The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.72

c7.72

Here is almost the first touch of that inimitable combination of the Upanishads, the Ātman, "breath," and the Brahma, "holy thought," that is the combination of physical and spiritual force into one pantheistic all. As a modern Hindu says of the Sāvitrī:² "It is of course impossible to say what the author of the Sāvitrī had in view, but his Indian commentators, both ancient and modern, are as one in believing that he rose from nature up to nature's God, and adored that sublime luminary which is visible only to the eye of reason, and not the planet we daily see in its course." Kātyāyana in his Index to the Rig-Veda, the so-called Anukramanī, after stating the familiar classification of all the gods of the Veda into three types—Agni (fire and light on earth), Vāyu (air or wind in the atmosphere), and Sūrya (sun in the sky)—proceeds still farther to assert that there is only one deity, namely, the "Great Self," (*mahān ātmā*), and "some say that he is the sun (*sūrya*) or that the sun is he." This is, of course, later thought, Upanishad thought, as it appears, for instance, in the Taittirīya Upanishad (8. 8): "He who dwells in man and he who dwells in the sun are one and the same." But this later thought is founded on the repeated revision, so to say, of the conceptions of the sun, fed anew by the sight of this engrossing nature force, which is not obscured and not made trivial by personification into an Olympian, human god.