The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

The Foundations of the Psychological Theory 41
a psychological significance and the mention of physical plenty
comes in with a violent jar of incoherency into the homogeneous
totality of the thought. Commonsense, therefore, demands that
the use of these words with a psychological import should be
admittedintheVeda.
But if this is done consistently, not only whole verses and
passages, but whole hymns assume at once the psychological
complexion. On one condition this transformation is frequently
complete, leaving no word or phrase unaffected, — the condition
that we should admit the symbolic character of the Vedic
sacrifice. We find in the Gita the word yajña, sacrifice, used in a
symbolic sense for all action, whether internal or external, that
is consecrated to the gods or to the Supreme. Was such symbolic
use of the word born of a later philosophical intellectuality, or
was it inherent in the Vedic idea of sacrifice? I found that in the
Veda itself there were hymns in which the idea of the yajña or
of the victim is openly symbolical, others in which the veil is
quite transparent. The question then arose whether these were
later compositions developing an incipient symbolism out of old
superstitious practices or rather the occasional plainer statement
of a sense which is in most hymns more or less carefully veiled by
the figure. If there were no constant recurrence of psychological
passages in the Veda, the former explanation would, no doubt,
have to be accepted. But on the contrary whole hymns took
naturally a psychological sense proceeding with a perfect and
luminous coherency from verse to verse, where the only points
of obscurity were the mention of the sacrifice or of the offering or
sometimes of the officiating priest, who might be either a man or
a god. If these words could be interpreted symbolically, I found
always that the progression of thought became more perfect,
more luminous, more coherent and the sense of the hymn in
its entirety was victoriously completed. I felt therefore justified
by every canon of sound criticism in pursuing my hypothesis
farther and including in it the symbolic sense of the Vedic ritual.
Nevertheless here intervenes the first real difficulty of the
psychological interpretation. Hitherto I had been proceeding by
a perfectly straightforward and natural method of interpretation