Hymns to the Mystic Fire

[9]

RV I.1.8, 5-7

[word] - word(s) omitted by the author or lost through damage to the manuscript that are required by grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors.

I will cite first a passage in the first hymn of the first Mandala, the invocation to Agni with which the Rig Veda opens. Agni the god of the sacred flame, ruler of the sacrifice, is described there as the "shining guardian of the Truth increasing in his own home", gopâm ritasya dîdivim. If we wish to render this verse ritualistically and take Agni as nothing but the physical fire we must interpret rita otherwise, "king of the sacrifices, the shining guardian of the rite", and if he increases in his own home, it must be in the house of sacrifice or on his own place on

Page 545

the altar. Or if "rita" is the cosmic Law Agni is the god of fire who is the guardian of the Law—in what sense?—and who is manifested in the sacrificial flame on the altar. Now, if we take the rik by itself, there is no means by which we can decide among these and other possible interpretations. But in the first place the idea of the guardian of the rita is a common thought of the Vedic Rishis and it occurs in passages where rita cannot well mean the sacrifice; even the phrase gopâm ritasya occurs elsewhere with this clear significance. The gods generally are said to be born in the Rita, ritejah, ritajâtah; they are increasing the rita, ritâvridh, protecting the rita, ritapâ, ritasya gopâ, touching the rita, ritaspriҫ, sending down streams of the rita, knowing the rita, ritam id chikiddhi, rita-conscious, ritachid. It is evident even at a first glance, and we shall be able to establish it conclusively enough, that rita must mean in these phrases some kind of truth and not the ritual of the sacrifice. Moreover this rik is preceded by three others in which there is repeated mention of the ideas of truth and thought and knowledge. Therefore in the absence of convincing reasons to the contrary we are justified in supposing that Agni is described as the shining guardian of the Truth and it must then immediately occur to us that if he is spoken of here in a psychological function and the Truth is a psychological not a physical conception, then he is described as its "shining" guardian because his light is necessary to that guardianship. The light of the god must therefore be an image for a psychological and not a physical illumination. Equally, the own home of such a deity increasing in the exercise of such a function should be rather a psychological region than the house of ritual sacrifice or a place on a sacrificial altar.

Let us examine the three Riks more minutely. The fifth verse runs: "Agni, the priest of the oblation (or, of the summoning), the seer-will (or he whose work, whose sacrifice or whose power-ofworks is a seer's), the true, who has most richly-varied (inspired) knowledge, may he come, a god with the gods." In this verse we have two words of doubtful meaning, ҫravas and kratu. Sayana wherever he can, renders ҫravas food, elsewhere fame, or where neither of these will do, ҫravas (also ҫrushti) is for him wealth

Page 546

or rarely hymn. But there is the word satya, true! That he forces to mean "giving true or right results of the sacrifice", evidently a meaning which the text itself does not suggest and read into the word from the commentator's mind. Again there is the phrase कविऋतुः and we cannot fit this into the ritualistic interpretation unless we destroy the Vedic significance of the word Kavi. Well then, we have two words satya and kavikratu which suggest a profound psychological character for the god Agni, the shining guardian of the Truth. It does not matter how we take kratu. Kavi is the seer, one who has vision of the revealed Truth and receives the inspired word, the drashtâ of the Vedic mantra with the inspired mind of knowledge. If kratu is sacrifice—Sayana often prefers "work"—then Agni is the priest whose sacrifice is that of the seer, therefore the sacrifice over which he presides is that over which the divine knowledge presides; if work, then he is the god of the inspired workings; if power of workings, then the god whose power for works is guided by divine knowledge. I suggest that kratu which Sayana sometimes interprets [as] knowledge and which has for one of its senses "mind", is in a psychological sense the mental power that presides over all action, that is to say the will or the volitional mind. The two words kavikratuh satyah, coming together in this intimate way, cannot be disconnected; the phrase must mean therefore that Agni is guided in his will or his works by the seer's vision of the Truth because he is himself true in his being, free from the cosmic falsehood. What then of chitraҫravastamah? Has it no connection at all with the two preceding words or does it mean that because Agni is true in being and has the seer-will, therefore he gives man all sorts of food or all sorts of wealth? I suggest that ҫravas means hearing or that which is heard (this is the root of its other sense fame) and is used by the mystics for the inspired knowledge which is contained in the Vedic mantra or else simply the inspirations that come from the divine Truth of which Agni is the seer. We have then a clear connection and interdependence of sense in the three epithets of Agni, he is the Truth in his being, therefore his will or works are those of the seer of the Truth and he receives all the varied inspirations of the

Page 547

knowledge that comes from the Truth; for that reason he is the hotâ in the sacrifice which the soul of man offers to the Lords of the Truth. We see at once in these three illuminative epithets all that is meant by the description of Agni as the shining guardian of the Truth.

The next verse runs, "O Agni, the good which thou wilt create for the giver, thine verily is that truth, O Angiras." This is interpreted ritualistically, "The good that thou wilt do to the giver, that (good) is thine, (this statement is) true (and not false)." But it is hardly possible on any rational law of poetic composition that satyam here should have no relation to satya immediately preceding it in the last verse. At any rate, the phrase tat satyam is used elsewhere in the Veda to mean "that truth" and is applied to the hidden sun or imprisoned light which the Angirases find as the result of their sacrifice & seeking in the cave of the Panis. Here too in connection with the same phrase tat satyam, Agni is described as the Angiras. The coincidence can hardly be fortuitous. Now the Angiras of the Veda, we shall find, is precisely the seer-puissance or seer-will, kavikratuh. So the good which Agni, the Angiras or seer-will, is to create for the human soul, giver of the sacrifice, is that divine Truth now withheld from man, the hidden light, the lost Sun which the powers of the seer-will find for man. We see in another hymn that Bhaga, a Sun God, creates this good or bhadram for man by getting rid of the evil dream to which the darkness or falsehood of existence belongs. We shall find too that in the Vedic idea the divine bliss or immortality of beatitude was held to be a result of the winning of the supramental Truth and this is evidently the idea which the verse indicates. It is indeed the central conception of the Vedic doctrine.

The next verse introduces and is connected in syntax with the rik which speaks of Agni as the guardian of the Truth; the two have to be taken together. "To thee,O Agni, we come day by day, in the night and the light, bringing with (or, by) the thought the obeisance; to thee ruling over the sacrifices, shining etc." This in the ritualistic sense must mean that the priests offer sacrifice daily both during the day and during the night by means of the

Page 548

hymn or the work (Sayana interprets dhî sometimes in one sense, sometimes in the other according to his pleasure, but sometimes admits the significance "thought" or "understanding"), bringing, that is to say, doing obeisance or perhaps bringing the food or portion to the god.¹ But if Agni is the god of an inner Flame, then we must interpret the verse differently. We see that the obeisance is brought, carried (bharantah, Latin ferentes, Gr. φέροντες) by the thought; therefore, the obeisance must be an inner bowing down or submission to an inner flame. Namas, the obeisance, implies also obedience; the verb is used in the Veda in the sense of subduing. Now Agni kavikratuh is the luminous force or will-power of the Divine Existence, ekam sat; the force is the flame, the light of the flame is the knowledge; therefore he is the shining guardian of the Truth, for his unified power and knowledge protect all the workings of the divine Truth in the universe. The sacrifice offered by Man is a sacrifice offered for the conquest and conscious possession of this Truth at present concealed from him by ignorance and darkness. Therefore he is the ruler of the sacrifice; therefore the seekers come to him from day to day bringing to him submission in their thought so that the divine Will may govern their mentality and their action and lead it to the Truth. Day and night are, we shall see, symbols of the dark and illumined states of the human mind; the former is our ordinary consciousness, the latter that on which there comes the dawn, the light and power from the supramental Truth. Moreover this Agni increases in his own home. We shall see hereafter whether the own home of Agni is not the plane of the supramental Truth itself on which the divine powers dwell and from which they descend to the aid of the seeker. We must also understand the weal or "good state of being" [in] the closing verse, "Be easy of approach to us as a father to his child; cleave to us for our happy being", as the state of bliss, the good, bhadram, which comes by the possession of the Truth. The Rishi is obviously not asking physical fire to allow him to approach

Page 549

and embrace it as a son with his father or pleading to fire to cleave to him for his welfare; the fulfilment of such a prayer would be slightly inconvenient and hardly lead to welfare. It is to the godhead, the Divine, that he prays, not the sacrificial flame on the altar, and what can be meant by the cleaving of a godhead to man,—not, be it noted, merely its succour or nearness—if Agni does not represent some divine power which must embrace the human being as a father his child and whose constant presence leads, not to the possession of herds and slaves and gold, but to a spiritually perfect state, svastaye? It is because the words of the Veda are not given their proper force, because we shirk their precise and evident meaning, preferring to think that the Rishis wrote loosely, clumsily and foolishly rather than to admit that they had other and profounder & subtler thoughts than ours—it is for this reason that we miss constantly the true sense of the Veda.