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A Great God has been Released
TRANSLATION AND EXPLANATION : V. I*
1. Agni by the fuel heaped by the peoples has awakened
towards the coming Dawn as towards the sun-cow coming;
like the waters spouting up for wide flowing, his flames
move towards the heaven.
2. The Priest of the offering awoke for sacrifice to the gods,
Agni stood up high in the dawn and perfect-minded; the
gathered force of him was seen reddening when he was
entirely kindled; a great god has been released out of the
darkness.
3. When so he has put forth the tongue of his multitude, pure
is the activity of Agni with the pure herd of his rays; then
is the goddess discerning yoked to her works in a growing
plenty; she upward-straining, he high-uplifted, he feeds on
her with his flaming activities.
4. Towards Agni move the minds of the seekers after the God-head, as their eyes move in the Surya; when the two unlike
Dawns bring him forth, he is born a white steed of being
in the van of the days.¹
5.. He is born full of delight at the head of the days helpful in
the helpful gods, active in those that take their joy; in each
of our homes establishing his seven ecstasies Agni, Priest
of the offering, takes seat in his might for the sacrifice.
6. Mighty for sacrifice Agni of the offerings takes his seat in
the lap of the Mother, in that rapturous middle world, young
and a seer, seated in many homes of his dwelling, full of the
*For the original text refer to pp. 201-203.
¹Or, at the head of our forces.
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Truth, upholding our actions and therefore kindled in the
mid-spaces.
7. Verily, it is this Agni, the illumined seer who perfects us in
these lower activities, the master of offering, that they adore
with obeisances and submission; who stretched out the
double firmament by the force of the Truth, him they
strengthen¹ with the rich droppings, the eternal master of
substance.
8. Strong ever, he grows stronger housed in his own seat in
us, and home, our guest auspicious to us; master-bull with
the thousand horses of thy flame, strong with that Strength, O Agni, by thy might thou art in front of all others.
9. At once, O Agni, thou passest beyond all others in him to
whom thou makest thyself manifest in thy splendid beauty,
adorable and full of body and widely luminous, the beloved
guest of the human peoples.
10. To thee, O vigorous Agni, the continents² bring their
oblation from near and bring from afar; perceive the perfected mind in one most happy, for wide and mighty is the
blessed peace of thee, O Agni.
11. O luminous Agni, mount today thy perfect and luminous
chariot with the masters of the sacrifice; thou knowest those
paths, bring then hither through the wide mid-world the gods
to eat of our offerings.
12. Utterance have we given to the word of our delight for the
seer who hath understanding, for the lord who is mighty;
firm in the light one by submission to him reaches in Agni
a fixity, even as in heaven, so here golden bright and vast-expanding.
¹Or, brighten
²Or, the peoples
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EXPLANATION
The awakening of the divine Force and its action in a man
is in this hymn rather indicated than described. The Sukta is
purely lyric in its character, vaco vandāru, an expression of delight and adoration, a stoma, or stabilising Mantra intended to
fix in the soul the sevenfold delight of Agni, damedame sapta ratnā(Rik 5), and assure that state of perfected and
happy mentality, pure in perception, light and calm in the emotional parts,
bhandiṣṭhasya, the summation of the truth which the divine
force dwelling in us abidingly assures to our conscious being.
The image of the physical morning sacrifice is maintained
throughout the first two Riks, but from its closing phrase, mahān
devastamaso niramoci the Rishi departs from the ritualisitic
symbol and confines himself to the purely psychological substance of his thought, returning occasionally to the physical
aspects of Agni but only as a loose poetical imagery. There is
nothing of the close symbolic parallelism which is to be found
in some hymns of the Veda.
Abodhi
agniḥ Samidhājānanām
prati dhenum iva
āyatīm uṣāsam;
Yahvāiva pra vayām ujjihānāḥ
pra
bhānavaḥ sisrate nākam accha.
Force, pure, supreme and universal, has in man awakened;
divine power is acting, revealed, in the consciousness of the
creature born into matter, janānām. It wakes when the fuel
has been perfectly heaped, abodhi samidhā, — that power, plenty
and richness of being on which this cosmic force in us is fed and
which minister to intensity and brightness. It wakes towards
the coming dawn of illumination, as to the Sun-cow, the cow of Surya, the
illumination of the ideal life and the ideal vision entering the soul that works imprisoned in the darkness of Matter.
The flames of the divine activity in us are pointing upwards towards
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heaven, mounting up from the lower levels of our being
to the heights of the pure mind, sisrate nākam accha, and their
rising is like the wide gushing up into manifestation of waters
that have been hidden. For it is a great god that has been released
out of the darkness, mahān devastamaso niramoci.
The two familiar images in dhenu and in
yahvāare intended
to convey directly in one, suggest obliquely by the simile in
the other, the inseparable companionship of divine power with
the divine light and the divine being. All the gods are indeed uṣarbudhaḥ; with the morning of the revelation all divine
faculties in us arise out of the night in which they have slept. But the
figure here is that of awakening towards the coming dawn. The
illumination has not touched the mortal mind, it is on its way,
approaching, ā yatīm, like a cow coming from a distance to its
pasture; it is then that the power divine stirs in its receptacle,
seizes upon all that is available in the waking consciousness of
the creature and, kindled, streams up towards the altitudes of the
pure mind in the face of the coming divine knowledge which it
rises to meet. Divine knowledge, revealing, inspiring, suggesting,
discerning, calls up the godlike ideal activity in us which exceeds
man's ordinary motions, — wakes it even before it actually
occupies this mortal system by its far-off touch and glimmer
on the horizon; so too divine, inspired and faultless activity in
us rises heavenward and calls down God's dawn on His creature.
This great uprush of force is in its nature a great uprush of
divine being; for force is nothing but the power of being in
motion. It is the secret waters in us that, released, gush up openly
and widely from their prison and their secrecy in our mortal
natures; for in vitalised matter, in mind enmeshed in material
vitality, the ideal and spiritual self are always concealed and
await release and manifestation; in this mortal that immortal
is covered and curtained in and lives and works behind the veil, martyeṣu devam amartyam. Therefore is the uprush of divine
force in the great release felt to be the wide uprush of divine
being and consciousness, yahvā iva pra vayām ujjihānāḥ.
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Abodhi hotā yajathāya devān
ūrdhvo agniḥ sumanāḥ prātar asthāt;
Samiddhasya
ruśad adarśi pājaḥ
mahān devastamaso niramoci.
The purpose of the waking is next emphasised. It is for
divine action in man that God's force awakes in us. It is the
divine priest of the offering who stands up in the dawn of the
illumination to offer to the gods, to each great god his portion,
to Indra a pure and deified mentality, to Vayu a pure and divine
vital joy and action, to the four great Vasus, Varuna, Mitra,
Bhaga and Aryaman the greatnesses, felicities, enjoyments and
strengths of perfected being, to the Ashwins the youth of the
soul and its raptures and swiftnesses, to Daksha and Saraswati,
Ila, Sarama and Mahi the activities of the Truth and Right,
to the Rudras, Maruts and Adityas the play of physical, vital,
mental and ideative activities. Agni has stood up in the dawning
illumination high uplifted in the pure mentality, ūrdhva, with a
perfected mind, sumanāḥ. He purifies in his rising the temperament and fixes on it the seal of peace and joy; he purifies the
intellectuality and makes it fit to receive the activity of the illuminating Truth and Infinite Rightness which is beyond intellect.
Great is the god who has been released out of the darkness of
this Avidya, out of this our blind bodily matter, out of this our
smoke-enveloped vital energy, out of this our confused luminous
murk of mortal mind and sense-enslaved intelligence. Mahān
devastamaso niramoci. For now that he has been perfectly
kindled, it is no longer God's occasional flamings that visit our
nature, but His collected and perfect force, pājaḥ, that is seen
reddening in our heavens.
The first verse is preoccupied with the idea of the self-illumination of Agni, the
bhānavaḥ,
the flames of Force manifesting Knowledge as its essential nature — for Force is nothing but
Knowledge shaped into creative energy and the creations of
energy, and veiled by its shape, as a man's soul is veiled by his
mind and body which are themselves shapes of his soul. In the
words abodhi, vayām, nākam, in the relation of Agni to Usha and
the emphasis on the illuminative character of Usha as the Sun-Cow,
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this aspect of illumination and manifestation is stressed
and enlarged. In the second verse the native aspect of the divine
Force as a mighty power of action consummating and purifying
is brought out with an equal force and insistence. It is as the
Hota that Agni awakes; in this illumination of the dawn that
comes with him to man, prātaḥ, he stands up with the intellect
and emotional temperament perfected and purified, sun for the
great offering of man's whole internal and external life and activity to God in the gods,
yajathāya devān, fulfilling the upward
impulse, ūrdhva, which raises matter towards life, life towards
mind, mind towards ideality and spirit, and thus consummating
God's intention in the creature. In the next verse the nature of
this human uplifting, this upward straining of the mind through
heart and intellect to ideal Truth and Love and Right, is indicated and particularised in an image of great poetical force and
sublimity.
Yadīm gaṇasya raśanām ajīgaḥ
śucir ankte śucibhir gobhir
agniḥ;
Ād dakṣiṇā yujyate vājayantī
uttānām ūrdhvo adhayat juhūbhiḥ.
When so he has put forth the tongue of enjoyment of his
host, yadīm gaṇasya raśanām ajīgaḥ, Agni has put forth his
powers for an uplifted and perfect activity, ruśad adarśi pājaḥ, —
for redness is always the symbolic colour of action and enjoyment. This
pājas, Agni's
force or massed army, is again described in the gaṇasya raśanām, but while the idea in the second
verse is that of their indistinctive mass, here the gaṇaḥ. or host of
Agni's powers, the Devatas of his nature who apply themselves
to his particular works, are represented as brought out in their
individuality collected in a mass, — for this is always the fire of gaṇaḥ, — each with his tongue of flame licking the mid-air,
(surabhā u loke — madhye iddhaḥ. in Verse 6), enjoying that is to
say the vital energies and vital pleasure (aśva and ghṛta), which
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support this higher action. Supported by this vital joy and force
Agni acts, ankte agniḥ; but the enjoyment is not impure and
unilluminated enjoyment of the unuplifted creature, — he is śuciḥ, purely bright, not smoky with unpurified Pranic impulses,
and his flames of action are in their nature pure flames of illumination, śucibhiḥ gobhiḥ. In modern diction, when the divine
force has so far purified us, our activities and enjoyments are not
darkened and troubled with striving and clouded vital desires
which strain dimly towards a goal, but, not being ṛtajā, know not
what they should seek, how they should seek it, in what force
and by what methods and stages, our action becomes a pure
illumination, our enjoyment a pure illumination; by the divine
illuminations as their motive force, essence and instrument, our
actions and enjoyments are effected. We see just the curious
and delicate literary art of the Vedic style in its symbolism, by
this selection of the great word, go, in this context, in preference
to any other, to describe the flames of Agni. In the next line,
with an equally just delicacy of selection juhū is used for the
same flames instead of bhānu or go.
It is in this state of pure activity and enjoyment that the
characteristic uplifting action of Agni is exercised, for then, āt,
the discriminative intellect, dakṣiṇā, growing in the substance of
its content and havings, vājayantī, is yoked or applied to its work
under these new conditions. Dakshina, the discriminative intellect is the energy of dakṣa, master of the works or unerring
right discernment but unerring in the ideality, in mahas or vijñāna, his and her own home, not unerring in the intellect, but
only straining towards hidden truth and right out of the mental
dualities of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. This deputy
and messenger of the Ritam Brihat seated in manas as reason,
discernment, intellect, can only attain its end and fulfill its
mission when Agni, the divine Force, manifests in the Prana
and Manas and uplifts her to the ideal plane of consciousness.
Therefore in this new activity she is described as straining and
extending herself upwards, uttānām, to follow and reach Agni
where are his topmost planes, ūrdhva, in the ideal being. From
there he leans down and feeds on her, adhayat, through the
flames of the divine activity, juhūbhiḥ, burning in the purified and
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upward aspiring activities of the intellectual mind. This essential
relation of the divine force and the purified mind is brought out
in a more general thought and figure in the first line of the
succeeding Rik.
Agnimacchādevayatām manāmsi
cakṣūmṣīva sūrye sam caranti;
Yad
īm suvāte uṣasā virūpe
śveto vājī jāyate agre ahnām.
Iva in the Veda is not always a particle of similitude and
comparison. Its essential meaning is truly, verily, so thus, and
it is from this sense that it derives its conjunctive uses, sometimes
meaning "and" or "also", sometimes "as", "like". Its force here
is to distinguish between the proper activity of Agni and Surya, of manas and cakṣus, and to confine the latter to their proper sphere
and thus by implication to confine the former also. When we
are mortals content with our humanity, then we are confused in
our functions; the manas or sense-mind attempts to do the work
of the mahas or idea-mind, to effect original knowledge, to
move in Surya, in the powerful concrete image of the Veda. The
ideal also confuses itself with sense and moves in the sense-forces,
the indriyas, instead of occupying itself in all purity with its own
function. Hence the confusions of our intellect and the stumblings of our mental activity in its grappling with the contacts of
the outer world. But when we rise from our mortal nature to the
nature of godhead, devayantaḥ, amṛtam sapantaḥ, then the first
change is the passage from mortal impurity to immortal purity,
and the very nature of purity is a clear brightness and rightness,
in which all our members work perfectly in God and the gods,
each doing its own function and preserving its right relation
with its superior and inferior fellows. Therefore in those who are
attaining this nature of godhead, devayatām, their sense-minds
strain towards Agni, the divine force of Right Being and Right
Action, satyam ṛtam, — they tend, that is to say, to have the right
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state, bhāva or temperament, out of which the right action of the
indriyas spontaneously proceeds; the seeings of the Yogin who
attains, move in Surya, the god of the ideal powers, all that he
perceives, creates, distinguishes, is worked out by the pure ideal
mentality which then uses its four powers of self-revelation, self-inspiration,
self-intuition, self-discernment, without suffering obscuration by the clouds of vital desire and impulse or
deflection by the sense-impacts and sense-reactions. The sensational mind confines itself then to its proper work of receiving
passively the impacts of the vital and material and mental outer
world and the illuminations of Surya and of pouring out on the
world in its reaction to the impacts, not its own hasty and distorted responses, but the pure force and action of Agni which
works in the world, pure, right and unerring, and seizes on it to
possess and enjoy it for God in the human being. This is the
goal towards which Dakshina is striving in her upward self-extension which ends by her taking her place as viveka or right
discernment in the kingdom of Surya, and this she begins already
in her new activity by discerning the proper action of the mind
from the proper action of idea in the mind. The purified intellect liberates itself from the obscurations of desire, the slavery
to vital impulse, and the false reports and false values of the
matter-besieged sense-powers.
The essential nature of Agni's manifestation which is at the
root of this successful distinction, is then indicated. Night and
Dawn are the two unlike mothers who jointly give birth to Agni,
Night, the avyakta, unmanifest state of knowledge and being,
the power of Avidya, Dawn, the vyakta, manifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Vidya. They are the two dawns,
the two agencies which prepare the manifestation of God in us,
Night fostering Agni in secret on the activities of Avidya, the
activities of unillumined mind, life and body by which the god in
us grows out of matter towards spirit, out of earth up to heaven,
Dawn manifesting him again, more and more, until he is ready
here for his continuous, pure and perfect activity. When this
point of our journey towards perfection is reached he is born, sveto vājī, in the van of the days. We have here one of those
great Vedic figures with a double sense in which the Rishis at
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once revealed and concealed their high knowledge, revealed it
to the Aryan mind, concealed it from the un-Aryan. Agni is the
white horse which appears galloping in front of the days, — the
same image is used with a similar Vedantic sense in the opening
of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; but the horse here is not, as
in the Upanishad, aśva, the horse of vital and material being in
the state of life-force, but vājī, the horse of Being generally. Being
manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or
the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni
therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the bṛhat of all this
sevenfold substantial being that is the world we are, but white,
the colour of illumined purity. He manifests therefore at this
stage primarily as that mighty wideness, purity and illumination
of our being which is the true basis of the complete and unassail-
able siddhi in the yoga, the only basis on which right knowledge,
right thinking, right living, right enjoyment can be firmly, vastly
and perpetually seated. He appears therefore in the van of the
days, the great increasing states of illuminated force and being,
— for that is the image of ahan, — which are the eternal future
of the mortal when he has attained immortality.
In the next Rik the idea is taken up, repeated and amplified
to its final issues in that movement of solemn but never otiose
repetition which is a feature of Vedic style.
Janista hi jenyo agre
ahnām
hito hiteṣu aruṣo vaneṣu;
Dame-dame sapta
ratnādadhānaḥ
agnir
hotāni ṣasādā yajīyān.
This divine force is born victorious by its very purity and
infinity over all the hostile forces that prevent, obstruct, limit or
strive to destroy our accomplished freedoms, powers, illuminations and widenesses; by his victory he ushers in the wide days
of the siddha, for which these nights and dawns of our human
life are the preparatory movements. He is effective and helpful
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in the effective powers that work out for
our good the movements of this lower life towards immortal strength and power, he
is active and joyous, aruṣaḥ, in those that take the delight of these
movements and to prepare us for the immortal bliss and ecstasy
of the divine nature. Manifesting progressively that Ananda, he
the force of God establishes and maintains in each house of
our habitation, in each of our five bodies, in each of our seven
levels of conscious existence, the seven essential forms of Ananda,
the bliss of body, the bliss of life, the bliss of mind, the senses,
the bliss of ideal illumination, the bliss of pure divine universal
ecstasy, the bliss of cosmic Force, the bliss of cosmic being. For
although we tend upwards immediately to the pure Idea, yet
not that but Ananda is the goal of our journey; the manifestation in our lower members of the divine bliss reposing on the
divine force and being is the law of our perfection. Agni, whether
he raises us to live in pure mind or yet beyond to the high plateaus of the pure ideal existence, adhi
ṣṇunābṛhatāvartamānam,
establishes and supports as the divine force that divine bliss in
its seven forms in whatever houses of our being, whatever worlds
of our consciousness have been already possessed by our waking
existence, life, body and mind, or life, body, mind and idea, dame-dame
dadhānaḥ. Thus manifesting God's bliss in us he takes
his seat in those houses, domiciled, damūnaḥ, as we have it in
other Suktas, and in those worlds, to perform as the hotāin his
greater might for the sacrifice, greater than the might of other
gods or greater than he has hitherto possessed, the offering of
human life into the immortal being, ādaivyam janam, yajathāya devān.
In a culminating Rik which at once completes the first half
of the Sukta and introduces a new movement, the Rishi once
more takes up the closing thought of this verse and carries it out
into a fuller conclusion.
Agnir hotāni asīdad yajīyān
upasthe
mātuḥ. surabhā u loke;
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Yuvā kaviḥ puruniḥṣṭha ṛtāvā
dhartā kṛṣṭīnām uta madhya iddhaḥ.
Agni thus takes his seat in us and because it is through human
activity that he is to fulfil the sacrifice, because the ascending movement is-, not completed, he takes it in the lap of his
mother in that rapturous middle world. For the middle world,
the Bhuvah, including all those states of existence in which the
mind and the life are interblended as the double medium through
which the Purusha acts and connects Heaven and Earth, is the
proper centre of all human action. Mind blended with the vital
energies is our seat even here in the material world. The Bhuvah
or middle regions are worlds of rapture and ecstasy because
life-energy and the joy of life fulfil themselves there free from the
restrictions of the material world in which it is an exile or invader
seeking to dominate and use the rebellious earthly material for
its purposes. Agni sits in the lap of the mother, on the principle of body in
the material human being, occupying there the vitalised mind consciousness which is man's present centre of activity
and bringing into it the mightier bliss of the rapturous middle
world to support and enlarge even the vital and physical activities
and enjoyments of our earthly existence. He sits there in the
human sacrifice, full of eternal youth and vigour, yuvā, in possession of the ideal truth and knowledge, in possession of the
unerring rightness of the liberated pure ideal life and consciousness, kaviḥ
ṛtāvā, and releasing that truth and right in many purposes and activities,
puruniḥṣṭhaḥ, for he works all these results
as the upholder of men in their actions and efforts and labours, dharta
kṛṣṭīnām, — he is that in all his forms of force from the
mere physical heat in earth and in our bodies to the divine Tapas
in us and without us by which God affects and supports the existence of the cosmos; and because he is thus supremely the up-holder of human life and activity, therefore he is kindled in the
mid-space; the seat is on the fullness of the realised mind-consciousness in the microcosm, in the rapturous mid-world of
fulfilled life-energy in the macrocosm. There kindled, awakened
and manifested in man, samidhā abodhi, samiddhaḥ, he does
his work for upward-climbing humanity. Thus by the return in
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iddhaḥ to the words and the idea with which he started, the
Rishi marks the close of the first movement of thought.
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