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

INTRODUCTION

ties,” or that God ‘“‘ cannot be a Person without a Nature, nor can his Nature be without a Person,’”’ Eckhart, I, 268 and 394,? or had read later Dante’s “O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,” Paradiso, XXxlil, would not have seen in the mutual generation of Purusa and Viraj, or Daksa and Aditi an arbitrary or primitive mode of thought: those familiar with Christian conceptions of Godhead as “‘ void,” ‘‘ naked,” and “as though it were not,” would not have been disconcerted by descriptions of That as “ Death ” (mytyu), and as being “ in no wise ” (nett, neti). To those who even to-day have some idea of what is meant by a “ reconciliation of opposites,” or have partly understood the relation between man’s conscious consciousness and the unconscious sources of his powers, the significance of the Waters as an “ inexhaustible well ’’ of the possibilities of existence might be apparent. When Blake speaks of a ‘‘ Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” or Swinburne writes, “‘ I bid you but be,”’ there is included more of the Vedas than can be found in many learned disquisitions on their “ philosophy.’’ What right have Sanskritists to confine their labours to the solution of linguistic problems: is it fear that precludes their wrestling with the ideology of the texts they undertake ? Our scholarship is too little humane.’

What I have called here a “new approach to the Vedas ” is nothing more than an essay in the exposition of Vedic ideas by means ofa translation anda commentary in which the resources of other forms of the universal tradition are taken for granted. Max Miiller, in r8or, held that the Veda would continue to occupy scholars “ for centuries to come.’’ Meanwhile there are others beside professional scholars, for whom the Vedas are significant. In any case, no great extension of our present measure of understanding can be expected from philological research alone, however valuable such methods of research may have been in the past: and what is true for SumeroBabylonian religion is no less true for the Vedas, viz., that

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