besides the words that in their plain and ordinary sense give at once a wealth of psychological significance to their context, the Veda is full of others to which it is possible to give either an external and material or an internal and psychological value according to our conception of the general purport of Veda. For instance such words as raye, rayi, r adhas, ratna, may mean either merely material prosperity and riches or internal felicity and plenitude applying itself equally to the subjective and the objective world; dhana, vaja, pos.a may mean either objective wealth, plenty and increase or all possessions internal or external, their plenitude and their growth in the life of the individual. Raye is used in the Upanishads, in a quotation from the Rig Veda, to mean spiritual felicity; why should it be incapable of bearing that sense in the original text?
We find in the Gita the word yajna, sacrifice, used in a symbolic sense for all action, whether internal or external, that is consecrated to the gods or to the Supreme.Was such symbolic use of the word born of a later philosophical intellectuality, or was it inherent in the Vedic idea of sacrifice?
The Vedic sacrifice consists of three features,—omitting for the moment the god and the mantra,—the persons who offer, the offering and the fruits of the offering. If the yajna is the action consecrated to the gods, I could not but take the yajamana, the giver of the sacrifice, as the doer of the action. Yajna is works, internal or external, the yajamana must be the soul or the personality as the doer. But there were also the officiating priests, hota, ritvij, purohita, brahma, adhvaryu etc. What was their part in the symbolism? For if we once suppose a symbolic sense for the sacrifice, we must suppose also a symbolic value for each feature of the ceremony. I found that the gods were continually spoken of as priests of the offering and in many passages it was undisguisedly a non-human power or energy which presided over the sacrifice. I perceived also that throughout Veda the elements of our personality are themselves continually personified. I had only to apply this rule inversely and to suppose that the person
of the priest in the external figure represented in the internal activities figured a non-human power or energy or an element of our personality. It remained to fix the psychological sense of the different priestly offices. Here I found that the Veda itself presented a clue by its philological indications and insistences, such as the use of the word purohita in its separated form with the sense of the representative “put in front” and a frequent reference to the god Agni who symbolises the divine Will or Force in humanity that takes up the action in all consecration of works.
The offerings were more difficult to understand. what could possibly be indicated by the “ghritam”, the clarified butter in the sacrifice? What for instance could be made of clarified butter dropping from heaven or dripping from the horses of Indra or dripping from the mind? Obviously, this was grotesque nonsense, if the sense of ghr.ta as clarified butter was anything more than a symbol used with great looseness, so that often the external sense was wholly or partly put aside in the mind of the thinker. It was possible of course to vary conveniently the sense of thewords, to take ghr.ta sometimes as butter and sometimes as water and manas sometimes as the mind, sometimes as food or a cake. But I found that ghr.ta was constantly used in connection with the thought or the mind, that heaven in Veda was a symbol of themind, that Indra represented the illuminatedmentality and his two horses double energies of that mentality and even that the Veda sometimes speaks plainly of offering the intellect (mansa) as purified ghr.ta to the gods, The word ghr.ta counts also among its philological significances the sense of a rich or warm brightness.
The fruits of the offering were in appearance purelymaterial —cows, horses, gold, offspring, men, physical strength, victory in battle. The word go means both cow and light and in a number of passages evidently meant light even while putting forward the image of the cow. I found that passages occurred in which all the surrounding context was psychological and only the image of the cow interfered with its obtrusive
material suggestion. Indra is invoked as the maker of perfect forms to drink the wine of Soma; drinking he becomes full of ecstasy and a “giver of cows”; then we can attain to his most intimate or his most ultimate right thinkings, then we question him and his clear discernment brings us our highest good. It is obvious that in such a passage these cows cannot be material herds nor would the giving of physical Light carry any sense in the context.
The cow and horse, go and a´sva, are constantly associated. Usha, the Dawn, is described as gomatı asvavatı; Dawn gives to the sacrificer horses and cows. As applied to the physical dawn gomatı means accompanied by or bringing the rays of light and is an image of the dawn of illumination in the human mind. Therefore asvavatı also cannot refermerely to the physical steed; it must have a psychological significance as well. A study of the Vedic horse led me to the conclusion that go and a´sva represent the two companion ideas of Light and Energy, Consciousness and Force, which to the Vedic and Vedantic mind were the double or twin aspect of all the activities of existence. It was apparent, therefore, that the two chief fruits of the Vedic sacrifice, wealth of cows and wealth of horses, were symbolic of richness of mental illumination and abundance of vital energy. It followed that the other fruits continually associated with these two chief results of the Vedic karma must also be capable of a psychological significance.
The gods I found to be described as children of Light, sons of Aditi, of Infinity; and without exception they are described as increasing man, bringing him light, pouring on him the fullness of the waters, the abundance of the heavens, increasing the truth in him, building up the divine worlds, leading him against all attacks to the great goal, the integral felicity, the perfect bliss. Their separate functions emerged by means of their activities, their epithets, the psychological sense of the legends connected with them, the indications of the Upanishads and Puranas, the occasional side-lights from Greek myth. On the other hand the demons who opposed them, are all powers of division and limitation, Coverers, Tearers, Devourers, Confiners, Dualisers, Obstructers, as their names indicate, powers that work against the free and unified integrality of the being. These Vritras, Panis, Atris, Rakshasas, Sambara, Vala, Namuchi, are not Dravidian kings and gods, as the modern mind with its exaggerated historic sense would like them to be; they represent a more antique idea better suited to the religious and ethical preoccupations of our forefathers. They represent the struggle between the powers of the higher Good and the lower desire, and this conception of the Rig Veda and the same opposition of good and evil otherwise expressed, with less psychological subtlety, with more ethical directness in the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, our ancient neighbours and kindred, proceeded probably from a common
original discipline of the Aryan culture.
from - the secret of vedas by aurobindo ghosh.
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