Rig Veda

Text & Audio

MAṆḌALA 1

Sūkta 41

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. 1912–13¹

Varuna and Mitra, the two great Vedic Twins, meet us in their united activity in the first crucial passage of the Veda informed with the clear and unmistakable idea of the Ritam which so largely dominates the thinking of the Vedic sages. Varuna and Mitra again, but this time helped by their companion Aryaman, govern a second passage which we shall find of equal importance in forming our conceptions of the Truth towards which our ancestors lifted so strenuous an aspiration of prayer and sacrifice. It occurs in the forty-first hymn of the Mandala, a hymn of the Rishi Kanwa son of Ghora to the three children of Aditi, and covers six out of the nine slokas of the hymn. It is fortunately a sufficiently clear and easy hymn, except precisely in the three closing riks with which we are not now concerned; we have to pause only for a moment [at] the word avakhādah, over which Sayana gives himself very unnecessary trouble,— for it means clearly a pitfall or an abrupt descent, and the sense of dhītaye, taken by Sayana in the ritualistic significance, “for your eating”, and by myself, following my hypothesis, in the psychological sense conceded by Sayana in a number of other passages; dhīti means literally holding and usually holding in the mind, thinking; it expresses then the fixed action of dhī, the thought faculty. Otherwise the only difficulty is in the word toka which the ritualistic commentators interpret invariably in the sense of son, putra.

I translate,

1.41.1. “He whom Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman guard, they who see with the conscious mind, can that man at all be crushed?

1.41.2. The mortal whom they like a multitude of arms fill with his desires and protect from his hurter, he unhurt grows to completeness in being (or prospers in all his being).

1.41.3. In front of these the Kings smite apart their obstacles and smite apart their haters and lead them beyond all sin.

1.41.4. Easy to travel and thornless is your path, O sons of Aditi, for him who travels to the Truth; here there is no pitfall in your way.

1.41.5. That sacrifice which you lead, O strong sons of Aditi, (or O Purushas sons of Aditi,) by the straight path, that goes forward to its place in the thought.

1.41.6. That mortal moves unoverthrown towards delightful being, yea and to all kind of creation by the self.” The rest of the hymn is taken up by certain conditions necessary for the effectivity of the praise of the three great deities whose protection assures this safe and prosperous movement to their worshipper.

We must consider first whether any valid objection can be offered to this translation; and, if not, what are the precise ideas conveyed by the words and expressions which they render. The word prachetas is one of the fixed recurrent terms of the Veda; and we have corresponding to it another term vichetas. Both terms are rendered by the commentators wise or intelligent. Is prachetas then merely an ornamental or otiose word in this verse? Is it only a partially dispensable and superfluous compliment to the gods of the hymn? Our hypothesis is that the Vedic Rishis were masters of a perfectly well managed literary style founded upon a tradition of sound economy in language and coherence in thought; all of every word in Veda is in its place and is justified by its value in the significance. If so, prachetasah gives the reason why the protection of these gods is so perfectly efficacious. I suppose,— as my hypothesis entitles me to suppose,— that the Vedic ideas of prachetas and vichetas correspond to the Vedantic idea of prajnana and vijnana to which as words they are exactly equivalent in composition and sense. Prajnana is that knowledge which is aware of, knows and works upon the objects placed before it. Vijnana is the knowledge which comprehends and knows thoroughly in itself all objects of knowledge. The one is the highest faculty of mind, the other is in mind the door to and beyond it the nature of the direct supra-intellectual knowledge, the Ritam and Brihat of the Veda. It is because Varuna, Mitra and Aryama protect the human being with the perfect knowledge of that through which he has to pass, his path, his dangers, his foes, that their protégé, however fiercely and by whatever powers assailed, cannot be crushed. At once, it begins to become clear that the protection in that case must, in all probability, be a spiritual protection against spiritual dangers and spiritual foes.

The second verse neither confirms as yet nor contradicts this initial suggestion. These three great gods, it says, are to the mortal as a multitude of arms which bring to him his desires and fill him with an abundant fullness and protect him from any who may will to do him hurt, rishah; fed with that fullness he grows until he is sarvah, complete in every part of his being — (that is to say, if we admit the sense of a spiritual protection and a spiritual activity, in knowledge, in power, in joy, in mental, vital and bodily fullness) — and by the efficacy of that protection he enjoys all this fullness and completeness unhurt. No part of it is maimed by the enemies of man, whose activities do him hurt, the Vritras, Atris, Vrikas, the Coverer on the heights, the devourer in the night, the tearer on the path. We may note in passing how important [it] is to render every Vedic word by its exact value; rish and dwish both mean enemy; but if we render them by one word, we lose the fine shade of meaning to which the poet himself calls our attention by the collocation pānti rishah — arishta edhate. We see also the same care of style in the collocation sarva edhate, where, as it seems to me, it is clearly suggested that the completeness is the result of the prosperous growth, we have again the fine care and balance with which the causes piprati — pānti are answered by the effects arishtah — edhate. There is even a good literary reason of great subtlety and yet perfect force for the order of the words and the exact place of each word in the order. In this simple, easy and yet faultless balance and symmetry a great number of the Vedic hymns represent exactly in poetry the same spirit and style as the Greek temple or the Greek design in architecture and painting. Nor can anyone who neglects to notice it and give full value to it, catch rightly, fully and with precision the sense of the Vedic writings.

In the third verse we come across the first confirmation of the spiritual purport of the hymn. The protected of Varuna, Mitra and Aryama — the plural is now used to generalise the idea more decisively — are travellers to a moral and spiritual goal, nayanti duritā tirah. It follows that the durgāni, the obstacles in the path are moral and spiritual obstacles, not material impediments. It follows equally that the dwishah, the haters, are spiritual enemies, not human; for there would be no sense or appropriateness in the scattering of human enemies by Varuna as a condition of the seeker after Truth and Right’s reaching a state of sinlessness. It is the spiritual, moral and mental obstacles, the spiritual beings and forces who are opposed to the soul’s perfection, Brahmadwishah, whom Varuna, Mitra and Aryama remove from the path of their worshippers. They smite them and scatter them utterly, vi durgā vi dwishah,— the particle twice repeated in order to emphasise the entire clearance of the path; they scatter them in front,— not allowing even the least struggle to be engaged before their intervention, but going in front of the worshippers and maintaining a clear way, suga anrikshara, in which they can pass not only without hurt, but without battle. The image of the sins, the duritā is that of an army besetting the way which is scattered to all sides by the divine vanguard and is compelled beyond striking distance. The armed pilgrims of the Right pass on and through and not an arrow falls across their road. The three great Kings of heaven and their hosts, rājānah, have passed before and secured the great passage for the favoured mortal.

The sense is completed and the spiritual character of the journey explicitly and unmistakably brought out in the next, the fourth rik of the Sukta. The traveller is one who is journeying towards the Truth, the ritam. We have already hazarded the conception of the Ritam as the principle of Mahas, the spontaneous, self-existent, self-efficient nature of the infinite and divine consciousness, satyam ritam brihat, to which right action, right emotion, right knowledge, right enjoyment belong inalienably and result naturally and without effort or stumble. In its moral aspect, that conception is now entirely justified. The path of Truth, ritasya panthā sādhuyā, is suga anrikshara; there are no pitfalls or precipices in that road; for it is the road of the Adityas, the children of Light and Infinity, sons of Aditi, the Infinite Nature, brothers of Surya to whom belongs the revealed knowledge and the divine illumination. It is as we shall see in the next line the straight road rijunā pathā. Sugah panthā anrikshara ādityāsa ritam yate. Nātrāvakhādo asti vah.

So far the image has been a double image of a journey and a battle,— the goal of the ritam, the journey of the sin-afflicted human being towards the Truth of the divine nature; the thorns, the pitfall, the enemy ambushed in the path; the great divine helpers whose divine knowledge, for they are prachetasah, becomes active in the human mind and conducts us unerringly and unfalteringly on that sublime journey. In the next rik the image of the path is preserved, but another image is associated with it, the universal Vedic image of the sacrifice. We get here our first clear and compelling indication of the truth which is the very foundation of our hypothesis that the Vedic sacrifice is only a material symbol of a great psychological or spiritual process. The divine children of Infinity lead² the sacrifice on the straight path to the goal of the ritam; under their guidance it progresses to their goal and reaches the gods in their home, pra vah sa dhītaye nashat. What is sacrifice which is itself a traveller, which has a motion in a straight path, a goal in the highest seat of Truth, parasmin dhāmann ritasya? If it is not the activities of the human being in us offered as a sacrifice to the higher and divine being so that human activities may be led up to the divine nature and be established in the divine consciousness, then there is either no meaning in human language or no sense or coherence in the Veda. The Vedic sacrificer is devayu,— devakāmah,— one who desires the god or the godhead, the divine nature; or devayan, one who is in the process of divinising his human life and being; the sacrifice itself is essentially devavītih and devatātih, manifestation of the divine and the extension of the divine in man. We see also the force of dhītaye. The havya or offering of human faculty, human having, human action, reaches its goal when it is taken up in the divine thought, the divine consciousness and there enjoyed by the gods.

In return for his offering the gods give to the sacrificer the results of the divine nature. The mortal favoured by them moves forward unstumbling and unoverthrown, acchā gacchati astrita, — towards or to what? Ratnam vasu visvam tokam uta tmanā. This is his goal; but we have seen too that the goal is the ritam. Therefore the expressions ratnam vasu, visvam tokam tmanā must describe either the nature of the ritam or the results of successful reaching and habitation in the ritam. Toka means son, says the ritualist. I fail to see how the birth of a son can be the supreme result of a man’s perfecting his nature and reaching the divine Truth; I fail to see also what is meant by a man marching unoverthrown beyond sin and falsehood towards pleasant wealth and a son. In a great number of passages in the Veda, the sense of son for toka or of either son or grandson for tanaya is wholly inadmissible except by doing gross violence to sense, context and coherence and convicting the Vedic Rishis of an advanced stage of incoherent dementia. Toka, from the root tuch, to cut, form, create (cf tach and twach, in takta, tashta, twashta, Gr. tikto, etekon, tokos, a child) may mean anything produced or created. We shall see, hereafter, that prajā, apatyam, even putra are used in the Veda as symbolic expressions for action and its results as children of the soul. This is undoubtedly the sense here. There are two results of life in the ritam, in the vijnana, in the principle of divine consciousness and its basis of divine truth; first ratnam vasu, a state of being the nature of which is delight, for vijnana or ritam is the basis of divine ananda; secondly, visvam tokam uta tmanā,— this state of Ananda is not the actionless Brahmananda of the Sannyasin, but the free creative joy of the Divine Nature, universal creative action by the force of the self. The action of the liberated humanity is not to be like that of the mortal bound, struggling and stumbling through ignorance and sin towards purity and light, originating and bound by his action, but the activity spontaneously starting out of self-existence and creating its results without evil reactions or bondage.

To complete our idea of the hymn and its significance, I shall give my rendering of its last three slokas,— the justification of that rendering or comment on it would lead me far from the confines of my present subject.

1.41.7. “How, O friends,” cries Kanwa to his fellow-worshippers, “may we perfect (or enrich) the establishment in ourselves (by the mantra of praise) of Mitra and Aryaman or how the wide form of Varuna?

1.41.8. May I not resist with speech him of you who smites and rebukes me while he yet leads me to the godhead; through the things of peace alone may I establish you in all my being.

1.41.9. Let a man fear the god even when he is giving him all the four states of being (Mahas, Swar, Bhuvah, Bhuh), until the perfect settling in the Truth: let him not yearn towards evil expression.”

In other words, perfect adoration and submission to the gods who are leading us in the path, those who are yajnanīh, leaders of the sacrifice, is the condition of the full wideness of Varuna’s being in us and the full indwelling of Mitra and Aryaman in the principles of the Ananda and the Ritam.

In this simple, noble and striking hymn we arrive at a number of certainties about the ideas of the Vedic Rishis and usual images of their poetry which are of the last importance to our inquiry. First we see that the ascension or the journey of the human soul to a state of divine Truth is among the chief objects of the prayers and sacrifices of the Veda. Secondly, we see that this Truth is not merely the simple primitive conception of truth-speaking, but a condition of consciousness consisting in delight and resulting in a perfect spontaneous and free activity in which there is no falsehood or error; it is a state of divine nature, the Vedantic amritam. Thirdly, we see that this activity of self-perfection, the sadhana of modern Yoga, is represented in the Veda under the image of a journey or of a battle or both in one image. It is a struggle to advance beset by pitfalls and difficult passages, assailed and beset by hostile spiritual forces, the enemies, hurters or destroyers. Whenever therefore we have the image of a battle or a journey, we have henceforth the right to enquire whether it is not in every case the symbol of this great spiritual and psychological process. Fourthly we see that the Vedic sacrifice is in some hymns and may be in all a symbol of the same purport. It is an activity offered to the gods, led by them in this path, directed towards the attainment of the divine Truth-Consciousness and Truth-Life and, presumably, assailed by the same spiritual enemies. Fifthly, we find that words like vasu and tokam, representing the result of the sacrifice, and usually understood as material wealth and children, are used here, must presumably be used in passages and may, possibly, be used in all in a symbolic sense to express by a concrete figure psychological conceptions like Christ’s treasure laid up in heaven or the common image of the children of one’s brain or of one’s works. We have in fact, provided always our conclusions are confirmed by the evidence of other hymns, the decisive clue to the Secret of the Veda.

¹ Ritam [Chapter III] // CWSA.– Vol. 14.– Vedic and Philological Studies.– Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2016, pp. 71-79.

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² Sri Aurobindo wrote the following note at the top of a later page of the manuscript. It would seem to have been intended for insertion here: (nayathā nara ādityā — I shall take up the discussion of the proper sense of nara in another context, to avoid useless repetition I omit it here).

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