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

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

loosed from bondage (bandhat pramucyate), V, 30, attaining, in the terms of our text, the Liberty (adititva) of Aditi.

So then at the end of the “ year,” cosmic or terrestrial as the case may be, the horse is sacrificed, its life-breaths returning to him whose image it is, not as he is in hypostasis (dvitiya dtman), but in the Unity, there “ the Son is lost in the unity of the essence,” Eckhart, I, 275. Just as all “souls” (bhi#tanz) are returned into His universal nature at the end of time, Bhagavad Gita, IX, 8, so the “‘ soul”’ of the horse is returned to its source when it is ritually slain: that is done with an end in view, that life may be renewed, just as at the beginning of time, of any time, in the spring of the “year,” all “souls’”’ are poured forth again from their latency in him, 702d.

The cosmic ASvamedha is the willed Passion of incarnate deity, begotten Second Person (duitzya diman), this his further sacrifice being a denial of the will to life, as the first was its assertion. But this Passion and formally undertaken death are not without an end in view, this also is a desirous work, kamya karma, and as such will have its consequences in a renewed manifestation of life, in another Time, when another Sun, another Horse, will be poured out (visysti). The terrestrial ASvamedha is the solemn enactment of that Passion, to the analogous end that life may be renewed, made viable, enhanced and continued here and now, ‘‘I ask the seed of the male horse.’”’ He who undertakes the rite accordingly, with an eye to its fruits, wins fullness of life on earth (a hundred years, in the analogy of His “ hundred years ’’), wealth, offspring, cattle, whatever he desires here, and therewith also the world of the Patriarchs, after his death: that is not a final emancipation, for the natural reward of interested works is inevitable, he must return again to renewed birth, punar apddana, and other deaths, punar mrtyu. He only who knows, who understands, who realises and

39 sy ie)