The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

600 The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo never found time to resume the series, and left The
Secret of the Veda incomplete.
Selected Hymns. These thirteen translations with commentaries were
published in the first twelve issues of the Arya, from August 1914 to
July 1915. (Two appeared in the first issue.) A footnote at the beginning
of the first instalment, explaining the nature of the translations, is
printed as an Author’s Note in the present edition. At the end of the
last instalment, Sri Aurobindo noted that he had selected “a few brief
and easy hymns” with the idea of “explaining by actual examples the
secret of the Veda”, but that “other translations of a more general
character” would be necessary to show that this was “the pervading
sense and teaching of the Rig Veda.” It was evidently for this purpose
that he began Hymns of the Atris in the next issue of the Arya.
Hymns of the Atris. In July 1915, Sri Aurobindo announced in “The
‘Arya’s’ Second Year” that he intended, from the following issue,
to replace the Selected Hymns by a translation of the Hymns
of the Atris (the fifth Mandala of the Rig Veda) so conceived
as to make the sense of the Vedic chants at once and easily
intelligible without the aid of a commentary to the general
reader.
Hymns of the Atris began to appear in the Arya in August 1915 and
continued until December 1917. This work consists of translations of
two series of Suktas (“hymns”) from the fifth Mandala (“book”) of the
Rig Veda, along with introductory chapters, a summary of each hymn
and interpretative notes. The introductory chapters consist of a foreword,
a general introduction entitled “The Doctrine of the Mystics”,
and two essays on the gods to whom the hymns are addressed: “Agni,
the Divine Will-Force” and “The Guardians of the Light”. The fifth
Mandala of the Rig Veda comprises eighty-seven hymns composed by
Rishis of the Atri clan. Sri Aurobindo translated forty-three of these:
all twenty-eight hymns to Agni (V.1 – 28), all eleven hymns to Mitra-
Varuna (V.62 – 72), both hymns to Usha (V.79, 80), the hymn to Surya
Savitri (V.81) already translated and commented upon in Selected
Hymns, and a hymn to Varuna (V.85), rendered in two versions to show
its “exoteric” as well as its “esoteric” sense. (See also “A Hymn of the