{"id":902,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:07","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=902"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:07","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:07","slug":"02-the-problem-and-its-solution-vol-10-the-secret-of-the-veda-volume-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/10-the-secret-of-the-veda-volume-10\/02-the-problem-and-its-solution-vol-10-the-secret-of-the-veda-volume-10","title":{"rendered":"-02_The Problem and Its Solution.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nTHE SECRET OF THE VEDA<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span>
\nI <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/b> <\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Problem and Its Solution <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n                  I<\/font>s <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/b> there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda?<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nAccording to current conceptions the heart of that ancient
\nmystery has been plucked out and revealed to the gaze of all,
\nor rather no real secret ever existed. The hymns of the Veda
\nare the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and still barbarous
\nrace written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory
\nrites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and replete with
\na confused mass of half-formed myth and crude astronomical allegories yet in the
\nmaking. Only in the later hymns do we perceive the first appearance of deeper psychological and moral
\nideas, \u2014 borrowed, some think, from the hostile Dravidians,
\nthe "robbers" and "Veda-haters" freely cursed in the hymns
\nthemselves, \u2014 and, however acquired, the first seed of the
\nlater Vedantic speculations. This modern theory is in accord
\nwith the received idea of a rapid human evolution from the
\nquite recent savage; it is supported by an imposing apparatus of critical research and upheld by a number of Sciences,
\nunhappily still young and still largely conjectural in their
\nmethods and shifting in their results, \u2014 Comparative. Philology, Comparative Mythology and the Science of Comparative
\nReligion.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt is my Object in these chapters to suggest a new view of
\nthe ancient problem. I do not propose to use a negative and
\ndestructive method directed against the received solutions, but
\nsimply to present, positively and constructively, a larger and, in
\nsome sort, a complementary hypothesis built upon broader
\nfoundations, \u2014 a hypothesis which, in addition, may shed light
\non one or two important problems in the history of ancient
\nthought and cult left very insufficiently solved by the ordinary
\ntheories.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nWe have in the Rig-veda, \u2014 the true and only Veda in the<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 1<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nestimation of European scholars, \u2014 a body of sacrificial hymns
\ncouched in a very ancient language which presents a number of
\nalmost insoluble difficulties. It is full of ancient forms and words
\nwhich do not appear in later speech and have often to be fixed
\nin some doubtful sense by intelligent conjecture; a mass even
\nof the words that it has in common with classical Sanskrit seem
\nto bear or at least to admit another significance than in the later
\nliterary tongue; and a multitude of its vocables, especially the
\nmost common, those which are most vital to the sense, are
\ncapable of a surprising number of unconnected significances
\nwhich may give, according to our preference in selection, quite
\ndifferent complexions to whole passages, whole hymns and
\neven to the whole thought of the Veda. In the course of several
\nthousands of years there have been at least three considerable
\nattempts, entirely differing from each other in their methods
\nand results, to fix the sense of these ancient litanies. One of these
\nis prehistoric in time and exists only by fragments in the Brahmanas and Upanishads; but we possess in its entirety the traditional interpretation of the Indian scholar Sayana and we have
\nin our own day the interpretation constructed after an immense
\nlabour of comparison and conjecture by modern European
\nscholarship. Both of them present one characteristic in common,
\nthe extraordinary incoherence and poverty of sense which their
\nresults stamp upon the ancient hymns. The separate lines can
\nbe given, whether naturally or by force of conjecture, a good sense
\nor a sense that hangs together; the diction that results, if garish in style, if
\nloaded with otiose and decorative epithets, if developing extraordinarily little of meaning in an amazing mass of gaudy
\nfigure and verbiage, can be made to run into intelligible sentences; but when we come to read the hymns as a whole we
\nseem to be in the presence of men who, unlike the early writers
\nof other races, were incapable of coherent and natural expression
\nor of connected thought. Except in the briefer and simpler
\nhymns, the language tends to be either obscure or artificial;<\/font>
\n<\/font>the thoughts are either unconnected or have to be forced and
\nbeaten by the interpreter into a whole. The scholar in dealing
\nwith his text is obliged to substitute for interpretation a process
\nalmost of fabrication. We feel that he is not so much revealing<\/font>
\n<\/font> <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 2<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe sense as hammering and forging rebellious material into some
\nsort of shape and consistency.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nYet these obscure and barbarous compositions have had
\nthe most splendid good fortune in all literary history. They have
\nbeen the reputed source not only of some of the world’s richest
\nand profoundest religions, but of some of its subtlest metaphysical philosophies. In the fixed tradition of thousands of years
\nthey have been revered as the origin and standard of all that
\ncan be held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad, in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages.
\nThe name borne by them was Veda, the knowledge, \u2014 the
\nreceived name for the highest spiritual truth of which the human
\nmind is capable. But if we accept the current interpretations,
\nwhether Sayana’s or the modern theory, the whole of this sublime
\nand sacred reputation is a colossal fiction. The hymns are, on
\nthe contrary, nothing more than the naive superstitious fancies
\nof untaught and materialistic barbarians concerned only with
\nthe most external gains and enjoyments and ignorant of all but
\nthe most elementary moral notions or religious aspirations. Nor
\ndo occasional passages, quite out of harmony with their general
\nspirit, destroy this total impression. The true foundation or
\nstarting-point of the later religions and philosophies is the
\nUpanishads, which have then to be conceived as a revolt of philosophical and speculative minds against the ritualistic materialism
\nof the Vedas.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut this conception, supported by misleading European
\nparallels, really explains nothing. Such profound and ultimate
\nthoughts, such systems of subtle and elaborate psychology as
\nare found in the substance of the Upanishads, do not spring
\nout of a previous void. The human mind in its progress marches
\nfrom knowledge to knowledge, or it renews and enlarges previous
\nknowledge that has been obscured and overlaid, or it seizes on
\nold imperfect clues and is led by them to new discoveries. The
\nthought of the Upanishads supposes great origins anterior to itself, and these in the ordinary theories are lacking. The hypothesis, invented to fill the gap, that these ideas were borrowed by
\nbarbarous Aryan invaders from the civilised Dravidians, is a<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nconjecture supported only by other conjectures. It is indeed
\ncoming to be doubted whether the whole story of an Aryan invasion through the Punjab is not a myth of the philologists.<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nNow, in ancient Europe the schools of intellectual philosophy were preceded by the secret doctrines of the mystics;<\/font>
\n<\/font>Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries prepared the rich soil of mentality out of which sprang Pythagoras and Plato. A similar
\nstarting-point is at least probable for the later march of thought
\nin India. Much indeed of the forms and symbols of thought
\nwhich we find in the Upanishads, much of the substance of the
\nBrahmanas supposes a period in India in which thought took the
\nform or the veil of secret teachings such as those of the Greek
\nmysteries.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nAnother hiatus left by the received theories is the gulf that
\ndivides the material worship of external Nature-Powers in the
\nVeda from the developed religion of the Greeks and from the psychological and spiritual ideas we find attached to the functions
\nof the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas. We may accept for
\nthe present the theory that the earliest fully intelligent form of
\nhuman religion is necessarily, \u2014 since man on earth begins from
\nthe external and proceeds to the internal, \u2014 a worship of outward Nature-Powers invested with the consciousness and the
\npersonality that he finds in his own being.<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nAgni in the Veda is avowedly Fire; Surya is the Sun,
\nParjanya the Rain-cloud, Usha the Dawn; and if the material
\norigin or function of some other Gods is less trenchantly clear,
\nit is easy to render the obscure precise by philological inferences
\nor ingenious speculation. But when we come to the worship of
\nthe Greeks not much later in date than the Veda, according to
\nmodern ideas of chronology, we find a significant change. The
\nmaterial attributes of the Gods are effaced or have become
\nsubordinate to psychological conceptions. The impetuous God
\nof Fire has been converted into a lame God of Labour; Apollo,
\nthe Sun, presides over poetical and prophetic inspiration;<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nAthene, who may plausibly be identified as in origin a Dawn-Goddess, has lost all memory of her material functions and is
\nthe wise, strong and pure Goddess of Knowledge; and there are
\nother deities also. Gods of War, Love, Beauty, whose material<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 4<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nfunctions have disappeared if they ever existed. It is not enough
\nto say that this change was inevitable with the progress of human
\ncivilisation: the process also of the change demands inquiry
\nand elucidation. We see the same revolution effected in the
\nPuranas partly by the substitution of other divine names and
\nfigures, but also in part by the same obscure process that we
\nobserve in the evolution of Greek mythology. The river Saraswati has become the Muse and Goddess of Learning; Vishnu and
\nRudra of the Vedas are now the supreme Godhead, members of
\na divine Triad and expressive separately of the conservative and
\ndestructive process in the cosmos. In the Isha Upanishad we
\nfind an appeal to Surya as a God of revelatory knowledge by
\nwhose action we can arrive at the highest truth. This, too, is his
\nfunction in the sacred Vedic formula of the Gayatri which was
\nfor thousands of years repeated by every Brahmin in his daily
\nmeditation; and we may note that this formula is a verse from
\nthe Rig-veda, from a hymn of the Rishi Vishwamitra. In the
\nsame Upanishad, Agni is invoked for purely moral functions
\nas the purifier from sin, the leader of the soul by the good path
\nto the divine Bliss, and he seems to be identified with the power
\nof the will and responsible for human actions. In other Upanishads the Gods are clearly the symbols of sense-functions in
\nman. Soma, the plant which yielded the mystic wine for the
\nVedic sacrifice, has become not only the God of the moon, but
\nmanifests himself as mind in the human being. These evolutions
\nsuppose .some period, posterior to the early material worship
\nor superior Pantheistic Animism attributed to the Vedas and
\nprior to the developed Puranic mythology, in which the Gods
\nbecame invested with deeper psychological functions, a period
\nwhich may well have been the Age of the Mysteries. As things
\nstand, a gap is left or else has been created by our exclusive
\npreoccupation with the naturalistic element in the religion of
\nthe Vedic Rishis.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nI suggest that the gulf is of our own creation and does not
\nreally exist in the ancient sacred writings. The hypothesis I
\npropose is that the Rig-veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human thought
\nof which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries were the<\/font>
\n<\/font> <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 5<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nfailing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological knowledge
\nof the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of
\nconcrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness
\nand secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the
\nGods. This wisdom was, they thought, unfit, perhaps even
\ndangerous to the ordinary human mind or in any case liable to
\nperversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar
\nand unpurified spirits. Hence they favoured the existence of an
\nouter worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, an inner
\ndiscipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words
\nand images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a
\nconcrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers. The Vedic
\nhymns were conceived and constructed on this principle. Their
\nformulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward
\nritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-Worship which was
\nthen the common religion, covertly the sacred words, the effective
\nsymbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest
\nachievement of the human race. The ritual system recognised by
\nSayana may, in its externalities, stand; the naturalistic sense
\ndiscovered by European scholarship may, in its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and
\nstill hidden secret of the Veda, \u2014 the secret words, niṇyā vacāmsi,
\n<\/i>which were spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in
\nknowledge. To disengage this less obvious but more important
\nsense by fixing the import of Vedic terms, the sense of Vedic
\nsymbols and the psychological functions of the Gods is thus a
\ndifficult but necessary task, for which these chapters and the
\ntranslations that accompany them are only a preparation.<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe hypothesis, if it proves to be valid, will have three
\nadvantages. It will elucidate simply and effectively the parts
\nof the Upanishads that remain yet unintelligible or ill-understood
\nas well as much of the origins of the Puranas. It will explain
\nand justify rationally the whole ancient tradition of India; for
\nit will be found that, in sober truth, the Vedanta, Purana, Tantra,
\nthe philosophical schools and the great Indian religions do go back<\/font>
\n<\/font> <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 6<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nin their source to Vedic origins. We can see there in their original
\nseed or in their early or even primitive forms the fundamental
\nconceptions of later Indian thought. Thus a natural starting-
\npoint will be provided for a sounder study of Comparative Religion in the Indian field. Instead of wandering amid insecure
\nspeculations or having to account for impossible conversions
\nand unexplained transitions we shall have a clue to a natural
\nand progressive development satisfying to the reason. Incidentally, some light may be thrown on the obscurities of early cult and
\nmyth in other ancient nations. Finally, the incoherencies of the
\nVedic texts will at once be explained and disappear. They exist
\nin appearance only, because the real thread of the sense is to be
\nfound in an inner meaning. That thread found, the hymns appear
\nas logical and organic wholes and the expression, though alien
\nin type to our modern ways of thinking and speaking, becomes,
\nin its own style, just and precise and sins rather by economy
\nof phrase than by excess, by over-pregnancy rather than by
\npoverty of sense. The Veda ceases to be merely an interesting
\nremnant of barbarism and takes rank among the most important
\nof the world’s early Scriptures.<\/font> <\/font> <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 7<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE SECRET OF THE VEDA CHAPTER I   The Problem and Its Solution                       Is there at all or is there still a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10-the-secret-of-the-veda-volume-10","wpcat-17-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}