A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s2.51

v1.c8.s2.51

However it is not entirely our fault, that we as yet do not rightly understand the Ṛgveda, and that a *complete* translation of it *must* of necessity contain much that is incorrect. The reason lies in the great age of these hymns which *to the Indians themselves*, already in very early times, had become unintelligible. Within the Vedic literature we find already some verses of the Ṛgveda misunderstood and wrongly interpreted. Already in early times Indian scholars busied themselves with the interpretation of the Ṛgveda. So-called Nighaṇṭus or "Glossaries," collections of rare and obscure words which occur in the hymns, were prepared. The first commentator of the Ṛgveda, whose work is preserved to us, was Yāska, who on the basis of the Nighaṇṭus, explains a great number of Vedic verses in his work Nirukta (*i.e.* "Etymology"). This Yāska, who doubtless is older than Pāṇini,¹ already quotes no less than seventeen predecessors, whose opinions frequently contradict each other. Indeed, one of the scholars quoted by Yāska declares outright that the whole Veda-exegesis is worth nothing, as the hymns are obscure, senseless, and contradictory to each other—to which Yāska, however, observes that it is not the fault of the beam if the blind man does not see it. Yāska himself, in the explanation of difficult words, often relies on the etymology (which of course does not fulfil the scientific requirements of modern philology) and frequently gives two or more different interpretations of one and the same word. It follows from this, that already in Yāska's time the sense of many words and passages of the Ṛgveda was no longer established by an uninterrupted tradition. Of the work of the many successors whom Yāska has had, there is nothing preserved to us, any more than of that of his predecessors. Only from the 14th century after the birth of Christ do we possess a comprehensive commentary, which explains the Ṛgveda word by word. This is the famous commentary of Sāyaṇa. Some of the older European interpreters of the Ṛgveda—thus the English scholar H. H. Wilson, who has published a complete English translation of the Ṛgveda, which entirely follows the Indian commentary—depended entirely upon Sāyaṇa's commentary, taking it for granted that the latter rested on reliable tradition. On the other hand, other Veda investigators did not trouble themselves at all about the native interpretation. They denied that a commentator, who lived more than two thousand years after the composition of the book explained by him, could know anything which we Europeans, with our philological criticism and rendered invaluable services to the clearing-up of many obscure passages of the Ṛgveda. They have also clung most firmly—certainly not without exaggeration—to the principle that the Ṛgveda must, above all, be interpreted as a production of the *Indian* mind, to the right understanding of which the Indian literature of later periods provides the best key.