RgVeda Page 1 of 225 LAST MANTRA The Rig Veda is not the whole shruti, but it enunciates the most central part of it and lays the foundations for all the rest. It is befitting, then, to conclude this anthology with the final mantra of the Rig Veda, just as we opened it with the invocation of the first. Having traversed the long road of praise, exaltation, meditation, and sacrifice, having traveled through the upper realms of the Gods and the underworld of the demons, having reached the loftiest peaks of mystical speculation and touched the lowest depths of the human soul, having gazed, as far as we could, upon the cosmos and upon the divine, we arrive at this last stanza, which is dedicated to the human world and is a prayer for harmony and peace among Men by means of the protection of Agni and all the Gods, but ultimately through the acceptance by Men of their human calling. The last mantra knows only Man's ordinary language and Man's own cherished ideas; it comes back to the simplicity of the fact of being human: a union of hearts and a oneness of spirit, the overcoming of isolating individualisms by harmonious living together, because Man as person is always society and yet not plural. He is a unity with so many strings that they incur the risk of wars and strife, but also offer the possibility of a marvelous harmony and concord. Last Mantra RV X, 191, 4 samani va akutih samanda hrdayani vah samanam astu vo mano yatha vah susahasati United your resolve, united your hearts, may your spirits be at one, that you may long together dwell in unity and concord! AUM TAT SAT AUM PART I A. DAWN AND BIRTH Agni Part I deals with the invisible and underlying foundations of reality; metaontogenesis could be its academic title. It speaks neither of that which "is" nor of that which "shall be." It uses a past tense, but it does not refer properly to a temporal "was." The origin of time cannot be temporal. The source of being cannot itself be just "being." If this were so, there would be no end: we would then search for the source of the source of being and so on indefinitely. The elements of the world or the elements of life are not just parts of the whole. The primordial Word is not yet spoken, nor is the Lord manifested as sovereign; he is not yet Lord. The topics and heroes of Part I of our anthology are not constituents or, as it were, "bricks" of the universe, as if they were molecules out of which reality is composed. They are rather pre-realities, pre-stages, factors shaping the real, not merely components or parts of it, just as in nuclear physics the elemental "particles" cannot any longer be said to be elements or particles out of which the whole is made. In any event our attention is here directed toward discovering the role of nothingness, or becoming aware of the place of a void which cannot be said to exist but which makes it possible that things can exist by the very act of filling up the void. The five sections of Part I, though not systematically connected, are deeply related inasmuch as they all try to give expression to God-above-God, the Beginning-before-the- Beginning, the Lord previous-to-any-Lordship, Life-before-Life, and the Unity underlying all Plurality. We repeat: all that goes on, or rather, in, behind the curtain is not within the range of our experience and thus that Source is neither God, nor Beginning, nor Lord, Life, Light, Unity, Basis, nor even Being or Nonbeing. It is not that I discover what makes Being possible, because it is merely a demand of the mind to find the conditions of possibility for everything. The mind here is by no means outside this very problem. The Prelude is really before the whole play, before all lila, human and divine. It is actually not played. Perhaps the phenomenological mark of "sacred Scriptures," modern or ancient, secular or religious, is file://G:\geniuscode\library\spiritual library\Rgveda.htm 07/08/09 RgVeda Page 2 of 225 that these Scriptures deal with that which cannot be dealt with and speak of the unspeakable, thus positioning themselves beyond the vigilance of the principle of noncontradiction, without, of course, intending or pretending to deny it (for which they would need the help of the same principle). At a later date cosmogonic images were, if not replaced, complemented and in a way overshadowed by meta-physical reflections and, in the course of time, by more religious language and more elaborated cultic performances. Examples of all this are given in Part I. Here our sights are on the invisible, on the origins, on the foundations, on Nonbeing, on the transcendent, but with no intention of stopping there; on the contrary, the whole thrust is on what follows, on what is coming and is being unfolded before our eyes. Liberation lies ahead; there is a long way to go, but the credentials of reality already show that anything is possible with the really real. The Dawn is not the day, nor is Birth really human life, but without them there would be neither day nor our life. The true "be-coming" is an authentic coming to be; but do not ask where it comes from lest you stop the very becoming. Faith very properly belongs to this section. Without faith nothing takes shape or comes into being. Faith is the beginning of salvation, because it is the very dawn of our true being, the existential openness of our human existence--the very condition of any real, that is, sacred act, the Vedas will say. A. PRELUDE Adi In the beginning, to be sure, nothing existed, neither the heaven nor the earth nor space in between. So Nonbeing, having decided to be, became spirit and said: "Let me be!''1 He warmed himself further and from this heating was born fire. He warmed himself still further and from this heating was born light. TB II, 2, 9, 1-2 Numerous texts are to be found in the Vedic scriptures, of extraordinary diversity and incomparable richness, which seek unweariedly to penetrate the mystery of the beginnings and to explain the immensity and the amazing harmony of the universe. We find a proliferation of speculations, doubts, and descriptions, an atmosphere charged with solemnity, a sense of life lived to the full-- all of which spontaneously bring to mind the landscape of the Himalayas. These texts seem to burst forth impetuously like streams issuing from glaciers. Within this rushing torrent may be discerned a certain life view, deep and basic, an evolving life view that can yet be traced unbroken from the Rig Veda, through the Atharva Veda and the Brahmanas, to the Upanisads. What is fascinating about the experience of the Vedic seers is not only that they have dared to explore the outer space of being and existence, piercing the outskirts of reality, exploring the boundaries of the universe, describing being and its universal laws, but that they have also undertaken the risky and intriguing adventure of going beyond and piercing the being barrier so as to float in utter nothingness, so to speak, and discover that Nonbeing is only the outer atmosphere of Being, its protective veil. They plunge thus into a darkness enwrapped by darkness, into the Beyond from which there is no return, into that Prelude of Existence in which there is neither Being nor Nonbeing, neither God nor Gods, nor creature of any type; the traveler himself is volatilized, has disappeared. Creation is the act by which God, or whatever name we may choose to express the Ultimate, affirms himself not only vis-à-vis the world, thus created, but also vis-à-vis himself, for he certainly was neither creator before creation nor God for himself. The Vedic seers make the staggering claim of entering into that enclosure where God is not yet God, where God is thus unknown to himself, and, not being creator, is "nothing." Without this perspective we may fail to grasp the Vedic message regarding the absolute Prelude to everything: that One, tad ekam (which is the less imperfect expression), or this, idam (which is the other way of saying it). Idam, this, that is to say, anything that I can refer to, though it is never exhausted by the reference; idam, that which I think, mean, touch, imagine, will, reject, love, hate--anything to which I may be able to point with any means at my disposal, my senses, mind, intuition, emotions, or whatever; idam, that which takes as many forms as I am capable of imagining and constantly transcends all of them; this, that is, whatever can fall into the range of my experience, idam, at the absolute Prelude, was neither Being nor Nonbeing, neither Consciousness nor Ignorance.2 This, in whatever form, is tad, that: outside, beyond, transcendent, hidden in its own immanence, absolutely ungraspable and ineffable.3 Furthermore, this that is ekam, One, absolute oneness, because all specific generic and ontic differences are included in the ekam and it is precisely this that makes differentiation intrinsically possible. Things can differ only against a background of oneness. Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Germ, appears here as a powerful symbol and Prajapati is one of the most important mythical names for the carrying out of this process, though he emerges at the very end of it.4 For a fuller understanding of the myth we may consider it in three stages or moments which are, of course, neither chronological nor perhaps ontological, but which are certainly anthropological (or rather metahistorical) and helpful for our understanding: Solitude, Sacrifice, Integration.