Sri Aurobindo said that one had to meditate on the mantras to understand their meaning. This is exactly what my Veda Guru’s Guru (Sri anAkAma mAra formerly Sri Padmanabha Aital) also taught her. So though I have been bringing up vedArtha as a lesson option., she has been generally postponing it.
In the mean time, she patiently taught me over many days to correctly pronounce and chant the puRuSa sUktam in the Rg VEdic swara style. And I have been dutifully practicing it. I have recently been given permission to learn it by heart. This means that I have got it right after 3 months of training for about 3 weeks a month. And as I chant it now, the clouds and fog covering the meaning are clearing away in patches and I am getting a sense of what the mantras mean. The sounds – the aksharas and swaras are forming themselves into words and sentences in my mind. Perhaps this is how I learned my mother tongue Telugu and various other languages.
My Veda Guru also said that her guru taught her that there were at least 3 to 6 layers of meaning for each mantra and suktam and that they would also dawn on us through repetition pArAyaNam, contemplation or mananam and meditation or dhyAnam. When I told her that meaning was dawning on me.. she was extremely happy.
I present below the sense that I get from the RV 10.90 : Purusha (puruSa) Suktham (sUktam) of Narayana (nArAyaNa) Rishih (RSih). The link will give you my attempts at translation of the individual Rks or mantras, as the fog clears out of my head slowly.
The puruSa enveloped the earth with the expanding universe and stood apart from it. The Purusha alone is all this, which has been and which is yet to be. He is the master, immortal. The mortal living world that we see around is but a fraction of the Pursusha, the rest is in the immortal heavens.
He performed a yajna using the elements of nature like spring, summer and autumn as the material. All of creation was born out of that yajna. The luminaries (dEvAs) , the ascetics (sAdhyAs) and the visionaries (RSis) were born of that yajna. Birds, wild animals and domestic animals were all created from that yajnam. The Vedas Rk, sAma and yajuh sprung from that yagnyam, in their metrical form. Horses, Cows and Goats (or whatever they symbolise) were all born of that yagnyam. Yajna itself was born out of that yagnya.
The people of the world in all their occupations comprise his thousands of heads, feet and eyes. His breath is the wind. Energy (Agni) and Indra were born of his face. The sky is his navel. From his feet came the earth and from his ears the directions and so on the rest of the world was created.
This sounds wonderful in Vedic Sanskrit in that poetic chanting. The chanting makes you feel that you have but to stretch a little and you can ‘experience’ the grandeur puruSa! He is within your reach.
I am also getting a sense from the rudram and the sri sUktam .. but those are the subjects for another day.
About 50 pairs of His eyes will be cast on these words over the course of 24 hours. The puruSa will be reading what the puruSa is presently writing. My present act of writing and my future (your present) act of reading are also the puruSa. This is but a fraction of the puruSa. The rest of him is in the immortal heavens! Maybe doing other yajnas and creating other universes!
Om namo nArAyaNaya! s’rI kRSNArpaNam!
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