|
The Great Aranyaka
A Commentary on the Brihad Aranyak Upanishad _____
Foreword
The Brihad Aranyak Upanishad, at once the most obscure and the profoundest of the Upanishads, offers peculiar difficulties to the modern mind. If its ideas are remote from us, its language is still more remote. Profound, subtle, extraordinarily rich in rare philosophical suggestions and delicate psychology, it has preferred to couch its ideas in a highly figurative and symbolical language, which to its contemporaries, accustomed to this suggestive dialect, must have seemed a noble frame for its riches, but meets us rather as an obscuring veil. To draw aside this curtain, to translate the old Vedic language and figures into the form contemporary thought prefers to give to its ideas is the sole object of this commentary. The task is necessarily a little hazardous. It would have been easy merely to reproduce the thoughts & interpretations of Shankara in the modern tongue—if there were an error, one could afford to err with so supreme an authority. But it seems to me that both the demands of truth and the spiritual need of mankind in this age call for a restoration of old Vedantic truth rather than for the prolonged dominion of that single side of it systematised by the mediaeval thinker. The great Shankaracharya needs no modern praise and can be hurt by no modern disagreement. Easily the first of metaphysical thinkers, the greatest genius in the history of philosophy, his commentary has also done an incalculable service to our race by bridging the intellectual gulf between the sages of the Upanishads and ourselves. It has protected them from the practical
Page – 273 oblivion in which our ignorance & inertia have allowed the Veda to rest for so many centuries—only to be dragged out by the rude hands of the daringly speculative Teuton. It has kept these ancient grandeurs of thought, these high repositories of spirituality under the safe-guard of that temple of metaphysics, the Adwaita philosophy—a little in the background, a little too much veiled & shrouded, but nevertheless safe from the iconoclasm and the restless ingenuities of modern scholarship. Nevertheless, it remains true that Shankara's commentary is interesting not so much for the light it sheds on the Upanishad as for its digressions into his own philosophy. I do not think that Shankara's rational intellect, subtle indeed to the extreme, but avid of logical clearness and consistency, could penetrate far into that mystic symbolism and that deep & elusive flexibility which is characteristic of all the Upanishads, but rises to an almost unattainable height in the Brihad Aranyaka. He has done much, has shown often a readiness and quickness astonishing in so different a type of intellectuality but more is possible and needed. The time is fast coming when the human intellect, aware of the mighty complexity of the universe, will be more ready to learn & less prone to dispute & dictate; we shall be willing then to read ancient documents of knowledge for what they contain instead of attempting to force into them our own truth or get them to serve our philosophic or scholastic purposes. To enter passively into the thoughts of the old Rishis, allow their words to sink into our souls, mould them & create their own reverberations in a sympathetic & responsive material—submissiveness, in short, to the Sruti—was the theory the ancients themselves had of the method of Vedic knowledge—giram upasrutim chara, stoman abhi swara, abhi grinihi, a ruva—to listen in soul to the old voices and allow the Sruti in the soul to respond, to vibrate first obscurely in answer to the Vedantic hymn of knowledge, to give the response, the echo & last to let that response gain in clarity, intensity & fullness. This is the principle of interpretation that I have followed—mystical perhaps but not necessarily more unsound than the insistence & equally personal standards of the logician & the scholar. And
Page – 274 for the rest, where no inner experience of truth sheds light on the text, to abide faithfully by the wording of the Upanishad and trust my intuitions. For I hold it right to follow the intuitions especially in interpreting this Upanishad, even at the risk of being accused of reading mysticism into the Vedanta, because the early Vedantists, it seems to me, were mystics—not in the sense of being vague & loose-thoughted visionaries, but in the sense of being intuitional symbolists—who regarded the world as a movement of consciousness & all material forms & energies as external symbols & shadows of deeper & ever deeper internal realities. It is not my intention here nor is it in my limits possible to develop the philosophy of the Great Aranyaka Upanishad, but only to develop with just sufficient amplitude for entire clearness the ideas contained in its language & involved in its figures. The business of my commentary is to lay a foundation; it is for the thinker to build the superstructure.
The Horse of the Worlds
The Upanishad begins with a grandiose abruptness in an impetuous figure of the Horse of the Aswamedha. "OM" it begins "Dawn is the head of the horse sacrificial. The sun is his eye, his breath is the wind, his wide-open mouth is Fire, the universal energy; Time is the self of the horse sacrificial. Heaven is his back and the mid-region is his belly, earth is his footing,—the quarters are his flanks and their intermediate regions are his ribs; the seasons are his members, the months and the half months are their joints, the days and nights are that on which he stands, the stars are his bones and the sky is the flesh of his body. The strands are the food in his belly, the rivers are his veins, the mountains are his liver and lungs, herbs and plants are the hairs of his body; the rising day is his front portion and the setting day is his hinder portion. When he stretches himself, then it lightens; when he shakes himself, then it thunders; when he urines, then it rains. Speech verily is the voice of him. Day was the grandeur that was born before the horse as he galloped, the eastern ocean gave it
Page – 275 birth. Night was the grandeur that was born in his rear and its birth was in the western waters. These were the grandeurs that arose to being on either side of the horse. He became Haya and carried the gods,—Vajin and bore the Gandharvas,—Arvan and bore the Titans,—Aswa and carried mankind. The sea was his brother and the sea his birthplace." This passage, full of a gigantic imagery, sets the key to the Upanishad and only by entering into the meaning of its symbolism can we command the gates of this many-mansioned city of Vedantic thought. There is never anything merely poetic or ornamental in the language of the Upanishads. Even in this passage which would at first sight seem to be sheer imagery, there is a choice, a selecting eye, an intention in the images. They are all dependent not on the author's unfettered fancy, but on the common ideas of the early Vedantic theosophy. It is fortunate, also, that the attitude of the Upanishads to the Vedic sacrifices is perfectly plain from this opening. We shall not stand in danger of being accused of reading modern subtleties into primitive minds or of replacing barbarous superstitions by civilised mysticism. The Aswamedha or Horse-Sacrifice is, as we shall see, taken as the symbol of a great spiritual advance, an evolutionary movement, almost, out of the dominion of apparently material forces into a higher spiritual freedom. The Horse of the Aswamedha is, to the author, a physical figure representing, like some algebraical symbol, an unknown quantity of force & speed. From the imagery it is evident that this force, this speed, is something worldwide, something universal; it fills the regions with its body, it occupies Time, it gallops through Space, it bears on in its speed men and gods and the Titans. It is the Horse of the Worlds,—and yet the Horse sacrificial. Let us regard first the word Aswa and consider whether it throws any light on the secret of this image. For we know that the early Vedantins attached great importance to words in both their apparent and their hidden meaning and no one who does not follow them in this path, can hope to enter into the associations with which their minds were full. Yet the importance of associations in colouring and often in determining our thoughts,
Page – 276 determining even philosophic and scientific thought when it is most careful to be exact & free, should be obvious to the most superficial psychologist. Swami Dayananda's method with the Vedas, although it may have been too vigorously applied and more often out of the powerful mind of the modern Indian thinker than out of the recovered mentality of the old Aryan Rishis, would nevertheless, in its principle, have been approved by these Vedantins. Now the word Aswa must originally have implied strength or speed or both before it came to be applied to a horse. In its first or root significance it means to exist pervadingly and so to possess, have, obtain or enjoy. It is the Greek echo (OS. [Old Sanskrit] ashâ), the ordinary word in Greek for "I have". It means, also and even more commonly, to eat or enjoy. Beside this original sense inherent in the roots of its family it has its own peculiar significance of existence in force—strength, solidity, sharpness, speed,—in ashan and ashma, a stone, ashani, a thunderbolt, asri, a sharp edge or corner, (Latin acer, acris, sharp, acus, a point etc) and finally aswa, the strong, swift horse. Its fundamental meanings are, therefore, pervading existence, enjoyment, strength, solidity, speed. Shall we not say, therefore, that aswa to the Rishis meant the unknown power made up of force, strength, solidity, speed and enjoyment that pervades and constitutes the material world? But there is a danger that etymological fancies may mislead us. It is necessary, therefore, to test our provisional conclusion from philology by a careful examination of the images of this parable. Yet before we proceed to this inquiry, it is as well to note that in the very opening of his second Brahmana, the Rishi passes on immediately from aswa the horse to Ashanaya mrityu, Hunger that is death and assigns this hunger that is death as the characteristic, indeed the very nature of the Force that has arranged and developed—evolved, as the moderns would say—the material worlds. "Dawn" says the Rishi, "is the head of the horse sacrificial." Now the head is the front, the part of us that faces and looks out upon our world,—and Dawn is that part to the Horse of the worlds. This goddess must therefore be the opening out of
Page – 277 the world to the eye of being—for as day is the symbol of a time of activity, night of a time of inactivity, so dawn images the imperfect but pregnant beginnings of regular cosmic action; it is the Being's movement forward, it is its impulse to look out at the universe in which it finds itself and looking towards it, to yearn, to desire to enter upon possession of a world which looks so bright because of the brightness of the gaze that is turned upon it. The word Ushas means etymologically coming into manifested being; and it could mean also desire or yearning. Ushas or Dawn to the early thinkers was the impulse towards manifest existence, no longer a vague movement in the depths of the Unmanifest, but already emerging and on the brink of its satisfaction. For we must remember that we are dealing with a book full of mystical imagery, which starts with & looks on psychological and philosophical truths in the most material things and we shall miss its meaning altogether, if in our interpretation we are afraid of mysticism. The sun is the eye of this great Force, the wind is its life-breath or vital energy, Fire is its open mouth. We are here in the company of very familiar symbols. We shall have to return to them hereafter but they are, in their surface application, obvious and lucid. By themselves they are almost sufficient to reveal the meaning of the symbol,—yet not altogether sufficient. For, taken by themselves, they might mislead us into supposing the Horse of the Worlds to be an image of the material universe only, a figure for those movements of matter & in matter with which modern Science is so exclusively preoccupied. But the next image delivers us from passing by this side-gate into materialism. "Time in its period is the self of the Horse Sacrificial." If we accept for the word atma a significance which is also common and is, indeed, used in the next chapter, if we understand by it, as I think we ought here to understand by it, "substance" or "body", the expression, in itself remarkable, will become even more luminous and striking. Not Matter then, but Time, a mental circumstance, is the body of this force of the material universe whose eye is the sun and his breath the wind. Are we then to infer that the Seer denies the essential materiality of
Page – 278 matter? does he assert it to be, as Huxley admitted it to be, "a state of consciousness"? We shall see. Meanwhile it is evident already that this Horse of the Worlds is not an image merely of matter or material force, but, as we had already supposed it to be, an image of the power which pervades and constitutes the material universe. We get also from this image about Time the idea of it as an unknown power—for Time which is its self or body, is itself an unknown quantity. The reality which expresses itself to us through Time—its body—but remains itself ungrasped, must be still what men have always felt it to be, the unknown God. In the images that immediately follow we have the conception of Space added to the conception of Time and both are brought together side by side as constituents of the being of the horse. For the sky is the flesh of his body, the quarters his flanks & the intermediate regions his ribs—the sky, nabhas, the ether above us in which the stellar systems are placed,—and these stellar systems themselves, concentrations of ether, are the bones which support the flesh and of which life in this spatial infinity takes advantage in order more firmly to place & organise itself in matter. But side by side with this spatial image is that of the seasons reminding us immediately & intentionally of the connection of Time to Space. The seasons, determined for us by the movements of the sun & stars, are the flanks of the horse and he stands upon the months and the fortnights—the lunar divisions. Space, then, is the flesh constituting materially this body of Time which the Sage attributes to his Horse of the worlds,—by movement in Space its periods are shaped & determined. Therefore we return always to the full idea of the Horse—not as an image of matter, not as a symbol of the unknown supra-material Power in its supra-material reality, but of that Power expressing itself in matter—materially, we might almost say, pervading & constituting the universe. Time is its body,—yes, but sanvatsara not kala, Time in its periods determined by movement in Space, not Time in its essentiality. Moreover, it is that Power imaging itself in Cosmos, it is the Horse of the Worlds. For, we read, "Heaven is its back, the
Page – 279 mid-region is its belly, earth is its footing"—pajasyam, the four feet upon which it stands. We must be careful not to confuse the ancient Seer's conception of the universe with our modern conception. To us nothing exists except the system of gross material worlds—annamayam jagat,—this earth, this moon, this sun & its planets, these myriad suns and their systems. But to the Vedantic thinkers the universe, the manifest Brahman, was a harmony of worlds within worlds; they beheld a space within our space but linked with it, they were aware of a Time connected with our Time but different from it. This earth was Bhur. Rising in soul into the air above the earth, the antariksham, they thought they came into contact with other sevenfold earths in which just as here matter is the predominant principle, so there nervous or vital energy is the main principle or else manas, still dependent on matter & vital energy; these earths they called Bhuvar. And rising beyond this atmosphere into the ethereal void they believed themselves to be aware of other worlds which they called Swar or heaven, where again in its turn mind, free, blithe, delivered from its struggle to impose itself in a world not its own upon matter & nerve-life, is the medium of existence & the governing Force. If we keep in mind these ideas, we shall easily understand why the images are thus distributed in the sentence I have last quoted. Heaven is the back of the Horse, because it is on mind that we rest, mind that bears up the Gods & Gandharvas, Titans & men;—the mid-region is the belly because vital energy is that which hungers & devours, moves restlessly everywhere seizing everything and turning it into food or else because mind is the womb of all our higher consciousness;—earth is the footing because matter here, outward form, is the fundamental condition for the manifestation of life, mind and all higher forces. On Matter we rest and have our firm stand; out of Matter we rise to our fulfilment in Spirit. Then once again, after these higher & more remote suggestions, we are reminded that it is some Force manifesting in matter which the Horse symbolises; the material manifestation constitutes the essence of its symbolism. The images used are of an almost gross materiality. Some of them are at the same
Page – 280 time of a striking interest to the practical student of Yoga, for he recognises in them allusions to certain obscure but exceedingly common Yogic phenomena. The strands of the rivers are imaged as the undigested food in the horse's belly—earth not yet assimilated or of sufficient consistency for the habitual works of life; the rivers, distributing the water that is the life blood of earth's activities, are his veins; the mountains, breathing in health for us from the rarer altitudes and supporting by the streams born from them the works of life, are his lungs and liver; herbs and plants, springing up out of the sap of earth, are the hairs covering & clothing his body. All that is clear enough and designedly superficial. But then the Upanishad goes on to speak no longer of superficial circumstances but of the powers of the Horse. Some of these are material powers, the thunder, the lightning, the rain. When he stretches himself, then it lightens; when he shakes himself, then it thunders; when he urines, then it rains—vijrimbhate, extends himself by intensity, makes the most of his physical bulk & force; vidhunute, throws himself out by energy, converts his whole body into a motion & force; these two words are of a great impetuosity & vehemence, and taken in conjunction with what they image, extremely significant. The Yogin will at once recognise the reference to the electrical manifestations visible or felt which accompany so often the increase of concentration, thought & inner activity in the waking condition—electricity, vidyutas, the material symbol, medium & basis of all activities of knowledge, sarvani vijnanavijrimbhitani. He will recognise also the meghadhwani, one of the characteristic sounds heard in the concentration of Yoga, symbolical of kshatratejas and physically indicative of force gathering itself for action. The first image is therefore an image of knowledge expressing itself in matter, the second is an image of power expressing itself in matter. The third, the image of the rain, suggests that it is from the mere waste matter of his body that this great Power is able to fertilise the world & produce sustenance for the myriad nations of his creatures. "Speech verily is the voice of him." Vagevasya vak. Speech with its burden of definite thought, is the neighing of this mighty horse of sacrifice; by that this great Power in matter
Page – 281 expresses materially the uprush of his thought & yearning & emotion, visible sparks of the secret universal fire that is in him—guhahitam. But the real powers, the wonderful fundamental greatnesses of the Horse are, the Sage would have us remember, not the material. What are they then? The sunrise & sunset, day & night are their symbols, not the magnitudes of space, but the magnitudes of Time,—Time, that mysterious condition of universal mind which alone makes the ordering of the universe in Space possible, although its own particular relations to matter are necessarily determined by material events & movements—for itself subtle as well as infinite it offers no means by which it can be materially measured. Sunrise & sunset, that is to say birth & death, are the front & hind part of the body of the horse, Time expressed in matter. But on Day & Night the sage fixes a deeper significance. Day is the symbol of the continual manifestation of material things [in] the vyakta, the manifest or fundamentally in Sat, in infinite being; Night is the symbol of their continual disappearance in Avyakta, the unmanifest or finally into Asat, into infinite non-being. They appear according to the swift movement of this Horse of the Worlds, anu ajayata, or, as I have written, translating the idea & rhythm of the Upanishad rather than the exact words, as he gallops. Day is the greatness that appears in his front, Night is the greatness that appears in his rear,—whatever this Time-Spirit, this Zeitgeist, turns his face towards or arrives at as he gallops through Time, that appears or, as we say, comes into being, whatever he passes away from & leaves, that disappears out of being or, as we say, perishes. Not that things are really destroyed, for nothing that is can be destroyed—nabhavo vidyate satah, but they no longer appear, they are swallowed up in this darkness of his refusal of consciousness; for the purposes of manifestation they cease to exist. All things exist already in Parabrahman, but all are not here manifest. They are already there in Being, not in Time. The universal Thought expressing itself as Time reaches them, they seem to be born; It passes away from them, they seem to perish; but there they still are, in Being, but not in Time. These
Page – 282 two greatnesses of the appearance of things in Time & Space & their disappearance in Time & Space act always & continuously so long as the Horse is galloping, are his essential greatnesses. Etau vai mahimanau. The birth of one is in the eastern ocean, of the other in the western, that is to say in Sat & Asat, in the ocean of Being & the ocean of denial of Being or else in Vyakrita Prakriti & Avyakrita Prakriti, occult sea of Chaos, manifest sea of Cosmos. Then the sage throws out briefly a description, not exhaustive but typical, of the relations of the Horse to the different natural types of being that seem to possess this universe. For all of them He is the vahana, He bears them up on His infinite strength & speed & motion. He bears all of them without respect of differences, samabhavena, with the divine impartiality and equality of soul—samam hi Brahma. To the type of each individual being this Universal Might adapts himself & seems to take upon himself their image. He is Haya to the Gods, Arvan to the Asura, Vajin to the Gandharvas, Aswa to men. Ye yatha mam prapadyante tans tathaiva bhajamyaham, mama vartmanuvartante manushyah Partha sarvashah. In reality, they are made in his image, not He in theirs, & though he seems to obey them & follow their needs & impulses, though they handle the whip, ply the spur & tug the reins, it is he who bears them on in the courses of Time that are marked out for him by his hidden Self; He is free & exults in the swiftness of his galloping. But what are these names, Haya, Vajin, Arvan, Aswa? Certainly, they must suggest qualities which fit the Horse in each case to the peculiar type of its rider; but the meaning depends on associations & an etymology which in modern Sanscrit have gone below the surface & are no longer easily seizable. Haya is especially difficult. For this reason Shankara, relying too much on scholarship & intellectual inference & too little on his intuitions, is openly at a loss in this passage. He sees that the word haya for horse must arise from the radical sense of motion borne by the root hi; but every horse has motion for his chief characteristic & utility, Arvan & Vajin no less than Haya. Why then should Haya alone be suitable for riding by the gods, why
Page – 283 Arvan for the Asuras? He has, I think, the right intuition when he suggests that it is some peculiar & excelling kind of motion (visishtagati) which is the characteristic of Haya. But then, unable to fix on that peculiarity, unable to read any characteristic meaning in the names that follow, he draws back from his intuition and adds that after all, these names may have merely indicated particular kinds of horses attributed mythologically to these various families of riders. But this suggestion would make the passage mere mythology; but the Upanishads, always intent on their deeper object, never waste time over mere mythology. We must therefore go deeper than Shankara and follow out the intuition he himself has abandoned. I am dwelling on this passage at a length disproportionate to its immediate importance, not only because Shankara's failure in handling it shows the necessity & fruitfulness of trusting our intuitions when in contact with the Upanishads, but because the passage serves two other important uses. It illustrates the Vedantic use of the etymology of words and it throws light on the precise notions of the old thinkers about those superterrestrial beings with whom the vision of the ancient Hindus peopled the universe. The Vedantic writers, we continually find, dwelt deeply & curiously on the innate & on the concealed meaning of words; vyakarana, always considered essential to the interpretation of the Vedas, they used not merely as scholars, but much more as intuitive thinkers. It was not only the actual etymological sense or the actual sense in use but the suggestions of the sound & syllables of the words which attracted them; for they found that by dwelling on them new & deep truths arose into their understandings. Let us see how they use this method in assigning the names assumed by the sacrificial Horse. Here modern philology comes to our help, for, by the clue it has given, we can revive in its principle the Nirukta of our ancestors and discover by induction & inference the old meaning of the Vedic vocables. I will leave Haya alone for the present; because philology unaided does not help us very much in getting at the sense of its application,—in discovering the visishtagati which the word conveyed to the mind of the sage. But Vajin &
Page – 284 Arvan are very illuminative. Vaja & Vajin are common Vedic words; they recur perpetually in the Rigveda. The sense of Vaja is essentially substantiality of being attended with plenty, from which it came to signify full force, copiousness, strength, and by an easy transition substance & plenty in the sense of wealth and possessions. There can be no doubt about Vajin. But European scholarship has confused for us the approach to the sense of Arvan. Ar is a common Sanscrit root, the basis of ari, Arya, Aryama and a number of well known words. But the scholars tell us that it means to till or plough & the Aryans so called themselves because they were agriculturists and not nomads & hunters. Starting from this premise one may see in Arvan a horse for ploughing as opposed to a draught-animal or a warhorse, & support the derivation by instancing the Latin arvum, a tilled field! But even if the Aryans were ploughmen, the Titans surely were not—Hiranyakashipu & Prahlad did not pride themselves on the breaking of the glebe & the honest sweat of their brow! There is no trace of such an association in arvan here,—I know not whether there is any elsewhere in the Vedas. Indeed, this agriculturist theory of the Aryans seems one of the worst of the many irresponsible freaks which scholastic fancifulness has perpetrated in the field of Sanscrit learning. No ancient race would be likely so to designate itself. Ar signifies essentially any kind of preeminence in fact or force in act. It means therefore to be strong, high, swift or active, preeminent, noble, excellent or first; to raise, lead, begin or rule; it means also to struggle, fight, to drive, to labour, to plough. The sense of struggle & combat appears in ari, an enemy; the Greek Ares, the war-god, arete, virtue, meaning originally like the Latin virtus, valour; the Latin arma, weapons. Arya means strong, high, noble or warlike, as indeed its use in literature constantly indicates. We can now discover the true force of Arvan,—it is the strong one in command, it is the stallion, or the bull, i.e. master of the herd, the leader, master or fighter. The word Asura also means the strong or mighty one. The Gandharvas are cited here briefly, so as to suit the rapidity of the passage, as the type of a particular class of beings, Gandharvas, Yakshas, Kinnaras
Page – 285 whose unifying characteristic is material ease, prosperity and a beautiful, happy & undisturbed self-indulgence; they are angels of joy, ease, art, beauty & pleasure. For them the Horse becomes full of ease & plenty, the support of these qualities, the vahana of the Gandharvas. The Asuras are, similarly, angels of might & force & violent struggle,—self-will is their characteristic, just as an undisciplined fury of self-indulgence is the characteristic of their kindred Rakshasas. It is a self-will capable of discipline, but always huge & impetuous even in discipline, always based on a colossal egoism. They struggle gigantically to impose that egoism on their surroundings. It is for these mighty but imperfect beings that the Horse adapts himself to their needs, becomes full of force & might and bears up their gigantic struggle, their unceasing effort. And Haya? In the light of these examples we can hazard a suggestion. The root meaning is motion; but from certain kindred words, hil, to swing, hind, to swing, hind, to .. roam about freely & from another sense of hi, to exhilarate or gladden, we may, perhaps, infer that haya indicated to the sage a swift, free & joyous, bounding motion, fit movement for the bearer of the gods. For the Aryan gods were devas, angels of joy & brightness, fulfilled in being, in harmony with their functions & surroundings, not like the Titans imperfect, dispossessed, struggling. Firmly seated on the bounding joy of the Horse, they deliver themselves confidently to the exultation of his movements. The sense here is not so plain & certain as with Vajin & Arvan; but Haya must certainly have been one in character with the Deva in order to be his vahana; the sense I have given certainly belongs to the word Deva, is discoverable in Haya from its roots, & that this brightness & joyousness was the character of the Aryan gods, I think every reader of Veda & Purana must feel and admit. Last of all, the Horse becomes Aswa for men. But is he not Aswa for all? why particularly for men? The answer is that the Rishi is already moving forward in thought to the idea of Ashanaya Mrityu with which he opens the second Brahmana of the Upanishad. Man, first & supreme type of terrestrial creatures, is most of all subject to this mystery of wasting & death which the Titans bear with difficulty & the gods
Page – 286 & Gandharvas entirely overcome. For in man that characteristic of enjoyment which by enjoying devours & wastes both its object & itself is especially developed & he bears the consequent pressure of Ashanaya Mrityu which can only lighten & disappear if we rise upward in the scale of Being towards Brahman & become truly sons of immortality, Amritasya putrah. That form of force in matter that is self-wasting because it wastes or preys upon others, is man's vahana. Of this Horse of the Worlds, who bears up all beings, the sea is the brother & the sea is the birthplace. There can be no doubt of the meaning of this symbol. It is the upper ocean of the Veda in which it imaged the superior & divine existence, these are the waters of supramaterial causality. From that this lower ocean of our manifestation derives its waters, its flowing energies, apah; from that when the Vritras are slain & the firmaments opened, it is perpetually replenished, prati samudram syandamanah and of that it is the shadow & the reproduction of its circumstances under the conditions of mental illusion,—Avidya, mother of limitation & death. This image not only consummates this passage but opens a door of escape from that which is to follow. Deliverance from the dominion of Ashanaya Mrityu is possible because of this circumstance that the sea of divine being is bandhu, kin & friend to the Horse. The aparardha proves to be of the same essential nature as the parardha, our mortal part is akin to our unlimited & immortal part, because the Horse of the Worlds comes to us from that divine source & in his essence partakes of its nature, & from what other except this Ocean can the Horse of the Worlds who is material yet supramaterial be said to have derived his being? We, appearing bound, mortal & limited, are manifestations of a free & infinite reality & from that from which we were born comes friendship & assistance for that which we are, towards making us that which we shall be. From our kindred heavens the Love descends always that works to raise up the lower to its brother, the higher.
Page – 287 |