Dayanand Saraswati, Swami
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Return to the Véds
A brief backgrounder
Satish K Kapoor, February 15, 2023: The Times of India
At the Kumbh Mela, Haridwar, in 1867, Maharishi Dayanand Saraswati did something unheard of. He installed the pakhanda khandana pataka, hypocrisy-denouncing flag, to challenge the forces of orthodoxy. And eight years later in Bombay, he went on to establish Arya Samaj that rests on the Vedic ideal: ‘Satyam paramo dharmah’, the highest religion is the religion of truth.
‘The inner self of man,’ he writes in his magnum opus Satyarth Prakash, ‘is the knower of truth and untruth, but through selfishness, stubbornness, malevolence and ignorance, he leaves truth and inclines towards untruth. ’ And the Vedas, texts that are in consonance with the laws of nature, contain the Truth in its highest and purest forms. Divinity is one in many, and many in one, believed Swamiji. God is Truth, thelaw of being, the upholder of Rita, cosmic order. The seemingly different gods in the Vedas represent His different aspects. Worship one god; bow before ideals and not idols, he advised. The Divine is so great that his image cannot be conceived or made. Though invoked by many names, ‘Aum’ is the first manifested sound representing Him. All the key mantras begin with this sacred monosyllable that has the quintessential elements of 52 Sanskrit letters, 16 vowels and 36 consonants, each endowed with cosmic power.
Dayanand regarded God, soul and nature as independent and eternal entities. He denounced superstitions, priest craft, ritualism and animal sacrifice in the name of religion.
Yajna, according to him, is a key concept of the Vedas. The creation of theuniverse has been regarded as a yajna undertaken by Virat Purush, the creator. Its maintenance is possible by the continuous yajna of all beings, which means the performance of righteous actions by each member of society. Yajna is a process of spiritualising human activities. It is a way to pay off the five debts – devarin, debt to god, by performing prescribed sacrifices; rishi rin, debt to sages, by imbibing supreme knowledge; pitririn, to parents and ancestors, by expiating rites; bhutarin, to plants, animals and all of the nature, by concern and care; and nririn, debt to human beings, by offering hospitality. To cleanse the atmosphere and boost prana, life energy, we need to perform agnihotra, fire-ritual at sandhya kala, when day and night meet, he propagated.
The Purush Sukta, which appears in all the four Vedas, is a metaphorical description of the cosmic creation coming out of the cosmic person.
Rejecting the theory that the brahmin was formed out of God’s mouth, the kshatriya from his arms, the vaishya from his thighs, and the shudra from his feet, Dayanand argued that this was a distortion of the scriptures which clearly laid down that varna vayastha, social order, ought to depend on guna, quality; karma, action; and svabhav, temperament, of a person, and not on his birth. And sages like Jabala, Vishvamitra and Matanga were examples of those who cut across caste-lines and became brahmins by virtue of righteousness, he said.
His clarion call, ‘Return to the Vedas’, meant a return to the inner order of life, to one’s essential nature, characterised by truth, beauty and goodness.
