Vedic and Philological Studies

The Hymns of Madhuchchhandas

[A]

Chapter I

In a work devoted to the formulation of the early Vedantic philosophy of the Upanishads—and especially to that philosophy as we find it massively concentrated into some of its greatest principles in the Isha Upanishad, I hazarded the theory that the Vedas were not a collection of sacrificial hymns to material Nature-gods, as supposed by the Europeans, but something more profound and noble, that they were indeed, I thought, the true substance & foundation of the Upanishads, if not of all “Hindu” religion & spirituality. Certain considerations were added which, it seemed to me, delivered me from the intellectual necessity of implicit submission to European standards and modern theories. Modern Science might not be infallible; some suggestions there are that lead us to the possibility of a fundamental error in her way of narrating the progress of human civilisation and her account of the origin and growth of our religious notions and practices. Western philology is admittedly imperfect and as applied to the Veda boldly conjectural & in the absence of a more perfect science of language we are not bound by its conclusions.We might even go so far as to assert the presence in the Vedas not only of a strong moral & spiritual element in its conceptions & the symbolism of sacrifice, but a conscious & elaborate psychological rationale for the assignment of their various functions to the Vedic deities.

This was the substance of the argument, an argument then only suggested, not pursued. The present work proposes some opening spadework with the object of rescuing this profounder significance from the ancient obscurity of the Veda. Like the labours of the European scholars, my work must be, from the

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intellectual standpoint, inductive and conjectural;—it is a large suggestion that I am offering to the religious consciousness of India, a suggestion time & human knowledge may confirm, if it is true & fortunately supported, but will reject, if it turns out to be an error or a premature discovery. It would be highly out of place in such a tentative to be positive or dogmatic. For although the position I take, that the Veda contains the foundations of Brahmavidya, is old & hoary in Indian tradition, it is an audacious novelty to the modern intellect. Sayana does not establish it for us. Shankara acknowledges only to turn away from it and take refuge in the trenchant division of Karmakanda from Jnanakanda. The Europeans believe themselves to have shattered it for ever & buried it away among the numerous delusions of the unscientific & superstitious past. What does this ancient ghost here, many may ask, revisiting the glimpses of the moon; we thought it had received its quietus; we had repeated Credos & Aves for its peaceful repose and sealed its tomb by sprinkling on it the holy waters of Science. Where a man presumes thus to differ from all the enlightenment & all the orthodoxy of his time, it behoves him to walk carefully, to content himself with the tone of suggestion only, and, however firm his own convictions, assert them to others with modesty & some hesitance.

My method in this book will be to separate from the first Mandala the eleven hymns of Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitra & his son Jeta with which the Rigveda opens and selecting from them the verses which seem to me to give a clear indication and a firm foundation for my theory, explain adequately the meaning I attach to them, coordinating as I proceed other verses from various hymns of this small group which set forth the same psychological notion. From this basis I shall ascend to the interpretation of the shlokas which are of an inferior clarity & modernity of language or are already in the firm possession of the ceremonial interpretation and construct from them whatever rendering of the hymns seems to me their true and ancient sense. I have selected the Madhuchchhanda group because, in my opinion, he troubles himself less than many other Rishis,

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less for instance than Medhatithi Kanwa who follows him in the received order of the Veda, with the external symbols of sacrifice & ceremony & is more clearly & singlemindedly occupied with moral & spiritual ideas & aspirations. He presents, therefore, a favourable ground for the testing of my theory.

I have already explained in the work, God & the World, the main ideas of the psychological system which I suppose to be discoverable in the Veda. I shall not therefore take up any space with a fresh formulation of its principles, but simply expose their application in the different & more antique language of the Veda. Nor shall I trouble myself, more than is necessary for clearing the ground, either with Sayana or the Germans. My process being constructive and synthetic, its defence against other theories must necessarily be left aside until the construction is complete and the synthesis appreciable in its entirety.

[B]

Chapter I
Surya, Sarasvati and Mahi.

Who are they, the gods of the Rigveda? Ancient and yet ever youthful powers, full of joy, help and light, shining ones with whose presence the regions of earth and the hearts of men were illuminated, Angels and Deputies of the mysterious unknown God, worshipped in India, worshipped in Mesopotamia & Central Asia fifteen hundred years before the Christian era, worshipped by the wild Scythians,—for the name of Bhaga is still the Russian name for God,—worshipped in Iran before Ahuramazda replaced them,—for Ahriman, the dark spirit of the Persians, preserves the name of the strong Vedic deity,—worshipped at some time by Greek & Roman & Celt and Scandinavian, they have long given way even in India to the direct adoration of their Master whom they revealed, the Deva Adhiyajna whom through them the ancient masters of the sacrifice so

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persistently sought and finally attained.What were they, then?—vain imaginations of men? personifications of material realities? the idea of God behind phenomena? or even—for we know too little of the worlds, are still, as Newton was, children picking up pebbles on the shore of the infinite ocean of knowledge,—were there and are there—behind the names men give them—real personalities who stand in spirit behind the functions of man and of Nature, hidden masters, now unworshipped gods? If they were nothing, wherefore did the fire of the sacrifice flame up to them so persistently from the hearts and the hearths of men?—from what vague primeval terror and need of propitiation or supernatural assistance,—or if something, from what higher knowledge of the secrets of force that lie behind these outward movements of the machinery of the world? Wherefore did they yoke the bright flaming coursers to their chariots of bliss and hasten down so swiftly to rejoice in the fires of the Aryan altar and drain the outpourings of the Soma-wine?

The Europeans believe that these Vedic gods were personifications of the material powers of Nature; Sky, Rain, Sun, Moon, Wind, Fire, Dawn and the Ocean are the gods of the Aryans. The names, they think, carry with them their own interpretation, and the language of the hymns, as translated by them, consents to this modern insight. Vayu blows, Agni burns, Indra opens the cloud and hurls the thunderbolt. There are passages that do not agree with this theory, do not, at least, permit us to accept it as an all-sufficing explanation, but we can account for them by a progressive moralising of the old naturalistic religion destined [to] culminate in the idea of the universal God and open the way for Vedanta. In the sacrifice we see the systemisation of the old savage sense of dread and weakness, having as its result according to temperament or culture the propitiation of terrible and maleficent powers or the invocation of bright and helpful deities. These shadows of our own terror or yearning were given their share of meat and wine,—because primitive men were naturally anthropomorphic in their conceptions of deity,—and imagined their gods to resemble their own chiefs & rulers. And if so much stress was laid on the Soma wine, was it not because

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the Vedic Rishis loved to get frequently drunk and naturally thought their gods would have the same robust inclination? For, it seems, heaven is only a magnified shadow of our own vain aspiration towards perfect strength, beauty & happiness and, if God did not make us in His image, we at least atone for His failure by making Him in ours!

The Indian Pundits, with Sayana at their head, give us little help against these ideas which attack so fatally the ancient bedrock of our religion; servant & passive minds, they make no inquiry of their own, but preserve for us the traditions of Puranic mythology, which, themselves symbols, cannot, unless themselves first explained, help us to explain more ancient images. Consequently, these European notions have had a sweeping victory, until at last an Indian hater of India’s past, brought up in their school of thought, was able to say, not without some plausibility, that the best way to destroy popular faith in the Hindu religion would be to print and publish broadcast cheap translations of the Veda,—of course, as they are now, by those foreign minds, understood and interpreted. But the method might be partially effective, without the effect being just. The European theory of the Vedas well supported though it seems may not be the true theory or even the only rational theory now available. A past race of men, great thinkers, whose writings are the source and fountainhead of some of the sublimest philosophies in the world, much nearer to the Vedic Rishis in time, more capable of understanding and entering into their mentality, did not hold this view of the ancient deities. They considered them to be divine beings whose nature was vital, moral and spiritual, not simply material; they thought sacrifice to be a helpful and even a necessary symbolism. Throughout the Brahmanas & Upanishads we see this constant idea and the great pains taken to penetrate into the meaning not only of Vedic language but of Vedic ritual. We have therefore two different clues to the inner sense of these ancient words and obsolete practices. The European clue has been followed for many decades; the Vedantic clue perhaps might also be not unprofitably pursued. We know what European scholars understand by the Vedas; it may not be

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labour lost to know what the Vedantic sages understood by the Vedas.

In this book I intend to make the attempt even with such limited qualifications as I possess—for it seems to me of importance to our religion and future culture that the attempt should be made even if it should prove unsuccessful. In order to avoid the danger of a merely futile industry, I must first make myself sure that the Rigveda is not plainly & entirely a naturalistic document, but contains utterances inconsistent with the naturalistic, consistent with the Vedantic explanation.

I open then the Rigveda,—open it at its commencement and cast my glance over the eleven hymns ascribed to Madhuchchhanda Vaiswamitra and his son Jeta. In the very first hymn, a hymn to Agni, I am struck with certain expressions which do not agree very well with the naturalistic conception of Agni. A divine personification of Fire may be described poetically as the Purohit, Ritwik and Hota of the sacrifice (purohitam Yajnasya devam ritwijam hotaram ratnadhatamam), though it is curious—the old clear & rigid ideas on these subjects being given—to find these different functions heaped pell-mell together without any clear appropriateness; for granting Agni to be in his place as Purohit, how is he the Ritwik, how is [he] the Hota? Agni is adorable to the sages of the past & of the future because he carries the gods to the sacrifice, sa devan eha vakshati. There seems to be no clear and firm idea in this talk of Fire carrying or bringing the gods—for what are we to think of Fire carrying thunder, rain, wind, moon and sun to the sacrifice? We will suppose however that the ideas of these early savages were not, could not have been clear and firm and, for want of this lucidity, they confused the idea of Fire carrying the sacrifice to the Gods with the contrary idea of Fire carrying the Gods to the sacrifice. We read next that by Agni one gets substance and increase or plenty day by day; by him one gets puissant fame. It may pass;—for were not the Vedic Rishis carpenters, greengrocers, chariot-makers? and perhaps the poet was a renowned blacksmith or a primitive iron-master or even, like Draupadi, a successful & famous cook. But when we find that Agni is said to exist encompassing the

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adhwara Yajna on every side, the expressions already strike us as strange and almost unintelligible in their form if there is no supra-naturalistic suggestion. Adhwara yajna stands in need of explanation (for both words in more modern Sanscrit mean sacrifice), unless indeed we are to take it as a parallel expression to Homer’s theleiai gunaikes which scholars long persisted in understanding as “female women”. Visvatah paribhur asi has a singularly Vedantic ring. Nevertheless I will refrain from pressing any of these points for fear of being misled by my own associations. I will put by these expressions as vague poetical tropes, the result of a loose imaginative diction. But when I read in the next line Agni described as kavikratuh satyash chitrasravastamah, the strong in wisdom, the true, the rich in various knowledge, I reach the limit of my powers of complaisance, I shake off the yoke of the materialist. The naturalistic interpretation sinks under the triple blows of these epithets and from my mind at least passes away never to return. Fire, material fire, has nothing to do with wisdom, truth and various knowledge—except indeed to burn them when it gets the chance from Holy Office or enthroned bigotry. Agni, of whom wisdom, truth and various knowledge are the attributes, cannot be the personification of fire or the god of the material flame, but must be & is something greater. The Rishi of the Veda is raising his hymn to a mighty god, moral and intellectual, a god before whom sages can bow down, not to a savage & materialistic conception. He is not thinking of the burning fire, he is thinking of the helper of man who fortifies his character & purifies his intellect, vaisvanara, pavaka, jatavedas.

Many objections can be urged against so rapid a conclusion. Originally it may be argued Agni was the personification of fire, and although in the present hymn Vedic religious conceptions have reached a stage of ennoblement and moral progress in which the primitive idea could no longer satisfy, we must even here take account of the original conception. But I am concerned with the ideas of the gods as conceived by Vedic men and not with the far-off origins of these ideas in the minds of their unknown ancestors. For the one question about the Veda that is not only of interest, but vital to us in India, is not what some remote

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savages who may or may not have existed, thought about fire & the sun,—a matter on which we have no real evidence,—but what our Vedic ancestors thought about fire & the sun and their relations to the Godhead My conclusion touches this question alone. Anthropologists may be interested in hunting in the dark for undiscoverable origins—my purpose, more practical and immediate, need only take into account the actual facts of the Veda. But there are passages in which Agni is clearly the material flame; these, it may be contended, bring us back to the European theory. But so is the Agni of the Vedanta the material flame and yet preeminently a moral and spiritual deity. The question we have put to ourselves is whether it is worth while following the clue given us by the Upanishads,—whether, relying only on the plain meaning of the words, we can find Vedanta implied or explicit in the terms & notions of the Veda. The occasional materiality of Agni is not inconsistent with the Vedanticity of Veda; it is his essential materiality, if established, that would convict the Vedantic hypothesis of unreality. For to the Vedantist also the material flame is not only so much carbon & oxygen. It is the manifestation of a force; it is also the expression of a Personality & not only a God, but God Himself. For when he sees the flames of Agni burning up towards heaven, it is God whom the Vedantist watches burning up towards Go.The Vedantic explanation of Veda does not therefore suffer, it gains by the occasional materiality of Agni. And from this single hymn we have it established that his materiality in the physical flame was only one circumstance in the personality of the Vedic Agni; we find the conception of him in this hymn identical in important respects with the fiery god of the Vedanta. In the Vedanta we already know him to be Agni Vaisvanara, an universal might filling the worlds, jatavedas, one to whom the highest knowledge has appeared, visvani vayunani vidvan, he who has known all phenomena, who in his might & his knowledge attacks the crooked attractions of the world, asmaj juhuranam eno. And here, in the very opening hymn of the Veda, we find him visvatah paribhuh, universally encompassing—the word used being the very one employed to describe Virat Vaisvanara, the Master of

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the physical universe—we find him to be satya, serving the fundamental law of the world (satyadharmanam adhware), opposed to all deviation & crookedness—chitrasravas, he, shall we not say, who has detailed knowledge of the Sruti,—jatavedas Agni—kavikratu, the mighty in divine knowledge, well fitted therefore to be our helper & saviour, to “lead us by the good path to felicity.” When the Rishi proceeds to describe Agni as the guardian of immortality, a brilliant splendour increasing in its home, and appeals to him to be as accessible as a father to his child and to cleave to us for our weal, we may say with some confidence that the home is not the altar of sacrifice, that in the appeal for accessibility there is no mere request to the god not to give us too much trouble when the pieces of tinder are struck together to produce him; that the Sage is surely not entreating the fire of his hearth or of his altar to cling to him for his weal! Whatever else may be in store for me in my inquiry, I can feel that I have made at the very beginning a great stride forward. For we are rid of that pervading character of barbarous childishness which the modern scholars have stamped upon the Vedas; we have thus opened the doors of rational interpretation to admit deeper ideas and a subtler psychology.

No doubt the gain is only negative until we can determine precisely what sense to attach to these notions about Agni. For it may be argued that these Vedic terms have not as yet the developed Vedantic significance, but are merely the vague beginnings to which Vedanta afterwards gave shape & brought into a state of precision & philosophic lucidity.We need therefore before we can go very far with our Vedantic hypothesis, passages in which the thoughts of Veda & Vedanta coincide exactly & clearly in the more subtle & precise ideas of the later Transcendentalism. But meanwhile we have perfectly established that to one of the Rishis, to the son of Visvamitra,—surely no late or modern voice,—the character of Agni as a mere personification of fire does not exist. Here at least we have him as a greater type of deity; we have moral notions of a high order, religious emotions of great depth and sweetness underlying the thought & diction. The religious ideas of the fatherhood of God, of a divine friend &

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lover, a recompenser of virtue, a Master of Truth and Knowledge are already present to this early Indian consciousness. The idea of Zeus pater or Jupiter existed in European antiquity but it evoked in the Greeks & Latins no such emotions as break out in the piteva sunave of Madhuchchhandas & are paralleled by the intimacy of his claim, later on, of special & dear comradeship with Indra, the master of the thunderbolt. The Fatherhood of Zeus was the distant fatherhood of the Prajapati, general & remote, not this near & moving personal relationship. But we have done more than ascertain the religious ideas & temperament of this single Rishi. We have established the right to look for similar ideas in other hymns, if not in the whole strain of the Veda;—we cannot do otherwise for we must surely suppose that Madhuchchhandas was no solitary mind, alien to the surrounding conceptions, a single flower of advanced spirituality in a desert of naturalistic barbarism. These thoughts must, to some extent, have been current; this attitude must have been partly created for him by his environment.

All this will be admitted. It may be suggested at the same time, that it does not carry us very far on our journey. Some of the hymns, it is said, are frankly naturalistic; others moralistic & religious as modern minds have understood religion.Madhuchchhanda, [who] was a Rishi of the second and later order, naturally brings with him this accent of a moralised and partly spiritual worship into the opening hymns of the first Mandala.For as the old Nature-worshippers progressed in civilisation, they would naturally come to attach deeper ideas to godhead. Without rising to the exalted level of Semitic monotheism,—for they kept their gods of the flame & the lightning-stroke and the storm-blast,—they would seem to have yielded to an universalising tendency—they did not, indeed, roll up all their gods into one, but they expanded each into the whole. Thus they established an universality of godhead which did the same elevating work as the Semitic monotheism and through which the Indian mind, released from materialistic religion, travelled towards the Vedanta. By following this line the Hindus missed monotheism; but they found henotheism and made it a halfway

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house to their destined Pantheistic development.

The theory has a plausible ring—the question for us, is whether it is as true as it is plausible. From some of its suggestions we must guard ourselves carefully—for example, from the vulgar error that Vedanta is Pantheism. It is not that, but a Transcendentalism of which Theism, Pantheism, polytheism are all single circumstances & carefully harmonised factors. It is doubtful whether pure Pantheism can be discovered anywhere in Indian thought or Indian religion—for even when the Vedantist sees the flame as God, he is able to do so because he regards the flame not as a flame but as intrinsically something else, a supra-material presence which has the appearance of a material fiery tongue. We must remember too that the henotheism discovered by MaxMuller in the Veda, is no obsolete eccentricity of the human mind but the still existent Indian theory of the ishta devata which sees God in many forms & names but chooses one name & figure in preference to all others as the centre of its spiritual experiences and emotions. Henotheism is merely a permanent circumstance in Indian transcendentalism for the sake of a more intimate relation with Him. It is not a useful aberration from which it rose to Pantheism but itself a result of the transcendental view of the Universe. Neither should we lend ourselves to the view of some European scholars who see in the Visve devah of the Veda a movement towards the idea of universality in godhead. The description of the Visve devah in the hymns does not support that view. It does not go beyond a special application of the idea that all activities in the world have behind them hosts of divine personages whose function it is to support & maintain the inert forgetfulness of matter with the secret consciousness of spirit. Pantheism, Henotheism, Vaisvadevism (taken as a self-sufficient religious synthesis) are European notions imported into Veda & Vedanta.The Vedic data from which they seem to arise, are more perfectly explained by ideas which are still persistent actualities of the Indian religious consciousness.

We are left, therefore, still in ignorance as to the means and possibility of this extraordinary rapid stride from a superstitious poetical materialism to profound moral and spiritual

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conceptions and even to the Transcendentalism which alone makes henotheism possible to the Indian intellect. We will suppose, however, that the Vedic worshippers, even when they saw Agni flaming before them on the altar, were able without the aid of any transcendentalism, to forget his material aspects, to regard him only as a god, and not as the particular god of fire, and therefore clothe him with the general attributes of godhead. But are we then to suppose that such an expression as gopamritasya didivim, vardhamanam swe dame, guardian of immortality, a splendour increasing in its home, has no special meaning, that it is in vain that Varuna & Mitra are continually referred to as kavi ritavridhav ritasprisha, as seers, as increasing by law & truth, as desiring or enjoying that always & finding in it their strength and fullness? In the henotheistic theory, the theory which differentiates only the material aspects of Varuna, Agni, Indra and confounds their moral aspects in the general notion of universal deity—a half-fledged Pantheism roughly doing duty for monotheism,—these and a host of other powerful expressions become vague & almost meaningless; or at any rate without distinct meaning,—the terms of a vague and fluid poetry which catches at ideas & images without mastering them. This is possible, though with the concrete, clear-thinking ancients improbable. But it is also possible and more probable that we have here religious notions of another order than the modern, but quite as firm and clear—a religion which knew its own ideas and its own psychology. If we can find out what precisely are these ideas, what notions of God and the world are covered by these images of Indra, Agni, Vayu, the Aswins, Varuna, we may find out the real secret which the lapse of ages keeps concealed from us in the hymns. We may even find that our opening conjecture was justified and we were only speaking an ancient truth when we hazarded the use of the phrase, the Vedanticity of the Veda.

Still, whatever the precise nature of these higher religious concepts & emotions, their development from the alleged primitive & materialistic naturalism has to be explained.The safest

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course is to get away from these terms, henotheism, pantheism, Nature worship and keep our eyes fixed firmly on the concrete facts supplied to us by Veda. There is a flame burning on the altar; that, say the Europeans, was personified to the Vedic consciousness as Agnidevata, fire the god; Agni had originally no other significance. But now we see Madhuchchhanda with his eyes on that flame beholding in it a vision of wisdom, truth, knowledge, fatherhood, moral force, spiritual helpfulness. How has this psychological miracle been effected? By the anthropomorphic tendency in man, say the Europeans,—Fire the god, given in imagination the shape of a man, he of the tongue of flame, came to be regarded as a personality independent of the fire—a personality first with the qualities of fire, speed, brightness, destructiveness, helpfulness,—but afterwards with the general qualities of godhead,—whatever qualities the developing Aryan consciousness came to attribute to godhead. Agni is wise, true, beneficent not because he is fire, but because he is a god—that is to say an idealised man. He keeps his peculiar material qualities, but morally he may not be very different from Indra or Varuna. All three, with whatever slight variations, are shaped on common lines by a common religious & moral mentality.They must differ if this theory is true, only as the thunder, fire & sky, not as moral forces. The wisdom of Agni is also the wisdom of Indra, it is the common divine wisdom; the moral helpfulness of Agni is also the moral helpfulness of Varuna, it is the common divine helpfulness. This is the reason why sometimes Agni, sometimes Varuna, sometimes Indra appear as the supreme god, because the poet has no reason to distinguish, he has about them all different physical images but the same moral conceptions.

These ideas give us a better explanation than the other fancy of a naturalistic henotheism. On the surface it explains the Veda; it explains at least the Vedas as they are interpreted in Europe. If I find that the actual terminology & ideas of the Vedic hymns coincide with this theory, I am bound unhesitatingly to accept it. But if, on the other hand, I find that there are clear, precise & firm psychological and moral conceptions attached to the

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Vedic deities, that though they belong to one moral family, they have strong personal differences, I shall then be free to follow, undisturbed, my original Vedantic hypothesis.

What is the actual meaning, the precise force we are to attach to Vedic language and terminology? If the European theory is to stand, we must suppose that the expressions applied to Agni, Gopamritasya didivim vardhamanam swe dame, have no clear & settled significance—there is the shapeless idea of ahelpful immortal godhead coupled confusedly with the physical image of a domestic or sacrificial flame increasing upon altar or hearth. There is no appropriateness in swe dame—we are not to gather from it that Agni could not increase quite as well elsewhere! And when, proceeding to the second hymn, we read the striking lines about Mitra & Varuna, when we find them continually described with a peculiar emphasis on ritam, a noble reiteration of the conception of truth & law, ritavridhav ritasprisha, increasing by law & truth, desiring and enjoying it always, finding in law & truth their strength & fullness, we must here too suppose that these powerful & stirring expressions have no definite force & application,—though they may have been suggested originally by the majesty & fixity of the sky & the regular & regularising movements in it of the sun. They are the terms of a vague & fluid poetry, reaching out through half forgotten physical impressions to moral ideas & images which they have not mastered, in which as yet there is no fixity. Yet the moral ideas of other ancient races,—Aryan races—seem to have been otherwise clear, concrete & definite. The Greeks knew well what they meant by Fate, Necessity,Ate, Themis, Dike, Koros,Hubris; we are in no danger of confusing morally Zeus with Ares, or Ares with Hephaistos, Aphrodite with Pallas or Pallas with Artemis! We will suppose, however, that the higher spiritual development of the Indians, their urge towards universality, prevented them from arriving at this clearness of individual conception. Or else that they were arrested by this tendency at an early & fluid stage of the mythological imagination, when material distinctions were clear & unblurred, the moral ideas which were to obscure or hide them not yet sifted and organised.

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What then is the desideratum, if we are to have clear authority to proceed with the Vedantic hypothesis—for it is not yet a theory.We must have, obviously, some clear & indubitable passage to start with, assigning definite & minute psychological, moral or intellectual functions to a particular Vedic deity, in a sense which shall be identical with or closely related to the ideas & the psychology of the Upanishads. If I can find one such passage, & if it is of a nature to shed light upon others of a less indubitable clarity I shall have firm hold of our clue. I shall be in a position to build up my hypothesis, & to posit & test, as I go, by means of a number of particular indications this truth so dim to us, but which to our forefathers was so clear, the Vedanticity of the Veda.

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