Hymns to the Lords of Light
The Guardians of the Light
SURYA, LIGHT AND SEER
THE RIG VEDA rises out of the ancient Dawn with the sound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light. Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in the thought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darkness and Ignorance. The battle of the Vedic Gods and Titans is a perpetual conflict between Day and Night for the possession of the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for the liberation or bondage of the mind, life and body of the human being, his mortality or his immortality. It is waged by the Powers of a supreme Truth and Lords of a supreme Light against other dark Powers who struggle to maintain the foundation of this falsehood in which we dwell and the iron walls of these hundred fortified cities of the Ignorance. This antinomy between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood has its roots in an original cosmic antinomy between the illumined Infinite and the darkened finite consciousness. Aditi the infinite, the undivided is the mother of the Gods, Diti or Danu, the division, the separative conscious ness the mother of the Titans; therefore the gods in man move towards light, infinity and unity, the Titans dwell in their cave of the darkness and issue from it only to break up, make discordant, wounded, limited his knowledge, will, strength, joy and being. Aditi is originally the pure consciousness of infinite existence one and self-luminous; she is the Light that is Mother of all things. As the infinite she gives birth to Daksha, the discriminating and distributing Thought of the divine Mind, and is herself born to Daksha as the cosmic infinite, the mystic Cow whose udders feed all the worlds.
Page – 473 It is this divine daughter of Daksha who is the mother of the gods. In the cosmos Aditi is the undivided infinite unity of things, free from the duality, advaya, and has Diti the separative dualising consciousness for the obverse side of her cosmic creation, —her sister and a rival wife in the later myth. Here in the lower being where she is manifested as the earth-principle, her husband is the lower or inauspicious Father who is slain by their child Indra, the power of the divine Mind manifested in the inferior creation. Indra, says the hymn, slays his father, dragging him by the feet, and makes his mother a widow. In another image, forcible and expressive though repugnant to the decorousness of our modern taste, Surya is said to be the lover of his sister Dawn and the second husband of his mother Aditi, and by a variation of the same image Aditi is hymned as the wife of the all-pervading Vishnu who is in the cosmic creation one of the sons of Aditi and the younger brother of Indra. These images which seem gross and confused when we lack the key to their mystic significance, become clear enough the moment that is recovered. Aditi is the infinite consciousness in the cosmos espoused and held by the lower creative power which works through the limited mind and body, but delivered from this subjection by the force of the divine or illumined Mind born of her in the mentality of man. It is this Indra who makes Surya the light of the Truth rise in heaven and dispel the darknesses and falsehoods and limited vision of the separative mentality. Vishnu is the vaster all-pervading existence which then takes possession of our liberated and unified consciousness, but he is born in us only after Indra has made his puissant and luminous appearance. This Truth is the light, the body of Surya. It is described as the True, the Right, the Vast; as the luminous supramental heaven of Swar —”vast Swar, the great Truth” —concealed be yond our heaven and our earth; and as Surya, the Sun, “that Truth” which dwells lost in the darkness, withheld from us in the secret cave of the subconscient. This hidden Truth is the Vast because it dwells free and manifest only on the supramental plane where existence, will, knowledge, joy move in a rapturous
Page – 474 and boundless infinity and are not limited and hedged as in this many-walled existence of the mind, life and body which form the lower being. That is the wideness of the higher being to which we have to ascend breaking beyond the two enclosing firmaments of the mental and physical; it is described as a divine existence free and large in its unbounded range; it is a wideness where there is no obstacle nor any siege of limitation; it is the fear-free pasture of the luminous herds of the Sun; it is the seat and house of the Truth, the own home of the Gods, the solar world, the true light where there is no fear for the soul, no possibility of any wound to the large and equal bliss of its existence. This supramental vastness is also the fundamental truth of being, satyam, out of which its active truth wells out naturally and without strife of effort into a perfect and faultless movement because there is upon those heights no division, no gulf between consciousness and force, no divorce of knowledge and will, no disharmonising of our being and its action; everything there is the “straight” and there is no least possibility of crookedness. Therefore this supramental plane of vastness and true being is also Ritam, the true activity of things; it is a supreme truth of movement, action, manifestation, an infallible truth of will and heart and knowledge, a perfect truth of thought and word and emotion; it is the spontaneous Right, the free Law, the original divine order of things untouched by the falsehoods of the divided and separative consciousness. It is the vast divine and self-luminous synthesis born of a fundamental unity, of which our petty existence is only the poor, partial, broken and perverted cutting up and analysis. Such was the Sun of the Vedic worship, the paradise of light to which the Fathers aspired, the world, the body of Surya son of Aditi. Aditi is the infinite Light of which the divine world is a formation and the gods, children of the infinite Light, born of her in the Ritam, manifested in that active truth of her movement guard it against Chaos and Ignorance. It is they who maintain the invincible workings of the Truth in the universe, they who build its worlds into an image of the Truth. They, bounteous givers, loose out upon man its floods variously imaged by the mystic poets
Page – 475 as the sevenfold solar waters, the rain of heaven, the streams of the Truth, the seven mighty Ones of heaven, the waters that have knowledge, the floods that breaking through the control of Vritra the Coverer ascend and overflow the mind. They, seers and revealers, make the light of the Truth to arise on the darkened sky of his mentality, fill with its luminous and honey-sweet satisfactions the atmosphere of his vital existence, transform into its vastness and plenitude by the power of the Sun the earth of his physical being, create everywhere the divine Dawn. Then are established in man the seasons of the Truth, the divine workings, called sometimes the Aryan workings; the law of the Truth seizes and guides his action, the word of the Truth is heard in his thought. Then appear the straight undeviating paths of the Truth, the road and ford of Heaven, the way of going of the gods and of the fathers; for by this path where no violence is done to the divine workings, straight, thornless, happy, easy to tread once our feet are set upon it and the manifested divinities are our guard, the luminous fathers ascended by the power of the Word, by the power of the Wine, by the power of the Sacrifice into the fearless light and stood upon the wide and open levels of the supramental existence. So must man, their posterity, exchange the crooked movements of the separative consciousness for the straight things of the truth-conscious mind. For always the courses of the Sun, the gallopings of the divine horse Dadhikravan, the movement of the chariot-wheels of the gods travel on the straight path over wide and level ranges where all is open and the vision is not confined; but the ways of the lower being are crooked windings beset with pits and stumbling-blocks and they crawl unvisited by the divine impulsion over a rugged and uneven ground which screens in from men their goal, their road, their possible helpers, the dangers that await them, their ambushed enemies. Travelling on the path of the Truth with the straight and perfect leading of the gods the limitations of mind and body are at length transcended; we take possession of the three luminous worlds of the higher heaven, enjoy the beatific immortality, grow into the epiphany of the gods and build in our human existence the universal formations
Page – 476 of the higher or divine creation. Man then possesses both the divine and the human birth; he is lord of the double movement, he holds Aditi and Diti together, realises the universal in the individual, becomes the Infinite in the finite. It is this conception that Surya embodies. He is the light of the Truth rising on the human consciousness in the wake of the divine Dawn whom he pursues as a lover follows after his beloved and he treads the paths she has traced for him. For Dawn the daughter of Heaven, the face or power of Aditi, is the constant opening out of the divine light upon the human being; she is the coming of the spiritual riches, a light, a power, a new birth, the pouring out of the golden treasure of heaven into his earthly existence. Surya means the illumined or the luminous, as also the illumined thinker is called suri; but the root means, besides, to create or, more literally, to loose, release, speed forth, —for in the Indian idea creation is a loosing forth of what is held back, a manifestation of what is hidden in the infinite Existence. Luminous vision and luminous creation are the two functions of Surya. He is Surya the creator and he is Surya the revealing vision, the all-seer. What does he create? First the worlds; for everything is created out of the burning light and truth of the infinite Being, loosed out of the body of Surya who is the light of His infinite self-vision, formed by Agni, the seer-will, the omniscient creative force and flaming omnipotence of that self-vision. Secondly, into the night of man’s darkened consciousness this Father of things, this Seer of the truth manifests out of himself in place of the inauspicious and inferior creation, which he then looses away from us, the illimitable harmony of the divine worlds governed by the self-conscious supramental Truth and the living law of the manifested godhead. Still, the name Surya is seldom used when there is question of this creation; it is reserved for his passive aspects as the body of the infinite Light and the revelation. In his active power he is addressed by other names; then he is Savitri, from the same root as Surya, the Creator; or he is Twashtri the Fashioner of things; or he is Pushan, the Increaser, —appellations that are sometimes used as if identical with Surya,
Page – 477 sometimes as if expressing other forms and even other personalities of this universal godhead. Savitri, again, manifests himself, especially in the formation of the Truth in man, through four great and active deities Mitra, Varuna, Bhaga and Aryaman, the Lords of pure Wideness, luminous Harmony, divine Enjoyment, exalted Power. But if Surya is the creator, he who is, as the Veda says, the self of all that moves and all that is stable, and if this Surya is also the divine, “the wide-burning Truth that is lodged in the law which upholds heaven”, then all the worlds should manifest that law of the Truth and all of them should be so many heavens. Whence then comes this falsehood, sin, death, suffering of our mortal existence? We are told that there are eight sons of the cosmic Aditi who are born from her body; by seven she moves to the gods, but the eighth son is Martanda, of the mortal creation, whom she casts away from her; with the seven she moves to the supreme life, the original age of the gods, but Martanda is brought back out of the Inconscient into which he had been cast to preside over mortal birth and death. This Martanda or eighth Surya is the black or dark, the lost, the hidden sun. The Titans have taken and concealed him in their cavern of darkness and thence he must be released into splendour and freedom by the gods and seers through the power of the sacrifice. In less figurative language the mortal life is governed by an oppressed, a hidden, a disguised Truth; just as Agni the divine seer-will works at first upon earth concealed or obscured by the smoke of human passion and self-will, so Surya the divine Knowledge lies concealed and unattainable in the night and darkness, is enveloped and contained in the ignorance and error of the ordinary human existence. The Seers by the power of truth in their thoughts discover this Sun lying in the darkness, they liberate this knowledge, this power of undivided and all-embracing vision, this eye of the gods concealed in our subconscient being; they release his radiances, they create the divine Dawn. Indra the divine Mind-power, Agni the Seer-Will, Brihaspati the Master of the inspired word, Soma the immortal Delight born in man aid them to shatter the strong places of the
Page – 478 mountain, the artificial obstructions of the Titans are broken and this Sun soars up radiant into our heavens. Arisen he mounts to the supramental Truth. “He goes where the gods have made a path for him cleaving like an eagle to his goal”; he ascends with his seven shining horses to the utter luminous ocean of the higher existence; he is led over it by the seers as in a ship. Surya, the Sun, is himself perhaps the golden ship in which Pushan the Increaser leads men beyond evil and darkness and sin to the Truth and the Immortality. This is the first aspect of Surya that he is the supreme Light of the truth attained by the human being after his liberation from the Ignorance. “Beholding a higher Light beyond this darkness we have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Surya divine in the divine Being.” This is the Vedic way of putting the idea which we find more openly expressed in the Upanishads, the fairest form of Surya in which man sees everywhere the one Purusha with the liberated vision “He am I.” The higher light of Surya is that by which vision rises on our darkness and moves towards the superconscient, the highest that other greater Truth-vision which, having attained, moves in the farthest supreme world of the Infinite. This brilliant Surya is made by the godward will of man; he is perfectly fashioned by the doers of divine works. For this light is the vision of the highest to which man arrives by the Yajna or Yoga of his being, by its union through a long labour of self-uplifting and self-giving to the powers of the concealed Truth. “O Sun, thou all-seeing Intelligence,” cries the Rishi, “may we, living creatures, behold thee bringing to us the great Light, blazing out on us for vision upon vision of the beatitude, ascending to the bliss in the vast mass of thy strength above!” The Life-powers in us, the purifying storm-gods who battle for the knowledge, they who are created by the divine Mind Indra and taught by Varuna who is the divine Purity and Wideness, are to attain to their enjoyment by the light of this Surya. The light of Surya is the form, the body of that divine vision. He is described as the pure and visioned force of the Truth which shines out in his rising like the gold of Heaven. He is the great
Page – 479 godhead who is the vision of Mitra and Varuna; he is the large and invincible eye of that Wideness and that Harmony; the eye of Mitra and Varuna is the great ocean of vision of Surya. His is that large truth-vision which makes us give to its possessors the name of seer. Himself the “wide-seeing”, “the Sun, the Seer who knows the triple knowledge of these gods and their more eternal births”, he sees all that is in the gods and all that is in men; “beholding the straight things and the crooked in mortals he looks down upon their movements.” It is by this eye of light that Indra, who has made him arise in heaven for far vision, distinguishes the Aryan powers from the Dasyu, separating the children of light from the children of darkness so that he may destroy these but raise those to their perfection. But seerhood brings with it not only the far vision but the far hearing. As the eyes of the sage are opened to the light, so is his ear unsealed to receive the vibrations of the Infinite; from all the regions of the Truth there comes thrilling into him its Word which becomes the form of his thoughts. It is when “the thought rises from the seat of the Truth” that Surya by his rays releases into the wideness the mystic Cow of Light. Surya himself is not only “the son of Heaven who is the farseeing eye of knowledge born of the gods”, but he is the speaker also of the supreme word and the impeller of the illumined and illuminating thought. “The truth that thou rising free from sin, O Sun, speakest today to Mitra and Varuna, that may we speak and abide in the Godhead dear to thee, O Aditi, and thee, O Aryaman.” And in the Gayatri, the chosen formula of the ancient Vedic religion, the supreme light of the godhead Surya Savitri is invoked as the object of our desire, the deity who shall give his luminous impulsion to all our thoughts. Surya Savitri, the Creator; for the seer and the creator meet again in this apotheosis of the divine vision in man. The victory of that vision, the arising of this Light to “its own home of the truth”, the outflooding of this great ocean of vision of Surya which is the eye of the infinite Wideness and the infinite Harmony, is in fact nothing else than the second or divine creation. For then Surya in us beholds with a comprehensive vision all the
Page – 480 worlds, all the births as herds of the divine Light, bodies of the infinite Aditi; and this new-seeing of all things, this new-moulding of thought, act, feeling, will, consciousness in the terms of the Truth, the Bliss, the Right, the Infinity is a new creation. It is the coming into us of “that greater existence which is beyond on the other side of this smaller and which, even if it be also a dream of the Infinite, puts away from it the falsehood.” To prepare that new birth and new creation for man by his illumination and upward voyaging is the function of Surya, the divine Light and Seer.
THE DIVINE DAWN
As the Sun is image and godhead of the golden Light of the divine Truth, so Dawn is image and godhead of the opening out of the supreme illumination on the night of our human ignorance. Dawn daughter of Heaven and Night her sister are obverse and reverse sides of the same eternal Infinite. Utter Night out of which the worlds arise is the symbol of the Inconscient. That is the inconscient Ocean, that the darkness concealed within darkness out of which the One is born by the greatness of His energy. But in the world of our darkened mortal view of things there reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which envelops heaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physical consciousness and our vital being. It is here that Dawn the daughter of Heaven rises with the radiances of her Truth, with the bliss of her boons; putting off the darkness like a black woven robe, as a young maiden garbed in light, this bride of the luminous Lord of beatitude unveils the splendours of her bosom, reveals her shining limbs and makes the Sun ascend upon the upclimbing tier of the worlds. This night of our darkness is not entirely unillumined. If there be nothing else, if all is deep gloom, yet the divine flame of the seer-will Agni burns through the dense murk giving light to him who sits afar in its shadow; though not yet kindled, as it shall be at dawn, on a sacrificial altar, yet even so it fulfils on our earth as the lowest and greatest of the gods the will and
Page – 481 works of the hidden Light in spite of all this enveloping smoke of passion and desire. And the stars shine out and the moon comes at night making manifest the invincible workings of the infinite King. Moreover, always Night holds hidden in her bosom her luminous sister; this life of our ignorance taught by the gods in their veiled human working prepares the birth of the divine Dawn so that, sped forth, she may manifest the supreme creation of the luminous Creator. For the divine Dawn is the force or face of Aditi; she is the mother of the gods; she gives them birth into our humanity in their true forms no longer compressed into our littleness and veiled to our vision. But this great work is to be done according to the ordered gradations of the Truth, in its fixed seasons, by the twelve months of the sacrifice, by the divine years of Surya Savitri. Therefore there is a constant rhythm and alternation of night and dawn, illuminations of the Light and periods of exile from it, openings up of our darkness and its settling upon us once more, till the celestial Birth is accomplished and again till it is fulfilled in its greatness, knowledge, love and power. These later nights are other than those utter darknesses which are dreaded as the occasion of the enemy, the haunt of the demons of division who devour; these are rather the pleasant nights, the divine and blessed ones who equally labour for our growth. Night and Dawn are then of different forms but one mind and suckle alternately the same luminous Child. Then the revealing lustres of the brighter goddess are known in the pleasant nights even through the movements of the darkness. Therefore Kutsa hymns the two sisters, “Immortal, with a common lover, agreeing, they move over heaven and earth forming the hue of the Light; common is the path of the sisters, infinite; and they range it, the one and the other, taught by the gods; common they, though different their forms.” For one is the bright Mother of the herds, the other the dark Cow, the black Infinite, who can yet be made to yield us the shining milk of heaven. Thus the Dawns come with a constant alternation, thrice ten —the mystic number of our mentality —making the month, till some day there shall break out upon us the wondrous experience
Page – 482 of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity when the dawns succeeded each other without the intervention of any night, when they came to the Sun as to a lover and circled round him, not returning again and again in his front as a precursor of his periodical visitations. That shall be when the supramental consciousness shines out fulfilled in the mentality and we shall possess the year-long day enjoyed by the gods on the summit of the eternal mountain. Then shall be the dawning of the “best” or highest, most glorious Dawn, when “driving away the Enemy, guardian of the Truth, born in the Truth, full of the bliss, uttering the highest truths, fulfilled in all boons she brings the birth and manifestation of the godheads.” Meanwhile each dawn comes as the first of a long succession that shall follow and pursues the path and goal of those that have already gone forward; each in her coming impels the life upwards and awakens in us “someone who was dead”. “Mother of the gods, force of the Infinite, the vast vision that awakes from the sacrifice she creates expression for the thought of the soul” and gives us the universal birth in all that is born. The Vedic Rishis, inspired poets penetrated with the beauty and glory of physical Nature, could not fail to make the most of the figures given to them by this splendid and attractive symbol of the earthly dawning, so that if we read carelessly or with too much attachment to the poetical figure we may miss or repel their deeper meaning. But in no hymn to their beautiful goddess do they forget to give us shining hints, illuminating epithets, profound mystical phrases which shall recall us to the divine sense of the symbol. Especially do they use that figure of the rays that are herds of shining cows around which they have woven the mystic parable of the Angiras Rishis. Dawn is invoked to shine out on us as when she shone upon the seven-mouthed Angiras, on the unity of the nine-rayed and the ten-rayed seers who by the utter thought of the soul, by the word that illumines broke open the fortified pens, “pens of the darkness” in which the Panis, misers and traffickers of the Night, had shut up the Sun’s radiant herds. Her rays are as loosings forth of these shining ones; the Dawns themselves are as if the
Page – 483 released upward movements of those herded illuminations. Pure and purifying, they break open the doors of the pen. Dawn is the truth-possessing mother of the herds; she is herself the shining Cow and her milk is the divine yield of heaven, the luminous milk which is mixed with the wine of the gods. This Dawn illumines not only our earth but all the worlds. She brings out into expression the successive planes of our existence so that we may look upon all “the diverse lives” of which we are capable. She reveals them by the eye of the Sun and fronting “the worlds of the becoming she stands aloft over them all as the vision of immortality.” She is herself that which shines out widely as the Eye, and like her lover the Sun she gives not only the vision, but also the word; “she finds speech for every thinker,” she creates expression for the thought in the soul. To those who saw only a little she gives wide vision and brings out into expression for them all the worlds. For she is a godhead of thought, the “young and ancient goddess of many thoughts who moves according to the divine law.” She is the goddess of the perceptive knowledge who has the perfect truth; she is the supreme light of all lights and is born as a varied and all-embracing conscient vision. She is the light full of knowledge which rises up out of the darkness. “We have crossed through to the other shore of this darkness,” cries the Rishi, “Dawn is breaking forth and she creates and forms the births of knowledge.” Constantly the idea of the Truth is associated with this luminous goddess Usha. She awakens full of the Truth by the illuminations of heaven; she comes uttering words of truth; her dawns are luminous in their entering in because they are true as being born from the Truth; it is from the seat of the Truth that the dawns awake. She is the shining leader of perfect truths who awakens in perception to things of varied light and opens all doors. Agni, the mighty one, enters into a great wideness of our heaven and earth receiving his impulsion in the foundation of the Truth which is the foundation of the Dawns; for the outshining of this Dawn is “the vast knowledge of Mitra and Varuna and like a thing of delight it orders the light everywhere in many forms.”
Page – 484 Moreover she gives the riches we seek and leads man on the divine path. She is the queen of all boons and the wealth she gives, expressed in the mystic symbols of the Cow and the Horse, is the bright abundance of the higher planes; Agni begs from her and attains in her luminous coming their delightful substance; she gives to the mortal inspired knowledge and plenitude and impelling force and vast energy. It is she who creates the Path for mortals by her light; she makes for them the good paths that are happy and easy of going. She moves man to his journey; “Thou” says the Rishi “art there for strength and knowledge and great impulsion, thou art our movement to the goal, thou makest us set forth on the journey.” Her path is a path of light and she moves on it with horses yoked by the Truth, herself possessed of the Truth and vast by its power. She follows effectively the path of the Truth and as one that knows she destroys not its directions. “Therefore,” runs the chant, “O Dawn divine, shine out on us immortal, in thy chariot of bliss, uttering the words of Truth; let horses bring thee that are well-governed, golden of hue, wide in their strength.” Like all the leaders of the Path, she is a destroyer of enemies. While the Aryan wakes in the dawn, the Panis, misers of Life and Light, sleep unawakening in the heart of the darkness where there are not her varied rays of knowledge. Like an armed hero she drives away our enemies and dispels the darkness like a charging war-horse. The daughter of heaven comes with the light driving away the enemy and all darknesses. And this Light is the light of the world of Swar, the luminous world that Surya Savitri shall create for us. For because she is divine Dawn of the luminous paths, vast with the Truth and bringing to us its bright world, therefore the illumined adore her with their thoughts. Removing, as it were, a woven robe the bride of the Lord of beatitude by her perfect works and her perfect enjoyment creates Swar and spreads wide in her glory from the ends of heaven over all the earth; she attains to a high-uplifted strength in heaven establishing the honey of the sweetness and the three luminous regions of that world are made to shine out by the delightful vision of this great Dawn.
Page – 485 Therefore cries the Rishi, “Arise, life and force have come to us, the darkness has departed, the Light arrives; she has made empty the path for the journey of the Sun; thither let us go where the gods shall carry forward our being beyond these limits.”
PUSHAN THE INCREASER
Since the divine work in us cannot be suddenly accomplished, the godhead cannot be created all at once, but only by a luminous development and constant nurture through the succession of the dawns, through the periodic revisitings of the illumining Sun, Surya the Sun-Power manifests himself in another form as Pushan, the Increaser. The root of this name means to increase, foster, nourish. The spiritual wealth coveted by the Rishis is one that thus increases “day by day”, that is, in each return of this fostering Sun; increase or growth (pusti) is a frequent object of their prayers. Pushan represents this aspect of the Surya-power. He is the “lord and master of plenitudes, lord of our growings, our comrade”. Pushan is the enricher of our sacrifice. Vast Pushan shall advance our chariot by his energy; he shall become for the increase of our plenitudes. Pushan is described as himself a stream of the divine riches and a lavish heap of its substance. He is lord of the vast treasure of its joy and companion of our felicity. The return of the night of ignorance which intervenes between the successive dawns is imaged as the loss of the radiant herds of the Sun frequently stolen from the seer by the Panis and sometimes as the loss of the Sun itself hidden by them again in their tenebrous cavern of the subconscient. The increase which Pushan gives depends on the recovery of these disappearing illuminations of the Truth. Therefore this god is associated with Indra the Power of divine Mind, his brother, friend, ally in battle, in their forceful recovery. He perfects and accomplishes our host that seeks for the herds so that they conquer and possess. “Let Pushan pursue after our luminous herds, let Pushan guard our war-horses, let Pushan conquer for us the plenitude. O Pushan, go after our cows. . . . Let Pushan hold his right hand over us
Page – 486 in front; let him drive back to us that which we have lost.” So also he brings back the lost Surya. “O shining Pushan, bring to us, as if our lost herd, the God of the varied fullness of flame who upholds our heavens. Pushan finds the shining King who was hidden from us and concealed in the cave.” And we are told of the luminous goad which this resplendent deity bears, the goad that urges the thoughts of the soul and is the means of accomplishment of the herd of the radiant illuminations. What he gives to us is secure; for because he has the knowledge, he loses not the herd and is the guardian of the world of our becoming. He has the variously ordaining and comprehensive no less than the complete unified vision of all our worlds and therefore he is our fosterer and increaser. He is the lord of our felicity who loses not our possession of knowledge and so long as we abide in the law of his workings we shall suffer no hurt nor diminution. The happy state of the soul that he gives removes from it all sin and evil and makes today and makes tomorrow for the building up of the whole godhead in our universal being. Since Surya is the lord of the Knowledge, Pushan also is especially the knower and thinker and guardian of the shining thoughts of the seer —the keeper of the herds delighting in the thought who is immanent in the whole world and all-pervading fosters all the forms of creative knowledge. It is this Increaser who stirs and impels the minds of the illumined and is the means of accomplishment and perfection of their thoughts; he is the seer set in man the thinker, the comrade of his illumined mind who moves him upon the path. He manifests in us the thought which wins the Cow and the Horse and all the plenitude of the wealth. He is the friend of every thinker; he cherishes the thought in its increase as a lover cherishes his bride. The thoughts that seek the supreme felicity are the forces that the Increaser yokes to his car, they are the “unborn ones”1 who take upon them the yoke of his chariot.
1 The word has the double meaning of goat and unborn. The words meaning sheep and goat are used with a covert sense in the Veda like that which means cow. Indra is called both the Ram and the Bull.
Page – 487 The image of the chariot, of the journey, of the path occurs constantly in association with Pushan because this growth which he gives is a journey towards the fullness of the Truth that lies beyond. The Path in the Veda is always the path of this Truth. Thus the Rishi prays to Pushan to become for us the charioteer of the Truth and the idea of the Vedic thought and knowledge and the idea of the Path are frequently interwoven with each other. Pushan is the lord of the Path whom we yoke as if a chariot for thought, for the winning of the plenitude; he distinguishes our paths so that the thoughts may be accomplished and perfected; he leads us on them by knowledge, forcefully teaching us, saying “thus it is and thus” so that we learn from him of the homes to which we travel; it is as the seer that he is the impeller of the horses of our chariots. Like Usha he makes for us happy paths of an easy going, —for he finds for us the will and strength, —and by his traversing of them rids us of evil. The wheel of his chariot comes not to harm, nor is there any trouble or suffering in its movement. There are indeed enemies on the way, but he shall slay these oppressors of our journey. “O Pushan, the wolf, the troubler of our bliss who teaches us evil, him smite from the Path. The adversary, the robber perverse of heart, drive him far from the road of our journeying. Set thy foot on the distressful force of whatsoever power of duality expresses evil in us.” Thus beyond all the obstacles that cling to our wheels Pushan, the divine and luminous increaser of man’s soul, shall lead us to the light and bliss which Surya Savitri creates. “The Life that is the life of all shall guard thee; Pushan shall guard thee in thy forward path in front, and where the doers of the good work are seated, where they have gone, there shall the divine Savitri set thee. Pushan knoweth all the regions and he shall lead us by the way which is freest from peril. Let the giver of felicity, the blazing god who has all the energies lead steadily in our front by his knowledge. Pushan has been born in thy forward travelling on the paths through earth and through heaven; for he moves in both the worlds which are made full of delight for us; here he ranges in his knowledge and he journeys beyond.”
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