In the Bhagavata Purana there is an elaborate discourse
given by Brahma himself to the sage Narad. Narad wanted to understand the
essence of the truth in the universe, wisdom which makes one realise the Principles
of the Spirit, Atmatatva. The Creator concedes that it is actually Vasudeva
himself who is the Begetter of the Worlds and their inhabitants. “The macrocosm
in the form of an egg lay on the causal waters in a lifeless condition for a
thousand years. With the help of Time as well as of the Destiny and innate
disposition of the individual souls, however, at the end of this period the
Lord infused life into this egg. Bursting out from that cosmic egg, emerged the
same Cosmic Being with thousands of thighs, feet, arms, and eyes and thousands
of faces, and heads too. It is in his limbs that the wise locate the various
worlds comprised in this universe—the seven lower spheres below his waist and
the seven higher spheres above his hips and loins. The Brahmin represents the
mouth of this Cosmic Being, and the Kshatriya his arms. The Vaishya emanated
from the Lord’s thighs and the Shudra from his feet.” The Purana describes the
result but does not give the process, except by saying that it was the Will of
the Lord and the agent to effect it was Time, Kala. Purusha Sukta provides the
details.
It is said that Purusha Sukta “speaks of the
restoration of the divinity of creation by the supreme holocaust of the Divine.
It is this sacrifice that distributes the divinity among the Gods, the Prajas,
and the whole of the universe enabling them to move jointly and integrally
toward Immortality.” But what seems to be presented in the Sukta is only one
particular aspect of the Creation; it is an important aspect, an episode no
doubt, but it is just an episode in the sequence of countless and recondite
operations that go in making this great and meaningful
involutionary-evolutionary Becoming. We must understand that the author of the
hymn was not setting himself to write a modern thesis or treatise giving the
details of the creation or its processes, an exhaustive document with its
prolegomenon and epilogue; instead, what is given is the dense but luminous
esoteric knowledge of the things, with one aspect in view, one particular
window opened out for seeing them. It was written in a milieu in which the
alert and perceptive receiver at once got in contact with the reality from
which it had originated; it had taken for granted the common knowledge of the
tradition and it is this knowledge which was further extended or enriched by
such explorative-creative presentations. It was in fact the mode of
establishing a new power of the spirit in the ready consciousness of the race.
It contributed to progress in knowledge. There are a number of aspects present
in the Sukta: the transcendental Absolute poised for manifestation, its
necessary projection in the cosmic field, holding back its own glory and
majesty, its aishwarya, its
Ishwarahood in order that multiplicity might become possible, putting into
operation Four Qualities, Four Powers of the divine Person in the universal
play, return of the Gods to their earlier status,—these are astounding events
narrated by it. And these have been established by doing Yajna, the Path of
Progress charted out by the Vedic Rishis.
About Yajna or Sacrifice, Sri Aurobindo writes: “The
law of sacrifice is the common divine action that was thrown out into the world
in its beginning as a symbol of the solidarity of the universe. It is by the
attraction of this law that a divinising principle, a saving power descends to
limit and correct and gradually to eliminate the errors of an egoistic and
self-divided creation. This descent, this sacrifice of the Purusha, the Divine
Soul submitting itself to Force and Matter so that it may inform and illuminate
them, is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance.
‘For with sacrifice as their companion,’ says the Gita, ‘the All-Father created
these peoples.’ ” In the Gita we have: “From food creatures come into being,
from rain is the birth of food, from sacrifice comes into being the rain,
sacrifice is born of work; work know to be born of Brahman, Brahman is born of
the Immutable; therefore is the all-pervading Brahman established in the
sacrifice.” And again: “Brahman is the giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by
Brahman it is offered into the Brahman-fire, Brahman is that which is to be
attained by samadhi in Brahman-action.” In Savitri
there is a situation when the God of Death just refuses to yield to the demands
of Savitri, she claiming the soul of Satyavan back. In fact it is a kind of
deadlock. The stubborn irredeemable God has snatched the soul of her lover and
husband, the divine Soul, and she does not see any prospect of its release from
the noose. But she is intent upon her silent will and, in her meditation’s
house, she summons her “spirit’s flame of conscient force”. There she
observes
Imperishable, a tongue of sacrifice,
[Flaming] unquenched upon the central hearth
Where burns for the high house-lord and his mate
The homestead’s sentinel and witness fire
From which the altars of the gods are lit.
Ishwara and Ishwari themselves are doing together the
Yajna in the heart of Savitri, and the result at once is that she becomes the
controller of events in the occult battle against the God of Death. Such is the
efficacy of the Vedic Yajna.
The power and preeminence of the supreme Purusha are
indescribable, the mahimā of the
Non-manifest is incomprehensible; even as luminous being he indeed is with a
form that cannot be figured out, divyam
puruşam achintya rūpam, as the Gita would say. But when turned towards
transcendental manifestation he becomes fourfold, a Beast with Four Legs, a
Bull with Vamadeva’s Four Mystic Horns,
Existence-Consciousness-Bliss-Knowledge, Sat-Chit-Ananda-Vijnan. There he is
the Primal God, Adi Deva, the Ancient or Purana Purusha, there the supreme
Abode, Param Nidhan wherein all abide. He as Vijnan Purusha, the Creator of the
Worlds projects himself into cosmic working. He sacrifices his royalty, his
greatness, his splendour and wealth, his vaibhava,
and assumes the limitations for the purposes of world manifestation.
While in the transcendent, he has all the richnesses, and has all its luminous
dynamism; but here in the projected sphere he acts through his delegate, the
Overmind Purusha in the greatness of multiplicity of every kind, with a
thousand heads and a thousand eyes and a thousand feet. It is he who can
perhaps be identified with the Vedic Vishvakarman or with Viraj of the Purusha
Sukta. About Vishvakarman the maker of the worlds, we have the following
description in the Rig Veda: he has his eyes on all sides, a mouth on all
sides, arms and feet in all sides, he who has given rise to earth and heaven,
he the one who gives commands to them all.
We could perhaps appreciate it better in the modern
language as we have in The Essays on the Gita: “Vasudeva, the eternal Being, is
all, says the Gita. He is the Brahman, consciously supports and originates all
from his higher spiritual nature, consciously here becomes all things in a
nature of intelligence, mind, life and sense and objective phenomenon of
material existence. The Jiva is he in that spiritual nature of the Eternal, his
eternal multiplicity, his self-vision from many centres of conscious
self-power. God, Nature and Jiva are the three terms of existence, and these
three are one being. How does this Being manifest himself in cosmos? First as
the immutable timeless self omnipresent and all-supporting which is in its
eternity being and not becoming. Then, held in that being there is an essential
power or spiritual principle of self-becoming, swabhāva, through which by spiritual self-vision it determines and
expresses, creates by liberation all that is latent or contained in its own
existence. The power or the energy of that self-becoming looses forth into
universal action, Karma, all that is thus determined in the spirit. All
creation is this action, is this working of the essential nature, is Karma. But
it is developed here in a mutable Nature of intelligence, mind, life, sense and
form-objectivity of material phenomenon actually cut off from the absolute
light and limited by the Ignorance. All its workings become there a sacrifice
of the soul in Nature to the supreme Soul secret within her, and the supreme
Godhead dwells therefore in all as the Master of their sacrifice, whose
presence and power govern it and whose self-knowledge and delight of being
receive it. To know this is to have the right knowledge of the universe and the
vision of God in the cosmos... .”
The sense of the root pŗ from which the word Purusha comes is: to fill, to place, set,
fix, direct, cast; to cause to work; to protect, maintain, sustain; to promote,
advance; and the root sah means: he; it is ‘he who is complete’, or ‘who is
everywhere’. Purusha has also the connotation of the seven divine or active
principles of which the universe was formed. Purusha is not only the individual
and the cosmic Man; he is also the personal aspect of the whole reality, they
all having an essential internal relationship. Everything that is, is a member
of the one and unique Purusha. Such could be the connection with the Dashangula
Purusha the Sukta speaks of, the Purusha who stands just ten-finger-width away
from us. And what a fine symbolism this! In The
Life Divine Sri Aurobindo speaks of the three poises of the Non-Manifest
Supreme, the Avyakta, the first Nothingness of Savitri. In the Philosophy of the Upanishads he writes about
Parabrahman in the course of evolving phenomena as follows: “The first
condition is called avyakta, the
state previous to manifestation, in which all things are involved, but in which
nothing is expressed or imaged, the state of ideality, undifferentiated but
pregnant of differentiation…” Beyond them all, beyond Parabrahman is the utter
Unknowable about which it is pointless to speak. But what is profitable to speak
of is the Infinite of the Chhandogya Upanishad. Sanatkumar tells Narad that,
which is Infinite is the plenum and is alone Happiness, tatsukham. The Rishi calls it Bhūma. The concept of Bhūma is
something very rich indeed. In the pure Infinite all aspects such as Existence,
Consciousness, Bliss, Knowledge, Power, everything are kind of frozen entities,
they do not grow, expand; they do not gather richnesses; it is the aspect of
the static Brahman. But that is what Bhūma does; he brings in the dynamism of
growth, advance, progress, increase, evolution. The root meaning of the word is
“to grow”; its feminine is Bhūmi, who upholds growth. And this Bhūmi is our
Earth, the precious little Earth where alone growth is possible, growth by the
process of evolution. That makes Earth a “significant centre” of the universe,
upholding the spiritual geo-centricity, an indisputable fact. No wonder, our
central being got attracted by it and opted for the adventure of the Strange,
with the confidence of finding a joy that is new and ever-growing,
ever-widening. It wanted to discover new wealth and hence it came here, kind of
plunged into the obscure unknown. The triple poise of the Supreme is described,
in the language of the Gita, in terms of Kshara-Akshara-Uttama Purusha. In the
metaphysical description these are the aspects of one and single indivisible
Reality, the Transcendental-Universal-Individual, the Absolute poised for
manifestation. “This triple aspect of the reality must be included in the total
truth of the soul and of the cosmic manifestation, and this necessity must
determine the ultimate trend of the process of evolutionary Nature,” writes Sri
Aurobindo. Of this triple aspect of Reality, of the three poises the Purusha
Sukta is chiefly concerned with the Cosmic Poise, the Cosmic Being. In it the
concept of Dashangula Purusha becomes felicitous indeed, in the warmth of
immanence of the Divine. If we have to quote Paul Eluard that, “there is
another world, but it is in this one,” then “in this one” refers to Bhūmi the
Earth with the “another world” entering into it,—because of the Sacrifice of
the Purusha.
The other important idea, and a very daring idea
certainly, the Sukta has introduced is of the dismemberment of the Sacrificial
Being, Viraj, an idea which is not found anywhere else in the early Vedic
revelations. While the Supreme Being who stands beyond all that is, beyond
everything and whose majesty and preeminence, whose mahimā cannot be described there are, apart from transcendental
aspects, aspects of manifestation also. It is in that specific context, of the manifestation,
that the Sukta, which is in a way the hymn of cosmic organisation and
functioning, celebrates exultantly the Sacrifice of the Purusha. The Purusha in
his cosmic poise has given up his sovereignty of the transcendental existence
and accepted the travail of the lower working, Purusha subjecting himself to
Prakriti. That indisputably is tyāga;
but much more than tyāga or
abandonment or renunciation it is the sacrifice, a willing sacrifice made by
the Purusha, subjecting himself to be victimised; he has offered himself to be
consumed in the Mystic Fire for the purposes of creation. “Brahman is the
giving, Brahman is the food-offering, by Brahman it is offered into the
Brahman-fire.” If Yajna is a mechanism, a means to initiate a certain cosmic
operation, then the readiness of the Purusha to offer himself in sacrifice
becomes a splendid act indeed, absolutely a worthy and creditable act which can
be taken up only by such a being. But it seems that it has also to be prompted
by somebody else. “From your sacrificed body, you shall create bodies for all
living creatures, as you have done in Kalpas before this, in the earlier
Eras,”—that was the advice given to Brahma before he undertook the performance
of the Sarvahuta Yajna. The desire, the urge, the impulse, the goodwill of the
Gods and the Rishis and the Sadhyas compelled him to accept the proposal,
seeing that thus alone could the cosmic operation get going. It is in his
consent that the fiery Yajna was performed, with Purusha himself becoming the
Fire-offering, Ahuti. Only when Brahma agreed to sacrifice his body, and when
the sacrifice was performed, that new bodies could be created. In the Vedic
terminology, it is the Purusha who has been made the ritualistic food prepared
for sacrifice, food to be given to the Yajna-Purusha; he responded to the
invocation of the contemplators and doers of the sacrifice and offered himself
voluntarily for the purpose. But what kind of bodies came out of this Sarvahuta
Yajna? These were bodies subject to decay-disintegration-death. These bodies
are subject to the laws of the mortal world; progress in life here becomes
possible by accepting death as an efficient mechanism, a necessary mechanism
also in the present mode of growth. That is the scope of the Vedic Sarvahuta
Yajna. If there has to be progress in the truth-dynamism of immortality then
another kind of Yajna will have to be performed. Wasn’t that the work the
Mother and Sri Aurobindo doing? We shall see it separately.
But as far as the Sarvahuta Yajna is concerned, the
deed was done. But how was the Purusha dismembered? He was cut up into four
parts, head-arms-thighs-legs, and offered in the Yajna. The names given to
these four parts are: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, andShudra, names which
essentially connote four qualities that have entered into the cosmic scheme,
four qualities, four swabhāvas, the
fourfold soul-force operational in the present working. About it Sri Aurobindo
writes as follows: “…in the soul-force in man this Godhead in Nature represents
itself as a fourfold effective Power, catur-vyūha,
a Power for knowledge, a Power for strength, a Power for mutuality and active
and productive relation and interchange, a Power for works and labour and
service, and its presence casts all human life into a nexus and inner and outer
operation of these four things. The ancient thought of
In the Gita,