The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Foreword 365
and religion had replaced the Puranic and Brahminical and the
old books and the Sanskrit language had ceased to be read and
understood, this now familiar phrase would have been as meaningless
in India as in Europe. Some infallible commentator or
ingenious scholar might have been proving to our entire satisfaction
that Laxmi was the Dawn and Saraswati the Night or
that they were two irreconcilable chemical substances — or one
knows not what else! It is something of this kind that has overtaken
the ancient clarities of the Veda; the sense is dead and only
the obscurity of a forgotten poetic form remains. Therefore when
we read “Sarama by the path of the Truth discovers the herds”,
the mind is stopped and baffled by an unfamiliar language. It
has to be translated to us, like the phrase about Saraswati to
the European, into a plainer and less figured thought, “Intuition
by the way of the Truth arrives at the hidden illuminations.”
Lacking the clue, we wander into ingenuities about the Dawn
and the Sun or even imagine in Sarama, the hound of heaven,
a mythological personification of some prehistoric embassy to
Dravidian nations for the recovery of plundered cattle!
And the whole of the Veda is conceived in such images.
The resultant obscurity and confusion for our intelligence is
appalling and it will be at once evident how useless would be
any translation of the hymns which did not strive at the same
time to be an interpretation. “Dawn and Night,” runs an impressive
Vedic verse, “two sisters of different forms but of one
mind, suckle the same divine Child.” We understand nothing.
Dawn and Night are of different forms, but why of one mind?
And who is the child? If it is Agni, the fire, what are we to
understand by Dawn and Night suckling alternately an infant
fire? But the Vedic poet is not thinking of the physical night, the
physical dawn or the physical fire. He is thinking of the alternations
in his own spiritual experience, its constant rhythm of
periods of a sublime and golden illumination and other periods
of obscuration or relapse into normal unillumined consciousness
and he confesses the growth of the infant strength of the divine
life within him through all these alternations and even by the
very force of their regular vicissitude. For in both states there