Sri Aurobindo puts the question: ‘Is there at all, or is there still the secret of the Veda?’
We have in the Rig-veda Samhita, a body of sacrificial hymns couched in a very ancient language. The hymns present a number of almost insoluble difficulties. ‘Yet these obscure and barbarous compositions have had the most splendid good fortune in all literary history. They have been the reputed source not only of some of the world’s richest and profoundest religions, but of some of its subtlest metaphysical philosophies’, in the words of Sri Aurobindo.
The Rig-veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of the human thought when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the human race was concealed in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols. The reasons why it so happened may now be difficult to determine.
One of the leading principles of the Vedic mystics is sacredness, secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the gods. For the mystics, this wisdom is unfit, rather dangerous, to the ordinary human mind. It is liable to perversion, misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits.
The ritual system recognized by Sayanacarya stands in its externalities. The naturalistic sense discovered by the European scholars, in its general conceptions, may call for acceptance. But behind them is the true and still hidden secret of the Veda, the secret words spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge.
Sri Aurobindo’s book ‘The Secret of the Veda’ establishes that the Vedic literature is only the precursor to the Vedantic literature the objective of which is to lead the seeker on the path of Truth to Self-realization.
This book ‘Symbolism in Rigveda’ is only an abridged version of ‘The Secret of the Veda’, Sri Aurobindo Revisited, intended for the benefit of beginners among students of Vedic literature.
