The European Pundits have erected their new and brilliant temple of phantasy

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SRI AUROBINDO Writings in Bengali Translated into English The Secret of the Veda

Sayana has put in the mouths of the Rishis such ungrammatical language, such complicated, jumbled and halting sentences, and attributed to them such disorderly and incoherent thought that upon reading his commentary, instead of calling this language and thought the Aryan language, the Aryan thought, one is tempted to treat them as the ravings of a barbarian or a lunatic. Sayana is not to be blamed.

The ancient lexicographer Yaska also committed the same blunder, and long before him the authors of the Brahmanas, unable to discover the plain meaning of the Veda, made an unsuccessful attempt to interpret the difficult Riks with the help of their "mythopoetic faculty." The historians, imitating this method, invested the Veda with a numerous pageantry of purely imaginary events twisting and obscuring its sacred and simple meaning...

In the nineteenth century, the Western Pundits girded up their loins and came into the arena producing a more intense foreign imbroglio. Even to this day, only to keep afloat, we are struggling hard against the huge waves of that flood. The European Pundits have erected their new and brilliant temple of phantasy on the old foundations laid by the ancient lexicographers and historians.

They do not much follow the `Nirukta' of Yaska, but explain the Veda with the help of recent lexicons compiled to their liking in Berlin and Petrograd. By giving a novel and bizarre form to the Solar myth of the ancient historians of India, by putting new paint on the old colours, they have dazzled the eyes of the educated community of this country. The Europeans also hold the view that the gods mentioned in the Veda are only symbols representing various activities of physical Nature...

The Europeans followed the method of the ancient Indian historians who used to fabricate various historical episodes on the authority of separate Riks and Suktas, with the difference that instead of letting their imagination run riot and building up such extraordinary stories full of unnatural and strange incidents as the death of a Brahmin youth crushed under the wheels of the chariot conducted by Jara (son of Jara), Rishi Vrisha, who is then recalled to life by the power of the mantra, and the theft of the force of Agni by some fiendish woman, they tried to reconstruct the ancient history of India with the help of such true or fanciful tales as the battle of the Aryan Tritsuraj Sudas against ten kings of mixed race, the priesthood of Vasistha on one side and the priesthood of Vishwamitra on the other, the theft of cattle of the Aryans and the obstruction of the flow of their rivers by the cave-dwelling Dravidians, the despatch of the Aryan envoy or royal ambassadress to the Dravidians in the parable of Sarama (the Hound of Heaven) etc...

It is true that hundreds of thunderers hailing from the banks of the Thames, the Seine, and the Neva have poured on our heads the seven celestial rivers of new learning, but none of them have been able to remove the obscurity produced by Vritra. We are enveloped in the same darkness as before.

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