Hymns to the Mystic Fire

[30]

RV V.1

Fifth Mandal - Translation and Explanation.

[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.

1) Agni by the fuel heaped by the peoples has awakened towards the coming Dawn as towards the Sun-cow coming; like the waters spouting up for wide flowing, his flames move towards the heaven.

2) The Priest of the offering awoke for sacrifice to the gods, Agni stood up high in the dawn and perfect-minded; the gathered force of him was seen reddening when he was entirely kindled; a great god has been released out of the darkness.

3) When so he has put forth the tongue of his multitude, pure is the activity of Agni with the pure herd of his rays; then is the goddess discerning yoked to her works in a growing plenty; she upward-straining, he high-uplifted, he feeds on her with his flaming activities.

4) Towards Agni move the minds of the seekers after the Godhead, as their eyes move in Surya; when the two unlike Dawns bring him forth, he is born a white steed of being in the van of the days (or, at the head of our forces).

5) He is born full of delight at the head of the days helpful in the helpful gods, active in those that take their joy; in each of our homes establishing his seven ecstasies Agni, priest of the offering, takes seat in his might for the sacrifice.

6) Mighty for sacrifice Agni of the offerings takes his seat in the lap of theMother, in that rapturous middle world, young and a seer, seated in many homes of his dwelling, full of the Truth, upholding our actions and therefore kindled in the mid-spaces.

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7) Verily, it is this Agni, the illumined seer who perfects us in these lower activities, the master of offering, that they adore with obeisances and submission; who stretched out the double firmament by the force of the Truth; him they strengthen (or brighten) with the rich droppings, the eternal master of substance.

8) Strong ever, he grows stronger housed in his own seat in us & home, our guest auspicious to us; master-bull with the thousand horns of thy flame, strong with that Strength, O Agni, by thy might thou art in front of all others.

9) At once, O Agni, thou passest beyond all others in him to whom thou makest thyself manifest in thy splendid beauty, adorable and full of body and widely luminous, the beloved guest of the human peoples.

10) To thee,Ovigorous Agni, the continents (or the peoples) bring their oblation from near and bring from afar; perceive the perfected mind in one most happy, for wide and mighty is the blessed peace of thee, O Agni.

11) Oluminous Agni, mount today thy perfect and luminous chariot with the masters of the sacrifice; thou knowest those paths, bring then hither through the wide mid-world the gods to eat of our offerings.

12) Utterance have we given to the word of our delight for the seer who hath understanding, for the lord who is mighty; firm in the light one by submission to him reaches in Agni a fixity, even as in heaven, so here golden bright and vast-expanding.

Explanation.

The awakening of the divine Force and its action in a man is in this hymn rather indicated than described. The súkta is purely lyric in its character, vacho vandáru, an expression of delight and adoration, a stoma or stabilising mantra intended to fix in the soul the sevenfold delight of Agni, dame dame sapta ratná (Rik 5), and assure that state of perfected and happy mentality, pure in perception, light and calm in the emotional parts,—the bhandishthasya sumatim of the tenth rik,—which the divine force dwelling in us abidingly assures to our conscious being. The

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image of the physical morning sacrifice is maintained throughout the first two riks, but from its closing phrase, mahán devas tamaso niramochi, the Rishi departs from the ritualistic symbol and confines himself to the purely psychological substance of his thought, returning occasionally to the physical aspects of Agni but only as a loose poetical imagery. There is nothing of the close symbolic parallelism which is to be found in some hymns of the Veda.

Abodhi Agnih samidhá janánám, Prati dhenum iváyatím ushásam,
Yahvá iva pra vayám ujjihánáh, Pra bhánavah sisrate nákam achchha.

Force, pure, supreme & universal has, in man, awakened; divine power is acting, revealed, in the consciousness of creatures born into matter, janánám. It wakes when the fuel has been perfectly heaped, abodhi samidhá,—that power, plenty and richness of being on which this cosmic Force in us is fed and which minister to its intensity and brightness. It wakes towards the coming dawn of illumination, as to the Sun-cow, the cow of Surya, the illumination of the ideal life & the ideal vision entering the soul that works imprisoned in the darkness of Matter. The flames of the divine activity in us are pointing upwards towards heaven, mounting up from the lower levels of our being to the heights of the pure mind, sisrate nákam achchha, and their rising is like the wide gushing up into manifestation of waters that have been hidden. For it is a great god that has been released out of the darkness, mahán devas tamaso niramochi.

The two familiar images in dhenu & in yahvá are intended to convey directly in one, suggest obliquely by the simile in the other, the inseparable companionship of divine power with the divine light and the divine being. All the gods are indeed usharbudhah; with the morning of the revelation all divine faculties in us arise out of the night in which they have slept. But the figure here is that of awakening towards the coming dawn. The illumination has not yet touched the mortal mind, it is on its way, approaching, áyatím, like a cow coming from the distance to its

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pasture; it is then that the power divine stirs in its receptacle, seizes upon all that is available in the waking consciousness of the creature and, kindled, streams up towards the altitudes of the pure mind in the face of the coming divine knowledge which it rises to meet. Divine knowledge, revealing, inspiring, suggesting, discerning, calls up the godlike ideal activity in us which exceeds man's ordinary motions,—wakes it even before it actually occupies this mortal system, by its far-off touch and glimmer on the horizon; so too divine, inspired and faultless activity in us rises heavenward & calls down God's dawn on His creature.

This great uprush of force is in its nature a great uprush of divine being; for force is nothing but the power of being in motion. It is the secret waters in us that released, gush up openly & widely from their prison & their secrecy in our mortal natures; for in vitalised matter, in mind emmeshed in material vitality, the ideal & spiritual self are always concealed and await release and manifestation; in this mortal that immortal is covered & curtained in and lives and works behind the veil, martyeshu devam amartyam. Therefore is the uprush of divine force in the great release felt to be the wide uprush of divine being & consciousness, yahvá iva pra vayám ujjihánáh.

Abodhi hotá yajatháya deván, Úrdhwo Agnih sumanáh prátar asthát,
Samiddhasya ruśad adarśi pájo, Mahán devas tamaso niramochi.

The purpose of the waking is next emphasised. It is for divine action in man that God's force awakes in us. It is the divine priest of the offering who stands up in the dawn of the illumination to offer to the gods, to each great god his portion, to Indra a pure & deified mentality, to Vayu a pure & divine vital joy & action, to the four great Vasus, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga & Aryamá the greatnesses, felicities, enjoyments & strengths of perfected being, to the Aswins the youth of the soul & its raptures & swiftnesses, to Daksha & Saraswati, Ila, Sarama & Mahi the activities of the Truth & Right, to the Rudras, Maruts & Adityas, the play of

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physical, vital, mental & ideative activities. Agni has stood up in the dawning illumination high uplifted in the pure mentality, úrdhwa, with a perfected mind, sumanáh. He purifies in his rising the temperament and fixes on it the seal of peace & joy; he purifies the intellectuality & makes it fit to receive the activity of the illuminating Truth & Infinite Rightness which is beyond intellect. Great is the god who has been released out of the darkness of this Avidya, out of this our blind bodily matter, out of this our smoke-enveloped vital energy, out of this our confused luminous murk of mortal mind and sense-enslaved intelligence. Mahán devas tamaso niramochi. For now that he has been perfectly kindled, it is no longer God's occasional flamings that visit our nature, but His collected and perfect force, pájah, is seen reddening in our heavens.

The first verse is preoccupied with the idea of the self-illumination of Agni, the bhánavah, the flames of Force manifesting Knowledge as its essential nature—for Force is nothing but Knowledge shaped into creative energy & the creations of energy & veiled by its shape, as a man's soul is veiled by his mind & body which are themselves shapes of his soul. In the words abodhi, vayám, nákam, in the relation of Agni to Usha and the emphasis on the illuminative character of Usha as the Sun Cow, this aspect of illumination & manifestation is stressed & enlarged. In the second verse the native aspect of the divine Force as a mighty power of action, consummating & purifying, is brought out with an equal force and insistence. It is as the hotá that Agni awakes; in this illumination of the dawn that comes with him to man, prátah, he stands up with the intellect and emotional temperament perfected & purified, sumanáh, for the great offering of man's whole internal & external life & activity to God in the gods, yajatháya deván, fulfilling the upward impulse, úrdhwa, which raises matter towards life, life towards mind, mind towards ideality & spirit, and thus consummating God's intention in the creature. In the next verse the nature of this human uplifting, this upward straining of the mind through heart & intellect to ideal Truth & Love & Right, is indicated & particularised in an image of great poetical force and sublimity.

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Yad ím gaṇasya raśanám ajígah, Śucir ankte śuchibhir gobhir Agnih,
Ád dakshiṇá yujyate vájayantí, Uttánám úrdhwo adhayaj juhúbhih.

When so he has put forth the tongue of enjoyment of his host, Yad ím gaṇasya raśanám ajígah, Agni has put forth his collected power for an uplifted and perfect activity, ruśad adarśi pájo,—for redness is always the symbolic colour of action and enjoyment. This pájas, Agni's force or massed army, is again described in the gaṇasya raśanám, but while the idea in the second verse is that of their indistinctive mass, here the gaṇah or host of Agni's powers, the devatás of his nature who apply themselves to his particular works, are represented as brought out in their individuality collected in a mass,—for this is always the force of gaṇah,—each with his tongue of flame licking the mid-air, (surabhá u loke .. madhye iddhah in v. 6), enjoying that is to say the vital energies & vital pleasure (aśwa and ghritam), which support this higher action. Supported by this vital joy & force Agni acts, ankte agnir; but the enjoyment is not the impure & unilluminated enjoyment of the unuplifted creature,—he is śuchih, purely bright, not smoky with the unpurified Pranic impulses, and his flames of action are in their nature pure flames of illumination, śuchibhir gobhir. In modern diction, when the divine force has so far purified us, our activities & enjoyments are not darkened and troubled with striving & clouded vital desires which strain dimly towards a goal but, not being ritajna, know not what they should seek, how they should seek it, in what force & by what method and stages; our action becomes a pure illumination, our enjoyment a pure illumination; by the divine illuminations, as their motive force, essence & instrument, our actions & enjoyments are effected. We see the just, curious and delicate literary art of the Vedic style in its symbolism, by this selection of the great word, go, in this context, in preference to any other, to describe the flames of Agni. In the next line, with an equally just delicacy of selection juhú is used for the same flames instead of bhánu or go.

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It is in this state of pure activity & enjoyment that the characteristic uplifting action of Agni is exercised; for then, ád, the discriminative intellect, dakshiná, growing in the substance of its content and havings, vájayantí, is yoked or applied to its work under these new conditions. Dakshina the discriminative intellect is the energy of Daksha, master of the viveka or unerring right discernment, but unerring in the ideality, in mahas or vijnána, his and her own home, not unerring in the intellect, but only straining towards the hidden truth & right out of the mental dualities of right & wrong, truth & falsehood. This deputy & messenger of the Ritam brihat seated in manas as reason, discernment, intellect, can only attain its end and fulfil its mission when Agni, the divine Force, manifests in the Prana and manas and uplifts her to the ideal plane of consciousness. Therefore in this new activity she is described as straining & extending herself upwards, uttánám, to follow & reach Agni where are his topmost flames, úrdhwa, in the ideal being. From there he leans down and feeds on her, adhayaj, through the flames of his divine activity, juh úbhih, burning in the purified and upward aspiring activities of the intellectual mind. This essential relation of the divine force and the purified mind is brought out in a more general thought and figure in the first line of the succeeding rik.

Agnim achchhá devayatám manánsi, Chakshúnshíva Súrye san charanti,
Yad ím suváte ushasá virúpe, Śweto vájí jáyate agre ahnám.

Iva in the Veda is not always a particle of similitude and comparison. Its essential meaning is truly, verily, so, thus, and it is from this sense that it derives its conjunctive uses, sometimes meaning and or also, sometimes as, like. Its force here is to distinguish between the proper activity of Agni & Surya, of manas and chakshu, & to confine the latter to their proper sphere and thus by implication to confine the former also. When we are mortals content with our humanity, then we are confused in our functions; the manas or sense-mind attempts to do the work of

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the mahas or idea-mind, to effect original knowledge, to move in Surya, in the powerful concrete image of the Veda. The idea also confuses itself with sense and moves in the sense-forces, the indriyas, instead of occupying itself in all purity with its own function. Hence the confusions of our intellect and the stumblings of our mental activity in its grappling with the contacts of the outer world. But when we rise from our mortal nature to the nature of godhead, devayantah, amritam sapantah, then the first change is the passage from mortal impurity to immortal purity, and the very nature of purity is a clear brightness and rightness, in which all our members work perfectly in God & the gods, each doing its own function & preserving its right relation with its superior and inferior fellows. Therefore in those who are attaining this nature of godhead, devayatám, their senseminds strain towards Agni, the divine force of Right Being & Right Action, satyam ritam,—they tend that is to say to have the right state, bháva or temperament, out of which the right action of the indriyas spontaneously proceeds; the seeings of the Yogin who attains, move in Surya, the god of the ideal powers, all that he perceives, creates, distinguishes, is worked out by the pure ideal mentality, which then uses its four powers of self-revelation, self-inspiration, self-intuition, self-discernment without suffering obscuration by the clouds of vital desire & impulse or deflection by the sense-impacts & sense-reactions. The sensational mind confines itself then to its proper work of receiving passively the impacts of the vital, material & mental outer world & the illuminations of Surya and of pouring out on the world in its reaction to the impacts, not its own hasty & distorted responses, but the pure force & action of Agni which works on the world, pure, right & unerring & seizes on it to possess & enjoy it for God in the human being. This is the goal towards which Dakshina is striving in her upward self-extension which ends by her taking her place as viveka or right discernment in the kingdom of Surya, and this she begins already in her new activities by discerning the proper action of the mind from the proper action of idea in the mind. The purified intellect liberates itself from the obscurations of desire,

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the slavery to vital impulse, and the false reports and false values of the matter-besieged sense-powers.

The essential nature of Agni's manifestation which is at the root of this successful distinction, is then indicated. Night & Dawn are the two unlike mothers who jointly give birth to Agni, Night, the avyakta unmanifest state of knowledge & being, the power of Avidyá, Dawn, the vyakta manifest state of knowledge & being, the power of Vidyá. They are the two dawns, the two agencies which prepare the manifestation of God in us, Night fostering Agni in secret in the activities of Avidyá, the activities of unillumined mind, life & body, by which the god in us grows out of matter towards spirit, out of earth up to heaven, Dawn manifesting him again, more & more, until he is ready here for his continuous, pure & perfect activity. When this point of our journey towards perfection is reached he is born, śweto vájí, in the van of the days. We have here one of those great Vedic figures with a double sense in which the Rishis at once revealed & concealed their high knowledge, revealed it to the Aryan mind, concealed it from the unAryan. Agni is the white horse which appears galloping in front of the days,—the same image is used with a similar Vedantic sense in the opening of the Brihad Aranyak Upanishad; but the horse here is not, as in the Upanishad, Aśwa, the horse of vital & material being in the state of life-force, but vájí, the horse of Being generally, Being manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the brihat of all this sevenfold substantial being that is the world we are, but white, the colour of illumined purity. He manifests therefore at this stage primarily as that mighty wideness, purity & illumination of our being which is the true basis of the complete & unassailable siddhi in the Yoga, the only basis on which right knowledge, right thinking, right living, right enjoyment can be firmly, vastly & perpetually seated. He appears therefore in the van of the days, the great increasing states of illuminated force & being,—for that is the image of ahan,—which are the eternal future of the mortal when he has attained immortality.

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In the next rik the idea is taken up, repeated & amplified to its final issues in that movement of solemn but never otiose repetition which is a feature of Vedic style.

Janishta hi jenyo agre ahnám, Hito hiteshu arusho vaneshu,
Dame dame sapta ratná dadháno, Agnir hotá ni shasádá yajíyán.

This divine force is born victorious by its very purity & infinity over all the hostile forces that prevent, obstruct, limit or strive to destroy our accomplished freedoms, powers, illuminations & widenesses; by his victory he ushers in the wide days of the siddha, for which these nights & dawns of our human life are the preparatory movements. He is effective & helpful in the effective powers that work out for our good the movements [of] this lower life towards immortal strength & power, he is active & joyous, arusho, in those that take the delight of these movements and so prepare us for the immortal bliss & ecstasy of the divine nature. Manifesting progressively that Ananda the force of God establishes and maintains in each house of our habitation, in each of our five bodies, in each of our seven levels of conscious existence, the seven essential forms of Ananda, the bliss of body, the bliss of life, the bliss of mind & the senses, the bliss of ideal illumination, the bliss of pure divine universal ecstasy, the bliss of cosmic Force, the bliss of cosmic being. For although we tend upwards immediately to the pure Idea, yet not that but Ananda is the goal of our journey; the manifestation in our lower members of the divine bliss reposing on the divine force & being is the law of our perfection. Agni, whether he raises us to live in pure mind or yet beyond to the high plateaus of the pure ideal existence, adhi shnuná brihatá vartamánam, establishes & supports as the divine force that divine bliss in its seven forms in whatever houses of our being, whatever worlds of our consciousness, have been already possessed by our waking existence, life, body & mind, or life, body, mind and idea, dame dame dadhánah. Thus manifesting God's bliss in us he takes his seat in those houses, domiciled, damúnáh, as we have it in other

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Suktas, and in those worlds, to perform as the hotá in his greater might for the sacrifice, greater than the might of other gods or greater than he has hitherto possessed, the offering of human life into the immortal being, á daivyam janam, yajatháya deván.

In a culminating rik which at once completes the first half of the Sukta and introduces a new movement, the Rishi once more takes up the closing thought of this last verse and carries it out into a fuller conclusion.

Agnir hotá ni asídad yajíyán, Upasthe mátuh surabhá u loke,
Yuvá kavih purunihshtha ritává, Dhartá krishtínám uta madhye iddhah.

Agni thus takes his seat in us and, because it is through human activity that he is to fulfil the sacrifice, because the ascending movement is not completed, he takes it in the lap of his Mother in that rapturous middle world. For the middle world, the Bhuvah, including all those states of existence in which the mind and the life are interblended as the double medium through which the Purusha acts and connects Heaven & Earth, is the proper centre of all human action. Mind blended with the vital energies is our seat even here in the material world. The bhuvah or middle regions are worlds of rapture & ecstasy because life-energy & the joy of life fulfil themselves there free from the restrictions of the material world in which it is an exile or invader seeking to dominate & use the rebellious earthly material for its own purposes. Agni sits in the lap of the mother, on the principle of body in the material human being, occupying there the vitalised mind consciousness which is man's present centre of activity & bringing into it the mightier bliss of the rapturous middle world to support & enlarge even the vital and physical activities & enjoyments of our earthly existence. He sits there in the human sacrifice, full of eternal youth and vigour, yuvá, in possession of the ideal truth & knowledge, in possession of the unerring rightness of the liberated pure ideal life & consciousness, kavir ritává, & realising that truth & right in many purposes & activities, purunihshthah. For he works all these results as the upholder

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of men in their actions, efforts & labours, dhartá krishtínám,—he is that in all his forms of force from the mere physical heat in earth & in our bodies to the divine Tapas in us & without us by which God effects & supports the existence of the cosmos, —and because he is thus supremely the upholder of human life & activity, therefore he is kindled in the mid-space; his seat is on the fullness of the vitalised mind-consciousness in the microcosm, in the rapturous mid-world of fulfilled life-energy in the macrocosm. There kindled, awakened & manifested in man, samidhá buddhah, samiddhah, he does his work for upward-climbing humanity. Thus by the return in iddhah to the words & the idea with which he started, the Rishi marks the close of his first movement of thought.