Sri Aurobindo: 2 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.   Saraswati and Her Consorts  “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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 same Word or knowledge. In the eighth hymn of Madhuchchhandas we have a Rik in which Bharati is mentioned under the name of Mahi.  Ev¯a hyasya s¯unr.t¯a, virap´s¯ı gomat¯ı mah¯ı; pakv¯a ´s¯akh¯a na d¯a´sus.e.


Sri Aurobindo: “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.


Sri Aurobindo: Surya is the Lord of the supreme Sight, the vast Light, br.haj jyotih., or, as it is sometimes called, the true Light, r.ta ˙m jyotih.. And the connection between the words r.tam and br.hat 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, br.hat, full of the truth of being, satyam, and of the truth of knowledge and action, r.tam. The gods have this consciousness. Agni, for instance, is termed r.tacit, he who has the truth-consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Mahi is full of the rays of this Surya; she carries in her this illumination. Moreover she is s¯unr.t¯a, she is the word of a blissful Truth, even as it has been said of Saraswati that she is the impeller of happy truths, codayitr¯ı s¯unr.t¯an¯am. Finally, she is virap´s¯ı, large or breaking out into abundance, a word which recalls to us that the Truth is also a Largeness, r.ta ˙m br.hat. And in another hymn, (I.22.10), she is described as var¯utr¯ı dhis.an. ¯a, a widely covering or embracing Thought-power. Mahi, then, is the luminous vastness of the Truth, she represents the Largeness, br.hat, of the superconscient in us containing in itself the Truth, r.tam.


Sri Aurobindo: 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, cetant¯ı sumat¯ın¯am, so also Ila comes to the sacriﬁce awakening the consciousness to knowledge, cetayant¯ı.  She is full of energy, suv¯ır¯a, and brings knowledge. She also is connected with Surya, the Sun, as when Agni, the Will is invoked (V.4.4) to labour by the rays of the Sun, Lord of the true Light, being of one mind with Ila, il.ay¯a sajos.


Sri Aurobindo: ¯a yatam¯ano ra´smibhih.  s¯uryasya. 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.


Sri Aurobindo: Ila may therefore well be the vision of the seer which attains the truth.  As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, ´sruti, which gives the inspired word, so Ila represents dr.s.t.i, the truthvision. If so, since dr.s.t.i and ´sruti 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.


Sri Aurobindo: We may note also that these three goddesses are said to  Saraswati and Her Consorts  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 v¯aryam, rayih., r¯ayah.. 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 ratn¯ani; the seven ﬂames, tongues or rays of Agni, sapta arcis.ah., sapta jv¯al¯ah.; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dh¯ıtayah.; the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi, mother of the gods, sapta g¯avah.; the seven rivers, the seven mothers or fostering cows, sapta m¯atarah., sapta dhenavah., 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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, pure mind, truth-mind and so on to the highest summit, param¯a par¯avat. 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  Saraswati and Her Consorts  the sevenfold substance of the ocean of being which appears to us formulated in the seven worlds enumerated by the Puranas.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 Great Water, maho arn.as, — an expression which gives us at once the origin of the later term, Mahas, — or sometimes mah¯an arn.avah.. We see in the third hymn the close connection between Saraswati and this great water.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 of Heaven, who, according to our hypothesis, symbolises the Power of Mind and especially the divine or self-luminous Mind in the human being.   Chapter X The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers T HE THREE riks of the third hymn of Madhuchchhandas in which Saraswati has been invoked, run as follows, in the Sanskrit: — P¯avak¯a nah. sarasvat¯ı, v¯ajebhir v¯ajin¯ıvat¯ı; yaj˜na ˙m vas.t.u dhiy¯avasuh..  Codayitr¯ı s¯unr.t¯an¯a ˙m, cetant¯ı sumat¯ın¯am; yaj˜na ˙m dadhe sarasvat¯ı.  Maho arn.ah. sarasvat¯ı, pra cetayati ketun¯a; dhiyo vi´sv¯a vi r¯ajati.


Sri Aurobindo: The sense of the ﬁrst two verses 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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  The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers  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, daivya 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.


Sri Aurobindo: We must remember that this truth-consciousness of the Vedic Rishis is a supra-mental plane, a level of the hill of being (adreh. s¯anu) 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.  But this line may, so far as the mere grammatical form of it goes, be quite otherwise translated; we may take maho arn.as in apposition to Saraswati and render the verse “Saraswati, the great river, awakens us to knowledge by the perception and shines in all our thoughts.” If we understand by this expression, “the great river”, as Sayana seems to understand, the physical river in the Punjab, we get an incoherence of thought and expression which is impossible except in a nightmare or a lunatic asylum.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is possible to suppose that it means the great ﬂood of inspiration and that there is no reference to the great ocean of the Truth-Consciousness. Elsewhere, however, there is repeated reference to the gods working by the vast power of the great ﬂood (mahn¯a mahato arn.avasya) where there is no reference to Saraswati and it is improbable that she should be meant. It is true that in the Vedic writings Saraswati is spoken of as the secret self of Indra, — an expression, we may observe, that is void of sense if Saraswati is only a northern river and Indra the god of the sky, but has a very profound and striking signiﬁcance if Indra be the illumined Mind and Saraswati the inspiration that proceeds from the hidden plane of the supra  mental Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is impossible to give Saraswati so important a place with regard to the other gods as would be implied by interpreting the phrase mahn¯a mahato arn.avasya in the sense “by the greatness of Saraswati”. The gods act, it is continually stated, by the power of the Truth, r.tena, but Saraswati is only one of the deities of the Truth and not even the most important or universal of them. The sense I have given is, therefore, the only rendering consistent with the general thought of the Veda and with the use of the phrase in other passages.  Let us then start from this decisive fact put beyond doubt by this passage — whether we take the great stream to be Saraswati itself or the Truth-ocean — that the Vedic Rishis used the image of water, a river or an ocean, in a ﬁgurative sense and as a psychological symbol, and let us see how far it takes us. We notice ﬁrst that existence itself is constantly spoken of in the Hindu writings, in Veda, Purana and even philosophical reasoning and illustration as an ocean.


Sri Aurobindo: The Veda speaks of two oceans, the upper and the lower waters. These are the ocean of the subconscient, dark and inexpressive, and the ocean of the superconscient, luminous and eternal expression but beyond the human mind. Vamadeva in the last hymn of the fourth Mandala speaks of these two oceans. He says that a honeyed wave climbs up from the ocean and by means of this mounting wave which is the Soma (a ˙m´su) one attains entirely to immortality; that wave or that Soma is the secret name of the clarity (ghr.tasya, the symbol of the clariﬁed butter); it is the tongue of the gods; it is the nodus (n¯abhi) of immortality.  Samudr¯ad ¯urmir madhum¯an ud¯arad, up¯a ˙m´sun¯a sam amr.tatvam ¯anat.;


Sri Aurobindo: Ghr.tasya n¯ama guhya ˙m yad asti, jihv¯a dev¯an¯am amr.tasya n¯abhih..   I presume there can be no doubt that the sea, the honey, the Soma, the clariﬁed butter are in this passage at least psychological symbols. Certainly, Vamadeva does not mean that a wave or ﬂood of wine came mounting up out of the salt water of the Indian Ocean or of the Bay of Bengal or even from the fresh  The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers  water of the river Indus or the Ganges and that this wine is a secret name for clariﬁed butter. What he means to say is clearly that out of the subconscient depths in us arises a honeyed wave of Ananda or pure delight of existence, that it is by this Ananda that we can arrive at immortality; this Ananda is the secret being, the secret reality behind the action of the mind in its shining clarities.


Sri Aurobindo: Soma, the god of the Ananda, the Vedanta also tells us, is that which has become mind or sensational perception; in other words, all mental sensation carries in it a hidden delight of existence and strives to express that secret of its own being.  Therefore Ananda is the tongue of the gods with which they taste the delight of existence; it is the nodus in which all the activities of the immortal state or divine existence are bound together. Vamadeva goes on to say, “Let us give expression to this secret name of the clarity, — that is to say, let us bring out this Soma wine, this hidden delight of existence; let us hold it in this world-sacriﬁce by our surrenderings or submissions to Agni, the divine Will or Conscious-Power which is the Master of being. He is the four-horned Bull of the worlds and when he listens to the soul-thought of man in its self-expression, he ejects this secret name of delight from its hiding-place.”  Vaya ˙m n¯ama pra brav¯am¯a ghr.tasya, asmin yaj˜ne dh¯aray¯am¯a namobhih.; Upa brahm¯a ´sr.n.avac chasyam¯ana ˙m, catuh. ´sr. ˙ngo avam¯ıd gaura etat.


Sri Aurobindo: Let us note, in passing, that since the wine and the clariﬁed butter are symbolic, the sacriﬁce also must be symbolic. In such hymns as this of Vamadeva’s the ritualistic veil so elaborately woven by the Vedic mystics vanishes like a dissolving mist before our eyes and there emerges the Vedantic truth, the secret of the Veda.  Vamadeva leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of the Ocean of which he speaks; for in the ﬁfth verse he openly describes it as the ocean of the heart, hr.dy¯at samudr¯at, out of which rise the waters of the clarity, ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯ah.; they ﬂow, he says, becoming progressively puriﬁed by the mind and the inner heart, antar hr.d¯a manas¯a p¯uyam¯an¯ah.. And in the closing   verse he speaks of the whole of existence being triply established,  ﬁrst in the seat of Agni — which we know from other riks to be the Truth-Consciousness, Agni’s own home, sva ˙m damam r.ta ˙m br.hat, — secondly, in the heart, the sea, which is evidently the same as the heart-ocean, — thirdly, in the life of man.


Sri Aurobindo: Dh¯aman te vi´sva ˙m bhuvanam adhi ´sritam, antah. samudre hr.dyantar ¯ayus.i.  The superconscient, the sea of the subconscient, the life of the living being between the two, — this is the Vedic idea of existence.  The sea of the superconscient is the goal of the rivers of clarity, of the honeyed wave, as the sea of the subconscient in the heart within is their place of rising.


Sri Aurobindo: This upper sea is spoken of as the Sindhu, a word which may mean either river or ocean; but in this hymn it clearly means ocean. Let us observe the remarkable language in which Vamadeva speaks of these rivers of the clarity. He says ﬁrst that the gods sought and found the clarity, the ghr.tam, triply placed and hidden by the Panis in the cow, gavi. It is beyond doubt that go is used in the Veda in the double sense of Cow and Light; the Cow is the outer symbol, the inner meaning is the Light. The ﬁgure of the cows stolen and hidden by the Panis is constant in the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: Here it is evident that as the sea is a psychological symbol — the heart-ocean, samudre hr.di, — and the Soma is a psychological symbol and the clariﬁed butter is a psychological symbol, the cow in which the gods ﬁnd the clariﬁed butter hidden by the Panis must also symbolise an inner illumination and not physical light. The cow is really Aditi, the inﬁnite consciousness hidden in the subconscient, and the triple ghr.tam is the triple clarity of the liberated sensation ﬁnding its secret of delight, of the thought-mind attaining to light and intuition and of the truth itself, the ultimate supra-mental vision. This is clear from the second half of the verse in which it is said, “One Indra produced, one Surya, one the gods fashioned by natural development out of Vena”; for Indra is the Master of the thought-mind, Surya of the supra-mental light, Vena is Soma, the master of mental delight of existence, creator of the sense-mind.   The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers   We may observe also in passing that the Panis here must perforce be spiritual enemies, powers of darkness, and not Dravidian gods or Dravidian tribes or Dravidian merchants.


Sri Aurobindo: In the next verse Vamadeva says of the streams of the ghr.tam that they move from the heart-ocean shut up in a hundred prisons (pens) by the enemy so that they are not seen. Certainly, this does not mean that rivers of ghee — or of water, either — rising from the heart-ocean or any ocean were caught on their way by the wicked and unconscionable Dravidians and shut up in a hundred pens so that the Aryans or the Aryan gods could not even catch a glimpse of them. We perceive at once that the enemy, Pani, Vritra of the hymns is a purely psychological conception and not an attempt of our forefathers to conceal the facts of early Indian history from their posterity in a cloud of tangled and inextricable myths. The Rishi Vamadeva would have stood aghast at such an unforeseen travesty of his ritual images. We are not even helped if we take ghr.ta in the sense of water, hr.dya samudra in the sense of a delightful lake, and suppose that the Dravidians enclose the water of the rivers with a hundred dams so that the Aryans could not even get a glimpse of them.


Sri Aurobindo: For even if the rivers of the Punjab all ﬂow out of one heart-pleasing lake, yet their streams of water cannot even so have been triply placed in a cow and the cow hidden in a cave by the cleverest and most inventive Dravidians.  “These move” says Vamadeva “from the heart-ocean; penned by the enemy in a hundred enclosures they cannot be seen; I look towards the streams of the clarity, for in their midst is the Golden Reed. Entirely they stream like ﬂowing rivers becoming puriﬁed by the heart within and the mind; these move, waves of the clarity, like animals under the mastery of their driver. As if on a path in front of the Ocean (sindhu, the upper ocean) the mighty ones move compact of forceful speed but limited by the vital force (v¯ata, v¯ayu), the streams of clarity; they are like a straining horse which breaks its limits, as it is nourished by the waves.” On the very face of it this is the poetry of a mystic concealing his sense from the profane under a veil of images which occasionally he suffers to grow   transparent to the eye that chooses to see.


Sri Aurobindo: What he means is that the divine knowledge is all the time ﬂowing constantly behind our thoughts, but is kept from us by the internal enemies who limit our material of mind to the sense-action and senseperception so that though the waves of our being beat on banks that border upon the superconscient, the inﬁnite, they are limited by the nervous action of the sense-mind and cannot reveal their secret. They are like horses controlled and reined in; only when the waves of the light have nourished their strength to the full does the straining steed break these limits and they ﬂow freely towards That from which the Soma-wine is pressed out and the sacriﬁce is born.  Yatra somah. s¯uyate yatra yaj˜no, ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯a abhi tat pavante.  This goal is, again, explained to be that which is all honey, — ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯a madhumat pavante; it is the Ananda, the divine Beatitude.


Sri Aurobindo: And that this goal is the Sindhu, the superconscient ocean, is made clear in the last rik, where Vamadeva says, “May we taste that honeyed wave of thine” — of Agni, the divine Purusha, the four-horned Bull of the worlds — “which is borne in the force of the Waters where they come together.”  Ap¯am an¯ıke samithe ya ¯abhr.tas, tam a´sy¯ama madhumanta ˙m ta ¯urmim.  We ﬁnd this fundamental idea of the Vedic Rishis brought out in the Hymn of Creation (X.129) where the subconscient is thus described. “Darkness hidden by darkness in the beginning was this all, an ocean without mental consciousness . . . out of it the One was born by the greatness of Its energy.


Sri Aurobindo: It ﬁrst moved in it as desire which was the ﬁrst seed of mind. The Masters of Wisdom found out in the non-existent that which builds up the existent; in the heart they found it by purposeful impulsion and by the thought-mind. Their ray was extended horizontally; there was something above, there was something below.” In this passage the same ideas are brought out as in Vamadeva’s hymn but without the veil of images. Out of the subconscient ocean  The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers  the One arises in the heart ﬁrst as desire; he moves there in the heart-ocean as an unexpressed desire of the delight of existence and this desire is the ﬁrst seed of what afterwards appears as the sense-mind.


Sri Aurobindo: The gods thus ﬁnd out a means of building up the existent, the conscious being, out of the subconscient darkness; they ﬁnd it in the heart and bring it out by the growth of thought and purposeful impulsion, prat¯ıs.y¯a, by which is meant mental desire as distinguished from the ﬁrst vague desire that arises out of the subconscient in the merely vital movements of nature. The conscious existence which they thus create is stretched out as it were horizontally between two other extensions; below is the dark sleep of the subconscient, above is the luminous secrecy of the superconscient. These are the upper and the lower ocean.  This Vedic imagery throws a clear light on the similar symbolic images of the Puranas, especially on the famous symbol of Vishnu sleeping after the pralaya on the folds of the snake Ananta upon the ocean of sweet milk. It may perhaps be objected that the Puranas were written by superstitious Hindu priests or poets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun and moon and could easily believe that during the periods of non-creation the supreme Deity in a physical body went to sleep on a physical snake upon a material ocean of real milk and that therefore it is a vain ingenuity to seek for a spiritual meaning in these fables.


Sri Aurobindo: My reply would be that there is in fact no need to seek for such meanings; for these very superstitious poets have put them there plainly on the very surface of the fable for everybody to see who does not choose to be blind. For they have given a name to Vishnu’s snake, the name Ananta, and Ananta means the Inﬁnite; therefore they have told us plainly enough that the image is an allegory and that Vishnu, the allpervading Deity, sleeps in the periods of non-creation on the coils of the Inﬁnite. As for the ocean, the Vedic imagery shows us that it must be the ocean of eternal existence and this ocean of eternal existence is an ocean of absolute sweetness, in other words, of pure Bliss. For the sweet milk (itself a Vedic image) has, evidently, a sense not essentially different from the madhu, honey or sweetness, of Vamadeva’s hymn.    Thus we ﬁnd that both Veda and Purana use the same symbolic images; the ocean is for them the image of inﬁnite and eternal existence.


Sri Aurobindo: We ﬁnd also that the image of the river or ﬂowing current is used to symbolise a stream of conscious being. We ﬁnd that Saraswati, one of the seven rivers, is the river of inspiration ﬂowing from the Truth-consciousness. We have the right then to suppose that the other six rivers are also psychological symbols.  But we need not depend entirely on hypothesis and inference, however strong and entirely convincing. As in the hymn of Vamadeva we have seen that the rivers, ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯ah., are there not rivers of clariﬁed butter or rivers of physical water, but psychological symbols, so we ﬁnd in other hymns the same compelling evidence as to the image of the seven rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: For this purpose I will examine one more hymn, the ﬁrst Sukta of the third Mandala sung by the Rishi Vishwamitra to the god Agni; for here he speaks of the seven rivers in language as remarkable and unmistakable as the language of Vamadeva about the rivers of clarity. We shall ﬁnd precisely the same ideas recurring in quite different contexts in the chants of these two sacred singers.   Chapter XI The Seven Rivers  T HE VEDA speaks constantly of the waters or the rivers, especially of the divine waters, ¯apo dev¯ıh. or ¯apo divy¯ah., and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun, svarvat¯ır apah.. The passage of the waters effected by the Gods or by man with the aid of the Gods is a constant symbol.


Sri Aurobindo: The three great conquests to which the human being aspires, which the Gods are in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to man are the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, g¯a apah.  svah.. The question is whether these references are to the rains of heaven, the rivers of Northern India possessed or assailed by the Dravidians — the Vritras being sometimes the Dravidians and sometimes their gods, the herds possessed or robbed from the Aryan settlers by the indigenous “robbers” — the Panis who hold or steal the herds being again sometimes the Dravidians and sometimes their gods; or is there a deeper, a spiritual meaning?  Is the winning of Swar simply the recovery of the sun from its shadowing by the storm-cloud or its seizure by eclipse or its concealment by the darkness of Night? For here at least there can be no withholding of the sun from the Aryans by human “black-skinned” and “noseless” enemies.


Sri Aurobindo: Or does the conquest of Swar mean simply the winning of heaven by sacriﬁce? And in either case what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows, waters and the sun or cows, waters and the sky? Is it not rather a system of symbolic meanings in which the herds, indicated by the word g¯ah. in the sense both of cows and rays of light, are the illuminations from the higher consciousness which have their origin in the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth? Is not Swar itself the world or plane of immortality governed by that Light or Truth of the all-illumining Sun called in Veda the vast Truth, r.ta ˙m br.hat, and the true Light?


Sri Aurobindo: and are not the divine waters, ¯apo dev¯ıh., divy¯ah.    or svarvat¯ıh., the ﬂoods of this higher consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from that plane of immortality?  It is, no doubt, easy to point to passages or hymns in which on the surface there seems to be no need of any such interpretation and the s¯ukta can be understood as a prayer or praise for the giving of rain or an account of a battle on the rivers of the Punjab. But the Veda cannot be interpreted by separate passages or hymns.


Sri Aurobindo: If it is to have any coherent or consistent meaning, we must interpret it as a whole. We may escape our difﬁculties by assigning to svar or g¯ah. entirely different senses in different passages — just as Sayana sometimes ﬁnds in g¯ah. the sense of cows, sometimes rays and sometimes, with an admirable lightheartedness, compels it to mean waters.1 But such a system of interpretation is not rational merely because it leads to a “rationalistic” or “common-sense” result.


Sri Aurobindo: It rather ﬂouts both reason and common sense. We can indeed arrive by it at any result we please, but no reasonable and unbiassed mind can feel convinced that that result was the original sense of the Vedic hymns.  But if we adopt a more consistent method, insuperable difﬁculties oppose themselves to the purely material sense. We have for instance a hymn (VII.49) of Vasishtha to the divine waters, ¯apo dev¯ıh., ¯apo divy¯ah., in which the second verse runs, “The divine waters that ﬂow whether in channels dug or self-born, they whose movement is towards the ocean, pure, purifying, — may those waters foster me.” Here, it will be said, the sense is quite clear; it is to material waters, earthly rivers, canals, — or, if the word khanitrim¯ah. means simply “dug”, then wells, — that Vasishtha addresses his hymn and divy¯ah., divine, is only an ornamental epithet of praise; or even perhaps we may render the verse differently and suppose that three kinds of water are described, — the waters of heaven, that is to say the rain, the water of wells, the water of rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: But when we study the hymn as a whole this sense can no longer stand. For thus it runs:  1 So also he interprets the all-important Vedic word r.tam sometimes as sacriﬁce, sometimes as truth, sometimes as water, and all these different senses in a single hymn of ﬁve or six verses!  The Seven Rivers  “May those divine waters foster me, the eldest (or greatest) of the ocean from the midst of the moving ﬂood that go purifying, not settling down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, the Bull, clove out. The divine waters that ﬂow whether in channels dug or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean, — may those divine waters foster me.


Sri Aurobindo: In the midst of whom King Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of creatures, they that stream honey and are pure and purifying, — may those divine waters foster me. In whom Varuna the king, in whom Soma, in whom all the Gods have the intoxication of the energy, into whom Agni Vaishwanara has entered, may those divine waters foster me.”  It is evident that Vasishtha is speaking here of the same waters, the same streams that Vamadeva hymns, the waters that rise from the ocean and ﬂow into the ocean, the honeyed wave that rises upward from the sea, from the ﬂood that is the heart of things, streams of the clarity, ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯ah.. They are the ﬂoods of the supreme and universal conscious existence in which Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of mortals, — a phrase that can apply neither to the descending rains nor to the physical ocean. Varuna in the Veda is not an Indian Neptune, neither is he precisely, as the European scholars at ﬁrst imagined, the Greek Ouranos, the sky.


Sri Aurobindo: He is the master of an ethereal wideness, an upper ocean, of the vastness of being, of its purity; in that vastness, it is elsewhere said, he has made paths in the pathless inﬁnite along which Surya, the Sun, the Lord of Truth and the Light can move. Thence he looks down on the mingled truths and falsehoods of the mortal consciousness. And we have farther to note that these divine waters are those which Indra has cloven out and made to ﬂow upon the earth, — a description which throughout the Veda is applied to the seven rivers.  If there were any doubt whether these waters of Vasishtha’s prayer are the same as the waters of Vamadeva’s great hymn, madhum¯an ¯urmih., ghr.tasya dh¯ar¯ah., it is entirely removed by another Sukta of the sage Vasishtha, (VII.47). In the forty-ninth hymn he refers brieﬂy to the divine waters as honey-streaming,   madhu´scutah.


Sri Aurobindo: and speaks of the Gods enjoying in them the intoxication of the energy, ¯urja ˙m madanti; from this we can gather that the honey or sweetness is the madhu, the Soma, the wine of the Ananda, of which the Gods have the ecstasy. But in the forty-seventh hymn he makes his meaning unmistakably clear.  “O Waters, that supreme wave of yours, the drink of Indra, which the seekers of the Godhead have made for themselves, that pure, inviolate, clarity-streaming, honeyed (ghr.taprus.a ˙m madhumantam) wave of you may we today enjoy. O Waters, may the son of the waters (Agni), he of the swift rushings, foster that most honeyed wave of you; that wave of yours in which Indra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we who seek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundred puriﬁers, ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and move to the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme ocean); they limit not the workings of Indra: offer to the rivers a food of oblation full of the clarity (ghr.tavat).


Sri Aurobindo: May the rivers which the sun has formed by his rays, from whom Indra clove out a moving wave, establish for us the supreme good. And do ye, O gods, protect us ever by states of felicity.”  Here we have Vamadeva’s madhum¯an ¯urmih., the sweet intoxicating wave, and it is plainly said that this honey, this sweetness is the Soma, the drink of Indra. That is farther made clear by the epithet ´satapavitr¯ah. which can only refer in the Vedic language to the Soma; and let us note that it is an epithet of the rivers themselves and that the honeyed wave is brought ﬂowing from them by Indra, its passage being cloven out on the mountains by the thunderbolt that slew Vritra.


Sri Aurobindo: Again it is made clear that these waters are the seven rivers released by Indra from the hold of Vritra, the Besieger, the Coverer and sent ﬂowing down upon the earth.  What can these rivers be whose wave is full of Soma wine, full of the ghr.ta, full of ¯urj, the energy? What are these waters that ﬂow to the goal of the gods’ movement, that establish for man the supreme good? Not the rivers of the Punjab; no wildest assumption of barbarous confusion or insane incoherence in the mentality of the Vedic Rishis can induce us to put such a  The Seven Rivers  construction upon such expressions. Obviously these are the waters of the Truth and the Bliss that ﬂow from the supreme ocean. These rivers ﬂow not upon earth, but in heaven; they are prevented by Vritra the Besieger, the Coverer from ﬂowing down upon the earth-consciousness in which we mortals live till Indra, the god-mind, smites the Coverer with his ﬂashing lightnings and cuts out a passage on the summits of that earth-consciousness down which they can ﬂow.


Sri Aurobindo: Such is the only rational, coherent and sensible explanation of the thought and language of the Vedic sages. For the rest, Vasishtha makes it clear enough to us; for he says that these are the waters which Surya has formed by his rays and which, unlike earthly movements, do not limit or diminish the workings of Indra, the supreme Mind. They are, in other words, the waters of the Vast Truth, r.ta ˙m br.hat and, as we have always seen that this Truth creates the Bliss, so here we ﬁnd that these waters of the Truth, r.tasya dh¯ar¯ah., as they are plainly called in other hymns (e.g. V.12.2, “O perceiver of the Truth, perceive the Truth alone, cleave out many streams of the Truth”) , establish for men the supreme good and the supreme good2 is the felicity, the bliss of the divine existence.  Still, neither in these hymns nor in Vamadeva’s is there an express mention of the seven rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: We will turn therefore to the ﬁrst hymn of Vishwamitra, his hymn to Agni, from its second to its fourteenth verse. The passage is a long one, but it is sufﬁciently important to cite and translate in full.  2.  Pr¯a˜nca ˙m yaj˜na ˙m cakr.ma vardhat¯a ˙m g¯ıh., samidbhir agni ˙m namas¯a duvasyan; Divah. ´sa´s¯asur vidath¯a kav¯ın¯a ˙m, gr.ts¯aya cit tavase g¯atum ¯ıs.uh..


Sri Aurobindo: 3 .  Mayo dadhe medhirah. p¯utadaks.o, divah. subandhur janus.


Sri Aurobindo: ¯a pr.thivy¯ah.; Avindan nu dar´satam apsvantar, dev¯aso agnim apasi svas¯r.n. ¯am.  2 The word indeed is usually understood as “felicity”.    4.


Sri Aurobindo: Avardhayan subhaga ˙m sapta yahv¯ıh., ´sveta ˙m jaj˜n¯anam arus.a ˙m mahitv¯a; ´Si´su ˙m na j¯atam abhy¯arur a´sv¯a, dev¯aso agni ˙m janiman vapus.yan.   5.  ´Sukrebhir a˙ngai raja ¯atatanv¯an, kratu ˙m pun¯anah. kavibhih.


Sri Aurobindo: pavitraih.;  ´Socir vas¯anah. pari ¯ayur ap¯a ˙m, ´sriyo mim¯ıte br.hat¯ır an¯un¯ah..   6.


Sri Aurobindo: Vavr¯aja s¯ım anadat¯ır adabdh¯a, divo yahv¯ır avas¯an¯a anagn¯ah.;  San¯a atra yuvatayah. sayon¯ır, eka ˙m garbha ˙m dadhire sapta v¯an.¯ıh..  7.  St¯ırn.


Sri Aurobindo: ¯a asya sa ˙mhato vi´svar¯up¯a, ghr.tasya yonau sravathe madh¯un¯am;  Asthur atra dhenavah. pinvam¯an¯a, mah¯ı dasmasya m¯atar¯a sam¯ıc¯ı.  8.  Babhr¯an.ah.


Sri Aurobindo: s¯uno sahaso vyadyaud, dadh¯anah. ´sukr¯a rabhas¯a vap¯u ˙ms.i; ´Scotanti dh¯ar¯a madhuno ghr.tasya, vr.s. ¯a yatra v¯avr.dhe k¯avyena.   9.


Sri Aurobindo: Pitu´s cid ¯udhar janus. ¯a viveda, vyasya dh¯ar¯a asr.jad vi dhen¯ah.;  Guh¯a caranta ˙m sakhibhih. ´sivebhir, divo yahv¯ıbhir na guh¯a babh¯uva.  10.


Sri Aurobindo: Pitu´s ca garbha ˙m janitu´s ca babhre, p¯urv¯ır eko adhayat p¯ıpy¯an¯ah.;  Vr.s.n.e sapatn¯ı ´sucaye sabandh¯u, ubhe asmai manus.ye ni p¯ahi.  11.  Urau mah¯an anib¯adhe vavardha, ¯apo agni ˙m ya´sasah. sa ˙m hi p¯urv¯ıh.;


Sri Aurobindo: R. tasya yon¯av a´sayad dam¯un¯a, j¯am¯ın¯am agnir apasi svas¯r.n. ¯am.  12.  Akro na babhrih. samithe mah¯ın¯a ˙m, didr.ks.eyah.


Sri Aurobindo: s¯unave bh¯a-r.j¯ıkah.;  Ud usriy¯a janit¯a yo jaj¯ana, ap¯a ˙m garbho nr.tamo yahvo agnih..   The Seven Rivers    13.


Sri Aurobindo: Ap¯a ˙m garbha ˙m dar´satam os.adh¯ın¯a ˙m, van¯a jaj¯ana subhag¯a vir¯upam; Dev¯asa´s cin manas¯a sa ˙m hi jagmuh., panis.t.ha ˙m j¯ata ˙m tavasa ˙m duvasyan.   14 .  Br.hanta id bh¯anavo bh¯a-r.j¯ıkam, agni ˙m sacanta vidyuto na ´sukr¯ah.; Guheva vr.ddha ˙m sadasi sve antar, ap¯ara ¯urve amr.ta ˙m duh¯an¯ah..


Sri Aurobindo: “We have made the sacriﬁce to ascend towards the supreme, let the Word increase. With kindlings of his ﬁre, with obeisance of submission they set Agni to his workings; they have given expression in the heaven to the knowings of the seers and they desire a passage for him in his strength, in his desire of the word. (2)  “Full of intellect, puriﬁed in discernment, the perfect friend (or, perfect builder) from his birth of Heaven and of Earth, he establishes the Bliss; the gods discovered Agni visible in the Waters, in the working of the sisters. (3)


Sri Aurobindo: “The seven Mighty Ones increased him who utterly enjoys felicity, white in his birth, ruddy when he has grown. They moved and laboured about him, the Mares around the newborn child; the gods gave body to Agni in his birth. (4)  “With his pure bright limbs he extended and formed the middle world purifying the will-to-action by the help of the pure lords of wisdom; wearing light as a robe about all the life of the Waters he formed in himself glories vast and without any deﬁciency. (5)


Sri Aurobindo: “He moved everywhere about the Mighty Ones of Heaven, and they devoured not, neither were overcome, — they were not clothed, neither were they naked. Here the eternal and ever young goddesses from one womb held the one Child, they the Seven Words. (6)  “Spread out were the masses of him in universal forms in the womb of the clarity, in the ﬂowings of the sweetnesses; here the fostering Rivers stood nourishing themselves; the two Mothers of the accomplishing god became vast and harmonised. (7)


Sri Aurobindo: “Borne by them, O child of Force, thou didst blaze out   holding thy bright and rapturous embodiments; out ﬂow the streams of the sweetness, the clarity, where the Bull of the abundance has grown by the Wisdom. (8)  “He discovered at his birth the source of the abundance of the Father and he loosed forth wide His streams and wide His rivers. By his helpful comrades and by the Mighty Ones of Heaven he found Him moving in the secret places of existence, yet himself was not lost in their secrecy. (9)


Sri Aurobindo: “He bore the child of the Father and of him that begot him; one, he fed upon his many mothers in their increasing. In this pure Male both these powers in man (Earth and Heaven) have their common lord and lover; do thou guard them both. (10)  “Great in the unobstructed Vast he increased; yea, many Waters victoriously increased Agni. In the source of the Truth he lay down; there he made his home, Agni in the working of the undivided Sisters.


Sri Aurobindo: (11)  “As the mover in things and as their sustainer he in the meeting of the Great Ones, seeking vision, straight in his lustres for the presser-out of the Soma wine, he who was the father of the Radiances, gave them now their higher birth, — the child of the Waters, the mighty and most strong Agni. (12)  “To the visible Birth of the waters and of the growths of Earth the goddess of Delight now gave birth in many forms, she of the utter felicity. The gods united in him by the mind and they set him to his working who was born full of strength and mighty for the labour.


Sri Aurobindo: (13)  “Those vast shinings clove to Agni straight in his lustre and were like bright lightnings; from him increasing in the secret places of existence in his own seat within the shoreless Vast they milked out Immortality.” (14)  Whatever may be the meaning of this passage, — and it is absolutely clear that it has a mystic signiﬁcance and is no mere sacriﬁcial hymn of ritualistic barbarians, — the seven rivers, the waters, the seven sisters cannot here be the seven rivers of the Punjab. The waters in which the gods discovered the visible Agni cannot be terrestrial and material streams; this Agni who  The Seven Rivers  increases by knowledge and makes his home and rest in the source of the Truth, of whom Heaven and Earth are the wives and lovers, who is increased by the divine waters in the unobstructed Vast, his own seat, and dwelling in that shoreless inﬁnity yields to the illumined gods the supreme Immortality, cannot be the god of physical Fire.


Sri Aurobindo: In this passage as in so many others the mystical, the spiritual, the psychological character of the burden of the Veda reveals itself not under the surface, not behind a veil of mere ritualism, but openly, insistently, — in a disguise indeed, but a disguise that is transparent, so that the secret truth of the Veda appears here, like the rivers of Vishwamitra’s hymn, “neither veiled nor naked”.  We see that these Waters are the same as those of Vamadeva’s hymn, of Vasishtha’s, closely connected with the clarity and the honey, — ghr.tasya yonau sravathe madh¯un¯am, ´scotanti dh¯ar¯a madhuno ghr.tasya; they lead to the Truth, they are themselves the source of the Truth, they ﬂow in the unobstructed and shoreless Vast as well as here upon the earth. They are ﬁgured as fostering cows (dhenavah.), mares (a´sv¯ah.), they are called sapta v¯an.¯ıh., the seven Words of the creative goddess Vak, — Speech, the expressive power of Aditi, of the supreme Prakriti who is spoken of as the Cow just as the Deva or Purusha is described in the Veda as Vrishabha or Vrishan, the Bull. They are therefore the seven strands of all being, the seven streams or currents or forms of movement of the one conscious existence.  We shall ﬁnd that in the light of the ideas which we have discovered from the very opening of the Veda in Madhuchchhandas’ hymns and in the light of the symbolic interpretations which are now becoming clear to us, this passage apparently so ﬁgured, mysterious, enigmatical becomes perfectly straightforward and coherent, as indeed do all the passages of the Veda which seem now almost unintelligible when once their right clue is found.


Sri Aurobindo: We have only to ﬁx the psychological function of Agni, the priest, the ﬁghter, the worker, the truth-ﬁnder, the winner of beatitude for man; and that has already been ﬁxed for us in the ﬁrst hymn of the Rig Veda by Madhuchchhandas’ description of him, — “the Will in works of the Seer true and most rich in   varied inspiration.” Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language, Divine or Cosmic Will, ﬁrst hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, “born”, building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.  Gods and men, says Vishwamitra in effect, kindle this divine force by lighting the ﬁres of the inner sacriﬁce; they enable it to work by their adoration and submission to it; they express in heaven, that is to say, in the pure mentality which is symbolised by Dyaus, the knowings of the Seers, in other words the illuminations of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds Mind;  and they do this in order to make a passage for this divine force which in its strength seeking always to ﬁnd the word of right self-expression aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying in all its workings the secret of the divine knowledge, kavikratuh., befriends or builds up the mental and physical consciousness in man, divah.


Sri Aurobindo: pr.thivy¯ah., perfects the intellect, puriﬁes the discernment so that they grow to be capable of the “knowings of the seers” and by the superconscient Truth thus made conscient in us establishes ﬁrmly the Beatitude (vs. 2-3).  The rest of the passage describes the ascent of this divine conscious-force, Agni, this Immortal in mortals who in the sacriﬁce takes the place of the ordinary will and knowledge of man, from the mortal and physical consciousness to the immortality of the Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak of ﬁve births for man, ﬁve worlds of creatures where works are done, pa˜nca jan¯ah., pa˜nca kr.s.t.¯ıh. or ks.it¯ıh.. Dyaus and Prithivi represent the pure mental and the physical consciousness; between them is the Antariksha, the intermediate or connecting level of the vital or nervous consciousness. Dyaus and Prithivi are Rodasi, our two ﬁrmaments; but these have to be overpassed, for then we ﬁnd admission to another heaven than that of the pure mind — to the wide, the Vast which is the basis, the foundation (budhna) of the inﬁnite consciousness, Aditi.


Sri Aurobindo: This Vast is the Truth which supports the supreme triple world, those highest steps or seats (pad¯ani, sad¯a ˙msi) of Agni, of Vishnu, those supreme Names of the Mother, the cow, Aditi. The Vast or Truth is declared to be  The Seven Rivers  the own or proper seat or home of Agni, sva ˙m damam, sva ˙m sadah.. Agni is described in this hymn ascending from earth to his own seat.  This divine Power is found by the gods visible in the Waters, in the working of the Sisters. These are the sevenfold waters of the Truth, the divine waters brought down from the heights of our being by Indra.


Sri Aurobindo: First it is secret in the earth’s growths, os.adh¯ıh., the things that hold her heats, and has to be brought out by a sort of force, by a pressure of the two aran.is, earth and heaven. Therefore it is called the child of the earth’s growths and the child of the earth and heaven; this immortal Force is produced by man with pain and difﬁculty from the workings of the pure mind upon the physical being. But in the divine waters Agni is found visible and easily born in all his strength and in all his knowledge and in all his enjoyment, entirely white and pure, growing ruddy with his action as he increases (v. 3). From his very birth the Gods give him force and splendour and body; the seven mighty Rivers increase him in his joy; they move about this great newborn child and labour over him as the Mares, a´sv¯ah.  (v. 4).


Sri Aurobindo: The rivers, usually named dhenavah., fostering cows, are here described as a´sv¯ah., Mares, because while the Cow is the symbol of consciousness in the form of knowledge, the Horse is the symbol of consciousness in the form of force.  Ashwa, the Horse, is the dynamic force of Life, and the rivers labouring over Agni on the earth become the waters of Life, of the vital dynamis or kinesis, the Prana, which moves and acts and desires and enjoys. Agni himself begins as material heat and power, manifests secondarily as the Horse and then only becomes the heavenly ﬁre. His ﬁrst work is to give as the child of the Waters its full form and extension and purity to the middle world, the vital or dynamic plane, raja ¯atatanv¯an.  He puriﬁes the nervous life in man pervading it with his own pure bright limbs, lifting upward its impulsions and desires, its puriﬁed will in works (kratum) by the pure powers of the super-conscient Truth and Wisdom, kavibhih. pavitraih..


Sri Aurobindo: So he wears his vast glories, no longer the broken and limited activity   of desires and instincts, all about the life of the Waters (vs. 4-5).  The sevenfold waters thus rise upward and become the pure mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven. They there reveal themselves as the ﬁrst eternal ever-young energies, separate streams but of one origin — for they have all ﬂowed from the one womb of the super-conscient Truth — the seven Words or fundamental creative expressions of the divine Mind, sapta v¯an.¯ıh.. This life of the pure mind is not like that of the nervous life which devours its objects in order to sustain its mortal existence; its waters devour not but they do not fail; they are the eternal truth robed in a transparent veil of mental forms; therefore, it is said, they are neither clothed nor naked (v. 6).  But this is not the last stage.


Sri Aurobindo: The Force rises into the womb or birthplace of this mental clarity (ghr.tasya) where the waters ﬂow as streams of the divine sweetness (sravathe madh¯un¯am); there the forms it assumes are universal forms, masses of the vast and inﬁnite consciousness. As a result, the fostering rivers in the lower world are nourished by this descending higher sweetness and the mental and physical consciousness, the two ﬁrst mothers of the all-effecting Will, become in their entire largeness perfectly equal and harmonised by this light of the Truth, through this nourishing by the inﬁnite Bliss. They bear the full force of Agni, the blaze of his lightnings, the glory and rapture of his universal forms. For where the Lord, the Male, the Bull of the abundance is increased by the wisdom of the superconscient Truth, there always ﬂow the streams of the clarity and the streams of the bliss (vs. 7-8).  The Father of all things is the Lord and Male


Sri Aurobindo: ; he is hidden in the secret source of things, in the super-conscient; Agni, with his companion gods and with the sevenfold Waters, enters into the super-conscient without therefore disappearing from our conscient existence, ﬁnds the source of the honeyed plenty of the Father of things and pours them out on our life. He bears and himself becomes the Son, the pure Kumara, the pure Male, the One, the soul in man revealed in its universality; the mental and physical consciousness in the human being accept him as their  The Seven Rivers  lord and lover; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifold movement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies (vs. 9-10).  Then we are told expressly that this inﬁnite into which he has entered and in which he grows, in which the many Waters victoriously reaching their goal (ya´sasah.) increase him, is the unobstructed vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless inﬁnite, his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. There the seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated though of one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but rather as indivisible companions (j¯am¯ın¯am apasi svas¯r.n. ¯am). In that entire meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things and upbears all things; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight, no longer affected by the lower crookedness; he from whom the radiances of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, now gives them this high and supreme birth; he turns them into the divine knowledge, the immortal consciousness (vs. 11-12).


Sri Aurobindo: This also is his own new and last birth. He who was born as the Son of Force from the growths of earth, he who was born as the child of the Waters, is now born in many forms to the goddess of bliss, she who has the entire felicity, that is to say to the divine conscious beatitude, in the shoreless inﬁnite. The gods or divine powers in man using the mind as an instrument reach him there, unite around him, set him to the great work of the world in this new, mighty and effective birth. They, the outshinings of that vast consciousness, cleave to this divine Force as its bright lightnings and from him in the super-conscient, the shoreless vast, his own home, they draw for man the Immortality.  Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veil of ﬁgures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers, of the Waters, of the ﬁve worlds, of the birth and ascent of Agni which is also the upward journey of man and the Gods whose image man forms in himself from level to level of the great hill of being (s¯anoh. s¯anum).


Sri Aurobindo: Once we apply it and seize the true sense of the symbol of the Cow and the symbol of the Soma with a just conception of the psychological functions of the Gods, all the apparent incoherences and obscurities and farfetched chaotic confusion of these ancient hymns disappears in a   moment. Simply, easily, without straining there disengages itself the profound and luminous doctrine of the ancient Mystics, the secret of the Veda.   Chapter XII The Herds of the Dawn  T HE SEVEN Rivers of the Veda, the Waters, ¯apah., are usually designated in the ﬁgured Vedic language as the seven Mothers or the seven fostering Cows, sapta dhenavah..  The word ¯apah. itself has, covertly, a double signiﬁcance; for the root ap meant originally not only to move from which in all probability is derived the sense of waters, but to be or bring into being, as in apatya, a child, and the Southern Indian app¯a, father.


Sri Aurobindo: The seven Waters are the waters of being; they are the Mothers from whom all forms of existence are born. But we meet also another expression, sapta g¯avah., the seven Cows or the seven Lights, and the epithet saptagu, that which has seven rays.  Gu (gavah.) and go (g¯avah.) bear throughout the Vedic hymns this double sense of cows and radiances. In the ancient Indian system of thought being and consciousness were aspects of each other, and Aditi, inﬁnite existence from whom the gods are born, described as the Mother with her seven names and seven seats (dh¯am¯ani), is also conceived as the inﬁnite consciousness, the Cow, the primal Light manifest in seven Radiances, sapta g¯avah..  The sevenfold principle of existence is therefore imaged from the one point of view in the ﬁgure of the Rivers that arise from the ocean, sapta dhenavah., from the other in the ﬁgure of the Rays of the all-creating Father, Surya Savitri, sapta g¯avah..


Sri Aurobindo: The image of the Cow is the most important of all the Vedic symbols. For the ritualist the word go means simply a physical cow and nothing else, just as its companion word, a´sva, means simply a physical horse and has no other sense, or as ghr.ta means only water or clariﬁed butter, v¯ıra only a son or a retainer or servant. When the Rishi prays to the Dawn, gomad v¯ıravad dhehi ratnam us.o a´sv¯avat, the ritualistic commentator sees in the invocation only an entreaty for “pleasant wealth to which are attached cows, men (or sons) and horses”. If on the other   hand these words are symbolic, the sense will run, “Conﬁrm in us a state of bliss full of light, of conquering energy and of force of vitality.” It is therefore necessary to decide once for all the signiﬁcance of the word go in the Vedic hymns.


Sri Aurobindo: If it proves to be symbolic, then these other words, — a´sva, horse, v¯ıra, man or hero, apatya or praj¯a, offspring, hiran.ya, gold, v¯aja, plenty (food, according to Sayana), — by which it is continually accompanied, must perforce assume also a symbolic and a kindred signiﬁcance.  The image of the Cow is constantly associated in Veda with the Dawn and the Sun; it also recurs in the legend of the recovery of the lost cows from the cave of the Panis by Indra and Brihaspati with the aid of the hound Sarama and the Angiras Rishis.  The conception of the Dawn and the legend of the Angirases are at the very heart of the Vedic cult and may almost be considered as the key to the secret of the signiﬁcance of Veda. It is therefore these two that we must examine in order to ﬁnd ﬁrm ground for our inquiry.  Now even the most superﬁcial examination of the Vedic hymns to the Dawn makes it perfectly clear that the cows of the Dawn, the cows of the Sun are a symbol for Light and cannot be anything else.


Sri Aurobindo: Sayana himself is obliged in these hymns to interpret the word sometimes as cows, sometimes as rays, — careless as usual of consistency; sometimes he will even tell us that go like r.tam, the word for truth, means water. As a matter of fact it is evident that we are meant to take the word in a double sense, “light” as the true signiﬁcance, “cow” as the concrete image and verbal ﬁgure.  The sense of “rays” is quite indisputable in such passages as the third verse of Madhuchchhandas’ hymn to Indra, I.7, “Indra for far vision made the Sun to ascend in heaven: he sped him all over the hill by his rays,” vi gobhir adrim airayat.1 But at the same time, the rays of Surya are the herds of the Sun, the kine  1


Sri Aurobindo: We may also translate “He sent abroad the thunderbolt with its lights”; but this does not make as good and coherent a sense; even if we take it, gobhir must mean “radiances” not “cows”.    The Herds of the Dawn  of Helios slain by the companions of Odysseus in the Odyssey, stolen by Hermes from his brother Apollo in the Homeric hymn to Hermes. They are the cows concealed by the enemy Vala, by the Panis; when Madhuchchhandas says to Indra, “Thou didst uncover the hole of Vala of the Cows”, he means that Vala is the concealer, the withholder of the Light and it is the concealed Light that Indra restores to the sacriﬁcer. The recovery of the lost or stolen cows is constantly spoken of in the Vedic hymns and its sense will be clear enough when we come to examine the legend of the Panis and of the Angirases.


Sri Aurobindo: Once this sense is established, the material explanation of the Vedic prayer for “cows” is at once shaken; for if the lost cows for whose restoration the Rishis invoke Indra, are not physical herds stolen by the Dravidians but the shining herds of the Sun, of the Light, then we are justiﬁed in considering whether the same ﬁgure does not apply when there is the simple prayer for “cows” without any reference to any hostile interception.  For instance in I.4.2 it is said of Indra, the maker of perfect forms who is as a good milker in the milking of the cows, that his ecstasy of the Soma-Wine is verily “cow-giving”, god¯a id revato madah.. It is the height of absurdity and irrationality to understand by this phrase that Indra is a very wealthy god and, when he gets drunk, exceedingly liberal in the matter of cowgiving. It is obvious that as the cow-milking in the ﬁrst verse is a ﬁgure, so the cow-giving in the second verse is a ﬁgure. And if we know from other passages of the Veda that the Cow is the symbol of Light, we must understand here also that Indra, when full of the Soma-ecstasy, is sure to give us the Light.


Sri Aurobindo: In the hymns to the Dawn the symbolic sense of the cows of light is equally clear. Dawn is described always as gomat¯ı, which must mean, obviously, luminous or radiant; for it would be nonsense to use “cowful” in a literal sense as the ﬁxed epithet of the Dawn. But the image of the cows is there in the epithet; for Usha is not only gomat¯ı, she is gomat¯ı a´sv¯avat¯ı; she has always with her her cows and her horses. She creates light for all the world and opens out the darkness as the pen of the Cow, where we have without any possibility of mistake the cow as the   symbol of light, (I.92.4). We may note also that in this hymn I.92, the Ashwins are asked to drive downward their chariot on a path that is radiant and golden, gomad hiran.yavad.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover Dawn is said to be drawn in her chariot sometimes by ruddy cows, sometimes by ruddy horses. “She yokes her host of the ruddy cows”; yu˙nkte gav¯am arun. ¯an¯am an¯ıkam (I.124.11), — where the second meaning “her host of the ruddy rays” stands clear behind the concrete image. She is described as the mother of the cows or radiances; gav¯a ˙m janitr¯ı akr.ta pra ketum (I.124.5), “the Mother of the cows (radiances) has created vision”, and it is said elsewhere of her action, “vision” or “perception has dawned now where nought was”; and again it is clear that the cows are the shining herds of the Light. She is also praised as “the leader of the shining herds”, netr¯ı gav¯am, VII.76.6; and there is an illuminating verse in which the two ideas are combined, “the Mother of the Herds, the guide of the days”, gav¯a ˙m m¯at¯a netr¯ı ahn¯am (VII.77.2).


Sri Aurobindo: Finally, as if to remove the veil of the image entirely, the Veda itself tells us that the herds are a ﬁgure for the rays of the Light, “her happy rays come into sight like cows released into movement” — prati bhadr¯a adr.ks.ata gav¯a ˙m sarg¯a na ra´smayah. (IV.52.5) . And we have the still more conclusive verse, VII.79.2, “Thy cows (rays) remove the darkness and extend the Light”; sa ˙m te g¯avas tama ¯a vartayanti, jyotir yacchanti.2  But Dawn is not only drawn by these shining herds; she brings them as a gift to the sacriﬁcer; she is, like Indra in his Soma-ecstasy, a giver of the Light.


Sri Aurobindo: In a hymn of Vasishtha (VII.75) she is described as sharing in the action of the gods by which the strong places where the herds are concealed are broken open and they are given to men; “True with the gods who are true, great with the gods who are great, she breaks open the strong places and gives of the shining herds; the cows low towards the dawn,” — rujad dr.d.h¯ani dadad usriy¯an. ¯a ˙m, prati 2 It cannot of course be disputed that go means light in the Veda e.g. when it is said that Vritra is slain gav¯a , by light, there is no question of the cow; the question is of the use of the double sense and of the cow as a symbol.   The Herds of the Dawn  g¯ava us.asa ˙m v¯ava´santa.


Sri Aurobindo: And in the very next verse she is asked to conﬁrm or establish for the sacriﬁcers gomad ratnam a´sv¯avat purubhojah., a state of bliss full of the light (cows), of the horses (vital force) and of many enjoyments. The herds which Usha gives are therefore the shining troops of the Light recovered by the gods and the Angiras Rishis from the strong places of Vala and the Panis and the wealth of cows (and horses) for which the Rishis constantly pray can be no other than a wealth of this same Light; for it is impossible to suppose that the cows which Usha is said to give in the seventh verse of the hymn are different from the cows which are prayed for in the eighth, — that the word in the former verse means light and in the next physical cows and that the Rishi has forgotten the image he was using the very moment it has fallen from his tongue.  Sometimes the prayer is not for luminous delight or luminous plenitude, but for a luminous impulsion or force; “Bring to us, O daughter of Heaven, luminous impulsions along with the rays of the Sun,” gomat¯ır is.a ¯a vah¯a duhitar divah., s¯aka ˙m s¯uryasya ra´smibhih., V.79.8. Sayana explains that this means “shining foods”, but it is obviously nonsense to talk of radiant foods being brought by Dawn with the rays of the Sun.


Sri Aurobindo: If is.  means food, then we have to understand by the phrase “food of cow’s ﬂesh”, but, although the eating of cow’s ﬂesh was not forbidden in the early times, as is apparent from the Brahmanas, still that this sense which Sayana avoids as shocking to the later Hindu sentiment, is not intended — it would be quite as absurd as the other, — is proved by another verse of the Rig Veda in which the Ashwins are invoked to give the luminous impulsion that carries us through to the other side of the darkness, y¯a nah.  p¯ıparad a´svin¯a jyotis.mat¯ı tamas tirah., t¯am asme r¯as¯ath¯am is.am (I.46.6).  We can perceive from these typical examples how pervading is this image of the Cow of Light and how inevitably it points to a psychological sense for the Veda. A doubt, however, intervenes.


Sri Aurobindo: Why should we not, even accepting this inevitable conclusion that the cow is an image for Light, understand it to mean simply the light of day as the language of the Veda seems to intend?    Why suppose a symbol where there is only an image? Why invite the difﬁculty of a double ﬁgure in which “cow” means light of dawn and light of dawn is the symbol of an inner illumination?  Why not take it that the Rishis were praying not for spiritual illumination, but for daylight?  The objections are manifold and some of them overwhelming.


Sri Aurobindo: If we assume that the Vedic hymns were composed in India and the dawn is the Indian dawn and the night the brief Indian night of ten or twelve hours, we have to start with the concession that the Vedic Rishis were savages overpowered by a terror of the darkness which they peopled with goblins, ignorant of the natural law of the succession of night and day — which is yet beautifully hymned in many of the Suktas, — and believed that it was only by their prayers and sacriﬁces that the Sun rose in the heavens and the Dawn emerged from the embrace of her sister Night. Yet they speak of the undeviating rule of the action of the Gods, and of Dawn following always the path of the eternal Law or Truth! We have to suppose that when the Rishi gives vent to the joyous cry “We have crossed over to the other shore of this darkness!”, it was only the normal awakening to the daily sunrise that he thus eagerly hymned. We have to suppose that the Vedic peoples sat down to the sacriﬁce at dawn and prayed for the light when it had already come. And if we accept all these improbabilities, we are met by the clear statement that it was only after they had sat for nine or for ten months that the lost light and the lost sun were recovered by the Angiras Rishis.


Sri Aurobindo: And what are we to make of the constant assertion of the discovery of the Light by the Fathers; — “Our fathers found out the hidden light, by the truth in their thoughts they brought to birth the Dawn,” g¯ud.ha ˙m jyotih. pitaro anvavindan, satyamantr¯a ajanayan us. ¯asam (VII.76.4). If we found such a verse in any collection of poems in any literature, we would at once give it a psychological or a spiritual sense; there is no just reason for a different treatment of the Veda.  If, however, we are to give a naturalistic explanation and no other to the Vedic hymns, it is quite clear that the Vedic Dawn and Night cannot be the Night and Dawn of India; it  The Herds of the Dawn


Sri Aurobindo: is only in the Arctic regions that the attitude of the Rishis towards these natural circumstances and the statements about the Angirases become at all intelligible. But though it is extremely probable that the memories of the Arctic home enter into the external sense of the Veda, the Arctic theory does not exclude an inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Nature nor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent and straightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn.  We have, for instance, the hymn of Praskanwa Kanwa to the Ashwins (I.46) in which there is the reference to the luminous impulsion that carries us through to the other shore of the darkness. This hymn is intimately connected with the Vedic idea of the Dawn and the Night. It contains references to many of the ﬁxed Vedic images, to the path of the Truth, the crossing of the rivers, the rising of the Sun, the connection between the Dawn and the Ashwins, the mystic effect and oceanic essence of the Soma Wine.


Sri Aurobindo: “Lo, the Dawn than which there is none higher, opens out full of delight in the Heavens; O Ashwins, the Vast of you I afﬁrm, ye of whom the Ocean is the mother, accomplishers of the work who pass beyond through the mind to the felicities and, divine, ﬁnd that substance by the thought. . . . O Lords of the Voyage, who mentalise the word, this is the dissolver of your thinkings, — drink ye of the Soma violently; give to us that impulsion, O Ashwins which, luminous, carries us through beyond the darkness. Travel for us in your ship to reach the other shore beyond the thoughts of the mind.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoke, O Ashwins, your car, — your car that becomes the vast oared ship in Heaven, in the crossing of its rivers. By the thought the powers of Delight have been yoked. The Soma-powers of delight in heaven are that substance in the place of the Waters. But where shall you cast aside the veil you have made to conceal you? Nay, Light has been born for the joy of the Soma; — the Sun that was dark has shot out its tongue towards the Gold.


Sri Aurobindo: The path of the Truth has come into being by which we shall travel to that other shore; seen is all the wide way through Heaven. The seeker grows in his being towards increasing manifestation after manifestation   of the Ashwins when they ﬁnd satisfaction in the ecstasy of the Soma. Do ye, dwelling (or, shining) in the all-luminous Sun, by the drinking of the Soma, by the Word come as creators of the bliss into our humanity. Dawn comes to us according to your glory when you pervade all our worlds and you win the Truths out of the Nights. Both together drink, O Ashwins, both together extend to us the peace by expandings whose wholeness remains untorn.”


Sri Aurobindo: This is the straightforward and natural sense of the hymn and its intention is not difﬁcult to follow if we remember the main ideas and images of the Vedic doctrine. The Night is clearly the image of an inner darkness; by the coming of the Dawn the Truths are won out of the Nights. This is the rising of the Sun which was lost in the obscurity — the familiar ﬁgure of the lost sun recovered by the Gods and the Angiras Rishis — the sun of Truth, and it now shoots out its tongue of ﬁre towards the golden Light: — for hiran.ya, gold is the concrete symbol of the higher light, the gold of the Truth, and it is this treasure not golden coin for which the Vedic Rishis pray to the Gods. This great change from the inner obscuration to the illumination is effected by the Ashwins, lords of the joyous upward action of the mind and the vital powers, through the immortal wine of the Ananda poured into mind and body and there drunk by them. They mentalise the expressive Word, they lead us into the heaven of pure mind beyond this darkness and there by the Thought they set the powers of the Delight to work.


Sri Aurobindo: But even over the heavenly waters they cross, for the power of the Soma helps them to dissolve all mental constructions, and they cast aside even this veil ; they go beyond Mind and the last attaining is described as the crossing of the rivers, the passage through the heaven of the pure mind, the journey by the path of the Truth to the other side. Not till we reach the highest supreme, param¯a par¯avat, do we rest at last from the great human journey.  We shall see that not only in this hymn, but everywhere Dawn comes as a bringer of the Truth, is herself the outshining of the Truth. She is the divine Dawn and the physical dawning is only her shadow and symbol in the material universe.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter XIII Dawn and the Truth  U SHA IS described repeatedly as the Mother of the Cows.  If then the cow is a Vedic symbol for the physical light or for spiritual illumination the phrase must either bear this sense that she is the mother or source of the physical rays of the daylight or else that she creates the radiances of the supreme Day, the splendour and clarity of the inner illumination. But we see in the Veda that Aditi, the Mother of the Gods, is described both as the Cow and as the general Mother; she is the Supreme Light and all radiances proceed from her. Psychologically, Aditi is the supreme or inﬁnite Consciousness, mother of the gods, in opposition to Danu or Diti,1 the divided consciousness, mother of Vritra and the other Danavas — enemies of the gods and of man in his progress.


Sri Aurobindo: In a more general aspect she is the source of all the cosmic forms of consciousness from the physical upwards; the seven cows, sapta g¯avah., are her forms and there are, we are told, seven names and seven seats of the Mother. Usha as the mother of the cows can only be a form or power of this supreme Light, of this supreme Consciousness, of Aditi. And in fact, we do ﬁnd her so described in I.113.19, m¯at¯a dev¯an¯am aditer an¯ıkam, “Mother of the gods, form (or, power) of Aditi.”  But the illumining dawn of the higher or undivided Consciousness is always the dawn of the Truth; if Usha is that illumining dawn, then we are bound to ﬁnd her advent frequently associated in the verses of the Rig Veda with the idea of the Truth, the Ritam. And such association we do repeatedly ﬁnd.


Sri Aurobindo: For, ﬁrst of all, Usha is described as “following effectively the path of the Truth,” r.tasya panth¯am anveti s¯adhu. Here neither the ritualistic nor the naturalistic sense suggested for r.tam can at 1 Not that the word Aditi is etymologically the privative of Diti; the two words derive from entirely different roots, ad and di.    all apply; there would be no meaning in a constant afﬁrmation that Dawn follows the path of the sacriﬁce or follows the path of the water. We can only escape from the obvious signiﬁcance if we choose to understand by panth¯a r.tasya the path, not of the Truth, but of the Sun.


Sri Aurobindo: But the Veda describes rather the Sun as following the path of Usha and this would be the natural image suggested to an observer of the physical Dawn. Moreover, even if the phrase did not clearly in other passages mean the path of the Truth, the psychological signiﬁcance would still intervene; for the sense would then be that the dawn of illumination follows the path of the True or the Lord of the Truth, Surya Savitri.  We have precisely the same idea repeated but with still clearer and fuller psychological indications in I.124.3; r.tasya panth¯am anveti s¯adhu, praj¯anat¯ıva na di´so min¯ati: “She moves according to the path of the Truth and, as one that knows, she limits not the regions.” Disah., we may note, has a double sense; but it is not necessary to insist upon it here. Dawn adheres to the path of the Truth and because she has this knowledge or perception she does not limit the inﬁnity, the br.hat, of which she is the illumination.


Sri Aurobindo: That this is the true sense of the verse is proved beyond dispute, expressly, unmistakably, by a Rik of the ﬁfth Mandala (V.80.1) which describes Usha dyutad-y¯am¯ana ˙m br.hat¯ım r.tena r.t¯avar¯ı ˙m svar ¯avahant¯ım, “of a luminous movement, vast with the Truth, supreme in (or possessed of) the Truth, bringing with her Swar.” We have the idea of the Vast, the idea of the Truth, the idea of the solar light of the world of Swar; and certainly all these notions are thus intimately and insistently associated with no mere physical Dawn! We may compare VII.75.1, vyus. ¯a ¯avo divij¯a r.tena, ¯avis.kr.n.v¯an¯a mahim¯anam ¯ag¯at; “Dawn born in heaven opens out things by the Truth, she comes manifesting the greatness.” Again we have Dawn revealing all things by the power of the Truth and the result described as the manifestation of a certain Vastness.  Finally we have the same idea described, but with the use of another word for Truth, saty¯a which does not, like r.tam, lend itself to any ambiguity, saty¯a


Sri Aurobindo: satyebhir mahat¯ı mahadbhir  Dawn and the Truth   dev¯ı devebhir (VII.75.7), “Dawn true in her being with the gods who are true, vast with the Gods who are vast.” This “truth” of the Dawn is much insisted upon by Vamadeva in one of his hymns, IV.51; for there not only does he speak of the Dawns “encompassing the worlds immediately with horses yoked by the Truth,” r.tayugbhir a´svaih. (cf. VI.65.2)


Sri Aurobindo: but he speaks of them as bhadr¯a r.taj¯atasaty¯ah., “happy, and true because born from the Truth”; and in another verse he describes them as “the goddesses who awake from the seat of the Truth.”  This close connection of bhadr¯a and r.ta reminds us of the same connection of ideas in Madhuchchhandas’ Hymn to Agni.  In our psychological interpretation of the Veda we are met at every turn by the ancient conception of the Truth as the path to the Bliss. Usha, the dawn of the illumination of the Truth, must necessarily bring also the joy and the beatitude. This idea of the Dawn as the bringer of delight we ﬁnd constantly in the Veda and Vasishtha gives a very positive expression to it in VII.81.3, y¯a vahasi puru sp¯arha ˙m ratna ˙m na d¯a´sus.e mayah., “thou who bearest to the giver the beatitude as a manifold and desirable ecstasy.”


Sri Aurobindo: A common Vedic word is the word s¯unr.t¯a which Sayana interprets as “pleasant and true speech”; but it seems to have often the more general sense of “happy truths”. Dawn is sometimes described as r.t¯avar¯ı, full of the Truth, sometimes as s¯unr.t¯avar¯ı.  She comes uttering her true and happy words, s¯unr.t¯a ¯ırayant¯ı.  As she has been described as the leader of the radiant herds and the leader of the days, so she is described as the luminous leader of happy truths, bh¯asvat¯ı netr¯ı s¯unr.t¯an¯am (I.92.7). And this close connection in the mind of the Vedic Rishis between the idea of light, of the rays or cows, and the idea of the truth is even more unmistakable in another Rik, I.92.14, gomati a´sv¯avati vibh¯avari . . . s¯unr.t¯avati, “Dawn with thy shining herds, with thy steeds, widely luminous, full of happy truths.”


Sri Aurobindo: A similar but yet more open phrase in I.48.2 points the signiﬁcance of this collocation of epithets, a´sv¯avat¯ır gomat¯ır vi´svasuvidah., “Dawns with their swiftnesses (horses), their radiances (herds), rightly knowing all things.”    These are by no means all the indications of the psychological character of the Vedic Dawn that we ﬁnd in the Rig Veda.  Dawn is constantly represented as awakening to vision, perception, right movement. “The goddess,” says Gotama Rahugana, “fronts and looks upon all the worlds, the eye of vision shines with an utter wideness; awakening all life for movement she discovers speech for all that thinks,” vi´svasya v¯acam avidan man¯ayoh. (I.92.9)


Sri Aurobindo: . We have here a Dawn that releases life and mind into their fullest wideness and we ignore the whole force of the words and phrases chosen by the Rishi if we limit the suggestion to a mere picture of the reawakening of earthly life in the physical dawning. And even if here the word used for the vision brought by the Dawn, caks.uh., is capable of indicating only physical sight, yet in other passages it is ketuh. which means perception, a perceptive vision in the mental consciousness, a faculty of knowledge. Usha is pracet¯ah., she who has this perceptive knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: Mother of the radiances, she has created this perceptive vision of the mind; gav¯a ˙m janitr¯ı akr.ta pra ketum (I.124.5). She is herself that vision, — “Now perceptive vision has broken out into its wide dawn where nought was before,” vi n¯unam ucch¯ad asati pra ketuh. (I.124.11) . She is by her perceptive power possessed of the happy truths, cikitvit-s¯unr.t¯avar¯ı (IV.52.4).


Sri Aurobindo: This perception, this vision is, we are told, that of the Immortality, amr.tasya ketuh. (III.61.3); it is the light, in other words, of the Truth and the Bliss which constitute the higher or immortal consciousness. Night in the Veda is the symbol of our obscure consciousness full of ignorance in knowledge and of stumblings in will and act, therefore of all evil, sin and suffering; light is the coming of the illuminated higher consciousness which leads to truth and happiness. We ﬁnd constantly the opposition of the two words duritam and suvitam. Duritam means literally stumbling or wrong going, ﬁguratively all that is wrong and evil, all sin, error, calamity; suvitam means literally right or good going and expresses all that is good and happy, it means especially the felicity that comes by following the right path.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus Vasishtha says of the goddess (VII.78.2), “Dawn  Dawn and the Truth  comes divine repelling by the Light all darknesses and evils,” vi´sv¯a tam¯a ˙msi durit¯a; and in a number of verses the goddess is described as awakening, impelling or leading men to right going, to the happiness, suvit¯aya.  Therefore she is the leader not only of happy truths, but of our spiritual wealth and joy, bringer of the felicity which is reached by man or brought to him by the Truth, es. ¯a netr¯ı r¯adhasah. s¯unr.t¯an¯am (VII.76.7). This wealth for which the Rishis pray is described under the ﬁgure of material riches; it is gomad a´sv¯avad v¯ıravad or it is gomad a´sv¯avad rathavac ca r¯adhah.. Go, the cow, a´sva, the horse, praj¯a or apatya, the offspring, nr. or v¯ıra, the man or hero, hiran.ya, gold, ratha, the chariot, ´sravas, — food or fame, according to the ritualist interpretation, — these are the constituents of the wealth desired by the Vedic sages.  Nothing, it would seem, could be more matter-of-fact, earthy, material; these are indeed the blessings for which a race of lusty barbarians full of vigorous appetite, avid of earth’s goods would pray to their primitive gods.


Sri Aurobindo: But we have seen that hiran.ya is used in another sense than that of earthly gold. We have seen that the “cows” return constantly in connection with the Dawn as a ﬁgure for the Light and we have seen that this light is connected with mental vision and with the truth that brings the bliss. And a´sva, the horse, is always in these concrete images of psychological suggestions coupled with the symbolic ﬁgure of the cow: Dawn is gomat¯ı a´sv¯avat¯ı. Vasishtha has a verse (VII.77.3) in which the symbolic sense of the Vedic Horse comes out with great power and clearness, — Dev¯an¯a ˙m caks.uh. subhag¯a vahant¯ı, ´sveta ˙m nayant¯ı sudr.´s¯ıkam a´svam; Us. ¯a adar´si ra´smibhir vyakt¯a, citr¯amagh¯a vi´svam anu prabh¯ut¯a.


Sri Aurobindo: “Happy, bringing the gods’ eye of vision, leading the white Horse that has perfect sight, Dawn is seen expressed entirely by the rays, full of her varied riches, manifesting her birth in all things.” It is clear enough that the white horse (a phrase applied to the god Agni who is the Seer-Will, kavikratu, the   perfectly-seeing force of divine will in its works, V.1.4) is entirely symbolical2 and that the “varied riches” she brings with her are also a ﬁgure and certainly do not mean physical wealth.  Dawn is described as gomat¯ı a´sv¯avat¯ı v¯ıravat¯ı; and since the epithets gomat¯ı and a´sv¯avat¯ı applied to her are symbolical and mean not “cowful and horsed”, but radiant with illuminations of knowledge and accompanied by the swiftnesses of force, so v¯ıravat¯ı cannot mean “man-accompanied” or accompanied by heroes or servants or sons, but rather signiﬁes that she is attended by conquering energies or at any rate is used in some kindred and symbolic sense. This becomes quite evident in I.113.18, y¯a gomat¯ır us.asah. sarvav¯ır¯ah. . . . t¯a a´svad¯a a´snavat somasutv¯a. It does not mean “the Dawns that have cows and all men or all servants, those a man, having offered the Soma, enjoys as horsegivers.”


Sri Aurobindo: The Dawn is the inner dawn which brings to man all the varied fullnesses of his widest being, force, consciousness, joy; it is radiant with its illuminations, it is accompanied by all possible powers and energies, it gives man the full force of vitality so that he can enjoy the inﬁnite delight of that vaster existence.  We can no longer take gomad a´sv¯avad v¯ıravad r¯adhah. in a physical sense; the very language of the Veda points us to quite another truth. Therefore the other circumstances of this god-given wealth must be taken equally in a spiritual signiﬁcance; the offspring, gold, chariots are symbolical; ´sravas is not fame or food, but bears its psychological sense and means the higher knowledge which comes not to the senses or the intellect, but to the divine hearing and the divine vision of the Truth; r¯adho d¯ırgha´sruttamam, rayi ˙m ´sravasyum is that rich state of being, that spiritually opulent felicity which turns towards the knowledge (´sravasyu) and has a far-extended hearing for the vibrations of the Word that comes to us from the regions (di´sah.) of the Inﬁnite. Thus the luminous ﬁgure of the Dawn liberates


Sri Aurobindo: 2 The symbolism of the horse is quite evident in the hymns of Dirghatamas to the Horse of the Sacriﬁce, the hymns of various Rishis to the Horse Dadhikravan and again in the opening of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in which “Dawn is the head of the Horse” is the ﬁrst phrase of a very elaborate ﬁgure.   Dawn and the Truth  us from the material, ritual, ignorant misunderstanding of the Veda which would lead us stumbling from pitfall to pitfall in a very night of chaos and obscurity; it opens to us the closed door and admits to the heart of the Vedic knowledge.   Chapter XIV The Cow and the Angiras Legend  W E MUST now pursue this image of the Cow which we are using as a key to the sense of the Veda, into the striking Vedic parable or legend of the Angiras Rishis, on the whole the most important of all the Vedic myths.


Sri Aurobindo: The Vedic hymns, whatever else they may be, are throughout an invocation to certain “Aryan” gods, friends and helpers of man, for ends which are held by the singers, — or seers, as they call themselves (kavi, r.s.i, vipra), — to be supremely desirable (vara, v¯ara). These desirable ends, these boons of the gods are summed up in the words rayi, r¯adhas, which may mean physically wealth or prosperity, and psychologically a felicity or enjoyment which consists in the abundance of certain forms of spiritual wealth. Man contributes as his share of the joint effort the work of the sacriﬁce, the Word, the Soma Wine and the ghr.ta or clariﬁed butter. The Gods are born in the sacriﬁce, they increase by the Word, the Wine and the Ghrita and in that strength and in the ecstasy and intoxication of the Wine they accomplish the aims of the sacriﬁcer. The chief elements of the wealth thus acquired are the Cow and the Horse; but there are also others, hiran.ya, gold, v¯ıra, men or heroes, ratha, chariots, praj¯a or apatya, offspring.


Sri Aurobindo: The very means of the sacriﬁce, the ﬁre, the Soma, the ghr.ta, are supplied by the Gods and they attend the sacriﬁce as its priests, puriﬁers, upholders, heroes of its warfare, — for there are those who hate the sacriﬁce and the Word, attack the sacriﬁcer and tear or withhold from him the coveted wealth. The chief conditions of the prosperity so ardently desired are the rising of the Dawn and the Sun and the downpour of the rain of heaven and of the seven rivers, — physical or mystic, — called in the Veda the Mighty Ones of heaven. But even this prosperity, this fullness of cows, horses, gold, men, chariots, offspring, is not a ﬁnal end in itself; all  The Cow and the Angiras Legend  this is a means towards the opening up of the other worlds, the winning of Swar, the ascent to the solar heavens, the attainment by the path of the Truth to the Light and to the heavenly Bliss where the mortal arrives at Immortality.  Such is the undoubted substance of the Veda. The ritual and mythological sense which has been given to it from very ancient times is well known and need not be particularised; in sum, it is the performance of sacriﬁcial worship as the chief duty of man with a view to the enjoyment of wealth here and heaven hereafter.


Sri Aurobindo: We know also the modern view of the matter in which the Veda is a worship of the personiﬁed sun, moon, stars, dawn, wind, rain, ﬁre, sky, rivers and other deities of Nature, the propitiation of these gods by sacriﬁce, the winning and holding of wealth in this life, chieﬂy from human and Dravidian enemies and against hostile demons and mortal plunderers, and after death man’s attainment to the Paradise of the gods. We now ﬁnd, that however valid these ideas may have been for the vulgar, they were not the inner sense of the Veda to the seers, the illumined minds (kavi, vipra) of the Vedic age. For them these material objects were symbols of the immaterial; the cows were the radiances or illuminations of a divine Dawn, the horses and chariots were symbols of force and movement, gold was light, the shining wealth of a divine Sun — the true light, r.ta ˙m jyotih.; both the wealth acquired by the sacriﬁce and the sacriﬁce itself in all their details symbolised man’s effort and his means towards a greater end, the acquisition of immortality. The aspiration of the Vedic seer was the enrichment and expansion of man’s being, the birth and the formation of the godheads in his life-sacriﬁce, the increase of the Force, Truth, Light, Joy of which they are the powers until through the enlarged and everopening worlds of his being the soul of man rises, sees the divine doors (dev¯ır dv¯arah.) swing open to his call and enters into the supreme felicity of a divine existence beyond heaven and earth.


Sri Aurobindo: This ascent is the parable of the Angiras Rishis.  All the gods are conquerors and givers of the Cow, the Horse and the divine riches, but it is especially the great deity Indra who is the hero and ﬁghter in this warfare and who wins for man   the Light and the Force. Therefore Indra is constantly addressed as the Master of the herds, gopati; he is even imaged as himself the cow and the horse; he is the good milker whom the Rishi wishes to milk and what he yields are perfect forms and ultimate thoughts ; he is Vrishabha, the Bull of the herds; his is the wealth of cows and horses which man covets. It is even said in VI.28.5, “O people, these that are the cows, they are Indra; it is Indra I desire with my heart and with my mind.”


Sri Aurobindo: This identiﬁcation of the cows and Indra is important and we shall have to return to it, when we deal with Madhuchchhandas’ hymns to that deity.  But ordinarily the Rishis image the acquisition of this wealth as a conquest effected against certain powers, the Dasyus, sometimes represented as possessing the coveted riches which have to be ravished from them by violence, sometimes as stealing them from the Aryan who has then to discover and recover the lost wealth by the aid of the gods. The Dasyus who withhold or steal the cows are called the Panis, a word which seems originally to have meant doers, dealers or trafﬁckers; but this signiﬁcance is sometimes coloured by its further sense of “misers”. Their chief is Vala, a demon whose name signiﬁes probably the circumscriber or “encloser”, as Vritra means the opponent, obstructer or enfolding coverer. It is easy to suggest, as do the scholars who would read as much primitive history as possible into the Veda, that the Panis are the Dravidians and Vala is their chief or god.


Sri Aurobindo: But this sense can only be upheld in isolated passages; in many hymns it is incompatible with the actual words of the Rishis and turns into a jumble of gaudy nonsense their images and ﬁgures.  We have seen something of this incompatibility already; it will become clearer to us as we examine more closely the mythus of the lost cows.  Vala dwells in a lair, a hole (bila) in the mountains; Indra and the Angiras Rishis have to pursue him there and force him to give up his wealth; for he is Vala of the cows, vala ˙m gomantam.  The Panis also are represented as concealing the stolen herds in a cave of the mountain which is called their concealing prison, vavra, or the pen of the cows, vraja, or sometimes in a signiﬁcant phrase, gavyam ¯urvam, literally the cowey wideness or in  The Cow and the Angiras Legend  the other sense of go “the luminous wideness”, the vast wealth of the shining herds. To recover this lost wealth the sacriﬁce has to be performed; the Angirases or else Brihaspati and the Angirases have to chant the true word, the mantra; Sarama the heavenly hound has to ﬁnd out the cows in the cave of the Panis; Indra strong with the Soma wine and the Angirases, the seers, his companions, have to follow the track, enter the cave or violently break open the strong places of the hill, defeat the Panis and drive upward the delivered herds.


Sri Aurobindo: Let us, ﬁrst, take note of certain features which ought not to be overlooked when we seek to determine the interpretation of this parable or this myth. In the ﬁrst place the legend, however precise in its images, is not yet in the Veda a simple mythological tradition, but is used with a certain freedom and ﬂuidity which betrays the signiﬁcant image behind the sacred tradition. Often it is stripped of the mythological aspect and applied to the personal need or aspiration of the singer. For it is an action of which Indra is always capable; although he has done it once for all in the type by means of the Angirases, yet he repeats the type continually even in the present, he is constantly the seeker of the cows, gaves.an.a, and the restorer of the stolen wealth.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes we have simply the fact of the stolen cows and the recovery by Indra without any reference to Sarama or the Angirases or the Panis. But it is not always Indra who recovers the herds. We have for instance a hymn to Agni, the second of the ﬁfth Mandala, a hymn of the Atris, in which the singer applies the image of the stolen cows to himself in a language which clearly betrays its symbolism. Agni, long repressed in her womb by mother Earth who is unwilling to give him to the father Heaven, held and concealed in her so long as she is compressed into limited form (pes.¯ı), at length comes to birth when she becomes great and vast (mahis.¯ı). The birth of Agni is associated with a manifestation or vision of luminous herds.