Sri Aurobindo's engagement with wisdom literature in Sanskrit by Lopa Mukherjee

Thank you for coming and uh my talk is on Shriarbindu's engagement with Sanskrit. Okay. So Shribbindu had a great love for languages. He knew some 14 languages and uh a lot of them he taught himself and how do you teach a language to yourself unless you know the rules of language. So he went deep into how humans communicate with each other. So the there is a whole study the field of study where humans uh you study the psychology of humans when they want to communicate with each other and that study of the psychology of humans how they communicate with each other and then finding out rules um is a whole study of its own. People do PhDs in it. they write books and novels and lots of work has happened. Um that field is called linguistics. Okay, it's a very scientific field and uh very methodically you study how the mind works and how it wants to communicate and those who know linguistics are able to uh craft communication in a very um different way than those who are not structured in their way of communicating. So it's not a trivial subject that you you happen to pick up and read a book. You go through a whole series of years of great study and there's a the a great authority in this field is called nom chsky and the field of linguistics uh very scientific study. So Sherbindu when he started studying languages the field itself didn't exist. There was no such thing as lingu linguistics but there was something called philology and philology still exists. So philology is the study of language starting from the history of the language. So how did it evolve? What are the old kind of texts? So Shiaindu took the old texts of Greek and Latin. He read from Dante and Gerte and German and Homer. He he started from the first productions of language like in Bengali also we have uh some writers who write in old Bengali very suda Bengali close to Sanskrit and then how the language has evolved. So those who study the evolution of a language and come up with a lot of information from that evolution. It's a whole civilization study that you can derive a lot of um facts about the civilization by studying the history of a language. I'll tell you what um what is a very big finding from philology. Uh the story starts when William Jones comes to India. This is way back in 1786. Okay. So he was one of the first what is called indologist. People who studied India as a area of study not just a curiosity or a passing whim. Okay. He came and studied India. He studied Sanskrit. He was also a great scholar and he fell in love with Indian culture. He may have come with the agenda to show that the Indian culture is not um a great culture, not an ancient culture, something that needs the white man's help to get civilized. But he came to India and he became a lover of Indian culture and he couldn't stick to that agenda. He said there is a lot in Asia that we we British and the white man and the western person has to learn. So he set up the Asiatic Society and it is headquartered in Kolkata which used to be the capital of India at least the British part of India way back. So he set up Asiatic society there is still a lot of research going on there and it's Asiatic it's not just Indian society. So he tried to do a lot of research all over Asia. So philology he was a philologist and he studied Persian he studied um English of course that's his mother tongue he studied other languages that's French and Latin and Greek and Sanskrit and he said these languages are not different languages they are all sister languages because there are a lot of words in common and it can't be randomly that there are like so many words in common. For example, uh let's say the word night. Okay, night in English has a gh. Why does it have a gh that is silent? It's because there was a word called nakta in Sanskrit. There still is, right? For night, it's called nakta. One of the synonyms for night is nakta. And where did the ka go? It's stuck in the word night in the spelling of night but not in the pronunciation of night. So same way for daughter there is a gh that is silent. Why is there a silent gh? Is because there is a word called duhita in Sanskrit and dhita became daughter. But you have to stick in the h somewhere and dhita itself comes from dugha gha. So the G and H in daughter G is there in DDA. DDA means milk in Sanskrit and duhita is one who milks. So the milk woman was called duhita. And often the daughter of the family used to be the milk person, the lady who used to milk the cow. So duhita means daughter. So in Sanskrit duhita means daughter and it came from milk which is dugdha and gerha are the g and h which are there in the word daughter. So if you know the history of how a word came about and how the spelling came about uh it's no more that English is strange and has all these strange spellings. It has a lot of history in it. And then this is what uh William Jones studied that uh impossible to have taru as tree in Sanskrit and tree as tree in English star and tara this serpent and serp. And he's like it's impossible that these two cultures share so many common words. So the theory started working out in people's minds and the in whose minds and philologists mind because they are all history lovers of history of language and they do comparative studies of old texts from this culture to that culture and they have a lot of uh it's again a huge field of study. So William Jones came up with this idea that all these languages um Roman, Greek, Persian, Indian means Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the mother language. He didn't study Dravidian. Okay. What is Dravidian? We'll come up to that. So far we just talk about these four main language groups. He studied and he said they have too many commonal commonalities. So I presume or I'll set forth a theory that they are actually sister languages and they are all children of the same mother and these philologists can construct the mother language. So they constructed a mother language and they tried to find out who uses that mother language. They couldn't find anyone but they found out people who live near the Caspian Sea and Baltic Ocean Baltic Sea uh which is northern Iran Iraq northern Iran Iraq and um this place called Anatolia and Turkey all those people speak a language uh that is close the old language that they had there were this people called the Hittites. So they used to speak a language that actually resembles this mother language. So they said okay so maybe all these other people migrated out of these regions. So it's called the Pontik Caspian region. Pontik is the Black Sea area and then next to it is the Caspian Sea. So that whole region is the Pontic Caspian region and there are lots of steps there. steps means uh grass grassland. So the theory is people living in that grassland 10,000 years back migrated to all other places and therefore the whole history of human migration comes from the history of the migration of words. So philology is the one that actually connected the migration of people. It's a it's a very big discovery that um the Arians they called that race the Arians. So the Arians migrated one branch went to Iran. Iran the name of Iran comes from Arian. And of course we know that North Indians are called Arians. And then the Germanic people when Hitler was there they too had the same story that we are the descendants of the Arians. So they also call themselves the Arians. So now there are so many arans and it's it's all fine because it's possible that they all migrated from that same region. And how do we know? Because of words because words migrate with people and language changes with time. So philology is that study that figures out human migrations with the help of language with the help of old texts and they do a comparative study of various texts. Yeah, please ask questions. >> Uh yes. So there is the theory that we have all migrated out of Africa, right? But that was uh 20,000 30,000 years back and we don't have any records of those languages. So we couldn't go back. But it is possible that all languages of the world have some connection with the African languages. Yeah. So there are philologists who have studied these languages and they have put the Indian Persian um romance and the Germanic languages and the Slavic. Slavic is Russia and the Baltic nations they've put these five groups of languages as one family. So there are language clans and then language families like all the Indian languages are part of one clan and they all flow from two um very old languages. One is Tamil and the other is Sanskrit. So right now this is the theory and William Jones's time he didn't go up to Tamil. So he didn't know he didn't come down to south India and he didn't study Tamil but they have Sherbindu studied Tamil when he came to South India in 1910 and he knows he knew the theory of William Jones and there were others by then who had postulated and they have lot of references that romance that is French Italian and uh Spanish and Portuguese these are the romance like Roman languages then Greece Baltics Slavic are the languages that are all part of what was USSR. All of them speak the same family. Iranian is its own family. Indian its own family. And Turic is part of the um old Turk. So they don't even call it Turic. They call it um Pontik because new Turkey and old Turkey are very different languages. So all these languages are different families. uh different clans and then they form a family and African is its own family. So maybe the migration happened before language came into being or language changed such a lot that we can't find uh commonalities anymore. So now to come to Shiaindu's to the topic that is Shiaindu's love for language uh brought him to wherever he was he studied language. So as till he was 21 years old, his father sort of wanted him not to know anything about India. But that didn't happen because Shiaindu found Indians in England who used to talk their mother tongue. So Shiaindu was very interested in Indian culture. He joined a Indian majish. Majilish is a Persian word which means parliament. Even now the in Iran the parliament is called Majlish. So they used to call themselves Indian majus. He was part of that and he picked up a lot of Indian languages. Then he took on the work with Gord of Boda and he studied Gujarati. He studied Sanskrit, he studied Bengali, he studied Hindi, Marathi of course lots of languages he studied and he found out that through his own studies of philology that the mother language is Sanskrit and he agreed with William Jones that yes Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages and all good and there is something called a mother of all these family and that mother language is now called protoindo-uropean. Because this family is called Indo-Uropean family of languages. See all of them are European. The whole of Europe. Okay, I forgot to tell Germanic is part of this this family. So it's a clan. So Germanic England uh English is part of the Germanic family group because uh the Tutonic race went and conquered England and they took a lot of their language and then it a lot of words came from the romance language because France also conquered England. So English is a mixture of lot of languages and that's why once you know English it's a it gives you a great uh tool to study philology. It has a huge amount of history of so many other migrations including lang words from Indian uh Sanskrit are there in English. For example, juggernaut. Jaggeraut means something that is very difficult to move and it comes from juggernat because jaggerat the puri uh festival it was such a difficult thing to move so it needed a lot of hands to move. So juggernaut is juggernaut's rat there are like this a lot of words that have come samosa for example is an English word it's in a English dictionary now so there are it's a very fluid it's a very fast growing language which is why it has been adopted by the world including AI chat GPT first started with English right so those people who are making a machine learn a human language are called linguists because they are not interested in the history of the language but they are interested in the structure of the communication. How do humans communicate? Let's come up with grammar rules and let's teach it to a machine. And now lo and behold the machine is able to talk as a human because of what the linguists have taught. But all this migration theory comes from the philologist. So now what Sherbindu did is when he moved to South India in 1910 his good friend was Subramanyam Bharati who was also a revolutionary. So they had an exchange deal that Subramanyam Bharati will teach him uh Tamil and he will teach the North Indian languages Hindi and all to Subramanyam Bharati. So now when he learns when he's learning Tamil so far the theory in India was that the Aryans have come from outside of India they have come as conquerors and they have pushed the Dravidians back. The Dravidians are the indigenous Indians. So this is called the Arian invasion theory. Again it came from philology study of words. So if the mother language protoindo-uropean which is now called pie in those days they used to call it the Arian tongue Arian language the Arian people have migrated from Baltic Caspian area they've come to India and the natives Dravidians couldn't fight so they went down south and the arians didn't go beyond the Vindyas they remained on north in the north of India and the Dravidians were in the south so there are two different civilizations that are happening and the south of India India has Tamil as its mother language and then these children languages Telugu, Canada and Malalam. These languages are the children of Tamil. So that was the story that Indians knew. Shabbindu comes down south and he debunks the theory. He says it's not true. Firstly that Tamil is not a different language family than Sanskrit. It is part of Indo-Uropean because there are too many words Sanskrit words in Tamil and it cannot be just same theory right how can English have so many Sanskrit words or in other ways Sanskrit have so many English words so similarly Dravidian has so many Tamil words so they are part of the same family and if they're part of the same family that means there was no invasion and pushing down the Dravidians there was a either The arians migrated and mixed with the local population without an invasion and without a pushing down that or there was no migration people always lived in the subcontinent. Now with genetic engineering. So when Shabbindu discovered all this is 1910 and he started writing in 1910 to 1914. He started writing in the area about all these or he had notebooks and finally they came out in the area. Way back they had no clue about genetic engineering. Now with genetic engineering it has been proven that the Indian population group is homogeneous. It's not that there is something called Ravidian and something called Arian. There is all it's been a mixture for thousands of years. So there is no Arian invasion theory. There is no out of India theory also that they have migrated from outside of India. There is just the theory that language has migrated with people but people have not migrated. It wasn't a continent that no one lived in and suddenly a bunch of variance come. So Shabbindo has done a whole lot of work proving all this but he has said I my main thing is about spirituality and to bring other things. I'm not interested in fighting this battle because during his time there was a whole uh uh theory of arian invasion and this theory was very convenient for those who didn't believe that the Indian civilization had anything great to offer. They said yes of course the Arians did it and the arians taught you they are the ones who wrote the Vedas and they are outsiders because you people are actually savages. So Shiaindu said no we are not savages but I don't have um I don't want to fight this battle for too long. So he wrote this book called the foundations of Indian culture where he starts in the beginning he starts fighting about this saying that I I can prove through philology that this is not true and philology is a science it's it's well proven it's not just a wishy-washy conjectural science it's a proper science that if you want you can prove it I can also prove it but I don't have the time let someone else prove it. But here's the material. So now we come to the the real um talk and the talk is what has Shamadu done in the field of Sanskrit. He he knew lots of languages but for Sanskrit what has he done? Huge amount. Okay. And again like I said he's not the one who goes and professes. So we remember we know his life divine. We know synthesis we know his works. But today I'm going to tell you about what he has done for Sanskrit. And this is a whole lot and a whole lot for new researchers to pick up from his work and take it forward. I mean there's a whole a treasure trove waiting for someone to pick up and take it and Shabbindu himself has left a lot of incomplete articles. He's written an essay and at the end he just trails off and in some places he says I think it's enough to take it this far and I would like future scholars to take it forward like the secret of the Veda he's done a lot of work on the Vedas but the Vedas are huge so not an exhaustive work but he has toward the end he has said I have done enough to set the platform whoever wants take it forward and there is an institute of Vic research in Bangalore that a disciple of Shriabindo has taken it forward and this is Kapali Shastri. So Kapali Shastri was already a Sanskrit scholar when he came to Pandichari but he hadn't looked at Sanskrit from the philological aspect and when he found Sherbindo's works in the Vedas from that aspect of I'll tell you which aspect why is it called the secret of the Vedas Shabbindu's book on the Vedas is called the secret what is the secret right so Kapali shasti says ah this is the secret I'll take it forward. In his lifetime, he wrote volumes and volumes and volumes. Again, at the end, he says, "It's not enough. Someone else take it forward." Because there's so much to discover about something that was written 2,000 years back. 2,000? No. Um, at least 3,500 years back because 500,500 is the age year when the Vedas have been completed. And we don't know when they started maybe a long time back. So there's a lot of scholarship waiting to be worked on it. And Kapali Shastri has an institute in Bangalore where people are scholars are working. So it's all good. Great. But Shiaindu's contribution was so crucial. So now I'll just tell all that Shiaindu did in the field of Sanskrit. Firstly he wrote a poem a very beautiful poem in Sanskrit 99 verses couplets and it is dedicated to the mother India and whom he used to call Bhavani. So this poem is called Bhavani Bharati not published for 80 years. So around 199 before he went to prison he wrote it. 198 99 verses of this very beautiful poem there in his notebook never published. Then the archives in ashram finds it and says wa such a beautiful poem. 1985 they publish it in the archives research and journal that used to come out every month. They published it there. That's one work he did. Uh the second work also got published in the 1980s. Again he wrote it in his notebook and left it. Didn't even tell people it's there. Finally all the material was dug through by the archives and someone says oh look he has written some something in Sanskrit. Can we get a scholar to read it? And the scholar says this is absolutely fascinating. The this scholar was Dr. Jaganat. So after kapali shastri the great scholar in ashram sanskrit scholar what Dr. Jaganat and the second work is called Dr. Jaganat called it Shriaruindu upanishad. So it's a text uh pros that reads like poetry. So it's pros poetry ramia as we say in Sanskrit. It's about um the supreme. All his realizations are there in this little text and it reads like opanishad becausead has its own way of talking about truth. They come and declare the truth and they declare it with so much force that one who reads it gets goosebumps. It's like the truth is really entering into you. They use a mantric language. Suskrit is such a language that if you read it, it transmits and then the truth is transmitted in this work. So Kapali shastri said no not kapali Dr. Jaganat said I'm going to call it an upanishad and let's call it shindu upanishad. Whether the world or the the the pundits of Banaras who banaras is a hot bed of pundits of Sanskrit or the Kashmir pundits agree or not we as asham devotees we can agree that this is a great work it's adding a new upanishad to the world so that's it shabbindo has two works in Sanskrit extremely high quality work but he didn't follow it because he would have needed some more lives to do all this work by himself. So after these two works again found from his notebooks published some 60 70 years later the works that he did publish now we'll talk about those secret of the Veda was his greatest work so this is where he does the philology that um William Jones did and he said yeah it's all good but a great piece was missing from the story of the Veda And because all the previous scholars who studied the Vedas studied them verbatim word by word. Okay. So they missed the secret. So what is the secret that Shiaindu discovered? So there is a scholar called Sana and there's another scholar called Yasca. Then there's a German scholar called Max Mueller. These people spend a lot of time tilak included balangata tilak they studied the Vedas they did a lot of work but they missed the secret because they read the surface of the veda okay so now to tell you the secret let's go through some exercises okay so first exercise imagine you had you are a gardener and you have gone it's morning you've gone to pluck a flower. You plug the flower and it's you look at it and the sunlight is filtering through the flower and there's a dew drop. You imagine uh the veins of the flower are getting magnified through the dew drop. You can all see it. Visualize it. It's very beautiful. The color just beautiful color. And then you bring it close to your nose and you smell the fragrance of the flower. Okay? And then suddenly you hear a bee waking up from the core. It got disturbed because you inhaled and it buzzes out of the flower. And uh you can feel the softness of the petals in your hand. And as the bee flies out, you feel you can see a bit of nectar falling from its feet. It was sapping on nectar and some pollen. And you can taste it. You can taste that nectar. Then you take this flower and you enter the temple and you place it in front of the dity. Okay? And then you find a diya and you light the lamp and you do the movement where you spread the light around. Okay? We call it arty. Now you do the arty. You have offered the flower. You light some incense. There's a whisk. Okay? It has some feathers. You take the whisk and you the since there's incense, right? You want it to get spread around the space, you spread it and at the end there's a bit of very pure water. You sprinkle it on the DT. It's like bathing the duty. You drink a little bit of it and you walk out. Okay. So this whole story I told you, how would you interpret it? Like what is happening in this story? You would think um it's a ritual formula, right? If you take it as um as literal value in how to do worship of a dity is you pluck a flower, you really engage with it. Then you take a lamp, you take the whisk, you take water and you light an incense. It's a nice ritual. So if the story was in the Vedas, you would say, "Okay, the Vedas are teaching us how to worship and this is how you should worship." You make a code of it. Start with flower. Now re-imagine this whole story and think it's all happening within. Okay? So the flowers, you looked at the flower, you smelt it, you tasted the ne nectar, you touched it and you saw it. Everything is the five senses. Okay? So it's not about the flower. It's about being very conscious of your five senses and coming inside and offering it to the divine. So it is a surrender of your five senses and the other things the light is tis water is apa if you if you notice these are the five elements the whisk is air and the incense is the matter earth so you have offered the five elements within yourself to the divine so in other words this whole story is not about the ritual it's about offering oneself completely to the divine. So now if you read the whole Vedas literally as it is saying you'll get one story and if you read it as the inner meaning as everything as an inner dynamics then you'll get another story right so Shiaindo jumped from here to the other so he he read the literal meaning and Sana Yasa Max Miller there were others like Tilak they all read the outer meaning and they said it's a book of people who were very good very pious they had these deities they had these gods they called Indra and Surya and Shiva and they did worship of with flowers incense and light and Shabbindo said this is the karmakanda way of looking it karma is works there is a whole different way of looking at the veda and that is janaandanda the whole story is symbolic. They're giving you they're telling you about the fact that your body is made up of these five senses and five elements and that these can be offered to the dity. So janakandanda means the knowledge aspect of the story and karma is the ritual aspect of the story. So for so many centuries the Brahmanas, the Brahinss who wrote the Brahmanas textbooks, they did the literal translation of these stories from the Vedas and they said these are the rituals prescribed by the Vedas. Do it and this is how you should chant the Vedas. Practice it without knowing the meaning. Generations of students practice the chanting correct tone but without knowing the meaning. And now Shabbindu says it's not about the rituals, it's about the inner meaning of it. The whole language is symbolic language. And people said how how did you find it that it is symbolic language? He said I I I was having these experiences. And then if I were to explain to someone who didn't have these experiences, I would use these symbols. I would use the symbol of a flower. I would use the symbol of light and symbol of this and that because they don't have this experience but I'm trying to communicate and all I have is their language. They have made this language. So using their language this is the way you have to communicate and this is what the Vic rishes did. They communicated their inner experience using the language that was available and the language that was available was ritualism. So the whole paradigm shifted right the Vedas are not about rituals you can do whatever rituals you like they are about the inner meaning of the actual the janakanda. So it was a great discovery and he discovered it through Tamil because he was studying Tamil. He came up to this point where Tamil and Sanskrit are same and then he said he had to go to what is called old Sanskrit. This is the Sanskrit that the Vedas are written in old Sanskrit. It is different from the Sanskrit that we read now in school. The Sanskrit that we read in school that the upanishads are written in, Gita is written in, all modern texts, modern means even upanishads are modern compared to Vedas. They are all written in classical Sanskrit that was codified by a linguist. This linguist was Panini, a very famous rishi panini. So around 500 B.CE, See, he took the old Sanskrit which was very symbolic, fluid, no grammar rules, very fluid grammar rules. They used to communicate through vibrations, not through words. So word meanings were from what vibration are being communicated. And they used to understand each other, the rishies. But then panini came and said this is difficult for the lay person because lay person doesn't have the vibrational level to understand. So he made a language with grammar. Some words disappeared. Why do you need 200 um synonyms for fire? Let's keep five or let's keep 10. So those synonyms disappeared and slowly people forgot what they meant. So classical Sanskrit is a reduced version and it's called Sanskrit means well done well created whereas the old language is Shiainda calls it old Sanskrit people call it dwa bhasha means language of the gods because it's a very intuitive language unless you can intuit it what is being said you won't understand so shindu first separated new Sanskrit with old Sanskrit means classical Sanskrit and Aryan bhasha or dvaba bhasha arryia bhasha is also what it's called then he studied arry bhasha in detail and then he came up with oh this realization I have also had it's only because he has had the um realizations of the vic rishies he could say he could crack the code it's all like put in a code word right he could crack the code and he gave us the code uncracked So he said this is the story but this is what they're really saying. So the famous story now you will be able to do it on your own. There is one story that has become very famous in the Vedas because a lot of rishies had the same realization and they they recounted it using similar images. It's a very pastoral story. It's like the story of farmers. That's why the old uh interpreters of Vedas they said the Vic people are not rishies they were farmers and they wrote about how to cultivate vegetables, how to take care of cows, how to take care of horses and all their aspiration was give me more cows and give me more horses and give me wine. I want to get intoxicated. So it was a very simple culture because the shlokas do say okay so now I'll tell you the shloka as a story which is what is written in the veda and then you'll tell you'll figure out what the janakandanda is so in the karmakanda there are these rishies called angiras angirasar rishies have been praying for a long time for light they are in a very cold place there's no light 6 months have passed Why? There's no light. 8 months have passed and then suddenly in the ninth month a new rishi comes and he says now we will get the light. And this lightning holding god shows up. You can call him Indra. So this god shows up and he has a dog with him. He has a hound. Okay, blood hound. Blood hounds are very good in smelling. So he says what's your problem? So that our cows have been stolen. We have no food. We have no nourishment and there is no light. We are dying in the cold. Plus our food is gone. We don't know where the cows are and who has stolen them. So Indra says, "Okay, I have a dog. The dog will help me. Let's go." So he and the dog go and the nine angras follow and the dog goes up a hill and smells and says no no this is not where the cows are hidden comes down go dog goes somewhere else dog goes somewhere else and everyone follows. Then the dog goes up a hill and the dogs yes yes I can smell the cows down there. So Indra runs up and he has a mace, a huge gada and he strikes the ground with the gada and a huge hole has been created and they can see the cows out there and the hole is big enough for the cows to come out. So the stolen cows are brought out by the angishis and they thank Indra. Indra goes back to his heaven and they get the cows back. So this is the story and if you go to asham shabindo's you enter asham okay main door before we could enter a little chamber now they lock it but if you enter that little chamber right in front of the main door on the right hand side there's a huge panel of cows with a lot of cows returning um and that is the the image where the cow cows have been rescued. So this is the story of the rescue of the cows and many rishies have spoken of the rescue of the cows with slight variation. So instead of Indra there is this god called briaspati and he doesn't have a mace. He doesn't hit the mound with his mace. He has the power of the word. Brihaspati is the lord of the gods. He's the is the guru of the gods and he has the mantra. So he stamps his foot and he utters the mantra and the power of the mantra and the stamping of the foot break the hill and the cows come out. The rest of the story is the same. So can you appreciate that if you didn't believe the fact that the Vedas have something deep within? If you didn't believe that this culture is uh really mature and has deep spirituality, it's easy to believe it's a pastoral story like we have. It always happens that the neighboring country has stolen the cows and you have you need some special hero king to help you get it. Very simple, right? But if you look at the inner story is that it's all happening within one human being. Not even nine angasish, one human being. And angi rasa is anga is the members and rasa means the flow. So when something flows in the members of the being you can think of the inner nadis the flow in the inner nadis this being is praying for something he has awakened there's that flow is happening the consciousness is flowing so he is praying for the next thing to happen and he's praying for light illumination okay he's praying for heat light and heat are connected he's doing tapasa and tapas means heat and tis means light. So he's praying for these two things that he doesn't have and something within him takes him to the place with the help of the sniffer dog and that is intuition. Okay. His intuition takes him here and there and he says no this is not the right place. This is a then he finds the right destination and with the power of the mantra or with the power of the last effort which is a very strong effort he releases the light and the cows are the light go. Yeah. So go means light. No goama full of light. So go has this double meaning. It means light and it means cows also. So if you knew that go means light then you would not get so confused and you know that tapas means doing your own inner heat. It's not outer heat that comes from the sun. It's not that you are in the north pole and you don't have sun for 6 months and in the ninth month something happens. You have given birth to something new. All the symbology is there that in the ninth something a new awakening happens. And those people who have stolen the cows, they are the ones that are your obstacles. So they have different names. They are the thieves. They they steal. They are the vas, panies, dasus, all different names. Vitras. These are names for different kinds of ways that you forget to reach your destination. There are various ways. No, doubt is one of the thieves that steals it. Um another could be your own distraction. Then depression. All these are our enemies and they have been given names. They are not neighboring uh land heroes of the neighboring land who've come and stolen your cows. So the whole symbology is actually for inner growth. And this is the secret that Shabbindu gave. And he says how two ways that he found the secret. One is because he had this inner experience. Second is philology and philology this is where the root of philology comes. He says there's a gona. Gona means quality. We know the word right? So every sound has its own quality. If you meditated on the quality of a word on the sound the quality that the sound gives up. So meditate on go. Why is go light? Right? So he says you have to meditate. You have to tune in with intuition. You have to tune into the vibration of the word go. Even before go the word G does the sound G. It uh it has it suggests something to the mind that is awakened to this vibration of sound. So it's a whole um shabda yoga. He did the shabda yoga and he connected to these root sounds and he says go means light primarily. Then how come go is cow? Because light is the source of food right the sun is the source of food is the source of heat and in those days the source of multiple things was the cow. So that's why cow is also called dhu. Dhu means wealth dana. Dana so dana because cow gave us um food milk cheese paneer di the cowdong gave us vegetables using cowang they they could grow because it's manure and it was medicine cow urine was medicine so everything came from that cow so cow was the nourisher like light food comes from light everything comes from Right? Wealth comes from. So the cow is the true dhana, the true dhu. So one synonym for cow is dhenu. Another is go because it's light. So now if you didn't know the vibrational quality of the word go, you would just look it up in a dictionary that say you would come out as cow. Then if it is only cow, then the story is okay. Actually the cows were lost and they went and got the cows and shabbindaput he has decoded hundreds of shlokas in the veda. So this is just one of the examples he has done it exhaustively to so many so it's major works is the secret of the Veda Sanskrit word it's a book and at the end he says incomplete please someone take it forward and parallel to secret of the Vedas he's done philological studies which means he has studied every root word now we have it in the new volumes of Shiaindu if you look volume 14 it has come out it wasn't there in Shiaabindu's time in SABC no Shiaindo word centinary books were not there that library didn't have it because the archives also took time to research it then they saw the whole alphabet that we have this 50 character alphabet every sound has a vibration and that came from the meditation of someone who did shaba yoga So he said this sound and therefore this word. So for example he has a whole essay on just the one sound dull. So we have do no do is pain in romance languages and we have dala to crush from which comes the word dalit. The dalits are those who are crushed. So the two words have dal as the root which means to put pressure. Then he went back and removed the l also. He removed the also. He just said just the just the the has vibration and quality of something that is forceful that has a little bit of violence involved in it. So all the the words have that sort of force in it. Whether it is da or the like damin means lightning. It's because it has the force in it. It's not la birds are very sweet and soft and liquid. So lightning doesn't have any synonym that starts with l because it's a forceful thing. And if you go down to every route, you will be able to decode the whole Veda. But then you have to do that shaba yoga. And the whole process is using that dog. The dog is a goddess called Sarama. And she is the goddess of intuition. And there are four goddesses that will help you in the process which of course Shabbindo was very conversant. That's why he could decode the Veda. One is Saraswati. Saraswati is the goddess of hearing. So through the hearing he knows what the word means. You speak a complete foreign language to him because he has done shabda yoga. He is able to understand. And there are such people in the Himalayas who can speak and understand a complete foreign language the very first time. It's there in uh there is a very beautiful book called Shri M's autobiography. Uh Shri M is still alive. No maybe he passed away 2 years back. So he is guru who used to be in the Himalayas. So it's not something that you have to believe from way back when. It's someone who has experienced it. The guru was a Kashmir guru. He he comes to Kerala and he's talking in the Kerala Mallayali dialect. Not only that Keral Malalam that he could learn from textbooks he's speaking a very obscure dialect with another saint and this Shri says you never told Shri was Malali so he said you never spoke in Mallayali with me you speak in Hindi with me said no yeah because I my language of comfort is Hindi said but you never told me you knew Malali so I didn't know Malali I heard you speak if you do shab the yoga you can. I tuned into that man's language and then it was available but right now that language is not available to me so I can't speak with you but with that saint I could I put that effort because I did shabi yoga that saint doesn't know anything but this dialect and some other time he went and he spoke fluent telugu by then Shriam says I I will not even ask him how he did it it's that capacity so shabbindu had he went to old Sanskrit He did all this work. So again getting back to Shabbindu's major works those two Sanskrit texts original Sanskrit texts secret of the Veda translations of a lots and lots of hymns. Companion volume that goes with secret of the Veda now published in CWSA is philological studies. So he call it's called Vic and philological studies. So that's volume 14. Secret of the Veda is volume 15 which is a hint if you want to really understand secret of the Veda first learn the philology and then you'll really appreciate it. Third is hymns to the mystic fire because he did a lot of studies on the fire specifically on fire because fire sacrifice is again not an outside sacrifice that you lay some bricks and then wood and then you put fire and you put ghee and you put this and that. Everything is a inner dynamic. So third book mystic uh hymns to the mystic fire and then he translated two other books. He translated the Gita mostly most of the uh shlokas but he commented on the Gita. So that book is called the essays on the Gita. And the last work he did was translated a lot of upanishadik shlokals. the major 13 and commented on some, not all but he commented on some and in fact he was commenting on the ishaishad which is the whole book on its own now comments on ishopishad because he has so many and then he said 18 shlokas only isha but he found so much profoundity in it he said that let me write a whole book from stepping off from the isha and that book is the life divine So after the upanishads the next volume is life divine book one book two. So these are the volume 14 15 16 17 18 are his Sanskrit works and uh they are like fascinating works. The whole code of the Veda has been decoded and there's so much to learn in these in these books and don't get waided by the translators who have come before him because he himself started off that way. He read Syana's translation completely lost. U the words didn't mean anything and uh he was completely lost. Then he realized why generations of Indian scholars lost their way because they went back to this so-called authority. So Shiaindu debunked this authority. So now who's the authority? It's this book. Anyone who wants to study and then like I said Kapali Shastri institute has done a lot of work and maybe now you can read Kapali Shastri's books but it's it's a sadena for a lifetime. So one last homework I'll give you. It's time. So there are a lot of shlokas that end with asking the deity. Give me ashwa horses. Give me go cows. One meaning of ashwa is horse. One meaning of go is cow. Give me lot of sons. Okay children putras. And give me soma. Soma is intoxicating wine. And give me gold. So all these gimme gimme gimmies are there at the end. Okay. And now that you know you've cracked the code of the Veda, you know it's nothing to do with actual gold, actual cow actual. So cow we have already worked and shabbinda has an essay on go. The whole essay is just on go. The word go how it is light and goama of course 500 BC people knew what go meant. So goama is full of light. Someone who's full of light. Now go dawi the river came out out of a cow's mouth. So now go becomes cow. It's not light anymore. Go is light. He wants light. Light. Ashwa is energy. Yeah. So ashwa is from Ashnati. Ashnati is to consume. So what can you consume? You can consume energy, right? We we all consume energy to survive. So give me that energy ashwa. Then uh give me children. So children is people whom I can replicate, whom I can pass on this knowledge to. So I need an heir. I need a lion. I need your lineage. I need some students. So that he wants and the soma is the intoxication, the delight of the divine. So it's not really some rasa that you you drink and you give it to Indra. So many stories as you press the soma rasa with your feet means you do a lot of work for it. When it has been brewed and it is ready then you offer it to Indra. Indra also all the names of the gods are not particular people that we know of. They are also have we have to interpret them also with the quality that's there. So Indra is the lord of the indrias of the senses. So you press this delight and you give it to your senses. Let them enjoy the rasa. The leela of existence has some rasa. So you do it. You do the hard tapas. You do the pressing and then you offer it. So with that I leave you all with a lot of studies to do in front going forward. Reading the Gita, reading the Vedas and Shabbindu has translated a like more than 100 300 hymns. So we have a lot of help from him. Yeah. >> Yeah. So uh the south Indian temples have a chanting parumpara and they have kept the sounds to a very very pure sounds and Sanskrit being an old language has lot of synonyms and a lot of those synonyms are so well pronounced that there is a lineage we know that this tradition wasn't written so it's very important to pronounce them well and shabinda starts his treaties on the Veda saying that I'm grateful that this culture has not completely f followed the narratives that this is a pastoral culture there's nothing of value this culture the people of India still know that the Vedas are very important texts we we all know right they are wisdom texts they are not like agricultural texts we all know they are wisdom texts we don't know what they have but this much we know that they are wisdom texts And the temples have the people who keep chanting them and they remember they keep remembering the text word by word in proper trans pronunciation. Extremely important to pronounce every word properly and because of this parumpara that he could pick it up and continue the studies and we can also continue the study. The words have not been deformed. Karmakanda also. Yes. So Karmakanda has importance. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. like the genetics uh geneticists have proven now that there was no invasion there was no out of India migration. So second theory was out of India that too is not there but it is true that people have moved around this whole family of languages people have always migrated. Migration is nothing new. So people have migrated into India but there was no such pushing down of something else called Dravidian. So there is no such thing as Arian versus Dravidian or pure Arian pure Dravidian. It's all one gene pool. And that has been proven ling um linguistically and also through genetics. Yeah. What we call Arian is India in India. But the word Arian like I said Iran also says they are arians. This is difficult to say but uh yeah the world wasn't cut up cut up like this and there's no one who was going to go and appropriate like Hitler did he appropriated the whole Arian concept and so we we are back to the point where we have become an international we are here in an international community so we don't say we are the origin they are not if they want they can use the word Arian Iran is from Arian. We don't call ourselves Arya. But there are some purists who would like to be called Aryawarta. The word is also very interesting. So means straight from which comes uh the straight line in English is called arat. No in French it's arat because of straight line. So ar means straight. It means a spoke from which the lotus comes. The lotus aravinda is like it has so many spokes like a wheel. Arya comes from there because anyone who supposed to be straightforward is an area. So to call it a race word is itself wrong. Anyone can be an area. One who is a straightforward person was called an area. So we used to call each other hey Arya listen to me means oh straightforward oh noble being at some point it became race and then the the wars started until it got so accentuated in Germany Hitler's Germany that people are now afraid to call it a race it's perhaps not a race if you go back to the original meaning it is anyone who straightforward so the whole Arian invasion is senseless because it's not a race. It's not a group of people. It's a quality of being. >> Yeah. Arrow. The word are. Yes, that's right. Aries also. Yeah. >> Uh kanda is uh happening. Yeah. So karmac is what happens in the in the level of works and janna is what happens in the level of the mind. No. So bhaktianda can be both because you can worship using karma just the rituals or you can worship only using the inner dynamics. There is no there is concept of devotion is how you do you can do it using uh knowledge or you can do it using works the concept is there very much >> yes that's right >> uh yeah so the bacti was there in the god mitra there was a god mitra whose friendship maitri's friendship. Maitraa is the the future god, the future Buddha that will come. So the god was there and there was a god called bhaga. They all went together. Bhaga means bhaga. It's there in north Indian language. Bhaga means to share to give each one's their rightful share is bhaga. So god bhaga is uh the one that shares happily. Mitra is his friend. They all go together. From that bhaga comes bhoga. enjoyment. So that was there mitrahaga going together always and giving aortioning things to the lord also. So sharing things but this three divisions of janna bhi and karma which which is the division of the three gonas no satwaraj oh I forgot to say every word that shabindo has analyzed phonetically means in his philology he has put a r or s next to it it's a satwic word or a rajasic word because a vibration comes through no so tikka he's put s r sometimes s- It's a mixture. I think tea is also there. Tamasi. So the discovery of these three gonas is where they put uh the three ways and it's the Gita that has created the baki and janna and shabindu also to it has become now the canonical way of approaching sadhana is this these three ways. Yes, that is why he does the fourth section which is it's not required to break them up. In fact, he says he goes back when he's talking about um karma yoga, he says it's incomplete without janna and bacti and then janna is incomplete within the two and then bhi he says is the highest. Yes. Yes, at the end he says they are all you cannot split them but this is just ways that help you just like rituals help you right it's not that you can directly climb the 10th level you have to go step by step and one step could be ritual so do it it's not uh you're not being condemned for doing the rituals but don't forget that there's a whole secret of the veda there's a whole janna and finally you want to reach there. Okay. Thank you for coming. Yeah. [music] >> [music]