CWTVKS Volume 1

First published: 1948; reprinted 1966.

SRI AUROBINDO AND THE VEDA

(1)⁹⁶

WHEN we write in a recognised and conventional imagery, Lakshmi and Sarasvati refuse to dwell under one roof”, the European reader may need a note or a translation of the phrase in its plain unfigured thought, “Wealth and learning seldom go together", before he can understand, but every Indian already possesses the sense of the phrase. But if another culture and religion had replaced the Puranic and the Brahmanical and the old books and the Sanskrit language and ceased to be read and understood, this now familiar phrase would have been as meaningless in India as in Europe. Some infallible commentator or ingenious scholar might have been proving to our entire satisfaction that Lakshmi was the Dawn and Sarasvati the Night or that they were two irreconcilable chemical substances — or one knows not what else!

It is something of this kind that has overtaken the ancient clarities of the Veda; the sense is dead and only the obscurity of a forgotten poetic form remains.

Wherever we can seize human society in what to us seem its primitive beginnings, no matter whether the race is cultured or savage or economically advanced or backward, — we do find a strongly symbolic mentality governing its thought, customs and institutions. We find that this social stage is always profoundly religious and imaginative in its religion; symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling go together; when man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, rationcinative, he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age of symbols and the age of conventions have passed. The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities — the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All this religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences which are behind them and shape and govern them.

If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of Sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit.

Veda, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning, and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal, the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner.

Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer, drastā, of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of the Veda itself is śruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge. The words themselves, drşți and fruti, sight and hearing, are Vedic expressions; these and cognate words signify in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledge and the contents of inspiration.

The hymns possess indeed a finished metrical form, a constant subtlety and skill in their technique, great variations of style and poetical personality; they are not the work of crude, barbarous and primitive craftsmen, but the living breath of a supreme and conscious art forming its creations in the puissant but well-governed movement of a self-observing inspiration.

Still all these high gifts have deliberately been exercised within one unvarying framework and always with the same materials. For the art of expression was to the Rishis only a means, not an aim; their principal preoccupation was strenuously practical, almost utilitarian in the highest sense of utility. The hymn was to the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress for himself and for others. It rose out of his soul, it became a power of his mind, it was the vehicle of his self-expression in some important or even critical moment of his life’s inner history.

When we note the invariable fixity of Vedic thought in conjunction with its depth, richness and subtlety, we may reasonably argue that such a fixed form and substance would not easily be possible in the beginnings of thought and psychological experience or even during their early progress and unfolding. The actual Samhita of the Rig Veda, the true and only Veda in the estimation of European scholars, represents the close of a period, not its commencement, nor even some of its successive stages. The whole voluminous mass of its litanies may be only a selection by Veda Vyasa out of a more richly vocal Aryan past. Made, according to the common belief, by Krishna of the isle, Dvaipayana, the great traditional sage, the colossal compiler (Vyasa), with his face turned towards the commencement of the Iron Age, towards the centuries of increasing twilight and final darkness, it is perhaps only the final testament of the Ages of Intuition, the luminous Dawns of the Forefathers to their descendants, to a human race already turning in spirit towards the lower levels and the more easy and secure gains of the physical life and of the intellect and the logical reason.

It is certain that the old tradition of a progressive obscuration and loss of the Veda as the law of the human cycle has been fully justified by the event. The obscuration had already proceeded far before the opening of the next age of Indian spirituality, the Vedantic, which struggled to preserve or recover what it yet could of the ancient knowledge.

The Brahmanas and the Upanishads are the record of a powerful revival which took the sacred text and ritual as a starting point for a new statement of spiritual thought and experience. This movement had two complementary aspects, one, the conservation of the forms, another the revelation of the soul of the Veda, the first represented by the Brahmanas, the second by the Upanishads.

These hymns have been the reputed source not only of some of the world’s richest and profoundest religions, but of some of its subtlest metaphysical philosophies. In the fixed tradition of thousands of years they have been revered as the origin and standard of all that can be held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad, in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages.

But if we accept the current interpretations and study the hymns of the Rig Veda in the light of Acharya Sayana’s great commentary on which European scholarship mostly depends for its naturalistic theory of the Veda, what do we find ? It is the ritualistic conception that pervades; that is the persistent note in which the old spiritual, philosophic or psychological interpretations of the Shruti which were the true foundation of its sanctity lose themselves. It is the most egoistic and materialistic objects that are proposed as the aim of the sacrifice — possessions, power, children, servants, gold, horses, cows, victory, the slaughter and plunder of enemies, the destruction of rival and malevolent critic.

As one reads hymn after hymn interpreted in this sense, one begins to understand better the passage of the Gita (11.42) censuring the champions of an exclusive Vedism, yet regarding always the Veda as Divine knowledge (XV.15).

The hypothesis on which Sri Aurobindo conducts his enquiry is that the Veda has a double aspect and that the two, though closely related, must be kept apart. The Rishis arranged the substance of their thought in a system of parallelism by which the same deities were at once the 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. But the psychological sense predominates and is more pervading, close-knit and coherent than the physical. The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. It is this sense that is restored to the hymns in the writings of Sri Aurobindo on Veda and Vedic symbolism.

The Vedic Deities are Names, Powers, Personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They manifest the Cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of the Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swiftnesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses and receives them into his being and their gifts into his life.

Once we have the key, it is easy to understand the Vedic imagery; but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.

II

We have presented a summary account of Sri Aurobindo’s views on Vedic thought, giving extracts from his writings on the subject, drawing pointed attention to the symbolic character of the Vedic sacrifice, to the double sense and use of the Vedic hymns and to the reality of the Gods addressed by the Vedic seers.

Here we shall give a hymn selected from the translation of Sri Aurobindo as an example out of the hundreds of these ancient litanies which to us are the remnant records of high spiritual discipline followed by the Rishis in the Vedic Yoga. But it is necessary to bear in mind some of the central ideas of Vedic thought for a correct approach to and proper appreciation of the spirit and sense of these Mantras.

The Vedic Gods are not the creations of poetic fancy, nor phantoms floating in the minds of the soma-intoxicated, nor are they abstract ideas of metaphysical seeking. They are names, powers and personalities of the universal Godhead; they manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. They help the soul of man in his onward march from darkness to light, from disharmony to harmony, from imperfection to perfection, they increase him by themselves increasing in him. To the Vedic seers they are living realities.

Gotama Rahugana is the seer of the hymn of which the translation is given here and the God that is hymned is Agni. This Deva of the Vedic pantheon is the most universal of the Vedic Gods, being the Divine Will at Work in the universe. Though his own home is high above beyond the Mind-world in the Svar, he comes down to Earth (as Creation proceeds from above downwards) and functions as the fire that assimilates and the heat of energy that forms. Next, he is equally the heat of life and creates the sap, the rasa, in things, the essence of their substantial being. Then he is equally the Will in prāņa, the dynamic Life-energy. Ascending still higher as upward development proceeds, he transfigures his powers into the energies of Mind. Our passions and emotions are the smoke of Agni’s burning. All our nervous forces are assured of their action only by his support.

If he is Will in the nervous being and purifies it by action, he is also the Will in the mind and clarifies it by aspiration. When he enters the intellect, he is drawing near his own Home, his divine birth-place. It is thither that he is leading upward the aspiration in humanity, the Soul of the Aryan, the head of the Cosmic Sacrifice.

It is at the point where there is the possibility of transition from Mind to Supermind, at this supreme and crucial point in the Vedic Yoga that the Rishi Gotama seeks in himself for the inspired word.

Agni, the Illumined Will⁹⁷

1. How shall we give to Agni? For him what Word accepted by the Gods is spoken, for the lord of the brilliant flame? for him who in mortals, immortal, possessed of the Truth, priest of the oblation strongest for sacrifice, creates the Gods?

2. He who in the sacrifices is the priest of the offering, full of peace, full of the Truth, him verily form in you by your surrenderings; when Agni manifests for the mortals the gods, he also has perception of them and by the mind offers to them the sacrifice.

3. For he is the will, he is the strength, he is the effecter of perfection, even as Mitra, he becomes the charioteer of the Supreme. To him, the first, in the rich-offerings the people seeking the Godhead utter the word, the Aryan people to the fulfiller.

4. May this strongest of the Powers and devourer of the destroyers manifest by his presence the Words and their understanding, and may they who in their extension are lords of plenitude brightest in energy pour forth their plenty and give their impulsion to the thought.

5. Thus has Agni, possessed of the Truth, been affirmed by the masters of light, the knower of the worlds by clarified minds. He shall foster in them the force of illumination, he too the plenty; he shall attain to increase and to harmony by his perceptions.