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

INTRODUCTION

Existinc translations of Vedic texts, however etymologically ‘‘ accurate,” are too often unintelligible or unconvincing, sometimes admittedly unintelligible to the translator himself. Neither the ‘‘ Sacred Books of the East,” nor for example such translations of the Upanisads as those of R. E. Hume, or those of Mitra, Roer, and Cowell, recently reprinted, even approach the standards set by such works as Thomas Taylor’s version of the Enneads of Plotinus, or Friedlander’s of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Translators of the Vedas do not seem to have possessed any previous knowledge of metaphysics, but rather to have gained their first and only notions of ontology from Sanskrit sources. As remarked by Jung, Psychological Types, p. 263, with reference to the study of the Upanisads under existing conditions, ‘any true perception of the quite extraordinary depth of those ideas and their amazing psychological accuracy is still but a remote possibility.”

It is very evident that for an understanding of the Vedas, a knowledge of Sanskrit, however profound, is insufficient. Indians themselves do not rely upon their knowledge of Sanskrit here, but insist upon the absolute necessity of study at the feet of a guru. That is not possible in the same sense for European students. Yet Europe also possesses a tradition founded in first principles. That mentality which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought into being an intellectual Christianity owing as much to Maimonides, Aristotle, and the Arabs as to the Bible itself, would not have found the Vedas “ difficult.’’ For example, those who understood that “ Paternity and filiation . . . are dependent proper-

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