Sri Aurobindo learned the Veda without help of any oral tradition or Vedic teacher

Ramanlal Pathak, Mother India, September, 2002

Through regular and intense Yogic sadhana he turned to the Veda, as the Veda simply brought him a confirmation of what he had received directly. Thus Sri Aurobindo is first a yogi and then a great Vedic scholar.

• Unlike other Vedic scholars, Sri Aurobindo
• Possessed no family background for the Rig-Veda and vedantic study
• He learned the Veda without help of any oral tradition or Vedic teacher, ‘shruti-parampara’
• He had not seen even Sayana before he attained considerable depth and height of his own in the Vedic study
• He had not followed any established branch of the study or theory propounded by any Indian or western scholar
• In the light of his own deep Yogic experiences, intense abstraction, severe meditation, ‘tapas’, and intuition, ‘ritambhara prajna’, he went towards the study of the Veda
• He studied the Veda with the direct and original text of the Veda itself
• Philologically he delved into the old Vedic language in the light of a deep study of the Tamil, Greek, and Latin root-system
• and learned the grammar of the old Sanskrit language from the original root-clans of the words.