The Significance of the Purusha Sukta
Divine Life
Society Publication: Daily Invocations
by Swami Krishnananda
The Purusha Sukta of the Vedas
is not only a powerful hymn of the insight of the great Seer, Rishi Narayana,
on the Cosmic Divine Being as envisaged through the multitudinous variety of
creation, but also a shortcut provided to the seeker of Reality for entering
into the state of Superconsciousness. The Sukta is charged with a fivefold
force potent enough to rouse God-experience in the seeker. Firstly, the Seer
(Rishi) of the Sukta is Narayana, the greatest of sages ever known, who is
rightly proclaimed in the Bhagavata as the only person whose mind cannot be
disturbed by desire and, as the Mahabharata says, whose power not even all the
gods can ever imagine. Such is the Rishi to whom the Sukta was revealed and who
gave expression to it as the hymn on the Supreme Purusha. Secondly, the mantras
of the Sukta are composed in a particular metre (chandas)
which makes its own contribution by the generating of a special spiritual force
during the recitation of the hymn. Thirdly, the intonation (svara) with which the mantras are
recited adds to the production of the correct meaning intended to be conveyed
through the mantras, and any error in the intonation may produce a different
effect altogether. Fourthly, the Deity (devata) addressed
in the hymn is not any externalized or projected form as a content in space and
time, but is the Universal Being which transcends space and time and is the
indivisible supra-essential essence of experience. Fifthly, the Sukta suggests,
apart from the universalized concept of the Purusha, an inwardness of this
experience, thus distinguishing it from perception of any object.
The Sukta begins with the
affirmation that all the heads, all the eyes, and all the feet in creation are
of the Purusha. Herein is implied the astonishing truth that we do not see many
things, bodies, objects, persons, forms, or colors, or hear sounds, but rather
only the limbs of the One Purusha. And, just as when we behold the hand, leg,
ear or nose of a person as various parts we do not think that we are seeing
many things but only a single person in front of us, and we develop no separate
attitude whatsoever in regard to the various parts of the person’s body—because
here our attitude is one of a single whole of consciousness beholding one
complete person irrespective of the limbs or the parts of which the person may
be the composite—in the same manner, we are to behold creation not as a
conglomeration of discrete persons and things with which we have to develop a
different attitude or conduct, but as a single Universal Person who gloriously
shines before us and gazes at us through all the eyes, nods before us through
all the heads, smiles through all the lips and speaks through all the tongues.
This is the Purusha of the Purusha Sukta. This is the God sung in the hymn by
Rishi Narayana. This is not the god of any religion, and this is not one among
many gods. This is the only God who can possibly be anywhere, at any time.
Our thought, when it is
extended and trained in the manner required to see the universe before us,
receives a stirring shock, because this very thought lays the axe at the root
of all desires, for no desire is possible when all creation is but one Purusha.
This illusion and this ignorance in which the human mind is moving when it
desires anything in the world— whether it is a physical object or a mental
condition, or a social situation—is immediately dispelled by the simple but
most revolutionary idea which the Sukta deals to the mind with one stroke. We
behold the One Being (ekam sat) before
us, not a manifoldness or a variety to be desired or avoided.
But a greater shock is yet to
be, for the Sukta implies to any intelligent thinker that he himself is
one of the heads or limbs of the Purusha. This condition where even to think
would be to think as the Purusha thinks—for no other way of thinking is even
possible, and it would be to think through all persons and things in creation
simultaneously—would indeed not be human thinking or living. Just as we do not
think merely with one cell of our brain but think with the entire brain, any
single thinker forming but a part of the Purusha’s Universal Thinking Centre,
‘a Centre which is everywhere with circumference nowhere’, cannot afford to
think as is usually attempted by what are called jivas, or individual fictitious centers
of thinking. There is no other way—na anyah pantha vidyate. This is
Supramental thinking. This is Divine Meditation. This is the yajnawhich, as the Sukta says, the
Devas performed in the beginning of time.
The Purusha-Sukta is not
merely this much. It is something more to the seeker. The above description
should not lead us to the erroneous notion that God can be seen with the
eyes—as we see a cow, for instance—though it is true that all things are the
Purusha. It is to be remembered that the Purusha is not the ‘seen’ but the
‘seer’. The point is simple to understand. When everything is the Purusha,
where can there be an object to be seen? The apparently ‘seen’ objects are also
the heads of the ‘seeing’ Purusha. There is, thus, only the seer seeing himself without a seen.
Here, again, the seer’s seeing
of himself is not to be taken in the sense of a perception in space and time,
for that would again be creating an object where it is not. It is the seer
seeing himself not through eyes, but in Consciousness. It is the absorption of
all objectification in a Universal Being-ness. In this meditation on the
Purusha, which is the most normal thing that can ever be conceived, man realizes
God in the twinkling of a second.
Excerpts from:
The Significance of the Purusha Sukta - Daily Invocations
by Swami KrishnanandaThe Purusha Sukta by Swami Krishnananda– Slokha with meaning. Also click on the audio link to listen.
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