The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Seven Rivers 111
“May those divine waters foster me, the eldest (or greatest)
of the ocean from the midst of the moving flood that go purifying,
not settling down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, the
Bull, clove out. The divine waters that flow whether in channels
dug or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean, —
may those divine waters foster me. In the midst of whom King
Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of
creatures, they that stream honey and are pure and purifying, —
may those divine waters foster me. In whom Varuna the king, in
whom Soma, in whom all the Gods have the intoxication of the
energy, into whom Agni Vaishwanara has entered, may those
divine waters foster me.”
It is evident that Vasishtha is speaking here of the same
waters, the same streams that Vamadeva hymns, the waters
that rise from the ocean and flow into the ocean, the honeyed
wave that rises upward from the sea, from the flood that is the
heart of things, streams of the clarity, ghr.tasya dhārāh. .They
are the floods of the supreme and universal conscious existence
in which Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the
falsehood of mortals, — a phrase that can apply neither to the
descending rains nor to the physical ocean. Varuna in the Veda
is not an Indian Neptune, neither is he precisely, as the European
scholars at first imagined, the Greek Ouranos, the sky. He is the
master of an ethereal wideness, an upper ocean, of the vastness
of being, of its purity; in that vastness, it is elsewhere said, he
has made paths in the pathless infinite along which Surya, the
Sun, the Lord of Truth and the Light can move. Thence he
looks down on the mingled truths and falsehoods of the mortal
consciousness. And we have farther to note that these divine
waters are those which Indra has cloven out and made to flow
upon the earth, — a description which throughout the Veda is
applied to the seven rivers.
If there were any doubt whether these waters of Vasishtha’s
prayer are the same as the waters of Vamadeva’s great hymn,
madhumān ūrmih. , ghr.tasya dhārāh. , it is entirely removed by
another Sukta of the sage Vasishtha, (VII.47). In the forty-ninth
hymn he refers briefly to the divine waters as honey-streaming,