An
Approach To Indian History
-Prof. Kittu Reddy |
We shall now study the ancient history of India, and we shall start with the Vedas. As we have mentioned in the previous chapter, research is going on the dating of the Vedas and the Harappan and Mohenjodaro civilisations; but whatever be their dates we shall start with the Vedas because it is generally accepted that they represent the foundation and basis of Indian culture and Indian spirituality.
Indian spiritual tradition and the great spiritual figures right till modern times have considered the Vedas to be the fountain and source of all Indian spirituality. Is there any truth in this legend and tradition or is it all moonshine and imagination? For modern European scholarship finds in the Vedas nothing but the most trivial and superficial writings with no real value at all, the composition of a barbarian people. Also it has been stated after a study of the Vedas that there was an invasion of India by a race called the Aryans and they were opposed by the native Dravidians. There is constant reference in the Vedas to battles between the Aryans and the Dasyus - the Aryans supposedly being the fair-skinned people and the Dasyus the darker race, and this has led to the theory of the Aryan invasion.
We shall have to examine these theories and see what truth they contain. But, first let us see what the Vedas are and how they have been written.
There are four Vedas - Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda. The Rig Veda is the most pre-eminent one. The Rig Veda consists of 10 mandalas (parts) and each mandala consists of a number of suktas and each one of the suktas consists of a group of verses. Veda is said to be fundamentally a record of experiences of intuition and revelation. The experiences are varied and belong to various stages of development and inner exploration. They record not only the experiences of the poets but also of the ancestors (pitarah purvajanah). Veda thus describes the knowledge contained in the pre-Vedic tradition as also the Vedic tradition proper. It is important to note that the largest number of verses and hymns are addressed to Agni, the Mystic Fire.
We must also note that the people of those times looked upon the universe with some kind of a deeper feeling. They saw divinity in everything and worshipping animals was also part of it. "Isha-vasyamidam sarvam"
To them the most important things were the phenomena of Nature, the sun, the moon, the stars, day and night, rain and the storms. Quite naturally therefore, the Vedas were expressed in a language which referred to Nature and there are constant references to animals like cows and horses and to the rain god and to the Wind.
This was how they combined human and animal traits as an exaltation of a deity and not as a denigration. This is the meaning of Ganesha, Narasimha and others in the Hindu tradition.
Also the Vedas were written in a language which is almost archaic; no doubt it has a great similarity to Sanskrit but many of the words have a different connotation to the modern mind. There have naturally been many interpretations of the Vedas; yet it is a fact that Indian spirituality and tradition have always regarded the Vedas as the fount of all knowledge.
There are three reasons for this persistent belief.
First as we have already said, it has been a long tradition in India that the Veda is the highest source of knowledge; it has been supported by almost all the schools of Indian philosophy and further most of the great spiritual personalities of India have confirmed this opinion.
Secondly, the Upanishads which come after the Vedas and are universally recognised as a body of the most profound truths have themselves declared the sacredness of the Vedas.
Thirdly, it has been found that the Vedas reveal their true meaning by the proper interpretation of certain very important keywords. These words which in their ordinary sense give only a very superficial and external meaning reveal a profound spiritual truth when viewed in another sense. We shall explain this later in the chapter.
However history tells us that there have been four major attempts to interpret the Vedas. We shall touch upon them briefly.
The first one was by Yaska, the second by Sayanacharya, the third by Max Mueller and other Indologists and the last one by Sri Aurobindo. We shall make a quick survey of these different interpretations.
The first interpretation by Yaska was one might almost say lexicographic. It gave a detailed dictionary meaning of the words as understood by the Rishis and although it did not provide any deeper meaning its great use lay in giving us a precise sense of the terms used in the Veda; also since it was nearest in time to the Vedas the deformation in the meaning of the words must have been the least.
The work of Sayanacharya was more scholarly and ritualistic. He tried to disengage and reveal the meaning of the Vedas by giving the words a symbolic sense . He however stressed more on the ritualistic sense of the Vedas, on its external aspects such as the sacrifice. Sacrifice was the principal institution and symbol of the Vedic tradition and knowledge. He gave it however solely an external and ritualistic meaning and thus robbed it of the deeper spiritual sense; yet now and then he did show that the Vedas had a deeper import.
The work of the modern European scholars was based on a study of Philology. They too stressed on the ritualistic aspect of the Vedas and came to the conclusion that the Vedas were the composition of a primitive people with no real and profound sense. This fits in perfectly with the modern view of history that primitive man was barbarian and that civilisation has been the result of a gradual development of the mind.
Lastly we have the interpretation of Sri Aurobindo. He has explained that the Vedas had a double significance, one for the ordinary physically-minded men and another for the initiates and the more spiritually evolved men. The physically-minded man is the man who is in the first stage of evolution and is mainly concerned with the material interests of life; he has not yet reached the stage where he can seek for a higher mental and spiritual development. And in India it has always been considered unwise and unsafe to reveal highest knowledge to those who are not ready; to them has to be given a simpler and more external truth which they can easily assimilate. Thus the Veda has been written in a double language - we shall illustrate this now. Let us take as an example the word ‘go’ in Sanskrit which means cow. This word has a double meaning -in the external sense it means cow but in the symbolic sense it means light. Thus one of the most revered spiritual figures of India, Buddha has been known as Gotama the Buddha and that means the “most enlightened one” and not as the external sense would have conveyed the greatest cow. In the same way it can be shown that many of the important words- in fact the keywords,- have a double meaning, an external sense and a symbolic significance; necessarily this alters the whole significance of the Vedas. It will then be seen that the Vedas are not the composition of a barbarian people but that they contain great and profound spiritual revelations. The Vedas have a double meaning - one in its external sense for the less developed man and another with a profound sense and a deeper psychological import.
Viewed in this light, a totally different meaning emerges and it can be shown that the Vedas contain some of the deepest values of Indian culture. We shall briefly mention these values in the remaining part of this chapter.
First as we have already said, the Vedic system took its outward foundation on the mind of the physical man and based itself on the physical representations and aims of the material world. The primitive man was deeply religious and looked upon the world from a symbolic angle. He believed that the sun and the moon and the stars were living entities and he prayed to them for a better harvest or for greater riches. The Vedic seer understood the nature of the men of that time but even here it did not limit itself to the first religious notions of the natural external man; the Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people. They spoke to them of a higher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians and of the necessity of a truer knowledge and of a larger inner living. No doubt, the people understood these truths in their more outward sense but they were slowly and gradually trained by them to develop their ethical nature. This approach is based on a fundamental concept of Indian culture - that of graduality. For it is a firm Indian belief that truth cannot be grasped at one stroke, one has to approach it by stages and that the truth has to be presented according to the stage of development.
The deeper truth of these things was reserved for the initiates, for those who were ready to understand and practise the inner truths. It was to these seekers that the Vedas were addressed and quite naturally it was they who understood the inner meaning that was revealed by the secret words.
The primary notion of the Vedic religion was that of a hierarchy of worlds, an ascending stair of planes of being in the universe. It saw a mounting scale of the worlds corresponding to a similar scale of planes or degrees or levels of consciousness in the nature of man. All these worlds and planes are governed by a truth, a right and a law, one in essence but different in their forms. We thus have the outer physical light, another higher and mental light and a still higher spiritual light. Surya, the Sun-God, was the god of the physical Sun, but he is at the same time to the Vedic Rishi the giver of the rays of knowledge and a higher light of spiritual illumination. All the Vedic godheads have this outer and inner and inmost function, their known and their secret names, all are in their external character , powers of physical nature and have in their inner meaning a psychic and psychological significance.
The greatest power of the Vedic teaching lay in its application to the inner life of man. Man lives in the physical world and he is subject to death and the falsehood of the mortal existence. To rise beyond this death and falsehood, he has to turn from the falsehood to the truth, he has to turn to the Light and to battle with and conquer the Forces of the Darkness. This, he does by communion with the divine powers and their aid and the way to call down this aid was the secret of the Vedic mystics.
How to call down this aid, what was the means to get into communion with the divine powers? The image used was that of the sacrifice or yajna which we find constantly mentioned in the Vedas. From the purely external point of view, the sacrifice was a ritual which had to be performed before all important occasions or actions and it governed the whole society and all its hours. It consisted in the offering of ghee and other material possessions at fixed times of the day in a prescribed manner; many have looked upon the sacrifice as nothing but a propitiation of Nature-Gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise. But it will be evident that this is only a superficial view and that the image of the sacrifice was profoundly mystic. The concept of the sacrifice was based on the recognition of a secret relationship between the manifest and external world on one side and the occult and secret energies and actions that lie behind all our physical vision and experience on the other side. The symbols of the outer sacrifice were given an inner meaning as in many other sacred Mysteries all over the world; they represent the calling of the gods into the human being, a connecting sacrifice. an intimate interchange, a mutual aid and a communion.
To what Gods shall the sacrifice be offered?
First, Agni the seven tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge; for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul.
Next, Indra the Puissant, who is the power of the Pure Existent manifested as the Divine Mind.
Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning.
Soma, is the representative deity of the beatitude; the beatitude concealed in the waters of our existence.
The Aryan man has to constantly labour and fight and conquer; he must be a tireless toiler and a stern warrior. He has to win kingdom after kingdom and tread down enemy after enemy that are leagued against him to thwart his progress.
The chief enemy is the Dasyu; these dividers, plunderers and harmful powers are given different names and appellations; there are also some specific names given such as Vritra, the Serpent who is the grand Adversary, Vala and the Panis who are the miser traffickers in the sense-life and so on. So understood, the Vedas become the high aspiring song of Humanity; its chants are the episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension. The battle is not between the fair-skinned Aryan and the dark Dravidian but the struggle of the aspiring soul against the lower nature in man.
Another point to note is the nature of the hymns or the mantras, for according to the Vedic poets, a sound or a certain secret set of vibrations tunes exactly with the vibrations which are appropriate to the invisible psychological forces and entities. Mantras are thus not only expressions of knowledge, but they are also vehicles of devotion. They are also vibratory forces of dynamism and action and it is therefore important to recite them properly and in the right manner.
One hears often of the Rishi in connection with the Vedas; the Rishi was the seer who had lived the fullness of life and had often even led the life of the householder; but he had at the same time realised his spiritual fullness and lived in his soul. He had thus the experience of life and was above it at the same time and could therefore guide wisely human life and endeavour. It is important to note that the Vedic teaching always insisted that spirituality never rejected life but embraced the whole of life and the Rishi was the perfect expression and embodiment of the highest spiritual life.
We shall now illustrate with a legend from the Vedas - the legend of the Cow and the Angirasa Rishis. It is a simple legend -the cows have been lost and the Angirasa Rishis are in search of the lost cows. The sacrifice has to be performed, the sacrificial fire has to be lit and the Rishis have to recite the Mantra. Indra has to be invoked and he comes down with his thunderbolt and the power of all the gods. A battle is waged against the Dasyus and the Panis and with the help of Sarama, the divine hound, the gods and the Rishis enter the caves of the Panis where the cows are hidden. The cows are liberated and the conquest is over. The legend is simple but it has a deeper significance; the cows, as we have already seen represent the light, the Rishis represent aspiring humanity, the Dasyus and the Panis are the dark forces and Indra is the divine power. The light has been stolen by the dark forces and has been hidden in the caves, the dark caverns of our lower nature; it has to be recovered with the aid of the divine forces. The legend becomes thus the story of man’s aspiration and of his soul’s adventure.
And this is a long and difficult endeavour and leads to a direct experience of the soul and a practical living it out in the actualities of life. This way and the path to this experience is termed in India - Yoga. For the word Yoga means union and here it is union with the highest spirit and soul, which is concealed in the depths of our being. Thus Yoga is a practical discipline with a definite method and goal.
It becomes clear from all this that the theory of the invasion of India by the Aryans is not founded on any reliable and sure evidence from the Vedas. On the contrary, the word Arya might well represent the higher element in human nature - the aspiring soul while the Dasyu is simply the lower nature wedded to the animal part in man. This seems as plausible and reasonable as the theory of the invasion of the fair-skinned Aryans and the battle with the dark Dravidians.
We may now sum up the chapter on the Vedas with its chief contributions to Indian culture and spiritual development
· First, it believed that at the centre of this creation and of the universe was a supreme Reality and Consciousness.(Ekam Sat)
· Secondly, it said that this Reality was present in the heart of all living beings - it was the soul or the psychic element in man.(hrdaye guhayam)
· This supreme Reality also manifests and presents itself to us in many forms, names, powers and personalities whom we call the gods.
· It made a distinction between Knowledge and Ignorance; the only true Knowledge was the knowledge of the supreme Reality. All other knowledge was termed Ignorance. This explains the great reverence in the Indian mind to a person who has attained spiritual realization.
· It also said that there was a means and method to enter into contact with this soul; this discipline is termed in India as the Yoga.(rtasya pantha).
· The Vedas spoke of the immortality of the human life and of the possibility of the conquest of death and there was a clear perception of divinising human life.
On these ideas, the Vedic sages built up a profound psychological and psychic discipline which led to a high spiritual realisation.
Indian civilisation and culture has taken its stamp and its fundamental direction from the ideas and values of the Vedic age and the Vedic culture.
The Vedas may thus be considered the cradle of Indian culture, the seed time of all its future development and not the creation of a barbaric and undeveloped stage of humanity.