The Secret of the Veda

Mitra

If the purity, infinity, strong royalty of Varuna are the grand framework and majestic substance of the divine being, Mitra is its beauty and perfection. To be infinite, pure, a king over oneself and a master-soul must be the nature of the divine man because so he shares in the nature of God. But the Vedic ideal is not satisfied simply with a large, unfulfilled plan of the divine image. There must be noble and rich contents in this vast continent; the many-roomed tenement of our being contained in Varuna has to be ordered by Mitra in the right harmony of its utility and its equipment.

For the godhead is a plenitude as well as an infinity; Varuna is an ocean no less than an ethereal heaven. Pure and subtle as the ether, his strong substance is yet no serene void or easy vague of inactive peace, but rather we have seen in it a surging march of thought and action; he has been described to us as a nodus in which all wisdom is upgathered and a hill upon which the original, unfallen workings of the gods are supported. King Varuna is one who sleeps not, but is awake and mighty forever, eternally an effective force and worker for the Truth and the Right. Still he acts as the guardian of the Truth rather than constitutes it, or constitutes rather through the action of other godheads who avail themselves of his wideness and surging force. He keeps, drives even the shining herds, but does not assemble them in the pastures, an upholder of our powers and remover of obstacles and enemies much more than a builder of our parts.

Who then gathers knowledge into this nodus or links divine action in this sustainer of works? Mitra is the harmoniser, Mitra the builder, Mitra the constituent Light, Mitra the god who effects the right unity of which Varuna is the substance and the infinitely self-enlarging periphery. These two Kings are complementary to each other in their nature and their divine works. In them we find and by them we gain harmony in largeness: we see in the Godhead and increase in ourselves purity without defect basing love faultless in wisdom. Therefore these two are a great duo of the self-fulfilling godhead and the Vedic word calls them together to a vaster and vaster sacrifice to which they arrive as the

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inseparable builders of an increasing Truth. Madhuchchhandas gives us the keynote of their united divinity. "Mitra I call, the pure in judgment, and Varuna, devourer of the foe. By Truth, Mitra and Varuna, Truth-increasers who get to the touch of Truth, you attain to a vast working of the will. Seers, dwellers in the wideness, born with many births they uphold the judgment at its works" (I.2.7-9).

The name Mitra comes from a root which meant originally to contain with compression and so to embrace and has given us the ordinary Sanskrit word for friend, mitra, as well as the archaic Vedic word for bliss, mayas. Upon the current sense of the word mitra, the Friend, the Vedic poets continually rely for their covert key to the psychological function of this apparent sungod. When the other deities and especially the brilliant Agni are spoken of as helpful friends to the human sacrificer, they are said to be Mitra, or to be like Mitra, or to become Mitra,—as we should now say, the divine Will-force, or whatever other power and personality of the godhead, reveals itself eventually as the divine Love. Therefore we must suppose that to these symbolists Mitra was essentially the Lord of Love, a divine friend, a kindly helper of men and immortals. The Veda speaks of him as the most beloved of the gods.

The Vedic seers looked at Love from above, from its source and root and saw it and received it in their humanity as an outflowing of the divine Delight. The Taittiriya Upanishad expounding this spiritual and cosmic bliss of the godhead, Vedantic Ananda, Vedic Mayas, says of it, "Love is its head." But the word it chooses for Love, priyam, means properly the delightfulness of the objects of the soul's inner pleasure and satisfaction. The Vedic singers used the same psychology. They couple mayas and prayas,—mayas, the principle of inner felicity independent of all objects, prayas, its outflowing as the delight and pleasure of the soul in objects and beings. The Vedic happiness is this divine felicity which brings with it the boon of a pure possession and sinless pleasure in all things founded upon the unfailing touch of the Truth and Right in the freedom of a large universality.

Mitra is the most beloved of the gods because he brings

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within our reach this divine enjoyment and leads us to this perfect happiness. Varuna makes directly for strength; we discover a force and a will vast in purity; Aryaman the Aspirer is secured in the amplitude of his might by Varuna's infinity; he does his large works and effects his great movement by the power of Varuna's universality. Mitra makes directly for bliss,—Bhaga the Enjoyer is established in a blameless possession and divine enjoyment by the all-reconciling harmony of Mitra, by his purifying light of right discernment, his firmly-basing law. Therefore it is said of Mitra that all perfected souls adhere or are firmly fixed "to the bliss of this Beloved in whom there is no hurt", for in him there is no sin or wound or falling. All mortal delight has its mortal danger; but the immortal light and law secures the soul of man in a fearless joy. That mortal, says Vishwamitra (III.59.2), who learns by Mitra's law, the law of this Son of Infinity, is possessed of prayas, the soul's satisfaction in its objects; such a soul cannot be slain, nor overcome, nor can any evil take possession of it from near or from afar. For Mitra fashions in gods and men impulsions whose action spontaneously fulfils all the soul's seekings.

That happy freedom of all-possession comes to us out of this godhead's universality and his reconciling luminous embrace of things: Mitra's is the principle of harmony by which the manifold workings of the Truth agree together in a perfectly wedded union. The root of the name means both to embrace and to contain and hold and, again, to build or form in the sense of linking together the parts or materials of a whole. Adorable Mitra is born in us as a blissful ordainer of things and a king full of might. Mitra holds up heaven and earth and looks sleeplessly upon the worlds and the peoples, and his vigilant and perfect ordinances create in us a happy rightness of mind and feeling,—sumati, a state of grace, we might almost say,—which becomes for us an unhurt abiding-place. "Free from all undelightfulness," says the Vedic verse, "rejoicing with rapture in the goddess of the Word, bowing the knee in the wideness of earth, may we attain to our abiding-place in the law of working of Mitra, son of Infinity, and dwell in his grace" (III.59.3). It is when Agni becomes Mitra, when the divine Will realises the divine

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Love that, in the Vedic image, the Lord and his Spouse agree in their mansion.

The well-accorded happiness of the Truth is Mitra's law of working; for it is upon Truth and divine Knowledge that this harmony and perfect temperament are founded; they are formed, secured and guarded by the Maya of Mitra and Varuna. That well-known word comes from the same root as Mitra. Maya is the comprehending, measuring, forming Knowledge which whether divine or undivine, secure in the undivided being of Aditi or labouring in the divided being of Diti, builds up the whole scene, environment, confines and defines the whole condition, law and working of our existence. Maya is the active, originative, determinative view which creates for each being according to his own consciousness his own world. But Mitra is a Lord of the Light, a Son of Infinity and a Guardian of the Truth and his Maya part of an infinite, supreme and faultless creative wisdom. He builds, he joins together in an illuminated harmony all the numerous planes, all the successive steps, all the graded seats of our being. Whatsoever Aryaman aspires to on his path, has to be effected by the 'holdings' or laws of Mitra or by his foundations, statuses, placings, mitrasya dharmabhiḥ, mitrasya dhāmabhiḥ. For dharma, the law is that which holds things together and to which we hold; dhāma, the status is the placing of the law in a founded harmony which creates for us our plane of living and the character of our consciousness, action and thought.

Mitra, like the other sons of Aditi, is a master of Knowledge. He possesses a light which is full of a varied inspiration, or, to keep closer to the Vedic term, a richly diversified hearing of the knowledge. In the wideness of existence which he enjoys in common with Varuna, he acquires possession of heaven by the greatness of the being of the Truth and enlarges his conquering mastery over the earth by these inspirations or hearings of its Knowledge. All the five Aryan peoples labour therefore and travel for this bright and beautiful Mitra who comes into them with his luminous force and bears in his wideness all the Gods. He is the great and blissful one who sets and leads creatures born into the world upon their path. The distinction is drawn in one verse that Varuna is the masterful traveller to the

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soul's supreme seat, Mitra makes men advance in that march. "Even now," says the Rishi, "may I attain the movement to the goal and journey on Mitra's path."

Since Mitra cannot fulfil his harmony except in the wideness and purity of Varuna, he is constantly invoked in company with that great godhead. Theirs are the supreme statuses or planes of the soul; it is the bliss of Mitra and Varuna that has to increase in us. By their law that vast plane of our consciousness shines out upon us and heaven and earth are the two paths of their journey. For Aditi of the Truth, their mother, has borne them omniscient and great for almightiness; and it is luminous Aditi, the undivided being, whom they, wakeful from day to day, cleave to, she who holds for us our habitations in that world of light and they attain to its luminous forcefulness. They are the two Sons perfect in their birth from of old who support the law of our action; children are they of a vast luminous power, offspring of the divine discerning thought and perfect in will. They are the guardians of Truth, possessed of its law in the supreme ether. Swar is their golden home and birth-place.

Mitra and Varuna have an unwounded vision and are better knowers of the Path than our sight; for in the Knowledge they are seers of Swar. They take by the passion of their discerning thought the concealing falsehood away from the Truth to which the path has to lead. They proclaim the vast Truth of which they are possessed. It is because they possess it and with it the perfection of the will which is its effect, that they are seated in us for empire and uphold our action as the masters of might. By Truth they come to the Truth, nourishing in their lordship of things our thoughts, and in their purified judgment they open the eye of consciousness to all wisdom by the perception in men. Thus all-seeing and all-knowing they by the law, by the Maya of the mighty Lord, guard our actions, even as they govern the whole world in the power of the Truth. That Maya is established in the heavens, it ranges there as a Sun of light; it is their rich and wonderful weapon. They are far-hearers, masters of true being, true themselves and increasers of truth in each human creature. They nourish the shining herds and loose forth the abundance of heaven; they make heaven to rain down by the Maya

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of the Mighty Lord. And that celestial rain is the wealth of the spiritual felicity which the seers desire; it is the immortality.¹