European scholars, the Vedic hymns are ritualistic compositions of joyous barbarians. Should this be the case, we could potentially perceive the Upanishads as a “revolution.” Sri Aurobindo disapproves of both the premise and the conclusion. He clearly says that the Upanishads and all later forms are a development from the Vedic religion and were never a revolt against its tenets.
How can the same book contain both ritual hymns and knowledge? According to Aurobindo, reconciliation can only happen when one sees, even in the exterior aspects of the hymns, not ritualistic materialism but symbolic ritualism. Traditions regarded Karmakanda as an indispensable stepping stone to the knowledge of the Atman. He writes, “That was an article of religious faith, no doubt, but it becomes valid for the intellect only if the Karmakanda is so interpreted as to show how its performance assists, prepares, or brings about the higher knowledge.”
Some “later” Veda hymns, according to European scholars, appear to be non-ritualistic and carry higher ideas. Sri Aurobindo acknowledges the use of separate texts to bolster philosophical doctrines. However, those interpretations prevent the Rigveda as a whole from serving as the foundation of a high spiritual philosophy. Aurobindo claims to have addressed the Veda’s overall interpretation and general character.
In general, there are only two interpretations: Sayana and European. It is these two that are concerning to Sri Aurobindo. The early Vedantins’ methods and results differed entirely from those of Sayana. Aurobindo says that he will explain the reasons in the second and third numbers of “Arya.” The impression one gathers from Sayana is that the “Veda” is not a great Revelation, a book of highest knowledge. Sri Aurobindo scathingly writes:
European scholars received this from Sayana and from which their theories started. They gave a picture of primitive worshippers praying to friendly gods, friendly but of a doubtful temper, gods of fire, rain, wind, dawn, night, earth and sky, for wealth, food, oxen, horses, gold, the slaughter of their enemies, even of their critics, victory in battle, the plunder of the conquered. And if so, how can such hymns be an indispensable preparation for the Brahmavidya? Unless indeed, it is a preparation by contraries, by exhaustion or dedication of the most materialistic and egoistic tendencies.
Sri Aurobindo believes that the hymns are indispensable not because of a mechanical virtue, but because the key experiences symbolized by the ritual are necessary to an integral knowledge and realization of transcendent and immanent Brahman. They are mines of all knowledge and on all the planes of consciousness.
Aurobindo does not claim that this is the first attempt to give an Adhyatmic interpretation of the Veda. He says it is an attempt to give the Veda a psychological sense based on the most modern method of critical research. Its interpretation of Vedic vocables is based on a re-examination of the field of comparative philology. Aurobindo calls for a reconstruction on a new basis, which he hopes will bring us nearer to a true science of language. Aurobindo says:
This I propose to develop in “The Origins of Aryan Speech”. I hope also to lead up to a recovery of the sense of the ancient spiritual conceptions of which old symbol and myth give us the indications and which I believe to have been at one time a common culture covering a great part of the globe with India perhaps, as a centre.
Next, we shall see how Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation differs significantly from that of Jamison and Brereton by considering a few hymns and ideas regarding the gods and sacrifices in the Veda. These would amply demonstrate the underlying thesis that approaching the Veda through a different metaphysics where the presuppositions are different leads to an incommensurability problem.
AGNI
Sri Aurobindo
SA describes the most important Agni as having multiple meanings: a burning brightness (when used for fire), a serpentine movement, strength, force, beauty, splendour, pre-eminence, and emotional values too (angry passion on one side; delight, and love on the other). The Vedic deity Agni is the first of the powers issued from the vast Godhead, whose conscious force has created the worlds. Agni is the form and flaming will of this Divinity. As a flaming force of knowledge, Agni descends to build up the worlds. Agni serves as a secret deity within the world, initiating action. Agni, the manifestation of all motivating power in action, presents as strength, beauty, knowledge, glory, and greatness.
He is a Truth-Conscious soul, a seer, a priest, and an infallible immortal worker in man. His goal is to purify everything he touches and lift the soul struggling in nature from darkness to light, suffering to love and joy. No sacrifice is possible without Agni. He is simultaneously the flame on the altar and the priest of the oblation. When man offers his inner and outer activities to the gods of a higher existence and attempts to ascend from mortality into immortality, it is this flame of upward aspiring Force and Will that he must kindle. Agni, the sacrifice leader, protects the great journey against the powers of darkness. Perfectly kindled, Agni expands into the vast light of the Truth, its ultimate home, as it ascends higher.
The Veda speaks of this divine Flame in a series of images, “splendid in poetic colouring, profound in psychological suggestion, and sublime in their mystic intoxication.” SA writes of Agni described by the Rishis as the rapturous priest, the God-Will intoxicated with its own delight, the young sage, the ever-wakeful flame in the house, the beloved guest, the lord in the creature, the divine child, the pure and virgin God, the invincible warrior, the leader on the path, the immortal in mortals, the worker established in man by the gods, the unobstructed in knowledge, the infinite in being, the vast sun of the Truth, the sustainer of the sacrifice, the divine perception, the light, the vision, the firm foundation, and so on.
His birth is from divine parents: Heaven and Earth; Mind and Body; and so on. The Rishis also claim that the Truth is his birthplace and home. Amongst the many descriptions of his birth, Agni’s birth from the fostering Cows, these Mothers of Plenty, is the greatest of his terrestrial births. Fostered by the Cows, he grows to his divine greatness, fills all the planes with his vast and shining limbs, and forms their kingdoms in the soul of man into the image of a divine Truth. Agni seeks no separate ends and claims no primacy over the other gods. He is content to be a worker for mankind and the helpful deities. SA writes, “Disinterested, sleepless, invincible, this divine Will-force works in the world as a universal Soul of power housed in all beings. Agni is the greatest, most powerful, most brilliant, and most impersonal of all the cosmic deities.”
Jamison and Brereton
For J and B, “Agni” refers to both the name of the second-most-important god after Indra and the noun “fire,” present in all ritual sacrifices. On a regular basis, Agni attends our rituals and receives our offerings. He is also a conduit for sacrifices made to other gods. Often referred to as the “mouth of the gods,” Agni serves as a mediator between celestial recipients and human offerors. Since the smoke and flames serve as a pathway for the gods to reach the sacrifice, Agni becomes a two-way conduit. He is a messenger, an ally, and a mediator for the more distant gods, all while being intimately associated with mankind.
In addition, Agni is both the sun and the fire that warm our homes and sustain our daily existence. J and B write that Agni hymns provide some of the most “inventive descriptions” of the uncontrollably destructive forest fires. One of the goals apparently is to use this destructive force to eliminate the opposition—a “demon-smasher.” The funeral fire, also known as cremation’s “flesh-eating” fire, is one example of this energy.
J and B claim that paradoxically, Agni is hidden in the plants as well as a small deity raised in the seas. This apparently dates back to Apam Napat, the “child of the waters” in Indo-Iranian antiquity. They subtly aim to place the Iranian text prior to the Vedas, upholding the Aryan narrative. According to them, the elaborate Agni birth songs make up a significant part of the Vedic lyrics about sacred fire. Thus, in one of the descriptions, Agni is a helpless newborn who grows up to be stronger than his parents and eats the plants from which he was born.
Agni goes by several names and titles. Tanunapat and Narasarnsa are associated with animal sacrifice; Kravyad is the “flesh-eating Are,” or the fire of the funeral pyre; Matarisvan brings the fire from heaven; and Jatavedas is the fire as an unbroken presence in the ritual. VaiWanara is the fire that becomes the sun, seeing and governing everything like a king. In stark contrast to Indra, the writers state that Agni takes part in relatively few narrative mythologies.
THE SOMA RITUAL
Rig-Veda IX.83
The Soma Ritual explanation is a typical example of how Sri Aurobindo stands in stark contrast to Jamison and Brereton in terms of understanding the Vedas. In the actual translations of the individual verses, the first is by Sri Aurobindo and the second by Jamison and Brereton. The individual commentary on the ritual comes next. It is quite evident that materialistic and literal translations completely miss the metaphysical aspects of the Veda. It grossly misses the spiritual significance of the most important text in Indian culture, on which all our knowledge systems rest.
पवित्रं ते विततं ब्रह्मणस्पते प्रभुर्गात्राणि पर्येषि विश्वतः ।
अतप्ततनूर्न तदामो अश्नुते शृतास इद्वहन्तस्तत्समाशत ॥१॥
- Wide spread out for thee is the sieve of thy purifying, O Master of the soul; becoming in the creature thou pervadest his members all through. He tastes not that delight who is unripe and whose body has not suffered in the heat of the fire; they alone are able to bear that and enjoy it who have been prepared by the flame.
- The filter is outstretched for you, o lord of the sacred formulation. Advancing, you circle around its limbs on all sides. A raw one, with unheated body, does not attain it [=filter]; only the cooked ones, driving along, have attained it entirely.
तपोष्पवित्रं विततं दिवस्पदे शोचन्तो अस्य तन्तवो व्यस्थिरन् ।
अवन्त्यस्य पवीतारमाशवो दिवस्पृष्ठमधि तिष्ठन्ति चेतसा ॥२॥
- The strainer through which the heat of him is purified is spread out in the seat of Heaven; its threads shine out and stand extended. His swift ecstasies foster the soul that purifies him; he ascends to the high level of Heaven by the conscious heart.
- The filter of the hot one is outstretched to the track of heaven; its blazing threads have been extended. His swift (steeds) aid the Purifier. They mount the back of heaven in their manifestation.
अरुरुचदुषसः पृश्निरग्रिय उक्षा बिभर्ति भुवनानि वाजयुः ।
मायाविनो ममिरे अस्य मायया नृचक्षसः पितरो गर्भमा दधुः ॥३॥
- This is the supreme dappled Bull that makes the Dawns to shine out, the Male that bears the worlds of the becoming and seeks the plenitude; the Fathers who had the forming knowledge made a form of him by that power of knowledge which is his; strong in vision they set him within as a child to be born.
- The dappled one at the front has made the dawns shine. The ox, seeking the prize, bears the worlds. They were measured out [=created] as masters of artifice by his artifice; the forefathers having their gaze on men set the embryo.
गन्धर्व इत्था पदमस्य रक्षति पाति देवानां जनिमान्यद्भुतः ।
गृभ्णाति रिपुं निधया निधापतिः सुकृत्तमा मधुनो भक्षमाशत ॥४॥
- As the Gandharva he guards his true seat; as the supreme and wonderful One he keeps the births of the gods; Lord of the inner setting, by the inner setting he seizes the enemy. Those who are utterly perfected in works taste the enjoyment of his honey-sweetness.
- The Gandharva guards his track just so; the infallible one protects the races of the gods. The lord of snares [=filter] grasps the defiler with his snare. Those who best perform (ritual) action have attained the draught of honey.
हविर्हविष्मो महि सद्म दैव्यं नभो वसानः परि यास्यध्वरम् ।
राजा पवित्ररथो वाजमारुहः सहस्त्रभृष्टिर्जयसि श्रवो बृहत् ॥५॥
- O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food, thou art the vast, the divine home; wearing heaven as a robe thou encompassest the march of the sacrifice. King with the sieve of thy purifying for thy chariot thou ascendest to the plenitude; with thy thousand burning brilliances thou conquerest the vast knowledge.
- You possessor of the oblation, as an oblation yourself you drive around the great heavenly seat, around the ceremonial course, clothing yourself in cloud. As king, having the filter as your chariot, you have mounted the prize. Having a thousand spikes, you win lofty fame.
Sri Aurobindo’s Commentary on the Soma Ritual
SA writes that an essential feature of Vedic hymns is that the many godheads invoked are really one Godhead. This one Godhead, known by many names, comes to humans in the form of many divine personalities. Perplexed Western scholars developed a theory of “henotheism” as an explanation. Thus, despite being polytheists, the Rishis elevated each of the worshipped gods to the status of the only deity. This invention, says SA, was the attempt of an alien mentality to understand the Indian idea of one Divine Existence manifesting in many names and forms.
SA says that the Veda contains the seed of the Vedantic conception of the Supreme Brahman—an unknowable and timeless existence, moving in the movement of the Gods but vanishing from the attempt of the mind to seize it. The human being aspires to the immortality and vast bliss of THAT, which is neither male nor female but a neuter in nature. Any of his names and aspects can help one recognise him. The Rishis hymn Agni as the supreme and universal Deva. As a Son of Force, he becomes Varuna, Mitra, Indra, Soma, Rudra, and Priest of the Sacrifice, ultimately leading to immortality, knowledge, and bliss. Others similarly hymn Indra and Soma.
SA clearly establishes that Soma is the Lord of the Wine of Delight, a symbol of immortality and bliss. Physically, Soma is in the plants, the earth’s growths, and the waters. The external sacrifice is a symbolic act that ultimately serves the purpose of achieving pure Ananda, or Bliss.
It is pressed out by the pressing stone (adri, grāvan), which has a close symbolic connection with the thunderbolt; the formed electric force of Indra, also called adri… Once pressed out as the delight of existence, Soma has to be purified through a strainer (pavitra), and through the strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl (camū) in which he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars (kalaśa) for Indra’s drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl or the jar is neglected, and Soma is simply described as flowing in a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home of Immortality. That these things are symbols is very clear in most of the hymns.
The human body functions like a jar of Soma-wine, with the strainer resting in “Heaven’s Seat,” Divaspade. This seat appears to be for the mind enlightened by knowledge (cetas). Now, not every human system can hold, sustain, and enjoy the often violent ecstasy of divine delight. The raw earthen vessel, not baked to consistency in the kiln’s fire, cannot hold the Soma-wine; it breaks and spills the precious liquid. Likewise, the physical body of an individual consuming this potent Ananda wine must endure and overcome the intense heats of life, thereby preparing for the enigmatic and intense heats of the Soma.
Soma, Lord of the Ananda, is the true creator who possesses the soul and brings out of it a divine creation. For him the mind and heart, enlightened, have been formed into a purifying instrument; freed from all narrowness and duality, the consciousness in it has been extended widely to receive the full flow of the sense-life and mind-life and turn it into pure delight of the true existence, the divine, the immortal Ananda. As the body of a man becomes full of the touch and exultation of strong wine, so all the physical systems become full of the touch and exultation of this divine Ananda…
This strong and fiery wine has to be purified, and the strainer has been spread out wide to receive it in the seat of heaven, divaspade; its threads or fibres are all of pure light and stand out like rays. Through these fibres, the wine comes streaming. The image refers to the purified mental and emotional consciousness, whose thoughts and emotions are the threads or fibres. After the purifying and filtering effect, these intense and forceful fluids no longer disrupt the mind or harm the body but instead nurture and enhance the purifier’s mind and body.
As the Rishis typically do to all the Vedic gods, Soma is the Supreme Personality, the high and universal Deva. He is the supreme “dappled One,” making the dawns shine as the Bull bears the worlds, seeking plenitude. According to SA, the word pṛśniḥ is for both the Bull, the supreme Male, and the Cow, the female energy. Symbolically, Soma is that first supreme dappled Bull, generator of the world. Soma is the Lord of the hosts of delight and guards the true seat of the Deva at the level of the Ananda; gandharva itthā padam asya rakṣati. He is the Supreme, wonderful (adbhutaḥ), and as the supreme and transcendent protects in those worlds the births of the gods, pāti devānāṁ janimāni adbhutaḥ. The “births of the gods” are manifestations of divine principles in the cosmos, particularly the formation of the godhead in its many forms. In the last verse, the Rishi speaks of Soma as the transcendent guarding the world of the Ananda formed in man against the attacks of the enemies, the powers of division, the powers of undelight (dviṣaḥ, arātīḥ), and false creative knowledge, or Avidya (adevīr māyāḥ).
The Lord of the Ananda, governing their inner nature, protects men against the forces of outer wickedness. Soma is thus the offering, immortality, a Deva, and above all the superconscient Bliss and Truth, bṛhat, from which the wine descends to us. In the sacrificial ascent, the Deva becomes the King of all our activities, master of our divinised nature and its energies, and with the enlightened conscious heart as his chariot, ascends into the infinite and immortal state. SA writes, “Like a sun with a thousand blazing energies, he conquers the vast regions of the inspired truth, the superconscient knowledge; rājā pavitraratho vājam āruhaḥ, sahasrabhṛṣṭir jayasi śravo bṛhat.” SA says that these selected hymns exemplify the real functions of the Vedic gods, the symbolism, the nature of the sacrifice, and finally reveal the Veda’s secret. SA asserts that these ideas are not of the select few, but are the pervading sense and teaching of the Rigveda.
The Soma Ritual By J And B
J and B assert that most of the Rgveda hymns were for the soma ritual. The central rite of this sacrifice was for the soma juice, which was offered to the gods and shared among male participants. The process of creating this juice is then described. A stone would be used to crush the soma plant. After purification or filtering, the extracted juice flowed into a different vessel and mixed with milk. As J and B write, the Rigved describes various methods. In Agnistoma, there are three soma pressings in a single day. In the Atiratra, or “overnight,” there are still three pressings on one day, but the rite continues throughout the night. The priests make the final Atiratra offerings on the morning of the second day.
They then speculate on one of the “perennial problems in Rgvedic and Avestan studies,” which is the identity of the soma plant or its Iranian equivalent, the haoma plant. The effect of soma on humans and gods is described as derived from ^mad, which roughly means “exhilarate” or “elate.” Thus, the soma juice invigorated and heightened their senses. They reject the early speculation that soma juice was an alcoholic drink, as there is no mention of fermentation, and the root word does not imply “intoxication.” They discuss two of the most dominant themes in recent times regarding the nature of the soma plant, mostly quoting European scholarship here. The soma plant was either a stimulant (probably ephedra) or a hallucinogen (Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric mushroom). Some authorities feel that previous attempts to identify the soma/haoma plant had “overvalued the Vedic evidence and undervalued the Iranian.” As a result, the soma plant was Peganum harmala, or mountain rue, which also has psychoactive properties. The poets’ unexpected associations, they argue, best explain themselves as reflections of their hallucinogenic experiences. The authors finally decide that the hallucogenic nature of soma is a difficult issue to resolve.
But J and B find more textual evidence to support the interpretation of the soma juice as a stimulant than as a hallucinogen, since neither the imagery nor the vision of the poets require a hallucinogen to explain them. The authors declare wisely that there is no need to assume the poets experienced the effects of a hallucinogen to explain the bizarre and obscure in these hymns. They make the final conceding remark regarding the soma ritual: “While there is much that remains obscure in the Rgveda, interpreters of the text have been able to make progress by the simple assumption that the hymns do make sense and that the poets did know exactly what they were doing.” (Italics mine)
They write that this well-known hymn faces numerous well-known challenges. They write that the hymn has elicited many different and contradictory interpretations, to which they add their own. They write that the poet’s name also refers to the mystical metaphor of the filter (pavitra). In this hymn, the necessary quality is being cooked rather than raw. The hymn transforms the raw material from the natural plant into a cultural product, both through physical manipulation and verbal accompaniment, even though there is no literal cooking by heat. Verse 2 suggests a cosmic dimension to the “filter” metaphor, likening it to the sun, whose rays traverse the sky like the soma’s footprints on the filter. Verse 1’s “cooking” provides a neat transition to verse 2’s “hot one,” with heat being an obvious characteristic of the sun. They find Verse 3 and the first half of Verse 4 quite enigmatic, given that they are in the middle of the hymn. The “dappled one” and the “ox” refer both to the Sun and to Soma, each of whom is also associated with dawn, and the first half of the verse thus continues the Sun/Soma identification of Verse 2.
They write, “The second half of verse 3 appears to contain one of those paradoxes beloved of Rgvedic bards.” According to their interpretation, the forefathers are the ancestral poet-sacrificers, or their divine prototypes. The forefathers “set” the embryo of Soma or Sun, which in turn, through their magic power, made them into poets. Soma/Sun is both the progenitor of the forefathers in their ritual role; and, as they fulfil their ritual role, their child too. They speculate that the Gandharva’s identity in Verse 4 is a double reference to Soma and the Sun, each guarding tracks of one another.
The second half of Verse 4 returns to the clearer ritual context of a filter that traps the impurities of the soma as the liquid passes over it, and the priests attain the prepared soma. The final verse proclaims the soma as a king, outfitted with cosmic garments and travelling a cosmic course, with the filter, the focus of the hymn, as his chariot. They achieve a “lofty fame.” They write that the hymn’s “omphalos” structure is quite pronounced, with many rings. They conclude that “enclosed within these rings are the mysterious and shifting identifications that make the hymn both aggravating and mesmerizing.”
Concluding Remarks
A purely ritualistic interpretation of the Veda is a limited view, according to Sri Aurobindo. The average person remains unaware of its deeper meaning in such a reading of the Vedas. For the initiated, the Vedas are the path to reach the highest aspirations of immortality and permanent bliss. For at least five thousand years, the remarkable preservation of the Vedic text, down to the precise pronunciation and intonation of each word, must carry some significance. As a culture, the first thing we must do is accord it the respect it deserves, which is perhaps the strongest wall preventing a civilisational collapse in the face of consistent attacks physically and intellectually.
The preservation, protection, and verbal transmission of the text from guru to shishya has been an extraordinary strategy that prevented another civilisational discontinuity that occurs when libraries are burned. Fortunately, dedicated Brahmins have preserved our knowledge in their minds, not in libraries. Sanatana Dharma is a conglomerate of many Vedic and non-Vedic traditions, but the former has guided the culture and formed the basis of harmony and peace in the country by adopting a non-aggressive stance against non-Vedic traditions. According to Balagangadhara, when interacting with each other, the major hallmark of Indian traditions (Vedic and non-Vedic) is an “indifference to the differences.” Syncretism, interactions, and the transfer of ideas all occur when traditions come close to each other, but they never result in the violence typical of interactions when Abrahamic religions come in contact with each other or the pagan traditions. One of the fundamental ways Indian culture dealt with alien religions coming to India was by traditionalising them. Instead of continuing this process, intellectuals are keen to convert our mass of traditions into religions with well-defined and concrete gods, doctrines, books, and temples. The conversion of traditions into religions is causing a surge in intolerance throughout the country. Indian culture, which has the solution for pluralism and has been far better at dealing with multiculturalism for centuries, suddenly finds itself in the dock for “Hindu fundamentalism,” an oxymoron.
The Vedas form the crux of Indian civilisation, and the attempts to preserve and protect them should only be increasing in the days to come. Modernity, Semitic religions that refuse to stop interfering in other traditions, and the values of liberalism and individualism are intensely inimical to the traditional land of India. Tradition does not imply dogmatism. Indian traditions are characterised by flexibility and dynamism, offering solutions for the present and future, particularly in addressing the growing multiculturalism within smaller geographical areas. Thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Balagangadhara have articulated this clearly.
Fortunately, Indian culture has ably preserved the Vedas. Most of us would not have the time or inclination to spend five or six years to learn one Veda. Therefore, we should defer to the experts when we lack in-depth domain knowledge. However, it is perfectly all right to know about a non-domain area, as we are only humans filled with curiosity. If one is interested in learning about String theory, reading a book by Michio Kaku could be an excellent approach. Similarly, anyone interested in learning about humanity’s greatest scripture should perhaps read Sri Aurobindo’s work, not the output of Indological scholarships. The latter approach bears a resemblance to a creationist’s interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. There would be only violence and injustice in ample measure.
RANDOM MUSINGS 