- Of Sāvitri divine we embrace that enjoying, that which is the best,
rightly disposes all, reaches the goal, even Bhaga’s, we hold by
the thought.
- For of
him no pleasure in things can they diminish, for too
self-victorious is it, nor the self-empire of this Enjoyer.
- 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.
- Today, O
divine producer, send forth o us fruitful felicity, dismiss what
belongs to the evil dream.
- All
evils, O divine producer, dismiss; what is good, that send forth
on us
- Blameless
for infinite being in the outpouring of the divine Producer, we
hold by the thought all things of delight.
- The
universal godhead and master of being we accept into ourselves by
perfect words today, the producer whose production is of the
truth-
- He who
goes in front of both this day and night never faltering, placing
rightly his thought, the divine Producer.
- 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, Varuņa, Mitra, Bhaga, Aryaman.
Varuņa and Mitra are continually coupled together in the thoughts
of the Rishis; sometimes a trio appears together, Varuņa, Mitra
and Bhaga or Varuņa, Mitra and Aryaman. Separate Sūktas addressed
to any of these godheads are compartively rare, although there are
some important hymns of which Varuņa 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 Sāyaņa, solar powers, Varuņa
negatively as lord of the night, Mitra positively as lord of the
day, Bhaga and Aryamān 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
Sūrya Sāvitri, the divine being in his creative and illuminative
solar form.
Sūrya Sāvitri 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, Varuņa and Mitra, Aryamān and Bhaga are four
effective Puissances. Varuņa represents the principle of pure and
wide being, Sat in Sachchidananda; Aryarmān 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 Varuņa, 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 Varuņa 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. Varuņa 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 Varuņa'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
Varuņa, 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
dhamabhiĥ. 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. Aryamān 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 Sāvitri we see both the functions of
Bhaga and his oneness with Sūrya Sāvitri; for it is to the
creative Lord of Truth that the hymn is addressed, to Sūrya, but
to Sūrya 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. Sāvitri, 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 root sense 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 Sāvitri" 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 rişhi
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 Sūrya Sāvitri, 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 Sāvitri in the completed sacrifice,
and it is that varied wealth which the rişhi
seeks for himself and his fellows in the sacrifice by the
acceptance of the divine Enjoyer.
Shyavashwa then calls on Bhaga Sāvitri 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 Sāvitri, 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 Sāvitri. It is
the creator whose creation 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
Sūrya Sāvitri, 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.
Sūrya Sāvitri, 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
Sāvitri, 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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