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tatsaviturvŗņīmahe vayam devasya bhojanam.
shreşhţham sarvadhātamam turam bhagasya dhīmahi .
1. Of Savitri
divine we embrace that enjoying, that which is the best, rightly
disposes all, reaches the goal, even Bhaga’s, we hold by the
thought.
asya hi svayashastaram savituĥ kachchana priyam.
na minanti svarājyam.
2. For of him no pleasure in things can they diminish, for too
self-victorious is it, nor the self-empire of this Enjoyer.
sa hi ratnāni dāshuşhe suvāti savitā bhagaĥ.
tam bhāgam chitramīmahe.
3. This he that sends forth the delights on the giver, the god
who is the bringer forth of things; that varied richness of his
enjoyment we seek.
adyā no deva savitaĥ prajāvatsāvīĥ saubhagam.
para duĥ şhvapnyam suva.
4. Today, O divine producer, send forth o us fruitful felicity,
dismiss what belongs to the evil dream.
vishvāni deva savitarduritāni parā suva. yadbhadram tanna āsuva.
5. All evils, O divine producer, dismiss; what is good, that send
forth on us
anāgaso aditaye devasya savituĥ save. vishvā vāmāni dhīmahi.
6. Blameless for infinite being in the outpouring of the divine
Producer, we hold by the thought all things of delight.
ā vishvadevam satparti sūktairdyā vŗņīmahe. satyasavam savitāram.
7. The universal godhead and master of being we accept into
ourselves by perfect words today, the producer whose production is
of the truth-
ya ime ubhe ahanīpura etatyaprayuchchhan svādhīrdevaĥ savitā.
8. He who goes in front of both this day and night never
faltering, placing rightly his thought, the divine Producer.
ya imā vishvā jātānyāshrāvayati shlokena. pra cha suvāti savitā.
9. He who by the rhythm makes heard of the knowledge all births
and produces the, the divine producer.
COMMENTARY
Four great deities constantly appear in the Veda as
closely allied in their nature and in their action, Varana, Mitra,
Bhaga, Aryaman. Varuna and Mitra are continually coupled together
in the thoughts of the Rishis; sometimes a trio appears together,
Varuna, Mitra and Bhaga or Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman. Separate
Suktas addressed to any of these godheads are compartively rare,
although there are some important hymns of which Varuna is the
deity. But the Riks in which their names occur, whether in hymns
to other gods or in invocations to the All-gods, the visve
devah, are by no means inconsiderable in number.
These four deities are, according to Sayana, solar powers, Varuna negatively as lord of the night,
Mitra positively as lord of the day, Bhaga and Aryaman as names of
the Sun. We need not attach much importance to these particular
identifications, but it is certain that a solar character attaches
to all the four. In them that peculiar feature of the Vedic gods,
their essential oneness even in the play of their different
personalities and functions, comes prominently to light. Not only
are the four closely associated among themselves, but they seem to
partake of each other's nature and attributes, and all are
evidently emanations of Surya Savitri, the divine being in his
creative and illuminative solar form.
Surya Savitri is the Creator. According to the Truth
of things, in the terms of the rtam, the worlds are brought
forth from the divine consciousness, from Aditi, goddess of
infinite being, mother of the gods, the indivisible
consciousness, the Light that cannot be impaired imaged by the
mystic Cow that cannot be slain. In that creation, Varuna and
Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga are four effective Puissances. Varuna
represents the principle of pure and wide being, Sat in
Sachchidananda; Aryarman represents the light of the divine
consciousness working as Force; Mitra representing light and
knowledge, using the principle of Ananda for creation, is Love
maintaining the law of harmony; Bhaga represents Ananda as the
creative enjoyment; he takes the delight of the creation, takes
the delight of all that is created. It is the Maya, the formative
wisdom of Varuna, of Mitra that disposes multitudinously the light
of Aditi brought by the Dawn to manifest the worlds.
In their psychological function these four gods represent
the same principles working in the human mind, in the human
temperament. They build up in man the different planes of his
being and mould them ultimately into the terms and the forms of
the divine Truth. Especially Mitra and Varuna are continually
described as holding firm the law of their action, increasing the
Truth, touching the Truth and by the Truth enjoying its vastness
of divine will or its great and uncontracted sacrificial action.
Varuna represents largeness, right and purity; everything that
deviates from the right, from the purity recoils from his being
and strikes the offender as the punishment of sin. So long as man
does not attain to the largeness of Varuna's Truth, he is bound to
the posts of the world-sacrifice by the triple bonds of mind, life
and body as a victim and is not free as a possessor and enjoyer.
Therefore we have frequently the prayer to be delivered from the
noose of Varuna, from the wrath of his offended purity. Mitra is
on the other hand the most beloved of the gods; he binds all
together by the fixities of his harmony, by the successive
lustrous seats of Love fulfilling itself in the order of things,
mitrasya dhamabhih. His name, mitra, which means also friend,
is constantly used with a play upon the double sense; it is as
Mitra, because Mitra dwells in all, that the other gods become the
friends of man. Aryaman appears in the Veda with but little
distinctness of personality, for the references to him are brief.
The functions of Bhaga are outlined more clearly and are the same
in the cosmos and in man.
In this hymn of Shyavashwa to Savitri we see both the
functions of Bhaga and his oneness with Surya Savitri; for it is
to the creative Lord of Truth that the hymn is addressed, to
Surya, but to Surya specifically in his form as Bhaga, as the Lord
of Enjoyment. The word bhaga means enjoyment or the enjoyer
and that this sense is the one held especially appropriate to the
divine name, Bhaga, is emphasised by the use of bhojanam,
bhaga, saubhagam in the verses of the hymn. Savitri, we have
seen, means Creator, but especially in the sense of producing
emitting from the unmanifest and bringing out into the manifest.
Throughout the hymn there is a constant dwelling upon this
rootsense of the word which it is impossible to render adequately
in a translation. In the very first verse there is a covert play
of the kind; for bhojanam means both enjoyment and food and
it is intended to be conveyed that the "enjoyment of Savitri" is
Soma from the same root su, to produce, press out, distil,
Soma, the food of divine beings, the supreme distilling, highest
production of the great Producer. What the Rishi seeks is the
enjoyment in all created things of the immortal and immortalising
Ananda.
It is this Ananda which is that enjoyment of the divine
Producer, of Surya Savitri, the supreme result of the Truth: for
Truth is followed as the path to the divine beatitude. This Ananda
is the highest, the best enjoyment. It disposes all aright:, for
once the Ananda, the divine delight in all things is attained, it
sets right all the distortions, all the evil of the world. It
carries man through to the goal. If by the truth and right of
things we arrive at the Ananda, by the Ananda also we can arrive
at the right and truth of things. It is to the divine Creator in
the name and form of Bhaga that this human capacity for the divine
and right enjoyment of all things belongs. When he is embraced by
the human mind and heart and vital forces and physical being, when
this divine form is received into himself by man, then the Ananda
of the world manifests itself.
Nothing can limit, nothing can diminish, neither god nor
demon, friend nor enemy, event nor sensation, whatever pleasure
this divine Enjoyer takes in things, in whatever vessel or object
of his enjoyment. For nothing can diminish or hedge in or hurt his
luminous self-empire, svarajyam, his perfect possession of
himself in infinite being, infinite delight and the vastnesses of
the order of the Truth.
Therefore it is he that brings the seven delights, sapta
ratna, to the giver of the sacrifice. He looses them forth on
us; for they are all there in the world as in the divine being, in
ourselves also, and have only to be loosed forth on our outer
consciousness. The rich and varied amplitude of this sevenfold
delight, perfect on all the planes of our being, is the bhaga,
enjoyment or portion of Bhaga Savitri in the completed sacrifice,
and it is that varied wealth which the Rishi seeks for himself and
his fellows in the sacrifice by the acceptance of the divine
Enjoyer.
Shyavashwa then calls on Bhaga savitri to vouchsafe to
him even today a felicity not barren, but full of the fruits of
activity, rich in the offspring of the soul, prajavat
saubhagam. Ananda is creative, it is jana, the delight
that gives birth to life and world; only let the things loosed
forth on us be of the creation conceived in the terms of the truth
and let all that belongs to the falsehood, to the evil dream
created by the ignorance of the divine Truth, duhsvapnyam,
be dismissed, dispelled away from our conscious being.
In the next verse he makes clearer the sense of
duhsvapnyam. What he desires to be dispelled is all evil,
vivani duritani. Suvitam and duritam in the Veda mean
literally right going and wrong going. Suvitam is truth of
thought and action, duritam error or stumbling,, sin and
perversion. Suvitam is happy going, felicity, the path of
Ananda; duritam is calamity, suffering, all ill result of
error and ill doing. All that is evil, visvani duritani,
belongs to the evil dream that has to be turned away from us.
Bhaga sends to us instead all that is good, - bhadram,
good in the sense of felicity, the auspicious things of the divine
enjoying, the happiness of the right activity, the right creation.
For, in the creation of Bhaga Savitri, in his perfect and
faultless sacrifice, - there is a double sense in the word sava,
"loosing forth”, used of the creation, and the sacrifice, the
libation of the Soma, - men stand absolved from sin and blame by
the Ananda, anagasah, blameless in the sight of Aditi, fit
for the undivided and infinite consciousness of the liberated
soul. The Ananda owing to that freedom is capable of being in them
universal. They are able to hold by their thought all things of
the delight, visva vamani; for in the dhi, the
understanding that holds and arranges, there is right arrangement
of the world, perception of right relation, right purpose, right
use, right fulfilment, the divine and blissful intention in all
things.
It is the universal Divine, the master of the Sat, from whom all
things are created in the terms of the truth, satyam, that
the sacrificers today by means of the sacred mantras seek
to accept into themselves under the name of Bhaga Savitri. It is
the creator whose c'reation is the Truth, whose sacrifice is the
outpouring of the truth through the outpouring of his own Ananda,
his divine and unerring joy of being, into the human soul. He as
Surya Savitri, master of the Truth, goes in front of both this
Night and this Dawn, of the manifest consciousness and the
unmanifest, the waking being and the subconscient and
superconscient whose interaction creates all our experiences; and
in his motion neglects nothing, is never unheeding, never falters.
He goes in front of both bringing out of the night of the
subconscient the divine Light, turning into the beams of that
Light the uncertain or distorted reflections of the conscient, and
always the thought is rightly placed. The source of all error is
misapplication, wrong placing of truth, wrong arrangement, wrong
relation, wrong positing in time and place, object and order. But
in the Master of Truth there is no such error, no such stumbling,
no such wrong placing.
Surya Savitri, who is Bhaga, stands between the Infinite
and the created worlds within us and without. All things that
have to be born in the creative consciousness he receives into the
Vijnana; there he puts it into its right place in the divine
rhythm by the knowledge that listens and receives the Word as it
descends and so he looses it forth into the movement of things,
asravayati slokena pra ca suvati. When in us each creation of
the active Ananda, the prajavat saubhagam, comes thus out
of the unmanifest, received and heard rightly of the knowledge in
the faultless rhythm of things, then is our creation that of Bhaga
Savitri, and all the births of that creation, our children, our
offspring, praja, apatyam, are things of the delight,
visva vamani. This is the accomplishment of Bhaga in man, his
full portion of the world- sacrifice.
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