The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Chapter IV
The Foundations of the
Psychological Theory
AHYPOTHESIS of the sense of Veda must always proceed,
to be sure and sound, from a basis that clearly emerges
in the language of the Veda itself. Even if the bulk of
its substance be an arrangement of symbols and figures, the
sense of which has to be discovered, yet there should be clear
indications in the explicit language of the hymns which will
guide us to that sense. Otherwise, the symbols being themselves
ambiguous, we shall be in danger of manufacturing a system out
of our own imaginations and preferences instead of discovering
the real purport of the figures chosen by the Rishis. In that case,
however ingenious and complete our theory, it is likely to be a
building in the air, brilliant, but without reality or solidity.
Our first duty, therefore, is to determine whether there is,
apart from figure and symbol, in the clear language of the hymns
a sufficient kernel of psychological notions to justify us in supposing
at all a higher than the barbarous and primitive sense of
the Veda. And afterwards we have to find, as far as possible from
the internal evidence of the Suktas themselves, the interpretation
of each symbol and image and the right psychological function
of each of the gods. A firm and not a fluctuating sense, founded
on good philological justification and fitting naturally into the
context wherever it occurs, must be found for each of the fixed
terms of the Veda. For, as has already been said, the language of
the hymns is a language fixed and invariable; it is the carefully
preserved and scrupulously respected diction consistently expressing
either a formal creed and ritual or a traditional doctrine
and constant experience. If the language of the Vedic Rishis were
free and variable, if their ideas were evidently in a state of flux,
shifting and uncertain, a convenient licence and incoherence in