Lexicon of Rig Veda

Lexicon

of Rig Veda

ṛjīṣin, drinking the pressed (the third time)

Sayana and many interpreters following him, used the word in the same meaning as the phrase tṛtīye savane, soma pressed out for the third time, investing only the external meaning of re-pressing juice from the plant. But since soma is an offering-hymn, the fruit of the poet’s work, repeated pressing out of soma means a method of approaching (approximating) to ideal poetry, when the verse is remade over and over again, each time with an increasingly high and undistorted “hearing of words born in knowledge,” in an increasingly higher consciousness. So, for the first time, the soma is pressed out in the morning, in Vedic Dawn, with the arrival of the first rays of higher consciousness from the Overmind, falling to the upper levels of our Earth (the first step of Vishnu). The second time the soma is pressed out in the middle of the day, in the second step of Vishnu, in the consciousness the Overmind. For the third time, the soma is pressed out in the third step of Vishnu, in the Heaven, in the supramental consciousness and in the consciousness of Sachchidananda. It is the hymn received in the highest step of Vishnu, the soma, pressed out a third time, is the most mighty, the most intoxicating the gods.

In the early translations Sri Aurobindo, however, interpreted a word otherwise, in meaning of straightness which can be found in a number of words of the family ṛj: (ṛju, ṛjīyas, ṛjuga, ṛjipya, ṛjīti, ṛjīpin, ṛjiman, ṛjutva, ṛjukratu, ṛjudṛś, or related nasalized ṛñj. However, when studying the meaning of the context of all the ricks in which this word occurs, the meaning of the soma pressed out for the third time, is seemed to us not just probable, but even preferable.