A New Approach to the Vedas: An Essay in Translation and Exegesis

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EXISTING translations of Vedic texts, however etymologically"accurate," are too often unintelligible or unconvincing, sometimes admittedly unintelligible to the translator himself. Neither the "Sacred Books of the East," nor for example such translations of the Upanişads as those of R. E. Hume, or those of Mitra, Roer, and Cowell, recently reprinted, even approach the standards set by such works as Thomas Taylor's version of the Enneads of Plotinus, or Friedländer's of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. Translators of the Vedas do not seem to have possessed any previous knowledge of meta- physics, but rather to have gained their first and only notions of ontology from Sanskrit sources. As remarked by Jung, Psychological Types, p. 263, with reference to the study of the Upanisads under existing conditions, "any true perception of the quite extraordinary depth of those ideas and their amazing psychological accuracy is still but a remote possibility."

It is very evident that for an understanding of the Vedas, a knowledge of Sanskrit, however profound, is insufficient. Indians themselves do not rely upon their knowledge of Sanskrit here, but insist upon the absolute necessity of study at the feet of a guru. That is not possible in the same sense for European students. Yet Europe also possesses a tradition founded in first principles. That mentality which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought into being an intellectual Christianity owing as much to Maimonides, Aristotle, and the Arabs as to the Bible itself, would not have found the Vedas "difficult." For example, those who understood that "Paternity and filiation are dependent proper-ties," or that God" cannot be a Person without a Nature, nor can his Nature be without a Person," Eckhart, 1, 268 and 39;, or had read later Dante's "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son," Paradiso, xxxiii, would not have seen in the mutual generation of Puruşa and Virāj, or Dakşa and Aditi an arbitrary or primitive mode of thought those familiar with Christian conceptions of Godhead as "void," "naked," and "as though it were not," would not have been disconcerted by descriptions of That as "Death" (mylyn), and as being " in no wise" (neti, neti). To those who even to-day have some idea of what is meant by a "reconciliation of opposites," or have partly understood the relation between man's conscious consciousness and the unconscious sources of his powers, the significance of the Waters as an "inexhaustible well" of the possibilities of existence might be apparent. When Blake speaks of a" Marriage of Heaven and Hell," or Swinburne writes, "I bid you but be," there is included more of the Vedas than can be found in many learned disquisitions on their "philosophy." What right have Sanskritists to confine their labours to the solution of linguistic problems is it fear that precludes their wrestling with the ideology of the texts they undertake? Our scholarship is too little humane.