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On interpreting the Vedas
Survey article ON INTERPRETING THE VEDAS Karel Werner
Religious studies owe much to Indian religious tradition in general and to the Vedic lore in particular, for their discovery for European scholarship nearly two hundred years ago and the subsequent research into them carried out by a number of specialists were major factors which, together with the progress of anthropology, led to the establishment of the study of religions on a comparative basis as an academic discipline in its own right . But have Indian studies in turn benefited from the progress of the new subject and used the methods developed by it for the sake of the interpretation of Indian religious tradition, and especially its earliest source, the bulk of the Vedic scriptures? To begin with, Indologists were, naturally enough, left to their own devices and it was philological erudition which provided the springboard for interpreting Indian religions . Thus Rudolf Roth (1821-95) was largely responsible for creating the Western terminology for Indian religions through his work on the monumental and as yet unsurpassed great Sanskrit ductionary . This work necessitated extensive reading of and preoccupation with religious texts, particularly the Vedas, and this led to his becoming an authority on the interpretation of the Vedas and gave him also the self-confidence to formulate a theory about their origin and composition . He was aware of the claim of Indian tradition that the hymns of the Rg Veda were rcords of the utterances of ancient rsis as they had 'heard' them, that is, as they were revealed to them directly from the divine source . But without investigating this claim or in any way taking it into account, Roth conceded to the Vedic hymns merely the status of being 'products of the oldest religious lyrical poetry', a view which became widely held 189
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and has since been many times repeated, but which is based on a rather naive and romantic conception of ancient man as being simple-minded or even primitive, yet gifted and capable of poetic inspiration in religious matters . (1) On the other hand he rightly refuted the later orthodox Brahmanic view of the Vedas as the creations of certain families of high caste origin and he recognized that the hymns were not the outcome of creations of theological speculation and could not have grown out of liturgical praxis . On the contrary, the Brahmanic families who monopolized the elaborate cult in the post-hymnic period appropriated and redacted the hymns for the purpose of the cult . Roth pointed out that just as Brahmans of that period did, so every subsequent period tried to interpret inherited holy scriptures according to its own reigning system of theology and the high or low state of its learning and held such interpretation to be the true and original tradition . (2) Roth's method of research and interpretation was based on an analysis and painstaking comparison of different portions of the Vedic texts which could throw light on each other and elucidate the meaning of words and names .. His contemporary Adalbert Kuhn (1812-81), on the other hand, introduced the comparative method into his studies of Vedic mythology and the etymology of names and so could identify a number of gods and their names in different Indo-European traditions (of which the equation Dyauh pita=Zeus pater=Jupiter is the most notorious example) and show that the Indo-Aryans had many religious ideas in common with the ancient Greeks, Romans, Germans, Slavs and others . (3) He can probably be viewed as the founder of Indo-European comparative studies, but it was Max Muller (1823-1903), the next great European in the field of Indian studies after Roth, who put Indian religions on the world scene by making the similarities between Vedic and ancient European mythologies and religions widely known through his books, and virtually established the disciplines of comparative religion and comparative philology . (4) Max Muller was a true idealist . He viewed the history of religions as the real history of mankind and believed in the existence of a hidden divine Infinite that exercised a direct influence on men's minds, thereby bringing about the appearance and development of religions . The Vedas were, to him, one of the clearest instances of this influence, which was particularly represented by the goddess Aditi (infinity), the great mother of the gods and of the whole universe . According to him there was first a period of pristine religious ideas, such as that of Aditi, which was originally understood as the Infinite itself and was not otherwise
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graspable, and this was then followed by a period of anthropomorphic mythology which was a development towards degeneration, for myths were a 'disease of language' . This view of mythology, certainly, has since been outdated, but the suggestion of original pristine ideas (naturally, only in the minds of an elite, that is of ancient rsis who may have been mystics) might have proved fruitful but it was not followed up by anybody and Max Muller's name has remained forever famous chiefly because of his series 'The Sacred Books of the East' . Maybe he deserves to be remembered also for his noble conception of the study of religions as a matter of personal involvement and as an expression of mankind's progress in the continuous search for truth . The next stepping-stone in the study of early Indian religion was Abel Bergaigne (1838-88), who narrowed down the principle of interpreting the Vedas to the effort to uncover natural processes behind all the Vedic gods, for they appeared to him as mere anthropomorphic masks for celestial, atmospheric and terrestrial forces of nature . Thus he produced a homogeneous but simplistic system of Vedic mythology which could not do justice to it . Yet his simplified grasp of it had enabled him to see important correlations, such as between the myths, the rituals and the regular processes in nature, and also the essential identity, in Brahmanic thinking, of the cosmic, the ritual and the moral order . (5) These insights have remained of lasting value for our understanding of Indian religious thinking . But the trend to narrow down the interpretation of the Vedas continued in another direction also . Richard Pischel (1849-1908) and Karl Geldner (1852-1929) put forth a view (6) that Indian religions, including Vedism, should be interpreted exclusively within their own context, despite obvious connections between the Vedic religious phenomena and other Indo-European religious systems, and the undoubted parallels between some subsequent developments within Indian religions and traits in other religious traditions, as could be shown in the wider context of comparative and historical religious studies . The positive fruit of this narrow approach was that some more attention was focused on Indian commentaries and other religious sources, but on the whole this reaction against the Indo-European and general comparative approach went too far . Oldenberg spoke of it as a 'bricking up of all gates' and it further prompted him to remark that when one observes this narrowness 'one is stricken by a kind of nostalgia for the great dreams of Max Muller . They were dreams, true, but what breadth they encompassed!' (7) Pischel and Geldner strongly influenced American Indologists, particularly
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M . Bloomfield (1855-1928) and C .R . Lanman (1850-1941), but did not find followers in Germany . What Max Muller's far-ranging dreams failed to impress on the minds of Indologists was partly achieved by the progress of ethnological studies (Oldenberg quotes, for instance, Tylor, Wilken, Lang, Frazer and Mannhardt) . In those studies the point that Indian religions had their special character was acknowledged, especially with regard to their post-Vedic development, but it was stressed once again, against Pischel and Geldner, that they had to be seen in the context of the old Indo-Iranian tradition with IndoEuropean connotations and that when they were being interpreted account should also be taken of the results of ethnological and comparative religious studies . However, as these were then concentrated predominantly around so-called primitive religions, their influence reintroduced or strengthened the view that the Vedic religion was a kind of nature worship in which every striking phenomenon of nature became a subject of the worshippers' anthropomorphic tendency and was developed into a god . Natural phenomena were then sought even where the connection was hard or even impossible to establish . The main representative of this trend was A . Hillebrandt (1853-1927), of whom J . Gonda says that he was too much under the spell of an obsolete naturalism . (8) His contemporary Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920) did not go to a similar extreme, but he did believe in the nineteenthcentury evolutionary view of the development of religions from primitive shamanistic stages to high monotheistic religious rationalism and he most consistently incorporated this view in his treatment of Indian religions . He considered the Vedic religion and mythology to be a further evolutionary development from a preceding stage which the ethnological study of primitive religions could still find in tribal societies and he also, in a way, reintroduced the Brahmanic view of the authorship of the Vedas . For him the singers of the R,g Veda, belonging to certain families that had already begun to differentiate themselves caste-wise into a priest aristocracy, composed their hymns in an old inherited way for sacrificial celebrations, particularly for the great, ostentatious soma sacrifice, at which the remuneration of poets was particularly rich . (9) He thought he had found in the Vedas various signs of primitive ecstatic practices which slowly developed through the Brahmanic religious cult into a more genuine spiritual quest, culminating in the noble thirst for liberation which
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motivated ascetics of the Buddhist time .
(10)
This evolutionary and, at bottom, positivistic conception of Indian religious development has never entirely disappeared from the scene . It has been particularly influential in Great Britain, where the positivistic element has been still stronger . Thus A . A . Macdonell regarded mythology as 'the attempt of the human mind, in a primitive and unscientific age, to explain the various forces and phenomena of nature with which man is confronted .' (11) Vedic mythology was for him 'an earlier stage in the evolution of beliefs based on the personification and worship of natural phenomena' than can be found anywhere else in literary sources . He believed that he could see in the Vedas 'the process of personification by which the natural phenomena developed into gods' (12) and spoke also of 'the imaginative creations of poets', but he rejected 'the etymological equations of comparative mythology' (13) and relied for his interpretation on Indian literature . The evolutionary trend in interpreting religions led to the quest for a possible 'origin' of religion as such (traceable already in the work of Max Muller, but this time it was strictly positivistic without his 'dreams' about the Infinite giving rise to pristine ideas in the minds of men) . M . Eliade calls this tendency, which was not confined to religious research, 'the obsession with origins' . (14) He shows how the belief of some scholars that religion originated from animism or totemism in the primitive mentality of tribal communities, was shattered by Andrew Lang's antievolutionistic findings as early as 1899 in his book Making of Religion, although Lang himself had previously been an adherent of the evolutionary ideas, particularly of Tylor's animistic theory, with whose help he had demolished Max Muller's dreams . Now the belief in High Gods found among the most primitive Australian and Andamanese peoples with no trace of previous ancestor worship or nature cults made him abandon the evolutionistic theory . This new development has been ignored in Britain, but has found acceptance on the continent, particularly in Germany . In fact one can say that it throws doubt not only on evolutionistic but on all positivistic approaches to the interpretation of religions . (15) A strong positivistic stance was held also by A .B . Keith . Although he avoided all theories about the origin of religions, he was still under the influence of evolutionism . He did see that the connection of Vedic deities with natural phenomena was often very vague, amounting to comparison rather than identity, but he redeemed for himself the
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anthropomorphic theory with the help of Indra, originally a thunder god, who became independent of his natural origin and thus became a bridge to a theology no longer based on nature's phenomena . On the whole, however, the underlying force responsible for the anthropomorphic nature gods as well as for other gods, including 'abstract deities', was for Keith the 'creative imagination', so often resorted to by previous scholars, which was later replaced by speculation . (16) The strength and persuasiveness of the theory of a merely poetic and imaginative origin of the Vedic religion was such that it penetrated even into the works of modern Indian scholars . Thus S . Dasgupta wrote that the Vedic poets were 'the children of nature' and the Vedic religion was to him 'a simple primitive stage of belief' . (17) The simplistic and positivistic view of Indian religions, and particularly of the Vedic religion, has not yet been entirely abandoned and in some quarters it has even hardened into 'scientific materialism', best represented by W . Ruben . (18) A phenomenon outside the main trend of Indological research was the work of Paul Deussen (1845-1919), a follower of Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophy . He was sensitive to the dimension of inner experience as the basis of religious ideas, but he could conceive this dimension only in a Kantian way as a province of moral intuition . In judging the external phenomena, he did not produce anything original . He saw the origin of the Vedic gods in the process of personification of nature's phenomena, which was to him a 'natural, half unconscious creative activity of the human mind' . And as 'products of childish imagination' the Vedic gods would have been dropped with the advent of logical thinking, if the inner experience of moral values had not been combined with them . Religion was to him the combination of mythological and moral elements and whenever the former prevailed, religion became decadent and had to be superseded, at least within the elite, by philosophical thought . (19) Deussen's view of mythology as the cause of decadence in religion was as misconceived and has remained as uninfluential as Max Muller's view of it as a 'disease of language' . The scholars so far mentioned were pioneers and had to work their way through a vast amount of philological material before they could try their hand at the task of interpretation . They can hardly be blamed for a certain lack of methodological skill which was only later developed in religious studies . Their critical editions of texts,
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translations and even summaries or extensive accounts of various aspects of Vedic religion . though mostly positivistic and often simplistic, are of lasting value . It is, however, somewhat disappointing to find a narrow, positivistic approach, and purely linguistic methods still determining the nature of the interpretation of the Vedas in the works of scholars who grew up in this century when religious studies were greatly expanding, and authors like R . Otto and C .G . Jung were opening new vistas for our understanding of religious phenomena which reach well beyond the confines of a positivistic approach . Typical examples are L . Renou (18961973) and P . Thieme (born 1905), both outstanding Sanskrit scholars . Renou's view of the Vedas was too secularized and did not contribute to our understanding of them over and above that which had come from the work of previous scholars . Thieme looks at the Vedas as being archaic and 'semi-primitive' and has failed to appreciate their deeper layers . Another French scholar, G . Dumezil (born 1898), reintroduced interest in Vedic mythology and its interpretation on a comparative IndoEuropean basis, but his approach is predominantly sociological and directed towards correlations between the Vedic religion and the social structures of Aryans, a worthy undertaking, but too specialized and narrowed down to satisfy a religionist . Rudolf Otto (1889-1937) was well trained in 'rational theology', yet he was also singularly aware of the 'non- or suprarational' in the depth of the divine nature which can be apprehended as 'the feeling which remains where concept fails' and which he could express only by introducing 'a terminology which is not more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols' . (20) After Otto it is hardly possible to exclude from religious studies the preoccupation with the nature of religious experience as going beyond the senses and rational thought . Its centre is, in Otto's terminology, the Numinous or the Holy, and it is accompanied by a sense of awe, mystery, majestic presence, energy, urgency and fascination . (21) C . G . Jung (1875-1961) coined the term 'archetype', whose importance for our understanding of religious thought and experience has not yet been fully appreciated . It was preceded by Freud's discovery that religious symbols and myths communicated their 'messages' to people even if their conscious minds remained unaware of the fact . (22) Jung went further in showing that these messages were carried by universal forces, which he called archetypes and explained as tendencies to form images, and passed from generation to generation in the unconscious of men . They manifested themselves in the symbolism of the dreams of Jung's patients - not understood by them but recognizable to Jung . The study of Oriental and Christian
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symbolism confirmed to him the universality of the archetypes and led him to the postulation of a 'collective unconscious' . (23) The impact of both Otto's and Jung's work on religious studies has yet to be fully realized and assessed . In the general field it is perhaps the work of Mircea Eliade (born 1907) which has profited from them most . (24) But this is not reflected in what he wrote on Indian religions, perhaps because he had, on those occasions, specific aims in mind and used Indian material just to illustrate them . With respect to the Vedas he grossly underestimated and misrepresented the Kesin hymn (RV 10, 136) when he presented his conception of Yoga as a result of evolution from primitive shamanist beginnings in the Vedas to the peak of the classical Yoga of Patanjali, (25) while on another occasion he wrote : . . .the Vedic hymns, far from being the spontaneous and naive expressions of a naturalistic religion, were the products of a highly learned and sophisticated class of ritualistic priests . (26) He derived this view from Bergaigne and while the first part of it is undoubtedly true, the second part can no longer be upheld . Within Indology it has been Jan Gonda (born 1905), a philologist of erudition, who has taken notice of the developments in religious studies and recognized the need for fresh assessment of Indian religions . His philological studies, frequently dealing with the Vedas, are addressed not only to specialists, but also to historians of religions . He has rejected the earlier views that a myth is a kind of paraphrase of natural phenomena or just a poetical creation and he appreciates the complex character of Vedic mythology : A Vedic myth is neither poetry nor popular physics, neither primitive contemplation nor embryonic philosophy, although its very nature is, as a rule, permeated both by elements of poetry and explanations of the world . A Vedic myth represents an eternal truth, a reality to which actual facts correspond . It does so in the form of a story of old or timeless dimension describing a unique event laden with power and felt to be real which is repeated in time, in nature or in ritual, or also in ritual and through it in nature . (27) Despite this broad view, however, Gonda has never really ventured more than a descriptive treatment of Vedic myths . Similarly, he devoted a whole book to the root dhi(derivatives dhiti, dhira, also dhyana, samadhi), and
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established its meaning as a kind of permanent intuition or inner vision which average men do not possess, but seers do and Yogis can develop, (28) but here also he limited himself to linguistic analysis and did not embark on a more farreaching interpretation or evaluation of the Vedas and their nature . Here, it seems, the matter rests at present . Old views of the Vedas are still echoed in works on the history of religions, while new assessments are only slowly emerging . Thus a recent book by Jeanine Miller, (29) to which Gonda wrote a foreword, concentrates on the meditational and spiritual aspect of the Vedic message . Miss Miller sees in all Vedic myths one recurring theme : a religious quest for enlightenment, (30) although she agrees that various interpretations are possible . Despite a certain lack of clearly formulated conclusions, her book is an important step in the right direction . When reassessing the Vedas some consideration should also be given to the claim of the Indian tradition that they are a transmission of a high spiritual truth based on direct vision of ancient seers or, in the traditional religious terms, a divine revelation . This is in line with the claim of founders of other religious traditions of being enlightened, having prophetic status or being in mystical communion with God . In India, where since earliest times Yoga techniques have been recognized as leading to such achievements (as in the case of the Buddha), Vedic rsis can be looked upon in just that way : Aurobindo says that they acquired their faculty of vision by a progressive self-culture, (31) that is, through Yoga . This agrees with J .W . Hauer's view concerning the high antiquity of the techniques of meditative absorption . (32) If the originators of the Vedic message (who certainly preceded the redactors of samhitas) were men of mystical vision and high spiritual standing, it becomes understandable that in addressing the multitudes they would have used the idiom of the time, a language full of parables, mythological allusions and symbolical imagery which would have had a direct impact on people's hearts or unconscious minds whilst being fully understood only by a few . This implies that Vedic hymns had something to convey to people of different levels of maturity, education and involvement . Some awareness of more than one level of meaning existed even in the postVedic period, as evidenced by Yaska's Nirukta (7, 1-2), and was reflected in the attitudes towards the Vedas of different types of writings, such as the Brahmanas, Upanisads and Kalpa Sutras . All of them were based on, and used quotations from,
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the Vedic hymns, interpreting them on their particular level . In modern times Dayananda, the founder of Arya Samaj, revived the princple of multi-level interpretation of the Vedic texts in his own commentary to the Vedas, but it went almost unnoticed . (33) However, the growing understanding of religious means of communication after Otto and Jung influenced even some theologians, and P . Tillich, for instance, recognized various levels of meaning expressed by religious symbols when analysing the nature of religious language . (34) Dayananda's and Tillich's approaches were utilized by F .R . Allchin in his interpretation of the Gayatri Mantra when, advocating the 'hermeneutical principle of more levels of meaning' in Vedic interpretation, he explained the image of the sun invoked in the mantra as a visible symbol standing, in the last instance, for the invisible and transcendent divine reality (not very far from Miller's interpretation of the sun in the Vedas) . (35) All these developments make it obvious that there is a case for a new and thorough reassessment of the meaning of the Vedas .
NOTES 1 R . Roth, Zur Litteratur and Geschichte des Weda, Stuttgart 1846, p . 9 . 2 0 . Bottlinck-R . Roth, Sanskrit-Worterbuch I, St Petersburg 1855, P .v (Roth's preface) . 3 A . Kuhn published his papers in Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Gottingen . 4 His noteworthy works in this context are : Essays in Comparative Mythology, London 1856 ; Essays on the Science of Language, London 1864 (2nd edition) ; Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India, London 1878 . A fine tribute has recently been paid to him : N .C . Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary ; The Life of Professor, the Rt . Hon . Friedrich Max Muller, P .C ., London 1974 . 5 Cf . H . Oldenberg, Vedaforschung, Stuttgart-Berlin 1905, pp . 11-13, 61-2 ; also J . Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens I, Veda and alterer Hinduismus, Stuttgart 1960, pp . 2-3 . 6 During the period 1888-1901 when they published their voluminous Vedische Studien . Oldenberg, op . cit ., p . 64 . 8 Gonda, op . cit ., p . 4 . 9 H . Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, Darmstadt 1970 (5th edition ; 1st edition 1894), p . 3 . 10 Ibid ., p . 404 . 11 A .A . Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, Strassburg 1897, p . 1 .
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Ibid ., p . 2 . Ibid ., p . 5, an obvious allusion to Max Muller, his colleague in oxford . M . Eliade, The Quest . History and Meaning in Religion, Chicago 1969, p . 44 . Ibid ., pp . 45-7 . A .B . Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanisads, Cambridge, Mass . 1925 (repr . Delhi 1970), pp . 42-51, 63-8, and throughout . S . Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy I, Cambridge 1951 (1st edition 1922), p . 17 . W . Ruben, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, Berlin 1954 P . Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie I, 1, Leipzig 1920 (1st edition 1895), pp . 81-3 . R . Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Foreword by the author to the first English edition (Oxford 1923 ; 1st German edition 1917), Harmondsworth 1959, p . 13 . Otto demonstrated his approach in the comparative study of the mysticism of Sankara and Eckhart : West-ostliche Mystik, Munich 1971, 3rd edition (revised by G . Mensching according to Otto's handwritten notes ; first in German : Gotha 1926 ; first in English : London 1932) . Cf . Eliade, The Quest, p . 21 . Cf . an introduction to Jung's books : Man and his Symbols, e d . by C .G . Jung and M .L . v . Franz, London 1964, pp . 55, 67, 107 . Cf . particularly the work Patterns in Comparative Religion, London 1958 (repr . 1971) . Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, London 1969 (2nd edition ; first in English 1958, in French, Paris 1954), p . 102ff . I pointed out this fact in my paper, 'Religious Practice and Yoga in the Time of the Vedas, Upanisads and Early Buddhism', in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol . LVI, Poona 1975, p . 182, and again, more explicitly, in 'Yoga and the Rg Veda . An Interpretation of the Kesin Hymn (RV 10, 136)' awaiting publication in Religious Studies . Eliade was criticized for his inaccuracy and the all-too generalizing nature of his observations also with respect to Buddhism by R . Gombrich in 'Eliade on Buddhism' in Religious Studies 10 (1974), pp . 225-31 . The Quest, p . 44 . Gonda, op . cit ., pp . 23-4 . Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets, The Hague 1963 . J . Miller, The Vedas, London 1974 . The difference of her approach from the current one can be illustrated e .g . on the interpretation of the IndraVrtra myth . N . Smart (The Religious Experience of Mankind,
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London 1973, p . 88) writes : 'Here then is Indra, the mighty storm deity, battling against the serpent Vrtra with lightning and thunder . This mythological conflict expresses and explains the drama of the monsoon .' Miller draws attention to a further element in the myth : when Indra slew Vrtra, he set up the sun on high for all to see, and she understands Vrtra as standing for chaos (or even the shackles of the human mind) and sun (sat yam suryam, 'true sun' or 'sun of truth') as representing order, vision of truth, enlightenment : 'Indra's constant fights and his establishment of the sun . . .are expressive of-effort towards enlightenment . . . and the sum is revealed as the fruit of all quest (and all meditation) .' Op . cit ., pp . 36-7 . Aurobindo, The secret of the Veda, Birth Centenary Library, Vol . 10, Pondicherry 1971, p . 8 . J .W . Hauer, Der Yoga . Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst, Stuttgart 1958, p . 19 . Dayananda wrote in Sanskrit . The following works were translated : Introduction to the Commentary on the Vedas, Meerut 1925 ; Light of Truth (Satyarth Prakash), Allahabad 1906 (2nd edition 1915) . P . Tillich, Theology of Culture, Oxford 1959 . F .R . Allchin : 'Gayatri Mantra and the Beginning of Indian Theology', a paper read during the First Symposium on Indian Religions, Cambridge 21-23 March 1975 .
Religious studies owe much to Indian religious tradition in general and to the Vedic lore in particular, for their discovery for European scholarship nearly two hundred years ago and the subsequent research into them carried out by a number of specialists were major factors which, together with the progress of anthropology, led to the establishment of the study of religions on a comparative basis as an academic discipline in its own right . But have Indian studies in turn benefited from the progress of the new subject and used the methods developed by it for the sake of the interpretation of Indian religious tradition, and especially its earliest source, the bulk of the Vedic scriptures? To begin with, Indologists were, naturally enough, left to their own devices and it was philological erudition which provided the springboard for interpreting Indian religions . Thus Rudolf Roth (1821-95) was largely responsible for creating the Western terminology for Indian religions through his work on the monumental and as yet unsurpassed great Sanskrit ductionary . This work necessitated extensive reading of and preoccupation with religious texts, particularly the Vedas, and this led to his becoming an authority on the interpretation of the Vedas and gave him also the self-confidence to formulate a theory about their origin and composition . He was aware of the claim of Indian tradition that the hymns of the Rg Veda were rcords of the utterances of ancient rsis as they had 'heard' them, that is, as they were revealed to them directly from the divine source . But without investigating this claim or in any way taking it into account, Roth conceded to the Vedic hymns merely the status of being 'products of the oldest religious lyrical poetry', a view which became widely held 189
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and has since been many times repeated, but which is based on a rather naive and romantic conception of ancient man as being simple-minded or even primitive, yet gifted and capable of poetic inspiration in religious matters . (1) On the other hand he rightly refuted the later orthodox Brahmanic view of the Vedas as the creations of certain families of high caste origin and he recognized that the hymns were not the outcome of creations of theological speculation and could not have grown out of liturgical praxis . On the contrary, the Brahmanic families who monopolized the elaborate cult in the post-hymnic period appropriated and redacted the hymns for the purpose of the cult . Roth pointed out that just as Brahmans of that period did, so every subsequent period tried to interpret inherited holy scriptures according to its own reigning system of theology and the high or low state of its learning and held such interpretation to be the true and original tradition . (2) Roth's method of research and interpretation was based on an analysis and painstaking comparison of different portions of the Vedic texts which could throw light on each other and elucidate the meaning of words and names .. His contemporary Adalbert Kuhn (1812-81), on the other hand, introduced the comparative method into his studies of Vedic mythology and the etymology of names and so could identify a number of gods and their names in different Indo-European traditions (of which the equation Dyauh pita=Zeus pater=Jupiter is the most notorious example) and show that the Indo-Aryans had many religious ideas in common with the ancient Greeks, Romans, Germans, Slavs and others . (3) He can probably be viewed as the founder of Indo-European comparative studies, but it was Max Muller (1823-1903), the next great European in the field of Indian studies after Roth, who put Indian religions on the world scene by making the similarities between Vedic and ancient European mythologies and religions widely known through his books, and virtually established the disciplines of comparative religion and comparative philology . (4) Max Muller was a true idealist . He viewed the history of religions as the real history of mankind and believed in the existence of a hidden divine Infinite that exercised a direct influence on men's minds, thereby bringing about the appearance and development of religions . The Vedas were, to him, one of the clearest instances of this influence, which was particularly represented by the goddess Aditi (infinity), the great mother of the gods and of the whole universe . According to him there was first a period of pristine religious ideas, such as that of Aditi, which was originally understood as the Infinite itself and was not otherwise
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graspable, and this was then followed by a period of anthropomorphic mythology which was a development towards degeneration, for myths were a 'disease of language' . This view of mythology, certainly, has since been outdated, but the suggestion of original pristine ideas (naturally, only in the minds of an elite, that is of ancient rsis who may have been mystics) might have proved fruitful but it was not followed up by anybody and Max Muller's name has remained forever famous chiefly because of his series 'The Sacred Books of the East' . Maybe he deserves to be remembered also for his noble conception of the study of religions as a matter of personal involvement and as an expression of mankind's progress in the continuous search for truth . The next stepping-stone in the study of early Indian religion was Abel Bergaigne (1838-88), who narrowed down the principle of interpreting the Vedas to the effort to uncover natural processes behind all the Vedic gods, for they appeared to him as mere anthropomorphic masks for celestial, atmospheric and terrestrial forces of nature . Thus he produced a homogeneous but simplistic system of Vedic mythology which could not do justice to it . Yet his simplified grasp of it had enabled him to see important correlations, such as between the myths, the rituals and the regular processes in nature, and also the essential identity, in Brahmanic thinking, of the cosmic, the ritual and the moral order . (5) These insights have remained of lasting value for our understanding of Indian religious thinking . But the trend to narrow down the interpretation of the Vedas continued in another direction also . Richard Pischel (1849-1908) and Karl Geldner (1852-1929) put forth a view (6) that Indian religions, including Vedism, should be interpreted exclusively within their own context, despite obvious connections between the Vedic religious phenomena and other Indo-European religious systems, and the undoubted parallels between some subsequent developments within Indian religions and traits in other religious traditions, as could be shown in the wider context of comparative and historical religious studies . The positive fruit of this narrow approach was that some more attention was focused on Indian commentaries and other religious sources, but on the whole this reaction against the Indo-European and general comparative approach went too far . Oldenberg spoke of it as a 'bricking up of all gates' and it further prompted him to remark that when one observes this narrowness 'one is stricken by a kind of nostalgia for the great dreams of Max Muller . They were dreams, true, but what breadth they encompassed!' (7) Pischel and Geldner strongly influenced American Indologists, particularly
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M . Bloomfield (1855-1928) and C .R . Lanman (1850-1941), but did not find followers in Germany . What Max Muller's far-ranging dreams failed to impress on the minds of Indologists was partly achieved by the progress of ethnological studies (Oldenberg quotes, for instance, Tylor, Wilken, Lang, Frazer and Mannhardt) . In those studies the point that Indian religions had their special character was acknowledged, especially with regard to their post-Vedic development, but it was stressed once again, against Pischel and Geldner, that they had to be seen in the context of the old Indo-Iranian tradition with IndoEuropean connotations and that when they were being interpreted account should also be taken of the results of ethnological and comparative religious studies . However, as these were then concentrated predominantly around so-called primitive religions, their influence reintroduced or strengthened the view that the Vedic religion was a kind of nature worship in which every striking phenomenon of nature became a subject of the worshippers' anthropomorphic tendency and was developed into a god . Natural phenomena were then sought even where the connection was hard or even impossible to establish . The main representative of this trend was A . Hillebrandt (1853-1927), of whom J . Gonda says that he was too much under the spell of an obsolete naturalism . (8) His contemporary Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920) did not go to a similar extreme, but he did believe in the nineteenthcentury evolutionary view of the development of religions from primitive shamanistic stages to high monotheistic religious rationalism and he most consistently incorporated this view in his treatment of Indian religions . He considered the Vedic religion and mythology to be a further evolutionary development from a preceding stage which the ethnological study of primitive religions could still find in tribal societies and he also, in a way, reintroduced the Brahmanic view of the authorship of the Vedas . For him the singers of the R,g Veda, belonging to certain families that had already begun to differentiate themselves caste-wise into a priest aristocracy, composed their hymns in an old inherited way for sacrificial celebrations, particularly for the great, ostentatious soma sacrifice, at which the remuneration of poets was particularly rich . (9) He thought he had found in the Vedas various signs of primitive ecstatic practices which slowly developed through the Brahmanic religious cult into a more genuine spiritual quest, culminating in the noble thirst for liberation which
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motivated ascetics of the Buddhist time .
(10)
This evolutionary and, at bottom, positivistic conception of Indian religious development has never entirely disappeared from the scene . It has been particularly influential in Great Britain, where the positivistic element has been still stronger . Thus A . A . Macdonell regarded mythology as 'the attempt of the human mind, in a primitive and unscientific age, to explain the various forces and phenomena of nature with which man is confronted .' (11) Vedic mythology was for him 'an earlier stage in the evolution of beliefs based on the personification and worship of natural phenomena' than can be found anywhere else in literary sources . He believed that he could see in the Vedas 'the process of personification by which the natural phenomena developed into gods' (12) and spoke also of 'the imaginative creations of poets', but he rejected 'the etymological equations of comparative mythology' (13) and relied for his interpretation on Indian literature . The evolutionary trend in interpreting religions led to the quest for a possible 'origin' of religion as such (traceable already in the work of Max Muller, but this time it was strictly positivistic without his 'dreams' about the Infinite giving rise to pristine ideas in the minds of men) . M . Eliade calls this tendency, which was not confined to religious research, 'the obsession with origins' . (14) He shows how the belief of some scholars that religion originated from animism or totemism in the primitive mentality of tribal communities, was shattered by Andrew Lang's antievolutionistic findings as early as 1899 in his book Making of Religion, although Lang himself had previously been an adherent of the evolutionary ideas, particularly of Tylor's animistic theory, with whose help he had demolished Max Muller's dreams . Now the belief in High Gods found among the most primitive Australian and Andamanese peoples with no trace of previous ancestor worship or nature cults made him abandon the evolutionistic theory . This new development has been ignored in Britain, but has found acceptance on the continent, particularly in Germany . In fact one can say that it throws doubt not only on evolutionistic but on all positivistic approaches to the interpretation of religions . (15) A strong positivistic stance was held also by A .B . Keith . Although he avoided all theories about the origin of religions, he was still under the influence of evolutionism . He did see that the connection of Vedic deities with natural phenomena was often very vague, amounting to comparison rather than identity, but he redeemed for himself the
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anthropomorphic theory with the help of Indra, originally a thunder god, who became independent of his natural origin and thus became a bridge to a theology no longer based on nature's phenomena . On the whole, however, the underlying force responsible for the anthropomorphic nature gods as well as for other gods, including 'abstract deities', was for Keith the 'creative imagination', so often resorted to by previous scholars, which was later replaced by speculation . (16) The strength and persuasiveness of the theory of a merely poetic and imaginative origin of the Vedic religion was such that it penetrated even into the works of modern Indian scholars . Thus S . Dasgupta wrote that the Vedic poets were 'the children of nature' and the Vedic religion was to him 'a simple primitive stage of belief' . (17) The simplistic and positivistic view of Indian religions, and particularly of the Vedic religion, has not yet been entirely abandoned and in some quarters it has even hardened into 'scientific materialism', best represented by W . Ruben . (18) A phenomenon outside the main trend of Indological research was the work of Paul Deussen (1845-1919), a follower of Kantian and Schopenhauerian philosophy . He was sensitive to the dimension of inner experience as the basis of religious ideas, but he could conceive this dimension only in a Kantian way as a province of moral intuition . In judging the external phenomena, he did not produce anything original . He saw the origin of the Vedic gods in the process of personification of nature's phenomena, which was to him a 'natural, half unconscious creative activity of the human mind' . And as 'products of childish imagination' the Vedic gods would have been dropped with the advent of logical thinking, if the inner experience of moral values had not been combined with them . Religion was to him the combination of mythological and moral elements and whenever the former prevailed, religion became decadent and had to be superseded, at least within the elite, by philosophical thought . (19) Deussen's view of mythology as the cause of decadence in religion was as misconceived and has remained as uninfluential as Max Muller's view of it as a 'disease of language' . The scholars so far mentioned were pioneers and had to work their way through a vast amount of philological material before they could try their hand at the task of interpretation . They can hardly be blamed for a certain lack of methodological skill which was only later developed in religious studies . Their critical editions of texts,
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translations and even summaries or extensive accounts of various aspects of Vedic religion . though mostly positivistic and often simplistic, are of lasting value . It is, however, somewhat disappointing to find a narrow, positivistic approach, and purely linguistic methods still determining the nature of the interpretation of the Vedas in the works of scholars who grew up in this century when religious studies were greatly expanding, and authors like R . Otto and C .G . Jung were opening new vistas for our understanding of religious phenomena which reach well beyond the confines of a positivistic approach . Typical examples are L . Renou (18961973) and P . Thieme (born 1905), both outstanding Sanskrit scholars . Renou's view of the Vedas was too secularized and did not contribute to our understanding of them over and above that which had come from the work of previous scholars . Thieme looks at the Vedas as being archaic and 'semi-primitive' and has failed to appreciate their deeper layers . Another French scholar, G . Dumezil (born 1898), reintroduced interest in Vedic mythology and its interpretation on a comparative IndoEuropean basis, but his approach is predominantly sociological and directed towards correlations between the Vedic religion and the social structures of Aryans, a worthy undertaking, but too specialized and narrowed down to satisfy a religionist . Rudolf Otto (1889-1937) was well trained in 'rational theology', yet he was also singularly aware of the 'non- or suprarational' in the depth of the divine nature which can be apprehended as 'the feeling which remains where concept fails' and which he could express only by introducing 'a terminology which is not more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols' . (20) After Otto it is hardly possible to exclude from religious studies the preoccupation with the nature of religious experience as going beyond the senses and rational thought . Its centre is, in Otto's terminology, the Numinous or the Holy, and it is accompanied by a sense of awe, mystery, majestic presence, energy, urgency and fascination . (21) C . G . Jung (1875-1961) coined the term 'archetype', whose importance for our understanding of religious thought and experience has not yet been fully appreciated . It was preceded by Freud's discovery that religious symbols and myths communicated their 'messages' to people even if their conscious minds remained unaware of the fact . (22) Jung went further in showing that these messages were carried by universal forces, which he called archetypes and explained as tendencies to form images, and passed from generation to generation in the unconscious of men . They manifested themselves in the symbolism of the dreams of Jung's patients - not understood by them but recognizable to Jung . The study of Oriental and Christian
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symbolism confirmed to him the universality of the archetypes and led him to the postulation of a 'collective unconscious' . (23) The impact of both Otto's and Jung's work on religious studies has yet to be fully realized and assessed . In the general field it is perhaps the work of Mircea Eliade (born 1907) which has profited from them most . (24) But this is not reflected in what he wrote on Indian religions, perhaps because he had, on those occasions, specific aims in mind and used Indian material just to illustrate them . With respect to the Vedas he grossly underestimated and misrepresented the Kesin hymn (RV 10, 136) when he presented his conception of Yoga as a result of evolution from primitive shamanist beginnings in the Vedas to the peak of the classical Yoga of Patanjali, (25) while on another occasion he wrote : . . .the Vedic hymns, far from being the spontaneous and naive expressions of a naturalistic religion, were the products of a highly learned and sophisticated class of ritualistic priests . (26) He derived this view from Bergaigne and while the first part of it is undoubtedly true, the second part can no longer be upheld . Within Indology it has been Jan Gonda (born 1905), a philologist of erudition, who has taken notice of the developments in religious studies and recognized the need for fresh assessment of Indian religions . His philological studies, frequently dealing with the Vedas, are addressed not only to specialists, but also to historians of religions . He has rejected the earlier views that a myth is a kind of paraphrase of natural phenomena or just a poetical creation and he appreciates the complex character of Vedic mythology : A Vedic myth is neither poetry nor popular physics, neither primitive contemplation nor embryonic philosophy, although its very nature is, as a rule, permeated both by elements of poetry and explanations of the world . A Vedic myth represents an eternal truth, a reality to which actual facts correspond . It does so in the form of a story of old or timeless dimension describing a unique event laden with power and felt to be real which is repeated in time, in nature or in ritual, or also in ritual and through it in nature . (27) Despite this broad view, however, Gonda has never really ventured more than a descriptive treatment of Vedic myths . Similarly, he devoted a whole book to the root dhi(derivatives dhiti, dhira, also dhyana, samadhi), and
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established its meaning as a kind of permanent intuition or inner vision which average men do not possess, but seers do and Yogis can develop, (28) but here also he limited himself to linguistic analysis and did not embark on a more farreaching interpretation or evaluation of the Vedas and their nature . Here, it seems, the matter rests at present . Old views of the Vedas are still echoed in works on the history of religions, while new assessments are only slowly emerging . Thus a recent book by Jeanine Miller, (29) to which Gonda wrote a foreword, concentrates on the meditational and spiritual aspect of the Vedic message . Miss Miller sees in all Vedic myths one recurring theme : a religious quest for enlightenment, (30) although she agrees that various interpretations are possible . Despite a certain lack of clearly formulated conclusions, her book is an important step in the right direction . When reassessing the Vedas some consideration should also be given to the claim of the Indian tradition that they are a transmission of a high spiritual truth based on direct vision of ancient seers or, in the traditional religious terms, a divine revelation . This is in line with the claim of founders of other religious traditions of being enlightened, having prophetic status or being in mystical communion with God . In India, where since earliest times Yoga techniques have been recognized as leading to such achievements (as in the case of the Buddha), Vedic rsis can be looked upon in just that way : Aurobindo says that they acquired their faculty of vision by a progressive self-culture, (31) that is, through Yoga . This agrees with J .W . Hauer's view concerning the high antiquity of the techniques of meditative absorption . (32) If the originators of the Vedic message (who certainly preceded the redactors of samhitas) were men of mystical vision and high spiritual standing, it becomes understandable that in addressing the multitudes they would have used the idiom of the time, a language full of parables, mythological allusions and symbolical imagery which would have had a direct impact on people's hearts or unconscious minds whilst being fully understood only by a few . This implies that Vedic hymns had something to convey to people of different levels of maturity, education and involvement . Some awareness of more than one level of meaning existed even in the postVedic period, as evidenced by Yaska's Nirukta (7, 1-2), and was reflected in the attitudes towards the Vedas of different types of writings, such as the Brahmanas, Upanisads and Kalpa Sutras . All of them were based on, and used quotations from,
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the Vedic hymns, interpreting them on their particular level . In modern times Dayananda, the founder of Arya Samaj, revived the princple of multi-level interpretation of the Vedic texts in his own commentary to the Vedas, but it went almost unnoticed . (33) However, the growing understanding of religious means of communication after Otto and Jung influenced even some theologians, and P . Tillich, for instance, recognized various levels of meaning expressed by religious symbols when analysing the nature of religious language . (34) Dayananda's and Tillich's approaches were utilized by F .R . Allchin in his interpretation of the Gayatri Mantra when, advocating the 'hermeneutical principle of more levels of meaning' in Vedic interpretation, he explained the image of the sun invoked in the mantra as a visible symbol standing, in the last instance, for the invisible and transcendent divine reality (not very far from Miller's interpretation of the sun in the Vedas) . (35) All these developments make it obvious that there is a case for a new and thorough reassessment of the meaning of the Vedas .
NOTES 1 R . Roth, Zur Litteratur and Geschichte des Weda, Stuttgart 1846, p . 9 . 2 0 . Bottlinck-R . Roth, Sanskrit-Worterbuch I, St Petersburg 1855, P .v (Roth's preface) . 3 A . Kuhn published his papers in Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Gottingen . 4 His noteworthy works in this context are : Essays in Comparative Mythology, London 1856 ; Essays on the Science of Language, London 1864 (2nd edition) ; Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India, London 1878 . A fine tribute has recently been paid to him : N .C . Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary ; The Life of Professor, the Rt . Hon . Friedrich Max Muller, P .C ., London 1974 . 5 Cf . H . Oldenberg, Vedaforschung, Stuttgart-Berlin 1905, pp . 11-13, 61-2 ; also J . Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens I, Veda and alterer Hinduismus, Stuttgart 1960, pp . 2-3 . 6 During the period 1888-1901 when they published their voluminous Vedische Studien . Oldenberg, op . cit ., p . 64 . 8 Gonda, op . cit ., p . 4 . 9 H . Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, Darmstadt 1970 (5th edition ; 1st edition 1894), p . 3 . 10 Ibid ., p . 404 . 11 A .A . Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, Strassburg 1897, p . 1 .
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17 18 19 20
21
22 23
24 25
26 27 28 29 30
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Ibid ., p . 2 . Ibid ., p . 5, an obvious allusion to Max Muller, his colleague in oxford . M . Eliade, The Quest . History and Meaning in Religion, Chicago 1969, p . 44 . Ibid ., pp . 45-7 . A .B . Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanisads, Cambridge, Mass . 1925 (repr . Delhi 1970), pp . 42-51, 63-8, and throughout . S . Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy I, Cambridge 1951 (1st edition 1922), p . 17 . W . Ruben, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, Berlin 1954 P . Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie I, 1, Leipzig 1920 (1st edition 1895), pp . 81-3 . R . Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Foreword by the author to the first English edition (Oxford 1923 ; 1st German edition 1917), Harmondsworth 1959, p . 13 . Otto demonstrated his approach in the comparative study of the mysticism of Sankara and Eckhart : West-ostliche Mystik, Munich 1971, 3rd edition (revised by G . Mensching according to Otto's handwritten notes ; first in German : Gotha 1926 ; first in English : London 1932) . Cf . Eliade, The Quest, p . 21 . Cf . an introduction to Jung's books : Man and his Symbols, e d . by C .G . Jung and M .L . v . Franz, London 1964, pp . 55, 67, 107 . Cf . particularly the work Patterns in Comparative Religion, London 1958 (repr . 1971) . Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, London 1969 (2nd edition ; first in English 1958, in French, Paris 1954), p . 102ff . I pointed out this fact in my paper, 'Religious Practice and Yoga in the Time of the Vedas, Upanisads and Early Buddhism', in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol . LVI, Poona 1975, p . 182, and again, more explicitly, in 'Yoga and the Rg Veda . An Interpretation of the Kesin Hymn (RV 10, 136)' awaiting publication in Religious Studies . Eliade was criticized for his inaccuracy and the all-too generalizing nature of his observations also with respect to Buddhism by R . Gombrich in 'Eliade on Buddhism' in Religious Studies 10 (1974), pp . 225-31 . The Quest, p . 44 . Gonda, op . cit ., pp . 23-4 . Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets, The Hague 1963 . J . Miller, The Vedas, London 1974 . The difference of her approach from the current one can be illustrated e .g . on the interpretation of the IndraVrtra myth . N . Smart (The Religious Experience of Mankind,
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London 1973, p . 88) writes : 'Here then is Indra, the mighty storm deity, battling against the serpent Vrtra with lightning and thunder . This mythological conflict expresses and explains the drama of the monsoon .' Miller draws attention to a further element in the myth : when Indra slew Vrtra, he set up the sun on high for all to see, and she understands Vrtra as standing for chaos (or even the shackles of the human mind) and sun (sat yam suryam, 'true sun' or 'sun of truth') as representing order, vision of truth, enlightenment : 'Indra's constant fights and his establishment of the sun . . .are expressive of-effort towards enlightenment . . . and the sum is revealed as the fruit of all quest (and all meditation) .' Op . cit ., pp . 36-7 . Aurobindo, The secret of the Veda, Birth Centenary Library, Vol . 10, Pondicherry 1971, p . 8 . J .W . Hauer, Der Yoga . Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst, Stuttgart 1958, p . 19 . Dayananda wrote in Sanskrit . The following works were translated : Introduction to the Commentary on the Vedas, Meerut 1925 ; Light of Truth (Satyarth Prakash), Allahabad 1906 (2nd edition 1915) . P . Tillich, Theology of Culture, Oxford 1959 . F .R . Allchin : 'Gayatri Mantra and the Beginning of Indian Theology', a paper read during the First Symposium on Indian Religions, Cambridge 21-23 March 1975 .