Rig Veda

Text & Audio

MAṆḌALA 1

Sūkta 3

2. Audio

▪   by South Indian brahmins
▪   by Sri Shyama Sundara Sharma and Sri Satya Krishna Bhatta. Recorded by © 2012 Sriranga Digital Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

1. 1939–40¹

1.3.1. O Aswins, drivers of galloping hooves, lords of happiness with your many joys, take delight in our forces of sacrifice.

1.3.2. O Aswins, O Strong Ones, doers of your many deeds, wise of understanding, delight in our Words with your forceful thought.

1.3.3. O puissant and formidable in your ways, Lords of the journey, mixed are the wine-offerings and cut the sacred grass, come to us.

1.3.4. Come, O Indra of the brilliant light; these wine-offerings are desirous of thee, they are purified in particles and mass.

1.3.5. Come, O Indra, impelled by the thought, driven by the illumined seer, to the words of knowledge of the speaker of the word, the offerer of the Wine.

1.3.6. Come, O Indra, hastening to the words of knowledge, O driver of strong steeds; uphold our delight in the wine-offering.

1.3.7. Benignant upholders of seeing man, O all gods, come, givers to the wine-offering of the giver.

1.3.8. O all gods, doers of the work, come in your speed to the wine-offering, like the Cows of Brightness to the stalls of their repose.

1.3.9. May the all gods, who cast not down nor harm, Bringers who have the movement of creative knowledge, accept our sacrifice.

1.3.10. May purifying Saraswati, opulent with her plenitudes, rich in thought, desire our sacrifice.

1.3.11. Impeller of true words, awakener to right thinkings, Saraswati upholds our sacrifice.

1.3.12. Saraswati awakens us by the intuition conscious of the Great Sea of the Light and illumines all our thoughts.

2. June 1915²

The sense of the first two verses [1.3.10–11] is clear enough when we know Saraswati to be that power of the Truth which we call inspiration. Inspiration from the Truth purifies by getting rid of all falsehood, for all sin according to the Indian idea is merely falsehood, wrongly inspired emotion, wrongly directed will and action. The central idea of life and ourselves from which we start is a falsehood and all else is falsified by it. Truth comes to us as a light, a voice, compelling a change of thought, imposing a new discernment of ourselves and all around us. Truth of thought creates truth of vision and truth of vision forms in us truth of being, and out of truth of being (satyam) flows naturally truth of emotion, will and action. This is indeed the central notion of the Veda.

Saraswati, the inspiration, is full of her luminous plenitudes, rich in substance of thought. She upholds the Sacrifice, the offering of the mortal being’s activities to the divine by awakening his consciousness so that it assumes right states of emotion and right movements of thought in accordance with the Truth from which she pours her illuminations and by impelling in it the rise of those truths which, according to the Vedic Rishis, liberate the life and being from falsehood, weakness and limitation and open to it the doors of the supreme felicity.

By this constant awakening and impulsion, summed up in the word, perception, ketu, often called the divine perception, daiva ketu, to distinguish it from the false mortal vision of things,– Saraswati brings into active consciousness in the human being the great flood or great movement, the Truthconsciousness itself, and illumines with it all our thoughts. We must remember that this truth-consciousness of the Vedic Rishis is a supra-mental plane, a level of the hill of being (adreḥ sānu) which is beyond our ordinary reach and to which we have to climb with difficulty. It is not part of our waking being, it is hidden from us in the sleep of the superconscient. We can then understand what Madhuchchhandas means when he says that Saraswati by the constant action of the inspiration awakens the Truth to consciousness in our thoughts.

3. May 1915³

Saraswati and Her Consorts

The symbolism of the Veda betrays itself with the greatest clearness in the figure of the goddess Saraswati.

In many of the other gods the balance of the internal sense and the external figure is carefully preserved. The veil sometimes becomes transparent or its corners are lifted even for the ordinary hearer of theWord; but it is never entirely removed.

Onemay doubt whether Agni is anything more than the personification of the sacrificial Fire or of the physical principle of Light and Heat in things, or Indra anything more than the god of the sky and the rain or of physical Light, or Vayu anything more than the divinity in the Wind and Air or at most of the physical Life-breath. In the lesser gods the naturalistic interpretation has less ground for confidence; for it is obvious that Varuna is not merely a Vedic Uranus or Neptune, but a god with great and important moral functions; Mitra and Bhaga have the same psychological aspect; the Ribhus who form things by the mind and build up immortality byworks canwith difficulty be crushed into the Procrustean measure of a naturalisticmythology. Still by imputing a chaotic confusion of ideas to the poets of the Vedic hymns the difficulty can be trampled upon, if not overcome.

But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment. She is, plainly and clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divine Inspiration.

If that were all, this would not carry us much farther than the obvious fact that the Vedic Rishis were not mere naturalistic barbarians, but had their psychological ideas and were capable of creating mythological symbols which represent not only those obvious operations of physical Nature that interested their agricultural, pastoral and open-air life, but also the inner operations of the mind and soul. If we have to conceive the history of ancient religious thought as a progression from the physical to the spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical and psychological view of Nature and the world and the gods – and this, though by no means certain, is for the present the accepted view⁴,– we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at least already advancing from the physical and naturalistic conception of the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is not only the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same time one of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question at once arises, whence came this extraordinary identification? And how does the connection of the two ideas present itself in the Vedic hymns? And there is more; for Saraswati is important not only in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding farther let us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what they can teach us.

The association of a river with the poetical inspiration occurs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are not conceived of as rivers; they are only connected in a not very intelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This stream is the river Hippocrene, the fountain of the Horse, and to account for its name we have a legend that it sprang from the hoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock with his hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where the mountain had been thus smitten.Was this legendmerely a Greek fairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident that if it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to a psychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspiration, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been an attempt to put into concrete figures certain psychological facts.

We may note that the word Pegasus, if we transliterate it into the original Aryan phonetics, becomes PЇ ajasa and is obviously connected with the Sanskrit pājas, which meant originally force, movement, or sometimes footing. In Greek itself it is connected with pēgē, a stream. There is, therefore, in the terms of this legend a constant association with the image of a forceful movement of inspiration. If we turn to Vedic symbols we see that the Ashwa or Horse is an image of the great dynamic force of Life, of the vital and nervous energy, and is constantly coupled with other images that symbolise the consciousness. Adri, the hill or rock, is a symbol of formal existence and especially of the physical nature and it is out of this hill or rock that the herds of the Sun are released and the waters flow. The streams of the madhu, the honey, the Soma, are said also to be milked out of this Hill or Rock. The stroke of the Horse’s hoof on the rock releasing the waters of inspiration would thus become a very obvious psychological image. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the old Greeks and Indians were incapable either of such psychological observation or of putting it into the poetical and mystic imagery which was the very body of the ancient Mysteries.

We might indeed go farther and inquire whether there was not some original connection between the hero Bellerophon, slayer of Bellerus, who rides on the divine Horse, and Indra Valahan, the Vedic slayer of Vala, the enemy who keeps for himself the Light. But this would take us beyond the limits of our subject. Nor does this interpretation of the Pegasus legend carry us any farther than to indicate the natural turn of imagination of the Ancients and the way in which they came to figure the stream of inspiration as an actual stream of flowing water.

Saraswati means, “she of the stream, the flowing movement”, and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for the goddess of inspiration. But by what process of thought or association does the general idea of the river of inspiration come to be associated with a particular earthly stream? And in the Veda it is not a question of one river which by its surroundings, natural and legendary, might seem more fitly associated with the idea of sacred inspiration than any other. For here it is a question not of one, but of seven rivers always associated together in the minds of the Rishis and all of them released together by the stroke of the God Indra when he smote the Python who coiled across their fountains and sealed up their outflow. It seems impossible to suppose that one river only in all this sevenfold outflowing acquired a psychological significance while the rest were associated only with the annual coming of the rains in the Punjab. The psychological significance of Saraswati carries with it a psychological significance for the whole symbol of the Vedic waters.⁵

Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but with other goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols and especially with Bharati and Ila. In the later Puranic forms of worship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharati and Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi, the Large, Great or Vast. The three, Ila, Mahi or Bharati and Saraswati are associated together in a constant formula in those hymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to the Sacrifice.

1.13.9. “May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birth to the bliss, take their place on the sacrificial seat, they who stumble not,” or “who come not to hurt” or “do no hurt.” The epithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movement with its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfalls of sin and error. The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of the tenth Mandala: 10.110.8. “May Bharati come speeding to our sacrifice and Ila hither awakening our consciousness (or, knowledge or perceptions) in human wise, and Saraswati,– three goddesses sit on this blissful seat, doing well the Work.”

It is clear and will become yet clearer that these three goddesses have closely connected functions akin to the inspirational power of Saraswati. Saraswati is the Word, the inspiration, as I suggest, that comes from the Ritam, the Truth-consciousness.

Bharati and Ila must also be different forms of the sameWord or knowledge. In the eighth hymn of Madhuchchhandas we have a Rik in which Bharati is mentioned under the name of Mahi.

1.8.8. “Thus Mahi for Indra full of the rays, overflowing in her abundance, in her nature a happy truth, becomes as if a ripe branch for the giver of the sacrifice.”

The rays in the Veda are the rays of Surya, the Sun. Are we to suppose that the goddess is a deity of the physical Light or are we to translate “go” by cow and suppose that Mahi is full of cows for the sacrificer? The psychological character of Saraswati comes to our rescue against the last absurd supposition, but it negatives equally the naturalistic interpretation. This characterisation of Mahi, Saraswati’s companion in the sacrifice, the sister of the goddess of inspiration, entirely identified with her in the later mythology, is one proof among a hundred others that light in the Veda is a symbol of knowledge, of spiritual illumination. Surya is the Lord of the supreme Sight, the vast Light, bṛhaj jyotiḥ, or, as it is sometimes called, the true Light, ṛtaṃ jyotiḥ. And the connection between the words ṛtam and bṛhat is constant in the Veda.

It seems to me impossible to see in these expressions anything else than the indication of a state of illumined consciousness the nature of which is that it is wide or large, bṛhat, full of the truth of being, satyam, and of the truth of knowledge and action, ṛtam. The gods have this consciousness. Agni, for instance, is termed ṛtacit, he who has the truth-consciousness. Mahi is full of the rays of this Surya; she carries in her this illumination. Moreover she is sūnṛtā , she is the word of a blissful Truth, even as it has been said of Saraswati that she is the impeller of happy truths, codayitrī sūnṛtānāṃ. Finally, she is virapśī, large or breaking out into abundance, a word which recalls to us that the Truth is also a Largeness,ṛtaṃ bṛhat. And in another hymn, (I.22.10), she is described as varūtrī dhiṣaṇā , a widely covering or embracing Thought-power. Mahi, then, is the luminous vastness of the Truth, she represents the Largeness, bṛhat, of the superconscient in us containing in itself the Truth, ṛtaṃ. She is, therefore, for the sacrificer like a branch covered with ripe fruit.

Ila is also the word of the truth; her name has become identical in a later confusion with the idea of speech. As Saraswati is an awakener of the consciousness to right thinkings or right states of mind, cetantī sumatīnām, so also Ila comes to the sacrifice awakening the consciousness to knowledge, cetayantī.

She is full of energy, suvīrā, and brings knowledge. She also is connected with Surya, the Sun, as when Agni, theWill is invoked (V.4.4) to labour by the rays of the Sun, Lord of the true Light, being of one mind with Ila, iḷayā sajoṣā yatamāno raśmibhiḥ sūryasya. She is the mother of the Rays, the herds of the Sun.

Her name means she who seeks and attains and it contains the same association of ideas as the words Ritam and Rishi. Ila may therefore well be the vision of the seer which attains the truth.

As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, śruti, which gives the inspired word, so Ila represents dṛṣṭi, the truthvision.

If so, since dṛṣṭi and śruti are the two powers of the Rishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, we can understand the close connection of Ila and Saraswati. Bharati or Mahi is the largeness of the Truth-consciousness which, dawning on man’s limited mind, brings with it the two sister Puissances. We can also understand how these fine and living distinctions came afterwards to be neglected as the Vedic knowledge declined and Bharati, Saraswati, Ila melted into one.

We may note also that these three goddesses are said to bring to birth for man the Bliss, Mayas. I have already insisted on the constant relation, as conceived by the Vedic seers, between the Truth and the Bliss or Ananda. It is by the dawning of the true or infinite consciousness in man that he arrives out of this evil dream of pain and suffering, this divided creation into the Bliss, the happy state variously described in Veda by the words bhadram, mayas (love and bliss), svasti (the good state of existence, right being) and by others less technically used such as vāryam, rayiḥ, rāyaḥ. For the Vedic Rishi Truth is the passage and the antechamber, the Bliss of the divine existence is the goal, or else Truth is the foundation, Bliss the supreme result.

Such, then, is the character of Saraswati as a psychological principle, her peculiar function and her relation to her most immediate connections among the gods.How far do these shed any light on her relations as the Vedic river to her six sister streams?

The number seven plays an exceedingly important part in the Vedic system, as in most very ancient schools of thought. We find it recurring constantly,– the seven delights, sapta ratnāni; the seven flames, tongues or rays of Agni, sapta arciṣaḥ, sapta jvālāḥ; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dhītayaḥ; the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi, mother of the gods, sapta gāvaḥ; the seven rivers, the seven mothers or fostering cows, sapta mātaraḥ, sapta dhenavaḥ, a term applied indifferently to the Rays and to the Rivers. All these sets of seven depend, it seems to me, upon the Vedic classification of the fundamental principles, the tattvas, of existence.

The enquiry into the number of these tattvas greatly interested the speculative mind of the ancients and in Indian philosophy we find various answers ranging from the One upward and running into the twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being.

However merely curious or barren these speculations and classifications may seem to the modern mind, they were no mere dry metaphysical distinctions, but closely connected with a living psychological practice of which they were to a great extent the thought-basis, and in any case we must understand them clearly if we wish to form with any accuracy an idea of this ancient and far-off system.

In the Veda, then, we find the number of the principles variously stated. The One was recognised as the basis and continent; in this One there were the two principles divine and human, mortal and immortal. The dual number is also otherwise applied in the two principles, Heaven and Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and Nature, who are regarded as the father and mother of all beings. It is significant, however, that Heaven and Earth, when they symbolise two forms of natural energy, the mental and the physical consciousness, are no longer the father and mother, but the two mothers. The triple principle was doubly recognised, first in the threefold divine principle answering to the later Sachchidananda, the divine existence, consciousness and bliss, and secondly in the threefold mundane principle, Mind, Life, Body, upon which is built the triple world of the Veda and Puranas. But the full number ordinarily recognised is seven.

This figure was arrived at by adding the three divine principles to the three mundane and interpolating a seventh or link-principle which is precisely that of the Truth-consciousness, Ritam Brihat, afterwards known as Vijnana or Mahas. The latter term means the Large and is therefore an equivalent of Brihat. There are other classifications of five, eight, nine and ten and even, as it would seem, twelve; but these do not immediately concern us.

All these principles, be it noted, are supposed to be really inseparable and omnipresent and therefore apply themselves to each separate formation of Nature. The seven Thoughts, for instance, are Mind applying itself to each of the seven planes as we would now call them and formulating Matter-mind, if we may so call it, nervous mind, puremind, truth-mind and so on to the highest summit, paramā parāvat. The seven rays or cows are Aditi the infinite Mother, the Cow unslayable, supreme Nature or infinite Consciousness, pristine source of the later idea of Prakriti or Shakti,– the Purusha is in this early pastoral imagery the Bull, Vrishabha,– the Mother of things taking form on the seven planes of her world-action as energy of conscious being.

So also, the seven rivers are conscious currents corresponding to the sevenfold substance of the ocean of being which appears to us formulated in the seven worlds enumerated by the Puranas.

It is their full flow in the human consciousness which constitutes the entire activity of the being, his full treasure of substance, his full play of energy. In the Vedic image, his cows drink of the water of the seven rivers.

Should this imagery be admitted, and it is evident that if once such conceptions are supposed to exist, this would be the natural imagery for a people living the life and placed in the surroundings of the ancient Aryans,– quite as natural for them and inevitable as for us the image of the “planes” with which theosophical thought has familiarised us,– the place of Saraswati as one of the seven rivers becomes clear. She is the current which comes from the Truth-principle, from the Ritam or Mahas, and we actually find this principle spoken of in the Veda,– in the closing passage of our third hymn for instance, – as the GreatWater, maho arṇas,– an expression which gives us at once the origin of the later term, Mahas,– or sometimes mahān arṇavaḥ. We see in the third hymn the close connection between Saraswati and this great water. Let us examine a little more closely this connection before we proceed to the consideration of the Vedic cows and their relation to the god Indra and Saraswati’s close cousin the goddess Sarama. For it is necessary to define these relations before we can progress with the scrutiny of Madhuchchhandas’ other hymns addressed without exception to the great Vedic deity, King ofHeaven, who, according to our hypothesis, symbolises the Power of Mind and especially the divine or self-luminous Mind in the human being.

4. April 1915⁶

1.3.1. O Riders of the Steed, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords of bliss, take delight in the energies of the sacrifice.

1.3.2. O Riders of the Steed, male souls effecting a manifold action, take joy of the words, O holders in the intellect, by a luminously energetic thought.

1.3.3. I have piled the seat of sacrifice, I have pressed out the vigorous Soma juices; fulfillers of action, powers of the movement, come to them with your fierce speed on the path.

1.3.4. Come, O Indra, with thy rich lustres, these Soma-juices desire thee; they are purified by the subtle powers and by extension in body.

1.3.5. Come, O Indra, impelled by the mind, driven forward by the illumined thinker, to my soul-thoughts, I who have poured out the Soma-juice and seek to express them in speech.

1.3.6. Come, O Indra, with forceful speed to my soul-thoughts, O lord of the bright horses; hold firm the delight in the Soma-juice.

1.3.7. O fosterers who uphold the doer in his work, O all-gods, come and divide the Soma-wine that I distribute.

1.3.8. O all-gods who bring over to us the Waters, come passing through to my Soma-offerings as illumined powers to your places of bliss.

1.3.9. O all-gods, you who are not assailed nor come to hurt, free-moving in your forms of knowledge, cleave to my sacrifice as its upbearers.

1.3.10. May purifying Saraswati with all the plenitude of her forms of plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacrifice.

1.3.11. She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in consciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacrifice.

1.3.12. Saraswati by the perception awakens in consciousness the great flood (the vast movement of the Ritam) and illumines entirely all the thoughts.

[Notes]

1.3.1. They are first described as “Ashwins, swift-footed lords of bliss, much-enjoying,— dravatpāṇī śubhaspatī purubhujā”. The word śubh, like the words ratna and candra, is capable of signifying either light or enjoyment; but in this passage it occurs in connection with the adjective purubhujā, “much-enjoying”, and the verb canasyatam, “take delight”, and must therefore be taken in the sense of weal or bliss.

1.3.1. In the present hymn the Ashwins are invoked, as swiftmoving lords of bliss who carry with them many enjoyments, to take delight in the impelling energies of the sacrifice

1.3.2. Next, these twin gods are described as “Ashwins, divine souls many-actioned, thought-holding” who accept and rejoice in the words of the Mantra “with an energetic thought”,— purudaṃsasā narā śavīrayā dhiyā dhiṣṇyā. Nṛ in the Veda is applicable both to gods and men and does not mean simply a man; it meant originally, I think, strong or active and then a male and is applied to the male gods, active divine souls or powers, puruṣas, opposed to the female deities, gnāḥ who are their energies. It still preserved in the minds of the Rishis much of its original sense, as we see from the word nṛmṇa, strength, and the phrase nṛtama nṛṇām, strongest of the divine powers. Śavas and its adjective śavīra give the idea of energy, but always with an association of the farther idea of flame or light; śavīra is therefore a very appropriate epithet for dhī, thought full of a shining or flashing energy. Dhiṣṇyā is connected with dhiṣaṇā, intellect or understanding, and is rendered by Sayana “intellectual”, buddhimantau.

1.3.3. Ashwins are described as “effectual in action, powers of the movement, fierce-moving in their paths,” dasrā nāsatyā rudravartanī.

1.3.4. The out-pressings of the wine of delight desire him, sutā ime tvāyavaḥ; they desire the luminous mind to take possession of them for its activities; they are purified, aṇvībhis tanā, “by the fingers and the body” as Sayana explains it, by the subtle thought-powers of the pure mind and by extension in the physical consciousness as it seems to me to mean.

1.3.5. He comes impelled by the thought, driven forward by the illumined thinker dhiyeṣito viprajūtaḥ, to the soul-thoughts of the Rishi who has pressed out the wine of delight and seeks to manifest them in speech, in the inspired mantras; sutāvataḥ upa brahmāṇi vāghataḥ.

1.3.6. He comes with the speed and force of the illumined mind-power, in possession of his brilliant horses to those thoughts, tūtujāna upa brahmāṇi harivaḥ, and the Rishi prays to him to confirm or hold the delight in the Soma offering, sute dadhiṣva naś canaḥ.

1.3.7. They are to come to the sacrifice in their collectivity and divide among themselves, each evidently for the divine and joyous working of his proper activity, the Soma which the giver of the sacrifice distributes to them...

They are fosterers or increasers of man and upholders of his labour and effort in the work, the sacrifice,— omāsaś carṣaṇīdhṛto.

1.3.8. I have translated the phrase, usrā iva svasarāṇi, in the most external sense possible; but in the Veda even poetical similes are seldom or never employed for mere decoration; they too are utilised to deepen the psychological sense and with a figure of symbolic or double meaning. The word usra is always used in the Veda, like go, with the double sense of the concrete figure or symbol, the Bull or Cow, and at the same time the psychological indication of the bright or luminous ones, the illumined powers of the Truth in man. It is as such illumined powers that the all-gods have to come and they come to the Soma-juice, svasarāṇi, as if to seats or forms of peace or of bliss; for the root svas, like sas and many others, means both to rest and to enjoy. They are the powers of Truth entering into the outpourings of the Ananda in man as soon as that movement has been prepared by the vital and mental activity of the Ashwins and the pure mental activity of Indra.

1.3.8. Then, they are apturaḥ, they who cross the waters, or as Sayana takes it, they who give the waters. This he understands in the sense of “rain-givers” and it is perfectly true that all the Vedic gods are givers of the rain, the abundance (for vṛṣṭi, rain, has both senses) of heaven, sometimes described as the solar waters, svarvatīr apaḥ, or waters which carry in them the light of the luminous heaven, Svar. But the ocean and the waters in the Veda, as this phrase itself indicates, are the symbol of conscient being in its mass and in its movements. The gods pour the fullness of these waters, especially the upper waters, the waters of heaven, the streams of the Truth, ṛtasya dhārāḥ, across all obstacles into the human consciousness. In this sense they are all apturaḥ. But man is also described as crossing the waters over to his home in the Truth-consciousness and the gods as carrying him over; it is doubtful whether this may not be the true sense here, especially as we have the two words apturaḥ... tūrṇayaḥ. close to each other in a connection that may well be significant.

1.3.8. In the next Rik the call is repeated with greater insistence; they are to arrive swiftly, tūrṇayaḥ, to the Soma offering or, it may mean, making their way through all the planes of consciousness, “waters”, which divide the physical nature of man from their godhead and are full of obstacles to communication between earth and heaven; apturaḥ sutam ā ganta tūrṇayaḥ. They are to come like cattle hastening to the stalls of their rest at eveningtide, usrā iva svasarāṇi.

1.3.9. Thus gladly arriving, they are gladly to accept and cleave to the sacrifice and support it, bearing it up in its journey to its goal, in its ascent to the gods or to the home of the gods, the Truth, the Vast; medham juṣanta vahnayaḥ.

1.3.9. Again the gods are all free from effective assailants, free from the harm of the hurtful or opposing powers and therefore the creative formations of their conscious knowledge, their Maya, move freely, pervasively, attain their right goal,— asridha ehimāyāso adruhaḥ.

5. Circa 1914–17⁷

(1) O Aswins, swift-footed lords of bliss, wide-enjoying, take delight in the impulses of the sacrifice. (2) O Aswins, ye strong Purushas of the many activities, firmly-seated with your bright-flashing thought, take joy of our Words. (3) O givers, O masters of the movement, O ye who are fierce in your paths, clear-set is the seat of sacrifice, strong-energied are the Soma-distillings; do ye arrive.

(4) Come thou too, O Indra of the varied lustres, thee these Soma-juices desire,— purified they in their subtleties and in their extension. (5) Come, O Indra, impelled by the thought, guided by the enlightened knower to the soul-thinkings of the Soma giver who aspires in the hymn. (6) Come hastening, O Indra, to our soul-movements, lord of the brilliance, uphold our delight in the Soma outpoured.

(7) O all gods who are kindly and uphold the actions of the doer, arrive, divide the Soma-offering of the giver. (8) O all gods who are active and swift, come ye to the Soma-offering, like the cows to their stalls (like the powers of light to the places of delight). (9) O all gods who stumble not but are wise in your might and do no hurt, accept and upbear the sacrifice!

(10) May purifying Saraswati, full-plentied with all sorts of possessions, control (or desire) our sacrifice in the riches of her thought. (11) Impeller of truths, awakener to right thinkings Saraswati upholds the sacrifice. (12) Saraswati awakens in consciousness the ocean Mahas by the perception; she illumines (or governs) variously all our thoughts.

The third hymn of the first Mandala of the Veda, Madhuchchhandas’ hymn of the Soma sacrifice, is addressed to no single god, but built in a harmony of four successive movements, each composed of three verses in the Gayatri metre, each an invocation of a separate divine power or set of divine powers, which in their significance are intended to follow the ascending series of a particular psychological progression reached by the Rishi in his self-development through the Vedic Yoga. The psychological symbolism of the Vedic Soma-offering is in this hymn expressed with that succinctness and rich suggestiveness of which Madhuchchhandas is a master.

The Soma wine in the Vedic symbolism is the wine of Immortality, the flowing stream of divine beatitude which wells up out of the secret places of the being and manifests in the triple human system, in the mind, the nervous life, the body. According to the philosophy of the ancient Indian seers Ananda, delight,— the rendering, in the terms of sensation, of the plenitude of divine being,— is that which supports, overtly or secretly, all mortal and immortal life and activity. “Who could live or breathe,” asks the Taittiriya Upanishad, “if there were not this ether of Delight in which we have our being?” Human joy and pleasure, even human grief and pain, are only minor terms natural or perverse in an inferior formula of this divine Bliss of being. All strength, all activity, all fullness proceed from this creative principle and are supported by it. But all mortal life is a broken rhythm of something that should be and in itself is vast, perfect and evenly harmonious. The one goal of Vedic Yoga is this vastness, this perfection, this state of infinite and harmonious being. The aim of the seers of the Veda is to exchange the small and broken, for the ample and whole, to travel, climb or fight their way out of the limited mortal state into illimitable immortality. The instrument of their effort is sacrifice; the strength that is both to be born of the sacrifice and to make it effective, is the triple strength of divine Force, divine Light and divine Bliss.

The primitive verbal sense of the word yajna was action, effort, endeavour done with a force directed towards some goal, some object or some person; its idea-sense in the Veda is action or effort internal or external directed towards the gods or immortal principles of higher being by this lower or mortal inhabitant. To the Vedic sages body was not our only possession nor bodily existence the whole of our existence. The body is only our earth, base and lower tenement or firmament of the conscious spirit that we are. Above it, in ourselves, there are higher reaches of conscious being represented in the body and in bodily existence but exceeding it by awakening which we can rise into ranges of experiences, manifest faculties and amplitudes of which the body-bound mortal is incapable. We have to awake those reaches of conscious being in the body and through their activity in the body to have access to their native vastnesses beyond. Informing this body and animating it there is the ocean of nervous or vital force just above the physical ocean of matter; informing the vital force and illuminating it there is the ocean of pure mentality which is beyond and exceeds nervous vitality; supporting, creating and rectifying the pure mentality, there is the ocean of supra-mental and pure ideal self-existent, self-perceptive Truth or Light which leads us into the heights of the divine being; generating the divine Light, pouring itself out on the surge of the infinite harmonies of this Truth is the ocean of the divine Bliss and the plenitude of self-existence. These are the five states or stairs of Being easily accessible to the tread of the human soul. Yet beyond is the absolute divine self-Awareness manifesting itself cosmically as the divine creative Force of God’s self-knowledge and it is this that takes delight in cosmic existence and by taking delight generates it on the foundation of the luminous Truth of things. That Force of divine self-Awareness, too, is an expression of a seventh and ultimate principle, pure divine Conscious Being which is, as it were, the surface of the Absolute and the source of Its world. All this existence is the ascending hill of our being and its successive summits rise out of our manifest being here and climb up into hidden altitudes veiled from us by clouds of vapour or by inaccessible depths of dazzling light. And as the body is only the lowest term of our subjective being, so also is the material universe represented for us by the earth only the lowest term of cosmic existence. Nervous life on earth is but the representative of great worlds or organised states of being beyond, of which not matter, but vital force is the primary condition, mind here the representative of a great mental world of which pure mentality is the primary condition. There is too a vast world or organised state of luminous being governed by divine Truth and worlds yet beyond in which the three supreme principles of the immortal life govern severally and unitedly their cosmic harmonies.

The psychological practice of the Vedic seers was founded upon this reading of human psychology in the microcosm with its corresponding life-notations in the world macrocosm. Two ideas of especial importance were entirely derived from it,— the need of divine help and the principle of a graduated and harmonious upward ascension. No creature of the lower worlds can develop a higher principle in him except by the attraction and aid of those grand Principles, Emanations and Forms of Deity, called the Gods, who inhabit the higher reaches of being and manifest themselves as powers in man, as both Powers and Personalities in the worlds. Hence the need of the manifestation in man of the gods, the need of their presence, aid and protection, the need of their constant friendship. By the aid of the gods man has to rise beyond them to God; with their consent and assistance he is helped to ascend and dwell in the divine being which they also dwell in and enjoy, the Vast, the Delightful, the True, the Light,— mahas, brihat, ratnam, ritam, satyam, jyotih, various epithets by which the seers expressed the manifestation in conscious being of the inexpressible because unthinkable Parabrahman. The Vedic sacrificer is continually described by the Veda as devayu, devayan, one who desires the gods, one who is developing the godhead in himself; the sacrifice itself is frequently described by the words devaviti, the widening, the opening, the manifestation of the God, and devatati, the extension of the God in the sacrificer. It is described also as an ascent of the hill of being from plateau to plateau, from summit to summit, or a journey on a path beset by obstacles, difficulties, enemies,— enemies who are described by various graphic epithets,— the plunderer, the detainer, the concealer, the thief, the wolf on the path, the devourer, a journey to the river of heaven and over it by the path of the divine Truth into the ineffable wideness. It is described also as a battle against individual enemies or groups of enemies, a Vritra, the Coverer, a Vala, the wall of concealment who fences in the Light, Panis, lords of sense-activity who intercept the herds of the divine Rays and pen them up in the obscure cavern of our unexpressed being behind this outward material life — or the battle is, generally, against the legioned hosts of evil, the armies of mortality for the victory of Immortality in the mortal. The journey, the ascent, the march is, by the very nature of things, a progressive development conquering the successive kingdoms of being in order to arrive safely and fully into our high and blissful dwelling place. The seers of the Veda, therefore, did not reject matter or the nervous life or the mental in order to reach now inaccessible felicities. Their idea of human progression was a conquering march and not a flight. Therefore, their idea of the gods was a conception of great divine Beings manifesting or born, as they said, variously in all the kingdoms of being. Surya is manifest as creative solar Light in the material world, he is Savitri, the Father; he is manifest in his own home, the Truth-principle, as the divine Light that illuminates our liberated being. To all the gods this parallelism applies and it is the basis of that concrete and material symbolism which saturates the whole language of the Veda and is for modern minds the chief stumbling block in the way of perfect comprehension. Moreover, since all these gods were but different powers and personalities of the one Being who is the source of all personalities and powers as is the solar principle of all beams and rays, the seers continually recognise their essential oneness; they differentiate them clearly when they are thinking of the diverse action of these Persons and their powers, they deliberately confuse them together when they look beyond; they declare plainly of Agni or another “Thou art Varuna, thou art Mitra”, or they address one god by the name of another in the course of the same hymn and the same strain of thought. Here lies the true secret of that isotheism and henotheism,— but henotheism in a far different sense from that understood by the German savant, — which is an unique and constant feature of the Vedic writings.

6. Circa 1913⁸

Saraswati and the Great Water

If the Veda is a great religious and psychological document and not an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants passages which preserve, in spite of the unavoidable difficulties of an archaic language, their ancient truth on their surface. The totality of the Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, constant in its ideas and unchanging in its terms that we may hope from even one such text a help considerably beyond the measure of its actual length and scope in fixing the nature of the Vedic outlook and helping us to some clue to the secret of its characteristic expressions. Our desideratum is a passage in which the god of the Riks must be a mental or moral Power, the thoughts religious, intellectual or psychological in their substance, the expressions insistent in their clear superphysical intention. We will begin with a striking passage in a hymn, put by Vyasa very early in the order of his collection. It is the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhanda, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the three closing riks of the hymn are the indicative passage.

Saraswati, a name familiar to the religious conceptions of the race from our earliest eras, and of incessant occurrence in poetic phraseology and image, is worshipped yearly even at the present day in all provinces of the peninsula no less than those many millenniums ago in the prehistoric dawn of our religion and literature. Consistently, subsequent to the Vedic times, she has been worshipped everywhere and is named in all passages as a goddess of speech, poetry, learning and eloquence. Epic, Purana and the popular imagination know her solely as this deity of speech and knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests itself: In any given passage may it not be the Aryan river, Saraswati, which the bards are chanting? even if they sing of her or cry to her as a goddess, may it not still be the River, so dear, sacred and beneficent to them, that they worship? Or even where she is clearly a goddess of speech and thought, may it not be that the Aryans, having had originally no intellectual or moral conceptions and therefore no gods of the mind and heart, converted, when they did feel the need, this sacred flowing River into a goddess of sacred flowing song? In that case we are likely to find in her epithets and activities the traces of this double capacity.

For the rest, Sayana in this particular passage lends some support [to] this suggestion of Saraswati’s etymological good luck; for he tells us that Saraswati has two aspects, the embodied goddess of Speech and the figure of a river. He distributes, indeed, these two capacities with a strange inconsistency and in his interpretation, as in so many of these harsh and twisted scholastic renderings, European and Indian, of the old melodious subtleties of thought and language, the sages of the Veda come before us only to be convicted of a baffling incoherence of sense and a pointless inaptness of language. But possibly, after all, it is the knowledge of the scholar that is at fault, not the intellect of the Vedic singers that was confused, stupid and clumsy! Nevertheless we must consider the possibility that Sayana’s distribution of the sense may be ill-guided, and yet his suggestion about the double role of the goddess may in itself be well-founded. There are few passages of the ancient Sanhita, into which these ingenuities of the ritualistic and naturalistic interpretations do not pursue us. Our inquiry would protract itself into an intolerable length, if we had at every step to clear away from the path either the heavy ancient lumber or the brilliant modern rubbish. It is necessary to determine, once for all, whether the Vedic scholars, pūrve nūtanā uta, are guides worthy of trust — whether they are as sure in taste and insight as they are painstaking and diligent in their labour, — whether, in a word, these ingenuities are the outcome of an imaginative licence of speculation or a sound and keen intuition of the true substance of Veda. Here is a crucial passage. Let us settle at least one side of the account — the ledger of the great Indian scholiast.

Madhuchchhanda turns to Saraswati at the close of his hymn after successively calling to the Aswins, Indra and the Visvadevas. To each of these deities he has addressed three riks of praise and invocation; the last three of the twelve reiterate in each verse the name, epithets and functions of Saraswati. The Sukta falls therefore into four equal parts of which the last alone immediately concerns us.

On the strength of Sayana’s commentary these lines would have to bear in English the following astounding significance. “Let the purifying goddess of Speech, equipped by means of food-offerings with a ritual full of food, desire (that is to say, upbear) the sacrifice, she who is the cause of wealth as a result of the ritual. Sender of pleasant and true sayings and explainer (of this sacrifice) to the performers of the ritual who have a good intelligence, the goddess of Speech upholds the sacrifice. The river Saraswati makes known by her action (that is, her stream) much water, she (the Muse) illumines all the ideas of the sacrificer.” Truly, whatever Saraswati may do for the sacrificer, — who does not appear at all in the lines except to the second sight of Sayana,— the great scholar does not succeed in illumining our ideas about the sense of the Sukta. The astonishing transition from the Muse to the river and the river to the Muse in a single rik is flagrantly impossible. How does Saraswati’s thoughtful provision of much water lead to her illumination of the sacrificer’s evidently confused intellect? Why should dhiyā in dhiyāvasu mean ritual act, and dhiyo in dhiyo viśvā ideas? How can desire mean upbear, ritual act mean wealth or action mean a stream of water? What sense can we extract from arnah prachetayati in Sayana’s extraordinary combination? If sūnritānām expresses speech or thought, why should the parallel expression sumatīnām in defiance of rhythm of sound and rhythm of sense, refer to the sacrificers? I have offered these criticisms not for any pleasure in carping at the great Southern scholar, but to establish by a clear, decisive and typical instance the defects which justify my total rejection of his once supreme authority in Vedic scholarship. Sayana is learned in ritualism, loaded with grammatical lore, a scholar of vast diligence and enormous erudition, but in his mentality literary perception and taste seem either to have been non-existent or else oppressed under the heavy weight of his learning. This and other defects common enough in men of vast learning whose very curiosity of erudition only leads them to prefer a strained to a simple explanation, the isolated suggestions of single words to a regard for the total form and coherence, and recondite, antiquarian or ceremonial allusions to a plain meaning, render his guidance less than useful in the higher matters of interpretation and far from safe in questions of verbal rendering.

The effectual motive for Sayana’s admission of Saraswati’s double rôle in this Sukta is the expression maho arnas, the great water, of the third rik. Only in her capacity as a river-goddess has Saraswati anything to do with material water; an abundance of liquid matter is entirely irrelevant to her intellectual functions. If therefore we accept arnah in a material sense, the entrance of the river into the total physiognomy of Saraswati is imposed upon us by hard necessity in spite of the resultant incoherence. But if on the other hand, arnah can be shown to bear other than a material significance or intention, then no other necessity exists for the introduction of a deified Aryan river. On the contrary, there is an extraordinary accumulation of expressions clearly intellectual in sense. Pāvakā, dhiyāvasuh, chodayitrī sūnrit ānām, chetantī sumatīnām, prachetayati ketunā, dhiyo viśvā vi rājati are all expressions of this stamp; for they mean respectively purifying, rich in understanding, impeller of truths, awakening to good thoughts, perceives or makes conscious by perception, governs variously all the ideas or mental activities. Even yajnam vashtu and yajnam dadhe refer, plainly, to a figurative moral upholding, — if, indeed, upholding be at all the Rishi’s intention in vashtu. What is left? Only the name Saraswati thrice repeated, the pronoun naḥ, and the two expressions vājebhir vājināvatī and maho arnah. The rest is clearly the substance of a passage full of strong intellectual and moral conceptions. I shall suggest that these two expressions vājebhir vājinīvatī and maho arnah are no exception to the intellectuality of the rest of the passage. They, too, are words expressing moral or intellectual qualities or entities.

The word vāja, usually rendered by Sayana, food or ghee, — a sense which he is swift to foist upon any word which will at all admit that construction, as well as on some which will not admit it,— has in other passages another sense assigned to it, strength, bala. It is the latter significance or its basis of substance and solidity which I propose to attach to vāja in every line of the Rigveda where it occurs — and it occurs with an abundant frequency. There are a number of words in the Veda which have to be rendered by the English strength,— bala, taras, vāja, sahas, śavas, to mention only the most common expressions. Can it be supposed that all these vocables rejoice in one identical connotation as commentators and lexicographers would lead us to conclude, and are used in the Veda promiscuously and indifferently to express the same idea of strength? The psychology of human language is more rich and delicate. In English the words strength, force, vigour, robustness differ in their mental values; force can be used in offices of expression to which strength and vigour are ineligible. In Vedic Sanscrit, as in every living tongue, the same law holds and a literary and thoughtful appreciation of its documents, whatever may be the way of the schools, must take account of these distinctions. In the brief list I have given, bala answers to the English strength, taras gives a shade of speed and impetuosity, sahas of violence or force, śavas of flame and brilliance, vāja of substance and solidity. In the philological appendix to this work there will be found detailed reasons for concluding that strength is in the history of the word vāja only a secondary sense, like its other meanings, wealth and food; the basic idea is a strong sufficiency of substance or substantial energy. Vāja is one of the great standing terms of the Vedic psychology. All states of being, whether matter, mind or life and all material, mental and vital activities depend upon an original flowing mass of Energy which is in the vivid phraseology of the Vedas called a flood or sea, samudra, sindhu or arnas. Our power or activity in any direction depends first on the amount and substantiality of this stream as it flows into, through or within our own limits of consciousness, secondly, on our largeness of being constituted by the wideness of those limits, thirdly, on our power of holding the divine flow and fourthly on the force and delight which enter into the use of our available Energy. The result is the self-expression, śansa or vyakti, which is the objective of Vedic Yoga. In the language of the Rishis whatever we can make permanently ours is called our holding or wealth, dhanam or in the plural dhanāni; the powers which assist us in the getting, keeping or increasing of our dhanāni, the yoga, sāti and vriddhi, are the gods; the powers which oppose and labour to rob us of this wealth are our enemies and plunderers, dasyus, and appear under various names, Vritras, Panis, Daityas, Rakshasas, Yatudhanas. The wealth itself may be the substance of mental light and knowledge or of vital health, delight and longevity or of material strength and beauty or it may be external possessions, cattle, progeny, empire, women. A close, symbolic and to modern ideas mystic parallelism stood established in the Vedic mind between the external and the internal wealth, as between the outer sacrifice which earned from the gods the external wealth and the inner sacrifice which brought by the aid of the gods the internal riches. In this system the word vāja represents that amount and substantial energy of the stuff of force in the dhanam brought to the service of the sacrificer for the great Jivayaja, our daily and continual life-sacrifice. It is a substantial wealth, vājavad dhanam that the gods are asked to bring with them. We see then in what sense Saraswati, a goddess purely mental in her functions of speech and knowledge, can be vājebhir vājinīvatī. Vājinī is that which is composed of vāja, substantial energy; the plural vājāh or vājāni the particular substantialities of various mind-quality or mental function of which the energy is ostensibly composed. For the rest, to no other purpose can a deity of speech and knowledge be vājebhir vājinīvatī. In what appropriateness or coherent conceivable sense can the goddess of knowledge be possessed of material wealth or full-stored with material food, ghee and butter, beef and mutton? If it be suggested that Speech of the mantras was believed by these old superstitious barbarians to bring them their ghee and butter, beef and mutton, the answer is that this is not what the language of the hymns expresses. Saraswati herself is said to be vājinīvatī, possessed of substance of food; she is not spoken of as being the cause of fullness of food or wealth to others.

This explanation of vājebhir vājinīvatī leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type and nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions and physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct and true origin and even a previous existence in the religion and psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,— early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,— were capable of such high thoughts and perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images and symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct and virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech and thought by the abstractions and formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised and the symbol.

What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought and speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great, maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta. We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being and pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life and mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately above Manas, preceding it therefore and containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy and Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness and Self-Being (Chit and Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit and Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness and self-delight. Annam, Prana and Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life and matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah and Swar, mental, vital and material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,— called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,— into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects and creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahān, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange and subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefathers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich and concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied and lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities and abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been and cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source and substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad and Purana as only the interpretation and later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.

Vājebhir vājinīvatī and maho arnas are therefore fixed in their significance. The word vashtu in the tenth Rik offers a difficulty. It is equivalent to vahatu, says the Brahmana; to kāmayatu, says Sayana; but, deferring to the opinion of the Brahmana, he adds that it means really “kāmayitwā vahatu”. Undoubtedly the root vaś means in classical Sanscrit to desire; but from the evidence of the classical Sanscrit we have it established that in more ancient times its ordinary meaning must have been to subdue or control; for although the verb has lost this sense in the later language, almost all its derivatives bear that meaning and the sense of wish, will or desire only persists in a few of them, vaśa, wish and possibly vaśā, a woman. It is this sense which agrees best with the context of the tenth rik and is concealed in the vahatu of the Brahmanas. There is no other difficulty of interpretation in the passage.

What then is it that Madhuchchhanda, son of Viswamitra, has to say in this Sukta of the goddess of inspiration, speech and knowledge? He does not directly address her, but he assigns to this deity the general control, support and illumination of the sacrifice he is performing. “Let Saraswati” he says “control our Yajna.” The epithets which fill the Rik must express either the permanent and characteristic qualities in her which fit her for this high office of control or the possible and suitable qualities with which he wishes her to be equipped in the performance of that office. First, pāvakā. She is the great purifier. It is as we shall see not a literary inspiration he invokes, but a divine inspiration, an inspiration of truths and right thoughts and, it may be, right feelings. Saraswati by this inspiration, by this inspired truth and knowledge and right feeling, is asked to purify, first, the mental state of the Yogin; for a mind unpurified cannot hold the light from on high. Knowledge purifies, says the Gita, meaning the higher spiritual knowledge which comes by śruti, divine inspiration; there is nothing in the whole world so pure as knowledge: Saraswati who purifies, Pāvakā Saraswatī. Vājebhir vājinīvatī. She is full of substantial energy, stored with a great variety in substance of knowledge, chitraśravastama, as is said in another hymn of the strong god Agni. The inspiration and resultant knowledge prayed for is not that of any isolated truth or slight awakening, but a great substance of knowledge and a high plenty of inspiration; the mental state has to be filled with this strong and copious substance of Saraswati. Dhiyāvasuh. She is rich in understanding. Dhī in the Veda is the buddhi, the faculty of reason that understands, discerns and holds knowledge. This inspiration has to be based on a great intellectual capacity which supports and holds the flood of the inspiration. Thus rich, thus strong and plenteous, thus purifying the divine inspiration has to hold and govern the Sacrifice.

The thought passes on in the eleventh Rik from the prayer to the fulfilment. Yajnam dadhe Saraswatī. Saraswati upholds the Yajna; she has accepted the office of governance and already upbears in her strength the action of the sacrifice. In that action she is Chodayitrī sūnritānām, chetantī sumatīnām. That great luminous impulse of inspiration in which the truths of being start to light of themselves and are captured and possessed by the mind, that spiritual enlightenment and awakening in which right thoughts and right seeing become spontaneously the substance of our purified mental state, proceed from Saraswati and are already being poured by her into the system, like the Aryan stream into the Indus. Mati means any activity of the mind; right thoughts in the intellect, right feelings in the heart, right perceptions in the sensational mind, sumati may embrace any or all of these associations; in another context, by a different turn of the prefix, it may express kindly thoughts, friendly feelings, happy perceptions.

In the last Rik the source of this great illumination is indicated. Spiritual knowledge is not natural to the mind; it is in us a higher faculty concealed and sleeping, not active to our consciousness. It is only when the inspiration of a divine enlightenment,— Saraswatī ketunā, in the concrete Vedic language,— seizes on that self-luminous faculty and directs a ray of it into our understanding that we receive the high truths, the great illuminations which raise us above our normal humanity. But it is not an isolated illumination with which this son of Viswamitra intends to be satisfied. The position for him is that the human mind is wakeful on its own level of sensations, emotion, sense perception and reason, but asleep, sushupta, achetana, on the level of the pure ideal knowledge. He wishes it to awake to the divine knowledge and his whole mental state to be illumined by it. The divine Inspiration has to awaken to conscious activity this great water now lying still and veiled in our humanity. This great awakening Saraswati now in the action of the Sacrifice effects for Madhuchchhandas — Maho arnah prachetayati. The instrument is ketu, enlightening perception. With the knowledge that now streams into the mind from the ocean of divine knowledge all the ideas of the understanding in their various and many-branching activity are possessed and illumined. Dhiyo viśvā vi rājati. She illumines variously or in various directions, or, less probably, she entirely illumines, all the activities of the understanding. This invasion and illumination of his whole mental state by the state of divine knowledge, with its spontaneous manifestation of high truths, right thoughts, right feelings, the ritam jyotih, is the culmination of this sacrifice of Madhuchchhandas.

Shall we suppose that a sacrifice with such a governance, such circumstances and such a crowning experience is the material offering of the Soma wine into a material fire on a material altar? Every expression in the text cries out against such an impossibility. This sacrifice must be a mental, moral subjective activity of which the Soma-offering is only a material symbol. We see at once that the Gita was not reading a later gloss into the Vedic idea in its description of the many kinds of Yajna in its [fourth] chapter. The modern Yoga and the ancient Yajna are one idea; there is only this difference that the Vedic Rishis regarded all the material and internal riches that came by Yoga as the gift of the gods to be offered to them again so that they may again increase them and supremely enrich our lives with all the boons that they, our friends, helpers, masters of world-evolution are so eager to shower upon us, the vessels and instruments of that evolution. The whole Vedic theory is succinctly stated in two slokas of the Gita. (III.10, 11)

sahayajñāḥ prajāḥ sṛṣṭvā purovāca prajāpatiḥ anena prasaviṣyadhvameṣa vo’stviṣṭakāmadhuk (III.10)

devānbhāvayatānena te devā bhāvayantu vaḥ parasparaṃ bhāvayantaḥ śreyaḥ paramavāpsyatha (III.11)

The Father created of old these peoples with sacrifice as their companion birth; “By this” he said, “ye shall bring forth; let this be your milker of all chosen desires. Nourish the gods in their being with this; let the gods nourish you in your being. Thus nourishing each other ye shall gain the highest good.” We see, at the same time, the Vedic origin of the central idea in the Gita, the offering of our lives and actions in a perfect sacrifice to God.

Greatly has this short passage helped us. It has shown us the true physiognomy of Saraswati as the goddess of inspiration and inspired knowledge and the true nature of the Vedic Yajna; it has fixed the great Vedic terms, vāja, dhī and ketu; but above all it has given us a firm foundation for a religious and spiritual interpretation of Veda, a brilliant starting point for an inquiry into its truth and its ancient secret. We can now hope to be delivered from the obscuration of Veda by the ritualists and its modern degradation into the document of a primitive and barbarous religion. Its higher and truer sense shows itself in this brief passage like the dim line of land seen on the far horizon.

7. Circa 1913⁹

7. Come, O Visvadevas who in your benignity uphold the activities of men, come, distributing the nectar-offering of the giver.

8. O Visvadevas, swift to effect, come to the nectar-offering, hastening like mornings to the days (or, like lovers to their paramours).

9. O Visvadevas, who stumble not in your work, for you are mighty for all activity and do no hurt, cleave in heart to the sacrifice and be its upbearers.

Visvadevas

We have now arrived, in the thought of the Sukta, at a stage when the strength and delight supported by the Soma, taken up through the mantras into the understanding, poured into a strong and many-sided mental activity can be utilised for action and poured out on the world. Therefore the next invocation is to the Visve Devah, to whom also three riks are devoted:

omāsaścarṣaṇīdhṛto viśve devāsa ā gata, dāśvāṃso dāśuṣaḥ sutam [1.3.7]

viśve devāso apturaḥ sutamā ganta tūrṇayaḥ, usrā iva svasarāṇi [1.3.8]

viśve devāso asridha ehimāyāso adruhaḥ, medham juṣanta vahnayaḥ [1.3.9]

We are accustomed to speak of the Visvadevas as if they were a separate class of deities, like the Adityas, Maruts or Rudras; but the Veda uses the expression Viśve devāsah, which in the absence of any other meaning for viśva, we must render simply “All gods”. We shall suppose for the present that when the expression is used, the gods generally and in the mass, whether apart from the great Thirty-three or including them, are invoked, — the gods in their general character as supporters and agents of all internal and external activity, charshanidhritah, without distinction of names or special faculty. A rich and many-sided activity is contemplated; the mass of the divine forces that support the world action in man are summoned to their functions.

The precise meaning of the words has first to be settled. Charshani is taken in the Veda to be, like krishti, a word equivalent to manushya, men. The entire correctness of the rendering may well be doubted. The gods, no doubt, can be described as upholders of men, but there are passages and uses in which the application of this significance becomes difficult. For Indra, like Agni, is called viśvacharshani. Can this expression mean the Universal Man? Is Indra, like Agni, Vaiśvānara, in the sense of being present in all human beings? If so, the subjective capacity of Indra is indeed proved by a single epithet. But Vaiśvānara really means the Universal Existence or Force, from a sense of the root an which we have in anila, anala, Latin anima or else, if the combination be viśvā-nara, then from the Vedic sense of nara, strong, swift or bright. And what can we make of such an expression as charshaniprā? We must therefore follow our usual course and ask how charshani came to mean a human being. The root charsh or chrish is formed from the primary root char or chri (a lost form whose original presence is, however, necessary in the history of Sanscrit speech), as krish from kri. Now kri means to do, char means to do, work, practise or perform. The form krish was evidently used in the sense of action which required a prolonged or laborious effort; in the same way as the root Ar it came to mean to plough; it came to mean also to overcome or to drag or pull. From this sense of action or labour alone can krishti have been extended in significance to the idea, man; originally it must have been used like kāru or keru to mean a doer, worker, and, from its form, have been capable also of meaning action. I suggest that charshani had really the same meaning and something of the same development. The other sense given to the word, swift, moving, cannot easily have led to the idea of man; strength, doing, thinking are the characteristics behind the human idea in the older languages. Charshani-dhrit applied to the Visvadevas or dhartārā charshanīnām to Mitra and Varuna will mean the upholders of actions or activities; viśvacharshani, applied to Indra or Agni, will mean the lord of all actions; charshaniprā will mean “filling the actions”. That Indra in this sense is viśvacharshani can be at once determined from two passages occurring early in the Veda,— I.9.2 in Madhuchchhanda’s hymn to Indra, mandim Indrāya mandine chakrim viśvāni chakraye, delight-giving for Indra the enjoyer, effective of action for the doer of all actions, where viśvāni chakri is a perfect equivalent to viśvacharshani, and I.11.4 in another hymn to Indra, Indro viśvasya karmano dhartā, Indra the upholder of every action, where we have the exact idea of charshanīdhrit, viśvacharshani and dhartārā charshanīnām. The Visvadevas are the upholders of all our activities.

In the eighth rik, usrā iva swasarāni offers us an almost insoluble difficulty. Usrā means, ordinarily, either rays or cows or mornings; swasaram is a Vedic word of unfixed significance. Sayana renders, “hastening like sunbeams to the days”, a rendering which has neither sense nor appropriateness; emending it slightly we get “hastening like dawns or mornings to the days”, a beautiful and picturesque, though difficult image but one, unhappily, which has no appropriateness to the context. If we can suppose the lost root swas to have meant, to lie, sleep, rest, like the simpler form sas (cf sanj to cling and swanj to embrace), we may translate, “hastening like kine to their stalls”; but this also is not appropriate to the Visvadevas hastening to the Soma offering not for rest, but for enjoyment and action. I believe the real meaning to be, “hastening like lovers to their paramours”; but the philological reasoning by which I arrive at these meanings for usra and swasaram is so remote and conjectural, that I cannot lay any stress on the suggestion. Aptur is a less difficult word. If it is a compound, ap+tur, it must mean swift or forceful in effecting or producing; but it may also be formed by the addition of a suffix tur in an adjectival sense to the root ap, to do, bring about, effect, produce or obtain.

In the ninth rik, I take vahnayah in its natural sense, “those who bear or support”; it is the application of the general function, charshanidhrit to the particular activity of the sacrifice, medham jushanta vahnayah. I cannot accept the sense of priest for vahni; it may have this meaning in some passages, but the ordinary significance is clearly fixed by Medhatithi’s collocation, vahanti vahnayah, in the [fourteenth] sukta; for to suppose such a collocation to have been made without any reference to the common significance of the two words, is to do violence to common sense and to language. In the same rik we have the word asridhah rendered by Sayana, “undecaying or unwithering”, and ehimāyāsah, in which he takes ehi to be ā-īha, “pervading activity” and māyā in the sense of prajnā, intelligence. We have no difficulty in rejecting these constructions. Ehi is a modified form, by gunation, from the root īh, and must mean like īh, wish, attempt, effort or activity; māyā from mā, to contain or measure (mātā, māna) or mī, to contain, embrace, comprehend, know, may mean either capacity, wideness, greatness or comprehending knowledge. The sense, therefore, is either that the Visvadevas put knowledge into all their activities or else that they have a full capacity, whether in knowledge or in any other quality, for all activities. The latter sense strikes me as the more natural and appropriate in the context. Sridhah, again, means enemies in the Veda, and asridhah may well mean, not hostile, friendly. It will then be complementary to adruhah,— asridhah adruhah, unhostile, unharmful,— and the two epithets will form an amplification of omāsas, kindly, the first of the characteristics applied to these deities. Yet such a purposeless negative amplification of a strong positive and sufficient epithet is not in the style of the Sukta, of Madhuchchhanda’s hymns generally or of any Vedic Rishi; nor does it go well with the word ehimāyāsah which inappropriately divides the two companion epithets. Sridh has the sense of enemy from the idea of the shock of assault. The root sri means to move, rush, or assail; sridh gives the additional idea of moving or rushing against some object or obstacle. I suggest then that asridhah means unstumbling, unfailing (cf the English to slide). The sense will then be that the Visvadevas are unstumbling and unfaltering in the effectuation of their activities because they have a full capacity for all activities, and for the same reason they cause no hurt to the work or the human worker. We have a coherent meaning and progression of related ideas and a good reason for the insertion of ehimāyāsah between the two negative epithets asridhah and adruhah.

We can now examine the functioning of the Visvadevas as they are revealed to us in these three riks of the ancient Veda: “Come,” says the Rishi, “O Visvadevas who in your benignity uphold the activities of men, come, distributing the nectar-offering of the giver. O Visvadevas, swift to effect, come to the nectar-offering, hastening like mornings to the days (or, like lovers to their paramours). O Visvadevas, who stumble not in your work, for you are mighty for all activity and do no hurt, cleave in heart to the sacrifice and be its upbearers.” The sense is clear and simple. The kindly gods who support man in his action and development, are to arrive; they are to give abroad the nectar-offering which is now given to them, to pour it out on the world in joy-giving activities of mind or body, for that is the relation of gods and men, as we see in the Gita, giving out whatever is given to them in an abundant mutual helpfulness. Swiftly have they to effect the many-sided action prepared for them, hastening to the joy of the offering of Ananda as a lover hastens to the joy of his mistress. They will not stumble or fail in any action entrusted to them, for they have full capacity for their great world-functions, nor, for the like reason, will they impair the force of the joy or the strength in the activity by misuse, therefore let them put their hearts into the sacrifice of action and upbear it by this unfaltering strength. Swiftness, variety, intensity, even a fierce intensity of joy and thought and action is the note throughout, but yet a faultless activity, fixed in its variety, unstumbling in its swiftness, not hurting the strength, light and joy by its fierceness or violent expenditure of energy — dhishnya, asridhah, adruhah. That which ensures this steadiness and unfaltering gait, is the control of the mental power which is the agent of the action and the holder of the joy by the understanding. Indra is dhiyeshita. But what will ensure the understanding itself from error and swerving? It is the divine inspiration, Saraswati, rich with mental substance and clearness, who will keep the system purified, uphold sovereignly the Yajna, and illumine all the actions of the understanding, by awakening with the high divine perception, daivyena ketunā, the great sea of ideal knowledge above. For this ideal knowledge, as we shall see, is the satyam, ritam, brihat; it is wide expansion of being and therefore utmost capacity of power, bliss and knowledge; it is the unobscured light of direct and unerring truth, and it is the unstumbling, unswerving fixity of spontaneous Right and Law.

We have gathered much from this brief hymn, one of the deepest in thought in the Veda. If our construction is correct, then this at least appears that the Veda is no loose, empty and tawdry collection of vague images and shallow superstitions, but there are some portions of it at least which present a clear, well-knit writing full of meaning and stored with ideas. We have the work of sages and thinkers, rishayah, kavayah, manīshinah, subtle practical psychologists and great Yogins, not the work of savage medicine-men evolving out of primitive barbarism the first glimpses of an embryonic culture in the half-coherent fumble, the meaningless ritual of a worship of personified rain, wind, fire, sun and constellations. The gods of the Veda have a clear and fixed personality and functions and its conceptions are founded on a fairly advanced knowledge and theory at least of our subjective nature. Nor when we look at the clearness, fixity and frequently psychological nature of the functions of the Greek gods, Apollo, Hermes, Pallas, Aphrodite, [have we] the right to expect anything less from the ancestors of the far more subtle-minded, philosophical and spiritual Indian nation.

8. Circa 1913¹⁰

Indra, the Luminous

From the Aswins Madhuchchhanda passes to Indra. Three verses are given to this great deity.

indrā yāhi citrabhāno sutā ime tvāyavaḥ, aṇvībhistanā pūtāsaḥ [1.3.4]

indrā yāhi dhiyeṣito viprajūtaḥ sutāvataḥ, upa brahmāṇi vāghataḥ [1.3.5]

indrā yāhi tūtujāna upa brahmāṇi harivaḥ, sute dadhiṣva naścanaḥ [1.3.6]

The modern naturalistic account of Indra is that he is the god of rain, the wielder of lightning, the master of the thunderbolt. It is as the lightning, we presume, that he is addressed as harivas and chitrabhāno, brilliant and of a richly varied effulgence. He comes to the brahmāni, the hymnal utterances of the Rishis, in the sense of being called by the prayer to the sacrifice, and he comes for the sole purpose of drinking the physical Soma wine, by which he is immediately increased,— sadyo vriddho ajāyathāh, says another Sukta,— that is, as soon as the Soma offering is poured out, the rains of the monsoon suddenly increase in force. So at least we must understand, if these hymns are to have any precise naturalistic sense. Otherwise we should have to assume that the Rishis sang without attaching any meaning to their words. If, however, we suppose the hymns to Indra to be sung at monsoon offerings, in the rainy months of the year only, we get ideas, imbecile enough, but still making some attempt at sense. On another hypothesis, we may suppose Indra to be one of the gods of light or day slaying Vritra the lord of night and darkness, and also a god of lightning slaying Vritra the lord of the drought. Stated generally, these hypotheses seem plausible enough; systematically stated and supported by Comparative Mythology and some Puranic details their easy acceptance and great vogue is readily intelligible. It is only when we look carefully at the actual expressions used by the Rishis, that they no longer seem to fit in perfectly and great gulfs of no-sense have to be perfunctorily bridged by empirical guesses. A perfect system of naturalistic Veda fails to evolve.

When we look carefully at the passage before us, we find an expression which strikes one as a very extraordinary phrase in reference to a god of lightning and rain. Indrāyāhi, says Madhuchchhanda, dhiyeshito viprajūtah. On any ordinary acceptance of the meaning of words, we have to render this line, “Come, O Indra, impelled by the understanding, driven by the Wise One.” Sayana thinks that vipra means Brahmin and the idea is that Indra is moved to come by the intelligent sacrificing priests and he explains dhiyeshito, moved to come by our understanding, that is to say, by our devotion. But understanding does not mean devotion and the artificiality of the interpretation is apparent. We will, as usual, put aside the ritualistic and naturalistic traditions and see to what the natural sense of the words themselves leads us. I question the traditional acceptance of viprajūta as a compound of vipra and jūta; it seems to me clearly to be vi prajūtah, driven forward variously or in various directions. I am content to accept the primary sense of impelled for ishita, although, whether we read dhiyā ishito with the Padapatha, or dhiyā īshito, it may equally well mean, controlled by the understanding; but of themselves the expressions “impelled and driven forward in various paths” imply a perfect control. We have then, “Come, O Indra, impelled” (or “controlled, governed”) “by the understanding and driven forward in various paths.” What is so driven forward? Obviously not the storm, not the lightning, not any force of material Nature, but a subjective force, and, as one can see at a glance, a force of mind. Now Indra is the king of Swar and Swar in the symbolical interpretation of the Vedic terms current in after times is the mental heaven corresponding to the principle of Manas, mind. His name means the Strong. In the Puranas he is that which the Rishis have to conquer in order to attain their goal, that which sends the Apsaras, the lower delights and temptations of the senses to bewilder the sage and the hero; and, as is well known, in the Indian system of Yoga it is the Mind with its snares, sensuous temptations and intellectual delusions which is the enemy that has to be overcome and the strong kingdom that has to be conquered. In this passage Indra is not thought of in his human form, but as embodied in the principle of light or tejas; he is harivas, “substance of brightness”; he is chitrabhānu, of a rich and various effulgence, epithets not easily applicable to a face or figure, but precisely applicable to the principle of mind which has always been supposed in India to be in its material element made of tejas or pure light. We may conclude, therefore, that in Indra, master of Swarga, we have the divine lord of mental force and power. It is as this mental power that he comes sutāvatah upa brahmāni vāghatah, to the soul-movements of the chanter of the sacred song, of the holder of the nectar-wine. He is asked to come, impelled or controlled by the understanding and driven forward by it in the various paths of sumati and sūnritā, right thinking and truth. We remember the image in the Kathopanishad in which the mind and senses are compared to reins and horses and the understanding to the driver. We look back and see at once the connection with the function demanded of the Aswins in the preceding verses; we look forward and see easily the connection with the activity of Saraswati in the closing riks. The thought of the whole Sukta begins to outline itself, a strong, coherent and luminous progression of psychological images begins to emerge.

Brahmāni, says Sayana, means the hymnal chants; vāghatah is the ritwik, the sacrificial priest. These ritual senses belong to the words — but we must always inquire how they came to bear them. As to vāghat, we have little clue or evidence, but on the system I have developed in another work (the Origins of Aryan Speech), it may be safely concluded that the lost roots vagh and vāgh, must have conveyed the sense of motion evident in the Latin vagus and vagari, wandering and to wander and the sense of crying out, calling apparent in the Latin vagire, to cry, and the Sanscrit vangh, to abuse, censure. Vāghat may mean the sacrificial priest because he is the one who calls to the deity in the chant of the brahma, the sacred hymn. It may also mean one who increases in being, in his brahma, his soul, who is getting vāja or substance.

The word Brahma is a great word in Indian thought, the greatest of all the words in which Indian spirituality has expressed itself; it means in the Upanishads, in all later literature, the Brahman, the Supreme and the All, the Spirit of Things and the sole reality. We need not ask ourselves, as yet, whether this crowning conception has any place in the Vedic hymns; all we need ask is whether Brahman in the Rigveda means hymn and only hymn or whether it has some sense by which it could pass naturally into the great Vedantic conception of the supreme Spirit. My suggestion is that Brahma in the Rigveda means often the soul, the psuche of the Greeks, animus of the Romans, as distinguished from the manas, mens or φρήν. This sense it must have borne at some period of Indian thought antecedent to the Upanishads; otherwise we cannot explain the selection of a word meaning hymn or speech as the great fundamental word of Vedanta, the name of the supreme spiritual Reality. The root brih, from which it comes, means, as we have seen in connection with barhis, to be full, great, to expand. Because Brahman is like the ether extending itself in all being, because it fills the body and whole system with its presence, therefore the word brahma can be applied to the soul or to the supreme Spirit, according as the idea is that of the individual spirit or the supreme Existence. It is possible also that the Greek phren, mind, phronis, etc may have derived from this root brih (the aspirate being thrown back on the initial consonant), and may have conveyed originally the same association of ideas. But are we justified in supposing that this use of Brahma in the sense of soul dates back to the Rigveda? May it not have originated in the intermediate period between the period of the Vedic hymns and the final emergence of the Upanishads? In most passages brahma can mean either hymn or soul; in some it seems to demand the sole sense of hymn. Without going wholly into the question, I shall only refer the reader to the hymn of Medhatithi Kanwa, to Brahmanaspati, the eighteenth of the first Mandala, and the epithets and functions there attributed to the Master of the Brahman. My suggestion is that in the Rigveda Brahmanaspati is the master of the soul, primarily, the master of speech, secondarily, as the expression of the soul. The immense importance attached to Speech, the high place given to it by the Vedic Rishis not only as the expression of the soul, but that which best increases and expands its substance and power in our life and being, is one of the most characteristic features of Vedic thought. The soul expresses itself through conscious knowledge and in thought; speech stands behind thought and connects knowledge with its expression in idea. It is through Vak that the Lord creates the world.

Brahmāni therefore may mean either the soul-activities, as dhiyas means the mental activities, or it may mean the words of the mantra which express the soul. If we take it in the latter sense, we must refer it to the girah of the second rik, the mantras taken up by the Aswins into the understanding in order to prepare for action and creation. Indra is to come to these mantras and support them by the brilliant substance of a mental force richly varied in its effulgent manifestation, controlled by the understanding and driven forward to its task in various ways. But it seems to me that the rendering is not quite satisfactory. The main point in this hymn is not the mantras, but the Soma wine and the power that it generates. It is in the forces of the Soma that the Aswins are to rejoice, in that strength they are to take up the girah, in that strength they are to rise to their fiercest intensity of strength and delight. Indra, as mental power, arrives in his richly varied lustre; āyāhi chitrabhāno. “Here” says the Rishi “are these life-forces in the nectar-wine; they are purified in their minute parts and in their whole extent”, for so I understand anwībhis tanā pūtāsah; that is to say the distillings of Ananda or divine delight whether in the body as nectar, [or] in the subjective system as streams of life-giving delight are purified of all that impairs and weakens the life forces, purified both in their little several movements and in the whole extent of their stream. These are phenomena that can easily be experienced and understood in Yoga, and the whole hymn like many in the Veda reads to those who have experience like a practical account of a great Yogic internal movement accurate in its every detail. Strengthened, like the Aswins, by the nectar, Indra is to prepare the many-sided activity supported by the Visve devah; therefore he has to come not only controlled by the understanding, dhishnya, like the Aswins, but driven forward in various paths. For an energetic and many-sided activity is the object and for this there must be an energetic and many-sided but well-ordered action of the mental power. He has to come, thus manifold, thus controlled, to the spiritual activities generated by the Soma and the Aswins in the increasing soul (vāghatah) full of the life-giving nectar, the immortalising Ananda, sutāvatah. He has to come to those soul-activities, in this substance of mental brilliancy, āyāhi upa brahmāni harivas. He has to come, tūtujāna, with a protective force, or else with a rapidly striving force and uphold by mind the joy of the Sacrificer in the nectar-offering, the offering of this Ananda to the gods of life and action and thought, sute dadhishwa naś chanah. Protecting is, here, the best sense for tūtujāna. For Indra is not only to support swift and energetic action; that has already been provided for; he has also to uphold or bear in mind and by the power of mind the great and rapid delight which the Sacrificer is about to pour out into life and action, jīvayāja. The divine delight must not fail us in our activity; hostile shocks must not be allowed to disturb our established pleasure in the great offering. Therefore Indra must be there in his light and power to uphold and to protect.

We have gained, therefore, another great step in the understanding of the Veda. The figure of the mighty Indra, in his most essential quality and function, begins to appear to us as in a half-luminous silhouette full of suggestions. We have much yet to learn about him, especially his war with Vritra, his thunderbolt and his dealings with the seven rivers. But the central or root idea is fixed. The rest is the outgrowth, foliage and branchings.

9. Circa 1913¹¹

1. O Aswins, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords of bliss, take your pleasure in the forces of the sacrifice.

3. The Soma is outpoured; come with your full bounty, dasrā & your fierce intensity, rudravartanī.

The Soma distillings are replete with energy and brought to their highest fullness.

Indra, the Visvadevas, the Aswins

If we are right, as we must now assume, in our interpretation of these three riks, then the conclusion is irresistible that the whole of this third Sukta in the Veda, and not only its closing verses, relates to an activity of moral and mental sacrifice and the other gods invoked by Madhuchchhandas are equally with Saraswati Powers of subjective Nature, Indra not the god of rain, but a mental deity, the Aswins not twin stars, or, if stars, then lights of a sublimer heaven, the Visvadevas, gods not of general physical Nature, but supraphysical and in charge of our general subjective or subjective-objective activity. The supposition is inadmissible that the hymn is purely ritual in its body and only ingrafted with a spiritual tail. The physical functions of the gods in the Veda need not be denied; but they must be alien to the thought of Madhuchchhandas in this Sukta,— unless as in some hymns of the Veda, there is the slesha or double application to subjective and objective activities. But this is improbable; for in the lines of which Saraswati is the goddess, we have found no reference either open or covert to any material form or function. She is purely the Muse and not at all the material river.

We must examine, then, the rest of the hymn and by an impartial scrutiny discover whether it yields naturally, without forcing or straining, a subjective significance. If we find that no such subjective significance exists and it is the gods of rain and of stars and of material activities who are invoked, a serious if not a fatal doubt will be cast on the validity of the first step we have gained in our second chapter. Here, too, we must follow the clue by which we arrived at the subjective physiognomy of Saraswati. We must see what is the evidence of the epithets and activities assigned to the several deities of the Sukta.

The first three riks are devoted to the Aswins and run in this strain: —

aśvinā yajvarīriṣo dravatpāṇī śubhaspatī, purubhujā canasyatam [1.3.1]

aśvinā purudaṃsasā narā śavīrayā dhiyā, dhiṣṇyā vanatam giraḥ [1.3.2]

dasrā yuvākavaḥ sutā nāsatyā vṛktabarhiṣaḥ, ā yātam rudravartanī [1.3.3]

In Sayana’s interpretation we find that isho is taken in the sense of food; yuvākavah sutā vriktabarhishah in the sense of Soma-offerings poured out, which are mixed with other liquid and for which the strewn grasses where they have been placed, are deprived of their roots. If these interpretations stand, the material nature of the sacrifice is established. But can they stand? And if they can, are they imperative? The word isho, in the first place, is not bound to this sense of foods; for it cannot in all the passages in which it occurs in the Veda, bear that sense. A single instance is decisive. We find in a hymn of Praskanwa Kanwa to the Aswins, this rik, the sixth in the forty-sixth Sukta of the first mandala:

yā naḥ pīparadaśvinā jyotiṣmatī tamastiraḥ, tāmasme rāsāthāmiṣam [1.46.6]

Now a brilliant or luminous food, jyotishmatī ish, is an absurdity which we certainly shall not accept; nor is there any reason for taking jyotih in any other than its ordinary sense of radiance, lustre. We must, therefore, seek some other significance for ish. It is the nature of the root ish, as of its lengthened form, īsh, and the family to which it belongs, to suggest intensity of motion or impulsion physical or subjective and the state or results of such intensity. It means impulse, wish, impulsion; sending, casting, (as in ishu, an arrow or missile), strength, force, mastery; in the verb, it signifies also striving, entreating, favour, assent, liking; in the noun, increase, affluence, or, as applied by the ritualists in the Veda, drink or food. We see, then, that impellent force or strength is the fundamental significance, the idea [of] food only a distant, isolated and late step in the sense-evolution. If we apply this fundamental sense in the rik we have quoted from Praskanwa’s hymn to the Aswins, we get at once the following clear, straightforward and lucid meaning, “The luminous force (force of the Mahas, or vijnana, the true light, ritam jyotih of [I.23.5]) which has carried us, O Aswins, through the darkness to its other shore, in that in us take delight” or else “that force give to us.” Apply the same key-meaning to this first rik of Madhuchchhandas’ lines to the same deities, we get a result equally clear, straightforward and lucid, “O Aswins, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords of bliss, take your pleasure in the forces of the sacrifice.” We have in Praskanwa and Madhuchchhandas the same idea, the same deities, the same prayer, the same subjective function of the gods and subjective purport of the words. We feel firm soil under our feet; a flood of light illumines our steps in these dim fields of Vedic interpretation.

What is this subjective function of the Aswins? We get it, I think, in the key words chanasyatam, rāsāthām. Whatever else may be the character of the Aswins, we get from the consonance of the two Rishis this strong suggestion that they are essentially gods of delight. Is there any other confirmation of the suggestion? Every epithet in this first rik testifies strongly to its correctness. The Aswins are purubhujā, much-enjoying; they are śubhaspatī, lords of weal or bliss, or else of beauty — for śubh may have any of these senses as well as the sense of light; they are dravatpānī, their hands dropping gifts, says Sayana, and that agrees well with the nature of gods of delight who pour from full hands the roses of rapture upon mortals, manibus lilia plenis. But dravat usually means in the Veda, swift, running, and pāni, although confined to the hands in classical Sanscrit, meant, as I shall suggest, in the old Aryan tongue any organ of action, hand, foot or, as in the Latin penis, the sexual organ. Even so, we have the nature of the Aswins as gods of delight, fully established; but we get in addition a fresh characteristic, the quality of impetuous speed, which is reinforced by their other epithets. For the Aswins are narā, the Strong ones; rudravartanī,— they put a fierce energy into all their activities; they accept the mantras of the hymn śavīrayā dhiyā, with a bright-flaming strength of intelligence in the understanding. The idea of bounteous giving, suggested by Sayana in dravatpānī and certainly present in that word if we accept pāni in its ordinary sense, appears in the dasrā of the third rik, “O you bounteous ones.” Sayana indeed takes dasrā in the sense of destroyers; he gives the root das in this word the same force as in dasyu, an enemy or robber; but das can also mean to give, dasma is sometimes interpreted by the scholiasts sacrificer and this sense of bounteous giving seems to be fixed on the kindred word dasra also, at least when it is applied to the Aswins, by the seventeenth rik of the thirtieth Sukta, Śunahśepa’s hymn to Indra and the Aswins,—

āśvināvaśvāvatyeṣā yātam śavīrayā, gomaddasrā hiraṇyavat [1.30.17]

“O Aswins, arrive with energetic force of a bright-flaming strength, givers of that which is radiant and brilliant” or, if we take the interpretation of the ritualists, “of wealth of cows and wealth of gold.” We see that here too we have ish with two epithets denoting strength and force; here also we meet the words dasrā and śavīrayā in connection with the Aswins; here also they are connected with light or radiance, go, rays or diffused light which we shall find to be the standing symbol-word in the Vedas for the diffusion of the light of the vijnana or mahas, for that ritam jyotih or light of ideal Truth which constitutes the luminous force hymned in connection with the Aswins by Praskanwa Kanwa, jyotishmatīm isham. These fixed ideas, this constant relation of epithets, this order in the divine functions, points to a settled system large in idea and minute in detail accepted by all the Vedic Rishis throughout the long period covered by the ensemble of the hymns of the Rigveda. In the ritualistic and naturalistic interpretations we get an artificial sense, an incoherent connection of ideas, a vague, purposeless and merely ornamental use of figures and epithets, one Rishi apparently reproducing stupidly the decorative ideas, images and words of his predecessors. In the subjective interpretation of the Vedas we shall find always a simple, lucid and straightforward sense perfectly connected and coherent, arising spontaneously from the text, in which there is a reason for the constant recurrence of ideas and terms, a complete appropriateness and fullness of meaning for every word that is used and an absolutely satisfying logical reason for the connection of each word with its predecessor and successor. According to our idea of the mentality of the Rishis we shall accept either the one interpretation which results in a confused barbaric intelligence or the other which reveals the culture and contents of a deep and splendid intellectuality. But there can be no doubt, which gives the best and most satisfying sense to the language of the Veda.

There are two epithets yet left which we have to fix to their right significance, before we sum up the evidence of this passage and determine the subjective physiognomy of the Aswins,— purudansasā and nāsatyā. Sayana interprets dansas as active,— the Aswins are gods of a great activity; I suggest fashioning or forming activity,— they are “abundant fashioners”. Sayana’s interpretation suits better with the idea of the Aswins as gods full of strength, speed and delight, purudansasā, full of a rich activity. But the sense of fashioning is also possible; we have in I.30.16 the expression sa no hiranyaratham dansanāvān sa nah sanitā sanaye sa no adāt, where the meaning may be “he gave a car”, but would run better “he fashioned for us a brilliant car”, unless with Sayana we are to disregard the whole structure and rhythmic movement of Śunahśepa’s sentence. The other epithet Nāsatyā has long been a puzzle for the grammarians; for the ingenious traditional rendering of Yaska and Sayana, na asatyā, not untruthful, is too evidently a desperate shift of entire ignorance. The word by its formation must be either a patronymic, “Sons of Nasata”, or an adjective formed by the termination tya from the old Aryan noun Nāsa, which still exists in the Greek νῆσος, an island. The physical significance of nā in the Aryan tongues is a gliding or floating motion; we find it in the Latin, nare, to swim or float, the Greek Nais, a river goddess, nama, a stream, nêxis, swimming, floating, naros, water, (S. nāra, water), necho, I swim, float or sail; but in Sanscrit, except in nāra, water, and nāga, a snake, elephant, this signification of the long root nā, shared by it originally with na, ni, nī, nu and nū, has disappeared. Nevertheless, the word Nāsa, in some sense of motion, floating, gliding, sailing, voyaging, must have existed among the more ancient Sanscrit vocables. But in what sense can it be applied to the Aswins? It seems to me that we get the clue in the seventh sloka of Praskanwa’s Hymn to the Aswins which I have already quoted. For immediately after he has spoken of the jyotishmatí ish, the luminous force which has carried him over to the other shore of the Ignorance, Praskanwa proceeds,—

ā no nāvā matīnām yātam pārāya gantave, yuñjāthāmaśvinā ratham [1.46.7]

“O ye who are the ships of our thoughts, come to us for our passing to the other shore; O Aswins, yoke your car.” It is as the ships that carry human mentality to the other shore of this darkness of ignorance, pīparat tamas tirah, as the masters or helpers of their voyage that the Aswins are addressed as Nāsatyā. Nāsa in Nāsatya would then be fixed in the sense of voyage, passage or transit. Is it not from the transference of this lofty idea to a more material plane that Castor and Pollux of the Romans, Kashtri and Purudansha, are the helpers of the distressed mariner when storm howls upon the darkened seas?

The Aswins, then, are the gods of youthful delight and youthful strength, yuvānā pitarā, always young yet fathers of men, (purudansasā, abundantly creating), as they are described in another sukta. They have a brilliant strength mental and physical, narā, a bright, strong and eager understanding, śavīrayā dhiyā, full hands of bounty and strong fertility of creation, dasrā, purudansasā; an insatiable enjoyment, purubhujā; a swift speed and fiery energy in action, dravatpānī rudravartanī; they are the lords of bliss who give physical, vital and mental well-being to men and that inferior ease, pleasure and delight they lift into the high regions of the original and luminous Ananda supported on the ritam jyotih of Mahas of which all these things are but pallid and broken rays penetrating into this lower play of subjective light and shade which is called the triple world. Because of this double aspect of delight and the force for action and knowledge which is given by delight, of force and the delight in action and enjoyment which is sustained by force, they are twin gods and not one; it may be that Castor is more essentially the lord of delight, Polydeuces of force, but they are too like each other not to share in each other’s qualities. Eternal youth is the essence of their character and the bestowal, maintenance, and increase in men of the gifts which attend youth, is their function. This, if I do not err, was the subjective aspect of the great Twin Brethren to the sages of the Veda.

For what functions are they called to the Sacrifice by Madhuchchhanda? First, they have to take delight in the spiritual forces generated in him by the action of the internal Yajna. These they have to accept, to enter into them and use them for delight, their delight and the sacrificer’s, yajwarīr isho .. chanasyatam; a wide enjoyment, a mastery of joy and all pleasant things, a swiftness in action like theirs is what their advent should bring and therefore these epithets are attached to this action. Then they are to accept the words of the mantra, vanatam girah. In fact, vanatam means more than acceptance, it is a pleased, joyous almost loving acceptance; for vanas is the Latin venus, which means charm, beauty, gratification, and the Sanscrit vanitā means woman or wife, she who charms, in whom one takes delight or for whom one has desire. Therefore vanatam takes up the idea of chanasyatam, enlarges it and applies it to a particular part of the Yajna, the mantras, the hymn or sacred words of the stoma. The immense effectiveness assigned to rhythmic Speech and the meaning and function of the mantra in the Veda and in later Yoga is a question of great interest and importance which must be separately considered; but for our present purpose it will be sufficient to specify its two chief functions, the first, to settle, fix, establish the god and his qualities and activities in the Sacrificer,— this is the true meaning of the word stoma, and, secondly, to effectualise them in action and creation subjective or objective,— this is the true meaning of the words rik and arka. The later senses, praise and hymn were the creation of actual ceremonial practice, and not the root intention of these terms of Veda. Therefore the Aswins, the lords of force and joy, are asked to take up the forces of the sacrifice, yajwarīr isho, fill them with their joy and activity and carry that joy and activity into the understanding so that it becomes śavīra, full of a bright and rapid strength. With that strong, impetuously rapid working they are to take up the words of the mantra into the understanding and by their joy and activity make them effective for action or creation. For this reason the epithet purudansasā is attached to this action, abundantly active or, rather, abundantly creative of forms into which the action of the yajwarīr ishah is to be thrown. But this can only be done as the Sacrificer wishes if they are in the acceptance of the mantra dhishnyā, firm and steady. Sayana suggests wise or intelligent as the sense of dhishnya, but although dhishanā, like dhī, can mean the understanding and dhishnya therefore intelligent, yet the fundamental sense is firm or steadily holding and the understanding is dhī or dhishanā because it takes up perceptions, thoughts and feelings and holds them firmly in their places. Vehemence and rapidity may be the causes of disorder and confusion, therefore even in their utmost rapidity and rapture of action and formation the Aswins are to be dhishnya, firm and steady. This discipline of a mighty, inalienable calm supporting and embracing the greatest fierceness of action and intensity of joy, the combination of dhishnyā and rudravartanī, is one of the grandest secrets of the old Vedic discipline. For by this secret men can enjoy the world as God enjoys it, with unstinted joy, with unbridled power, with undarkened knowledge.

Therefore the prayer to the Aswins concludes: “The Soma is outpoured; come with your full bounty, dasrā and your fierce intensity, rudravartanī.” But what Soma? Is it the material juice of a material plant, the bitter Homa which the Parsi priests use today in the ceremonies enjoined by the Zendavesta? Does Sayana’s interpretation give us the correct rendering? Is it by a material intoxication that this great joy and activity and glancing brilliance of the mind joined to a great steadfastness is to be obtained? Yuvākavah, says Sayana, means mixed and refers to the mixing of other ingredients in the Soma wine. Let us apply again our usual test. We come to the next passage in which the word yuvāku occurs, the fourth rik of the seventeenth Sukta, Medhatithi Kanwa’s hymn to Indra and Varuna.

yuvāku hi śacīnām yuvāku sumatīnām, bhūyāma vājadāvnām [1.17.4]

Sayana’s interpretation there is a miracle of ritualism and impossibility which it is best to ignore. Śachī means in the Veda power, sumati, right thought or right feeling, as we have seen, vājadāvan, strength-giving,— strength in the sense of steadfast substance whether of moral state or quality or physical state or quality. Yuvāku in such a connection and construction cannot mean mixed. The word is in formation the root yu and the adjectival āku connected by the euphonic v. It is akin therefore to yuvā, youth, and yavas, energy, plenty or luxuriance; the common idea is energy and luxuriance. The adjective yuvāku, if this connection be correct, would mean full of energy or particularly of the energy of youth. We get, therefore, a subjective sense for yuvāku which suits well with śachī, sumati and vājadāvan and falls naturally into the structure and thought of Medhatithi’s rik. Bhūyāma may mean “become” in the state of being or like the Greek φύω (bhú) it may admit a transitive sense, to bring about in oneself or attain; yuvāku śachīnām will mean the full energy of the powers and we get this sense for Medhatithi’s thought: “Let us become” or “For we would effect in ourselves the full energy of the powers, the full energy of the right thoughts which give substance” to our inner state or faculties.

We have reached a subjective sense for yuvāku. But what of vriktabarhishah? Does not barhih always mean in the Veda the sacred grass strewn as a seat for the gods? In the Brahmanas is it not so understood and have [we] not continually the expression Ā barhishi sīdata? I have no objection; barhis is certainly the seat of the Gods in the sacrifice, stritam ānushak, strewn without a break. But barhis cannot originally have meant Kusha grass; for in that case the singular could only be used to indicate a single grass and for the seat of the Gods the plural barhīnshi would have to be used,— barhihshu sīdata and not barhishi sīdata. We have the right to go behind the Brahmanas and enquire what was the original sense of barhis and how it came to mean kusha grass. The root barh is a modified formation from the root brih, to grow, increase or expand, which we have in brihat. From the sense of spreading we may get the original sense of seat, and because the material spread was usually the Kusha grass, the word by a secondary application came to bear also that significance. Is this the only possible sense of barhis? No, for we find it interpreted also as sacrifice, as fire, as light or splendour, as water, as ether. We find barhana and barhas in the sense of strength or power and barhah or barham used for a leaf or for a peacock’s tail. The base meaning is evidently fullness, greatness, expansion, power, splendour or anything having these attributes, an outspread seat, spreading foliage, the outspread or splendid peacock’s tail, the shining flame, the wide expanse of ether, the wide flow of water. If there were no other current sense of barhis, we should be bound to the ritualistic explanation. Even as it is, in other passages the ritualistic explanation may be found to stand or be binding; but is it obligatory here? I do not think it is even admissible. For observe the awkwardness of the expression, sutā vriktabarhishah, wine of which the grass is stripped of its roots. Anything, indeed, is possible in the more artificial styles of poetry, but the rest of this hymn, though subtle and deep in thought, is sufficiently lucid and straightforward in expression. In such a style this strained and awkward expression is an alien intruder. Moreover, since every other expression in these lines is subjective, only dire necessity can compel us to admit so material a rendering of this single epithet. There is no such necessity. Barhis means fundamentally fullness, splendour, expansion or strength and power, and this sense suits well with the meaning we have found for yuvākavah. The sense of vrikta is very doubtful. Purified (cleared, separated) is a very remote sense of vrij or vrich and improbable. They can both mean divided, distributed, strewn, outspread, but although it is possible that vriktabarhishah means “their fullness outspread through the system or distributed in the outpouring”, this sense too is not convincing. Again vrijana in the Veda means strong, or as a noun, strength, energy, even a battle or fight. Vrikta may therefore [mean] brought to its highest strength. We will accept this sense as a provisional conjecture, to be confirmed or corrected by farther enquiry, and render the line “The Soma distillings are replete with energy and brought to their highest fullness.”

But to what kind of distillings can such terms be applied? The meaning of Soma and the Vedic ideas about this symbolic wine must be examined by themselves and with a greater amplitude. All we need ask here [is], is there any indication in this hymn itself, that the Soma like everything else in the Sukta is subjective and symbolic? For, if so, our rendering, which at present is clouded with doubt and built on a wide but imperfectly solid foundation, will become firm and established. We have the clear suggestion in the next rik, the first of the three addressed to Indra. Sutā ime twā āyavah. Our question is answered. What has been distilled? Ime āyavah. These life-forces, these vitalities. We shall find throughout the Veda this insistence on the life, vitality, āyu or jīva; we shall find that the Soma was regarded as a life-giving juice, a sort of elixir of life, or nectar of immortality, something at least that gave increased vitality, established health, prolonged youth. Of such an elixir it may well be said that it is yuvāku, full of the force of youth in which the Aswins must specially delight, vriktabarhish, raised to its highest strength and fullness so that the gods who drink of it, become in the man in whom they enter and are seated, increased, vriddha, to the full height of their function and activity,— the Aswins to their utmost richness of bounty, their intensest fiery activity. Nectar-juices, they are called, indavah, pourings of delight, āyavah, life forces, amritāsah, elixirs of immortality.

Thus we see that when we take words in their first and plain sense, the meaning of the riks builds itself up before our eyes, everything agrees, a coherent sense is obtained, idea links itself to idea, every noun, epithet and verb falls into its right place and has a clear and perfect appropriateness. May we not then say at every step, “Is not this the right sense of the Veda, this rather than the forced ritualistic interpretation with its strainings, violences, incoherences, inconsistencies, or the difficult, laboured and artificial naturalistic interpretation of the European scholars with its result of garish image, tawdry ornament, emptiness of idea and ill-related sense?” At least the possibility has been established; we have a beginning and a foundation.

10. 1912¹²

1.. O Aswins, I am in the full rush, the full ecstasy of the sacrificial action, O swift-footed, much-enjoying masters of happiness, take in me your delight.

2. O strong wide-distributing Aswins, with your bright-flashing (or brilliantly-forceful) understanding take pleasure in the words (of the mantra) which are now firmly settled (in the mind).

3. O givers, O lords of free movement, come to the outpourings of my nectar, be ye fierce in action; — I feel full of youthful vigour, I have prepared the sacred grass.

4. Indra, arrive, O thou of rich and varied light, here are these life-streams poured forth, purified, with vital powers, with substance.

5. Arrive, O Indra, controlled by the understanding, impelled forward in various directions to my soul faculties, I who am now full of strength and flourishing increase.

6. Arrive, O Indra, with protection to my soul faculties, O dweller in the brilliance, confirm our delight in the nectar poured.

8. O you all-gods who are energetic in works, come to the nectar distilled, ye swift ones, (or, come swiftly), like calves to their own stalls,— (so at least we must translate this last phrase, till we can get the real meaning, for I do not believe this is the real or, at any rate, the only meaning).

9. O you all-gods unfaltering, with wide capacity of strength, ye who harm not, attach yourselves to the offering as its supporters.

The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchchhanda Vaisvamitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invoked — apparently in order to conduct an ordinary material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen,— to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?

The passage devoted to her occupies the three final and culminating verses of the sacred poem. Pāvakā naḥ sarasvatī vājebhirvājinīvatī, yajñam vaṣṭu dhiyāvasuḥ. Codayitrī sūnṛtānām cetantī sumatīnām, yajñam dadhe sarasvatī. Maho arṇaḥ sarasvatī pra cetayati ketunā, dhiyo viśvā vi rājati [1.3.10-1.3.12]

Now there is here mention in the last verse of a flowing water, arṇas, whether sea or river, but this can be no material stream, since plainly the rest of the passage can only refer to a goddess whose functions are subjective. She is dhiyavasuh [dhiyāvasuḥ], stored or rich with understanding, she is the impelling power of truths, she is the awakener of or to right thoughts. She awakens something or brings it forward into consciousness (pra-cetayati) by the perceptive intelligence and she governs or shines through all the movements of the fixing and discerning mind. There are too many words here that do ordinarily and ought here to bear a purely subjective sense for any avoidance of the clear import of the passage. We start then with the conception of Saraswati as a goddess of mind, if not the goddess of mind and we have then to determine what are her functions or activities as indicated in this important passage and for what purpose she has been summoned by the son of Visvamitra to this sacrifice.

What exact sense are we to apply to vajebhir vajinivati [vājebhir vājinīvatī] when it is spoken of a subjective Power? It is a suggestion I shall make and work out hereafter by application to all the hundreds of passages in which the word occurs that vaja in the Veda means a substantial, firm and copious condition of being, well-grounded and sufficient plenty in anything material, mental or spiritual, any substance, wealth, chattels, qualities, psychological conditions. Saraswati has the power of firm plenty, vajini [vājinī], by means of or consisting in many kinds of plenty, copious stores of mental material for any mental activity or sacrifice. But first of all she is purifying, pavaka [pāvakā]. Therefore she is not merely or not essentially a goddess of mental force, but of enlightenment; for enlightenment is the mental force that purifies. And she is dhiyavasu [dhiyāvasu], richly stored with understanding, buddhi, the discerning intellect, which holds firmly in their place, fixes, establishes all mental conceptions. First, therefore she has the purifying power of enlightenment, secondly, she has plenty of mental material, great wealth of mental being; thirdly, she is powerful in intellect, in that which holds, discerns, places. Therefore she is asked, as I take it, to control the Yajna —vashtu [vaṣṭu] from Root vash [vaṣ], which bore the idea of control as is evident from its derivatives vasha, vashya and vashin [vaṣa, vaṣya and vaṣin].

But greater capacities, mightier functions are demanded of Saraswati. Mind and discerning intelligence, however active and well-stored, may give false interpretation and mistaken counsel. But Saraswati at the sacrifice is chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam [codayitrī sūnṛtānām cetantī sumatīnām]. It is she who gives the impulsion to the truths that appear in the mind, it is she who, herself conscious of right thoughts and just processes of thinking, awakens to them the mental faculties. Therefore, because she is the impelling force behind intellectual Truth, and our awakener to right thinking, she is present at the sacrifice; she has established and upholds it, yajnam dadhe [yajñam dadhe]. This sacrifice, whatever else it may be, is controlled by mental enlightenment and rich understanding and confirmed in and by truth and right-thinking. Therefore is Saraswati its directing power and presiding goddess.

But by what power of Saraswati’s are falsehood and error excluded and the mind and discerning reason held to truth and right-thinking? This, if I mistake not, is what the Rishi Madhuchchhanda, the drashta [draṣṭā] of Veda has seen for us in his last and culminating verse. I have said that arnas [arṇas] is a flowing water whether river or sea; for the word expresses either a flowing continuity or a flowing expanse. We may translate it then as “the river of Mah or Mahas”, and place arnas in apposition with Saraswati. This goddess will then be in our subjective being some principle to which the Vedic thinkers gave the names of Mah and Mahas for it is clear, if the rest of our interpretation is at all correct, that there can be no question of a material stream and arnas must refer to some stream or storehouse of subjective faculty. But there are strong objections to such a collocation. We shall find later that the goddess Mahi and not Saraswati is the objectivising feminine power and divine representative of this Vedic principle Mahas; pracetayati besides demands an object and maho arnas [maho arṇaḥ] is the only object which the structure of the sentence and the rhythm of the verse will allow. I translate therefore “Saraswati awakens by the perceptive intelligence the ocean (or, flowing expanse) of Mahas and governs diversely all the movements (or, all the faculties) of the understanding.”

What is Mah or Mahas? The word means great, embracing, full, comprehensive. The Earth, also, because of its wideness and containing faculty is called mahi,— just as it is called prithivi, dhara, medini, dharani, etc. In various forms, the root itself, mahi, mahitwam, maha, magha, etc, it recurs with remarkable profusion and persistence throughout the Veda. Evidently it expressed some leading thought of the Rishis, was some term of the highest importance in their system of psychology. Turning to the Purana we find the term mahat applied to some comprehensive principle which is supposed itself to be near to the unmanifest, avyaktam but to supply the material of all that is manifest and always to surround, embrace and uphold it. Mahat seems here to be an objective principle; but this need not trouble us; for in the old Hindu system all that is objective had something subjective corresponding to it and constituting its real nature. We find it explicitly declared in the Vishnu Purana that all things here are manifestations of vijnana, pure ideal knowledge, sarvani vijnanavijrimbhitani — ideal knowledge vibrating out into intensity of various phenomenal existences each with its subjective reason for existence and objective case and form of existence. Is ideal knowledge then the subjective principle of mahat? If so, vijnanam and the Vedic mahas are likely to be terms identical in their philosophical content and psychological significance. We turn to the Upanishads and find mention made more than once of a certain subjective state of the soul, which is called Mahan Atma, a state into which the mind and senses have to be drawn up as we rise by samadhi of the instruments of knowledge into the supreme state of Brahman and which is superior therefore to these instruments. The Mahan Atma is the state of the pure Brahman out of which the vijnana or ideal truth (sattwa or beness of things) emerges and it is higher than the vijnana but nearer us than the Unmanifest or Avyaktam (Katha: III.10, 11, 13 and VI.7). If we understand by the Mahan Atma that status of soul existence (Purusha) which is the basis of the objective mahat or mahati prakriti and which develops the vijnanam or ideal knowledge as its subjective instrument, then we shall have farther light on the nature of Mahas in the ancient conceptions. We shall see that it is ideal knowledge, vijnanam, or is connected with ideal knowledge.

But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice, — the final and conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic and Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter and material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar and Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality and vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manas — either in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted and enlightened by buddhi — predominates and by the laws of mind determines the life and movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,— not unknown to the Veda — constitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyakta — lost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain and only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength and being. Between the upper hemisphere and the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge and pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide and immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth and right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth and ideal knowledge.

We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers and knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know. Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knows — as it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively and know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole and therefore in the part, in the mass and therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first and reasons afterwards,— to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled and frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them and thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth and error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions,— and then too always with some reserve of doubt, — about the past and the present. Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past and present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition and his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations and perceptions and it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements and the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world and end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyameva jayate nānṛtaṃ satyena panthā vitato devayānaḥ, yenākramantyṛṣayo hyāptakāmā yatra tat satyasya paramaṃ nidhānam¹³. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed and firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible and persistent, are indications that pure Truth exists. We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts and creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless and self-regarding emotions and disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions and her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth and distorts and misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless and luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kant’s pure reason; bids it divine truth and learn to hold the true divination and reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason and its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited and seen and understood. Therefore error maintains and even extends her reign. At last come the logician and modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason and intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon and thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation and a rigid logic. To live on these dry and insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind and senses — until man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts and either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening and upward march.

It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Mahachamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being,— therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth and ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat,— the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam and ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihat — Sacchidananda objectivised — is the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth, the principle of infinite and divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things self-arranged; Brihat is full content and fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being and law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or halfillumined things of mind and sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true and self-existent. Nalpe sukham asti bhumaiva sukham. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness and constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power and peace. The harmony of creative power and peace, pravritti and nivritti, jana and shama, is the divine state which we feel — as Wordsworth felt it — when we go back to the brihat, the wide and infinite which, containing and contented with its works, says of it “Sukritam”, What I have made, is good. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smriti — sees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memory — just as we say of a friend “This is he” and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselves — though we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self-evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied and divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati and atmastha, confines itself to itself and does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satyapratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees,— he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya,— is in all things “true”. Truth is his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works and destinies from decay and dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas. The psychological conceptions of our remote forefathers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought and experience that they may be a little difficult to follow and more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand and grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre and keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides and connects the human in us from the divine, and to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small and divided finite to that one, great and infinite, from this death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation and final aim of Veda and Vedanta.

We can now understand the intention of the Rishi in his last verse and the greatness of the climax to which he has been leading us. Saraswati is able to give impulsion to Truth and awaken to right thinking because she has access to the Maho Arnas, the great ocean. On that level of consciousness, we are usually it must be remembered asleep, sushupta. The chetana or waking consciousness has no access; it lies behind our active consciousness, is, as we might say, superconscious, for us, asleep. Saraswati brings it forward into active consciousness by means of the ketu or perceptive intelligence, that essential movement of mind which accepts and realises whatever is presented to it. To focus this ketu, this essential perception on the higher truth by drawing it away from the haphazard disorder of sensory data is the great aim of Yogic meditation. Saraswati by fixing essential perception on the satyam ritam brihat above makes ideal knowledge active and is able to inform it with all those plentiful movements of mind which she, “dhiyavasu, vajebhir vajinivati”, has prepared for the service of the Master of the sacrifice. She is able to govern all the movements of understanding without exception in their thousand diverse movements and give them the single impression of truth and right thinking — visva dhiyo vi rajati. A governed and ordered activity of soul and mind, led by the Truth-illuminated intellect, is the aim of the sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda son of Viswamitra is offering to the Gods.

For we perceive at once that the yajna here can be no material sacrifice, no mere pouring out of the Soma-wine on the sacred flame to the gods of rain and cloud, star and sunshine. Saraswati is not even here the goddess of speech whose sole function is to inspire and guide the singer in his hymn. In other passages she may be merely Bharati,— the Muse. But here there are greater depths of thought and soul-experience. She has to do things which mere speech cannot do. And even if we were to take her here as the divine Muse, still the functions asked of her are too great, there is too little need of all these high intellectual motions, for a mere invitation to Rain and Star Gods to share in a pouring of the Soma-wine. She could do that without all this high intellectual and spiritual labour. Even, therefore, if it be a material sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda is offering, its material aspects can be no more than symbolical. Unless indeed the rest of the hymn contradicts the intellectual and spiritual purport which we have discovered in these closing verses, full — on the face of them and accepting the plainest and most ordinary meaning for each single word in them — of deep psychological knowledge, moral and spiritual aspiration and a supreme poetical art.

I do not propose to study the earlier verses of the hymn with the same care as we have expended on the closing dedication to Saraswati,— that would lead me beyond my immediate purpose. A rapid glance through them to see whether they confirm or contradict our first results will be sufficient. There are three passages, also of three verses each, consecrated successively to the Aswins, Indra and the Visve Devah. I shall give briefly my own view of these three passages and the gods they invoke.

The master word of the address to the Aswins is the verb chanasyatam, take your delight. The Aswins, as I understand them, are the masters of strength, youth, joy, swiftness, pleasure, rapture, the pride and glory of existence, and may almost be described as the twin gods of youth and joy. All the epithets applied to them here support this view. They are dravatpani subhaspati, the swift-footed masters of weal, of happiness and good fortune; they are purubhuja, much enjoying; their office is to take and give delight, chanasyatam. So runs the first verse,

1.3.1. O Aswins, cries Madhuchchhanda, I am in the full rush, the full ecstasy of the sacrificial action, O swift-footed, much-enjoying masters of happiness, take in me your delight.

1.3.2. Again they are purudansasa, wide-distributing, nara, strong. “O strong wide-distributing Aswins,” continues the singer, “with your bright-flashing (or brilliantly-forceful) understanding take pleasure in the words (of the mantra) which are now firmly settled (in the mind)”.

Again we have the stress on things subjective, intellectual and spiritual. The extreme importance of the mantra, the inspired and potent word in the old Vedic religion is known nor has it diminished in later Hinduism. The mantra in Yoga is only effective when it has settled into the mind, is asina, has taken its seat there and become spontaneous; it is then that divine power enters into, takes possession of it and the mantra itself becomes one with the god of the mantra and does his works in the soul and body. This, as every Yogin knows, is one of the fundamental ideas not only in the Rajayogic practice but in almost all paths of spiritual discipline. Here we have the very word that can most appropriately express this settling in of the mantra, dhishnya, combined with the word girah. And we know that the gods in the Veda are called girvanah, those who delight in the mantra; Indra, the god of mental force, is girvahas, he who supports or bears the mantra. Why should Nature gods delight in speech or the god of thunder and rain be the supporter or bearer of any kind of speech? The hymns? But what is meant by bearing the hymns? We have to give unnatural meanings to vanas and vahas, if we wish to avoid this plain indication. In the next verse the epithets are dasra, bountiful, which, like wide-distributing is again an epithet appropriate to the givers of happiness, weal and youth, rudravartani, fierce and impetuous in all their ways, and Nasatya, a word of doubtful meaning which, for philological reasons, I take to mean gods of movement. As the movement indicated by this and kindred words nâ, (natare), especially meant a gliding, floating, swimming movement, the Aswins came to be especially the protectors of ships and sailors, and it is in this capacity that we find Castor and Polydeuces (Purudansas) acting, their Western counterparts, the brothers of Helen (Sarama), the swift riders of the Roman legend. “O givers, O lords of free movement,” runs the closing verse of this invocation, “come to the outpourings of my nectar, be ye fierce in action; — I feel full of youthful vigour, I have prepared the sacred grass,” — if that indeed be the true and early meaning of barhis.

1.3.3. It is an intense rapture of the soul (rudravartani) which Madhuchchhandas asks first from the gods. Therefore his first call is to the Aswins.

Next, it is to Indra that he turns. I have already said that in my view Indra is the master of mental force. Let us see whether there is anything here to contradict the hypothesis.

1.3.4-6. There are several important words here that are doubtful in their sense, anwi, tana, vaghatah, brahmani; but none of them are of importance for our present purpose except brahmani. For reasons I shall give in the proper place I do not accept Brahma in the Veda as meaning speech of any kind, but as either soul or a mantra of the kind afterwards called dhyana, the object of which was meditation and formation in the soul of the divine Power meditated on whether in an image or in his qualities. It is immaterial which sense we take here. “Indra,” sings the Rishi, “arrive, O thou of rich and varied light, here are these life-streams poured forth, purified, with vital powers, with substance. Arrive, O Indra, controlled by the understanding, impelled forward in various directions to my soul faculties, I who am now full of strength and flourishing increase. Arrive, O Indra, with protection to my soul faculties, O dweller in the brilliance, confirm our delight in the nectar poured.” It seems to me that the remarkable descriptions dhiyeshito viprajutah are absolutely conclusive, that they prove the presence of a subjective Nature Power, not a god of rain and tempest, and prove especially a mind-god. What is it but mental force which comes controlled by the understanding and is impelled forward by it in various directions? What else is it that at the same time protects by its might the growing and increasing soul faculties from impairing and corrupting attack and confirms, keeps safe and continuous the delight which the Aswins have brought with them? The epithets chitrabhano, harivas become at once intelligible and appropriate; the god of mental force has indeed a rich and varied light, is indeed a dweller in the brilliance. The progress of the thought is clear. Madhuchchhanda, as a result of Yogic practice, is in a state of spiritual and physical exaltation; he has poured out the nectar of vitality; he is full of strength and ecstasy. This is the sacrifice he has prepared for the gods. He wishes it to be prolonged, perhaps to be made, if it may now be, permanent. The Aswins are called to give and take the delight, Indra to supply and preserve that mental force which will sustain the delight otherwise in danger of being exhausted and sinking by its own fierceness rapidly consuming its material in the soul faculties. The state and the movement are one of which every Yogin knows.

1.3.7. But he is not content with the inner sacrifice. He wishes to pour out this strength and joy in action on the world, on his fellows, on the peoples, therefore he calls to the Visve Devah to come, A gata! — all the gods in general who help man and busy themselves in supporting his multitudinous and manifold action. They are kindly, omasas, they are charshanidhrito, holders or supporters of all our actions, especially actions that require effort, (it is in this sense that I take charshani, again on good philological grounds), they are to distribute this nectar to all or to divide it among themselves for the action,— dasvanso may have either force,— for Madhuchchhanda wishes not only to possess, but to give, to distribute, he is dashush. Omasas charshanidhrito visve devasa a gata, daswanso dashushah sutam. He goes on,

1.3.8-9. Visve devaso apturah sutam a ganta turnayah Usra iva swasarani. Visve devaso asridha ehimayaso adruhah, Medham jushanta vahnayah. “O you all-gods who are energetic in works, come to the nectar distilled, ye swift ones, (or, come swiftly), like calves to their own stalls,— (so at least we must translate this last phrase, till we can get the real meaning, for I do not believe this is the real or, at any rate, the only meaning). O you all-gods unfaltering, with wide capacity of strength, ye who harm not, attach yourselves to the offering as its supporters.” And then come the lines about Saraswati. For although Indra can sustain for a moment or for a time he is at present a mental, not an ideal force; it is Saraswati full of the vijnana, of mahas, guiding by it the understanding in all its ways who can give to all these gods the supporting knowledge, light and truth which will confirm and uphold the delight, the mental strength and supply inexhaustibly from the Ocean of Mahas the beneficent and joy-giving action,— Saraswati, goddess of inspiration, the flowing goddess who is the intermediary and channel by which divine truth, divine joy, divine being descend through the door of knowledge into this human receptacle. In a word, she is our inspirer, our awakener, our lurer towards Immortality. It is immortality that Madhuchchhandas prepares for himself and the people who do sacrifice to Heaven, devayantah. The Soma-streams he speaks of are evidently no intoxicating vegetable juices; he calls them ayavah, life-forces; and elsewhere amritam, nectar of immortality; somasah, wine-draughts of bliss and internal well being. It is the clear Yogic idea of the amritam, the divine nectar which flows into the system at a certain stage of Yogic practice and gives pure health, pure strength and pure physical joy to the body as a basis for a pure mental and spiritual vigour and activity.

We have therefore as a result of a long and careful examination the clear conviction that certainly in this poem of Madhuchchhanda, probably in others of his hymns, perhaps in all we have an invocation to subjective Nature powers, a symbolic sacrifice, a spiritual, moral and subjective effort and purpose. And if many other suktas in this and other Mandalas confirm the evidence of this third hymn of the Rigveda, shall we not say that here we have the true Veda as the Rishis understood it and that this was the reason why all the ancient thinkers looked on the hymns with so deep-seated a reverence that even after they came to be used merely as ceremonial liturgies at a material sacrifice, even after the Buddha impatiently flung them aside, the writer of the Gita had to look beyond them and Shankara respectfully put them on the shelf of neglect as useless for spiritual purposes, even after they have ceased to be used and almost to be read, the most spiritual nation on the face of the earth still tenaciously, by a sort of divine instinct, clings to them as its supreme Scriptures and refers back all its spirituality and higher knowledge to the Vedas? Let us proceed and see whether this is not the truest as well as the noblest reading of the riddle — the real root of God’s purpose in maintaining this our ancient faith and millennial tradition.

¹ R.V. 1.2 / 1.4.– Sheets for revision of the Life Divine // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 199-201.

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² The Secret of the Veda. X. The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers // CWSA.– Vol. 15.– The Secret of the Veda.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998, pp. 100-108. 1-st published: Arya: A Philosophical Review. Monthly.– Vol.1, No 11 – June 1915, pp. 658-666.

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³ The Secret of the Veda. IX. Saraswati and Her Consorts // CWSA.– Vol. 15.– The Secret of the Veda.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998, pp. 91-99. 1-st published: Arya: A Philosophical Review. Monthly.– Vol.1, No 10 – May 1915, pp. 593-601.

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⁴ I do not think we have any realmaterials for determining the first origin and primitive history of religious ideas. What the facts really point to is an early teaching at once psychological and naturalistic, that is to say with two faces, of which the first came to be more or less obscured, but never entirely effaced even in the barbarous races, even in races like the tribes of North America. But this teaching, though prehistoric, was anything but primitive.

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⁵ The rivers have a symbolic sense in later Indian thought; as for instance Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati and their confluence are in the Tantric imagery Yogic symbols, and they are used, though in a different way, in Yogic symbolism generally.

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⁶ The Secret of the Veda. VIII. The Ashwins Indra the Vishwadevas // CWSA.– Vol. 15.– The Secret of the Veda.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1998, pp. 80-90. 1-st published: Arya: A Philosophical Review. Monthly.– Vol.1, No 9 – April 1915, pp. 529-540.

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⁷ R.V. 1.3 // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 359-364. (Part 3 № 4).

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⁸ The Gods of the Veda / The Secret of the Veda // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 123-138.

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⁹ The Gods of the Veda / The Secret of the Veda // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 155-160.

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¹⁰ The Secret of the Veda // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 149-154.

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¹¹ The Gods of the Veda / The Secret of the Veda // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 139-149.

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¹² The Gods of the Veda // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 24-62. 1-st published: Sri Aurobindo: Archives & Research: a biannual journal.– Volume 8, No1 (1984, April), pp. 17-52.

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¹³ Mundaka, 3.1.6.

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Please, start with Introduction
Without knowledge of some things, reading Rigveda will be unproductive. We strongly recommend that you begin your acquaintance with Rigveda by reading the Introduction.