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

THREE VEDIC HYMNS

formulated just a week or year before this particular hymn was published.

Not only are the terms and implications of our hymn all formally correct (pramiti), they tally also in form and content with those of the Upanisads. Yet we are asked to believe that Vedic thought was “ primitive ’’1°%—that the wise-singers of the Vedic hymns were able to express themselves in terms that have been universally employed elsewhere and otherwhen with a deep and known significance, and all without knowing what it was they said. It is as though it were argued that the law of gravity had been hit upon by lucky chance, long before anyone had consciously observed that heavy objects have a tendency to fall. Surely our faith in uniformity forbids us to imagine, what is outside the range of our experience, viz., that any sound formula, any clear statement of principles, could have been propounded by anyone who did not understand his own words.1°® It would be far easier to suppose that such a statement had been propounded in the past by those who knew what they were saying, and that it had since come to be repeated mechanically without understanding: but on the one hand, that would be to push the beginnings of wisdom too far back for the comfort of those who fondly believe that wisdom came into the world only in their own day, and on the other would need proof by some internal evidence of the presumed misunderstanding. I prefer to believe that wherever and whenever a proposition has been correctly and intelligibly stated (and that covers both verbal and visual symbolisms, both “‘ scripture’ and “‘ art’) the proposition was also understood. Problems of ontology are not so simple that they can be solved by “luck” or “inspiration”’: on the contrary there is no sort of work more arduous than “audition,” and here a man has need of all the power of the pure intellect.

A version now follows of another hymn of creation, Rg Veda, X, 72:

59