Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s2.1

v1.c8.s2.1

Different views of the spirit of the Vedic hymns are held by competent scholars who have made these ancient scriptures their life study. Pfleiderer speaks of the “primæval child-like naïve prayer of Ṛg-Veda.” Pictet maintains that the Aryans of the Ṛg-Veda possessed a monotheism, however vague and primitive it might be. Roth and Dayānanda Sarasvatī, the founder of the Arya Samaj, agree with this view. Ram Mohan Roy considers the Vedic gods to be “the allegorical representations of the attributes of the supreme Deity.” According to others, Bloomfield among them, the hymns of the Ṛg-Veda are sacrificial compositions of a primitive race which attached great importance to ceremonial rites. Bergaigne holds that they were all allegorical. Sāyaṇa, the famous Indian commentator, adopts the naturalistic interpretation of the gods of the hymns, which is supported by modern European scholarship. Sāyaṇa sometimes interprets the hymns in the spirit of the later Brāhmanic religion. These varying opinions need not be looked upon as antagonistic to one another, for they only point to the heterogeneous nature of the Ṛg-Veda collection. It is a work representing the thought of successive generations of thinkers, and so contains within it different strata of thought. In the main, we may say that the Ṛg-Veda represents the religion of an unsophisticated age. The great mass of the hymns are simple and naïve, expressing the religious consciousness of a mind yet free from the later sophistication. There are also hymns which belong to the later formal and conventional age of the Brāhmaṇas. There are some, especially in the last book, which embody the mature results of conscious reflection on the meaning of the world and man's place in it. Monotheism characterises some of the hymns of the Ṛg-Veda. There is no doubt that sometimes the several gods were looked upon as the different names and expressions of the Universal Being.¹ But this monotheism is not as yet the trenchant clear-cut monotheism of the modern world.