The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.66

c7.66

We know from the history of the later classical Sanskrit literature that India's climate and physiography have kept her poets in touch with nature to a degree unknown elsewhere, until we come to the modern nature poets. Even so, the transparency of the Vedic Pantheon as a whole remains surprising. This results in what we may call arrested personification, or arrested anthropomorphism, and this is the very genius of Vedic religion, and more especially of the religion of the Rig-Veda. Nothing so much as this has enabled the early Hindu thinkers to think out anew, a second and a third time, what had been apparently settled to everybody's final satisfaction, and was beginning to enter upon a career of rigmarole. Thus the Rig-Veda says of God Savitar, the sun conceived as the promoter of life: "God Savitar, approaching on the dark blue sky, sustaining mortals and immortals, comes on his golden chariot, beholding all the worlds."[1] It is the fiery ball that rises from the sea or over the hills, nothing more in the first place. The ordinary way of mythology would be to make of this Savitar a wonderful charioteer, given over, say, to racing or to warlike deeds. Instead, this process is, as I say, arrested. The natural phenomenon remains the repository of renewed and deepening thought. Even in the Rig-Veda itself the conception of the sun makes great onward strides as the most prominent symbol of the ultimate force at work in the universe. Another stanza, speaking of Sūrya, another sun-god, says, "The sun is the Self or Soul of all that moves or stands."[2] And yet another, the famous so-called Sāvitrī, or Gāyatrī, which remains sacro-sanct at all times, and is recited daily even now by every orthodox Hindu,[3] again turns to Savitar: