rigveda

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"“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.”"

"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."

"The wise speak of what is One in many ways."

"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..."

"The people deck him like a docile king of elephants."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"