Vanaspati: Plants and Plant-Life as in Indian Treatises and Traditions c6.t3.86

c6.t3.86

This hymn begins by asking the poets to "harness the ploughs" and "to extend severally the yokes," and "scatter the seed in prepared womb," and so forth—a fact showing us unmistakably that poets in their fine frenzy of a joyous vision, and wise men in their meditative quest after truth, at least occasionally made time to hold the plough and to cultivate the land as a means of earning the livelihood—food without which no poetry, however excellent, and no philosophy, however grand, is possible. The picture of the art of cultivation as we get in this hymn does not differ a bit materially from the same art practised by the peasants in India to-day. There is the same mode of ploughing the land, preparing the womb of the earth, cutting the corn with the same sickles when they are ripe only with this distinction that the profession was then sanctified with a hallow of divinity.