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The Terminology of the Vedas and European Scholars 39
of Madhava Sayana that the translations of Wilson, Benfey and
Langlois are based. It is *Tana whose commentaries are appealed to
in all doubtful cases. "If a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant can see
further than the giant, he is no less a dwarf in comparison with the
giant." If modern exegetes and lexicographers standing at the top of
*ram,
i.e.
with their main knowledge of the Vedas borrowed from
Sayana, should now exclaim, "Sayana intimates only that sense of the
Vedas which was current in India some centuries ago, but comparative
philology gives us that meaning which the poets themselves gave to
their songs and phrases"; or if they should exclaim that they have the
great advantage of putting together ten or twenty passages for
examining the sense of a word which occurs in them, which *Tana
had not: nothing is to be wondered at. Madhava *Tana, the
voluminous commentator of all the Vedas, of the most important
Brahamanas and a Kalpa work, the renowned
Mimansist, —
he, the great
grammarian, who wrote the learned commentary on Sanskrit radicals;
yes, he is still a model of learning and a colossal giant of memory, in
comparison to our modern philologists and scholars. Let modern
scholars, therefore, always bear in mind, that *Tana is the life of their
scholarship, their comparative philology, and their so much boasted
interpretation of the Vedas. And if Sayana was himself diseased —
whatsoever the value of the efforts of modern scholars—their
comparative philology, their new interpretations, and their so-called
marvellous achievements cannot but be diseased. Doubt not that the
vitality of modern comparative philology and Vedic scholarship is
wholly derived from the diseased and defective victuals of Sayana's
learning. Sooner or later, the disease will develop its final symptoms
and sap the foundation of the very vitality it seemed to produce. No
branch of a tree can live or flourish when separated from the living
stock. No interpretations of the Vedas will, in the end, ever succeed
unless they are in accord with the living sense of the Vedas in Nirukta
and the Brahmanas.
I quote here a
mantra
from Rigveda, and will show how
Sayana's interpretation radically differs from the exposition of Nirukta.
The
mantra
is from Rigveda ix. 96. It runs thus: