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Ageless Divine Ved
AGELESS DIVINE VEDAS
Late Acharya Ram Dev Ji
(First Chancellor, Gurukul Kangri University-Haridwar, U.P.,
Bharat.)
(Note : This article was written by well known Vedic Philosopher
Acharya Ram Dev Ji of Gurukul Kangri. It was published first in
1930 as introduction of Pandit Chamupati's famous book Ten
Commandments of the Arya Samaj. Later this was translated in
various languages.)
There was a time when it was believed by the leading scientists
and philosophers of the world that all civilizations had grown up
independently and by a process of evolution. Tyler talked of
"independent evolution" and psychic unity". Rivers, however,
exposed the falsity of this view and started the "Theory of
Transmission of Cultures". This hypothesis is being increasingly
supported by sociologists and anthropologists. In fact, early on
the nineteenth century Von Humboldt had come to the conclusion
that "if language afford only feeble proofs of the ancient
communications between the old world and the New, the connection
is revealed in an indubitable form by the cosmogonies, the
monuments, the hieroglyphs and the institutions of the peoples of
America and Asia". The writer of the article on Mexico in the
Encyclopedia Britannica and Prescot in his immortal works on
Mexico and Peru specifically mention India as the possible source
of ancient American civilization. This view was, as we have
stated, converted into a sociological theory by Rivers. Perry in
his "Children of the Sun" built it up further. he came to the
definite conclusion that:-
"The idea of universal, steady, continual upward cultural
progress must be given up once and for all, as contrary to patent
facts." (Page 128).
Says Dr. Elliot Smith, M.A.,M.D., F.R.S., in the chapter on
anthropology contributed by his to the latest American
publication on the subject, "Evolution in the Light of Modern
Knowledge" :- "Moreover, they (ethnologists) invented the
argument that useful arts once acquired could not be lost, a most
fallacious claim which wrought untold confusion in
anthropological discussions until Dr. Rivers in 1912 exposed the
error and its implications." Again:- "The amazing coincidence in
the arbitrary details of hundreds of strange customs and beliefs
revealed in the earliest civilizations of Central Africa, Mexico
and Peru, when compared with contemporary or earlier evidence
from Asia, call for something more satisfying in the way of
explanation than the claim that the resemblances "may arise from
no more than a common psychology" and that "the evidence which we
possess points rather to the undisturbed evolution of Mexico and
Mayan Civilization on American soil, and that civilization may
therefore be regarded as in every sense American." It is not
surprising that the man in the street, who is not to be deceived
by such trivial evasions of a great issue, attempted to interpret
in his own way the obvious fact that there must have been some
sort of intimate contact between the old World and the New ten
centuries and more ago, to explain the derivation of the
strangely exotic elements of the Mayan, Aztec, Pre-Inca and Inca
Civilizations.
The learned doctor even recognizes that "progress is not the
rule." Says he:- "once the reality of the fact is recognized that
progress is the exception rather than the rule in the history of
human societies, the chief difficulty is eliminated that was
responsible for doctrine of "independence evolution'.
Not merely this ! It is also being recognized in an increasing
degree that biological analogies are misleading. Says our
author:- "It is therefore, dangerous and misleading to use such
terms as "evolution", as so many writers are now doing, in
reference to cultural history and to circumstances that are
fundamentally distinct from those biological phenomena in
reference to which the terms in question were devised."
Many philosophers and thinkers are now positively of opinion that
the source of all cultures is the Veda. Says Edward Carpenter in
his "Art of Creation":- "A new philosophy we can hardly expect or
wish for, since indeed the same germinal thoughts of the Vedic
authors come all the way down history even to Schopenhaur and
Whitman, inspiring philosophy after philosophy and religion after
religion....and it is only to-day that science, with its huge
conquests in the material plane, is able to provide-for these
world-old principles- somewhat of a new form and so wonderful a
garment of illustration and expression as it does."(Page vii).
Not only are philosophers, who study the Veda, forced to this
view, but even religious propagandists, whose interest it is to
prove the superiority of their own religion, are driven to this
startling conclusion. Says Maurice Phillips in his "The Teachings
of the Vedas" (London, Longmans Green and Co. 1895):_ "It is
evident then that the higher, up to the sources of the Vedic
religion, we push our inquiries, the purer and simpler we find
the conception of God, and in proportion as we come down the
stream of time, the more corrupt and complex we find it. We
conclude therefore, that the Vedic Aryans did not acquire their
knowledge of divine attributes and functions empirically, for, in
that case, we should find at the beginning. hence we must seek
for a theory which will account alike for the acquisition of
Varuna, and for that gradual deprivation which culminated in
Bramha; and what theory will cover these facts as well as the
doctrine of a Primitive revelation." (Page 104)
Mr Phillips took the same view in the paper which he read before
the Parliament of Religions held at Chicago in 1883.
It is clear, therefore that in proportion as the hypothesis of
eternal progress is suffering discredit, it is being
progressively realized that the fount of knowledge must be looked
for in the Veda, the ancient most scripture of the human race.
Even orientalists are veering round to the view that the Veda is
not the primitive savagery. Max Muller, who started with the idea
that the Veda was a collection of the traditions of savages, had
in his mature age when Rishi Dayanand's intellectual influence
considerably modified his opinion, to acknowledge that is taught
the loftiest conceptions. He says in his "Six Systems of Indian
Philosophy" that the Vedic poets had arrived at a conception of
Godhead which had only once been reached by the Christian
philosophers of Alexandria, but which was even now beyond many
who called themselves Christians. Not only that, but in spite of
himself he was led to exclaim in the same book that there was
startling outbursts of philosophy in the Vedas, and that 'there
always been individuals whose mind was untrammelled by the
thoughts of the great mass of the people and who saw and
proclaimed, as if inspired by a power not themselves, truths far
beyond the reach of their fellow-men'. A later orientalist, Barth
is constrained to admit:- "The poetry it (the Veda) contains
appears to me, on the contrary, to be of singularly refined
character and artificially elaborated, full of allusions and
reticences, and the manner of its expressions is such as reminds
one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small
groups of initiates than the poetic language of a large
community. And these features, I am constrained to remark, are
characteristic of the whole collection......" (Barth xiii-xv.
quoted by Perry in his Children of the Sun, pages 181-182).
A study of the history of philosophy also tends to confirm the
view that the modern-most conceptions are to be found in their
fully developed form in the ancient-most or eternal scripture-the
Veda-and in their distorted forms in the historical religions.
Take the conception of the nature of matter. The latest view of
matter is that either is the sole source of all substances. Now
ether is a fluid. In the Rigved x.129 we read that in the
beginning of the cycle of creation, there was a vast body of
fluid containing productive force. We find the same conception
slightly distorted in Homer who says that "water or ocean" is the
origin of all things, gods and men included." Aristophanes also
speaks of the primeval "deep abyss.... a wondrous egg from which
issued love". Athenagoras speaks of "the egg formed by the union
of chaos and 'ether', and of he operation of energy of active
principle upon the eternal mass of passive matter". In the first
chapter of Genesis we are told the same thing.
This very cosmological conception, viz., that of eternal akaash,
gave rise to the theory of Eternal 'Shabd', which is no other
than the Veda, elaborated by Jaimini.
It thus appears that the Veda is the "logos" which recurs so
often in the philosophic traditions of the human race and which
is first mentioned in Rigved X, exc. It is this which Plato calls
the immanent reason of the world" that "existent from all time"
and is "The divine Law" upon which "all human laws are fed". It
is this which, Anaxagoras says, "is intermediate between God and
the world, being the regulating principle of the universe, the
divine intelligence." It is this Veda which is the real "memra"
that, in the words of Jewish philosopher Philo, is the "teacher
not only of every virtue and of all theological knowledge, but of
all human arts and sciences. It is the Veda which constitutes
"the first spark of philosophy," that, according to Archbishop
Berkley, "must have been derived from heaven." It is this which
constitutes the "spiritual influx", in the direction of which,
according to the eminent physicist and co-discoverer of
Evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, all the evidence points and
which, he says, was analogous to that which first initiated the
organized life of the plant, then the consciousness and
intelligence of the animal and lastly reasons... ."
This eternal scripture, says the French savant Edward Schuse in
his Rama and Moses, has a peculiar fascination for the modern
man, for "It may be that the future is reserving for us a final
surprise, that of discovering in the Vedas the definition of
occult forces of nature which modern science is rediscovering for
us."
It is this Veda which Swami Dayanand has rescued from the debris
of superstition and false interpretation and restored to its
pristine refulgence.
Here ends the article by Shri Acharya Ram Dev Ji.
Jai Maharaj <jai@mantra.com> Jyotishi, Vedic Astrologer
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