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bulleshah,
"[Sacrificer:] 'They are pressing out the impetuous, exhilarating Soma juices with the pressing-stone, for you, Indra. Drink them! They are cooking bulls for you; you will eat them, generous Indra, when they summon you with food.' " -- Rig Veda 10:28:3.
"[Indra:] 'They have cooked for me fifteen bulls, and twenty, so that I may eat the fat as well. Both sides of my belly are full.' " -- Rig Veda 10:86:14.
Thanks.
To the uninstructed Aryan worshipper, the Maruts were powers of wind, storm and rain; it is the images of the tempest that are most commonly applied to them and they are spoken of as the Rudras, the fierce, impetuous ones, - a name that they share with the god of Force, Agni.
Indra is described sometimes as the eldest of the Maruts, - indrajyestho marudganah, - yet they would seem at first to belong rather to the domain of Vayu, the Wind-God, who in the Vedic system is the Master of Life, inspirer of that Breath or dynamic energy, called the Prana.
Soma is the Lord of the wine of delight, the wine of immortality. Like Agni he is found in the plants, the growths of earth, and in the waters. The Soma-wine used in the external sacrifice is the symbol of this wine of delight. It is pressed out by the pressing-stone (
adri, gravan) which has a close symbolic connection with the thunderbolt, the formed electric force of Indra also called
adri. The Vedic hymns speak of the luminous thunders of this stone as they speak of the light and sound of Indra's weapon. Once pressed out as the delight of existence Soma has to be purified through a strainer (
pavitra) and through the strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl (
camu) in which he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars (
kalasa) for Indra's drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl or the jar is neglected and Soma is simply described as flowing in a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home of Immortality.
That these things are symbols is very clear in most of that hymns of the ninth Mandala which are all devoted to the God Soma:
"In sweetest and most gladdening stream
flow pure, O Soma, on thy way,
Pressed out for Indra, for his drink.....
....By means of this eternal fleece may Surya's Daughter purify
Thy Soma that is foaming forth.
Ten sister maids of slender form seize him within the press and hold
Him firmly on the final day.
The virgins send him forth: they blow the the skin musician-like and fuse
The triple foe-repelling meath.
Inviolable milch-kine round about him blend for Indra's drink,
The fresh young Soma with their milk...."
Soma Pavamana : Hymn I, Rig Veda
CLICK
Soma, flow on, inviting Gods, speed to the purifying cloth:
Pass into Indra, as a Bull.
2 As mighty food speed hitherward, Indu, as a most splendid Steer:
Sit in thy place as one with strength.
Soma Pavamana : Hymn II, Rig Veda
WHAT THE BULL SIGNIFIES I WILL TELL YOU LATER...
To translate the Veda is to border upon an attempt at the impossible.
The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems. The inner sense is psychological, universal, impersonal; the ostensible significance and the figures which were meant to reveal to the initiates what they concealed from the ignorant, are to all appearance crudely concrete, intimately personal, loosely occasional and allusive. A literal and external translation gives either a bizarre, unconnected sequence of sentences or a form of thought and speech strange and remote to the uninitiated intelligence. It is only when the figures and symbols are made to suggest their concealed equivalents that there emerges out of the obscurity a transparent and well-linked though close and subtle sequence of spiritual, psychological and religious ideas.
RigVeda is high-class poetry. It is sheer poverty of imagination to read poetry suppressing symbolism. Veda itself says there is a secret in RigVeda. That secret must be the symbolism. A symbol attempts to describe an experience beyond the realm of the senses. Symbols can be either auditory or visual. For persons who have the gift, hearing a word can create an impression in the inner being which conveys the full power of the symbol. There are four classes of symbols in the RV. Firstly, the
devās, Agni
, Indra and so on and the
devīs Sarasvati, Sarama and Mahī represent distinct types of divine powers and associated functions. In the second class are Vŗtra, Vāla and Shuşĥņa, the powers of falsehood.
The third class of symbols consists of the common nouns like go, cow, ashva, horse, adri, hill, āpaĥ, waters, nadi, rivers, vŗka, wolf etc. Lastly is the class of the names associated with the sages and poets like Kaņva and Kutsa.
Each member of these four classes represents a distinct psychological power which is helpful or otherwise. The unravelling of the symbolism behind each word was done by
Sri Aurobindo using his intuition. But we do not have to merely believe what they say. We can set up concrete objective tests to determine whether the symbolic meanings suggested by them are correct or not.
For instance, take the word go which ordinarily means cattle. It and its synonyms like usra occur in more than one thousand verses. Of course, many of these verses may involve other members of the four classes like adri, hill. Regard all these words in these verses as unknown. Substitute the symbolic meanings for the unknowns and see whether the verse makes sense. For the verses involving go, all the verses make excellent sense except those where go is used as a simile in which case it is an animal.
A few examples will show what the gulf is and how it was created. When we write in a recognized and conventional imagery, "Laxmi and Saraswati refuse to dwell under one roof", the European reader may need a note or a translation of the phrase into its plain unfigured thought, "Wealth and Learning seldom go together", before he can understand, but every Indian already possesses the sense of the phrase. But if another culture and religion had replaced the Puranic and Brahminical and the old books and the Sanskrit language had ceased to be read and understood, this now familiar phrase would have been as meaningless in India as in Europe. Some infallible commentator or ingenious scholar might have been proving to our entire satisfaction that Laxmi was the Dawn and Saraswati the Night or that they were two irreconcilable chemical substances - or one knows not what else!
When we read "Sarama by the path of the Truth discovers the herds", the mind is stopped and baffled by an unfamiliar language. It has to be translated to us, like the phrase about Saraswati to the European, into a plainer and less figured thought, "Intuition by the way of the Truth arrives at the hidden illuminations." Lacking the clue, we wander into ingenuities about the Dawn and the Sun or even imagine in Sarama, the hound of heaven, a mythological personification of some prehistoric embassy to somk nations for the recovery of plundered cattle!
As to that quote from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad ...so what?
...besides the Veda's were never considered to be the ultimate
in wisdom. No scripture can ever be the ultimate in wisdom.
Not the Vedas, not the Geeta, not the Bible, Not the Quran,
not the Guru Granthji......
THANKS
What, in the first place, is the Veda?
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