________________
296
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1879.
been attained," the question arose what was meant by this Om, and to this ... the most various answers were given, according as the mind was to be led up to higher and higher objects." In one place Om is said to be the beginning of the Veda, or of the Sama-veda, so that he who meditates on Om may be supposed to meditate on the whole of the Sama-veda. Then Om is said to be the essence of the Sama-veda, which again may be called the essence of the Rig-veda. As the Rig-veda stands for all speech and the Sama-veda for all breath of life, Om may be conceived as the symbol of these. "Om thus becomes the name not only of all our physical and mental powers, but especially of the living principle, the Prána or spirit." "He there. fore who meditates on Om, meditates on the spirit in man as identical with the spirit in nature, or in the sun, and thus the lesson that is meant to be taught in the beginning of the Khandogya (Chhandogya) Upanishad is really this, that none of the Vedas with their sacrifices and ceremonies could ever secure the salvation of the worshipper, i.e. that sacred works, performed according to the rules of the Vedas, are of no avail in the end, but that meditation on Om alone, or that knowledge of what is meant by Om alone, can procure true salvation, or true immortality. Thus the pupil is led on step by step to what is the highest object of the Upanishade, viz. the recognition of the self in man as identical with the Highest Self or Brahman. The lessons which are to lead up to that highest conception of the universe, both subjective and objective, are no doubt mixed up with much that is superstitious and absurd; still the main object is never lost sight of," "This," the writer concludes his second caution by saying, "is but one instance to show that even behind the fantastio and whimsical phraseology of the sacred writings of the Hindus and other Eastern nations, there may be sometimes aspirations after truth which deserve careful consideration from thestudent of the psychological development and the histori- cal growth of early religious thought, and that after careful sifting, treasures may be found in what at first we may feel inclined to throw away as utterly worthless." Pro. Max Müller's third cantion is that we must not expect "that a translation of the sacred books of the ancients can ever be more than an approximation of our language to theirs, of our thoughts to theirs." "Those," he says, "who know French and German well enough, know how difficult, nay, how impossible it is, to render justice to certain touches of genius which the true artist knows how to give to a sentence. Many poets have translated Heine into English, or Tennyson into German .... But the greater the excellence of these translators, the
more frank has been their avowal, that the original is beyond their reach. And what is a translation of modern German into modern English compared with a translation of ancient Sanskrit or Zend or Chinese into any modern language P"
“The translator, however," Prof. Müller proceeds, "if he has once gained the conviction that it is impossible to translate old thought into modern speech, without doing some violence either to the one or to the other, will.... prefer to do some violence to language rather than to misrepresent old thoughts by clothing them in words which do not fit them. If therefore the reader finds some of these translations rather rugged, if he meets with expressions which sound foreign...... let him feel sure that the translator has had to deal with a choice of evils, and that when the choice lay between sacrificing idiom and truth, he has chosen the smaller evil of the two." The writer then instances the word dtman in his own translation of the Upanishads. This word, when it occurs in philosophical treatises, has generally been rendered by "soul, mind, or spirit." He tried to use one or other of these words, "but the oftener" he "employed them, the more" he "felt their inadequacy, and was driven at last to adopt selfand Self as the least liable to misunderstanding." Further on he explains this: "If we translate åt man by soul, mind, or spirit, we commit, first of all, that fundamental mistake of using words which may be predicated, in place of a word which is a subject only, aud can never become a predicate. We may say in English that a man possesses a soul,... is out of his mind, ... has or even is.... a spirit, but we could never predicate atman, or self, of anything else." Spirit, mind, and soul, in certain of their meanings, "may be predicated of the dtman, as it is manifested in the phenomenal world. But they are never subjects in the sense in which the átman is; they have no independent being, apart from atman." Prof. Max Müller then gives a specimen (fuller than where it appears in its place in p. 101) of his own mode of translating the Chhandogya-Upanishad vi, 8, 7: That which is the subtile essence (the Sat, the root of every thing), in it all that exists has its self, or more literally, its self-bood. It is the True (not the Truth in the abstract, but that which truly and really exists). It is the Self, i.e. the Sat is what is called the Self of everything:' and then remarks: "No doubt this translation sounds strange to English ears, but as the thoughts contained in the Upanishads are strange, it would be wrong to smooth down their strangeness by clothing them in language familiar to us, which, because, it is familiar, will fail to startle us," and Bo "will
