The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s3.11

v2.c41.s3.11

There is, therefore, no ground to hold that the term açmānam svaryam in Rigveda, v. 56. 4, with the derivative v. 30. 8, refers to the firmament of stone which the Maruts cause to move. Quite different is vii. 86. 1, which ascribes to Varuṇa the motion of the lofty vault of heaven, that is the starry firmament, for that passage says nothing of the firmament as a building of stone. Wholly irrelevant also are passages in the Upaniṣads and later⁶ which treat of the sun as a stage on the way to the highest place; this is not the view of the Rigveda⁷ which expressly prays that those who despise Vedic practices (*apavrata*) may be debarred from the sun itself, doubtless as the abode of the holy, not as the way to it; Hertel himself recognizes that in ix. 113. 8 the pious man desires to win immortality in the place where is the closure of the sky, i. e. the sun. When in the Upaniṣads⁸ the moon appears as the door of the world of heaven, nothing whatever is said to suggest that this refers to an opening through which the waters of heaven are poured forth; clearly the reference is to the old idea that the souls of the dead go to the moon to dwell there, as the text in question expressly lays down. When the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa⁹ says that the rain springs from the moon and enters back into it, it says nothing of water from the heaven. Varuṇa’s connexion with rain is sufficiently natural without deriving it from the fact that the firmament is his palace, and that the ocean of the heaven is connected with the fire of heaven. Still less plausible is the treatment of Bṛhaspati as merely lord of the fire-heaven, who, therefore, can send down rain, or the assertion that the ruddy kine which he sets free are the stars who send rain, and that this conception of them is only explicable on the theory that they are doors to the fiery heaven.