''...in the last century a new scholarship has invaded the country, the scholarship of aggressive & victorious Europe, which for the first time denies the intimate connection and the substantial identity of the Vedas & the later Scriptures.
We ourselves have made distinctions of Jnanakanda & Karmakanda, Sruti & Smriti, but we have never doubted that all these are branches of a single stock.
But our new Western Pandits & authorities tell us that we are in error. All of us from ancient Yajnavalkya to the modern Vaidika have been making a huge millennial mistake. European scholarship applying for the first time the test of a correct philology to these obscure writings has corrected the mistake. It has discovered that the Vedas are of an entirely different character from the rest of our Hindu development. For our development has been Pantheistic or transcendental, philosophical, mystic, devotional, sombre, secretive, centred in the giant names of the Indian Trinity, disengaging itself from sacrifice, moving towards asceticism. The Vedas are naturalistic, realistic, ritualistic, semi-barbarous, a sacrificial worship of material Nature-powers, henotheistic at their highest, Pagan, joyous and self-indulgent. Brahma & Shiva do not exist for the Veda; Vishnu & Rudra are minor, younger & unimportant deities. Many more discoveries of a startling nature, but now familiar to the most ignorant, have been successfully imposed on our intellects. The Vedas, it seems, were not revealed to great & ancient Rishis, but composed by the priests of a small invading Aryan race of agriculturists & warriors, akin to the Greeks & Persians, who encamped, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, in the Panjab.
With the acceptance of these modern opinions Hinduism ought by this time to have been as dead among educated men as the religion of the Greeks & Romans. It should at best have become a religio Pagana, a superstition of ignorant villagers. Itis, on the contrary, stronger & more alive, fecund & creative than it had been for the previous three centuries.
To a certain extent this unexpected result may be traced to the high opinion in which even European opinion has been compelled to hold the Vedanta philosophy, the Bhagavat Gita and some of the speculations—as the Europeans think them—or, as we hold, the revealed truths of the Upanishads. But although intellectually we are accustomed in obedience to Western criticism to base ourselves on the Upanishads & Gita and put aside Purana and Veda as mere mythology & mere ritual, yet in practice we live by the religion of the Puranas & Tantras even more profoundly & intimately than we live by & realise the truths of the Upanishads.
In heart & soul we still worship Krishna and Kali and believe in the truth of their existence. Nevertheless this divorce between the heart & the intellect, this illicit compromise between faith & reason cannot be enduring.
If Purana & Veda cannot be rehabilitated, it is yet possible that our religion driven out of the soul into the intellect may wither away into the dry intellectuality of European philosophy or the dead formality & lifeless clarity of European Theism.
It behoves us therefore to test our faith by a careful examination into the meaning of Purana & Veda and into the foundation of that truth which our intellect seeks to deny but our living spiritual experience continues to find in their conceptions.
We must discover why it is that while our intellects accept only the truth of Vedanta, our spiritual experiences confirm equally or even more powerfully the truth of Purana.
A revival of Hindu intellectual faith in the totality of the spiritual aspects of our religion, whether Vedic, Vedantic, Tantric or Puranic, I believe to be an inevitable movement of the near future.''
Sri Aurobindo - Vedic and Philological Studies
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