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

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

eternity and time, God in love and anger, moreover heaven and hell.’ Equally consonant with the thought of the Vedas and Upanisads are Swinburne’s moving lines :

“ The tree many rooted That swells to the sky With frondage red-fruited The life-treeamI... In me only the root is That blooms in your boughs... My own blood is what stanches The wounds in my bark....”

The efficacy of the ritual sacrifice (karma, yajva), that the ritual undertaken with a given end in view assuredly procures that end, is by no means denied in the Upanisads. The end in view, however, is a renewal and magnification of life, not an absolute emancipation from mortality. Knowledge alone, That avt thou, is the realisation of immortality, in or regardless of any here or now. So then there is a higher sacrifice, his who understands, ya evam veda, the ritual not only in its imitative operation here, as a thing per-formed,” but in its intrinsic-form as a thing un-formed, re-turned, there in the uttermost Empyrean, the lotus of the heart. And that applies not only to specific rituals, such as the horse-sacrifice or offering of soma, but to all the functions of life, which if they are undertaken blindly and desirously increase the sum of our mortality, but if undertaken undesirously, and unselfishly but Self-ishly, and with an understanding of their spiritual, transubstantial equivalents, are by no means obstacles, but rather ways of enlightenment. What is here involved is transformation (parduytti, abhisambhava) ,” or in terms of psychology, sublimation: in religious extension, “ Except aman be born again.” All that is further developed in the Bhagavad Gita, e.g., 1V, 27, 32 and 33, “ Others pour out as their sacrifice all the functioning of the senses (¢ndriya-

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