Sri Aurobindo: In the psychological interpretation of the Veda there are, especially, two difﬁculties which can only be met by a satisfactory philological justiﬁcation. This interpretation necessitates the acceptance of several new senses for a fair number of ﬁxed technical terms of the Veda, — terms, for example like ¯uti, avas, vayas. These new renderings satisfy one test we may fairly demand; they ﬁt into every context, clarify the sense and free us from the necessity of attributing quite different signiﬁcances to the same term in a work of so ﬁxed a form as the Veda. But this test is not sufﬁcient. We must have, besides, a philological basis which will not only account for the new sense, but also explain how a single word came to be capable of so many different meanings, the sense attached to it by the psychological interpretation, those given to it by the old grammarians and those, if any, which are attached to it in later Sanskrit.


Sri Aurobindo: But this is not easily possible unless we ﬁnd a more scientiﬁc basis for our philological deductions than our present knowledge affords.  Secondly, the theory of the psychological interpretation depends very often on the use of a double meaning for important words, — the key-words of the secret teaching. The ﬁgure is one that is traditional in Sanskrit literature and sometimes employed with an excess of artiﬁce in the later classical works; it is the ´sles.a or rhetorical ﬁgure of double entendre. But its very artiﬁciality  The Philological Method of the Veda  predisposes us to believe that this poetical device must belong necessarily to a later and more sophisticated culture. How are we to account for its constant presence in a work of the remotest antiquity?


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover, there is a peculiar extension of it in the Vedic use, a deliberate employment of the “multi-signiﬁcance” of Sanskrit roots in order to pack as much meaning as possible into a single word, which at ﬁrst sight enhances the difﬁculty of the problem to an extraordinary degree. For instance, the word, a´sva, usually signifying a horse, is used as a ﬁgure of the Prana, the nervous energy, the vital breath, the half-mental, half-material dynamism which links mind and matter. Its root is capable, among other senses, of the ideas of impulsion, force, possession, enjoyment, and we ﬁnd all these meanings united in this ﬁgure of the Steed of Life to indicate the essential tendencies of the Pranic energy. Such a use of language would not be possible if the tongue of the Aryan forefathers obeyed the same conventions as our modern speech or were in the same stage of development. But if we can suppose that there was some peculiarity in the old Aryan tongue as it was used by the Vedic Rishis by which words were felt to be more alive, less merely conventional symbols of ideas, more free in their transitions of meaning than in our later use of speech, then we shall ﬁnd that these devices were not at all artiﬁcial or far-fetched to their employers, but were rather the ﬁrst natural means which would suggest themselves to men anxious at once to ﬁnd new, brief and adequate formulae of speech for psychological conceptions not understood by the vulgar and to conceal the ideas contained in their formulae from a profane intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: I believe that this is the true explanation; it can be established, I think, by a study of the development of Aryan speech that language did pass through a stage peculiarly favourable to this cryptic and psychological use of words which in their popular handling have a plain, precise and physical signiﬁcance.  I have already indicated that my ﬁrst study of Tamil words had brought me to what seemed a clue to the very origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue; and so far did this clue lead that I lost sight entirely of my original subject of interest, the   connections between Aryan and Dravidian speech, and plunged into the far more interesting research of the origins and laws of development of human language itself. It seems to me that this great inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations of linguistic scholars should be the ﬁrst and central aim of any true science of Philology.  Owing to the failure of the ﬁrst hopes which attended the birth of modern Philology, its meagre results, its crystallisation into the character of a “petty conjectural science”, the idea of a Science of Language is now discredited and its very possibility, on quite insufﬁcient reasoning, entirely denied. It seems to me impossible to acquiesce in such a ﬁnal negation.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is one thing that Modern Science has triumphantly established, it is the reign of law and process of evolution in the history of all earthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature of Speech, in its outward manifestation as human language it is an organism, a growth, a terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constant psychological element and is therefore more free, ﬂexible, consciously self-adaptive than purely physical organisms; its secret is more difﬁcult to seize, its constituents yield themselves only to more subtle and less trenchant methods of analysis. But law and process exist in mental no less than in material phenomena in spite of their more volatile and variable appearances. Law and process must have governed the origins and developments of language.


Sri Aurobindo: Given the necessary clue and sufﬁcient data, they must be discoverable. It seems to me that in the Sanskrit language the clue can be found, the data lie ready for investigation.  The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at a more satisfactory result in this direction, was its preoccupation in the physical parts of speech with the exterior morphology of language and in its psychological parts with the equally external connections of formed vocables and of grammatical inﬂexions in kindred languages. But the true method of Science is to go back to the origins, the embryology, the elements and more obscure processes of things. From the obvious only the obvious and superﬁcial results.


Sri Aurobindo: The profundities of things, their real truth, can best be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that  The Philological Method of the Veda  the surface of phenomena conceals, into that past development of which the ﬁnished forms present only secret and dispersed indications or into the possibilities from which the actualities we see are only a narrow selection. A similar method applied to the earlier forms of human speech can alone give us a real Science of Language.  It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief and devoted to another subject that it is at all possible to present the results of the work that I have attempted on these lines.1 I can only brieﬂy indicate the one or two features which bear directly on the subject of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them here solely to avoid any supposition in the minds of my readers that in departing from the received senses of certain Vedic words I have simply taken advantage of that freedom of ingenious conjecture which is at once one of the great attractions and one of the most serious weaknesses of modern Philology.


Sri Aurobindo: My researches ﬁrst convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artiﬁcial products, but growths, — living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number of primitive rootwords with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general signiﬁcances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds.  The process of this association was also in no sense artiﬁcial but natural, governed by simple and deﬁnite psychological laws.  In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values.


Sri Aurobindo: It was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To 1 I propose to deal with them in a separate work on “The Origins of Aryan Speech”.  [See Vedic Studies with Writings on Philology, volume 14 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO.]    use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the original artiﬁcers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital and sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions.


Sri Aurobindo: By a similar process the intellectual use of language has developed by a natural law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which were originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, have evolved into ﬁxed symbols of precise intellectual signiﬁcances.  In consequence, the word originally was not ﬁxed to any precise idea. It had a general character or quality (gun.a), which was capable of a great number of applications and therefore of a great number of possible signiﬁcances. And this gun.a and its results it shared with many kindred sounds.


Sri Aurobindo: At ﬁrst, therefore, word-clans, word-families started life on the communal system with a common stock of possible and realised signiﬁcances and a common right to all of them; their individuality lay rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive right to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language was a development from this communal life of words to a system of individual property in one or more intellectual signiﬁcances.  The principle of partition was at ﬁrst ﬂuid, then increased in rigidity, until word-families and ﬁnally single words were able to start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes when the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents.  For in the ﬁrst state of language the word is as living or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense.


Sri Aurobindo: In its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important, the sound secondary.  Another feature of the early history of language is that it expresses at ﬁrst a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete, such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of idea. The progression is from the general to the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the  The Philological Method of the Veda  expression of an abundant variety of sensations about similar things to the expression of precise difference between similar things, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and, although no doubt due to the environments and actual experiences of the men who spoke the language, wear the appearance of ﬁxed natural laws of development.


Sri Aurobindo: And after all what is a law but a process which has been worked out by the nature of things in response to the necessities of their environment and has become the ﬁxed habit of their action?  From this past history of language certain consequences derive which are of considerable importance in Vedic interpretation. In the ﬁrst place by a knowledge of the laws under which the relations of sound and sense formed themselves in the Sanskrit tongue and by a careful and minute study of its wordfamilies it is possible to a great extent to restore the past history of individual words. It is possible to account for the meanings actually possessed by them, to show how they were worked out through the various stages of language-development, to establish the mutual relations of different signiﬁcances and to explain how they came to be attached to the same word in spite of the wide difference and sometimes even the direct contrariety of their sense-values. It is possible also to restore lost senses of words on a sure and scientiﬁc basis and to justify them by an appeal to the observed laws of association which governed the development of the old Aryan tongues, to the secret evidence of the word itself and to the corroborative evidence of its immediate kindred.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus instead of having a purely ﬂoating and conjectural basis for our dealings with the vocables of the Vedic language, we can work with conﬁdence upon a solid and reliable foundation.  Naturally, it does not follow that because a Vedic word may or must have had at one time a particular signiﬁcance, that signiﬁcance can be safely applied to the actual text of the Veda. But we do establish a sound sense and a clear possibility of its being the right sense for the Veda. The rest is a matter of comparative study of the passages in which the word occurs and of constant ﬁtness in the context. I have continually found that   a sense thus restored illumines always the context wherever it is applied and on the other hand that a sense demanded always by the context is precisely that to which we are led by the history of the word.


Sri Aurobindo: This is a sufﬁcient basis for a moral, if not for an absolute certainty.  Secondly, one remarkable feature of language in its inception is the enormous number of different meanings of which a single word was capable and also the enormous number of words which could be used to represent a single idea. Afterwards this tropical luxuriance came to be cut down. The intellect intervened with its growing need of precision, its growing sense of economy.  The bearing capacity of words progressively diminished; and it became less and less tolerable to be burdened with a superﬂuous number of words for the same idea, a redundant variety of ideas for the same word.


Sri Aurobindo: A considerable, though not too rigid economy in these respects, modiﬁed by a demand for a temperate richness of variation, became the ﬁnal law of language. But the Sanskrit tongue never quite reached the ﬁnal stages of this development; it dissolved too early into the Prakrit dialects. Even in its latest and most literary form it is lavish of varieties of meanings for the same word; it overﬂows with a redundant wealth of synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity for rhetorical devices which in any other language would be difﬁcult, forced and hopelessly artiﬁcial, and especially for the ﬁgure of double sense, of ´sles.a.


Sri Aurobindo: The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the development of language. Even in its outward features it is less ﬁxed than any classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of forms and inﬂexions; it is ﬂuid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use of cases and tenses. And on its psychological side it has not yet crystallised, is not entirely hardened into the rigid forms of intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi is still a living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is not yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent and former of ideas.


Sri Aurobindo: It carries within it the memory of its roots, is still conscient of its own history.  The Rishis’ use of language was governed by this ancient  The Philological Method of the Veda  psychology of the Word. When in English we use the word “wolf” or “cow”, we mean by it simply the animal designated; we are not conscious of any reason why we should use that particular sound for the idea except the immemorial custom of the language; and we cannot use it for any other sense or purpose except by an artiﬁcial device of style. But for the Vedic Rishi “vrika” meant the tearer and therefore, among other applications of the sense, a wolf; “dhenu” meant the fosterer, nourisher, and therefore a cow. But the original and general sense predominates, the derived and particular is secondary.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore, it was possible for the fashioner of the hymn to use these common words with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward the image of the wolf or the cow, sometimes using it to colour the more general sense, sometimes keeping it merely as a conventional ﬁgure for the psychological conception on which his mind was dwelling, sometimes losing sight of the image altogether. It is in the light of this psychology of the old language that we have to understand the peculiar ﬁgures of Vedic symbolism as handled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common and concrete. It is so that words like “ghritam”, the clariﬁed butter, “soma”, the sacred wine, and a host of others are used.  Moreover, the partitions made by the thought between different senses of the same word were much less separative than in modern speech. In English “ﬂeet” meaning a number of ships and “ﬂeet” meaning swift are two different words; when we use “ﬂeet” in the ﬁrst sense we do not think of the swiftness of the ship’s motion, nor when we use it in the second, do we recall the image of ships gliding rapidly over the ocean.


Sri Aurobindo: But this was precisely what was apt to occur in the Vedic use of language.  “Bhaga”, enjoyment, and “bhaga”, share, were for the Vedic mind not different words, but one word which had developed two different uses. Therefore it was easy for the Rishis to employ it in one of the two senses with the other at the back of the mind colouring its overt connotation or even to use it equally in both senses at a time by a sort of ﬁgure of cumulative signiﬁcance.  “Chanas” meant food but also it meant “enjoyment, pleasure” ; therefore it could be used by the Rishi to suggest to the profane   mind only the food given at the sacriﬁce to the gods, but for the initiated it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss entering into the physical consciousness and at the same time suggested the image of the Soma-wine, at once the food of the gods and the Vedic symbol of the Ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: We see everywhere this use of language dominating the Word of the Vedic hymns. It was the great device by which the ancient Mystics overcame the difﬁculty of their task. Agni for the ordinary worshipper may have meant simply the god of the Vedic ﬁre, or it may have meant the principle of Heat and Light in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may have meant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many “givers of wealth”, satisﬁers of human desire. How suggest to those capable of a deeper conception the psychological functions of the God? The word itself fulﬁlled that service.


Sri Aurobindo: For Agni meant the Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. So it could easily recall to the initiated, wherever it occurred, the idea of the illumined Energy which builds up the worlds and which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, the Purohit of the human sacriﬁce.  Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all these gods are personalities of the one universal Deva? The names of the gods in their very meaning recall that they are only epithets, signiﬁcant names, descriptions, not personal appellations. Mitra is the Deva as the Lord of love and harmony, Bhaga as the Lord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of illumination, Varuna as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supporting and perfecting the world.


Sri Aurobindo: “The Existent is One,” says the Rishi Dirghatamas, “but the sages express It variously; they say Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Agni; they call It Agni, Yama, Matarishwan.”  The initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge had no need of this express statement. The names of the gods carried to him their own signiﬁcance and recalled the great fundamental truth which remained with him always.  But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishis turned against the preservation of the knowledge. For language changed its character, rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old  The Philological Method of the Veda  familiar senses; the word contracted and shrank into its outer and concrete signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: The ambrosial wine of the Ananda was forgotten in the physical offering; the image of the clariﬁed butter recalled only the gross libation to mythological deities, lords of the ﬁre and the cloud and the storm-blast, godheads void of any but a material energy and an external lustre. The letter lived on when the spirit was forgotten; the symbol, the body of the doctrine, remained, but the soul of knowledge had ﬂed from its coverings.   Chapter VI Agni and the Truth  T HE RIG VEDA is one in all its parts. Whichever of its ten Mandalas we choose, we ﬁnd the same substance, the same ideas, the same images, the same phrases.


Sri Aurobindo: The Rishis are the seers of a single truth and use in its expression a common language. They differ in temperament and personality; some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use of Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion.  Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the utmost simplicity to the most curious richness. Or there are risings and fallings in the same hymn; it proceeds from the most ordinary conventions of the general symbol of sacriﬁce to a movement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others bafﬂe us at ﬁrst by their semblance of antique obscurity.


Sri Aurobindo: But these differences of manner take nothing from the unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the ﬁxed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vasishtha’s even harmonies we have the same ﬁrm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates.  From this peculiarity of the Vedic compositions it results that the method of interpretation which I have described can be equally well illustrated from a number of scattered Suktas selected from the ten Mandalas or from any small block of hymns by a single Rishi. If my purpose were to establish beyond all possibility of objection the interpretation which I am now offering, a much more detailed and considerable work would  Agni and the Truth  be necessary. A critical scrutiny covering the whole of the ten Mandalas would be indispensable.


Sri Aurobindo: To justify for instance the idea I attach to the Vedic term Ritam, the Truth, or my explanation of the symbol of the Cow of Light, I should have to cite all passages of any importance in which the idea of the Truth or the image of the Cow are introduced and establish my thesis by an examination of their sense and context. Or if I wish to prove that Indra in the Veda is really in his psychological functions the master of luminous mind typiﬁed by Dyaus, or Heaven, with its three shining realms, Rochana, I should have to examine similarly the hymns addressed to Indra and the passages in which there is a clear mention of the Vedic system of worlds. Nor could this be sufﬁcient, so intertwined and interdependent are the notions of the Veda, without some scrutiny of the other Gods and of other important psychological terms connected with the idea of the Truth and of the mental illumination through which man arrives at it. I recognise the necessity of such a work of justiﬁcation and hope to follow it out in other studies on the Vedic Truth, on the Gods of the Veda and on Vedic symbols. But a labour of this scope would be beyond the range of the present work, which is conﬁned merely to an illustration of my method and to a brief statement of the results of my theory.


Sri Aurobindo: In order to illustrate the method I propose to take the ﬁrst eleven Suktas of the ﬁrst Mandala and to show how some of the central ideas of a psychological interpretation arise out of certain important passages or single hymns and how the surrounding context of the passages and the general thought of the hymns assume an entirely new appearance in the light of this profounder thinking.  The Sanhita of the Rig Veda, as we possess it, is arranged in ten books or Mandalas. A double principle is observed in the arrangement. Six of the Mandalas are given each to the hymns of a single Rishi or family of Rishis. Thus the second is devoted chieﬂy to the Suktas of the Rishi Gritsamada, the third and the seventh similarly to the great names of Vishwamitra and Vasishtha respectively, the fourth to Vamadeva, the sixth to   Bharadwaja.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁfth is occupied by the hymns of the house of Atri. In each of these Mandalas the Suktas addressed to Agni are ﬁrst collected together and followed by those of which Indra is the deity; the invocations of other gods, Brihaspati, Surya, the Ribhus, Usha etc. close the Mandala. A whole book, the ninth, is given to a single god, Soma. The ﬁrst, eighth and tenth Mandalas are collections of Suktas by various Rishis, but the hymns of each seer are ordinarily placed together in the order of their deities, Agni leading, Indra following, the other gods succeeding. Thus the ﬁrst Mandala opens with ten hymns of the seer Madhuchchhandas, son of Vishwamitra, and an eleventh ascribed to Jetri, son of Madhuchchhandas.


Sri Aurobindo: This last Sukta, however, is identical in style, manner and spirit with the ten that precede it and they can all be taken together as a single block of hymns one in intention and diction.  A certain principle of thought-development also has not been absent from the arrangement of these Vedic hymns. The opening Mandala seems to have been so designed that the general thought of the Veda in its various elements should gradually unroll itself under the cover of the established symbols by the voices of a certain number of Rishis who almost all rank high as thinkers and sacred singers and are, some of them, among the most famous names of Vedic tradition. Nor can it be by accident that the tenth or closing Mandala gives us, with an even greater miscellaneity of authors, the last developments of the thought of the Veda and some of the most modern in language of its Suktas.  It is here that we ﬁnd the Sacriﬁce of the Purusha and the great Hymn of the Creation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is here also that modern scholars think they discover the ﬁrst origins of the Vedantic philosophy, the Brahmavada.  In any case, the hymns of the son and grandson of Vishwamitra with which the Rig Veda opens strike admirably the ﬁrst essential notes of the Vedic harmony. The ﬁrst hymn, addressed to Agni, suggests the central conception of the Truth which is conﬁrmed in the second and third Suktas invoking Indra in company with other gods. In the remaining eight hymns with Indra as the sole deity, except for one which he shares with the Maruts,  Agni and the Truth  we ﬁnd the symbols of the Soma and the Cow, the obstructor Vritra and the great role played by Indra in leading man to the Light and overthrowing the barriers to his progress. These hymns are therefore of crucial importance to the psychological interpretation of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: There are four verses in the Hymn to Agni, the ﬁfth to the eighth, in which the psychological sense comes out with a great force and clearness, escaping from the veil of the symbol.  Agnir hot¯a kavikratuh., satya´s citra´sravastamah.; devo devebhir ¯a gamat.  Yad a˙nga d¯a´sus.e tvam, agne bhadra ˙m karis.yasi; tavet tat satyam a˙ngirah..  Upa tv¯agne dive dive, dos. ¯avastar dhiy¯a vayam; namo bharanta emasi.


Sri Aurobindo: R¯ajantam adhvar¯an. ¯a ˙m, gop¯am r.tasya d¯ıdivim; vardham¯ana ˙m sve dame.  In this passage we have a series of terms plainly bearing or obviously capable of a psychological sense and giving their colour to the whole context. Sayana, however, insists on a purely ritual interpretation and it is interesting to see how he arrives at it. In the ﬁrst phrase we have the word kavi meaning a seer and, even if we take kratu to mean work of the sacriﬁce, we shall have as a result, “Agni, the priest whose work or rite is that of the seer”, a turn which at once gives a symbolic character to the sacriﬁce and is in itself sufﬁcient to serve as the seed of a deeper understanding of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: Sayana feels that he has to turn the difﬁculty at any cost and therefore he gets rid of the sense of seer for kavi and gives it another and unusual signiﬁcance. He then explains that Agni is satya, true, because he brings about the true fruit of the sacriﬁce. ´Sravas Sayana renders “fame”, Agni has an exceedingly various renown. It would have been surely better to take the word in the sense of wealth so as to avoid the incoherency of this last rendering. We shall then have this result for the ﬁfth verse, “Agni the priest, active in the ritual, who is true (in its fruit) — for his is the most varied wealth, — let him come, a god with the gods.”


Sri Aurobindo: To the sixth Rik the commentator gives a very awkward and abrupt construction and trivial turn of thought which breaks entirely the ﬂow of the verse. “That good (in the shape of varied wealth) which thou shalt effect for the giver, thine is that. This is true, O Angiras,” that is to say, there can be no doubt about this fact, for if Agni does good to the giver by providing him with wealth, he in turn will perform fresh sacriﬁces to Agni, and thus the good of the sacriﬁcer becomes the good of the god. Here again it would be better to render, “The good that thou wilt do for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Angiras,” for we thus get at once a simpler sense and construction and an explanation of the epithet, satya, true, as applied to the god of the sacriﬁcial ﬁre. This is the truth of Agni that to the giver of the sacriﬁce he surely gives good in return.


Sri Aurobindo: The seventh verse offers no difﬁculty to the ritualistic interpretation except the curious phrase, “we come bearing the prostration.” Sayana explains that bearing here means simply doing and he renders, “To thee day by day we, by night and by day, come with the thought performing the prostration.” In the eighth verse he takes r.tasya in the sense of truth and explains it as the true fruit of the ritual. “To thee shining, the protector of the sacriﬁces, manifesting always their truth (that is, their inevitable fruit), increasing in thy own house.” Again, it would be simpler and better to take r.tam in the sense of sacriﬁce and to render, “To thee shining out in the sacriﬁces, protector of the rite, ever luminous, increasing in thy own house.”


Sri Aurobindo: The “own house” of Agni, says the commentator, is the place of sacriﬁce and this is indeed called frequently enough in Sanskrit, “the house of Agni”.  We see, therefore, that with a little managing we can work out a purely ritual sense quite empty of thought even for a passage which at ﬁrst sight offers a considerable wealth of psychological signiﬁcance. Nevertheless, however ingeniously it is effected, ﬂaws and cracks remain which betray the artiﬁciality of the work. We have had to throw overboard the plain sense of kavi which adheres to it throughout the Veda and foist in an unreal rendering. We have either to divorce the two words  Agni and the Truth  satya and r.ta which are closely associated in the Veda or to give a forced sense to r.ta.


Sri Aurobindo: And throughout we have avoided the natural suggestions pressed on us by the language of the Rishi.   Let us now follow instead the opposite principle and give their full psychological value to the words of the inspired text.  Kratu means in Sanskrit work or action and especially work in the sense of the sacriﬁce; but it means also power or strength (the Greek kratos) effective of action. Psychologically this power effective of action is the will.


Sri Aurobindo: The word may also mean mind or intellect and Sayana admits thought or knowledge as a possible sense for kratu. ´Sravas means literally hearing and from this primary signiﬁcance is derived its secondary sense, “fame”. But, psychologically, the idea of hearing leads up in Sanskrit to another sense which we ﬁnd in ´sravan.a, ´sruti, ´sruta, — revealed knowledge, the knowledge which comes by inspiration. Dr.s.t.i and ´sruti, sight and hearing, revelation and inspiration are the two chief powers of that supra-mental faculty which belongs to the old Vedic idea of the Truth, the Ritam. The word ´sravas is not recognised by the lexicographers in this sense, but it is accepted in the sense of a hymn, — the inspired word of the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: This indicates clearly that at one time it conveyed the idea of inspiration or of something inspired, whether word or knowledge. This signiﬁcance, then, we are entitled to give it, provisionally at least, in the present passage; for the other sense of fame is entirely incoherent and meaningless in the context.  Again the word namas is also capable of a psychological sense; for it means literally “bending down” and is applied to the act of adoring submission to the deity rendered physically by the prostration of the body. When therefore the Rishi speaks of “bearing obeisance to Agni by the thought” we can hardly doubt that he gives to namas the psychological sense of the inward prostration, the act of submission or surrender to the deity.  We get then this rendering of the four verses: — “May Agni, priest of the offering whose will towards action is that of the seer, who is true, most rich in varied inspiration, come, a god with the gods.


Sri Aurobindo: “The good that thou wilt create for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Angiras.  “To thee day by day, O Agni, in the night and in the light we by the thought come bearing our submission, — “To thee who shinest out from the sacriﬁces (or, who governest the sacriﬁces), guardian of the Truth and its illumination, increasing in thy own home.”  The defect of the translation is that we have had to employ one and the same word for satyam and r.tam whereas, as we see in the formula satyam r.ta ˙m br.hat, there was a distinction in the Vedic mind between the precise signiﬁcances of the two words.  Who, then, is this god Agni to whom language of so mystic a fervour is addressed, to whom functions so vast and profound are ascribed? Who is this guardian of the Truth, who is in his act its illumination, whose will in the act is the will of a seer possessed of a divine wisdom governing his richly varied inspiration?


Sri Aurobindo: What is the Truth that he guards? And what is this good that he creates for the giver who comes always to him in thought day and night bearing as his sacriﬁce submission and self-surrender? Is it gold and horses and cattle that he brings or is it some diviner riches?  It is not the sacriﬁcial Fire that is capable of these functions, nor can it be any material ﬂame or principle of physical heat and light. Yet throughout the symbol of the sacriﬁcial Fire is maintained.


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident that we are in the presence of a mystic symbolism to which the ﬁre, the sacriﬁce, the priest are only outward ﬁgures of a deeper teaching and yet ﬁgures which it was thought necessary to maintain and to hold constantly in front.  In the early Vedantic teaching of the Upanishads we come across a conception of the Truth which is often expressed by formulas taken from the hymns of the Veda, such as the expression already quoted, satyam r.ta ˙m br.hat, — the truth, the right, the vast. This Truth is spoken of in the Veda as a path leading to felicity, leading to immortality. In the Upanishads also it is by the path of the Truth that the sage or seer, Rishi or Kavi, passes beyond. He passes out of the falsehood, out of the mortal  Agni and the Truth  state into an immortal existence.


Sri Aurobindo: We have the right therefore to assume that the same conception is in question in both Veda and Vedanta.  This psychological conception is that of a truth which is truth of divine essence, not truth of mortal sensation and appearance. It is satyam, truth of being; it is in its action r.tam, right, — truth of divine being regulating right activity both of mind and body; it is br.hat, the universal truth proceeding direct and undeformed out of the Inﬁnite. The consciousness that corresponds to it is also inﬁnite, br.hat, large as opposed to the consciousness of the sense-mind which is founded upon limitation. The one is described as bh¯um¯a, the large, the other as alpa, the little.


Sri Aurobindo: Another name for this supramental or truth consciousness is Mahas which also means the great, the vast. And as for the facts of sensation and appearance which are full of falsehoods (anr.tam, not-truth or wrong application of the satyam in mental and bodily activity), we have for instruments the senses, the sense-mind (manas) and the intellect working upon their evidence, so for the truth-consciousness there are corresponding faculties, — dr.s.t.i, ´sruti, viveka, the direct vision of the truth, the direct hearing of its word, the direct discrimination of the right.  Whoever is in possession of this truth-consciousness or open to the action of these faculties, is the Rishi or Kavi, sage or seer. It is these conceptions of the truth, satyam and r.tam, that we have  to


Sri Aurobindo: apply in this opening hymn of the Veda .  Agni in the Veda is always presented in the double aspect of force and light. He is the divine power that builds up the worlds, a power which acts always with a perfect knowledge, for it is j¯atavedas, knower of all births, vi´sv¯ani vayun¯ani vidv¯an, — it knows all manifestations or phenomena or it possesses all forms and activities of the divine wisdom. Moreover it is repeatedly said that the gods have established Agni as the immortal in mortals, the divine power in man, the energy of fulﬁlment through which they do their work in him.


Sri Aurobindo: It is this work which is symbolised by the sacriﬁce.  Psychologically, then, we may take Agni to be the divine will perfectly inspired by divine Wisdom, and indeed one with it,   which is the active or effective power of the Truth-consciousness.  This is the obvious sense of the word kavikratuh., he whose active will or power of effectivity is that of the seer, — works, that is to say, with the knowledge which comes by the truth-consciousness and in which there is no misapplication or error. The epithets that follow conﬁrm this interpretation. Agni is satya, true in his being; perfect possession of his own truth and the essential truth of things gives him the power to apply it perfectly in all act and movement of force.


Sri Aurobindo: He has both the satyam and the r.tam. Moreover, he is citra´sravastamah.; from the Ritam there proceeds a fullness of richly luminous and varied inspirations which give the capacity for doing the perfect work. For all these are epithets of Agni as the hotr., the priest of the sacriﬁce, he who performs the offering. Therefore it is the power of Agni to apply the Truth in the work (karma or apas) symbolised by the sacriﬁce, that makes him the object of human invocation.  The importance of the sacriﬁcial ﬁre in the outward ritual corresponds to the importance of this inward force of uniﬁed Light and Power in the inward rite by which there is communication and interchange between the mortal and the Immortal.


Sri Aurobindo: Agni is elsewhere frequently described as the envoy, d¯uta, the medium of that communication and interchange.  We see, then, in what capacity Agni is called to the sacriﬁce.  “Let him come, a god with the gods.” The emphasis given to the idea of divinity by this repetition, devo devebhir, becomes intelligible when we recall the standing description of Agni as the god in human beings, the immortal in mortals, the divine guest. We may give the full psychological sense by translating, “Let him come, a divine power with the divine powers.”


Sri Aurobindo: For in the external sense of the Veda the Gods are universal powers of physical Nature personiﬁed; in any inner sense they must be universal powers of Nature in her subjective activities, Will, Mind, etc. But in the Veda there is always a distinction between the ordinary human or mental action of these puissances, manus.vat, and the divine. It is supposed that man by the right use of their mental action in the inner sacriﬁce to the gods can convert them into their true or divine nature, the mortal can  Agni and the Truth  become immortal. Thus the Ribhus, who were at ﬁrst human beings or represented human faculties, became divine and immortal powers by perfection in the work, sukr.tyay¯a, svapasyay¯a.  It is a continual self-offering of the human to the divine and a continual descent of the divine into the human which seems to be symbolised in the sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: The state of immortality thus attained is conceived as a state of felicity or bliss founded on a perfect Truth and Right, satyam r.tam. We must, I think, understand in this sense the verse that follows. “The good (happiness) which thou wilt create for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Agni.” In other words, the essence of this truth, which is the nature of Agni, is the freedom from evil, the state of perfect good and happiness which the Ritam carries in itself and which is sure to be created in the mortal when he offers the sacriﬁce by the action of Agni as the divine priest. Bhadram means anything good, auspicious, happy and by itself need not carry any deep signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: But we ﬁnd it in the Veda used, like r.tam, in a special sense. It is described in one of the hymns (V.82) as the opposite of the evil dream (duh.s.vapnyam), the false consciousness of that which is not the Ritam, and of duritam, false going, which means all evil and suffering. Bhadram is therefore equivalent to suvitam, right going, which means all good and felicity belonging to the state of the Truth, the Ritam. It is Mayas, the felicity, and the gods who represent the Truthconsciousness are described as mayobhuvah., those who bring or carry in their being the felicity. Thus every part of the Veda, if properly understood, throws light upon every other part.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only when we are misled by its veils that we ﬁnd in it an incoherence.  In the next verse there seems to be stated the condition of the effective sacriﬁce. It is the continual resort day by day, in the night and in the light, of the thought in the human being with submission, adoration, self-surrender, to the divine Will and Wisdom represented by Agni. Night and Day, Naktos. ¯as¯a, are also symbolical, like all the other gods in the Veda, and the sense seems to be that in all states of consciousness, whether   illumined or obscure, there must be a constant submission and reference of all activities to the divine control.


Sri Aurobindo: For whether by day or night Agni shines out in the sacriﬁces; he is the guardian of the Truth, of the Ritam in man and defends it from the powers of darkness; he is its constant illumination burning up even in obscure and besieged states of the mind. The ideas thus brieﬂy indicated in the eighth verse are constantly found throughout the hymns to Agni in the Rig Veda.  Agni is ﬁnally described as increasing in his own home. We can no longer be satisﬁed with the explanation of the own home of Agni as the “ﬁre-room” of the Vedic householder. We must seek in the Veda itself for another interpretation and we ﬁnd it in the 75th hymn of the ﬁrst Mandala.


Sri Aurobindo: Yaj¯a no mitr¯avarun. ¯a, yaj¯a dev¯an r.ta ˙m br.hat; agne yaks.i sva ˙m damam.   “Sacriﬁce for us to Mitra and Varuna, sacriﬁce to the gods, to the Truth, the Vast; O Agni, sacriﬁce to thy own home.”  Here r.ta ˙m br.hat and sva ˙m damam seem to express the goal of the sacriﬁce and this is perfectly in consonance with the imagery of the Veda which frequently describes the sacriﬁce as travelling towards the gods and man himself as a traveller moving towards the truth, the light or the felicity.


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident, therefore, that the Truth, the Vast and Agni’s own home are identical. Agni and other gods are frequently spoken of as being born in the truth, dwelling in the wide or vast. The sense, then, will be in our passage that Agni the divine will and power in man increases in the truth-consciousness, its proper sphere, where false limitations are broken down, ur¯av anib¯adhe, in the wide and the limitless.  Thus in these four verses of the opening hymn of the Veda we get the ﬁrst indications of the principal ideas of the Vedic Rishis, — the conception of a Truth-consciousness supramental and divine, the invocation of the gods as powers of the Truth to raise man out of the falsehoods of the mortal mind, the attainment in and by this Truth of an immortal state of perfect good and felicity and the inner sacriﬁce and offering of what  Agni and the Truth  one has and is by the mortal to the Immortal as the means of the divine consummation. All the rest of Vedic thought in its spiritual aspects is grouped around these central conceptions.


Sri Aurobindo: Chapter VII Varuna-Mitra and the Truth I F THE idea of the Truth that we have found in the very opening hymn of the Veda really carries in itself the contents we have supposed and amounts to the conception of a supramental consciousness which is the condition of the state of immortality or beatitude and if this be the leading conception of the Vedic Rishis, we are bound to ﬁnd it recurring throughout the hymns as a centre for other and dependent psychological realisations. In the very next Sukta, the second hymn of Madhuchchhandas addressed to Indra and Vayu, we ﬁnd another passage full of clear and this time quite invincible psychological suggestions in which the idea of the Ritam is insisted upon with an even greater force than in the hymn to Agni. The passage comprises the last three Riks of the Sukta.  Mitra ˙m huve p¯utadaks.a ˙m, varun.a ˙m ca ri´s¯adasam; dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ı ˙m s¯adhant¯a.


Sri Aurobindo: R. tena mitr¯avarun. ¯av, r.t¯avr.dh¯av r.taspr.´s¯a; kratu ˙m br.hantam ¯a´s¯athe.  Kav¯ı no mitr¯avarun. ¯a, tuvij¯at¯a uruks.ay¯a; daks.a ˙m dadh¯ate apasam.


Sri Aurobindo: In the ﬁrst Rik of this passage we have the word daks.a usually explained by Sayana as strength, but capable of a psychological signiﬁcance, the important word ghr.ta in the adjectival form ghr.t¯ac¯ı and the remarkable phrase dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ım. The verse may be translated literally “I invoke Mitra of puriﬁed strength (or, puriﬁed discernment) and Varuna destroyer of our foes perfecting (or accomplishing) a bright understanding.”  In the second Rik we have Ritam thrice repeated and the words br.hat and kratu, to both of which we have attached a considerable importance in the psychological interpretation of the Veda. Kratu here may mean either work of sacriﬁce or effective  Varuna-Mitra and the Truth  power. In favour of the former sense we have a similar passage in the Veda in which Varuna and Mitra are said to attain to or enjoy by the Truth a mighty sacriﬁce, yaj˜na ˙m br.hantam ¯a´s¯athe.


Sri Aurobindo: But this parallel is not conclusive; for while in one expression it is the sacriﬁce itself that is spoken of, in the other it may be the power or strength which effects the sacriﬁce. The verse may be translated, literally, “By Truth Mitra and Varuna, truthincreasing, truth-touching, enjoy (or, attain) a mighty work” or “a vast (effective) power.”  Finally in the third Rik we have again daks.a; we have the word kavi, seer, already associated by Madhuchchhandas with kratu, work or will; we have the idea of the Truth, and we have the expression uruks.aya, where uru, wide or vast, may be an equivalent for br.hat, the vast, which is used to describe the world or plane of the truth-consciousness, the “own home” of Agni. I translate the verse, literally, “For us Mitra and Varuna, seers, multiply-born, wide-housed, uphold the strength (or, discernment) that does the work.”  It will at once be evident that we have in this passage of the second hymn precisely the same order of ideas and many of the same expressions as those on which we founded ourselves in the ﬁrst Sukta.


Sri Aurobindo: But the application is different and the conceptions of the puriﬁed discernment, the richly-bright understanding, dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ım, and the action of the Truth in the work of the sacriﬁce, apas, introduce certain fresh precisions which throw further light on the central ideas of the Rishis.   The word daks.a, which alone in this passage admits of some real doubt as to its sense, is usually rendered by Sayana strength.  It comes from a root which, like most of its congeners, e.g. da´s, di´s, dah, suggested originally as one of its characteristic significances an aggressive pressure and hence any form of injury, but especially dividing, cutting, crushing or sometimes burning.  Many of the words for strength had originally this idea of a force for injury, the aggressive strength of the ﬁghter and slayer, the kind of force most highly prized by primitive man making a place for himself by violence on the earth he had come to inherit.


Sri Aurobindo: We see this connection in the ordinary Sanskrit word for   strength, balam, which is of the same family as the Greek ball¯o, I strike, and belos, a weapon. The sense, strength, for daks.a has the same origin.  But this idea of division led up also in the psychology of language-development to quite another order of ideas, for when man wished to have words for mental conceptions, his readiest method was to apply the ﬁgures of physical action to the mental movement. The idea of physical division or separation was thus used and converted into that of distinction. It seems to have been ﬁrst applied to distinguishing by the ocular sense and then to the act of mental separation, — discernment, judgment.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus the root vid, which means in Sanskrit to ﬁnd or know, signiﬁes in Greek and Latin to see. Dr.´s, to see, meant originally to rend, tear apart, separate; pa´s, to see, has a similar origin. We have three almost identical roots which are very instructive in this respect, — pis, to hurt, injure, be strong; pis., to hurt, injure, be strong, crush, pound; and pi´s, to form, shape, organise, be reduced to the constituent parts, — all these senses betraying the original idea of separation, division, cutting apart, — with derivatives, pi´s¯aca, a devil, and pi´suna, which means on one side harsh, cruel, wicked, treacherous, slanderous, all from the idea of injury, and at the same time “indicatory, manifesting, displaying, making clear” from the other sense of distinction.  So k¯r., to injure, divide, scatter appears in Greek krin¯o, I sift, choose, judge, determine. Daks.a has a similar history.


Sri Aurobindo: It is kin to the root da´s which in Latin gives us doceo, I teach and in Greek doke¯o, I think, judge, reckon, and dokaz¯o, I observe, am of opinion. So also we have the kindred root di´s meaning to point out or teach, Greek deiknumi. Almost identical with daks.a itself is the Greek doxa, opinion, judgment, and dexios, clever, dexterous, right-hand. In Sanskrit the root daks. means to hurt, kill and also to be competent, able, the adjective daks.a means clever, skilful, competent, ﬁt, careful, attentive; daks.in.a means clever, skilful, right-hand, like dexios, and the noun daks.a means, besides strength and also wickedness from the sense of hurting, mental ability or ﬁtness like other words of the family. We may compare also the word da´s¯a in the sense of  Varuna-Mitra and the Truth  mind, understanding.


Sri Aurobindo: All this evidence taken together seems to indicate clearly enough that daks.a must have meant at one time discernment, judgment, discriminative thought-power and that its sense of mental capacity is derived from this sense of mental division and not by transference of the idea of physical strength to power of mind.  We have therefore three possible senses for daks.a in the Veda, strength generally, mental power or especially the power of judgment, discernment. Daks.a is continually associated with kratu; the Rishis aspire to them together, daks. ¯aya kratve, which may mean simply, “capacity and effective power” or “will and discernment”. Continually we ﬁnd the word occurring in passages where the whole context relates to mental activities.


Sri Aurobindo: Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be a female form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in the Purana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors, — we have Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledge and sometimes almost identiﬁed with Usha, the divine Dawn, who is the bringer of illumination. I shall suggest that Dakshina like the more famous Ila, Saraswati and Sarama, is one of four goddesses representing the four faculties of the Ritam or Truthconsciousness, — Ila representing truth-vision or revelation, Saraswati truth-audition, inspiration, the divine word, Sarama intuition, Dakshina the separative intuitional discrimination.  Daksha then will mean this discrimination whether as mental judgment on the mind-plane or as intuitional discernment on the plane of the Ritam.


Sri Aurobindo: The three riks with which we are dealing occur as the closing passage of a hymn of which the ﬁrst three verses are addressed to Vayu alone and the next three to Indra and Vayu. Indra in the psychological interpretation of the hymns represents, as we shall see, Mind-Power. The word for the sense-faculties, indriya, is derived from his name. His special realm is Swar, a word which means sun or luminous, being akin to s¯ura and s¯urya, the sun, and is used to indicate the third of the Vedic vy¯ahr.tis and the third of the Vedic worlds corresponding to the principle of the pure or unobscured Mind. Surya represents the illumination   of the Ritam rising upon the mind; Swar is that plane of mental consciousness which directly receives the illumination.


Sri Aurobindo: Vayu on the other hand is always associated with the Prana or LifeEnergy which contributes to the system all the ensemble of those nervous activities that in man are the support of the mental energies governed by Indra. Their combination constitutes the normal mentality of man. These two gods are invited in the hymn to come and partake together of the Soma-wine. This wine of Soma represents, as we have abundant proof in the Veda and especially in the ninth book, a collection of more than a hundred hymns addressed to the deity Soma, the intoxication of the Ananda, the divine delight of being, inﬂowing upon the mind from the supramental consciousness through the Ritam or Truth. If we accept these interpretations, we can easily translate the hymn into its psychological signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: Indra and Vayu awaken in consciousness (cetathah.) to the ﬂowings of the Soma-wine; that is to say, the mind-power and life-power working together in human mentality are to awaken to the inﬂowings of this Ananda, this Amrita, this delight and immortality from above. They receive them into the full plenitude of the mental and nervous energies, cetathah. sut¯an¯a ˙m v¯ajin¯ıvas¯u.1 The Ananda thus received constitutes a new action preparing immortal consciousness in the mortal and Indra and Vayu are bidden to come and swiftly perfect these new workings by the participation of the thought, ¯a y¯atam upa nis.kr.ta ˙m maks. ¯u dhiy¯a.2


Sri Aurobindo: For dh¯ı is the thought-power, intellect or understanding.   It is intermediate between the normal mentality represented by the combination of Indra and Vayu and the Ritam or truthconsciousness.   It is at this point that Varuna and Mitra intervene and our passage begins.


Sri Aurobindo: Without the psychological clue the connection between the ﬁrst part of the hymn and the close is not very clear, nor the relation between the couple Varuna-Mitra and the couple Indra-Vayu. With that clue both connections become obvious; 1 V. 5. 2 V. 6.  Varuna-Mitra and the Truth  indeed they depend upon each other. For the earlier part of the hymn has for its subject the preparation ﬁrst of the vital forces represented by Vayu who is alone invoked in the three opening Riks, then of the mentality represented by the couple Indra-Vayu for the activities of the Truth-consciousness in the human being; the close has for its subject the working of the Truth on the mentality so as to perfect the intellect and to enlarge the action.  Varuna and Mitra are two of the four gods who represent this working of the Truth in the human mind and temperament.  In the style of the Veda when there is a transition of this kind from one movement of thought to another developing out of it, the link of connection is often indicated by the repetition in the new movement of an important word which has already occurred in the close of the movement that precedes.


Sri Aurobindo: This principle of suggestion by echo, as one may term it, pervades the hymns and is a mannerism common to all the Rishis. The connecting word here is dh¯ı, thought or intellect. Dh¯ı differs from the more general word, mati, which means mentality or mental action generally and which indicates sometimes thought, sometimes feeling, sometimes the whole mental state. Dh¯ı is the thoughtmind or intellect; as understanding it holds all that comes to it, deﬁnes everything and puts it into the right place,3 or often dh¯ı indicates the activity of the intellect, particular thought or thoughts.


Sri Aurobindo: It is by the thought that Indra and Vayu have been called upon to perfect the nervous mentality, nis.kr.ta ˙m dhiy¯a.  But this instrument, thought, has itself to be perfected, enriched, clariﬁed before the mind can become capable of free communication with the Truth-consciousness. Therefore Varuna and Mitra, Powers of the Truth, are invoked “accomplishing a richly luminous thought,” dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ı ˙m s¯adhant¯a.  This is the ﬁrst occurrence in the Veda of the word ghr.ta, in a modiﬁed adjectival form, and it is signiﬁcant that it should occur as an epithet of the Vedic word for the intellect, dh¯ı. In other passages also we ﬁnd it continually in connection with the words manas, man¯ıs. ¯a or in a context where some activity of thought is 3


Sri Aurobindo: The root dh¯ı means to hold or to place.    indicated. The root ghr. conveys the idea of a strong brightness or heat such as that of ﬁre or the summer sun. It means also to sprinkle or anoint, Greek chri¯o. It is capable of being used to signify any liquid, but especially a bright, thick liquid.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the ambiguity of these two possible senses of which the Vedic Rishis took advantage to indicate by the word outwardly the clariﬁed butter in the sacriﬁce, inwardly a rich and bright state or activity of the brain-power, medh¯a, as basis and substance of illuminated thought. By dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ım is meant, therefore, the intellect full of a rich and bright mental activity.  Varuna and Mitra who accomplish or perfect this state of the intellect, are distinguished by two several epithets. Mitra is p¯utadaks.a, possessed of a puriﬁed judgment; Varuna is ri´s¯adas, he destroys all hurters or enemies. In the Veda there are no merely ornamental epithets.


Sri Aurobindo: Every word is meant to tell, to add something to the sense and bear a strict relation to the thought of the sentence in which it occurs. There are two obstacles which prevent the intellect from being a perfect and luminous mirror of the truth-consciousness; ﬁrst, impurity of the discernment or discriminative faculty which leads to confusion of the Truth, secondly the many causes or inﬂuences which interfere with the growth of the Truth by limiting its full application or by breaking up the connections and harmony of the thoughts that express it and which thus bring about poverty and falsiﬁcation of its contents. Just as the Gods in the Veda represent universal powers descended from the Truth-consciousness which build up the harmony of the worlds and in man his progressive perfection, so the inﬂuences that work against these objects are represented by hostile agencies, Dasyus and Vritras, who seek to break up, to limit, to withhold and deny. Varuna in the Veda is always characterised as a power of wideness and purity; when, therefore, he is present in man as a conscious force of the Truth, all that limits and hurts the nature by introducing into it fault, sin and evil is destroyed by contact with him. He is ri´s¯adas, destroyer of the enemy, of all that seek to injure the growth.


Sri Aurobindo: Mitra, a power like Varuna of Light and Truth, especially represents Love, Joy and Harmony, the foundations of Mayas, the Vedic beatitude.   Varuna-Mitra and the Truth   Working with the purity of Varuna and imparting that purity to the discernment, he enables it to get rid of all discords and confusions and establish the right working of the strong and luminous intellect.  This progress enables the Truth-consciousness, the Ritam, to work in the human mentality. With the Ritam as the agency, r.tena, increasing the action of the Truth in man, r.t¯avr.dh¯a, touching or reaching the Truth, enabling, that is to say, the mental consciousness to come into successful contact with and possession of the Truth-consciousness, r.taspr.´s¯a, Mitra and Varuna are able to enjoy the use of a vast effective will-power, kratu ˙m br.hantam ¯a´s¯athe.


Sri Aurobindo: For it is the Will that is the chief effective agent of the inner sacriﬁce, but a will that is in harmony with the Truth, guided therefore by a puriﬁed discernment. The Will as it enters more and more into the wideness of the Truth-consciousness becomes itself wide and vast, free from limitation in its view and of hampering impediments in its effectivity. It works ur¯av anib¯adhe, in the wideness where there is no obstacle or wall of limitation.  Thus the two requisites on which the Vedic Rishis always insist are secured, Light and Power, the Light of the Truth working in the knowledge, dhiya ˙m ghr.t¯ac¯ım, the Power of the Truth working in the effective and enlightened Will, kratu ˙m br.hantam


Sri Aurobindo: .  As a result Varuna and Mitra are shown to us in the closing verse of the hymn working in the full sense of their Truth, kav¯ı tuvij¯at¯a uruks.ay¯a. Kavi, we have seen, means possessed of the Truth-consciousness and using its faculties of vision, inspiration, intuition, discrimination. Tuvij¯ata is “multiply born”, for tuvi, meaning originally strength or force, is used like the French word “force” in the sense of many. But by the birth of the gods is meant always in the Veda their manifestation; thus tuvij¯at¯a signiﬁes “manifested multiply”, in many forms and activities.


Sri Aurobindo: Uruks.aya means dwelling in the wideness, an idea which occurs frequently in the hymns; uru is equivalent to br.hat, the Vast, and indicates the inﬁnite freedom of the Truth-consciousness. Thus we have as the result of the increasing activities of the Ritam the manifestation in the human being of the Powers of wideness   and purity, of joy and harmony, a manifestation rich in forms, seated in the wideness of the Ritam and using the faculties of the supra-mental consciousness.  This manifestation of the Powers of the Truth upholds or conﬁrms the discernment while it does the work, daks.a ˙m dadh¯ate apasam. The discernment, now puriﬁed and supported, works in the sense of the Truth, as a power of the Truth and accomplishes the perfection of the activities of Indra and Vayu by freeing the thought and the will from all defect and confusion in their working and results.  To conﬁrm the interpretation we have put on the terms of this passage we may quote a Rik from the tenth Sukta of the fourth Mandala.


Sri Aurobindo: Adh¯a hyagne krator bhadrasya daks.asya s¯adhoh., rath¯ır r.tasya br.hato babh¯utha.   “Then indeed, O Agni, thou becomest the charioteer of the happy will, the perfecting discernment, the Truth that is the Vast.” We have here the same idea as in the ﬁrst hymn of the ﬁrst Mandala, the effective will that is the nature of the Truthconsciousness, kavikratuh., and works out therefore in a state of beatitude the good, bhadram. We have in the phrase daks.asya s¯adhoh.


Sri Aurobindo: at once a variant and explanation of the last phrase of the second hymn, daks.am apasam, the discernment perfecting and accomplishing the inner work in man. We have the vast Truth as the consummation of these two activities of power and knowledge, Will and Discernment, kratu and daks.a. Always the hymns of the Veda conﬁrm each other by this reproduction of the same terms and ideas and the same relation of ideas. This would not be possible unless they were based on a coherent doctrine with a precise signiﬁcance for standing terms such as kavi, kratu, daks.a, bhadram, r.tam, etc. The internal evidence of the Riks themselves establishes that this signiﬁcance is psychological, as otherwise the terms lose their ﬁxed value, their precise sense, their necessary connection, and their constant recurrence in relation to each other has to be regarded as fortuitous and void of reason or purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: Varuna-Mitra and the Truth   We see then that in the second hymn we ﬁnd again the same governing ideas as in the ﬁrst. All is based on the central Vedic conception of the supra-mental or Truth-consciousness towards which the progressively perfected mentality of the human being labours as towards a consummation and a goal. In the ﬁrst hymn this is merely stated as the aim of the sacriﬁce and the characteristic work of Agni. The second hymn indicates the preliminary work of preparation, by Indra and Vayu, by Mitra and Varuna, of the ordinary mentality of man through the force of the Ananda and the increasing growth of the Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: We shall ﬁnd that the whole of the Rig Veda is practically a constant variation on this double theme, the preparation of the human being in mind and body and the fulﬁlment of the godhead or immortality in him by his attainment and development of the Truth and the Beatitude.   Chapter VIII The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas  T   HE THIRD hymn of Madhuchchhandas is again a hymn of the Soma sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: It is composed, like the second before it, in movements of three stanzas, the ﬁrst addressed to the Ashwins, the second to Indra, the third to the Vishwadevas, the fourth to the goddess Saraswati. In this hymn also we have in the closing movement, in the invocation to Saraswati, a passage of clear psychological signiﬁcance, of a far greater clarity indeed than those that have already helped us to understand the secret thought of the Veda.  But this whole hymn is full of psychological suggestions and we ﬁnd in it the close connection and even identity which the Vedic Rishis sought to establish and perfect between the three main interests of the human soul, Thought and its ﬁnal victorious illuminations, Action and its last supreme all-achieving puissances, Enjoyment and its highest spiritual ecstasies. The Soma wine symbolises the replacing of our ordinary sense-enjoyment by the divine Ananda. That substitution is brought about by divinising our thought-action, and as it progresses it helps in its turn the consummation of the movement which has brought it about.


Sri Aurobindo: The Cow, the Horse, the Soma-Wine are the ﬁgures of this triple sacriﬁce. The offering of ghr.ta, the clariﬁed butter which is the yield of the cow, the offering of the horse, a´svamedha,  the offering of the wine of Soma are its three principal forms or elements. We have also, less prominent, the offering of the cake which is possibly symbolic of the body, of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: We commence with an invocation of the two Ashwins, the two Riders on the Horse, Castor and Polydeuces of the old Mediterranean mythology. They are supposed by the comparative mythologists to represent twin stars in the heavens which  The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas  for some reason had a better fortune than the rest of the celestial host and attracted the special adoration of the Aryans. Let us, however, see how they are described in the hymn we are studying. They are ﬁrst described as “Ashwins, swift-footed lords of bliss, much-enjoying, — dravatp¯an.¯ı ´subhaspat¯ı purubhuj¯a”.  The word ´subh, like the words ratna and candra, is capable of signifying either light or enjoyment; but in this passage it occurs in connection with the adjective purubhuj¯a, “much-enjoying”, and the verb canasyatam, “take delight”, and must therefore be taken in the sense of weal or bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: Next, these twin gods are described as “Ashwins, divine souls many-actioned, thought-holding” who accept and rejoice in the words of the Mantra “with an energetic thought”, — puruda ˙msas¯a nar¯a ´sav¯ıray¯a dhiy¯a dhis.n.y¯a. Nr. in the Veda is applicable both to gods and men and does not mean simply a man ; it meant originally, I think, strong or active and then a male and is applied to the male gods, active divine souls or powers, purus.as, opposed to the female deities, gn¯ah. who are their energies. It still preserved in the minds of the Rishis much of its original sense, as we see from the word nr.mn.a, strength, and the phrase nr.tama nr.n. ¯am, strongest of the divine powers.  ´Savas and its adjective ´sav¯ıra give the idea of energy, but always with an association of the farther idea of ﬂame or light; ´sav¯ıra is therefore a very appropriate epithet for dh¯ı, thought full of a shining or ﬂashing energy. Dhis.n.y¯a is connected with dhis.an. ¯a, intellect or understanding, and is rendered by Sayana “intellectual”, buddhimantau.


Sri Aurobindo: Again the Ashwins are described as “effectual in action, powers of the movement, ﬁerce-moving in their paths,” dasr¯a n¯asaty¯a rudravartan¯ı. The Vedic epithets dasra and dasma are rendered by Sayana indifferently “destroying” or “beautiful” or “bountiful” according to his caprice or convenience. I connect it with the root das not in the sense of cutting, dividing, from which it gets the two signiﬁcances of destroying and giving, not in the sense of “discerning, seeing” from which it gets Sayana’s signiﬁcance “beautiful”, dar´san¯ıya, but in the sense of doing, acting, shaping, accomplishing, as in puruda ˙msas¯a in the second   Rik. N¯asatya is supposed by some to be a patronymic; the old grammarians ingeniously fabricated for it the sense of “true, not false”; but I take it from nas to move. We must remember that the Ashwins are riders on the horse, that they are described often by epithets of motion, “swift-footed”, “ﬁerce-moving in their paths”; that Castor and Pollux in Graeco-Latin mythology protect sailors in their voyages and save them in storm and shipwreck and that in the Rig Veda also they are represented as powers that carry over the Rishis as in a ship or save them from drowning in the ocean.


Sri Aurobindo: N¯asaty¯a may therefore very well mean lords of the voyage, journey, or powers of the movement.  Rudravartani is rendered by modern scholars “red-pathed”, an epithet supposed to be well-suited to stars and they instance the parallel phrase, hiran.yavartani, having a golden or shining path. Certainly, rudra must have meant at one time, “shining, deep-coloured, red” like the roots rus. and ru´s, rudhira, “blood”, “red”, the Latin ruber, rutilus, rufus, all meaning red. Rodas¯ı, the dual Vedic word for heaven and earth, meant probably, like rajas and rocana, other Vedic words for the heavenly and earthly worlds, “the shining”.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand the sense of injury and violence is equally inherent in this family of words and is almost universal in the various roots which form it. “Fierce” or “violent” is therefore likely to be as good a sense for rudra as “red”.  The Ashwins are both hiran.yavartan¯ı and rudravartan¯ı, because they are both powers of Light and of nervous force; in the former aspect they have a bright gold movement, in the latter they are violent in their movement. In one hymn (V.75.3) we have the combination rudr¯a hiran.yavartan¯ı, violent and moving in the paths of light; we can hardly with any respect for coherence of sense understand it to mean that the stars are red but their movement or their path is golden.  Here then, in these three verses, are an extraordinary series of psychological functions to apply to two stars of a heavenly constellation!


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident that if this was the physical origin of the Ashwins, they have as in Greek mythology long lost their purely stellar nature; they have acquired like Athene, goddess of dawn, a psychological character and functions. They are riders  The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas  on the horse, the Ashwa, symbolic of force and especially of lifeenergy and nervous force, the Prana. Their common character is that they are gods of enjoyment, seekers of honey; they are physicians, they bring back youth to the old, health to the sick, wholeness to the maimed. Another characteristic is movement, swift, violent, irresistible; their rapid and indomitable chariot is a constant object of celebration and they are described here as swift-footed and violent in their paths. They are like birds in their swiftness, like the mind, like the wind (V.77.3 and 78.1).


Sri Aurobindo: They bring in their chariot ripe or perfected satisfactions to man, they are creators of bliss, Mayas. These indications are perfectly clear. They show that the Ashwins are twin divine powers whose special function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man in the sense of action and enjoyment. But they are also powers of Truth, of intelligent action, of right enjoyment. They are powers that appear with the Dawn, effective powers of action born out of the ocean of being who, because they are divine, are able to mentalise securely the felicities of the higher existence by a thought-faculty which ﬁnds or comes to know that true substance and true wealth: — Y¯a dasr¯a sindhum¯atar¯a, manotar¯a ray¯ın. ¯am; dhiy¯a dev¯a vasuvid¯a.


Sri Aurobindo: (I.46.2)  They give that impelling energy for the great work which, having for its nature and substance the light of the Truth, carries man beyond the darkness: — Y¯a nah. p¯ıparad a´svin¯a, jyotis.mat¯ı tamas tirah.; t¯am asme r¯as¯ath¯am is.am. (I.46.6)  They carry man in their ship to the other shore beyond the thoughts and states of the human mind, that is to say, to the supramental consciousness, — n¯av¯a mat¯ın¯a ˙m p¯ar¯aya (I.46.7).  Sury¯a, daughter of the Sun, Lord of the Truth, mounts their car as their bride.


Sri Aurobindo: In the present hymn the Ashwins are invoked, as swiftmoving lords of bliss who carry with them many enjoyments, to take delight in the impelling energies of the sacriﬁce, — yajvar¯ır   is.o . . . canasyatam. These impelling forces are born evidently of the drinking of the Soma wine, that is to say, of the inﬂow of the divine Ananda. For the expressive words, girah., that are to make new formations in the consciousness are already rising, the seat of the sacriﬁce has been piled, the vigorous juices of the Soma wine are pressed out.1 The Ashwins are to come as effective powers of action, puruda ˙msas¯a nar¯a, to take delight in the Words and to accept them into the intellect where they shall be retained for the action by a thought full of luminous energy.2  They are to come to the offering of the Soma wine, in order to effect the action of the sacriﬁce, dasr¯a, as fulﬁllers of action, by giving to the delight of the action that violent movement of theirs, rudravartan¯ı, which carries them irresistibly on their path and overcomes all opposition.


Sri Aurobindo: They come as powers of the Aryan journey, lords of the great human movement, N¯asaty¯a. We see throughout that it is energy which these Riders on the Horse are to give; they are to take delight in the sacriﬁcial energies, to take up the word into an energetic thought, to bring to the sacriﬁce their own violent movement on the path. And it is effectiveness of action and swiftness in the great journey that is the object of this demand for energy. I would call the attention of the reader continually to the consistency of conception and coherence of structure, the easy clearness and precision of outline which the thought of the Rishis assumes by a psychological interpretation, so different from the tangled confusion and incoherent abruptness of the interpretations which ignore the supreme tradition of the Veda as a book of wisdom and deepest knowledge.  We have then this rendering for the ﬁrst three verses: “O Riders of the Steed, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords of bliss, take delight in the energies of the sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: “O Riders of the Steed, male souls effecting a manifold action, take joy of the words, O holders in the intellect, by a luminously energetic thought.  “I have piled the seat of sacriﬁce, I have pressed out the 1 Yuv¯akavah. sut¯a vr.ktabarhis.ah..  2 ´Sav¯ıray¯a dhiy¯a dhis.n.y¯a vanata ˙m girah..


Sri Aurobindo: The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas  vigorous Soma juices; fulﬁllers of action, powers of the movement, come to them with your ﬁerce speed on the path.”  As in the second hymn, so in the third the Rishi begins by invoking deities who act in the nervous or vital forces. But there he called Vayu who supplies the vital forces, brings his steeds of life; here he calls the Ashwins who use the vital forces, ride on the steed. As in the second hymn he proceeds from the vital or nervous action to the mental, he invokes in his second movement the might of Indra. The out-pressings of the wine of delight desire him, sut¯a ime tv¯ayavah.; they desire the luminous mind to take possession of them for its activities; they are puriﬁed, an.v¯ıbhis tan¯a, “by the ﬁngers and the body” as Sayana explains it, by the subtle thought-powers of the pure mind and by extension in the physical consciousness as it seems to me to mean.


Sri Aurobindo: For these “ten ﬁngers”, if they are ﬁngers at all, are the ten ﬁngers of Sury¯a, daughter of the Sun, bride of the Ashwins. In the ﬁrst hymn of the ninth Mandala this same Rishi Madhuchchhandas expands the idea which here he passes over so succinctly. He says, addressing the deity Soma, “The daughter of the Sun puriﬁes thy Soma as it ﬂows abroad in her straining-vessel by a continuous extension”, v¯aren.a ´sa´svat¯a tan¯a. And immediately he adds, “The subtle ones seize it in their labour (or, in the great work, struggle, aspiration, samarye), the ten Brides, sisters in the heaven that has to be crossed”, a phrase that recalls at once the ship of the Ashwins that carries us over beyond the thoughts; for Heaven is the symbol of the pure mental consciousness in the Veda as is Earth of the physical consciousness. These sisters who dwell in the pure mind, the subtle ones, an.v¯ıh., the ten brides, da´sa yos.an.ah., are elsewhere called the ten Casters, da´sa ks.ipah., because they seize the Soma and speed it on its way.


Sri Aurobindo: They are probably identical with the ten Rays, da´sa g¯avah., sometimes spoken of in the Veda. They seem to be described as the grandchildren or descendants of the Sun, napt¯ıbhir vivasvatah.  (IX.14.5). They are aided in the task of puriﬁcation by the seven forms of Thought-consciousness, sapta dh¯ıtayah.. Again we are told that “Soma advances, heroic with his swift chariots, by the force of the subtle thought, dhiy¯a an.vy¯a, to the perfected activity   (or perfected ﬁeld) of Indra and takes many forms of thought to arrive at that vast extension (or, formation) of the godhead where the Immortals are” (IX.15.1, 2).


Sri Aurobindo: Es.a pur¯u dhiy¯ayate, br.hate devat¯ataye; yatr¯amr.t¯asa ¯asate.  I have dwelt on this point in order to show how entirely symbolical is the Soma-wine of the Vedic Rishis and how richly surrounded with psychological conceptions, — as anyone will ﬁnd who cares to go through the ninth Mandala with its almost overcharged splendour of symbolic imagery and overﬂowing psychological suggestions.  However that may be, the important point here is not the Soma and its puriﬁcation but the psychological function of Indra. He is addressed as Indra of the richly-various lustres, indra citrabh¯ano. The Soma-juices desire him.


Sri Aurobindo: He comes impelled by the thought, driven forward by the illumined thinker within, dhiyes.ito vipraj¯utah., to the soul-thoughts of the Rishi who has pressed out the wine of delight and seeks to manifest them in speech, in the inspired mantras; sut¯avata upa brahm¯an.i v¯aghatah.. He comes with the speed and force of the illumined mind-power, in possession of his brilliant horses to those thoughts, t¯utuj¯ana upa brahm¯an.i harivah., and the Rishi prays to him to conﬁrm or hold the delight in the Soma offering, sute dadhis.va na´s canah.. The Ashwins have brought and energised the pleasure of the vital system in the action of the Ananda.  Indra is necessary to hold that pleasure ﬁrmly in the illuminated mind so that it may not fall away from the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: “Come, O Indra, with thy rich lustres, these Soma-juices desire thee; they are puriﬁed by the subtle powers and by extension in body.   “Come, O Indra, impelled by the mind, driven forward by the illumined thinker, to my soul-thoughts, I who have poured out the Soma-juice and seek to express them in speech.  “Come, O Indra, with forceful speed to my soul-thoughts, O lord of the bright horses; hold ﬁrm the delight in the Somajuice.”   The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas


Sri Aurobindo: The Rishi next passes to the Vishwadevas, all the gods or the all-gods. It has been disputed whether these Vishwadevas form a class by themselves or are simply the gods in their generality.  I take it that the phrase means the universal collectivity of the divine powers; for this sense seems to me best to correspond to the actual expressions of the hymns in which they are invoked.  In this hymn they are called for a general action which supports and completes the functions of the Ashwins and Indra. They are to come to the sacriﬁce in their collectivity and divide among themselves, each evidently for the divine and joyous working of his proper activity, the Soma which the giver of the sacriﬁce distributes to them; vi´sve dev¯asa ¯a gata, d¯a´sv¯a ˙mso d¯a´sus.ah. sutam.


Sri Aurobindo: In the next Rik the call is repeated with greater insistence; they are to arrive swiftly, t¯urn.ayah., to the Soma offering or, it may mean, making their way through all the planes of consciousness, “waters”, which divide the physical nature of man from their godhead and are full of obstacles to communication between earth and heaven; apturah. sutam ¯a ganta t¯urn.ayah.. They are to come like cattle hastening to the stalls of their rest at eveningtide, usr¯a iva svasar¯an.i. Thus gladly arriving, they are gladly to accept and cleave to the sacriﬁce and support it, bearing it up in its journey to its goal, in its ascent to the gods or to the home of the gods, the Truth, the Vast; medha ˙m jus.anta vahnayah..  And the epithets of the Vishwadevas, qualifying their character and the functions for which they are invited to the Somaoffering, have the same generality; they are common to all the gods and applied indifferently to any or all of them throughout the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: They are fosterers or increasers of man and upholders of his labour and effort in the work, the sacriﬁce, — om¯asa´s cars.an.¯ıdhr.to. Sayana renders these words protectors and sustainers of men. I need not enter here into a full justiﬁcation of the signiﬁcances which I prefer to give them; for I have already indicated the philological method which I follow. Sayana himself ﬁnds it impossible to attribute always the sense of protection to the words derived from the root av, avas, ¯uti, ¯uma, etc. which are so common in the hymns, and is obliged to give to the same word in different passages the most diverse and unconnected   signiﬁcances. Similarly, while it is easy to attribute the sense of “man” to the two kindred words cars.an.i and kr.s.t.i when they stand by themselves, this meaning seems unaccountably to disappear in compound forms like vicars.an.i, vi´svacars.an.i, vi´svakr.s.t.i.


Sri Aurobindo: Sayana himself is obliged to render vi´svacars.an.i “allseeing” and not “all-man” or “all-human”. I do not admit the possibility of such abysmal variations in ﬁxed Vedic terms. Av  can mean to be, have, keep; contain, protect; become, create; foster, increase, thrive, prosper; gladden, be glad; but it is the sense of increasing or fostering which seems to me to prevail in the Veda.


Sri Aurobindo: Cars. and kr.s. were originally derivate roots from car and kr., both meaning to do, and the sense of laborious action or movement still remains in kr.s., to drag, to plough. Cars.an.i and kr.s.t.i mean therefore effort, laborious action or work or else the doers of such action. They are two among the many words, (karma, apas, k¯ara, k¯ıri, duvas etc.), which are used to indicate the Vedic work, the sacriﬁce, the toil of aspiring humanity, the arati of the Aryan.  The fostering or increasing of man in all his substance and possessions, his continual enlargement towards the fullness and richness of the vast Truth-consciousness, the upholding of him in his great struggle and labour, this is the common preoccupation of the Vedic gods. Then, they are apturah., they who cross the waters, or as Sayana takes it, they who give the waters. This he understands in the sense of “rain-givers” and it is perfectly true that all the Vedic gods are givers of the rain, the abundance (for vr.s.t.i, rain, has both senses) of heaven, sometimes described as the solar waters, svarvat¯ır apah., or waters which carry in them the light of the luminous heaven, Svar.


Sri Aurobindo: But the ocean and the waters in the Veda, as this phrase itself indicates, are the symbol of conscient being in its mass and in its movements. The gods pour the fullness of these waters, especially the upper waters, the waters of heaven, the streams of the Truth, r.tasya dh¯ar¯ah., across all obstacles into the human consciousness. In this sense they are all apturah.. But man is also described as crossing the waters over to his home in the Truth-consciousness and the gods as carrying him over; it is doubtful whether this may not be the  The Ashwins — Indra — the Vishwadevas  true sense here, especially as we have the two words apturah. . . .  t¯urn.ayah.


Sri Aurobindo: close to each other in a connection that may well be signiﬁcant.   Again the gods are all free from effective assailants, free from the harm of the hurtful or opposing powers and therefore the creative formations of their conscious knowledge, their Maya, move freely, pervasively, attain their right goal, — asridha ehim¯ay¯aso adruhah.. If we take into account the numerous passages of the Veda which indicate the general object of the sacriﬁce, of the work, of the journey, of the increase of the light and the abundance of the waters to be the attainment of the Truthconsciousness, Ritam, with the resultant Bliss, Mayas, and that these epithets commonly apply to powers of the inﬁnite, integral Truth-consciousness we can see that it is this attainment of the Truth which is indicated in these three verses. The all-gods increase man, they uphold him in the great work, they bring him the abundance of the waters of Swar, the streams of the Truth, they communicate the unassailably integral and pervading action of the Truth-consciousness with its wide formations of knowledge, m¯ay¯ah..


Sri Aurobindo: I have translated the phrase, usr¯a iva svasar¯an.i, in the most external sense possible; but in the Veda even poetical similes are seldom or never employed for mere decoration; they too are utilised to deepen the psychological sense and with a ﬁgure of symbolic or double meaning. The word usra is always used in the Veda, like go, with the double sense of the concrete ﬁgure or symbol, the Bull or Cow, and at the same time the psychological indication of the bright or luminous ones, the illumined powers of the Truth in man. It is as such illumined powers that the all-gods have to come and they come to the Soma-juice, svasar¯an.i, as if to seats or forms of peace or of bliss; for the root svas, like sas and many others, means both to rest and to enjoy. They are the powers of Truth entering into the outpourings of the Ananda in man as soon as that movement has been prepared by the vital and mental activity of the Ashwins and the pure mental activity of Indra.    “O fosterers who uphold the doer in his work, O all-gods, come and divide the Soma-wine that I distribute.


Sri Aurobindo: “O all-gods who bring over to us the Waters, come passing through to my Soma-offerings as illumined powers to your places of bliss.  “O all-gods, you who are not assailed nor come to hurt, free-moving in your forms of knowledge, cleave to my sacriﬁce as its upbearers.”  And, ﬁnally, in the last movement of the hymn we have the clear and unmistakable indication of the Truth-consciousness as the goal of the sacriﬁce, the object of the Soma-offering, the culmination of the work of the Ashwins, Indra and the All-gods in the vitality and in the mind. For these are the three Riks devoted to Saraswati, the divine Word, who represents the stream of inspiration that descends from the Truth-consciousness, and thus limpidly runs their sense: “May purifying Saraswati with all the plenitude of her forms of plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacriﬁce.  “She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in consciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: “Saraswati by the perception awakens in consciousness the great ﬂood (the vast movement of the Ritam) and illumines entirely all the thoughts.”  This clear and luminous ﬁnale throws back its light on all that has preceded it. It shows the intimate connection between the Vedic sacriﬁce and a certain state of mind and soul, the interdependence between the offering of the clariﬁed butter and the Soma juice and luminous thought, richness of psychological content, right states of the mind and its awaking and impulsion to truth and light. It reveals the ﬁgure of Saraswati as the goddess of the inspiration, of ´sruti. And it establishes the connection between the Vedic rivers and psychological states of mind.


Sri Aurobindo: The passage is one of those luminous hints which the Rishis have left scattered amidst the deliberate ambiguities of their symbolic style to guide us towards their secret.   Chapter IX Saraswati and Her Consorts   T HE SYMBOLISM of the Veda betrays itself with the greatest clearness in the ﬁgure of the goddess Saraswati.  In many of the other gods the balance of the internal sense and the external ﬁgure is carefully preserved.


Sri Aurobindo: The veil sometimes becomes transparent or its corners are lifted even for the ordinary hearer of the Word; but it is never entirely removed.  One may doubt whether Agni is anything more than the personiﬁcation of the sacriﬁcial Fire or of the physical principle of Light and Heat in things, or Indra anything more than the god of the sky and the rain or of physical Light, or Vayu anything more than the divinity in the Wind and Air or at most of the physical Life-breath. In the lesser gods the naturalistic interpretation has less ground for conﬁdence; for it is obvious that Varuna is not merely a Vedic Uranus or Neptune, but a god with great and important moral functions; Mitra and Bhaga have the same psychological aspect; the Ribhus who form things by the mind and build up immortality by works can with difﬁculty be crushed into the Procrustean measure of a naturalistic mythology. Still by imputing a chaotic confusion of ideas to the poets of the Vedic hymns the difﬁculty can be trampled upon, if not overcome.  But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment.


Sri Aurobindo: She is, plainly and clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divine Inspiration.  If that were all, this would not carry us much farther than the obvious fact that the Vedic Rishis were not mere naturalistic barbarians, but had their psychological ideas and were capable of creating mythological symbols which represent not only those obvious operations of physical Nature that interested their agricultural, pastoral and open-air life, but also the inner operations of the mind and soul. If we have to conceive the history of ancient religious thought as a progression from the physical to the   spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical and psychological view of Nature and the world and the gods — and this, though by no means certain, is for the present the accepted view,1 — we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at least already advancing from the physical and naturalistic conception of the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is not only the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same time one of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question at once arises, whence came this extraordinary identiﬁcation?


Sri Aurobindo: And how does the connection of the two ideas present itself in the Vedic hymns? And there is more; for Saraswati is important not only in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding farther let us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what they can teach us.  The association of a river with the poetical inspiration occurs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are not conceived of as rivers; they are only connected in a not very intelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This stream is the river Hippocrene, the fountain of the Horse, and to account for its name we have a legend that it sprang from the hoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock with his hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where the mountain had been thus smitten.


Sri Aurobindo: Was this legend merely a Greek fairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident that if it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to a psychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspiration, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been an attempt to put into concrete ﬁgures certain psychological facts.  We may note that the word Pegasus, if we transliterate it into the original Aryan phonetics, becomes P¯ajasa and is obviously connected with the Sanskrit p¯ajas, which meant originally force, 1 I do not think we have any real materials for determining the ﬁrst origin and primitive history of religious ideas. What the facts really point to is an early teaching at once psychological and naturalistic, that is to say with two faces, of which the ﬁrst came to be more or less obscured, but never entirely effaced even in the barbarous races, even in races like the tribes of North America. But this teaching, though prehistoric, was anything but primitive.


Sri Aurobindo: Saraswati and Her Consorts  movement, or sometimes footing. In Greek itself it is connected with p¯eg¯e, a stream. There is, therefore, in the terms of this legend a constant association with the image of a forceful movement of inspiration. If we turn to Vedic symbols we see that the Ashwa or Horse is an image of the great dynamic force of Life, of the vital and nervous energy, and is constantly coupled with other images that symbolise the consciousness. Adri, the hill or rock, is a symbol of formal existence and especially of the physical nature and it is out of this hill or rock that the herds of the Sun are released and the waters ﬂow.


Sri Aurobindo: The streams of the madhu, the honey, the Soma, are said also to be milked out of this Hill or Rock. The stroke of the Horse’s hoof on the rock releasing the waters of inspiration would thus become a very obvious psychological image. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the old Greeks and Indians were incapable either of such psychological observation or of putting it into the poetical and mystic imagery which was the very body of the ancient Mysteries.  We might indeed go farther and inquire whether there was not some original connection between the hero Bellerophon, slayer of Bellerus, who rides on the divine Horse, and Indra Valahan, the Vedic slayer of Vala, the enemy who keeps for himself the Light. But this would take us beyond the limits of our subject.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor does this interpretation of the Pegasus legend carry us any farther than to indicate the natural turn of imagination of the Ancients and the way in which they came to ﬁgure the stream of inspiration as an actual stream of ﬂowing water.  Saraswati means, “she of the stream, the ﬂowing movement”, and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for the goddess of inspiration. But by what process of thought or association does the general idea of the river of inspiration come to be associated with a particular earthly stream? And in the Veda it is not a question of one river which by its surroundings, natural and legendary, might seem more ﬁtly associated with the idea of sacred inspiration than any other. For here it is a question not of one, but of seven rivers always associated together in the minds of the Rishis and all of them released together by   the stroke of the God Indra when he smote the Python who coiled across their fountains and sealed up their outﬂow.


Sri Aurobindo: It seems impossible to suppose that one river only in all this sevenfold outﬂowing acquired a psychological signiﬁcance while the rest were associated only with the annual coming of the rains in the Punjab. The psychological signiﬁcance of Saraswati carries with it a psychological signiﬁcance for the whole symbol of the Vedic waters.2  Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but with other goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols and especially with Bharati and Ila. In the later Puranic forms of worship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharati and Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi, the Large, Great or Vast.


Sri Aurobindo: The three, Ila, Mahi or Bharati and Saraswati are associated together in a constant formula in those hymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to the Sacriﬁce.  Il.¯a sarasvat¯ı mah¯ı, tisro dev¯ır mayobhuvah.; barhih. s¯ıdantvasridhah..  “May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birth to the bliss, take their place on the sacriﬁcial seat, they who stumble not,” or “who come not to hurt” or “do no hurt.” The epithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movement with its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfalls of sin and error. The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of the tenth Mandala: ¯A no yaj˜na ˙m bh¯arat¯ı t¯uyam etu, il.¯a manus.vad iha cetayant¯ı; Tisro dev¯ır barhir eda ˙m syona ˙m, sarasvat¯ı svapasah. sadantu.