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

THREE VEDIC HYMNS

where even at the present day it is felt that none but a living teacher can communicate ultimate truth. Furthermore, that is an erroneous view which describes the ‘“‘ beginnings’’ of Indian “ philosophy” as a process of “‘ syncretic’’ thought, as a “ tendency to see that all the angels are really One.” On the contrary, Vedic “‘mythology’”’ as we possess it represents an already “late ’’ and sophisticated stage in the history of symbolism, an employment of increasingly diverse similitudes and images, and of new-found essential names and epithets, accompanied by a tendency towards a conception of these names as those of independent powers, so that a superficial aspect of polytheism is brought about, of the same sort as that which can be recognized in Christianity when it is said with respect to the Trinity, “We do not say the only God, for deity is common to several,’ St. Thomas, Sum. Th., I, Q. 31, A. 29°. These elaborations may be regarded from some points of view as a progress in theological science, but from that point of view which takes into consideration that “ the angels have fewer ideas and use less means than men,” and holds that in a single seeing and in one idea “ He” beholds himself and all things simultaneously, and accordingly that with the knowledge of That One “ this entire universe becomes known,” Mundaka Up., I, I, 3, rather as a decline. In reality, the notion of a progress or decline is out of place, an absolute progress or decline being no more conceivable in metaphysics than in art: the thing known can only be in the knower according to the mode of the knower,* and that is why under changed conditions alternative-formulations (parydya) necessarily present themselves; each of these, in so far as it is “ correct,” and not in the measure of its complexity or simplicity, expressing one and the same truth. All that concerns the historian of style, rather than the expositor of the meaning of meanings, paramdrtha: it is precisely with respect to that ultimate significance that ya evam