126 quotes found
"The wise speak of what is One in many ways."
"May we not anger you, O God, in our worship By praise that is unworthy or by scanty tribute."
"Your ancient home, your auspicious friendship, O Heroes, your wealth is on the banks of the Jahnavi."
"Here did our human fathers take their places, fain to fulfil the sacred Law of worship."
"Do adore with salutations the deva asura[Rudra]."
"Brbu hath set himself above the Panis, o'er their highest head, Like the wide bush on Ganga's bank."
"Sarasvati, pure in her course from the mountains to the sea."
"We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered. Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?"
"The people deck him like a docile king of elephants."
"Favour ye this my laud, O Gangā, Yamunā, O Sutudri, Paruṣṇī and Sarasvatī: With Asikni, Vitasta, O Marudvrdha, O Ārjīkīya with Susoma hear my call. First with Trstama thou art eager to flow forth, with Rasā, and Susartu, and with Svetya here, With Kubha; and with these, Sindhu and Mehatnu, thou seekest in thy course Krumu and Gomati."
"Pischel and Geldner have done well to point out that these poems are not the productions of ignorant peasants, but of a highly cultured professional class, encouraged by the gifts of kings and the applause of courts (Einleitung p.xxiv). Just the same may be said of the Homeric bards and of those of Arthur‘s court [...]"
"It is impossible to read into the story of the Angirases, Indra and Sarama, the cave of the Panis and the conquest of the Dawn, the Sun and the Cows an account of a political and military struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidian cave-dwellers. It is a struggle between the seekers of Light and the powers of Darkness; the cows are the illuminations of the Sun and the Dawn, they cannot be physical cows; the wide fear-free field of the Cows won by Indra for the Aryans is the wide world of Swar, the world of the solar Illumination, the threefold luminous regions of Heaven (Aurobindo [1914–20] 1998: 223)"
"We have in the Rig-veda,—the true and only Veda in the estimation of European scholars,—a body of sacrificial hymns couched in a very ancient language which presents a number of almost insoluble difficulties. ... The scholar in dealing with his text is obliged to substitute for interpretation a process almost of fabrication. We feel that he is not so much revealing the sense as hammering and forging rebellious material into some sort of shape and consistency."
"“the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human thought… when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the Gods… Hence… (the mystics) clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, and a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers.”"
"“The ritual system recognised by SAyaNa may, in its, externalities, stand; the naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in its general conception, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda - the secret words, niNyA vacAMsi, which were spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge. To disengage this less obvious but more important sense by fixing the import of Vedic terms, the sense of Vedic symbols, and the psychological function of the Gods is thus a difficult but a necessary task.”"
"Max Muller's dating of the Veda illustrates the arbitrariness involved in the production of theories that are then propagated as "facts" in generations of schoolbooks. Muller, as I have noted, was fully aware of the arbitrary nature of his calculations (which, as Goldstucker pointed out, were based on a "ghost story" written in the twelfth century C.E.): "I ... have repeatedly dwelt on the hypothetical character of the dates" (1892, xiv). As Whitney noted, however: "We have already more than once seen it stated that 'Muller has ascertained the date of the Vedas to be 1200-1000 B.C.'" ([1874] 1987, 78). Winternitz also objected that "it became a habit . . . to say that Max Muller had proved 1200-1000 B.C. as the date of the Rg Veda. . . . Strange to say it has been quite forgotten on what a precarious footing [this opinion] stood" ([1907] 1962, 256)."
"In the West, it is said that the whole tradition of philosophical thought is but a series of footnotes on the Greek philosopher Plato. Here, you could say that all Indian thought is but a series of footnotes on Dīrghatamas."
"“On the whole ... the language of the first nine Mandalas must be regarded as homogeneous, inspite of traces of previous dialectal differences... With the tenth Mandala it is a different story. The language here has definitely changed.”"
"Thus, the whole foundation of Mueller's date [for the Rigveda] rests on the authority of Somadeva, the author of "an Ocean of (or rather for) the River of Stories" who narrated his tales in the twelfth century after Christ. Somadeva, I am satisfied, would not be a little surprised to learn that 'a European point of view" raises a "ghost story" of his to the dignity of an historical document.""
"Goldstücker ([I860] 1965) objected that "neither is there a single reason to account for his allotting 200 years to the first of his periods, nor for his doubling this amount of time in the case of the Sutra period" (80). He points out that, ultimately, "the whole foundation of Muller's date rests on the authority of Somadeva . . . [who] narrated his tales in the twelfth century after Christ [and] would not be a little surprised to learn that 'a European point of view" raises a 'ghost story' of his to the dignity of an historical document" (91)."
"“As in its original language, we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Celt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity. As the science of comparative philology could hardly have existed without the study of Sanskrit, so the comparative history of the religions of the world would have been impossible without the study of the Veda.”"
"The Rigveda “reflects not so much a wandering life…. as a life stable and fixed, a life of halls and cities, and shows sacrificial cases in such detail as to lead one to suppose that the hymnists were not on the tramp, but were comfortable well-fed priests” [...] If the first home of the Aryans can be determined at all by the conditions topographical and meteorological, described in their early hymns, then decidedly the Punjab was not that home. For here there are neither mountains nor monsoon storms to burst, yet storm and mountain belong to the very marrow of the Rigveda. ...[it is] ―a district [...] where monsoon storms and mountain scenery are found, that district, namely, which lies South of Umballa (or Ambālā). It is here, in my opinion, that the Rigveda, taken as a whole, was composed. In every particular, this locality fulfils the physical conditions under which the composition of the hymns was possible, and what is of paramount importance, is the first district east of the Indus that does so."
"[The Vedic Gods] “are nearer to the physical phenomena which they represent, than the gods of any other Indo-European mythology”."
"Max Müller, Weber, Muir, and others held that the Punjab was the main scene of the activity of the Rgveda, whereas the more recent view put forth by Hopkins and Keith is that it was composed in the country round the SarasvatI river south of modem AmbAla.”"
"I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely hypothetical character of the dates I ventured to assign to the first three periods of Vedic literature. All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates"
"It is quite clear that we cannot fix a terminum a quo, whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 2000 or 3000 years BC, no power on earth will ever determine"
"The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years."
"These dates Mueller later insisted were minimum dates only, , and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement.... to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 BC, but without any absolutely conclusive evidence."
"That age [of the Rigveda] is not known with even an approximate degree of certainty."
"There was nothing in the Rgveda to look for a primitive or primarily nomadic society [sic]. . . . Chariots and wagons and boats which occur so frequently in the Rgveda do not agree well with nomadism. Movement of cars presupposes existence of roads and defined routes, which in turn presuppose settlements and regular traffic from point to point. Boats and ships are not floating logs. They presuppose ferry ghats and fixed destinations. . . , there was much in the Rgveda that defied explanation. . . . But instead of reconciling the discordant features, scholars either ignored them or distorted the facts and features. (Singh 1995, 8)"
"If we can dig beneath the assumptions about meaning that overlay the text... we shall uncover a very different Rigveda from the one that we have come to accept."
"There is nothing in any of the 1,028 poems that make up the collection to suggest that their authors were incomers to the area that they describe in their poems. Rather the opposite."
"All attempts to date the Vedic literature on linguistic grounds have failed miserably for the simple reason that (a) the conclusions of comparative philology are often speculative and (b) no one has yet suceeded in showing how much change should take place in a language in a given period."
"Of the Vedic poetic art Watkins writes: “The language of India from its earliest documentation in the Rigveda has raised the art of the phonetic figure to what many would consider its highest form”."
"Chitra is King, and only kinglings are the rest, who dwell beside Sarasvati. He, like Parjanya with his rain, hath spread himself with thousand, yea, with myriad gifts."
"Split apart the enclosure of the cow and the horse like a stronghold for your comrades."
"Break open for us the thousands of the Cow and the Horse."
"We drank soma, we became immortal; we went to the light, we found the gods; how could now affect us distress, O Immortal One, how man’s malevolence?"
"We must, I think, suppose that the Avesta and RV. viii. are younger than RV. ii.-vii.; or else that the poets of viii. were geographically nearer to the Avestan people, and so took from them certain words..."
"There is a peculiarity about these points of resemblance which is not so commonly known: It is the eighth Mandala which bears the most striking similarity to the Avesta. There and there only (and of course partly in the related first Mandala) do some common words like uṣṭra and the strophic structure called pragātha occur. … Further research in this direction is sure to be fruitful."
"He (Indra) boasts of “winning cows and horses” (10.48.4) with his weapon; won over from his enemies, they were initially not his."
"Just as revealing is the famous dialogue between the divine hound Saramå, Indra’s intransigent emissary, and the Panis, after she has discovered their faraway den, where they jealously hoard their “treasures”. Saramå boldly declares Indra’s intention to seize those treasures, but the Panis are unimpressed and threaten to fight back; they taunt her: “O Saramå, see the treasure deep in the mountain, it is replete with cows and horses and treasures (gobhir a‹vebhir vasubhir). The Panis guard it watchfully. You have come in vain to a rich dwelling” (1.108.7). Every verse makes it clear that all these treasures – “horses” included – belong to the Panis."
"Thou leadest as a warrior king thine army's wings what time thou comest in the van of these swift streams.""
"When they divided Purusa how many portions did they make? What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?"
"He who nourishes neither God nor man, he who eats alone, gathers sin."
"Play not with dice, [but] cultivate your corn-land. Enjoy the gain, and deem that wealth sufficient."
"These very bounteous Gods made the Sun mount to heaven, and spread the righteous laws of Āryas o’er the land."
"Having gained access to Vāk by evil means, they spin out their thread in sheer ignorance’ (RV 10.71.9)."
"In the earliest age of the gods, existence was born from non-existence."
"His, through his might, are these snow-covered mountains, and men call sea and Rasā his possession: His arms are these, his are these heavenly regions. What God shall we adore with our oblation?"
"“The gods are later than this world’s production.”"
"The Gods have not ordained hunger to be our death: even to the well-fed man comes death in varied shape, The riches of the liberal never waste away, while he who will not give finds none to comfort him, The man with food in store who, when the needy comes in miserable case begging for bread to eat, Hardens his heart against him, when of old finds not one to comfort him. Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food, and the feeble, Success attends him in the shout of battle. He makes a friend of him in future troubles, No friend is he who to his friend and comrade who comes imploring food, will offer nothing. Let the rich satisfy the poor implorer, and bend his eye upon a longer pathway, Riches come now to one, now to another, and like the wheels of cars are ever rolling, The foolish man wins food with fruitless labour: that food – I speak the truth – shall be his ruin, He feeds no trusty friend, no man to love him. All guilt is he who eats with no partaker."
"Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit. Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit. Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent. Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it? There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not."
"There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond."
"Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know."
"I laud Agni the priest, the divine minister of sacrifice, who invokes the gods, and is most rich in gems. May Agni, the invoker, the sage, the true, the most renowned, a god, come hither with the gods!"
"Child of a double birth he grasps at triple food; in the year's course what he hath swallowed grows anew. He, by another's mouth and tongue a noble Bull, with other, as an elephant, consumes the trees."
"Mighty, with wondrous power and marvellously bright, selfstrong like mountains, ye glide swiftly on your way. Like the wild elephants ye eat the forests up when ye assume your strength among the bright red flames."
"When you drove the course for Divodāsa and for Bharadvāja, Aśvins, urging your steeds onward, your accompanying chariot conveyed wealth. A bull and a river dolphin were yoked to it.Conveying wealth with good rule and a full lifetime with good descendants and good men, Nāsatyas, you two of one mind journeyed here with the prizes of victory to the wife of Jahnu, who was setting your portion three times a day."
"His spies are seated round about."
"What thing I am I do not know. I wander secluded, burdened by my mind. When the first-born of Truth has come to me I receive a share in that self-same Word."
"May He delight in these my words."
"God is one and the sole ruler of the Universe. God is one but the learned call him by many names."
"O ye who wish to gain realization of the Supreme Truth, utter the name of "Vishnu" at least once in the steadfast faith that it will lead you to such realization."
"Just as the sun's rays in the sky are extended to the mundane vision, so in the same way the wise and learned devotees always see the abode of Lord Vishnu."
"Let me now sing the heroic deeds of Viṣṇu who has measured apart the realms of the earth, who propped up the upper dwelling-place, striding far as he stepped forth three times. They praise for his heroic deeds Viṣṇu who lurks in the mountains, wandering like a ferocious wild beast, in whose three wide strides all creatures dwell."
"Alone, he supports threefold the earth and the sky — all creatures. Would that I might reach his dear place of refuge, where men who love the gods rejoice. For their one draws close to the wide-striding Viṣṇu; there, in his highest footstep, is the fountain of honey."
"The Angirasas gained the whole enjoyment of the Pani, its herds of the cows and the horses."
"Elsewhere, he “found the cattle, found the horses, found the plants, the forests and the waters” (1.103.5)."
"The four-and-thirty ribs of the. Swift Charger, kin to the Gods, the slayer's hatchet pierces. Cut ye with skill, so that the parts be flawless, and piece by piece declaring them dissect them."
"Indra, in short, is “the best winner of horses” (1.175.5)"
"The chronological order of the Mandalas, as we saw, is: VI, III, VII, IV, II, V, VIII, IX, X, with the chronological period of Mandala I spread out over the periods of at least four other Mandalas (IV, II, V, VIII).... [Mandala I also because] ‘it is, for the most part, earlier than Mandala V’."
"A dolphin lying on the sands, dried out by the North wind, could refer to the Gangetic dolphin, as in fact it does at 1.176..."
"Indra is... the “finder of horses” (9.61.3). ..."
"We saw Indra and Soma “winning cows and horses” from their enemies, but Soma occasionally wins chariots too (9.78.4) (besides the Sun and waters ...). Here too, a literalist reading would force us to conclude that the Dasyus and Dåsas, besides horses, possess “chariots”, defeating the dogma that chariots were brought (physically or mentally) by the Aryans."
"Flow on Soma as wealth from four oceans to us, a thousandfold and from every side"
"Flow on Soma as peace for us, draw out for our milk an ambrosial juice, and increase the ocean of the hymn."
"Forming the ray from Heaven, you flow through all forms. Soma, as the ocean you overflow. Soma, beloved enter the ocean."
"To the ocean the Soma drops, like cows to their home, have come to the source of truth."
"Soma stirs the ocean with the winds."
"The king of the river plunges into the sea, lodged in the rivers, he holds to the wave of the waters."
"Soma, as the ecstatic, you were the first to extend the ocean for the Gods."
"As the priest seeks the station rich in cattle, like a true king who goes to great assemblies, Soma hath sought the pitchers while they cleansed him, and like a wild buffalo, in the wood hath settled."
"Far far away hath Agni chased those Dasyus, and, in the east, hath turned the godless westward."
"Vaiśvānara the God, at the sun's setting, hath taken to himself deep-hidden treasures: Agni hath taken them from earth and heaven, from the sea under and the sea above us."
"They were the Gods’ companions at the banquet, the ancient sages true to Law Eternal. The Fathers found the light that lay in darkness, and with effectual words begat the Morning."
"Varuna dug a path for the Sun and led forth the ocean-going floods of the rivers."
"This stream Sarasvatī with fostering current comes forth, our sure defence, our fort of iron. As on a car, the flood flows on, surpassing in majesty and might all other waters. Pure in her course from mountains to the ocean, alone of streams Sarasvatī hath listened. Thinking of wealth and the great world of creatures, she poured for Nahuṣa her milk and fatness."
"R.D. Dandekar, who subscribed to the Aryan migration model, proposed a fairly sober reconstruction of the Battle of the Ten Kings, but was more honest in admitting, “I must hasten to add that the Dåsaråjña has nowhere in the Vedic literature been described in a consistent and connected narrative. [...] I have collated the relevant material from the various versions of the Dåsaråjña, have tried to eliminate the inconsistencies and deficiencies in them as far as possible, and have reconstructed a plausible history mainly with the help of constructive imagination.” He was also not sure that the number “ten” should be taken literally; it “has to be understood as being only generally descriptive rather than definitive”."
"[It] has long been used as a major source for the reconstruction of `Rgvedic history, perhaps somewhat too credulously, as the description of the battle is anything but clear and is also clearly full of puns, derisive word plays, phonological deformations of the names of opponents, and other poetic tricks, all couched in slangy language."
"Thus, whereas the text passages about the historical Battle of the Ten Kings (incidentally near the Ravi river, right on the present Indo-Pak border) repeatedly have the Vedic king Sudās come from the East and his Iranian-named enemies from the West, the translators insisted on having Sudās come from the West and fight against the Eastern “Aboriginals”."
"...But in fact, the enemies are led into battle by a king with an Iranian name, Kavaṣa, belonging to the Iranian Kavi dynasty, their tribal names and nicknames all have Iranian counterparts or are known from Iranian and Greek sources to refer to Iranian communities. Moreover, their religion is described as having the typical characteristics of Mazdeism: without Indra, without Devas, without fire-sacrifice etc.. Very obviously, the enemies of the Vedic people at that time, when Rg-Vedic books 7 and 4 and the contemporaneous parts of books 1 and 9 were composed, were Iranian, not “black aboriginal”. This is attested from so many angles that one tends to wonder how this mistake could have been made at all, and how the true Iranian identity of the Dāsas (Greek Dahai) could have been missed."
"With Bow let us win kine, with Bow the battle, with Bow be victors in our hot encounters. The Bow brings grief and sorrow to the foeman: armed with the Bow may we subdue all regions."
"She, the holy follower of Universal Order, [Sarasvatī,] has spread us all [the five tribes of the Vedic people (stanza 12)] beyond enmities, beyond the other [seven] sister-rivers, as the sun spreads out the days."
"[The composer begs the river Sarasvatī:] "let us not go from thee to distant countries"."
"After smiting two Dåsas, he distributes the vast bounty seized from them, which includes “ten horses, ten casks, ten garments [...] ten chariots with side-horses, a hundred cows” (6.47.23–24)."
"Two wagon-teams, with damsels, twenty oxen, O Agni, Abhyåvartin Chåyamåna, The liberal Sovran, giveth me. This guerdon of P®ithu’s seed is hard to win from others."
"Agni born shone out slaying the Dasyus, the darkness by the Light; he found the Cows, the Waters, Swar."
"Worship thou Rudra for his great good favour: adore the Asura, God, with salutations."
"O Maruts, you raise up rain from the [and] cause-to-rain."
"As the wind, as the wood, as the sea stirs."
"That is the great magic power of this divine greatest seer, Varuna, that no one can challenge, when the diverse flowing streams cannot fill the one ocean with their water."
"And let the patrons of our rites subdue all regions of the earth."
"The vocabulary of the Kaṇva maṇḍala [8] often coincides with that of the Atri maṇḍala [5] when it shows no correspondence with that of other family books. This subject deserves special treatment."
"We need not rely exclusively on the Anukramaṇī to affirm that there were important interactions between the priestly groups represented in Books 1, 5 and 8. As Oldenberg has shown, evidence from the hymns themselves supports this conclusion."
"The connections of Book 5 with Books 1 and 8 and not with the other clan books (2-4, 6-7) is interesting, since it seems to belong to the core RV collection."
"For Divodasa, him who brought oblations, Indra overthrew A hundred fortresses of stone."
"As in the days of old our ancient Fathers, speeding the work of holy worship, Agni, Sought pure light and devotion, singing praises; they cleft the ground and made red Dawns apparent."
"“Indra conquered all cows, all gold, all horses” (4.17.11)"
"Indra-Soma, by means of the truth (eva satyam), shatters the stable where Dasyus were holding “horses and cows” (ashvyam goh)."
"I have made Indra glorified by these two, heaven and earth, and this prayer of Viśvāmitra protects the people of Bhārata."
"Elsewhere, after smiting the Dasyus, he 'gained possession of the sun and horses ... [and] the cow that feeds many (3.34.9)."
"Among the Kikatas what do thy cattle? They pour no milky draught, they heat no caldron. Bring thou to us the wealth of Pramaganda;give up to us, O Maghavan, the low-born."
"Agni, you move to the ocean of Heaven...to the waters which are beyond the luminous heaven of the Sun and to those which stand below it."
"Come forward, Kuśikas, and be attentive; let loose Sudās's horse to win him riches. East, west, and north, let the King slay the foeman, then at earth's choicest place perform his worship."
"From the lap of the mountains, happy, smiling, like two running mares, like two bright Mother cows licking their calf, Vipas and Shutudri run with fluid. Directed by Indra, seeking power, as chariots they travel to the sea."
"Impelled by Indra … you-two [rivers] ‘like chariot- horses go to the sea."
"The sounding rivers fill one common storehouse."
"Naditamá, ambitamá and devitamá."