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CHAPTER IX
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE SELF
My readers will have understood from what has been,
stated above, how the tradition of Spiritual Knowledge, which
is the root of the science of Release, has come to us in an
unbroken line from the Upanisads right upto Tukarama. But,
in order to impress on my readers that this knowledge had
come into existence in our country even before the date of the
Upanisads, that is to say, already in very very ancient times,
and that the ideas in the Upanisads have gradually grown
from those times, I shall give here, before concluding, a
well-known hymn (sukta) from the Rg-Veda, which is the
foundation even of the Spiritual Knowledge in the Upanisads,
together with its Marathi translation. Not only do we not
come across in the scriptures of any religion, critical
philosophical ideas, as to what the unknowable Fundamental
Element of the Cosmos must have been, and how this
variegated visible universe sprang from it, which are as
comprehensive, independent and root-touching as those in
this hymn, but no one has yet come across any text replete
with such Spiritual Knowledge, which is equal to it in "point
of antiquity. Therefore, many wonder-struck Western
scholars have translated this hymn into their various
languages, looking upon it as important, from the point of
view of religious history, for showing how the natural
tendency of the human mind runs beyond the Name-d and
Form-ed universe to reach the permanent and unimaginable
Brahman-Energy which is beyond it. This hymn is the 129th
hymn in the tenth mandala of the Rg-Veda, and is known as-
the 'Nasadiya-Sukta', having regard to its commencing words.
And this Sukta has been adopted in the Taittiriya Brahmana
( 2. 8. 9 ), and the description given in the Narayaniya or the
Bhagavata religion in the Mahabharata as to how the universe
was first created by the desire of the Blessed Lord has been,
based on this hymn [1]. According to-
the general index ( sarvanukramanika ), the Rsi of this hymn
is Paramesthi Prajapati, its deity is the Paramatman, and it
consists of seven stanzas ( rca ) in the tristup metre, each
stanza containing four lines of eleven words each. As the
words, sat and asat, have a double meaning, the difference of
opinion among the writers of the Upanisads, as regards-
describing the Fundamental Element of the world as ‘sat’,
which has been referred to earlier in this chapter, is also to be
found in the Rg-Veda. For instance, this Fundamental.
Cause of the world is in some places described by saying "ekam
sad vipra bahudha. vadanti" [2], or " ekam santam
bahudha kalpayanti" [3]— that is, "It, being one.
and sat ( i. e. lasting for erer ), has been given different names-
by people "; whereas in other places, it has been described by
saying: "devanam puruye yuge 'satah sad ajayata" [4],
that is, "the sat, that is, the perceptible universe, came into
existence out of the asat, that is, the Imperceptible, even
before the gods had come into existence."
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