The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Seven Rivers 117
increases by knowledge and makes his home and rest in the
source of the Truth, of whom Heaven and Earth are the wives
and lovers, who is increased by the divine waters in the unobstructed
Vast, his own seat, and dwelling in that shoreless infinity
yields to the illumined gods the supreme Immortality, cannot be
the god of physical Fire. In this passage as in so many others the
mystical, the spiritual, the psychological character of the burden
of the Veda reveals itself not under the surface, not behind a veil
of mere ritualism, but openly, insistently, — in a disguise indeed,
but a disguise that is transparent, so that the secret truth of
the Veda appears here, like the rivers of Vishwamitra’s hymn,
“neither veiled nor naked”.
We see that these Waters are the same as those of Vamadeva’s
hymn, of Vasishtha’s, closely connected with the clarity and the
honey, — ghr.tasya yonau sravathe madhūnām, ´scotanti dhārā
madhuno ghr.tasya; they lead to the Truth, they are themselves
the source of the Truth, they flow in the unobstructed and shoreless
Vast as well as here upon the earth. They are figured as
fostering cows (dhenavah. ), mares (a´svāh. ), they are called sapta
vān. īh. , the seven Words of the creative goddess Vak, — Speech,
the expressive power of Aditi, of the supreme Prakriti who is
spoken of as the Cow just as the Deva or Purusha is described in
the Veda as Vrishabha or Vrishan, the Bull. They are therefore
the seven strands of all being, the seven streams or currents or
forms of movement of the one conscious existence.
We shall find that in the light of the ideas which we have
discovered from the very opening of the Veda in Madhuchchhandas’
hymns and in the light of the symbolic interpretations
which are now becoming clear to us, this passage apparently so
figured, mysterious, enigmatical becomes perfectly straightforward
and coherent, as indeed do all the passages of the Veda
which seem now almost unintelligible when once their right clue
is found. We have only to fix the psychological function of Agni,
the priest, the fighter, the worker, the truth-finder, the winner of
beatitude for man; and that has already been fixed for us in the
first hymn of the Rig Veda by Madhuchchhandas’ description
of him, — “the Will in works of the Seer true and most rich in