A new approach to the Vedas : an essay in translation and exegesis

A NEW APPROACH TO THE VEDAS

that all potentiality is realised in him, cf. Eckhart, I, 409). With respect to agibilia and factibilia, we call this grace habitus, Skr., kausalya, slistatua (ct. my Reactions to Avt in India, J.A.O.S., Vol. 52, p. 220, note 10, third paragraph). “It behoves a man in all he does to turn his will in God's direction and keeping only God in view to forge ahead without a qualm, not wondering, am I right or am I doing something wrong? If the painter had to plan out every brushmark before he made his first he would not paint at all. And if, going to some place, we had first to settle how to put the front foot down, we should never get there,” Eckhart, I, 141. Cf. St. Thomas, “human virtues are habits,” Sum. Th., II, QO, 55, A. 2. To identify this point of view with “ nature-worship ” (where ‘“‘ nature ’’ stands for “ens naturata ”’), to suppose that what is meant by all this is nothing but a “ selfish ” obedience to merely functional impulses and animal instincts, implies a defective intellect: for how can he, who is by definition freed from private will, be at the same time spoken of as “ self-willed ” ?_ As remarked by Jung, Psychological types, p. 263, “as we study the Upanishad philosophy, the impression grows on us that the attainment of the path is not just the simplest of tasks.”’ Proportionate to the difficulty of the task, however, is the immediate reward in terms of power and happiness, which power and happiness are precisely from the Upanisad point of view, the values of gnosis.

103 With dadhe in this active sense of “appointed,” cf. dharvmani dadhise Rg Veda, 1X, 64,1; also X, 81, 5, uidhatr.

104 “ To compare ”’ (the “‘ first existing one thing, which is described as breathing without wind”) with “‘ Aristotle’s deity, the unmoved mover, is to falsify entirely primitive thought “: similarly, the “ assertion that the sages were able to discriminate between the thing in itself and the phenomenal world, between natura naturans and natura naturata”’ is unnatural and _strained,’’ Keith, Religion and Philosophy of the Veda, p. 436. Professor Keith himself does not understand the type of thonght he is discussing. Pamapam na janasi, Jataka, II, 254; cthituse jandya, m& gam anagam aditim vadhista, Rg. Veda, VIII, tor, 15.

When the modern scholar boldly asserts that “‘ the method of interpreting earlier ideas from a larger point of view,” that is to say in the light of our own deeper understanding, may be “‘ very serviceable . . . to the expounder of a philosophy or to the exhorter of a religion . . . yet by the scholar is to be carefully discriminated from a historically

- correct exegesis of the primitive statements ” (Hume, Thirteen Upanishads, p. 299, Note 2), there comes to mind a remark of the prihagjana very often overheard in museums in presence of the Italian “ primitives,” ““ That was before they knew anything about anatomy.’ The notion of “ progress ’’ in fact so flatters our pride, that we cannot refrain from applying it even where it is inapplicable, i.e., in the fields of art and metaphysics. Professor Hume’s own versions and induction of the Upanisads raise in our minds very serious doubts of his own “larger point of view.”

105 When Professor Keith speaks of ‘‘ our natural desire to modernise and to find reason prevailing in a barbarous age,’’ he begs the whole question, and we suggest, again to quote his own words, that “ we must be prepared to shed our personal predilections and to accept the conclusion which evidence indicates ’’ (Buddhist philosophy, p. 26). Those who think that “in a country like this we must not expect to find anything that appeals to mind or to deep feeling ’’ (Baden-Powell,

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