The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

30 The Secret of the Veda
application there is nowhere a sure basis. Yesterday we were all
convinced that Varuna was identical with Ouranos, the Greek
heaven; today this identity is denounced to us as a philological
error; tomorrow it may be rehabilitated. Parame vyoman
is a Vedic phrase which most of us would translate “in the
highest heaven”, but Mr. T. Paramasiva Aiyar in his brilliant
and astonishing work, The Riks, tells us that it means “in the
lowest hollow”; for vyoman “means break, fissure, being literally
absence of protection, (uma)”; and the reasoning which
he uses is so entirely after the fashion of the modern scholar
that the philologist is debarred from answering that “absence
of protection” cannot possibly mean a fissure and that human
language was not constructed on these principles. For Philology
has failed to discover the principles on which language was constructed
or rather was organically developed, and on the other
hand it has preserved a sufficient amount of the old spirit of mere
phantasy and ingenuity and is full of precisely such brilliances of
hazardous inference. But then we arrive at this result that there
is nothing to help us in deciding whether parame vyoman in the
Veda refers to the highest heaven or to the lowest abyss. It is
obvious that a philology so imperfect may be a brilliant aid, but
can never be a sure guide to the sense of Veda.
We have to recognise in fact that European scholarship in
its dealings with the Veda has derived an excessive prestige from
its association in the popular mind with the march of European
Science. The truth is that there is an enormous gulf between the
patient, scrupulous and exact physical sciences and these other
brilliant, but immature branches of learning upon which Vedic
scholarship relies. Those are careful of their foundation, slow
to generalise, solid in their conclusions; these are compelled to
build upon scanty data large and sweeping theories and supply
the deficiency of sure indications by an excess of conjecture and
hypothesis. They are full of brilliant beginnings, but can come
to no secure conclusion. They are the first rough scaffolding for
a Science, but they are not as yet Sciences.
It follows that the whole problem of the interpretation of
Veda still remains an open field in which any contribution that