(This article was first published in the Dec 2015 issue of 'The Call Beyond', monthly magazine of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, New Delhi.)
Living in India, one is
never too far from the Vedas, whether one realizes this or not. The Hindu
culture, in its purity, is founded on the Vedas. Almost every day do we
encounter deities such as Vishnu, Shiva, Ganapati, Saraswati and Lakshmi, all of
whom were first mentioned in the Vedas. We participate in yajñas, which too
have their origin in the Vedas. A yajña today is still performed the way it was
performed thousands of years ago because the tradition has been preserved so carefully
over the centuries.
From time to time, we also get the chance to
hear chanting of Vedic mantras - at prayer ceremonies, as well as, at important
life-events, such as a marriage ceremony. So, in a way, the Vedic culture is
still quite alive and around us.
But while the outer
symbols, rituals, and mantras are still part of our daily lives, their inner meaning
and significance is not fully known to us. The result of this, sadly, is that a
lot of us have come to believe that the Vedas are merely ritualistic. We think
that the performance of the ritual itself is the sole aim and purpose of the
Vedas.
This view is further
supported by early Western interpretations of the Vedas, which dismissed them
as “sacrificial compositions of a primitive and barbarous race”. They did
not see the Vedas as capable of a deeper spiritual thought.
However, this couldn’t be
farthest from the truth. The Vedas are compositions based on profound spiritual
experiences of our ancients, the Rishis. They had developed an inner discipline
which enabled them to clearly view the inflow of ideas from a higher plane of
consciousness. The Vedas are the expression of these high ideas and experiences.
Sri Aurobindo was perhaps
the first scholar to recognize and explain this. He wrote extensively on the
inner meaning of the Vedas. He found the Vedas to be a repository of such
profound ideas which were far more elaborate and exact in describing spiritual
experiences than the teachings of Yoga or the Upanishads.
He explained that the
Vedic ritual of yajña represented an inner spiritual progress towards the Divine
Nature of man. It symbolized an inner devotion of one’s highest mental
capacities towards the realization of our Truth.
“The sacrifice is the
giving by man of what he possesses in his being to the higher or divine nature
and its fruit is the farther enrichment of his manhood by the lavish bounty of
the gods.”[1]
Sri Aurobindo explained
that the reason this inner meaning got lost is that such profound and intuitive
spiritual experiences required consistent inner effort and development. The generations
after the Rishis found it difficult to achieve this high ideal of self-culture.
As a result, only the outer ritual could be preserved and the inner meaning got
lost.
Therefore, if one truly
wishes to understand the foundational wisdom of Hindu culture, one needs to
look beyond the outer ritual and delve deep into its spiritual meaning. The
rituals were, as Sri Aurobindo writes, “the effective symbols of a spiritual
experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which
were then the highest achievement of the human race.”[2]
If we, today, appreciate
this fact then perhaps we need to look deeper into the meaning of the Vedas
before labeling them as ‘ritualistic’.
No comments:
Post a Comment