Write articles for 'GatewayforIndia' and
earn
Read
Other Articles
From- The Secret of the Veda
The Philological Method of the Veda
By- Sri Aurobindo
No
interpretation of the Veda can be sound which does not rest on a sound and
secure philological basis; and yet this scripture with its obscure and
antique tongue of which it is the sole remaining document offers unique
philological difficulties. To rely entirely on the traditional and often
imaginative renderings of the Indian scholars is impossible for any critical
mind. Modern philology strives after a more secure and scientific basis, but
has not yet found it.In the psychological interpretation of the Veda there
are, especially, two difficulties which can only be met by a satisfactory
philological justification. This interpretation necessitates the acceptance
of several new senses for a fair number of fixed technical terms of the
Veda, -- terms, for example like uti, avas, vayas. These new renderings
satisfy one test we may fairly demand; they fit in to every context, clarify
the sense and free us from the necessity of attributing quite different
significances to the same term in a work of so fixed a form as the Veda. But
this test is not sufficient. We must have, besides, a philological basis
which will not only account for the new sense, but also explain how a single
word came to be capable of so many different meanings, the sense attached to
it by the psychological interpretation, those given to it by the old
grammarians and those, if any, which are attached to it in later Sanskrit.
But this is not easily possible unless we find a more scientific basis for
our philological deductions than our present knowledge affords. Secondly,
the theory of the psychological interpretation depends very often on the use
of a double meaning for important words, -- the key-words of the secret
teaching. The figure is one that is traditional in Sanskrit literature and
sometimes employed with an excess of artifice in the later classical works;
it is the slesa or rhetorical figure of double entendre. But its very
artificiality predisposes us to believe that this poetical device must
belong necessarily to a later and more sophisticated culture. How are we to
account for its constant presence in a work of the remotest antiquity?
Moreover, there is a peculiar extension of it in the Vedic use, a deliberate
employment of the "multi-significance" of Sanskrit roots in order to pack as
much meaning as possible into a single word, which at first sight enhances
the difficulty of the problem to an extraordinary degree. For instance, the
word, asva, usually signifying a horse, is used as a figure of the Prana,
the nervous energy, the vital breath, the half-mental, half-material
dynamism which links mind and matter. Its root is capable, among other
senses, of the ideas of impulsion, force, possession, enjoyment, and we find
all these meanings united in this figure of the Steed of Life to indicate
the essential tendencies of the Pranic energy. Such a use of language would
not be possible if the tongue of the Aryan forefathers obeyed the same
conventions as our modern speech or were in the same stage of development.
But if we can suppose that there was some peculiarity in the old Aryan
tongue as it was used by the Vedic Rishis by which words were felt to be
more alive, less merely conventional symbols of ideas, more free in their
transitions of meaning than in our later use of speech, then we shall find
that these devices were not at all artificial or far-fetched to their
employers, but were rather the first natural means which would suggest
themselves to men anxious at once to find new, brief and adequate formulae
of speech for psychological conceptions not understood by the vulgar and to
conceal the ideas contained in their formulae from a profane intelligence. I
believe that this is the true explanation; it can be established, I think,
by a study of the development of Aryan speech that language did pass through
a stage peculiarly favourable to this cryptic and psychological use of words
which in their popular handling have a plain, precise and physical
significance.I have already indicated that my first study of Tamil words had
brought me to what seemed a clue to the very origins and structure of the
ancient Sanskrit tongue; and so far did this clue lead that I lost sight
entirely of my original subject of interest, the connections between Aryan
and Dravidian speech, and plunged into the far more interesting research of
the origins and laws of development of human language itself. It seems to me
that this great inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations of linguistic
scholars should be the first and central aim of any true science of
Philology.Owing to the failure of the first hopes which attended the birth
of modern Philology, its meagre results, its crystallisation into the
character of a "petty conjectural science", the idea of a Science of
Language is now discredited and its very possibility, on quite insufficient
reasoning, entirely denied. It seems to me impossible to acquiesce in such a
final negation. If there is one thing that Modern Science has triumphantly
established, it is the reign of law and process of evolution in the history
of all earthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature of Speech, in its
outward manifestation as human language it is an organism, a growth, a
terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constant psychological element
and is therefore more free, flexible, consciously self-adaptive than purely
physical organisms; its secret is more difficult to seize, its constituents
yield themselves only to more subtle and less trenchant methods of analysis.
But law and process exist in mental no less than in material phenomena in
spite of their more volatile and variable appearances. Law and process must
have governed the origins and developments of language. Given the necessary
clue and sufficient data, they must be discoverable. It seems to me that in
the Sanskrit language the clue can be found, the data lie ready for
investigation.The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at a
more satisfactory result in this direction, was its preoccupation in the
physical parts of speech with the exterior morphology of language and in its
psychological parts with the equally external connections of formed vocables
and of grammatical inflexions in kindred languages. But the true method of
Science is to go back to the origins, the embryology, the elements and more
obscure processes of things. From the obvious only the obvious and
superficial results. The profundities of things, their real truth, can best
be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that the surface of
phenomena conceals, into that past development of which the finished forms
present only secret and dispersed indications or into the possibilities from
which the actualities we see are only a narrow selection. A similar method
applied to the earlier forms of human speech can alone give us a real
Science of Language.It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief
and devoted to another subject that it is at all possible to present the
results of the work that I have attempted on these lines. [I propose to deal
with them in a separate work on "The Origins of Aryan Speech". ] I can only
briefly indicate the one or two features which bear directly on the subject
of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them here solely to avoid any
supposition in the minds of my readers that in departing from the received
senses of certain Vedic words I have simply taken advantage of that freedom
of ingenious conjecture which is at once one of the great attractions and
one of the most serious weaknesses of modern Philology.My researches first
convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense
artificial products, but growths, -- living growths of sound with certain
seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small number
of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successive
generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective
groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For
the factor which presided over the development of language was the
association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general
significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with
articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense
artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological
laws.In their beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we
should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain general
sensations and emotion-values. It was the nerves and not the intellect which
created speech. To use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the
original artificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital and
sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a basis of
sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar process the
intellectual use of language has developed by a natural law out of the
sensational and emotional. Words, which were originally vital ejections full
of a vague sense-potentiality, have evolved into fixed symbols of precise
intellectual significances.In consequence, the word originally was not fixed
to any precise idea. It had a general character or quality (guna), which was
capable of a great number of applications and therefore of a great number of
possible significances. And this guna and its results it shared with many
kindred sounds. At first, therefore, word-clans, word-families started life
on the communal system with a common stock of possible and realised
significances and a common right to all of them; their individuality lay
rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in any exclusive right
to the expression of a single idea. The early history of language was a
development from this communal life of words to a system of individual
property in one or more intellectual significances. The principle of
partition was at first fluid, then increased in rigidity, until
word-families and finally single words were able to start life on their own
account. The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes
when the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea
which it represents. For in the first state of language the word is as
living or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In
its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes
all-important, the sound secondary. Another feature of the early history of
language is that it expresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and
these are the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete,
such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc.
Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of
idea. The progression is from the general to the particular, from the vague
to the precise, from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the
abstract, from the expression of an abundant variety of sensations about
similar things to the expression of precise difference between similar
things, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of
association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and,
although no doubt due to the environments and actual experiences of the men
who spoke the language, wear the appearance of fixed natural laws of
development. And after all what is a law but a process which has been worked
out by the nature of things in response to the necessities of their
environment and has become the fixed habit of their action? From this past
history of language certain consequences derive which are of considerable
importance in Vedic interpretation. In the first place by a knowledge of the
laws under which the relations of sound and sense formed themselves in the
Sanskrit tongue and by a careful and minute study of its word-families it is
possible to a great extent to restore the past history of individual words.
It is possible to account for the meanings actually possessed by them, to
show how they were worked out through the various stages of
language-development, to establish the mutual relations of different
significances and to explain how they came to be attached to the same word
in spite of the wide difference and sometimes even the direct contrariety of
their sense-values. It is possible also to restore lost senses of words on a
sure and scientific basis and to justify them by an appeal to the observed
laws of association which governed the development of the old Aryan tongues,
to the secret evidence of the word itself and to the corroborative evidence
of its immediate kindred. Thus instead of having a purely floating and
conjectural basis for our dealings with the vocables of the Vedic language,
we can work with confidence upon a solid and reliable foundation. Naturally,
it does not follow that because a Vedic word may or must have had at one
time a particular significance, that significance can be safely applied to
the actual text of the Veda. But we do establish a sound sense and a clear
possibility of its being the right sense for the Veda. The rest is a matter
of comparative study of the passages in which the word occurs and of
constant fitness in the context. I have continually found that a sense thus
restored illumines always the context wherever it is applied and on the
other hand that a sense demanded always by the context is precisely that to
which we are led by the history of the word. This is a sufficient basis for
a moral, if not for an absolute certainty. Secondly, one remarkable feature
of language in its inception is the enormous number of different meanings of
which a single word was capable and also the enormous number of words which
could be used to represent a single idea. Afterwards this tropical
luxuriance came to be cut down. The intellect intervened with its growing
need of precision, its growing sense of economy. The bearing capacity of
words progressively diminished; and it became less and less tolerable to be
burdened with a superfluous number of words for the same idea, a redundant
variety of ideas for the same word. A considerable, though not too rigid
economy in these respects, modified by a demand for a temperate richness of
variation, became the final law of language. But the Sanskrit tongue never
quite reached the final stages of this development; it dissolved too early
into the Prakrit dialects. Even in its latest and most literary form it is
lavish of varieties of meanings for the same word; it overflows with a
redundant wealth of synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity for
rhetorical devices which in any other language would be difficult, forced
and hopelessly artificial, and especially for the figure of double sense, of
slesa. The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the
development of language. Even in its outward features it is less fixed than
any classical tongue; it abounds in a variety of forms and inflexions; it is
fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use of cases and tenses. And on
its psychological side it has not yet crystallised, is not entirely hardened
into the rigid forms of intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi
is still a living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is not
yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent and former of
ideas. It carries within it the memory of its roots, is still conscient of
its own history. The Rishis' use of language was governed by this ancient
psychology of the Word. When in English we use the word "wolf" or "cow", we
mean by it simply the animal designated; we are not conscious of any reason
why we should use that particular sound for the idea except the immemorial
custom of the language; and we cannot use it for any other sense or purpose
except by an artificial device of style. But for the Vedic Rishi "vrika"
meant the tearer and therefore, among other applications of the sense, a
wolf; "dhenu" meant the fosterer, nourisher, and therefore a cow. But the
original and general sense predominates, the derived and particular is
secondary. Therefore, it was possible for the fashioner of the hymn to use
these common words with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward the
image of the wolf or the cow, sometimes using it to colour the more general
sense, sometimes keeping it merely as a conventional figure for the
psychological conception on which his mind was dwelling, sometimes losing
sight of the image altogether. It is in the light of this psychology of the
old language that we have to understand the peculiar figures of Vedic
symbolism as handled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common and
concrete. It is so that words like "ghritam", the clarified butter, "soma",
the sacred wine, and a host of others are used.Moreover, the partitions made
by the thought between different senses of the same word were much less
separative than in modern speech. In English "fleet" meaning a number of
ships and "fleet" meaning swift are two different words; when we use "fleet"
in the first sense we do not think of the swiftness of the ship's motion,
nor when we use it in the second, do we recall the image of ships gliding
rapidly over the ocean. But this was precisely what was apt to occur in the
Vedic use of language. "Bhaga", enjoyment, and bhaga, share, were for the
Vedic mind not different words, but one word which had developed two
different uses. Therefore it was easy for the Rishis to employ it in one of
the two senses with the other at the back of the mind colouring its overt
connotation or even to use it equally in both senses at a time by a sort of
figure of cumulative significance. "Chanas" meant food but also it meant
"enjoyment, pleasure"; therefore it could be used by the Rishi to suggest to
the profane mind only the food given at the sacrifice to the gods, but for
the initiated it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss entering into
the physical consciousness and at the same time suggested the image of the
Soma-wine, at once the food of the gods and the Vedic symbol of the
Ananda.We see everywhere this use of language dominating the Word of the
Vedic hymns. It was the great device by which the ancient Mystics overcame
the difficulty of their task. Agni for the ordinary worshipper may have
meant simply the god of the Vedic fire, or it may have meant the principle
of Heat and Light in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may have
meant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many "givers of wealth",
satisfiers of human desire. How suggest to those capable of a deeper
conception the psychological functions of the God? The word itself fulfilled
that service. For Agni meant the Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force,
Brilliance. So it could easily recall to the initiated, wherever it
occurred, the idea of the illumined Energy which builds up the worlds and
which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, the Purohit of
the human sacrifice. Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all these
gods are personalities of the one universal Deva? The names of the gods in
their very meaning recall that they are only epithets, significant names,
descriptions, not personal appellations. Mitra is the Deva as the Lord of
love and harmony, Bhaga as the Lord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of
illumination, Varuna as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine
supporting and perfecting the world. "The Existent is One," says the Rishi
Dirghatamas, "but the sages express It variously; they say Indra, Varuna,
Mitra, Agni; they call It Agni, Yama, Matariswan." [Rv. I.164.46.] The
initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge had no need of this
express statement. The names of the gods carried to him their own
significance and recalled the great fundamental truth which remained with
him always. But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishis turned
against the preservation of the knowledge. For language changed its
character, rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old familiar senses;
the word contracted and shrank into its outer and concrete significance. The
ambrosial wine of the Ananda was forgotten in the physical offering; the
image of the clarified butter recalled only the gross libation to
mythological deities, lords of the fire and the cloud and the storm-blast,
godheads void of any but a material energy and an external luster. The
letter lived on when the spirit was forgotten; the symbol, the body of the
doctrine, remained, but the soul of knowledge had fled from its coverings. |