Dayananda and The Vedas-1

Dayananda accepted the Veda as his rock of firm foundation he took it for his guiding view of life, his rule of inner existence and his inspiration for external work, but he regarded it as even more, the word of eternal Truth on which man’s knowledge of God and his relations with the Divine Being and with his fellows can be rightly and securely founded. This everlasting rock of the Veda, many assert, has no existence, there is nothing there but the commonest mud and sand, it is only a hymnal of primitive barbarians, only a rude worship of personified natural

जीवन जीने की सही कला जानने एवं वैचारिक क्रान्ति और आध्यात्मिक उत्थान के लिए
वेद मर्मज्ञ आचार्य डॉ. संजय देव के ओजस्वी प्रवचन सुनकर लाभान्वित हों।
वेद सन्देश - स्वैच्छिक व्रत से सुख एवं बन्धन से दुःख होता है
Ved Katha Pravachan _33 (Vedic Secrets of Happy Life & Happiness) वेद कथा - प्रवचन एवं व्याख्यान Ved Gyan Katha Divya Pravachan & Vedas explained (Introduction to the Vedas, Explanation of Vedas & Vaidik Mantras in Hindi) by Acharya Dr. Sanjay Dev

phenomena or even less than that, a liturgy of caremonial sacrifice, half magic, which superstitious animal men of your hoped to get themselves gold and food and cattle, slaughter pitilessly their enemies protect themselves from disease, calamity and demoniac influencees, and enjoy the coarse pleasures of a material parodies. To that we must add a third view the orthodox, or at least that which arises from Sayana’s commentary, this view admits, practically, the nobler interpretation of the substance of the Veda and yet-or is it therefore ? Exalts this primitive farrago as a holy Scripture and a Book of Sacred Works.

Now this matter is no mere scholastic question, but has a living importance, not only for a just estimate of Dayanada’s work but for our consciousness of our past and for the determination of the influences that shall mould our future. A nation grows into what it shall be by the force of that which it was in the past and is in the present, and in this growth there come periods of conscious and sub-conscious stocktaking, when the national soul selects, modifies, rejects, keeps out of all that it had or is acquiring whatever it needs as subastance and capital for its growth and acation in the future, in such a period of stock-taking we are still, and Dayananda was one of its great and formative spirits. But among all the materials of our past, the Veda is the most venerable and has been directly and indirectly the most potent. Even when its sense was no longer understood, even when its traditions were lost behind Pauranic forms, it was still held in honour though without knowledge, as authoritative revelation and inspired Book of Knowledge, the source of all sanctions and standard of all truth.

maharshi swami dayanand saraswati

But there has always been this double and incompatible tradition about the Veda, that it is a book of ritual and mythology and that it is a book of divine knowledge. The Brahmans seized on the one tradition, the Upanishads on the other. Later, the learned took the hymns for a book essentially of ritual and works, they went elsewhere for pure knowledge, but the instinct of the race bowed down before it with an obstinate inarticulate memory of a loftier tradition. And when in our age the Veda was brought out of its obscure security behind the purdah of a reverential neglect the same phenomenon reappears. While Western scholarship extending the hints of Sayana seemed to have classed it for ever as a ritual liturgy to Nature-Gods, the genius of the race, looking through the eyes of Dayanada, pierced behind the error of many centuries. and again the intuition of a timeless revelation and a divine truth was given to humanity. In any case, we have to make one choice or another. We can no longer securely enshrine the Veda wrapped up in the folds of an ignorant reverence or guarded by a pious self-deceit. Either the Veda is what Sayana says it is, and then we have to leave it behind for ever as the document of a mythology and ritual which have no longer any living truth or force for thinking minds, or it is what the European scholars say it is, and then we have to put it away among the relics of the past as an antique record of semi barbarous worship; or else it is inded Veda, a book of divine knowledge, and then it be comes of supreme importance to us to know and to hear its message.

It is objected to the sense Dayananda gave to the Veda, that it is no true sense but an arbitrary fabrication of imaginative learning and ingenuity to his method, that it is a fantastic and inacceptable by the critical reason, to this teaching of a revealed scripture, that the very idea is a rejected superstition impossible for any enlightened mind to admit or to announce sincerely. I will not now examine the solidity of Dayananda’s interpretation of Vedic texts, nor anticipate the verdict of the future on his commentary, nor discuss his theory of revelation. I shall only state the broad principles underlying his thought about the Veda as these present themselves to me. For in the action and thought of great soul or a great personality the vital thing, to my mind is not the form he gave to it, but in his action the helpful power he put forth. and in his thought the helpful truth he has added or, it may be, restored to the yet all too scanty stock of our human acquisition and divine potentially. - Yogi Aurobindo Ghosh.

राष्ट्रीय प्रशासनिक मुख्यालय
अखिल भारत आर्य समाज ट्रस्ट
आर्य समाज मन्दिर अन्नपूर्णा इन्दौर
नरेन्द्र तिवारी मार्ग
बैंक ऑफ़ इण्डिया के पास
दशहरा मैदान के सामने
अन्नपूर्णा, इंदौर (मध्य प्रदेश) 452009
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Dayananda and The Vedas-1

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