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ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on Early Indian Literature
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To: soc-religion-hindu@uunet.uu.net
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Subject: ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on Early Indian Literature
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From: Srinivasa Chakravarthy <srini@monod.neusc.bcm.tmc.edu>
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Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 10:46:00 -0600
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian, soc.culture.indian.kerala, soc.culture.indian.karnataka, soc.culture.indian.marathi, soc.culture.indian.gujarati, soc.culture.indian.delhi, soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir, soc.culture.tamil, soc.culture.bengali, soc.religion.hindu
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Organization: Baylor College of Medicine
EARLY INDIAN LITERATURE: PART II
(Part I concludes by saying: The Veda became to the later
scholastic
and ritualistic idea of Indian priests and pundits nothing better than
a book of mythology and sacrificial ceremonies...)
"But that was not what it was to the Vedic Rishis themselves or
to
the great seers and thinkers who came after them and developed out of
their pregnant and luminous intuitions their own wonderful structures
of thought and speech built upon an unexampled spiritual revelation
and experience. The Veda was to these early seers the Word discovering
the Truth and clothing in image and symbol he mystic significances of
life.
It was a divine discovery and unveiling of the potencies of the word,
...
the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance, the mantra...
The poets of the Vedic verse ... did not look on themselves as a sort of
superior medicine-men and makers of hymn and incantation to a robust
and
barbarous tribe... [but] believed that they were in possession of
a high, mystic and hidden truth, claimed to be the bearers of a speech
acceptable to a divine knowledge,... [of] secret words which declare
their
whole meaning only to the seer, kavaye nivachanaani ninyaa vachaamsi.
...the Veda was really what it professes to be, the seeking for a mystic
knowledge, the first form of the constant attempt of the Indian mind,
...to look beyond the appearances of the physical worldand through its
own
experiences to the godheads, powers, self-existence of the One of whom
the sages speak variously - the famous phrase in which the Veda utters
its own
central secret - ekam tad vipraa bahudhaa vadanti.
"...A famous German scholar rating from his high pedestal of
superior intelligence the silly persons who find sublimity in the Veda,
tells us that it is full of childish, silly, even monstrous
conceptions... and that only here and there are a few rare conceptions
that come from the depths of the soul. It may be so if we put our own
mental conceptions into the words of the Rishis, but if we read them as
they are without any false translation into what we think early
barbarians ought to have said and thought, we shall find instead
a sacred poetry sublime and powerful in its words and images, though
with another kind of language and imagination than we now prefer and
appreciate, deep and subtle in its psychological experience
and stirred by a moved soul of vision and utterance. Hear rather the
word itself of the Veda:...
"As the Manu we set thee in thy place, as the Manu we kindle
thee: O Fire, O Angiras, as the Manu sacrifice to the gods for him
who desires the godheads. O Fire, well pleased thou art kindled
in the human being and the ladles go to thee continually .. Thee
all the gods with one pleasure (in thee) made their messenger and
serving
thee, O Seer, (men) in the sacrifices adore the god. Let the mortal
adore the divine Fire with sacrifice to the godheads. Kindled, flame
forth,
O Bright One. Sit in the seat of Truth, sit in the seat of peace."
...
"The poets of the Veda had another mentality than ours, their
use of
their images is of a peculiar kind and an antique cast of vision gives a
strange outline to their substance. The physical and psychical worlds
were to their eyes a manifestation and a twofold and ...
similar figure of the cosmic godheads, the inner and outer
life of man a divine commerce with the gods, and behind was the one
Spirit or Being of which the Gods were the names and personalities and
powers. These godheads were at once masters of physical Nature and its
principles and forms, their godheads and their bodies and their inward
divine powers with their corresponding states and energies born in
our psychic being because they are the soul powers of the cosmos,
the gaurdians of truth and immortality, the children of the Infinite,
and each of them too in his origin and his last reality the supreme
Spirit putting in front one of his aspects."
"...The western critic sneers at the bold and reckless and to
him
monstrous image in which Indra son of earth and heaven is said to create
his own father and mother; but if we remember that Indra is the supreme
spirit in one of its eternal and constant aspects, creator of earth and
heaven,
born as a cosmic godhead between the mental and physical worlds
and recreating their powers in man, we shall see that the image
is not only a powerful but in fact a true and revealing figure... It is
in this way that throughout we must interpret and receive the Vedic
poetry according to its own spirit and vision and the psychically
natural, even if to us strange and supernatural, truth of its ideas and
figures."
Sri Aurobindo
From "Foundations of Indian Culture"
