Going Back The Hindu Way

To the heavens be peace, to the sky and the earth,

To the waters be peace, to planets and all the trees,

To the Gods be peace, to Brahman be peace,

To all men be peace, again and again-peace also to me!

-Yajur Veda (XXXVI, 17)

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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.

-Rig Veda, I.164.37

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As a kid who grew up in a bourgeoise puritanical Hindu family, I was always surrounded by priests and sages on festive occasions. I often demanded explanations from sages, to what do they pray for? I was often chucked the same answer, at the hilt which never satisfied me as it was an arcane one, “For the ultimate Truth”. I used to wonder, that what the “Ultimate Truth” was? Was it, that there is no Santa Claus? No wonder they used to ignore me.

And then in my good adult years I read this puranic story, it seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The princess’s father, the king, knew that the warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow. He sanctified that the warrior could only marry his daughter after he found the Truth. So the warrior set out into the world to seek the Truth. The warrior unabated prowled through different mountain tops and plains and temples and monasteries where the ascetics used to malign and scourge themselves, but nowhere he could find the arcane Truth.

Despairing himself he took a shelter from a thunderstorm in a malodorous cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath musty.? But as he got her as her interlocutor, he was flabbergasted to the fact that he was coming to the end of his journey; she was Truth.

They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared the warrior stood up and said, that his journey is complete for the ultimate quest of truth. Armed with knowledge he could go back to the palace and claim the bride.

“Now that I have found truth,’ he deliriously spoke, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’

The wizened old lady smiled and said, ‘tell them, tell them that I am young and beautiful.’

I was in awe of the story and it lurked in my mind for so long, that such a ?deep insight about life. The moral says that the truth exists, but the truth is always not true. The Hindu recognizes one supreme spirit that suffuses the universe. He worships only one God while recognizing that others see and name him differently. Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti: the Truth is one but sages call It by different names.

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~Vedas~

Truth may be a synonym of the Vedas; knowledge in divided into two niches:-

a)???? Depth unfathomed in the individuals.

b)???? The knowledge spread across the vast area of the earth through times and climes.

Knowledge of most of the? people is conditioned by the subjective and the objective thinking of their experiences, but humans from all climes and times have recognized that there is some other knowledge, far more far beyond reaching than what they manifest and comprehend in their day to day lives, beyond the pinnacle of what they sense is a vast land of knowledge of the unknown, to which they envisage as a higher power that controls both the known and the unknown.

Starting from the Paleolithic age or even before till this date, there always has been a small group of sages and seers who have been able to see the world beyond the world, a world beyond the materialistic world, a world of emotions, predictions, apprehensions and feelings. They tend to construe a tenacious relationship between the objective and the subjective world as the inseparable sides of a coin. They are the people who see everything in the inner world of the man and the outer world of the void or the cosmos. And the errand journey of them was put into words and phrases, acquired the status of divine revelation for the Vedas, represented by the words “Drusti”,meaning “What was Seen”, and “Sruti”, meaning “What was Heard” and the world was further described by them in terms of Nama and Roopa, or name and form. Albeit, the forms were too many, there were far too few names available in the language to represent them. This resulted in an extensive derivation of symbols and synonyms and metaphors and oxymorons, to refer to the forms. The sages and ascetics often went beyond the understanding of schools of the later times who were simply nebulous and not vivid about, the lexicon and the symbol usage by the sages. They misread it to that extent that, they started referring them to myths and just a lucid superstitions.

The Vedas to us have come in the most scientific language devised by man- Sanskrit. And, the reader may go bonkers, by the fact that the Vedas today we have, have retained their authenticity and accuracy and have formed a living manifestation in the lives of millions of Hindus today, despite the startling fact that they have been orally transmitted through the numerous generations.

This is due to the establishment of the edifices back then related to six supporting disciples namely Siksha (Phonetics), Vyakarsns (Grammar), Chandas (Poesy), Nirukta (Etymology), Kalpa (Ritual Procedure), and Jyotisha (Astronomy and Astrology). Now these are the limbs of the Vedas which provide a strict framework and? a definite structure to what to do and to how to do. Particular body posture and techniques of memorizing and reciting the texts, were made in a way that priests till this date have been trained in a tradition that , they can pick on any word at any time and recite the complete large text for hours.

Now the texts were embedded in rituals and procedures in the fear of punishment or reward, this became one of the major limbs of Hinduism and the psyche of the people. The prayers that people offer today have been lofty in spirit and thought even after 6000 years of their composition.

Om bhu: Om bhuvah om suvah,

Tat savituh: Varenyam,

Bhargo devasya dhimahi,

Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat

-Rig Veda (V-62-10)

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The Mantra is catalyzed in the first line of the text with the puritanical sound Om applied to Bhu, Bhuvah and Suvah, representing the physical, the subtle and Brobdingnagian spirit and the substantive cause of all the existence. The Mantra further coruscates the Devine Reality.

These rishis known as sages and seers wrote thousands of mantras like these, yet they were scattered at different places due to the different Vedic schools at that time; the Muktikopanishad mentions that these schools were explicitly known as Sakhas and there were 1180 Sakhas in existence. I know, there must be an impeding thought in the mind of the reader that, “Who was Veda Vyasa?”. Veda Vyasa retrieved all the smattered remains of the Hymns composed by hundreds of such rishis in aloof antiquity and made an unabated compendium of the hymns. It can be metaphorically taken as a massive cannon of all the four Vedas.

The Rig Veda alone is composed of 10,028 hymns and are attributed to as many as 414 Rishis, whose names are chartered in the Anukramanis. The original composition of the Rig Veda is considered to have occurred over a time span of 1000 years or more, preceding the time of their compilation by Vyasa at the time of Mahabharata which itself is around 3102 BC thus making Rig Veda ardently old.

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The word Veda means knowledge or wisdom.

a)???? Rig Veda- Poetic

b)???? Yajur- Prose

c)???? Atharva- Poetic and Prose

d)???? Sama- Hymns(Music)

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~Misconceptions~

One of the greatest misconceptions about the Vedas is that, they only relates to spiritual and religious content. But the Chandyogya Upnishad has an anecdote, allegorical and satirical in intent, describing an abecedarian Baka Dalbhya, commanding a pack of ravenously famish dogs on chanting the following sloka:

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Om madamo pvimo devo varuna prajapatia

Savitanmiha haranpateh namiha haro haromiti.

-Chandyogya Upnishad (1-12-1-7)

Which may be translated in English for the English readers who cant comprehend Hindi; “Om May we eat, Om May we drink, Oh Lord of Food, bring food to us”. Now this sloka is a jocular one which has no relevance to either spirituality or religiousness. And that is why Hinduism is most enigmatic religion.

The power that transmits deep into the levels of human body is very little or probably unknown and the common mass can just vaguely sense it. The Vedas act as a bridge between the cosmic and the materialistic sense.

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~Time~

The Vedas hold eternity, to be a never ending cycle of finite periods of time, called the Kalpa. The kalpa was subdivided into units measured on two scales, one cosmic and the other human.

The kalpa is divided into 14 Manvantaras, ruled on the behalf of the Brahma, by a Manu, each? Manvantara is further divided into 71 Mahayugas and each Manvantara is separated by a Sandhya, now all the 15 Sandhayas together make 6 Mahayugas.

?Thus the total duration of Kalpa is 14 (Manvantaras)* 71 (Mayayugas)= 994 Mayayugas + 6 Mahayugas.

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It may be further noted that, Sandhayas are the gaps between each Mahayugas, now, each Mayayuga breaks down into 4 Yugas:

a)???? Krita

b)???? Treta

c)???? Dvapara

d)???? Kali

We are today in the Kali Yuga of the 28th Mahayuga and the Kali Yuga began in 3101 BC.? Now these mathematical calculations are a complex form of science, but we can very well imagine that what science and mathematics was developed back then.

The Mahabharata is replete with complex astronomical calculations but are set in considering their bearing on events as omens or indicators of the looming disaster.

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~Writing and Speeches~

The ascetics wanted this fathomed knowledge to be ubiquitous, so for this purpose they had to use the Word. The seers meticulously scrutinized the sounds of their surroundings, Om, the divine sound is the coin of the realm, as the primordial sound was the first manifestation of the Divine and several other seed sounds, The Bija Aksharas, from which the mantaras and hymns could emanate.

These basic sounds were assembled into expressive words, which further became the Sanskrit Language. This task was taken with a lot of care and reverence, which was evidently reflected in the name Sanskrit itself, which means “Made to perfection”. Now in this new obfuscated language were the hidden stashed truths that were revealed by the physical and physic version in the poetic forms at different meters. ?

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~Hinduism~

The idea of reincarcerations, emerging from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, is basic to Hinduism. If in other faiths the individual is a body which has its own soul, in Hinduism the individual is a soul which happens to be in a temporary possession of a certain body; the immortal soul occupies a mortal corpus, which it sheds away at the latter of its life, only to re-emerge in other form, until it accomplishes true self-realization and moksha, and finally merges with the Brahman. The above mentioned cycle is known as Samsara, and it is a belief that addresses one of the central challenges facing every believer of God. Now to some Hindus a question predominantly arises that, “If God is all companionate and merciful the why does He permit so much of suffering?”

The Hindu answer is that the man reaps his own bad deed done in the previous life; this means that our present circumstances are manipulated or influenced by our old deeds. The soul cycle then continues from life-cycle to life-cycle, hopping from one body to the other, just like a caterpillar climbs onto a blade of grass and jumps to a new one (this metaphor is Upanishadic, not my own).

These all hymns, songs, quotes and ironies have made the Vedas a very obfuscated script to read and to interpret, but these mysterious, yet interesting stories have made the Vedas, the most popular and the most important script on the earth. These scripts play a major role in the day to day lives of millions of Indians around the globe.

As Dr. Sarvepalli Radhkrishnan has also said, “Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason and intuition that can not be defined but is only to be experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no Hell, for that means that there is a place where God is not, and there are sins which exceed his love.