The Vedas

Many Hindus look upon the Vedas as revealed scripture. This seen;; to me to be peculiarly unfortunate, for thus we miss their real significance — the unfolding of the human mind in the earliest stages of thought. And what a wonderful mind it was! The Vedas (from the root vid, to know) were simply meant to be a collection of the existing knowledge of the day; they are a jumble of many things: hymns, prayers, ritual for sacrifice, magic, magnificent nature poetry. There is no idolatory in them; no temples for the gods. The vitality and affirmation of life pervading them are extraordinary. The early Vedic Aryans were so full of the zest for life that they paid little attention to the soul. In a vague way they believed in some kind of existence after death.
Gradually the conception of God grows: there are the Olym-pian type of gods, and then monotheism, and later, rather mixed with it, the conception of monism. Thought carries them to strange realms, and brooding on nature's mystery comes, and the spirit of inquiry. These developments take place in the course of hundreds of years, and by the time we reach the end of the Veda, the Vedanta (anta, meaning end), we have the philo-sophy of the Upanishads.
The Rig Veda, the first of the Vedas, is probably the earliest book that humanity possesses. In it we can find the first out-pourings of the human mind, the glow of poetry, the rapture at nature's loveliness and mystery. And in these early hymns there are, as Dr. Macnicol says, the beginnings of 'the brave adventures made so long ago and recorded here, of those who seek to discover the significance of our world and of man's life within it.... India here set out on a quest which she has never ceased to follow.'
Yet behind the Rig Veda itself lay ages of civilized existence and thought, during which the Indus Valley and the Meso-potamian and other civilizations had grown. It is appropriate, therefore, that there should be this dedication in the Rig Veda: 'To the Seers, our ancestors, the first path-finders!'
These Vedic hymns have been described by Rabindranath Tagore as 'a poetic testament of a people's collective reaction to the wonder and awe of existence. A people of vigorous and unsophisticated imagination awakened at the very dawn of civi-lization to a sense of the inexhaustible mystery that is implicit in life. It was a simple faith of theirs that attributed divinity to every element and force of nature, but it was a brave and joyous one, in which the sense of mystery only gave enchantment to life, without weighing it down with bafflement—the faith of a
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race unburdened with intellectual brooding on the conflicting diversity of the objective universe, though now and again illu-mined by intuitive experience as: "Truth is one: (though) the wise call it by various names." '
But that brooding spirit crept in gradually till the author of the Veda cried out: 'O Faith, endow us with belief,' and raised deeper questions in a hymn called the 'The Song of Creation', to which Max Miiller gave the title: 'To the Unknown God':
1. Then there 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?
2. 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.
3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness, this all was
undiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of warmth was born that unit.
4. 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.
5. 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 of yonder.
6. 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.
7. 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 it not.*