Sri Aurobindo: This modern theory is in accord with the received idea of a rapid human evolution from the quite recent savage; it is supported by an imposing apparatus of critical research and upheld by a number of Sciences, unhappily still young and still largely conjectural in their methods and shifting in their results, — Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology and the Science of Comparative Religion.  It is my object in these chapters to suggest a new view of the ancient problem. I do not propose to use a negative and destructive method directed against the received solutions, but simply to present, positively and constructively, a larger and, in some sort, a complementary hypothesis built upon broader foundations, — a hypothesis which, in addition, may shed light on one or two important problems in the history of ancient thought and cult left very insufﬁciently solved by the ordinary theories.  We have in the Rig Veda, — the true and only Veda in the estimation of European scholars, — a body of sacriﬁcial hymns   couched in a very ancient language which presents a number of almost insoluble difﬁculties. It is full of ancient forms and words which do not appear in later speech and have often to be ﬁxed in some doubtful sense by intelligent conjecture; a mass even of the words that it has in common with classical Sanskrit seem to bear or at least to admit another signiﬁcance than in the later literary tongue; and a multitude of its vocables, especially the most common, those which are most vital to the sense, are capable of a surprising number of unconnected signiﬁcances which may give, according to our preference in selection, quite different complexions to whole passages, whole hymns and even to the whole thought of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: In the course of several thousands of years there have been at least three considerable attempts, entirely differing from each other in their methods and results, to ﬁx the sense of these ancient litanies.  One of these is prehistoric in time and exists only by fragments in the Brahmanas and Upanishads; but we possess in its entirety the traditional interpretation of the Indian scholar Sayana and we have in our own day the interpretation constructed after an immense labour of comparison and conjecture by modern European scholarship. Both of them present one characteristic in common, the extraordinary incoherence and poverty of sense which their results stamp upon the ancient hymns. The separate lines can be given, whether naturally or by force of conjecture, a good sense or a sense that hangs together; the diction that results, if garish in style, if loaded with otiose and decorative epithets, if developing extraordinarily little of meaning in an amazing mass of gaudy ﬁgure and verbiage, can be made to run into intelligible sentences; but when we come to read the hymns as a whole we seem to be in the presence of men who, unlike the early writers of other races, were incapable of coherent and natural expression or of connected thought. Except in the briefer and simpler hymns, the language tends to be either obscure or artiﬁcial; the thoughts are either unconnected or have to be forced and beaten by the interpreter into a whole.


Sri Aurobindo: The scholar in dealing with his text is obliged to substitute for interpretation a process almost of fabrication. We feel that he is not so much  The Problem and Its Solution  revealing the sense as hammering and forging rebellious material into some sort of shape and consistency.  Yet these obscure and barbarous compositions have had the most splendid good fortune in all literary history. They have been the reputed source not only of some of the world’s richest and profoundest religions, but of some of its subtlest metaphysical philosophies. In the ﬁxed tradition of thousands of years they have been revered as the origin and standard of all that can be held as authoritative and true in Brahmana and Upanishad, in Tantra and Purana, in the doctrines of great philosophical schools and in the teachings of famous saints and sages.


Sri Aurobindo: The name borne by them was Veda, the knowledge, — the received name for the highest spiritual truth of which the human mind is capable. But if we accept the current interpretations, whether Sayana’s or the modern theory, the whole of this sublime and sacred reputation is a colossal ﬁction. The hymns are, on the contrary, nothing more than the naive superstitious fancies of untaught and materialistic barbarians concerned only with the most external gains and enjoyments and ignorant of all but the most elementary moral notions or religious aspirations. Nor do occasional passages, quite out of harmony with their general spirit, destroy this total impression. The true foundation or starting-point of the later religions and philosophies is the Upanishads, which have then to be conceived as a revolt of philosophical and speculative minds against the ritualistic materialism of the Vedas.


Sri Aurobindo: But this conception, supported by misleading European parallels, really explains nothing. Such profound and ultimate thoughts, such systems of subtle and elaborate psychology as are found in the substance of the Upanishads, do not spring out of a previous void. The human mind in its progress marches from knowledge to knowledge, or it renews and enlarges previous knowledge that has been obscured and overlaid, or it seizes on old imperfect clues and is led by them to new discoveries. The thought of the Upanishads supposes great origins anterior to itself, and these in the ordinary theories are lacking. The hypothesis, invented to ﬁll the gap, that these ideas were borrowed   by barbarous Aryan invaders from the civilised Dravidians, is a conjecture supported only by other conjectures.


Sri Aurobindo: It is indeed coming to be doubted whether the whole story of an Aryan invasion through the Punjab is not a myth of the philologists.  Now, in ancient Europe the schools of intellectual philosophy were preceded by the secret doctrines of the mystics; Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries prepared the rich soil of mentality out of which sprang Pythagoras and Plato. A similar starting-point is at least probable for the later march of thought in India. Much indeed of the forms and symbols of thought which we ﬁnd in the Upanishads, much of the substance of the Brahmanas supposes a period in India in which thought took the form or the veil of secret teachings such as those of the Greek mysteries.  Another hiatus left by the received theories is the gulf that divides the material worship of external Nature-Powers in the Veda from the developed religion of the Greeks and from the psychological and spiritual ideas we ﬁnd attached to the functions of the Gods in the Upanishads and Puranas.


Sri Aurobindo: We may accept for the present the theory that the earliest fully intelligent form of human religion is necessarily, — since man on earth begins from the external and proceeds to the internal, — a worship of outward Nature-Powers invested with the consciousness and the personality that he ﬁnds in his own being.  Agni in the Veda is avowedly Fire; Surya is the Sun, Parjanya the Raincloud, Usha the Dawn; and if the material origin or function of some other Gods is less trenchantly clear, it is easy to render the obscure precise by philological inferences or ingenious speculation. But when we come to the worship of the Greeks not much later in date than the Veda, according to modern ideas of chronology, we ﬁnd a signiﬁcant change. The material attributes of the Gods are effaced or have become subordinate to psychological conceptions. The impetuous God of Fire has been converted into a lame God of Labour; Apollo, the Sun, presides over poetical and prophetic inspiration; Athene, who may plausibly be identiﬁed as in origin a Dawn-Goddess, has lost all memory of her material functions and is the wise, strong and pure Goddess of Knowledge; and there are other deities  The Problem and Its Solution  also, Gods of War, Love, Beauty, whose material functions have disappeared if they ever existed.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not enough to say that this change was inevitable with the progress of human civilisation: the process also of the change demands inquiry and elucidation.  We see the same revolution effected in the Puranas partly by the substitution of other divine names and ﬁgures, but also in part by the same obscure process that we observe in the evolution of Greek mythology. The river Saraswati has become the Muse and Goddess of Learning; Vishnu and Rudra of the Vedas are now the supreme Godhead, members of a divine Triad and expressive separately of conservative and destructive process in the cosmos.  In the Isha Upanishad we ﬁnd an appeal to Surya as a God of revelatory knowledge by whose action we can arrive at the highest truth. This, too, is his function in the sacred Vedic formula of the Gayatri which was for thousands of years repeated by every Brahmin in his daily meditation; and we may note that this formula is a verse from the Rig Veda, from a hymn of the Rishi Vishwamitra.


Sri Aurobindo: In the same Upanishad, Agni is invoked for purely moral functions as the puriﬁer from sin, the leader of the soul by the good path to the divine Bliss, and he seems to be identiﬁed with the power of the will and responsible for human actions. In other Upanishads the Gods are clearly the symbols of sense-functions in man. Soma, the plant which yielded the mystic wine for the Vedic sacriﬁce, has become not only the God of the moon, but manifests himself as mind in the human being. These evolutions suppose some period, posterior to the early material worship or superior Pantheistic Animism attributed to the Vedas and prior to the developed Puranic mythology, in which the gods became invested with deeper psychological functions, a period which may well have been the Age of the Mysteries. As things stand, a gap is left or else has been created by our exclusive preoccupation with the naturalistic element in the religion of the Vedic Rishis.


Sri Aurobindo: I suggest that the gulf is of our own creation and does not really exist in the ancient sacred writings. The hypothesis I propose is that the Rig Veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human   thought of which the historic Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries were the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difﬁcult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material ﬁgures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the Gods. This wisdom was, they thought, unﬁt, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind or in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpuriﬁed spirits. Hence they favoured the existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers.


Sri Aurobindo: The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructed on this principle. Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic NatureWorship which was then the common religion, covertly the sacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; the naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, — the secret words, nin.y¯a vac¯a ˙msi, which were spoken for the puriﬁed in soul and the awakened in knowledge. To disengage this less obvious but more important sense by ﬁxing the import of Vedic terms, the sense of Vedic symbols and the psychological functions of the Gods is thus a difﬁcult but necessary task, for which these chapters and the translations that accompany them are only a preparation.  The hypothesis, if it proves to be valid, will have three advantages.


Sri Aurobindo: It will elucidate simply and effectively the parts of the Upanishads that remain yet unintelligible or ill-understood as well as much of the origins of the Puranas. It will explain and  The Problem and Its Solution  justify rationally the whole ancient tradition of India; for it will be found that, in sober truth, the Vedanta, Purana, Tantra, the philosophical schools and the great Indian religions do go back in their source to Vedic origins. We can see there in their original seed or in their early or even primitive forms the fundamental conceptions of later Indian thought. Thus a natural startingpoint will be provided for a sounder study of Comparative Religion in the Indian ﬁeld. Instead of wandering amid insecure speculations or having to account for impossible conversions and unexplained transitions we shall have a clue to a natural and progressive development satisfying to the reason.


Sri Aurobindo: Incidentally, some light may be thrown on the obscurities of early cult and myth in other ancient nations. Finally, the incoherencies of the Vedic texts will at once be explained and disappear. They exist in appearance only, because the real thread of the sense is to be found in an inner meaning. That thread found, the hymns appear as logical and organic wholes and the expression, though alien in type to our modern ways of thinking and speaking, becomes, in its own style, just and precise and sins rather by economy of phrase than by excess, by over-pregnancy rather than by poverty of sense. The Veda ceases to be merely an interesting remnant of barbarism and takes rank among the most important of the world’s early Scriptures.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter II A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  V EDA, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind’s ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner.


Sri Aurobindo: Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (dras.t.¯a) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is ´Sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Inﬁnite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself ﬁt for the impersonal knowledge. The words themselves, dr.s.t.i and ´sruti, sight and hearing, are Vedic expressions; these and cognate words signify, in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledge and the contents of inspiration.  In the Vedic idea of the revelation there is no suggestion of the miraculous or the supernatural.


Sri Aurobindo: The Rishi who employed these faculties, had acquired them by a progressive self-culture.  Knowledge itself was a travelling and a reaching, or a ﬁnding and a winning; the revelation came only at the end, the light was the prize of a ﬁnal victory. There is continually in the Veda this image of the journey, the soul’s march on the path of Truth. On that path, as it advances, it also ascends; new vistas of power and light open to its aspiration; it wins by a heroic effort its enlarged spiritual possessions.  From the historical point of view the Rig Veda may be  A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  regarded as a record of a great advance made by humanity by special means at a certain period of its collective progress.


Sri Aurobindo: In its esoteric, as well as its exoteric signiﬁcance, it is the Book of Works, of the inner and the outer sacriﬁce; it is the spirit’s hymn of battle and victory as it discovers and climbs to planes of thought and experience inaccessible to the natural or animal man, man’s praise of the divine Light, Power and Grace at work in the mortal. It is far, therefore, from being an attempt to set down the results of intellectual or imaginative speculation, nor does it consist of the dogmas of a primitive religion. Only, out of the sameness of experience and out of the impersonality of the knowledge received, there arise a ﬁxed body of conceptions constantly repeated and a ﬁxed symbolic language which, perhaps, in that early human speech, was the inevitable form of these conceptions because alone capable by its combined concreteness and power of mystic suggestion of expressing that which for the ordinary mind of the race was inexpressible. We have, at any rate, the same notions repeated from hymn to hymn with the same constant terms and ﬁgures and frequently in the same phrases with an entire indifference to any search for poetical originality or any demand for novelty of thought and freshness of language.  No pursuit of aesthetic grace, richness or beauty induces these mystic poets to vary the consecrated form which had become for them a sort of divine algebra transmitting the eternal formulae of the Knowledge to the continuous succession of the initiates.


Sri Aurobindo: The hymns possess indeed a ﬁnished metrical form, a constant subtlety and skill in their technique, great variations of style and poetical personality; they are not the work of rude, barbarous and primitive craftsmen, but the living breath of a supreme and conscious Art forming its creations in the puissant but well-governed movement of a self-observing inspiration.  Still, all these high gifts have deliberately been exercised within one unvarying framework and always with the same materials.  For the art of expression was to the Rishis only a means, not an aim ; their principal preoccupation was strenuously practical, almost utilitarian, in the highest sense of utility. The hymn was to the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress   for himself and for others.


Sri Aurobindo: It rose out of his soul, it became a power of his mind, it was the vehicle of his self-expression in some important or even critical moment of his life’s inner history. It helped him to express the god in him, to destroy the devourer, the expresser of evil; it became a weapon in the hands of the Aryan striver after perfection, it ﬂashed forth like Indra’s lightning against the Coverer on the slopes, the Wolf on the path, the Robber by the streams.  The invariable ﬁxity of Vedic thought when taken in conjunction with its depth, richness and subtlety, gives rise to some interesting speculations. For we may reasonably argue that such a ﬁxed form and substance would not easily be possible in the beginnings of thought and psychological experience or even during their early progress and unfolding. We may therefore surmise that our actual Sanhita represents the close of a period, not its commencement, nor even some of its successive stages.


Sri Aurobindo: It is even possible that its most ancient hymns are a comparatively modern development or version of a more ancient1 lyric evangel couched in the freer and more pliable forms of a still earlier human speech. Or the whole voluminous mass of its litanies may be only a selection by Veda Vyasa out of a more richly vocal Aryan past.  Made, according to the common belief, by Krishna of the Isle, the great traditional sage, the colossal compiler (Vyasa), with his face turned towards the commencement of the Iron Age, towards the centuries of increasing twilight and ﬁnal darkness, it is perhaps only the last testament of the Ages of Intuition, the luminous Dawns of the Forefathers, to their descendants, to a human race already turning in spirit towards the lower levels and the more easy and secure gains — secure perhaps only in appearance — of the physical life and of the intellect and the logical reason.  But these are only speculations and inferences. Certain it is that the old tradition of a progressive obscuration and loss of the Veda as the law of the human cycle has been fully justiﬁed


Sri Aurobindo: 1 The Veda itself speaks constantly of “ancient” and “modern” Rishis, (p¯urvah. . . . n¯utanah.), the former remote enough to be regarded as a kind of demigods, the ﬁrst founders of knowledge.   A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  by the event. The obscuration had already proceeded far before the opening of the next great age of Indian spirituality, the Vedantic, which struggled to preserve or recover what it yet could of the ancient knowledge. It could hardly have been otherwise.


Sri Aurobindo: For the system of the Vedic mystics was founded upon experiences difﬁcult to ordinary mankind and proceeded by the aid of faculties which in most of us are rudimentary and imperfectly developed and, when active at all, are mixed and irregular in their operation. Once the ﬁrst intensity of the search after truth had passed, periods of fatigue and relaxation were bound to intervene in which the old truths would be partially lost. Nor once lost, could they easily be recovered by scrutinising the sense of the ancient hymns; for those hymns were couched in a language that was deliberately ambiguous.  A tongue unintelligible to us may be correctly understood once a clue has been found; a diction that is deliberately ambiguous, holds its secret much more obstinately and successfully, for it is full of lures and of indications that mislead. Therefore when the Indian mind turned again to review the sense of Veda, the task was difﬁcult and the success only partial.


Sri Aurobindo: One source of light still existed, the traditional knowledge handed down among those who memorised and explained the Vedic text or had charge of the Vedic ritual, — two functions that had originally been one; for in the early days the priest was also the teacher and seer. But the clearness of this light was already obscured. Even Purohits of repute performed the rites with a very imperfect knowledge of the power and the sense of the sacred words which they repeated.  For the material aspects of Vedic worship had grown like a thick crust over the inner knowledge and were stiﬂing what they had once served to protect. The Veda was already a mass of myth and ritual.


Sri Aurobindo: The power had begun to disappear out of the symbolic ceremony; the light had departed from the mystic parable and left only a surface of apparent grotesqueness and naivete.  The Brahmanas and the Upanishads are the record of a powerful revival which took the sacred text and ritual as a starting-point for a new statement of spiritual thought and experience. This movement had two complementary aspects, one,   the conservation of the forms, another the revelation of the soul of Veda, — the ﬁrst represented by the Brahmanas,2 the second by the Upanishads.  The Brahmanas labour to ﬁx and preserve the minutiae of the Vedic ceremony, the conditions of their material effectuality, the symbolic sense and purpose of their different parts, movements, implements, the signiﬁcance of texts important in the ritual, the drift of obscure allusions, the memory of ancient myths and traditions. Many of their legends are evidently posterior to the hymns, invented to explain passages which were no longer understood; others may have been part of the apparatus of original myth and parable employed by the ancient symbolists or memories of the actual historical circumstances surrounding the composition of the hymns.


Sri Aurobindo: Oral tradition is always a light that obscures; a new symbolism working upon an old that is half lost, is likely to overgrow rather than reveal it; therefore the Brahmanas, though full of interesting hints, help us very little in our research; nor are they a safe guide to the meaning of separate texts when they attempt an exact and verbal interpretation.   The Rishis of the Upanishads followed another method.  They sought to recover the lost or waning knowledge by meditation and spiritual experience and they used the text of the ancient mantras as a prop or an authority for their own intuitions and perceptions; or else the Vedic Word was a seed of thought and vision by which they recovered old truths in new forms. What they found, they expressed in other terms more intelligible to the age in which they lived.


Sri Aurobindo: In a certain sense their handling of the texts was not disinterested; it was not governed by the scholar’s scrupulous desire to arrive at the exact intention of the words and the precise thought of the sentences in their actual framing.  They were seekers of a higher than verbal truth and used words merely as suggestions for the illumination towards which they were striving. They knew not or they neglected the etymological 2 Necessarily, these and other appreciations in the chapter are brief and summary views of certain main tendencies. The Brahmanas for instance have their philosophical passages.


Sri Aurobindo: A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  sense and employed often a method of symbolic interpretation of component sounds in which it is very difﬁcult to follow them.  For this reason, while the Upanishads are invaluable for the light they shed on the principal ideas and on the psychological system of the ancient Rishis, they help us as little as the Brahmanas in determining the accurate sense of the texts which they quote.  Their real work was to found Vedanta rather than to interpret Veda.  For this great movement resulted in a new and more permanently powerful statement of thought and spirituality, Veda culminating in Vedanta. And it held in itself two strong tendencies which worked towards the disintegration of the old Vedic thought and culture.


Sri Aurobindo: First, it tended to subordinate more and more completely the outward ritual, the material utility of the mantra and the sacriﬁce to a more purely spiritual aim and intention. The balance, the synthesis preserved by the old Mystics between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual life was displaced and disorganised. A new balance, a new synthesis was established, leaning ﬁnally towards asceticism and renunciation, and maintained itself until it was in its turn displaced and disorganised by the exaggeration of its own tendencies in Buddhism. The sacriﬁce, the symbolic ritual became more and more a useless survival and even an encumbrance; yet, as so often happens, by the very fact of becoming mechanical and ineffective the importance of everything that was most external in them came to be exaggerated and their minutiae irrationally enforced by that part of the national mind which still clung to them. A sharp practical division came into being, effective though never entirely recognised in theory, between Veda and Vedanta, a distinction which might be expressed in the formula, “the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages.”


Sri Aurobindo: The second tendency of the Vedantic movement was to disencumber itself progressively of the symbolic language, the veil of concrete myth and poetic ﬁgure, in which the Mystics had shrouded their thought and to substitute a clearer statement and more philosophical language. The complete evolution of this tendency rendered obsolete the utility not only of the Vedic   ritual but of the Vedic text. Upanishads, increasingly clear and direct in their language, became the fountainhead of the highest Indian thought and replaced the inspired verses of Vasishtha and Vishwamitra.3 The Vedas, becoming less and less the indispensable basis of education, were no longer studied with the same zeal and intelligence; their symbolic language, ceasing to be used, lost the remnant of its inner sense to new generations whose whole manner of thought was different from that of the Vedic forefathers. The Ages of Intuition were passing away into the ﬁrst dawn of the Age of Reason.


Sri Aurobindo: Buddhism completed the revolution and left of the externalities of the ancient world only some venerable pomps and some mechanical usages. It sought to abolish the Vedic sacriﬁce and to bring into use the popular vernacular in place of the literary tongue. And although the consummation of its work was delayed for several centuries by the revival of Hinduism in the Puranic religions, the Veda itself beneﬁted little by this respite. In order to combat the popularity of the new religion it was necessary to put forward instead of venerable but unintelligible texts Scriptures written in an easy form of a more modern Sanskrit. For the mass of the nation the Puranas pushed aside the Veda and the forms of new religious systems took the place of the ancient ceremonies.


Sri Aurobindo: As the Veda had passed from the sage to the priest, so now it began to pass from the hands of the priest into the hands of the scholar. And in that keeping it suffered the last mutilation of its sense and the last diminution of its true dignity and sanctity.  Not that the dealings of Indian scholarship with the hymns, beginning from the pre-Christian centuries, have been altogether a record of loss. Rather it is to the scrupulous diligence and conservative tradition of the Pandits that we owe the preservation of Veda at all after its secret had been lost and the hymns themselves had ceased in practice to be a living Scripture. And 3


Sri Aurobindo: Again this expresses the main tendency and is subject to qualiﬁcation. The Vedas are also quoted as authorities; but as a whole it is the Upanishads that become the Book of Knowledge, the Veda being rather the Book of Works.   A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  even for the recovery of the lost secret the two millenniums of scholastic orthodoxy have left us some invaluable aids, a text determined scrupulously to its very accentuation, the important lexicon of Yaska and Sayana’s great commentary which in spite of its many and often startling imperfections remains still for the scholar an indispensable ﬁrst step towards the formation of a sound Vedic learning.  THE SCHOLARS


Sri Aurobindo: The text of the Veda which we possess has remained uncorrupted for over two thousand years. It dates, so far as we know, from that great period of Indian intellectual activity, contemporaneous with the Greek efﬂorescence, but earlier in its beginnings, which founded the culture and civilisation recorded in the classical literature of the land. We cannot say to how much earlier a date our text may be carried. But there are certain considerations which justify us in supposing for it an almost enormous antiquity. An accurate text, accurate in every syllable, accurate in every accent, was a matter of supreme importance to the Vedic ritualists; for on scrupulous accuracy depended the effectuality of the sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: We are told, for instance, in the Brahmanas the story of Twashtri who, performing a sacriﬁce to produce an avenger of his son slain by Indra, produced, owing to an error of accentuation, not a slayer of Indra, but one of whom Indra must be the slayer. The prodigious accuracy of the ancient Indian memory is also notorious. And the sanctity of the text prevented such interpolations, alterations, modernising revisions as have replaced by the present form of the Mahabharata the ancient epic of the Kurus. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that we have the Sanhita of Vyasa substantially as it was arranged by the great sage and compiler.  Substantially, not in its present written form.


Sri Aurobindo: Vedic prosody differed in many respects from the prosody of classical Sanskrit and, especially, employed a greater freedom in the use of that principle of euphonic combination of separate words (sandhi) which is so peculiar a feature of the literary tongue. The Vedic   Rishis, as was natural in a living speech, followed the ear rather than ﬁxed rule; sometimes they combined the separate words, sometimes they left them uncombined. But when the Veda came to be written down, the law of euphonic combination had assumed a much more despotic authority over the language and the ancient text was written by the grammarians as far as possible in consonance with its regulations. They were careful, however, to accompany it with another text, called the Padapatha, in which all euphonic combinations were again resolved into the original and separate words and even the components of compound words indicated.  It is a notable tribute to the ﬁdelity of the ancient memorisers that, instead of the confusion to which this system might so easily have given rise, it is always perfectly easy to resolve the formal text into the original harmonies of Vedic prosody.


Sri Aurobindo: And very few are the instances in which the exactness or the sound judgment of the Padapatha can be called into question.  We have, then, as our basis a text which we can conﬁdently accept and which, even if we hold it in a few instances doubtful or defective, does not at any rate call for that often licentious labour of emendation to which some of the European classics lend themselves. This is, to start with, a priceless advantage for which we cannot be too grateful to the conscientiousness of the old Indian learning.  In certain other directions it might not be safe always to follow implicitly the scholastic tradition, — as in the ascription of the Vedic poems to their respective Rishis, wherever older tradition was not ﬁrm and sound. But these are details of minor importance.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor is there, in my view, any good reason to doubt that we have the hymns arrayed, for the most part, in the right order of their verses and in their exact entirety. The exceptions, if they exist, are negligible in number and importance. When the hymns seem to us incoherent, it is because we do not understand them. Once the clue is found, we discover that they are perfect wholes as admirable in the structure of their thought as in their language and their rhythms.  It is when we come to the interpretation of the Veda and seek  A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  help from ancient Indian scholarship that we feel compelled to make the largest reserves.


Sri Aurobindo: For even in the earlier days of classical erudition the ritualistic view of the Veda was already dominant, the original sense of the words, the lines, the allusions, the clue to the structure of the thought had been long lost or obscured; nor was there in the erudite that intuition or that spiritual experience which might have partly recovered the lost secret. In such a ﬁeld mere learning, especially when it is accompanied by an ingenious scholastic mind, is as often a snare as a guide.   In Yaska’s lexicon, our most important help, we have to distinguish between two elements of very disparate value. When Yaska gives as a lexicographer the various meanings of Vedic words, his authority is great and the help he gives is of the ﬁrst importance.


Sri Aurobindo: It does not appear that he possessed all the ancient signiﬁcances, for many had been obliterated by Time and Change and in the absence of a scientiﬁc Philology could not be restored. But much also had been preserved by tradition.  Wherever Yaska preserves this tradition and does not use a grammarian’s ingenuity, the meanings he assigns to words, although not always applicable to the text to which he refers them, can yet be conﬁrmed as possible senses by a sound Philology. But Yaska the etymologist does not rank with Yaska the lexicographer.  Scientiﬁc grammar was ﬁrst developed by Indian learning, but the beginnings of sound philology we owe to modern research.


Sri Aurobindo: Nothing can be more fanciful and lawless than the methods of mere ingenuity used by the old etymologists down even to the nineteenth century, whether in Europe or India. And when Yaska follows these methods, we are obliged to part company with him entirely. Nor in his interpretation of particular texts is he more convincing than the later erudition of Sayana.  The commentary of Sayana closes the period of original and living scholastic work on the Veda which Yaska’s Nirukta among other important authorities may be said to open. The lexicon was compiled in the earlier vigour of the Indian mind when it was assembling its prehistoric gains as the materials of a fresh outburst of originality; the Commentary is almost the last great work of the kind left to us by the classical tradition   in its ﬁnal refuge and centre in Southern India before the old culture was dislocated and broken into regional fragments by the shock of the Mahomedan conquest.


Sri Aurobindo: Since then we have had jets of strong and original effort, scattered attempts at new birth and novel combination, but work of quite this general, massive and monumental character has hardly been possible.  The commanding merits of this great legacy of the past are obvious. Composed by Sayana with the aid of the most learned scholars of his time, it is a work representing an enormous labour of erudition, more perhaps than could have been commanded at that time by a single brain. Yet it bears the stamp of the coordinating mind. It is consistent in the mass in spite of its many inconsistencies of detail, largely planned, yet most simply, composed in a style lucid, terse and possessed of an almost literary grace one would have thought impossible in the traditional form of the Indian commentary.


Sri Aurobindo: Nowhere is there any display of pedantry; the struggle with the difﬁculties of the text is skilfully veiled and there is an air of clear acuteness and of assured, yet unassuming authority which imposes even on the dissident. The ﬁrst Vedic scholars in Europe admired especially the rationality of Sayana’s interpretations.  Yet, even for the external sense of the Veda, it is not possible to follow either Sayana’s method or his results without the largest reservation. It is not only that he admits in his method licences of language and construction which are unnecessary and sometimes incredible, nor that he arrives at his results, often, by a surprising inconsistency in his interpretation of common Vedic terms and even of ﬁxed Vedic formulae. These are defects of detail, unavoidable perhaps in the state of the materials with which he had to deal.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is the central defect of Sayana’s system that he is obsessed always by the ritualistic formula and seeks continually to force the sense of the Veda into that narrow mould. So he loses many clues of the greatest suggestiveness and importance for the external sense of the ancient Scripture, — a problem quite as interesting as its internal sense. The outcome is a representation of the Rishis, their thoughts, their culture, their aspirations, so narrow and poverty-stricken that, if accepted, it  A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  renders the ancient reverence for the Veda, its sacred authority, its divine reputation quite incomprehensible to the reason or only explicable as a blind and unquestioning tradition of faith starting from an original error.  There are indeed other aspects and elements in the commentary, but they are subordinate or subservient to the main idea. Sayana and his helpers had to work upon a great mass of often conﬂicting speculation and tradition which still survived from the past.


Sri Aurobindo: To some of its elements they had to give a formal adhesion, to others they felt bound to grant minor concessions.  It is possible that to Sayana’s skill in evolving out of previous uncertainty or even confusion an interpretation which had ﬁrm shape and consistence, is due the great and long-unquestioned authority of his work.  The ﬁrst element with which Sayana had to deal, the most interesting to us, was the remnant of the old spiritual, philosophic or psychological interpretations of the Sruti which were the true foundation of its sanctity. So far as these had entered into the current or orthodox4 conception, Sayana admits them; but they form an exceptional element in his work, insigniﬁcant in bulk and in importance. Occasionally he gives a passing mention or concession to less current psychological renderings.


Sri Aurobindo: He mentions, for instance, but not to admit it, an old interpretation of Vritra as the Coverer who holds back from man the objects of his desire and his aspirations. For Sayana Vritra is either simply the enemy or the physical cloud-demon who holds back the waters and has to be pierced by the Rain-giver.  A second element is the mythological, or, as it might almost be called, the Puranic, — myths and stories of the gods given in their outward form without that deeper sense and symbolic fact which is the justifying truth of all Purana.5  4 I use the word loosely.


Sri Aurobindo: The terms orthodox and heterodox in the European or sectarian sense have no true application to India where opinion has always been free.   5 There is reason to suppose that Purana (legend and apologue) and Itihasa (historical tradition) were parts of Vedic culture long before the present forms of the Puranas and historical Epics were evolved.    A third element is the legendary and historic, the stories of old kings and Rishis, given in the Brahmanas or by later tradition in explanation of the obscure allusions of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: Sayana’s dealings with this element are marked by some hesitation. Often he accepts them as the right interpretation of the hymns; sometimes he gives an alternative sense with which he has evidently more intellectual sympathy, but wavers between the two authorities.  More important is the element of naturalistic interpretation.  Not only are there the obvious or the traditional identiﬁcations, Indra, the Maruts, the triple Agni, Surya, Usha, but we ﬁnd that Mitra was identiﬁed with the Day, Varuna with the Night, Aryaman and Bhaga with the Sun, the Ribhus with its rays. We have here the seeds of that naturalistic theory of the Veda to which European learning has given so wide an extension.


Sri Aurobindo: The old Indian scholars did not use the same freedom or the same systematic minuteness in their speculations. Still this element in Sayana’s commentary is the true parent of the European Science of Comparative Mythology.  But it is the ritualistic conception that pervades; that is the persistent note in which all others lose themselves. In the formula of the philosophic schools, the hymns, even while standing as a supreme authority for knowledge, are yet principally and fundamentally concerned with the Karmakanda, with works, — and by works was understood, preeminently, the ritualistic observation of the Vedic sacriﬁces. Sayana labours always in the light of this idea.


Sri Aurobindo: Into this mould he moulds the language of the Veda, turning the mass of its characteristic words into the ritualistic signiﬁcances, — food, priest, giver, wealth, praise, prayer, rite, sacriﬁce.  Wealth and food; — for it is the most egoistic and materialistic objects that are proposed as the aim of the sacriﬁce, possessions, strength, power, children, servants, gold, horses, cows, victory, the slaughter and the plunder of enemies, the destruction of rival and malevolent critic. As one reads and ﬁnds hymn after hymn interpreted in this sense, one begins to understand better the apparent inconsistency in the attitude of  A Retrospect of Vedic Theory  the Gita which, regarding always the Veda as divine knowledge,6 yet censures severely the champions of an exclusive Vedism,7 all whose ﬂowery teachings were devoted solely to material wealth, power and enjoyment.  It is the ﬁnal and authoritative binding of the Veda to this lowest of all its possible senses that has been the most unfortunate result of Sayana’s commentary. The dominance of the ritualistic interpretation had already deprived India of the living use of its greatest Scripture and of the true clue to the entire sense of the Upanishads.


Sri Aurobindo: Sayana’s commentary put a seal of ﬁnality on the old misunderstanding which could not be broken for many centuries. And its suggestions, when another civilisation discovered and set itself to study the Veda, became in the European mind the parent of fresh errors.  Nevertheless, if Sayana’s work has been a key turned with double lock on the inner sense of the Veda, it is yet indispensable for opening the antechambers of Vedic learning. All the vast labour of European erudition has not been able to replace its utility. At every step we are obliged to differ from it, but at every step we are obliged to use it.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a necessary springing-board, or a stair that we have to use for entrance, though we must leave it behind if we wish to pass forwards into the penetralia.  6 Gita XV.15.  7 Ibid. II.42.   Chapter III Modern Theories


Sri Aurobindo: I T WAS the curiosity of a foreign culture that broke after many centuries the seal of ﬁnal authoritativeness which Sayana had ﬁxed on the ritualistic interpretation of the Veda. The ancient Scripture was delivered over to a scholarship laborious, bold in speculation, ingenious in its ﬂights of fancy, conscientious according to its own lights, but ill-ﬁtted to understand the method of the old mystic poets ; for it was void of any sympathy with that ancient temperament, unprovided with any clue in its own intellectual or spiritual environment to the ideas hidden in the Vedic ﬁgures and parables. The result has been of a double character, on the one side the beginnings of a more minute, thorough and careful as well as a freer handling of the problems of Vedic interpretation, on the other hand a ﬁnal exaggeration of its apparent material sense and the complete obscuration of its true and inner secret.  In spite of the hardiness of its speculations and its freedom in discovery or invention the Vedic scholarship of Europe has really founded itself throughout on the traditional elements preserved in Sayana’s commentary and has not attempted an entirely independent handling of the problem.


Sri Aurobindo: What it found in Sayana and in the Brahmanas it has developed in the light of modern theories and modern knowledge; by ingenious deductions from the comparative method applied to philology, mythology and history, by large ampliﬁcations of the existing data with the aid of ingenious speculation, by uniﬁcation of the scattered indications available it has built up a complete theory of Vedic mythology, Vedic history, Vedic civilisation which fascinates by its detail and thoroughness and conceals by its apparent sureness of method the fact that this imposing ediﬁce has been founded, for the most part, on the sands of conjecture.   Modern Theories   The modern theory of the Veda starts with the conception, for which Sayana is responsible, of the Vedas as the hymnal of an early, primitive and largely barbaric society crude in its moral and religious conceptions, rude in its social structure and entirely childlike in its outlook upon the world that environed it. The ritualism which Sayana accepted as part of a divine knowledge and as endowed with a mysterious efﬁcacy, European scholarship accepted as an elaboration of the old savage propitiatory sacriﬁces offered to imaginary superhuman personalities who might be benevolent or malevolent according as they were worshipped or neglected. The historical element admitted by Sayana was readily seized on and enlarged by new renderings and new explanations of the allusions in the hymns developed in an eager hunt for clues to the primitive history, manners and institutions of those barbarous races. The naturalistic element played a still more important role.


Sri Aurobindo: The obvious identiﬁcation of the Vedic gods in their external aspects with certain Nature-Powers was used as the starting-point for a comparative study of Aryan mythologies; the hesitating identiﬁcation of certain of the less prominent deities as Sun-Powers was taken as a general clue to the system of primitive myth-making and elaborate sun-myth and star-myth theories of comparative mythology were founded. In this new light the Vedic hymnology has come to be interpreted as a halfsuperstitious, half-poetic allegory of Nature with an important astronomical element. The rest is partly contemporary history, partly the formulae and practices of a sacriﬁcial ritualism, not mystic, but merely primitive and superstitious.  This interpretation is in entire harmony with the scientiﬁc theories of early human culture and of the recent emergence from the mere savage which were in vogue throughout the nineteenth century and are even now dominant. But the increase of our knowledge has considerably shaken this ﬁrst and too hasty generalisation.


Sri Aurobindo: We now know that remarkable civilisations existed in China, Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria many thousands of years ago, and it is now coming generally to be agreed that Greece and India were no exceptions to the general high culture of Asia and the Mediterranean races. If the Vedic Indians do not get the beneﬁt   of this revised knowledge, it is due to the survival of the theory with which European erudition started, that they belonged to the so-called Aryan race and were on the same level of culture with the early Aryan Greeks, Celts, Germans as they are represented to us in the Homeric poems, the old Norse Sagas and the Roman accounts of the ancient Gaul and Teuton. Hence has arisen the theory that these Aryan races were northern barbarians who broke in from their colder climes on the old and rich civilisations of Mediterranean Europe and Dravidian India.  But the indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their signiﬁcance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion.


Sri Aurobindo: The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built, seems on the mass of the evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.1  The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worship or spiritual culture as the distinguishing sign of the Aryan, — a worship of Light and of the powers of Light and a self-discipline based on the culture of the “Truth” and the aspiration to Immortality, — Ritam and Amritam. There is no reliable indication of any racial difference. It is always possible that the bulk of the peoples now inhabiting India may have been the descendants of a new race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as argued by Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions; but there is nothing in the Veda, as there is nothing in the present ethnological features2 of the country to prove that this descent took place near to the time of the Vedic hymns or was the slow penetration of a small body of fair-skinned barbarians into a civilised Dravidian peninsula.


Sri Aurobindo: 1 It is urged that the Dasyus are described as black of skin and noseless in opposition to the fair and high-nosed Aryans. But the former distinction is certainly applied to the Aryan Gods and the Dasa Powers in the sense of light and darkness, and the word an¯asah. does not mean noseless. Even if it did, it would be wholly inapplicable to the Dravidian races; for the southern nose can give as good an account of itself as any “Aryan” proboscis in the North.


Sri Aurobindo: 2 In India we are chieﬂy familiar with the old philological divisions of the Indian races and with the speculations of Mr. Risley which are founded upon these earlier generalisations. But a more advanced ethnology rejects all linguistic tests and leans to the idea of a single homogeneous race inhabiting the Indian peninsula.   Modern Theories   Nor is it a certain conclusion from the data we possess that the early Aryan cultures — supposing the Celt, Teuton, Greek and Indian to represent one common cultural origin, — were really undeveloped and barbarous.


Sri Aurobindo: A certain pure and high simplicity in their outward life and its organisation, a certain concreteness and vivid human familiarity in their conception of and relations with the gods they worshipped, distinguish the Aryan type from the more sumptuous and materialistic EgyptoChaldean civilisation and its solemn and occult religions. But those characteristics are not inconsistent with a high internal culture. On the contrary, indications of a great spiritual tradition meet us at many points and negate the ordinary theory. The old Celtic races certainly possessed some of the highest philosophical conceptions and they preserve stamped upon them even to the present day the result of an early mystic and intuitional development which must have been of long standing and highly evolved to have produced such enduring results. In Greece it is probable that the Hellenic type was moulded in the same way by Orphic and Eleusinian inﬂuences and that Greek mythology, as it has come down to us, full of delicate psychological suggestions, is a legacy of the Orphic teaching.


Sri Aurobindo: It would be only consonant with the general tradition if it turned out that Indian civilisation has throughout been the prolongation of tendencies and ideas sown in us by the Vedic forefathers. The extraordinary vitality of these early cultures which still determine for us the principal types of modern man, the main elements of his temperament, the chief tendencies of his thought, art and religion, can have proceeded from no primitive savagery. They are the result of a deep and puissant prehistoric development.  Comparative Mythology has deformed the sense of man’s early traditions by ignoring this important stage in human progress. It has founded its interpretation on a theory which saw nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads.


Sri Aurobindo: It has supposed the early religions to have been founded on the wonder of barbarians waking up suddenly to the astonishing fact that such strange things as Dawn and Night and the Sun existed and attempting in a crude, barbaric, imaginative way to   explain their existence. And from this childlike wonder we stride at one step to the profound theories of the Greek philosophers and the Vedantic sages. Comparative Mythology is the creation of Hellenists interpreting un-Hellenic data from a standpoint which is itself founded on a misunderstanding of the Greek mind. Its method has been an ingenious play of the poetic imagination rather than a patient scientiﬁc research.  If we look at the results of the method, we ﬁnd an extraordinary confusion of images and of their interpretations in which there is nowhere any coherence or consistency.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a mass of details running into each other, getting confusedly into each other’s way, disagreeing yet entangled, dependent for their validity on the licence of imaginative conjecture as our sole means of knowledge. This incoherence has even been exalted into a standard of truth; for it is seriously argued by eminent scholars that a method arriving at a more logical and well-ordered result would be disproved and discredited by its very coherency, since confusion must be supposed to be the very essence of the early mythopoeic faculty. But in that case there can be nothing binding in the results of Comparative Mythology and one theory will be as good as another; for there is no reason why one particular mass of incoherence should be held to be more valid than another mass of incoherence differently composed.  There is much that is useful in the speculations of Comparative Mythology; but in order that the bulk of its results should be sound and acceptable, it must use a more patient and consistent method and organise itself as part of a well-founded Science of Religion. We must recognise that the old religions were organic systems founded on ideas which were at least as coherent as those which constitute our modern systems of belief.


Sri Aurobindo: We must recognise also that there has been a perfectly intelligible progressive development from the earlier to the later systems of religious creed and of philosophical thought. It is by studying our data widely and profoundly in this spirit and discovering the true evolution of human thought and belief that we shall arrive at real knowledge. The mere identiﬁcation of Greek and Sanskrit names and the ingenious discovery that Heracles’ pyre is  Modern Theories  an image of the setting sun or that Paris and Helen are Greek corruptions of the Vedic Sarama and the Panis make an interesting diversion for an imaginative mind, but can by themselves lead to no serious result, even if they should prove to be correct. Nor is their correctness beyond serious doubt, for it is the vice of the fragmentary and imaginative method by which the sun and star myth interpretations are built up that they can be applied with equal ease and convincingness to any and every human tradition, belief or even actual event of history.3 With this method we can never be sure where we have hit on a truth or where we are listening to a mere ingenuity.


Sri Aurobindo: Comparative Philology can indeed be called to our aid, but, in the present state of that Science, with very little conclusiveness. Modern Philology is an immense advance on anything we have had before the nineteenth century. It has introduced a spirit of order and method in place of mere phantasy; it has given us more correct ideas of the morphology of language and of what is or is not possible in etymology. It has established a few rules which govern the phenomena of the detrition of language and guide us in the identiﬁcation of the same word or of related words as they appear in the changes of different but kindred tongues.


Sri Aurobindo: Here, however, its achievements cease. The high hopes which attended its birth, have not been fulﬁlled by its maturity.  It has failed to create a Science of Language and we are still compelled to apply to it the apologetic description given by a great philologist after some decades of earnest labour when he was obliged to speak of his favourite pursuits as “our petty conjectural sciences”. But a conjectural Science is no Science at all. Therefore the followers of more exact and scrupulous forms of knowledge refuse that name altogether to Comparative Philology and deny even the possibility of a linguistic science.


Sri Aurobindo: There is, in fact, no real certainty as yet in the obtained results of Philology; for beyond one or two laws of a limited 3 E.g. Christ and his twelve apostles are, a great scholar assures us, the sun and the twelve months. The career of Napoleon is the most perfect Sun-myth in all legend or history.    application there is nowhere a sure basis. Yesterday we were all convinced that Varuna was identical with Ouranos, the Greek heaven; today this identity is denounced to us as a philological error; tomorrow it may be rehabilitated. Parame vyoman is a Vedic phrase which most of us would translate “in the highest heaven”, but Mr. T. Paramasiva Aiyar in his brilliant and astonishing work, The Riks, tells us that it means “in the lowest hollow”


Sri Aurobindo: ; for vyoman “means break, ﬁssure, being literally absence of protection, (uma)”; and the reasoning which he uses is so entirely after the fashion of the modern scholar that the philologist is debarred from answering that “absence of protection” cannot possibly mean a ﬁssure and that human language was not constructed on these principles. For Philology has failed to discover the principles on which language was constructed or rather was organically developed, and on the other hand it has preserved a sufﬁcient amount of the old spirit of mere phantasy and ingenuity and is full of precisely such brilliances of hazardous inference. But then we arrive at this result that there is nothing to help us in deciding whether parame vyoman in the Veda refers to the highest heaven or to the lowest abyss. It is obvious that a philology so imperfect may be a brilliant aid, but can never be a sure guide to the sense of Veda.  We have to recognise in fact that European scholarship in its dealings with the Veda has derived an excessive prestige from its association in the popular mind with the march of European Science.


Sri Aurobindo: The truth is that there is an enormous gulf between the patient, scrupulous and exact physical sciences and these other brilliant, but immature branches of learning upon which Vedic scholarship relies. Those are careful of their foundation, slow to generalise, solid in their conclusions; these are compelled to build upon scanty data large and sweeping theories and supply the deﬁciency of sure indications by an excess of conjecture and hypothesis. They are full of brilliant beginnings, but can come to no secure conclusion. They are the ﬁrst rough scaffolding for a Science, but they are not as yet Sciences.  It follows that the whole problem of the interpretation of Veda still remains an open ﬁeld in which any contribution that  Modern Theories  can throw light upon the problem should be welcome.


Sri Aurobindo: Three such contributions have proceeded from Indian scholars. Two of them follow the lines or the methods of European research, while opening up new theories which if established, would considerably alter our view of the external sense of the hymns.  Mr. Tilak in his Arctic Home in the Vedas has accepted the general conclusions of European scholarship, but by a fresh examination of the Vedic Dawn, the ﬁgure of the Vedic cows and the astronomical data of the hymns, has established at least a strong probability that the Aryan races descended originally from the Arctic regions in the glacial period. Mr. T. Paramasiva Aiyar by a still bolder departure has attempted to prove that the whole of the Rig Veda is a ﬁgurative representation of the geological phenomena belonging to the new birth of our planet after its long-continued glacial death in the same period of terrestrial evolution. It is difﬁcult to accept in their mass Mr. Aiyar’s reasonings and conclusions, but he has at least thrown a new light on the great Vedic mythus of Ahi Vritra and the release of the seven rivers.


Sri Aurobindo: His interpretation is far more consistent and probable than the current theory which is not borne out by the language of the hymns. Taken in conjunction with Mr. Tilak’s work it may serve as the starting-point for a new external interpretation of the old Scripture which will explain much that is now inexplicable and recreate for us the physical origins if not the actual physical environment of the old Aryan world.  The third Indian contribution is older in date, but nearer to my present purpose. It is the remarkable attempt by Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, to re-establish the Veda as a living religious Scripture. Dayananda took as his basis a free use of the old Indian philology which he found in the Nirukta.


Sri Aurobindo: Himself a great Sanskrit scholar , he handled his materials with remarkable power and independence. Especially creative was his use of that peculiar feature of the old Sanskrit tongue which is best expressed by a phrase of Sayana’s, — the “multi-signiﬁcance of roots”. We shall see that the right following of this clue is of capital importance for understanding the peculiar method of the Vedic Rishis.    Dayananda’s interpretation of the hymns is governed by the idea that the Vedas are a plenary revelation of religious, ethical and scientiﬁc truth.


Sri Aurobindo: Its religious teaching is monotheistic and the Vedic gods are different descriptive names of the one Deity; they are at the same time indications of His powers as we see them working in Nature and by a true understanding of the sense of the Vedas we could arrive at all the scientiﬁc truths which have been discovered by modern research.  Such a theory is, obviously, difﬁcult to establish. The Rig Veda itself, indeed, asserts4 that the gods are only different names and expressions of one universal Being who in His own reality transcends the universe; but from the language of the hymns we are compelled to perceive in the gods not only different names, but also different forms, powers and personalities of the one Deva. The monotheism of the Veda includes in itself also the monistic, pantheistic and even polytheistic views of the cosmos and is by no means the trenchant and simple creed of modern Theism. It is only by a violent struggle with the text that we can force on it a less complex aspect.


Sri Aurobindo: That the ancient races were far more advanced in the physical sciences than is as yet recognised, may also be admitted.  The Egyptians and Chaldeans, we now know, had discovered much that has since been rediscovered by modern Science and much also that has not been rediscovered. The ancient Indians were, at least, no mean astronomers and were always skilful physicians; nor do Hindu medicine and chemistry seem to have been of a foreign origin. It is possible that in other branches also of physical knowledge they were advanced even in early times.  But the absolute completeness of scientiﬁc revelation asserted by Swami Dayananda will take a great deal of proving.


Sri Aurobindo: The hypothesis on which I shall conduct my own enquiry is that the Veda has a double aspect and that the two, though closely related, must be kept apart. The Rishis arranged the substance of their thought in a system of parallelism by which the same deities were at once internal and external Powers of 4 R.V. I.164.46 and 170.1.   Modern Theories  universal Nature, and they managed its expression through a system of double values by which the same language served for their worship in both aspects. But the psychological sense predominates and is more pervading, close-knit and coherent than the physical. The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture.


Sri Aurobindo: It is, therefore, this sense which has ﬁrst to be restored.  To this task each of the ancient and modern systems of interpretation brings an indispensable assistance. Sayana and Yaska supply the ritualistic framework of outward symbols and their large store of traditional signiﬁcances and explanations. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to us their method of spiritual experience and intuition. European scholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research, yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing the materials available and sure eventually to give a scientiﬁc certainty and ﬁrm intellectual basis which has hitherto been lacking.


Sri Aurobindo: Dayananda has given the clue to the linguistic secret of the Rishis and reemphasised one central idea of the Vedic religion, the idea of the One Being with the Devas expressing in numerous names and forms the many-sidedness of His unity.  With so much help from the intermediate past we may yet succeed in reconstituting this remoter antiquity and enter by the gate of the Veda into the thoughts and realities of a prehistoric wisdom.   Chapter IV The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  A HYPOTHESIS of the sense of Veda must always proceed, to be sure and sound, from a basis that clearly emerges in the language of the Veda itself. Even if the bulk of its substance be an arrangement of symbols and ﬁgures, the sense of which has to be discovered, yet there should be clear indications in the explicit language of the hymns which will guide us to that sense.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise, the symbols being themselves ambiguous, we shall be in danger of manufacturing a system out of our own imaginations and preferences instead of discovering the real purport of the ﬁgures chosen by the Rishis. In that case, however ingenious and complete our theory, it is likely to be a building in the air, brilliant, but without reality or solidity.  Our ﬁrst duty, therefore, is to determine whether there is, apart from ﬁgure and symbol, in the clear language of the hymns a sufﬁcient kernel of psychological notions to justify us in supposing at all a higher than the barbarous and primitive sense of the Veda. And afterwards we have to ﬁnd, as far as possible from the internal evidence of the Suktas themselves, the interpretation of each symbol and image and the right psychological function of each of the gods. A ﬁrm and not a ﬂuctuating sense, founded on good philological justiﬁcation and ﬁtting naturally into the context wherever it occurs, must be found for each of the ﬁxed terms of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: For, as has already been said, the language of the hymns is a language ﬁxed and invariable; it is the carefully preserved and scrupulously respected diction consistently expressing either a formal creed and ritual or a traditional doctrine and constant experience. If the language of the Vedic Rishis were free and variable, if their ideas were evidently in a state of ﬂux, shifting and uncertain, a convenient licence and incoherence in  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  the sense we attach to their terminology and the relation we ﬁnd between their ideas, might be justiﬁed or tolerated. But the hymns themselves on the very face of them bear exactly the contrary testimony. We have the right therefore to demand the same ﬁdelity and scrupulousness in the interpreter as in the original he interprets. There is obviously a constant relation between the different notions and cherished terms of the Vedic religion; incoherence and uncertainty in the interpretation will prove, not that the face evidence of the Veda is misleading, but simply that the interpreter has failed to discover the right relations.


Sri Aurobindo: If, after this initial labour has been scrupulously and carefully done, it can be shown by a translation of the hymns that the interpretations we had ﬁxed ﬁt in naturally and easily in whatever context, if they are found to illuminate what seemed obscure and to create intelligible and clear coherence where there seemed to be only confusion; if the hymns in their entirety give thus a clear and connected sense and the successive verses show a logical succession of related thoughts, and if the result as a whole be a profound, consistent and antique body of doctrines, then our hypothesis will have a right to stand besides others, to challenge them where they contradict it or to complete them where they are consistent with its ﬁndings. Nor will the probability of our hypothesis be lessened, but rather its validity conﬁrmed if it be found that the body of ideas and doctrines thus revealed in the Veda are a more antique form of subsequent Indian thought and religious experience, the natural parent of Vedanta and Purana.  So considerable and minute a labour is beyond the scope of these brief and summary chapters. Their object is only to indicate for those who care to follow the clue I have myself received, the path and its principal turnings, — the results I have arrived at and the main indications by which the Veda itself helps us to arrive at them. And, ﬁrst, it seems to me advisable to explain the genesis of the theory in my own mind so that the reader may the better understand the line I have taken or, if he chooses, check any prepossessions or personal preferences which may have inﬂuenced or limited the right application of reasoning to this difﬁcult problem.


Sri Aurobindo: Like the majority of educated Indians I had passively accepted without examination, before myself reading the Veda, the conclusions of European Scholarship both as to the religious and as to the historical and ethnical sense of the ancient hymns. In consequence, following again the ordinary line taken by modernised Hindu opinion, I regarded the Upanishads as the most ancient source of Indian thought and religion, the true Veda, the ﬁrst Book of Knowledge. The Rig Veda in the modern translations which were all I knew of this profound Scripture, represented for me an important document of our national history, but seemed of small value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience.  My ﬁrst contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise in my mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certain psychological experiences which had begun to regularise themselves; and among them there came the ﬁgures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three out of the four faculties of the intuitive reason, — revelation, inspiration and intuition.


Sri Aurobindo: Two of these names were not well known to me as names of Vedic goddesses, but were connected rather with the current Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati, goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. But Sarama was familiar enough. I was unable, however, to establish any connection between the ﬁgure that rose in my mind and the Vedic hound of heaven, who was associated in my memory with the Argive Helen and represented only an image of the physical Dawn entering in its pursuit of the vanished herds of Light into the cave of the Powers of darkness. When once the clue is found, the clue of the physical Light imaging the subjective, it is easy to see that the hound of heaven may be the intuition entering into the dark caverns of the subconscious mind to prepare the delivery and out-ﬂashing of the bright illuminations of knowledge which have there been imprisoned. But the clue was wanting  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  and I was obliged to suppose an identity of name without any identity of the symbol.


Sri Aurobindo: It was my stay in Southern India which ﬁrst seriously turned my thoughts to the Veda. Two observations that were forced on my mind, gave a serious shock to my second-hand belief in the racial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians. The distinction had always rested for me on a supposed difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidian and a more deﬁnite incompatibility between the northern Sanskritic and the southern non-Sanskritic tongues. I knew indeed of the later theories which suppose that a single homogeneous race, Dravidian or Indo-Afghan, inhabits the Indian peninsula; but hitherto I had not attached much importance to these speculations. I could not, however, be long in Southern India without being impressed by the general recurrence of northern or “Aryan” types in the Tamil race.


Sri Aurobindo: Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognise with a startling distinctness, not only among the Brahmins but in all castes and classes, the old familiar faces, features, ﬁgures of my friends of Maharashtra, Gujerat, Hindustan, even, though this similarity was less widely spread, of my own province Bengal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribes of the North had descended on the South and submerged any previous populations that may have occupied it. A general impression of a Southern type survived, but it was impossible to ﬁx it rigidly while studying the physiognomy of individuals. And in the end I could not but perceive that whatever admixtures might have taken place, whatever regional differences might have been evolved, there remains, behind all variations, a unity of physical as well as of cultural type1 throughout India. For the rest, this is a conclusion to which ethnological speculation2 itself has an increasing tendency.


Sri Aurobindo: 1 I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more obscure and difﬁcult to determine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it the trenchant distinctions current in the popular mind are wholly out of place.  2 Always supposing that ethnological speculations have at all any validity.


Sri Aurobindo: The only ﬁrm basis of ethnology is the theory of the hereditary invariability of the human skull which is now being challenged. If it disappears, the whole science disappears with it.    But what then of the sharp distinction between Aryan and Dravidian races created by the philologists? It disappears. If at all an Aryan invasion is admitted, we have either to suppose that it ﬂooded India and determined the physical type of the people, with whatever modiﬁcations, or that it was the incursion of small bands of a less civilised race who melted away into the original population.


Sri Aurobindo: We have then to suppose that entering a vast peninsula occupied by a civilised people, builders of great cities, extensive traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, they were yet able to impose on them their own language, religion, ideas and manners. Such a miracle would be just possible if the invaders possessed a very highly organised language, a greater force of creative mind and a more dynamic religious form and spirit.  And there was always the difference of language to support the theory of a meeting of races. But here also my preconceived ideas were disturbed and confounded. For on examining the vocables of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskritic form and character, I yet found myself continually guided by words or by families of words supposed to be pure Tamil in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally, between the Greek and the Sanskrit.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes the Tamil vocable not only suggested the connection, but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And it was through this Dravidian language that I came ﬁrst to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues. I was unable to pursue my examination far enough to establish any deﬁnite conclusion, but it certainly seems to me that the original connection between the Dravidian and Aryan tongues was far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed and the possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue. If so, the sole remaining evidence of an Aryan invasion of Dravidian India would be the indications to be found in the Vedic hymns.  It was, therefore, with a double interest that for the ﬁrst time I took up the Veda in the original, though without any  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  immediate intention of a close or serious study.


Sri Aurobindo: It did not take long to see that the Vedic indications of a racial division between Aryans and Dasyus and the identiﬁcation of the latter with the indigenous Indians were of a far ﬂimsier character than I had supposed. But far more interesting to me was the discovery of a considerable body of profound psychological thought and experience lying neglected in these ancient hymns. And the importance of this element increased in my eyes when I found, ﬁrst, that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufﬁcient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta, so far as I was acquainted with them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas.  I was helped in arriving at this result by my fortunate ignorance of the commentary of Sayana. For I was left free to attribute their natural psychological signiﬁcance to many ordinary and current words of the Veda, such as dh¯ı, thought or understanding, manas, mind, mati, thought, feeling or mental state, man¯ıs. ¯a, intellect, r.tam, truth; to give their exact shades of sense to kavi, seer, man¯ıs.¯ı, thinker, vipra, vipa´scit, enlightened in mind, and a number of similar words; and to hazard a psychological sense, justiﬁed by more extensive study, for words like daks.a which for Sayana means strength and ´sravas which he renders as wealth, food or fame.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychological theory of the Veda rests upon our right to concede their natural signiﬁcance to these vocables.  Sayana gives to the words dh¯ı, r.tam, etc., very variable signiﬁcances. R. tam, which is almost the key-word of any psychological or spiritual interpretation, is rendered by him sometimes as “truth”, more often “sacriﬁce”, occasionally in the sense of water. The psychological interpretation gives it invariably the sense of Truth. Dh¯ı is rendered by Sayana variously “thought”, “prayer”, “action”, “food”, etc.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychological interpretation gives it consistently the sense of thought or understanding.    And so with the other ﬁxed terms of Veda. Moreover, Sayana’s tendency, is to obliterate all ﬁne shades and distinctions between words and to give them their vaguest general signiﬁcance. All epithets conveying ideas of mental activity mean for him simply “intelligent”, all words suggesting various ideas of force, and the Veda overﬂows with them, are reduced to the broad idea of strength. I found myself on the contrary impressed by the great importance of ﬁxing and preserving the right shade of meaning and precise association to be given to different words, however close they may be to each other in their general sense.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not see indeed why we should suppose that the Vedic Rishis, unlike all other masters of poetic style, used words pell-mell and indiscriminately without feeling their just associations and giving them their right and exact force in the verbal combination.  By following this principle I found that without departing from the simple natural and straightforward sense of words and clauses an extraordinarily large body not only of separate verses but of entire passages came at once into evidence which entirely altered the whole character of the Veda. For this Scripture then appeared to have a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience running all through it and appearing sometimes in small streaks, sometimes in larger bands, in the majority of its hymns. Moreover, besides the words that in their plain and ordinary sense give at once a wealth of psychological signiﬁcance to their context, the Veda is full of others to which it is possible to give either an external and material or an internal and psychological value according to our conception of the general purport of Veda. For instance such words as r¯aye, rayi, r¯adhas, ratna, may mean either merely material prosperity and riches or internal felicity and plenitude applying itself equally to the subjective and the objective world; dhana, v¯aja, pos.a may mean either objective wealth, plenty and increase or all possessions internal or external, their plenitude and their growth in the life of the individual.


Sri Aurobindo: R¯aye is used in the Upanishads, in a quotation from the Rig Veda, to mean spiritual felicity; why should it be incapable of bearing that sense in the original text? V¯aja occurs frequently in a context in which every other word has  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  a psychological signiﬁcance and the mention of physical plenty comes in with a violent jar of incoherency into the homogeneous totality of the thought. Commonsense, therefore, demands that the use of these words with a psychological import should be admitted in the Veda.  But if this is done consistently, not only whole verses and passages, but whole hymns assume at once the psychological complexion. On one condition this transformation is frequently complete, leaving no word or phrase unaffected, — the condition that we should admit the symbolic character of the Vedic sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: We ﬁnd in the Gita the word yaj˜na, sacriﬁce, used in a symbolic sense for all action, whether internal or external, that is consecrated to the gods or to the Supreme. Was such symbolic use of the word born of a later philosophical intellectuality, or was it inherent in the Vedic idea of sacriﬁce? I found that in the Veda itself there were hymns in which the idea of the yaj˜na or of the victim is openly symbolical, others in which the veil is quite transparent. The question then arose whether these were later compositions developing an incipient symbolism out of old superstitious practices or rather the occasional plainer statement of a sense which is in most hymns more or less carefully veiled by the ﬁgure. If there were no constant recurrence of psychological passages in the Veda, the former explanation would, no doubt, have to be accepted.


Sri Aurobindo: But on the contrary whole hymns took naturally a psychological sense proceeding with a perfect and luminous coherency from verse to verse, where the only points of obscurity were the mention of the sacriﬁce or of the offering or sometimes of the ofﬁciating priest, who might be either a man or a god. If these words could be interpreted symbolically, I found always that the progression of thought became more perfect, more luminous, more coherent and the sense of the hymn in its entirety was victoriously completed. I felt therefore justiﬁed by every canon of sound criticism in pursuing my hypothesis farther and including in it the symbolic sense of the Vedic ritual.  Nevertheless here intervenes the ﬁrst real difﬁculty of the psychological interpretation. Hitherto I had been proceeding by a perfectly straightforward and natural method of interpretation   based on the surface meaning of the words and sentences.


Sri Aurobindo: Now I came to an element in which the surface meaning had, in a sense, to be overridden, and this is a process in which every critical and conscientious mind must ﬁnd itself beset by continual scruples.  Nor can one always be sure, even with the utmost care, of having hit on the right clue and the just interpretation.  The Vedic sacriﬁce consists of three features, — omitting for the moment the god and the mantra, — the persons who offer, the offering and the fruits of the offering. If the yaj˜na is the action consecrated to the gods, I could not but take the yajam¯ana, the giver of the sacriﬁce, as the doer of the action. Yaj˜na is works, internal or external, the yajam¯ana must be the soul or the personality as the doer. But there were also the ofﬁciating priests, hot¯a, r.tvij, purohita, brahm¯a, adhvaryu etc.


Sri Aurobindo: What was their part in the symbolism? For if we once suppose a symbolic sense for the sacriﬁce, we must suppose also a symbolic value for each feature of the ceremony. I found that the gods were continually spoken of as priests of the offering and in many passages it was undisguisedly a non-human power or energy which presided over the sacriﬁce. I perceived also that throughout Veda the elements of our personality are themselves continually personiﬁed. I had only to apply this rule inversely and to suppose that the person of the priest in the external ﬁgure represented in the internal activities ﬁgured a non-human power or energy or an element of our personality.


Sri Aurobindo: It remained to ﬁx the psychological sense of the different priestly ofﬁces. Here I found that the Veda itself presented a clue by its philological indications and insistences, such as the use of the word purohita in its separated form with the sense of the representative “put in front” and a frequent reference to the god Agni who symbolises the divine Will or Force in humanity that takes up the action in all consecration of works.  The offerings were more difﬁcult to understand. Even if the Soma-wine by the context in which it occurred, its use and effect and the philological indication of its synonyms, suggested its own interpretation, what could possibly be indicated by the “ghritam”, the clariﬁed butter in the sacriﬁce? And yet the word  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  as used in the Veda was constantly insisting on its own symbolical signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: What for instance could be made of clariﬁed butter dropping from heaven or dripping from the horses of Indra or dripping from the mind? Obviously, this was grotesque nonsense, if the sense of ghr.ta as clariﬁed butter was anything more than a symbol used with great looseness, so that often the external sense was wholly or partly put aside in the mind of the thinker. It was possible of course to vary conveniently the sense of the words, to take ghr.ta sometimes as butter and sometimes as water and manas sometimes as the mind, sometimes as food or a cake. But I found that ghr.ta was constantly used in connection with the thought or the mind, that heaven in Veda was a symbol of the mind, that Indra represented the illuminated mentality and his two horses double energies of that mentality and even that the Veda sometimes speaks plainly of offering the intellect (man¯ıs. ¯a) as puriﬁed ghr.ta to the gods, ghr.ta ˙m na p¯uta ˙m man¯ıs. ¯am.3 The word ghr.ta counts also among its philological signiﬁcances the sense of a rich or warm brightness.


Sri Aurobindo: It was by this concurrence of indications that I felt justiﬁed in ﬁxing a certain psychological signiﬁcance for the ﬁgure of the clariﬁed butter. And I found the same rule and the same method applicable to other features of the sacriﬁce.  The fruits of the offering were in appearance purely material — cows, horses, gold, offspring, men, physical strength, victory in battle. Here the difﬁculty thickened. But I had already found that the Vedic cow was an exceedingly enigmatical animal and came from no earthly herd.


Sri Aurobindo: The word go means both cow and light and in a number of passages evidently meant light even while putting forward the image of the cow. This is clear enough when we have to do with the cows of the sun — the Homeric kine of Helios — and the cows of the Dawn. Psychologically, the physical Light might well be used as a symbol of knowledge and especially of the divine knowledge. But how could this mere possibility be tested and established? I found that passages occurred in which all the surrounding context was psychological 3


Sri Aurobindo: See Rig Veda I.110.6 and III.2.1. — Ed.    and only the image of the cow interfered with its obtrusive material suggestion. Indra is invoked as the maker of perfect forms to drink the wine of Soma; drinking he becomes full of ecstasy and a “giver of cows”; then we can attain to his most intimate or his most ultimate right thinkings, then we question him and his clear discernment brings us our highest good. It is obvious that in such a passage these cows cannot be material herds nor would the giving of physical Light carry any sense in the context. In one instance at least the psychological symbolism of the Vedic cow was established with certainty to my mind.


Sri Aurobindo: I then applied it to other passages in which the word occurred and always I saw that it resulted in the best sense and the greatest possible coherency in the context.  The cow and horse, go and a´sva, are constantly associated.  Usha, the Dawn, is described as gomat¯ı a´svavat¯ı; Dawn gives to the sacriﬁcer horses and cows. As applied to the physical dawn gomat¯ı means accompanied by or bringing the rays of light and is an image of the dawn of illumination in the human mind. Therefore a´svavat¯ı also cannot refer merely to the physical steed; it must have a psychological signiﬁcance as well.


Sri Aurobindo: A study of the Vedic horse led me to the conclusion that go and a´sva represent the two companion ideas of Light and Energy, Consciousness and Force, which to the Vedic and Vedantic mind were the double or twin aspect of all the activities of existence.  It was apparent, therefore, that the two chief fruits of the Vedic sacriﬁce, wealth of cows and wealth of horses, were symbolic of richness of mental illumination and abundance of vital energy. It followed that the other fruits continually associated with these two chief results of the Vedic karma must also be capable of a psychological signiﬁcance. It remained only to ﬁx their exact purport.  Another all-important feature of Vedic symbolism is the system of the worlds and the functions of the gods.


Sri Aurobindo: I found the clue to the symbolism of the worlds in the Vedic conception of the vy¯ahr.tis, the three symbolic words of the mantra, “OM Bhur Bhuvah Swah”, and in the connection of the fourth Vyahriti, Mahas, with the psychological term “Ritam”. The Rishis speak  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  of three cosmic divisions, Earth, the Antariksha or middle region and Heaven (Dyaus); but there is also a greater Heaven (Brihad Dyau) called also the Wide World, the Vast (Brihat), and typiﬁed sometimes as the Great Water, Maho Arnas. This “Brihat” is again described as “Ritam Brihat” or in a triple term “Satyam Ritam Brihat”. And as the three worlds correspond to the Vyahritis, so this fourth world of the Vastness and the Truth seems to correspond to the fourth Vyahriti mentioned in the Upanishads, Mahas.


Sri Aurobindo: In the Puranic formula the four are completed by three others, Jana, Tapas and Satya, the three supreme worlds of the Hindu cosmology. In the Veda also we have three supreme worlds whose names are not given. But in the Vedantic and Puranic system the seven worlds correspond to seven psychological principles or forms of existence, Sat, Chit, Ananda, Vijnana, Manas, Prana and Anna. Now Vijnana, the central principle, the principle of Mahas, the great world, is the Truth of things, identical with the Vedic Ritam which is the principle of Brihat, the Vast, and while in the Puranic system Mahas is followed in the ascending order by Jana, the world of Ananda, of the divine Bliss, in the Veda also Ritam, the Truth, leads upward to Mayas, Bliss. We may, therefore, be fairly sure that the two systems are identical and that both depend on the same idea of seven principles of subjective consciousness formulating themselves in seven objective worlds.


Sri Aurobindo: On this principle I was able to identify the Vedic worlds with the corresponding psychological planes of consciousness and the whole Vedic system became clear to my mind.  With so much established the rest followed naturally and inevitably. I had already seen that the central idea of the Vedic Rishis was the transition of the human soul from a state of death to a state of immortality by the exchange of the Falsehood for the Truth, of divided and limited being for integrality and inﬁnity.  Death is the mortal state of Matter with Mind and Life involved in it; Immortality is a state of inﬁnite being, consciousness and bliss. Man rises beyond the two ﬁrmaments, Rodasi, Heaven and Earth, mind and body, to the inﬁnity of the Truth, Mahas,   and so to the divine Bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the “great passage” discovered by the Ancestors, the ancient Rishis.  The gods I found to be described as children of Light, sons of Aditi, of Inﬁnity; and without exception they are described as increasing man, bringing him light, pouring on him the fullness of the waters, the abundance of the heavens, increasing the truth in him, building up the divine worlds, leading him against all attacks to the great goal, the integral felicity, the perfect bliss.  Their separate functions emerged by means of their activities, their epithets, the psychological sense of the legends connected with them, the indications of the Upanishads and Puranas, the occasional side-lights from Greek myth. On the other hand the demons who opposed them, are all powers of division and limitation, Coverers, Tearers, Devourers, Conﬁners, Dualisers, Obstructers, as their names indicate, powers that work against the free and uniﬁed integrality of the being. These Vritras, Panis, Atris, Rakshasas, Sambara, Vala, Namuchi, are not Dravidian kings and gods, as the modern mind with its exaggerated historic sense would like them to be; they represent a more antique idea better suited to the religious and ethical preoccupations of our forefathers.


Sri Aurobindo: They represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of the Rig Veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwise expressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethical directness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancient neighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a common original discipline of the Aryan culture.  Finally, I found that the systematic symbolism of the Veda was extended to the legends related of the gods and of their dealings with the ancient seers. Some of these myths, if not all, may have had, in all probability had, a naturalistic and astronomical origin; but, if so, their original sense had been supplemented by a psychological symbolism. Once the sense of the Vedic symbols is known, the spiritual intention of these legends becomes apparent and inevitable. Every element of the Veda is inextricably bound up with every other and the very nature of these compositions compels us, once we have adopted a principle of interpretation,  The Foundations of the Psychological Theory  to carry it to its farthest rational limits.


Sri Aurobindo: Their materials have been skilfully welded together by ﬁrm hands and any inconsistency in our handling of them shatters the whole fabric of their sense and their coherent thinking.  Thus there emerged in my mind, revealing itself as it were out of the ancient verses, a Veda which was throughout the Scripture of a great and antique religion already equipped with a profound psychological discipline, — a Scripture not confused in thought or primitive in its substance, not a medley of heterogeneous or barbarous elements, but one, complete and selfconscious in its purpose and in its purport, veiled indeed by the cover, sometimes thick, sometimes transparent, of another and material sense, but never losing sight even for a single moment of its high spiritual aim and tendency.   Chapter V The Philological Method of the Veda N O INTERPRETATION of the Veda can be sound which does not rest on a sound and secure philological basis; and yet this scripture with its obscure and antique tongue of which it is the sole remaining document offers unique philological difﬁculties. To rely entirely on the traditional and often imaginative renderings of the Indian scholars is impossible for any critical mind. Modern philology strives after a more secure and scientiﬁc basis, but has not yet found it.