Outlines of Indian Philosophy

Author(s): Paul Deussen
Publisher: Crest Publishing House

Page 18

PHILOSOPHY OF THE RIGVEDA
kitchen, and so we all pursue our own advantage, as a herdsman his cows. This little piece of humorous poetry would be perfectly innocent were it not that after each verse comes the refrain, probably taken from an old hymn: "Thou, O Soma, flow for Indra", which evidently means that Indra also seeks his own advantage and is an egotist like other people.
Even more bold is the scorn in hymn x. 119, which introduces Indra in the merriest humour, ready to give away everything, ready to destroy the earth and all that it contains, boasting of his greatness in ridiculous fashion,
-all this because, as the refrain tells us, he is in an advanced stage of intoxication, caused by excessive appreciation of the soma offered to him. Another hymn (vii. 103) sings of the frogs, comparing their voices to the noise of a Brahmanical school and their hopping round the tank to the behaviour of drunken priests celebrating a nocturnal offering of Soma. As here the holy teachers and the priests, so in another hymn (x. 82) the religious poetry of the Veda and its authors are depreciated by the words: "The Vedic minstrels, wrapped in fog and floods of words, go on the stump to make a livelihood." Beginnings of Philosophical Thought
5. The age in which such words were possible was certainly ripe for philosophy; and accordingly we see emerging in certain later hymns of the Rigveda the thought by which here as well as in Greece philosophy begins-the conception of the unity of the world. Just as